The Terranauts Read online

  The moment—the initial moment, there on the dais—seemed to go on forever. I was grinning so hard my gums ached, light-headed, heavy of foot and ankle and haunch, planted there and yet soaring too. But then the applause faltered, the cheers died, and I realized what was happening: they were waiting for Dawn and Eve, every head turned to the airlock even as my crewmates began to cast glances over their shoulders. My crewmates were frowning now, their six identical grimaces so familiar to me, so alike, so predictable they might have been sextuplets. Everything was madness, but it was calculated too, and I had no trouble at all reading their minds—Not again, not now, the bitch, the unforgiveable bitch, how could she? They weren’t grinning anymore, nobody was, because this wasn’t funny, this joke that was all on them, and they weren’t high on the moment or relieved or perplexed or anything else—they were seething now and it showed in their faces.

  But then suddenly E. was there, Eve clasped to one shoulder—not at the entrance, but the window, the visitors’ window, inside still, and what did it mean, what was going on? A low murmur rolled through the crowd. There were gasps, cries of shock, consternation, surprise, the reality beginning to dawn on them in a long slow reveal. We were out here and E. was in there. Which meant—?

  G.C. put the microphone to his lips. “Ladies and gentlemen, friends of the Ecosphere and distinguished guests, I give you the Mission Two crew!” he roared out over the crowd in a voice made fuller, richer, deeper by the massive sub-woofers pummeling the thin startled Arizona air and echoing off the glass panels of E2 till it was like the clapping of a pair of god-sized hands. The applause rose halfheartedly, confusedly, and he went on, ignoring the response—or no, drawing the crowd in, ever deeper, to the very lip of the pit we’d dug for them: “And”—pause—“the Mission Three crew!” A broad gesture now for the replacement crew seated beneath us in the first row, only six of whom were dressed in red and only six of whom stood to acknowledge the tentative wavelet of applause that seemed to break and slosh in confusion.

  He was a showman, G.C., one of the best I’ve ever seen in action, and he took his time now, standing there silently and staring out over the massed heads and shoulders of the seated audience to where the University of Arizona Wildcats marching band stood at the ready, their instruments molten under the sun. “We speak of miracles,” he said finally, his voice booming and clapping till it felt like it was inside each and every one of us, “as if they were everyday occurrences. It’s a miracle that it’s raining or not raining, a miracle that the dry cleaner didn’t ruin our best suit or skirt, a miracle that the traffic jam on Route 77 cleared and we could all be here today.” He paused to shift his gaze to us, the Mission Two crew arrayed beside him. “All that’s just a figure of speech. You want the true miracle? It’s what these dedicated young people have endured—and celebrated—in the name of the science of closed systems. And I’m here to tell you there’s another miracle in the making . . . But, Ramsay, why don’t you step up to the mike and tell these good people all about it?”

  So I did. I took the microphone from G.C.’s hand and told everybody that the human legacy of E2 was its single greatest accomplishment and that just as with the life of the ponds and the ocean and the rain forest, we were going to have generational continuity between the missions. I looked over my shoulder to where E. and our daughter stood poised at the window, ready to wave at my signal. “I want to announce that my wife, Dawn Chapman, and my daughter, Eve Chapman-Roothoorp, will not be walking out into this glorious sunshine to join you all today, or any other day, for that matter—not till the Mission Three Terranauts emerge two full years from now!”

  I shouted this last bit, expecting an answering roar from the crowd, but it didn’t come, people shifting uneasily, their parched white faces uplifted and straining to comprehend, and what was wrong, hadn’t I been speaking clearly? And in English? In my excitement—my intoxication, my O2 drunkenness—I’d forgotten the key element here, the role of the husband and father, of me, Ramsay Roothoorp, first among equals. And what did they think—I was abandoning my responsibilities? Deserting my wife and child? That I was some blowhard hypocrite standing up here before them in the red jumpsuit I really didn’t measure up to?

  “And I myself,” I blurted, my super-amplified voice looping back to startle them all over again, “will be making the same commitment to my little family gathered there behind the window—and to my greater one too.” Here I gazed down on the baffled faces of the Mission Three crew, who were standing erect just below the podium. “If you, Gavin, and you, Matt, and Francisco, Rita, Tricia and Julie will have me—have us—as your companions and crewmates, we will be honored to join you.”

