The Terranauts Read online

  We were going about our business as usual, all of us looking forward to the ten-forty-five break and the handful of peanuts we devoured like trained monkeys, when our walkie-talkies began buzzing. It was T.T., calling each of us to the command center, urgently. This was unusual, the first time it had happened, actually, but still I was more curious than alarmed as I made my way up the tunnel from the south lung, where I’d been checking water quality in the holding pond there, and if it seemed hotter than normal I didn’t really register that either, except in retrospect. I ran into Stevie on the way (her crew name was Barracuda, shortened to Cuda, but I don’t think I used it more than a handful of times, though E.—Dawn—began to insist on applying it as time went on). I’d come up the south stairway from the basement, the one that gave onto the desert biome, then worked my way up to the ridge above the ocean, and there was Stevie, in shorts and bikini top, her hair wet from whatever she’d been doing in the water that morning after ag duty.

  “What’s going on?” she asked, falling into stride with me, and I couldn’t help noticing how her eyes widened and her mouth pursed as she tightened the muscles there for the interrogative and how they relaxed in the next instant. She was congenitally flirtatious, unconsciously so, as if it were a reflex—she had a pretty face, expectedly pretty, model-pretty, and she knew it. I let her loop her arm through my mine even as I said, “Beats me,” and we walked on, arm in arm.

  When we reached the Habitat the air seemed denser somehow and she stopped me a moment. “Does it feel hot in here to you?” She wrinkled her forehead and sniffed the air. “Hotter than normal, I mean?”

  E. was just coming up the stairs below us, and I really don’t know why but I disengaged my arm from Stevie’s, trying to be casual about it, extending both hands in a gesture of puzzlement, palms up. “Now that you mention it,” I said.

  “So what’s up?” E. asked, at the top of the stairs now and falling into stride with us as we started off through the dining room and down the hall to the command center, where the others were already gathered. If I answered her, it was with a shrug: I didn’t have a clue.

  Troy was standing there in the middle of the room, looking perplexed. Like Gyro, he was one of those can-do types whose range of talents extended beyond the chem lab—if anything ever happened to Gyro, T.T. would have gone a long way toward filling the gap. Even if he was something of a bore, along the lines of Gyro. But then what would you expect from a chemistry major?

  “Okay, good, great,” he said, waving us into the room, “everybody’s here. We’re having a problem, I’m afraid, a glitch with the power, if you haven’t noticed. The temperature right now is ninety-one point four and rising—”

  There was a clamor of voices, Lark’s the loudest among them. She was crew chief. It was her job, her authority, to take charge. “What’s going on?” she demanded, first of Troy, then Gyro.

  “It’s some sort of power outage, something with the electric company.” Troy was trying to restrain himself, just the facts, ma’am, but I saw how agitated he was, and that really rearranged the moment for me.

  “What about the backup generators?”

  “We’re not going to fry like wontons, are we?” Richard said, putting on a face, though he knew as well as anybody just how critical this was. Better, actually—he could tell you at what point heatstroke set in and what the complications were likely to be in the worst-case scenario, which would mean eight Terranauts down and nobody to revive them.

  “That’s the problem,” Troy said. “They’re having issues getting the generators online, and so, in the meanwhile, and I don’t know what else to tell you, we’re going to need to start throwing switches here—”

  Gyro, rising tall from his seat on the far side of the room: “What he means is we’re going to have to shut down all non-essential systems, the Habitat, the stream, the waterfall, any grow lights—the computer too. And the wave machine. How long”—turning to Stevie—“will the corals go before damage sets in?”

  Stevie’s face was beaded with sweat—all our faces were. It was hot and getting hotter and we were all in the mix now. E. seemed flushed and I had to stifle the impulse to go to her. Gretchen just stared. “Shit,” Stevie said, “don’t tell me that. We can’t shut down the wave action—I mean that’s suicide.”

  “Polypicide, technically,” Richard put in.

  Troy ignored him. “I’m asking for a number.”

