The Explorer (11 page)

I sleep for the first time in days, but it’s fitful, transient. I manage to wedge myself in between two pipes, rubber-lined hoses the circumference of my arms, the bracket of one against my shoulder to stop me hitting the ceiling. It hurts like hell, but I take more of the painkillers that I found and it’s fine. They help me sleep, in fact, for those fits and bursts, twenty minutes at a time. Every part of me aches. I tell myself to stop moaning about it, because I’m annoying myself, even; but I can’t. Once an ache sets in – once it’s there, niggling away, coursing through with every movement – you can’t shake it.

The excitement is amazing. The me that’s with the crew is giddy, filming everything, talking so quickly. I listen as I type something, my fingers thickly beating the keyboard into submission – it’s a report, part of my article, the diary that’s going up on
Time Magazine
’s website to chronicle what we’re doing, all first draft, no editor, my writing at its most raw – and as Emmy and Quinn laugh about something, and as Wanda and Guy prepare the airlock for the walk. When they’re done, Guy speaks to us all.

‘We want to be still for as short a time as possible,’ he says. He’s all business at times like this. ‘We stop, do the stuff we’ve got to do, get started again, right?’

Emmy laughs. ‘Why can’t we stop for longer? It’s not like we’re using fuel or anything.’

‘There’s a schedule,’ Guy says. ‘What else do you want? I let you do that, you’ll stop every time you wish you were sitting on a fucking toilet, or have a funny tummy and want to eat food sitting down.’ He’s at that curious halfway point between anger and laughter. ‘There’s a schedule.’ The crew brace. I push myself against the wall, jamming myself as tightly as I can, my feet resting on the floor in an approximation of the pose that we were told to take. Guy asks Quinn to hit the button to bring us to full stop, which he does.

‘Feet don’t fail me now,’ he says, and then everything seems to slow. From the cabin I hear the gentle clatter of shoes touching the metal flooring, settling in; inside the lining I slump down. The pressure of my weight on my leg makes me wince, even through the painkillers; I keep it under control. If they heard me, they would tear the walls apart.

‘Shit,’ I say, forgetting about my voice. They don’t hear, but my whisper echoes across the pipes, through the lining and into the electrics. I listen as Guy and Wanda head towards the airlock and their suits, as the me that’s part of the crew goes with them, filming them as they go on their first walk. I remember standing outside the airlock, looking through the glass at them; watching as the door was heaved open by Guy, and as Wanda took her first drift, totally unlike those that we did inside the ship; perfectly smooth and effortless. She went out of the door and disappeared, and the safety ropes went tight, and then she pulled herself back on them, towards the door. I remember filming it all, because it would be brilliant footage for the broadcast home, the footage of her freely drifting. Only four days later she died – will die – and the footage becomes eerily prescient, predictive. Part of me wants to tell her, to stop it happening. Something in my gut tells me that I shouldn’t.

My leg hurts, so I reach down to my pocket, take another painkiller out, swallow it dry. I realize that my provisions are running low – my water bottle is nearly empty, and I have no food bars left – which means that I’ll have to make a move into the ship again, back to the storage crates and their bounty. In the cabin, Emmy and Quinn talk about Wanda, saying that she’s too high maintenance. It was something that we always moaned about.

‘Can’t believe that Dogsbody gets all the fun of the walks,’ Emmy says. ‘She whines all day and then gets to go out there?’

‘She’s with Guy,’ Quinn says, ‘it’s not like it’ll be anything resembling actual fun.’ I hear him walking around, coming closer to where I am, to where Emmy is seated at the table – actually sitting down for the first time in what felt like forever, we all said. ‘Besides, you’d rather be in here with me, right?’

‘Don’t,’ Emmy says. ‘Just, don’t.’

Elena and I rowed about my taking part in the testing. This was well before they even came close to announcing that I was part of the crew. We rowed from the day that I applied, but I said that it was important to me, that it might be the most important thing that I ever did. When there were four journalists left – when we were all told that they had to be sure we were made of the right stuff, ready for the hard work that space would take on us – they took us to Florida for a week, a solid week above and beyond the day-to-day that we were doing in New York. We joked and called it space camp, but when I told Elena, she flipped. We had been living in a hotel near to JFK airport, because that’s where the hangar where we underwent most of our training was, and she had been writing reviews from there, going to res-taurants in the city and eating alone, then telling the American branch of her magazine what she thought of their bread rolls, their creamy desserts. When I got back to the hotel room and told her that I was leaving for space camp, she broke down.

