The Explorer (22 page)

‘Will he be okay?’ Emmy asks, and Quinn nods. He’s gone quiet. Something’s wrong. I didn’t see this in him before; either because I missed it, or because I wasn’t here. It feels private, secretive, but I watch anyway. He follows the me, watches me dress, talks me through more of the details, and then tells me that he’ll fasten the safety cable for me. He does, and it’s secure; and then he says that he’ll work the airlock. I remember standing there, terrified at being on my own, and Quinn telling me that I would be fine, reassuring me, totally confident; then pressing the button, and then I was gone for that second. I listen now to the sealing of the airlock door, but can’t see myself sucked out, suddenly free again. I don’t need to, because I remember it like it was yesterday.

I remember feeling totally alone for those first few minutes, so alone, more alone than ever before, because there was just me and the metal and the stars. I remember thinking about what happened if I cut the cord; if I let myself off, to drift, to plough onwards on my own, a one-man satellite, a moon, a comet. There’s that story about the astronaut who wasn’t Armstrong or Aldrin; how he spent half an hour on the dark side of the Moon, away from any communications, cut off from everybody. He said he felt alone, but that it was great. You’re at one with the universe. That was what the trip was all about in the first place: achieving greatness. I could drift off and try to find God until my oxygen ran out, and then I would die, but I would be content, maybe. I remember pulling myself along the cord to the ship, moving to the navigation panels and starting the long process of unscrewing them.

In the ship, I watch as Quinn goes back to Emmy in the cabin.

‘It was Cormac,’ he says, ‘not Guy. Guy said he was out there with him, right? And Cormac denied it, said he was in the shower, but I checked the tapes, and he was outside, just like Guy said.’ We recorded everything that happened to the hull. I forgot. There was a camera on the outside of the ship, pointed behind us, recording everything, because if something physically broke, it was the easiest way of the engineers back home seeing exactly what went wrong. ‘I watched the tape, and he was there. He was out there with Guy, helping Guy, just like he said. And get this: he walked again last night, while we were asleep, and he opened panels – and why the fuck would he be opening panels? What was he doing to them? I think he’s . . . I think he’s sabotaged us. I can’t say for sure, but he’s got something to do with this, with our situation.’

‘Cormac wouldn’t do that,’ Emmy says. She has faith in me. It’s warranted, I suppose. ‘He wouldn’t lie like that.’

‘Don’t defend him. He’s been lying about his wife,’ Quinn says, ‘and that’s pretty big, right? He lied about that, he might be lying about everything. What’s he got to live for, now, anyway? He’s unhinged.’

‘He’s not unhinged.’

‘Oh, come on, Emmy. You know. You know him better than any of us, from the psych stuff, from being with him before.’ It stings her, you can see. I didn’t know that Quinn knew. Emmy must have told him. ‘He’s not right in the head. Why bother to lie to us? What’s the point in it?’

‘Don’t.’

‘He’s sabotaged this, him and Guy. They must have done it together. He wants . . . I don’t know what he wants. He wants us dead.’ His chin shakes, and he balls his hands, and Emmy keeps gasping, as if the shock hits her every few seconds, as if she can’t comprehend it all. Here, in the lining, I know how she feels. I didn’t know that any of this happened. I didn’t have a clue.

‘What do we do?’ she asks, seemingly having decided that he’s right, swayed suddenly, persuaded.

‘I don’t know,’ Quinn says, and then the me that’s on the hull, the guilty before being proven innocent, asks Quinn over the speakers what he should do.

‘The panel is open,’ he says, ‘and I can see the wires. Which one shall I join first?’

‘Start from the left,’ Quinn says. ‘Let me know when it’s done.’ He doesn’t stand by the computer; there are no tests to be run, no equations or codes to be rewritten or altered. He thinks I’ve already been out there once, that I already know what I’m doing. He’s just buying himself time to think, time to work out how to deal with me. I already know that he won’t get the chance.

I watch as they pace, as they discuss it. Emmy favours tying me up, leaving me in the storeroom – ‘Nobody goes in there,’ she says, and I stifle a laugh at that – but Quinn keeps his cards to his chest. I know what he’s thinking before he says it, and when it’s out there, he can’t take it back.

‘We could just shut the airlock,’ he says.

‘What do you mean?’ Emmy asks, but she knows exactly what he means. If she pretends that she doesn’t, if she plays dumb, then she can act as if the thought has never crossed her mind.
The idea was all Quinn’s
, she can say, to herself, or to whatever tribunal she might still hope they get to face when they’re rescued.

‘We shut the outer door. It’ll sever the safety cord.’ He doesn’t look at her as he says it. She doesn’t look at him as she processes it.

‘He’ll die,’ she says.

‘Yes.’

‘You think we should kill him? You think he deserves that? He’s not a murderer.’

