The Explorer (13 page)

‘Oh, you know,’ she said. ‘If it’s possible to fail a test where there’s no wrong answers, I’m sure that I just did.’ She didn’t smile for me when she said it, slipping away from that veneer. I never questioned whether she wanted to be on the trip itself: seeing her acting (either for me, or for the doctors who ticked their boxes and said that she was fine to carry on with the process) made me realize that she wanted it as much as anybody else.

I follow Wanda through the ship. We all called her Dogsbody behind her back, never to her face. We thought – I thought – that it was a gentle nickname, harmless, that she was in on the joke, but she isn’t. I watch her cleaning, running the basic diagnostic tests, the stuff that Quinn can’t be bothered to do. I watch her helping Guy in the Bubble, and ensuring that measurements from the telescopes and cameras are recorded and logged properly, all to be sent home. I watch her do everything that we don’t want to do, and nobody thanks her. She goes into the changing room, alone, and cries, gently sobbing into her hands like some 1950s movie star, floating in the room, scrunched up and foetal. That was one of the best feelings, about being weightless: being able to do gymnastics in the air. She revolves slowly, involuntarily, as she sobs. Nobody hears her.

She goes back to her routine, and I follow her through the ship. In the main cabin, she prepares the meal as Emmy laughs about something with Quinn, as I sit at the computer and type. Quinn leans over the cockpit instruments and taps a screen.

‘What does this message mean?’ he asks, and Guy heads over and looks at it.

‘It’s nothing,’ Guy says. I wonder if they’re talking about the number that I saw before I died. Maybe it’s the same. Maybe I’ll solve that puzzle. ‘It’s just an alert about some of my research.’ He disappears back towards the Bubble. I can’t see the screen: if it is the number, I’ll never know now.

Wanda warms the food in the heaters, bars that taste of fast-food fried chicken, and serves it with flat Coca-Cola in crisp white sachets.

‘Dinner’s ready,’ she says. We strap ourselves in and eat. I join them, peeling open one of my own packets – this one some homogeneous freezer-meal branded bar that tastes vaguely of sausages and potato – and nobody really speaks, but then Quinn reminds Emmy of the dream that she had.

‘Hope you don’t wake us all up again tonight,’ he says. She hits him on the arm.

‘I couldn’t help it.’ I’m filming them all – part of my remit, get the stuff that looks friendly, that shows how well we all get on, how much fun exploring is – but I’m not paying attention to Wanda, who is quiet, and still. I watch her now, and see it all.

Wanda’s walk will take place in twenty-four hours’ time. Full-stop is scheduled for first thing in the morning, as that’s when the broadcast home will happen – our first with gravity – and, after that, Wanda will get into her suit and head out into the darkness as we eat our breakfast, and she will die. I watch her wake up, not knowing. I watch her record interviews, talking about nothing, bullshit, her day-to-day, what she does. The me that’s interviewing her ignores everything, ignores all the questions that might actually tell us something about her, or help her through whatever the hell it is that she’s going through. Instead, he finds out about how statistics help the ship be efficient, about how much oxygen gets used and how it’s measured. I remember watching these when they were all dead and thinking how dull she was, how she had nothing to offer. Hindsight.

This is how she spends her last day. I struggle with my eyelids, which want to close, even though I know I won’t sleep; and I take more painkillers, because the pain is absent, or only niggling, like a memory of the pain, and I want it to stay that way, even though they make me even more tired. I watch everything she does, because somebody has to. Somebody has to see how she lived her final day, what she did. But she does nothing. She cleans and records things and sits in the background, even further back than I do, somehow.

At the end of the day, she talks to Guy, corners him in the corridor, leads him to the storeroom.

‘I need to talk to you,’ she says.

‘Fine,’ he says. ‘What’s up?’ He tries to sound casual, but never can. Everything is brusque and bitter when he’s preoccupied.

‘I’m having trouble,’ she says. She seems like she needs a shoulder to cry on, but Guy shrugs her off.

‘Look,’ he says, ‘fucking deal with it. You knew what you were getting into. You wanted to be an explorer, wanted your name to go down in history, or you wouldn’t have signed up. Man up and get on with your job, okay?’ He leaves her in the storeroom, in the dark. I think about getting out and telling her that I’m there, holding her, because that’s what I think she needs. Instead I wait in the lining for her to stop crying again, and move back to the cabin, and to pretend that everything is normal.