‘How could you?’ she asked, because I was suggesting that she stay where she was and I would go. There were others on the trip with wives and husbands and partners, and they were all staying in the same hotel; I casually suggested that she might get to know more of them while I was away. ‘You’re really going to go?’ she asked.

‘I haven’t come this far to stop now,’ I said. ‘It’s only a week.’ Elena was depressed, or had had depression. I don’t know if it ever leaves. She took a pill and went to sleep, and when we both woke up the next morning told me that she was going back to London.

‘I’ll be there when you get back, and we can talk,’ she said.

‘I want this,’ I told her, ‘and I want you. I want both things.’

‘I know you do,’ she replied. We kissed goodbye at the airport, and I paid a grotesque amount of money for her last-minute ticket, and she left. I waited there until the end of the day, when the rest of the cadets – we called ourselves that, buying into the fiction we were so in love with – turned up, and we got on our plane. I sat next to Emmy, completely by chance. We hadn’t seen each other in a week or so, not since the psychiatric evaluations.

‘Hey, Monkey’s Uncle,’ she said. ‘I wondered what happened to you.’ We were all in different groups, being trialled for compatibility as a crew. We were to be together in space for a long time, and they wanted to make sure that we could all work together. Emmy was with all the other medical staff. Doctors in one group; pilots in another group; researchers and scientists in another; journalists in the last. They wanted to break us down to our core components before they spread us around and let us form bonds. ‘Did you ever work out what it means to trust?’ There was another journalist sitting on the other side of Emmy; she craned over, looked quizzical. Emmy explained. ‘We had the same questions in our psych tests. Didn’t you get stuff like that?’

The journalist sighed. ‘I missed those; stomach bug. They’re doing them when I get back.’

‘Ah, we won’t spoil them for you, then.’ Emmy laughed. ‘Seriously, it’s not that bad, but this guy here, he looked so sick when he came out of them.’

‘
I
looked sick?’ I asked.

‘Oh God, yes. That’s why I spoke to you; thought I could calm you down or something, stop you from climbing the walls.’ I realized that she was joking, to wind up the journalist. ‘Had you been sick?’

‘Loads,’ I said. ‘One of the worst days of my life.’ When the flight had taken off and the journalist next to her had fallen asleep, Emmy leant over to me, half-whispered at me.

‘It’s a competition, right? Like that
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
. There’s only a few golden tickets, and I’d rather you got one than she did.’ She put her hand on my arm, squeezed.

For a second, a brief second, I forgot about Elena.

Guy and Wanda come back in from the outside, and Emmy begs Guy to let her try it.

‘We’re stopped,’ she says, ‘doesn’t matter. Just ten minutes.’ He lets her do it, because he’s still on the high from being out there. We all go down to the airlock to watch her suit up – she goes with Wanda, who somehow has the most time spent training for this, the most hours logged on the simulators – and they dance around outside for a few minutes.

Now, here, I stay in the lining and try not to be heard, as the pain ebbs back into my leg, and I contemplate when I can take the next pill. I don’t have a watch.

Fifteen minutes later the engines are switched back on, and I slowly drift off the ground again, my little space suddenly feeling even smaller. In the cabin, Emmy sighs.

‘That was amazing,’ she says. She leans over to the me and Quinn. ‘You guys have to try it.’

‘Next time,’ we both say.

When they’re all asleep I sidle along the lining, taking my time, and then ease open the panelling in the storage room, taking care to make sure that it doesn’t fall. I swim to the food crates, stuff my pockets with meal bars – a handful of breakfasts, lunches and dinners – and a few bottles of water. We never even used the emergency water the first time around, because the recycled stuff was fine; they won’t miss it. The pills are different. With the space, the light, I roll back my trouser leg and look at the muscles, the bruising. The swelling seems to have gone down, but there’s something else in there, something bad. I press my fingers to the bone and the pain snaps at me, telling me to stop. It’s only one patch, but it hurts more than anything I’ve ever done to myself before. It must be a break, I think, a fracture. They say that: you can have a fracture, and it can be thin – hairline – and it’ll just sit there until it gets infected if you let it. I can’t risk an infection, not here, not now. It can’t have healed fully: there must still be problems, under the skin.