  “Three hours. Four, max. Then you’ll start to see damage, but the real problem is with the temperature. If the water temp rises that high and stays there—what did you say it was in here, ninety-one?—then it’s goodbye to everything.” Stevie widened her stance, shot a fierce look round the room. “I’m not going to allow that to happen, and I don’t care what anybody says—”

  A gabble of voices. “Fuck that”—Gretchen, mild Gretchen—“and I don’t care either. The rain forest has got to be our number one priority—”

  Diane was clapping her hands, sharply, and where was the banana now? Not that it would have mattered. We were in a panic, or the closest thing to it. “All right, all right, everybody just stay calm. We need to get on the horn to Mission Control and get an estimate on how long it’s going to be before they can take us back to full power, and in the meanwhile, like Troy says, let’s go around hitting every off-switch there is, right, people?”

  People? What was she talking about? This wasn’t one of those Hollywood disaster flicks with some dyke in sweatpants handing out emergency supplies, this was E2, this was us. We weren’t people, we were Terranauts. To this point, I’d stayed out of it, absorbing the news in the way I might have listened to the dentist trying to explain the procedure as he swung the drill into position, but now I couldn’t hold back. “You mean you haven’t got them on the phone yet? Where’s Judy? G.C.? Isn’t anybody dealing with this?”

  “No, no, they’re on it,” Troy assured us, waving his arms like a referee. “Have been on it. G.C. and Judy are in Tucson still but they’ve been apprised and Dennis is going to do a conference call in exactly”—he consulted his watch—“five minutes. To update us.”

  That was when the alarm sounded and every one of us just about jumped out of our skin.

  What Dennis had to tell us was a whole lot of nothing, nothing interspersed with assurances that things were under control. But things weren’t under control, not even close. The tech staff fussed, the temperature rose. The tipping point came three hours later. By then the internal temperature was at one hundred fourteen, two degrees higher than outside, and we were all thinking the same thing: they’re going to force open the airlock. Which would mean failure, another failure, worse even than the first mission’s—and whether or not we were in any way responsible, as Roberta Brownlow demonstrably was, or the victims of what our insurers would call an act of God (or of one drunken, amped-up trucker), no matter: we would feel the world’s opprobrium all the same. Our critics had accused us of hubris and of elitism too, as in let’s preserve a handful of privileged white people in a hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar bomb shelter and leave the rest of the world to face the blitz of global warming and the storms, droughts and mass starvation that come along with it, and now they’d fill the airwaves with their derisive laughter and poison every aspect of the mission regardless of what we might have accomplished.

  Me? I was grim, scuttling around like a crab in a pot set over a gas burner, running from one hopeless task to the next. I was down to my shorts alone and my shorts were soaked through with sweat. My hair was matted, greased to my head. I felt heavy, oppressed, as if I were wearing a parka lined with lead. Twice I’d plunged into the ocean to cool off but only for the smallest fraction of a moment because adrenaline had me charging from one pool to another with buckets of water to keep them from going dry and then bolting headlong across the IAB to the fish ponds, where I kept churning the surface in the hope of keeping the water oxygenated. Warm water carries less O2—the warmer the water, the more oxygen-depleted
it is—and though tilapia have been selected for their ability to withstand water temperatures as high as a hundred degrees, which would kill off just about anything else, I could see them gulping at the surface and I was wondering just how long it would be before they started turning belly-up.

  That was when my walkie-talkie squawked again. I was knee-deep, oblivious to the mosquitoes, churning, churning, and at first I couldn’t remember where I’d set the thing down—but there it was, a dull metallic gleam etched into the face of one of the artificial rocks in the wall behind me. There was a hiss as of the air going out of a balloon, then Troy’s voice came at me in a terse tense bark. Everyone was to report immediately to the command center, Code Red.