  I tried not to look at Linda or Malcolm, though I had no use for them at all and if they both dried up and blew away on a good stiff wind it wouldn’t have affected me one iota. I was going to say more—this was my moment, this was my stage—but thank god I had the sense to shut up and let Dawn and Eve take over for me, the two of them waving tirelessly from behind the glass while the crowd whistled and cheered till they ran out of breath and the University of Arizona Wildcats marching band came in right on cue to take up the slack.

  I don’t think I’d be inflating my sense of myself or my significance to that little moment of regional, national and even international history if I say there probably aren’t many people reading this who don’t know what came next, what fell out, that is—or at least some version of it. Which, in a way, I suppose, is why I’ve written this account in the first place. What began as a record of Mission Two has incrementally morphed into a kind of apologia pro vita sua, a way of finding some peace for myself in all the confusion of conflicting ideals and desires, and not least, of deflecting a portion of the criticism. But if I’m strong, if I’m iron-willed—and I’ve emphasized this throughout—I’m also weak, I’m also human. So understand me.

  There I was, up on the dais, the microphone in my hand, G.C., G.F., Judy and Little Jesus paying public homage and my fellow Terranauts soaking up the adulation of the crowd and never mind the little surprise that had thrown them off balance, they were all right with it now, all right with everything, because this was the single defining moment of all of our lives. The Mission Three crew joined us onstage for G.C.’s introductions and blessings and still I stood there, stood right there with them and not my former crew, and how special was that? It was a heady moment. We’d managed what no one else ever had, making it through 730 days without breaking closure, and now one of us (two of us, that is—three, if you count Eve) was going to do it all over again. Heady, yes, but why was I simultaneously feeling this emptiness at the core of me, down deep, where my emotions went to hide? A gut feeling. I have a gut feeling, that’s what people say, but what does that mean, really? That there’s an imperative that lies outside the control of the brain, the personality, the will? For just an instant, the crowd cheering and applauding and everything right with the world, it hit me, but then I dismissed it. I told myself it was just hunger, that was all.

  Cue up the food. Not simply the Big Mac I ceremonially tore into for the cameras while Richard lashed at his lobster tail and Gretchen smeared her face with butterscotch syrup, but the spread Mission Control had laid out in the command center for the hundred or so of the inner circle. I stood there in the middle of it all in my red jumpsuit, glutting myself on caviar, chorizo-and-prawn skewers and slice after slice of thin-cut filet mignon, a flute of champagne—champagne!—clutched in one hand while people swarmed round me with their worshipful faces and my ego swelled till I could have floated off on it and never touched ground again. Did I give even a glancing thought to my wife and daughter? No, I didn’t.

  But Judy was there now, right there, right at my elbow, and I did give her a whole lot more than just a glancing thought (and what would be the opposite of that—a fixed thought? A bull’s-eye of a thought that locks on the flight of the arrow till it sticks there quivering in the very center of all those concentric circles?)
. Can I even begin to tell you how magnetic Judy was—is—and how she looked and smelled and felt to a man marooned as long as I’d been? I’ve already told you what her heels and stockings did to me from behind the inert glass walls of the little prison cell we called the visitors’ window, not to mention the frisson of her bared crotch that propelled me in what was nothing short of sexual panic right up the stairs to my heavy sleeping pregnant wife. Well, all right: here she was.

  “Congratulations,” she said, pulling me aside even as I began to experience the first gaseous rumble in my stomach from the too-rich food served up in an equally rich environment.

  “Thanks,” I said, watching her smooth down her skirt and shift her weight beneath the ironic smirk she was wearing. “That means a lot, Judy. Coming from you. Especially.”

  “Yeah, I’ll bet,” she said, in a voice of pure smoke. And here she raised her wrist to glance at the thin ribbon of her watch. “But you’ve got I guess just over an hour and a half now before Jeremiah strikes up the band and you go marching back in with Rita and Julie and the rest of them. I don’t mean to keep you—you’re probably anxious to get back to your wife. And the kid, right?”

