She scoops up the morning’s data. She takes it all down twice then meets up with Per in South 2 for the handover.
“Greetings, co-worker.” He looks directly into her eyes for three or four seconds. “You’re still sleeping badly.”
“I need to ski for longer.”
“Then ski for longer.” Per has a birthmark on his neck precisely where the bolt would be if he were Frankenstein’s Monster. His blond buzz cut has grown into a blond ponytail. In one of the early training runs there was a fire. Everyone assumed it was real, that something had gone terribly wrong. Per sealed Shona and Kurt inside a module to stop it spreading. Shona wept openly assuming she was about to die. They were gone by the end of the week. If the shit really hits the fan Clare wants Per nearby, on her side of the airlock.
“Water throughput?” says Per.
“Two hundred and five litres.”
“Backups?”
“A good. B good.”
“UV sterilisation?”
“We’re up and running again.”
“Thank God for that,” Per says, “the chlorine is disgusting.”
“Oxygen 21.85 percent, nitrogen 77.87, CO2 0.045.”
“Internal radiation?”
“Top 10.5 milirads, bottom 9.5.”
“Humidity?”
“Twenty-three percent,” says Clare. “I dropped the night temperature a couple of degrees.”
“Don’t want people getting too comfortable. And how is the weather out there?”
“Minus 12.2 °C and rising. Winds 4 to 8 kph. Visibility between 18 and 20 km.”
“So, people, it is shaping up to be a fine summer’s day.” Per leans back. “Enjoy your drive-time commute. Stay safe. And here is some classic Bruce Springsteen to kick off the programme, the appropriately titled ‘Radio Nowhere’ from 2007’s Magic album.”
The second crew are en route aboard the Halcyon, 408 days into their journey — Joe Deller, Annie Chen, Anne-Marie Harpen, Thanh Thuy, Kees Van Es. They don’t seem real yet. Perhaps it’s self-preservation, perhaps it’s the two-way light-time of thirty minutes, perhaps it’s those two weeks of radio silence when the earth was behind the sun. None of them use the word “home” anymore. It has become a fictional place, despite the daily ebb and flow of information. So here they come, these five new people, like characters walking out of a fairy-tale forest, no one knowing if they are good or evil.
She goes to West 1 and strips down to pants and vest. She wipes the headphones clean, puts them in and scrolls through her playlist till she finds Kylie’s Impossible Princess. She presses play, steps onto the machine and turns the resistance up to 64.
Gravity here is 0.4 G. But after two weightless years on the Argo it felt like being poured onto the Wall of Death in a fairground. It seems normal now. She no longer notices the bounce in everyone’s step, the thin legs, the puffy faces. But on the increasingly rare occasions when she watches a DVD she is surprised by the speed at which everyone moves, like Charlie Chaplin or the Keystone Cops. A couple of months back Suki broke her ankle tripping over a chair. They still don’t know if the bone loss plateaus. They’re the guinea pigs on this one. Fifteen minutes, twenty. She cheats and drops the resistance a little. The trick is not to ask why you are doing anything, the trick is simply to persist. Twenty-five, thirty. I should be so lucky. She is sweating heavily.
Arvind says he misses baths, the sensation of lowering yourself into ridiculously hot water. It’s showers for her. One in particular keeps coming back. They were on holiday in Portugal. The name of the resort escapes her, as does the year, her poor memory being one of those disabilities which become skills in the right context. But the beach is clear in her mind, the wooden diving platform, the jellyfish like Victorian lampshades, Peter in his green Speedo. They’re in the hotel room afterwards, wind moving the balcony curtains, those cool terra-cotta tiles underfoot, the tightness on her salty, almost-burnt skin. Standing naked in the falling water. What is it about that moment which calls her?
After lunch she goes to find Mikal. They’re doing an EVA later in the day to work on the Long Array, not much more than a slow walk for a kilometre and a half carrying two titanium poles and a rock drill, but a hundred ways to die en route. On her first outing her oxygen supply failed after forty metres. She lost consciousness halfway back and Per saved her life by dragging her to the airlock.
They now have a 73-point checklist to work through before they call in Per and Jon to get suited and booted. They take their helmets out of the lockers and lay them on the table. They take our their thermal underwear and lay it on the table.
“Suki tells me Jon is not feeling well,” says Mikal. “So if you’re thinking of having a heart attack it might be wise to postpone it till tomorrow.”
“A heart attack would be a good way to go, don’t you think?” says Clare.
“Not in the immediate future, I hope.”
Per and Suki are, in the best possible way, psychopaths. They have retained pretty much every piece of information they’ve been given and they have never been visibly tired or frightened, but Clare has absolutely no idea what is going on in their minds. She suspects, sometimes, that for long periods there is nothing going on in their minds, that they sleep like sharks, on autopilot, shutting down half their brain at a time. Arvind pays for his buoyancy with periods of darkness which he tries hard to keep from the rest of them, so that Clare holds him at a distance for fear of becoming infected, as they all do. Jon, the crew’s doctor, is constantly positive, a whipper-up of good cheer, and while she enjoys playing backgammon with him or helping him swab down one of the units she is uncomfortable with his relentless need for activity, for noise, for distraction. But she can sit in a room with Mikal for hours and his silent presence puts her at ease in the way that dogs and horses once put her at ease. He has a piratical beard, bends every rule a little and treats his previous life as a deep well of entertaining stories. They have sex sometimes. She never used to like it much, one of the reasons her relationship with Peter faltered. She doesn’t like it much now, but the testosterone which stops her bones turning to powder gives her discomfiting dreams unless she relieves her raised libido every now and then. Of all times this is the one she finds hardest, when they are lying together afterwards, the way he runs his hand through her hair, the way three years and three hundred thousand kilometres seem like a curtain she could step through.
They take out their boots. “There was a beech wood just below the sawmill,” says Mikal. “It was the most astonishing place in spring. Yellow rapeseed to one side, bluebells coming up through the dead leaves.” They visually check the airtight joints at the ankles, knees and pelvis, rotating each one through 360 degrees. “I was chased by a forester once. A huge man. He had a gun. It was tremendously exciting.”
Suki appears in the doorway, noiselessly as always. There is a look on her face that Clare has never seen before. “You need to come.”
“I have pain moving from my stomach down to my right iliac fossa.” Jon is finding it hard to speak. “I have no appetite. I’ve been vomiting. I have a temperature of forty-one and I have rebound tenderness. I think it’s fairly obvious without doing a white blood cell count.”
“Antibiotics?” asks Per.
“I’m taking them.”
“When do we have to make a decision?”
“Now would be good,” says Jon.