The Explorer. James Smythe

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      ‘Make sure you alert the rest of the crew when you do one of these, check that somebody is on the end of your Safe Cable at all times, ready to pull you back in if you need it.’ That was one of the major rules of the suits. They taught us how to work on the outside of the ship, in case we needed to. ‘You won’t need to,’ they said, ‘the ship is perfectly capable of taking good care of itself. But if panelling comes loose, something like that, you may need to assist one of the pilots in repairs.’ I’d give anything to be assisting right now. I float myself down to the back of the ship and step into the Exit booth – there’s a one-man exit, like a revolving door, with depressurized seals, and a door that slides back when you hit a button. It pulls wide to reveal the nothingness. The suit I’m in is fitted with loose magnets over all the limbs, designed to help you stay in an orbit of the craft itself – the scientists were thrilled with how difficult it would be to lose yourself, to float off into space. I cling to the ship like those baby monkeys you see on nature documentaries, and pull myself along on all fours. It’s silent and cold and I haven’t got a clue what I’m doing out here. I don’t even know what I’m looking for: damage, maybe, or an open petrol cap. It’s going to be that simple, I tell myself; you’ll see it, and fix it, and that’ll be that. All the stuff under panels, the broken and bruised parts of the ship’s guts, they’ll be fine. I circle the main body of the ship, never having any sense of which way is up as I cling to the cylinder and I look up and down the panelling, at the clean lines, at the lack of scratches and scuffs, at the perfect cleanliness of the body. There’s nothing. I get back into the ship and change again, and there’s ten minutes on the clock before life support would have run out. I start us up again, and watch the numbers. They have to be wrong.

      Wherever you are, when you’re alone, you feel eyes on you. I sit at the desk and write my entries for Earth – because they could still be listening, maybe these would get there eventually – and as I type, I feel eyes on me. No matter where you are, no matter how alone you are – in the dead of space, in the middle of nowhere – it always feels like you’re being watched.

      22%. Something’s definitely awry, something mechanical. I hoped for a while that it would be the computer maybe, just fucking up. It isn’t. There’s a pattern again, but it isn’t constant: each percentage point seems to be taking less time than the one before it. That means I have three or four days left at most. A few days of flying, moving, whatever, and then, assuming that the piezoelectric batteries charge to full, another day or so of sitting around, waiting for the air to run out, or to be rescued, whatever happens first. Less than a week of my life left. People achieve a lot in a week: in a week you can cure a disease, write a song, create a child.

      Elena and I had spoken about having children. A recurring theme, running around a track passing a baton to each other wherein we make excuses. We tried, two years ago, and she lost it. The worst moments in life come when you are happiest, like the cruellest anvil of irony. We were happy and laughing and in a taxi going to a party to celebrate an award I was getting – to celebrate me! – and she cramped up. Dinner had been asparagus and steamed salmon and dauphinoise, rich and stodgy and hearty, and we were going to the party afterwards – like a real celebrity, an after-party with invites – when she grabbed the headrest of the front passenger seat and wrenched at it.

      ‘Are you okay?’ I asked her, because she was never one for indigestion or heartburn. (I used to say that she had a stomach made of iron. She would poke her belly – her normal, not-fat belly – and I would clarify that I meant inside, and she would mock-take it as an insult.)

      ‘I’m fine,’ she said, ‘must have eaten too much.’ She sounded so convinced that I didn’t worry her while she checked herself; as she puffed to control her breathing, like they would have eventually taught her to do in antenatal classes. I didn’t notice as she reached down to grab at the cramp, to claw it out of her; I only saw what was wrong when her hand came up covered in blood, the front of her dress sodden, the still-cold cream leather of the car – an expensive one, that had its own business card, that we argued was worth it on this Special Occasion – smeared red, and she started crying. I got the driver to pull over and she lost the baby right there at the side of the Uxbridge Road, halfway between a pub and a police station. I took my jumper off and she clutched it to herself to soak up the blood, and we threw it away in the bin when we got to the hospital, an expensive jumper, just like that. I don’t even know if it was big enough that you could call it a baby. I don’t know what you’d call it. We weren’t even sure she was pregnant: we’d been trying for a couple of months, and this was the first period she had missed. It happens, we were told, sometimes; sometimes, it’s best not to get your hopes up at that early stage.

      ‘I said we shouldn’t assume it would be fine,’ I offered during the conversation, and I’m still not sure if that was me consoling or accusing. It took another year before we spoke about it again, and then we agreed to try, but another month. There were bills, or too much work, or the time that it would be born was wrong – we planned everything nine months ahead, verbally positive that nothing would go wrong. And then I got my trip, or the promise of it.

      Here are other things about Elena: she had a temper, but never shouted; she once threw a cup at me across the kitchen, and she hit me square in the forehead and caused this scar, and I mercilessly teased her about having the best throwing arm in the world, saying she should join the London Meteors, help them win some games; and only once more did she throw something at me, a book this time; and she begged me not to go, saying that the time we would be away from each other would be too much. She was right. This is too much, now. I am left with the sterility of space and so much else of nothing.

      19%, and I don’t want to go to sleep. I have been awake now for what feels like hours and hours, and my eyelids are tugging themselves shut, but I don’t want to sleep. I want to watch this tick, in case. I look outside. There’s no sun to keep me awake. I’ve switched all the lights back on: there’s nothing to see but they keep me irritated every time I start to drift off. My headache is here, a comforting neighbour come to borrow a cup of sugar, who stays to have a drink and will Never Fucking Leave. There’s a library of books, films, music, all in the computer, and none of them even slightly fascinate me: I’m in space, and I’m slowly dying.

      17%, and something hits me. What if the message – the numbers, the beep, the light – is coming from aliens? What if something is out there, watching me, hailing me, and this is how it comes through in our system, like an error message in an operating system? We don’t know what’s here. We’ve been here by video, never in person; they might have been waiting for us to get this far.

      ‘Congratulations,’ they would say, ‘you are the first species to get to us. Here are our secrets.’ I spend the next few hours looking at the blackness out of the Bubble, and there’s nothing. No ship, no aliens, no stars. Nothing.

      15%. Another day. No sun rises. I eat a coffee-flavoured protein bar for breakfast – it’s actually coffee ice-cream, but that feels more like a dessert, and I like to act socially acceptable, even when by myself, so tell myself that it’s just coffee – and run the recycling units, get some fresh water. I’ve been drinking stale for days. I should start living like a king. I have food supplies enough to feed a full contingent, including special occasions. We had the resources for a party, for when we reached the halfway point, when the ship turned itself. We were to celebrate and film it, and that would be what they showed on the news. There are a couple of bottles of champagne, hidden here for celebrations – the halfway point of the trip, probably. That was the good intention of them. They’re a good way to celebrate, I suppose. I decide to drink them, to eat the Roast Beef meal bars – the best meal bars, sponsored by some celebrity chef – for as many meals as I can, then work my way down the list. The Fried Chicken and Pepperoni Pizza bars get to stay in the box, where they can forever taste like the stale crisps that they are. I am no longer rationed. The champagne is loose and crisp, the bubbles almost larger here. If there was anyone else here I would ask them if they actually were larger, if the pressure or the gravity СКАЧАТЬ