  Code Red? I didn’t even know what that meant—I’d never been in the military—but I didn’t like the sound of it. Given what we were facing, who would? I gave up the fish for dead, tucked the walkie-talkie into my waistband, and made for the Habitat as fast as I could, the words of a half-remembered prayer rising to my lips, the prayer I’d worn thin the day they took me out of school to tell me my parents had been in an accident. I saw my aunt’s face, my grandmother’s. They’ll get better, won’t they? I was nine years old. Animals die, I solemnly informed my grandmother in the hospital waiting room that was like a cold-storage unit, but people don’t. They don’t. Do they?

  This time there was no pretense. We were doomed and we knew it. The command center was an oven and we milled around inside it, edgy, everybody trying to talk at once, and what I was thinking was that if anybody tried to break closure I’d go ballistic, whether it was one of the crewmembers or G.C. himself, because there was no way they were getting me out of here, even if I had to croak in the process. Or fry. Like a wonton. But Richard wasn’t making any jokes now. He looked haggard, looked depleted, old. The sun swatted at the steel struts and glass plates overhead. The temperature jumped and jumped again. We were on the verge of heatstroke, all of us, and there wasn’t a thing we could do about it.

  “We’re going to give it five minutes more,” Diane said, raising her voice to be heard over the clamor, “and then we’re going to assemble at the airlock.” A look for Stevie, for Gretchen, and then me. “No exceptions.”

  “I can’t believe it!” E., inflamed. She was down to shorts and bra, her limbs greased with sweat, her hair drenched and hanging limp. She turned an outraged face to the room, to all of us, in mute appeal. “Can you believe this?”

  “We’re not breaking closure,” I said, the words out before I knew my lips were moving. “No matter what. That’s the pledge we took.”

  “Pledge? We’re going to die, don’t you get that? Fluids or no—and keep hydrating, all of you,” Richard said. “Listen, I’m sorry, but as medical officer, I’m with Lark on this one—with our crew chief. We have no choice.”

  “A vote,” I said. “Show your hands—who’s for sticking it out?”

  “This isn’t a democracy,” Diane snapped, shooting me a look that put her on the other side of all I wanted and believed in. “Not when it comes to crew safety, it isn’t. Four minutes,” she said, clenching her jaw. “And counting.”

  I looked wildly round the room. Every face was drawn, eyes receding, shoulders slumped, sweat dripping. “Show of hands!” I cried, my right arm jerking up over my head.

  Three hands rose: E.’s, Gretchen’s, Gyro’s.

  “It’s not a democracy,” Diane repeated.

  “Come on, guys, it’s not worth our lives,” Stevie cut in, and I couldn’t believe it. Had all that over-my-dead-body business been nothing but a show? Was she that soft? That banal? That uncommitted? “It’s just not. We can always—”

  “Live to fight another day,” Troy said, wagging his head back and forth as if he’d lost control of the muscles there. He looked pained. Looked wilted.

  “Always what?” I demanded, hating Stevie, hating everything about her, and if I was a heartbeat away from physical violence, so be it. This was wrong. Misguided. Idiotic. What if the power came back on two minutes after we’d broken closure? What then? What would we look like then? “Always quit, is that?” I snarled, throwing it back at her.

  “Go to hell,” she said.

  “No,” I roared, “you go to hell!”

  That was the low point, the point at which the whole tottering edifice came as close to collapse as it ever had, but then—and we were so wrought up it took us a moment to register it—the PicTel pulsed to life, the screen going light, then dark, then light again, and G.C.’s face appeared before us in a wavering electronic flicker. It was a face nagged with worry, but tanned and confident for all that, the face of the man in charge, come to redeem us. “I just want you all to know that we’re doing everything in our power on this end,” he said, “so I’m going to ask you to hang in there just a little while longer, right to the point where you think you can’t take it anymore, because I know you can, and will. Richard? You there?”

  Our medical officer bent forward to peer into the camera, and he didn’t look good, I’ll admit, didn’t look inspiring or even equal to the situation, if you want to know the truth. What he said was, “I’m here.”