  I was thinking about the last time, the time we were interrupted in the executive washroom by the sound of G.C.’s key in the lock, and beating myself up over why I hadn’t thought to maybe jam a paper clip in the aperture there (and I’m not trying to summon Freudian images of lock and key or rod and receptacle, just giving you a sense of my thought processes in the moment—remember, I was drunk on the air, the occasion, the food, and most of all, Judy). She was toying with me. Waiting for me to drop my voice and whisper, Do you want to maybe see what it’s like in the washroom—remember the washroom?, so she could say, No, so she could say, Oh, come on, Vodge, I’m surprised at you, I really am. But that didn’t happen. I just shrugged. “You know how it is,” I said.

  “No, actually, I don’t.” Her lips were glistening, a sheen of Louis Roederer Cristal Brut there, champagne, the fine French champagne that had been denied us inside, just like everything else.

  I took a gulp from my own glass, drained it, set it down on a passing tray and snatched up another. I was feeling no pain. I was way up there now, my hands right on the controls of the shuttle taking us to Mars. “Why don’t we cut the crap,” I said.

  She was balancing on one leg, leaning back into one of the high cocktail tables the caterers had brought in for the occasion, her ankles crossed, the glass at her lips. “You’ve got your duty,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said, bitter now, the shuttle dropping so fast I felt dizzy, thrusters jammed, clogged, dead in the sky, “and so do you.”

  Of course, that wasn’t the end of it. If that was the end of it I wouldn’t be telling you this because it wouldn’t be germane to the mission, wouldn’t be seared into the record or even faintly relevant. What happened, right at that moment, right as the words passed my lips, was that somebody wanted a photo, the guy from Time, I think it was. Not a group shot, but just a portrait of me alone—the famous shot, or infamous, I guess, where I’m posed against the glow of the new command center computers—because I was the story at that juncture, I was the one outside the glass and intimately connected to the two inside. (And yes, for the full two hours the press and the public had my wife and daughter posing for them at the visitors’ window, though E. wouldn’t go near the airlock, not even for ten seconds, which was what everybody wanted, of course. Why do I say that? Because while people might admire purity, or give lip service to it, they all secretly want to see it compromised, ideals crushed and sullied and dragged down into the mud they inhabit. We might need our heroes and mad saints to live for us, but we certainly don’t want to exchange places with them and all the while we’re yearning for the sick thrill of their temptation and fall. Read Genesis. They got that right, at least.)

  So I sat for the portrait and Judy wandered off and somebody else was there, everybody else, more and more of them. I saw Stevie and Troy across the room in a swarm of people, Stevie’s hair as dull as one of the goat’s till she could get her hands on a box of Clairol Natural Instincts for the next day’s official photo session. Was I eating too much? Drinking too much? Had I lost control, totally? Yes, yes and yes. But before you criticize me, put yourself in my place. I’d just been freed from prison—or no, not freed: I was out on parole. For two hours. Two dwindling pinched little hours of ego-stroking and sensory overload, of reward for all the deprivation I’d put myself through, the aperture growing narrower and narrower as I shifted from foot to foot and smiled and nodded and drained one glass after another, until all at once it hit me as if I’d seized hold of a three-thousand-volt electrified fence: I didn’t want to go back inside. No: I wasn’t going to go back inside.

  Maybe you can blame me—everybody else did. I did go to the restroom, not the executive washroom, for which I didn’t have a key in any case, but the one at the other end of the hall, which was there to accommodate employees and guests alike. While I was in there—and the place was a miracle, make no mistake about it, with water that just ran and ran on infinitely from some vast reservoir out there in the greater world that made it all possible, E2, Eve, E. and me, and everything else under the sun too—I unzipped and began to drain off some of the residue of the champagne, feeling woozy, as I’ve said, and sick to my stomach on top of it (too much, too soon). I was still ringing with the shock of that electrified fence and before I knew what I was doing I was shucking off the red jumpsuit till I was standing there in my best battered pair of Terranaut high-top sneakers, shorts and a T-shirt that was just a T-shirt, sans slogan or corporate logo. Oh, that water flowed like in some magic show, the toilets flushing over and over, the sinks running, hand dryers roaring, but then there came an interval—seconds, that was all—when the sounds fell off and the outer door wheezed shut and all at once I was out in the middle of the floor, catching a quick glimpse of myself in the mirror over the sink. I looked—reduced. Looked guilty. Looked like somebody who had no principles, who had never had any principles, who was driven by the raw impulses of the id, by cowardice and fear and the glorification of the moment, who didn’t think, didn’t stop to think, who just . . . ran.