Wanda was the last into the room when we were being told who was on the crew. I had been third, after Arlen and Guy, and I knew them both fairly well, so was happy. I was happy to see Emmy, and Quinn, and then Wanda came in, and none of us really knew her. I reintroduced myself, because I didn’t know if she would remember my name.

‘I’m terrible with names,’ she said when I did it, apologizing for me, pre-empting anything that I could say.

‘Yeah, we didn’t really get a chance to talk to you much,’ Arlen said. He introduced himself then, and the rest of the crew. She knew Guy; they shook hands, smiled.

‘So you’re going to be my dogsbody,’ Guy said, which is when the name began. ‘Tell you what, that ship won’t clean itself.’ He was joking, but he wasn’t. Everybody else had experience, reason to be there. Wanda was the anomaly, of sorts. There were others who could have had her job who were far more qualified; when Guy led Wanda off to tell her how the day-to-day would work for them, the rest of us crewmates questioned the choice.

‘It’s not even like we know her socially,’ Emmy said. ‘You can’t even argue we get on really well with her or anything.’

‘She must be the best person for the job,’ Arlen said. ‘No two ways about it.’

I listen as the crew get into their beds, as they say goodnight like they do every night, like they will until there aren’t enough of them left to bother; when it’s just me and Emmy, Emmy and I, alone. They say goodnight, and they seal their beds, and they go to sleep. I hear Wanda saying goodnight last, and think about how sad I am for her – that she’s got so little time left.

‘I don’t want to watch it happen,’ I say to myself as I lie in the lining and try to sleep. ‘I have to try and save her.’ If there’s a reason for me to be here – if it isn’t just chance, or some accident, if the universe (ha!) has put me back here for a reason, maybe it’s to save Wanda?

I listen to the air for hours, until it’s totally still. There’s no noise, apart from the engines, and the moans of Emmy dreaming, murmuring in her sleep. I slip back to the storeroom, prise open the panel and drift into the ship again. Wanda dies in space, her suit torn, compromised; there must be a tear. This won’t be like Arlen, I tell myself, where I caused it. In Wanda’s case, I’ll save her. I’ll change what happened, for the good.

I get to the changing room and look at the suits, trying to find the one imprinted with her name. I don’t know how the tear was caused but I’m careful, cautious. The suits have diagnostic panels; I switch hers on to see what it says, see if it picks up any tears, but there aren’t any. I check the helmets then, all of them, because they’re generic, one size fits all. None of them have cracks or bleeds. I run my fingers across their seals, gently, trying to find anything, but there’s nothing there. Not a thing. Everything is perfect, totally perfect, and I haven’t caused anything, and she shouldn’t die. Maybe they just needed the diagnostics to be run to make them okay; maybe I’ve already changed it.

I pull myself back to the corridor and towards the storeroom when I hear her crying. I can see her, floating in the corner, hands on her face again, these tiny little sobs. She’s right in front of the panel that I came out of, that I’ve only loosely re-fixed to the wall. I decide to do the unthinkable.

‘Wanda,’ I say. She’s the first person that I’ve spoken to in what feels like forever, the first time I’ve used my voice properly in days and days. She doesn’t look up at me: she wipes her face with the palms of her hands. I stay back, so she can’t see me, hidden slightly by the darkness. If she sees how thin I am, sees the scars, my hairline, my beard, bushier and fuller than the me in the cabin, the manic look I’m sure that I have in my eyes almost constantly . . . If she saw those things, she’d know that there was something wrong straight away. She’s upset, not stupid.

‘Cormac,’ she says. It’s so strange to hear my name, and to hear it addressed to me, not the other version. ‘I thought you were asleep.’ She doesn’t look at me, because she doesn’t want me to see her eyes, to see that she’s been crying. ‘I didn’t mean to wake you; I just wanted to look at the ship like this, when it’s quiet.’

‘It’s okay,’ I say. ‘You’ve been crying.’

‘Homesick,’ she says, which is a lie, because I know that something more is wrong, something deeper.

‘You want to talk?’ I ask her.

‘No,’ she says, ‘I’m fine. Honestly.’

‘You can talk to me,’ I say.

‘No,’ she tells me. ‘I can’t.’

‘You’ll be all right,’ I say, meaning it; wanting to reassure her, and myself.