I drift through the room, slide back the door as quietly as possible, and move towards the cabin. The crew are all asleep still, in their beds, the doors sealed. I keep forgetting about Arlen, and yet, there he is. I open the medicine cabinet, pull out a carton of the pain pills, exactly the same as the one I found in my pocket – we left with thirty cartons, which was more than enough; or should have been, at least – and some of the generic antibiotics, the stuff that any doctor would prescribe for a small infection. It’s all labelled – I suppose, in case anything should have happened to Emmy. (Which it did, and will.) I take another bandage as well, a support for my leg. Tight, constricting elastic to keep it still and in place. It’s a frantic scramble through a slow-motion filter, as I struggle to make sure that nothing drifts away from me, that everything stays in the sealable plastic Tupperware-esque boxes it was given to us in. I go to the computer and sit down, load up my folder and look at the pictures of my loved ones that I brought with me. I miss them all: I zoom in on their faces, force myself to remember exactly what it is that they look like. After that I read through my blog entries, what I wrote about that day, what I sent back to Earth. It’s kind and excited and in my voice, and I can’t even imagine being that person, now: being the person who would write those things.
I remember writing them, though. I remember the turns of phrase I used, florid and overwrought, filled with metaphor and implied meaning. If I could only have seen me now.

I log out after looking at the picture of Elena again, and when I turn around I see myself staring at me, from my bed: eyes open, watching. I haven’t put the lights on in the cabin, so it’s dark out here, darker still from behind the tinted glass, but his – my – eyes follow me around the room, a creepy old painting on the walls of a pitch-black mansion. I don’t know if he’s awake: I don’t remember this happening, don’t remember catching a version of me skulking around the corridors while we all slept. I move towards the doorway and leave, and quietly retreat back to the storeroom, listening for the hiss of his door opening, but it never comes. I fasten the wall behind me, slip back inside the lining, and swallow antibiotics, painkillers, water.

I spend the rest of the night unable to sleep, even with the dullness given by the pills. I think about why I’m here, and what happens: I know how this ends, and I know that it can only end with my death – both the me in the cabin, and the me here. I picture myself trapped here, in the lining, struggling to breathe, kicking against the walls as the air – the oxygen, the only thing I really need – is replaced with
nothing
, taken away and not given back, and I choke here. I beat the walls, and the only person who could hear is me, and I’m already dead, out there.

When they wake up, the me doesn’t say anything about what he saw, if he saw anything. He didn’t, I’m sure: everything else is exactly the same. The ship moves quietly, a slow, long day of tests and write-ups. Everything has to be detailed and noted, every single change, every measurement. The ship is mounted with cameras, and stills and video have to be taken at various milestones, markers for future generations. The fourth day is a day for this, for record-taking. I hide, and stay awake, and then, when they all go to bed, so do I. It’s a routine. I listen to their conversations and still remember them, their ebb and flow. It’s all so natural.

Every noise wakes me up from my sleep. I’m getting so much less than I need. Every time I wake up I wonder how much I’ll need to function the following day, and that thought keeps me awake. I sleep for no more than an hour at a time, and I worry that it all means nothing.

The crew gather around the table for another live broadcast, something to be beamed home, something inspiring. I watch through the grate as they pull themselves around the table unnaturally, so close that they’re all touching. The connection is established, and the crew smiles and cheers. On the screen are the smiling faces of the DARPA Ground Control; their mouths move first, and then their voices fill the cabin from the computer’s tiny speakers.

‘Hello to the crew of the
Ishiguro
! Greetings from Ground Control!’

‘Hey there!’ Quinn says, then the rest of us follow.

‘How are things up there?’ they ask, an absolute, unequivocal formality, because we submit three reports a day when nothing is happening, hourly reports if anomalies occur – when Arlen died, for example – but this is for the press. The world likes to imagine us in solitude: it’s part of the great deceit. Astronauts were almost conceived by fiction, by books and television and movies, and then they became real; but those conceits created with the first image of a man travelling beyond the bounds of Earth, and heading towards the stars, those have stayed. The astronaut is alone. He drifts through space. He explores. He discovers. Since it all changed – since the India tragedy, the dearth of funding for governmental space agencies, the down-sizing of NASA – that was lost. Our purpose was to give that back. The people back home read my diary, a one-way transmission. We were like a television reality show, unaware of what was going on outside the TV studios; and then we made contact every few days, our faces beamed down to let them know that we were okay, that we were happy and doing our job, and
exploring
. ‘We’re going to cut to some of the extraordinary exterior footage, now; why don’t you talk us through what we’re seeing here?’ Ground Control are in charge of what we do. This stuff is pre-edited, taken by us, but chosen to show points of interest, grabbed by the cameras attached to the Bubble, a full 360 degrees-worth of footage. In the distance, that’s Saturn. Mars. That cluster, that’s the Eagle Nebula, which seen through a high-powered telescope looks like this. As they show it, the crew stop grinning, but not completely.