  To say I was unprepared for life on the outside was to speak truth, in spades. Perhaps the greatest technological transformation in human history had exploded on the scene while I was locked away—the computer revolution, dial-up, the worldwide Web, p.c.’s in something like thirty-six percent of the households in the country—and I didn’t know a thing about it. I didn’t know about world events either, didn’t know about Rwanda or the Serbs or Nancy Kerrigan, Aldrich Ames or O.J. Simpson. And money. I didn’t know about money, the feel of it between thumb and forefinger, or its value, and when I slipped down the back stairway at Mission Control and ducked into the head-high scrub that fringed the back courtyard and ran on unbroken all the way to the slopes of the Santa Catalinas, I didn’t have any either. Not a cent. I didn’t have a hat. Or a jacket. Or water. I wasn’t in the rain forest anymore, wasn’t in a controlled atmosphere: I was out in the Sonoran Desert, and I was drunk and sick to my stomach and caught up in the greatest crisis of my adult life.

  I didn’t go far, maybe half a mile, a mile. Far enough, in any case, so that I could no longer distinguish the celebratory strains of the party Mission Control was throwing. By the time I stopped running—or sidling or creeping or just shoving through one unforgiving bush after another—both my legs and both arms were striped with thin horizontal cuts, but I didn’t feel a thing. The air was a banquet for the alveoli of my lungs, for my bloodstream, for my brain, and it made me feel unconquerable, made me feel I could keep on going, all the way up the mountains and over the other side, down through Tucson and on into Mexico—Nogales, Guaymas, Culiacán—and who needed water? Not me. I’d made my break for it and now here I was, crouched under a creosote bush that was all but identical to ten thousand others, listening for sounds of pursuit like a child playi
ng at hide-and-seek. Nothing was irretrievable yet. I could have gone back, could have re-donned the jumpsuit and marched in through the airlock to extend my sentence for another two years and no time off for good behavior—there was time still, at least an hour, maybe more. I sat, stretched my legs, tried to think things through. A period of time slid by, how long I couldn’t say—I had no watch either. Very slowly my heartbeat began to decelerate, and though I wasn’t tired (just the opposite: I was riding a wave of exhilaration that had yet to crest), I laid myself down on my side in the prickling dirt, buffered my head with two folded hands (like a child) and fell off to sleep.

  If that seems incredible—that anybody could fall asleep under those conditions—I can only say it was beyond my conscious control, my body dealing with the burden of what I’d just done and what I was facing, not just now but on into the future. A brownout. Systems overload. If I hadn’t been drunk, hadn’t been out of my mind on oxygen and the mad caloric rush of all that sugary, salty, fat-drenched food, things might have been different. But that’s just making excuses, isn’t it? The truth is, even if I was stone-cold sober and fasting like a true believer and hadn’t been pushed into a corner by E. and G.C. and the exigencies of the unending mission, I still don’t think I would have been able to go back inside—not then, not ever. Once I breached the airlock, once I felt the sun on my face—and it wasn’t Judy, or not yet, wasn’t the cheers of the crowd or the food or drink or anything more than the world itself, E1 in all its glory—it would have been easier to shoot myself in the head than submit to that. I’d done my two years’ time and that was enough. Please.

  When dusk fell, birds ricocheting through the branches, things buzzing and chittering and humming against the coming night (wild things, things that weren’t necessarily innocuous, that weren’t imprisoned under glass in the world’s biggest terrarium, things that could—and would—bite), I was wide awake. My head had begun to clear. The exotic food lay heavy on my stomach and the various nicks and scratches I’d suffered began to sting. I wasn’t cold, but when the desert floor gave up its heat I would be. And I was thirsty, me, the water-meister of E2, where even in our own artificial desert it was insufferably humid and a drink was never more than fifty feet away. Irony? Sure, irony enough for another chapter altogether. Turn the page. Here it is, staring you in the face.