‘You should go back to bed,’ she tells me, wanting me to leave her alone. ‘Big day tomorrow. Aren’t you going to get to walk?’ I had forgotten that: I was going to get a chance to go out there, after she was finished with the diagnostic checks. I’d forgotten that, when she died, one of the things I felt was disappointment, selfish disappointment.

‘Goodnight,’ I say, and I push backwards, away from her, down towards the cabin. When she’s not looking I duck into one of the fuel rooms and wait until she gets up and leaves, sliding the door shut behind her, going back to her bed. The me she thought I was is already there; the me that she actually spoke to rushes back to the hole in the wall, opens it up, gets inside. My eyes have adjusted to the darkness now, and there’s no chance of me sleeping. I take another pain pill and move to the changing room, and watch the suits to make sure that nothing can possibly happen to them.

The crew wake up at the same time, because there’s an alarm been set. Guy tells everybody to brace, which they do, and then he presses the button, and the ship stops moving as fast as it was, begins to rely solely on momentum – which, we were told in training, could take us a long way in space. When there’s nothing pushing you backwards, nothing to force you to stop, you can keep going forward, a car with no brakes barrelling down a hill. Gravity falls, and I find myself steady. I’m doing less exercise than I was first time around, and this is harder, much harder, because my legs aren’t feeling nearly as strong, and whatever I did to my leg before, it’s not what it was, even with the painkillers, and even though it’s not as bad as I remember it being. The crew gather around and greet home, and everybody grins and smiles and updates them, lets them know that we’re happy and fine, that everything is going to plan. When they’re gone it’s back to business, and Wanda shakes slightly at the side, testing her legs, almost, as she leans against the table.

‘Wanda, you’re up,’ Guy says after a few minutes. She doesn’t say anything, but leaves the cabin. I scurry along inside the walls to follow her: she goes to the bathroom first, washes her hands and face, splashes water onto her cheeks, rubs them. (That was something that Guy recommended to us during training. ‘It’s a survival mechanism,’ he told us, when we asked him why he did it – this was in the final stages of training, when we were taken up in a modified jet to the stratosphere. ‘Humans have got this thing built into them, where water, on their faces, wakes them up, kicks adrenalin in. It’s to stop us from drowning, something that we’ve evolved to do.’ He always splashed the water, he said, because it helped him to think clearly.) From there she strips to her underwear, a vest and pants, and then walks to the changing room and pulls her suit on. It’s the same suit that I checked last night, checked and found to be fine. She takes her time, following all the protocols, and then, when it’s pulled up and fastened, takes a helmet down, puts it on, locks it in place. Guy comes in, checks it for her. ‘You ready?’ he asks, and she nods. He tests her oxygen, that the seal is okay, and then puts his hand on her shoulder. ‘You’re feeling better?’ he asks, and she nods.

‘Much,’ she says, but I can barely hear it through the helmet. He takes the safety cable, clips it to her back, and the proxy cable, in case of failure.

‘Good girl. See you in a few.’ Guy backs out of the room, heaves the door closed and instigates the airlock process. He waves to her through the windows, like a little salute. She doesn’t return the salute: she suddenly flashes a glint of something sharp and metal, and jabs it into the seal between her suit and her helmet, which is only a thin rubber thing, and the door behind her opens, and she plunges backwards, like she’s falling from a diving board. She doesn’t squirm or wriggle; it’s graceful, peaceful, almost. Guy doesn’t scream – the rest of the crew don’t hear anything – but his face falls, and he realizes what she’s done. His decision flashes over his face, and he decides to keep what happened a secret. He watches what I can’t, because I can’t see out of the ship, but I remember what she looked like when she came back; burst, swollen. None of us knew that Guy saw it when it happened; he didn’t say a word.

I wait and listen as everything plays out like it did before: Guy tells the crew that something’s wrong, that he’s bringing Wanda back – and he calls her Wanda, not Dogsbody, even though she can’t possibly hear him use the name that he first birthed for her – and Emmy rushes down to her, tearing off her helmet as soon as the airlock finishes its cycle and we could get past the door. She feels for a pulse but there’s nothing, so she pumps at her chest as Quinn rushes to get the bumpers, but then she calls to him, tells him to stop, that Wanda’s gone, that there’s no chance. We all stop and bow our heads, because she’s the second to go, and because it’s a tragedy, and because we’re all wondering what this means for us, as a trip, as individuals. Guy steps onto whatever it was that Wanda was holding, and as soon as he gets the chance, he grabs it from the floor and slips it into his pocket.