  “How crucial is it? Because we’re not prepared to put anybody’s life at risk—”

  “Fifty-fifty,” Richard said, with some effort. He looked as if he were about to pass out. Heatstroke shuts down the body’s ability to regulate temperature, resulting in cramps, disorientation, fainting, seizure. Brain damage, that was another medical term to consider. So was death. It was a hundred and eighteen degrees in that room and rising. Richard wanted out. Stevie wanted out. Troy wanted out. Diane wanted out. I wanted in, to stay in, no matter what.

  “All right,” G.C.’s voice, rolling and deep, a liner cutting a trough through a furious sea, “I’m going to authorize breaking closure on the grounds of crew safety in exactly ten minutes’ time, and I’m sorry, I am, because you all know it’s the last thing I would ever want to do . . .” His voice trailed off.

  We all looked at one another. E.’s eyes were full. Gretchen, her emotions rubbed raw, let out a low moan and pressed both hands to her face. I’d never been in a plane wreck, but what I was thinking was that this must have been what it was like when the oxygen masks dropped and the wings shrieked and you held on to your tray table with a grip that was like death. And what were you supposed to do—cradle your head?

  But then the miracle—all at once the fans started up and the water gurgled in the pipes and the lights we’d forgotten snapped back to life like so many flashbulbs and the temperature stabilized and then began to drop. And drop. By evening, we were back to normal, eighty-two degrees, all systems go. So we were saved, the tech staff in the power plant propping us up till the tech staff at the Tucson Electric Power Company could bring it home, but it was close. That close.

  I learned something that day. Learned how to divide. Learned who was committed, truly committed, till death do us part, and who was just along for the ride.

  Linda Ryu

  So I start putting on weight and I have nobody but myself to blame, but that’s no fun so I blame Dawn. It’s like I’m eating for two, or that’s the joke I try to make anyway, not that it matters to her. She’s completely self-absorbed, so much so I’m beginning to question what I’m getting out of the relationship, especially the time I spend at the visitors’ window or on the phone with her, time that could be put to better purpose. Like getting laid by someone who might actually care about me—Gavin Helgeland, maybe, though he seems more interested in numbing-out his brain with Tricia Berner and Ellen Shapiro, who, by the way, are with him constantly, one under each arm, as if they’ve been grafted on. But Dawn has her problems and her problems take precedence over mine because she’s a Terranaut and I’m not. Only fair, right?

  The fact is I’m trying my hardest not to quibble over things or show my resentment and when it comes down to it I can say without a trace of irony that I’m sticking with her out of loyalty. That’s right, loyalty—I’m not
hing if not loyal. And if that means sitting there sweating outside the visitors’ window while she goes on about the minutiae of every interaction she’s had since she rolled out of bed that morning, who said this or that, who’s feuding, who she suspects of stealing bananas from the storeroom that doesn’t yet have a lock on it because a lock would be an indictment of them all and the ideals they live by and for, then I just have to grin and bear it. She’d do the same for me, I’m sure.

  I went to her the day after she’d had her talk with G.C., which, as I understood it at the time, was all about harmony. I knew it had to do with Gyro and his personal brand of disharmony and the way he was expressing it—or relieving it—but I didn’t know the extent of what G.C. was driving at, how outrageous it was, really, till I actually got to sit down with her. This would have been late June, as best I remember, before the galago business and the power outage that put a scare into all of us (or more than a scare: I heard Dennis actually pissed himself, though I wasn’t there to witness the stains, so don’t quote me on that).

  The heat had set in with a vengeance. I was sweating. And itching. I’d just showered but any relief I might have felt was gone by the time I toweled off. I was chafed under my arms and between my legs and heat rash was creeping across my abdomen and up under my breasts in a pink prickling band that defied talcum powder and even Tinactin. There was no relief, of course, because the air-conditioning was down in the Residences (which should have been an indication or at least a hint as to what was to come when the tech staff encountered a real emergency, but that wasn’t for me to say). Anyway, when I came round the corner of the building for our prearranged chat at eight p.m., I saw that somebody was already there at the window, but what with the hair hanging in my eyes and the heat haze and all the rest, I didn’t realize it was Johnny till I was almost on him.