‘Yes, he is. He’s tried to stop us getting home, Emmy. We’ll die if we don’t get home. We’ll drift and drift, and we’ll die, because we’ll run out of food or oxygen, and that’ll be it. Besides,’ he says, ‘maybe he was the one who tampered with Wanda’s suit.’ It’s founded on nothing, because that was an accident, but it’s enough. A line can be drawn between all my actions, my guilt proven. Outside the ship, the me has completed his second-to-last connection. He tells Quinn, and Quinn tells him that it hasn’t worked. ‘Keep trying,’ he says.

‘Okay,’ my voice says. ‘Last one now. I’ll tell you when it’s done.’

‘We’ve only got a couple of minutes,’ Quinn says. ‘I’m going to do it.’ He stands up, walks down the corridor towards the airlock. Emmy runs after him, begging him to stop, even though I can’t tell if she means it in her voice, not really.

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘stop.’ I shake. I shake, and I ache, and my gut is tired and hungry and hurting, and my head hurts, but this didn’t happen. I didn’t die out there. I came back in and Quinn was dead. Emmy’s going to kill him. She’s going to kill him, for me. To save me. I follow them down the corridor towards the airlock, not worrying how much noise I make, because they’re lost already, stuck in their own world of murder and tears and the speculative insanity of Cormac Easton.

‘Done,’ the me outside says over the speakers.

‘Doesn’t work,’ Quinn says. He’s standing by the console outside the airlock.

‘I’ll come back in, then,’ I say. ‘You should try, maybe. I don’t really know what I’m doing.’ I sound disappointed. I really wanted to help save the day. Quinn doesn’t say anything. He starts to key in his security code, and I watch for Emmy to make her move but she doesn’t. She stays totally still, shaking, crying. He looks at her.

‘This is the right thing to do,’ he says, not a question, an affirmation, but she nods anyway, giving him permission. It’s not her: it’s me. I’m all that’s left. And if I’m not, this will reset, and the next me will know, somehow. I kick open the wall and run, and in a second I’m in the hallway, charging into Quinn, my hundred-something pounds of frail, worn body thudding into his muscles, his brawn, and he would have been able to overpower me if I didn’t push his head with my hand, take him so completely by surprise, slam his skull against the wall so hard that it sounds like the slamming of a door.

That’s all it takes; his skull cracks, and he slides down, collapses under my pathetic weight. Against the white panelling, he leaves a red trail, a streak down to the ground. The blood starts to puddle as Emmy screams. I look at her and she takes me in, and her face looks like she’s seen death, but she can’t comprehend it, not properly, and then I hear the me that was outside clambering into the airlock, hear the doors start to shut, their mechanics making the whole ship rumble. I have to go, I realize, so I do, back into the walls, but Emmy doesn’t see that because she’s too busy staring at the now-corpse of Quinn on the floor, too busy screaming. I listen as the me takes his helmet off, asks her what’s wrong before he’s seen it, then sees the body and tells her that he’s sorry, asks her what happened, but he’s talking too fast and it almost all sounds like gibberish, like blabbering, so he does what he thinks he should, what he thinks is appropriate, and he puts his arms around her to console her but that only makes her scream louder, so he thinks she’s reacting to the death and he restrains her with his arms, holds her as she beats at him, tries to fight him off, her hands leaving blood prints on his suit from where she had grabbed at Quinn to check his pulse, to see if she could save him.

‘Shh,’ the me says to her. ‘It’ll be all right. Honestly, it’ll be all right.’

He takes her to the main cabin, tries to get her to sit down but she won’t. She screams at him.

‘How did you do that?’ she asks. ‘You killed him! How did you do that?’

‘I didn’t,’ the me says. He is honest, genuine in his confusion. She takes it as a lie.

‘Get away from me,’ she says, ‘you’re a fucking murderer.’ She spits it, and I’m the villain. My face is hurt and shock. I remember thinking,
She’s lost it. Quinn’s death was the end.
I remember thinking,
I wonder if she killed him
, because that was a natural reaction, just a quick thought, and I dismissed it, because I knew she would never be capable of it.

‘We’ve only got an hour of life support left,’ I say, because we used so much of the battery operating the airlocks, changing the suits. ‘We have to start the engines.’ I go and clean up the blood first, from the puddles around Quinn’s head, sucking it up into a smaller liquid-hoover.
I can’t imagine anything worse than blood in zero gravity
, I remember thinking.
Poor Quinn
. I press the button for the first time that trip (and she doesn’t try to stop me, though from the lining I can see her flinch, as if she’s considering it). It’s the first time I note how much fuel is left.

‘57%,’ I say to her. ‘We’ll be turning around soon enough.’ She ignores me, her eyes dismayed and reddened. ‘We’ll be okay,’ I tell her.

‘How could you do this?’ she asks, but it’s a rhetorical question, because – then, at that point – I don’t know what it is that I’ve supposedly done. I remember even wondering if it wasn’t her that did it, that killed Quinn, or pushed him by accident, or something. Now, remembering that, I can only feel guilty for ever having doubted her.

The me pulls Quinn’s body down the corridor, clumsily (because Emmy won’t help), his limbs hitting the walls, his leg dragging on the floor as if it’s somehow heavier than the rest of him: which it isn’t, it’s just luck that it looks that way; or a better word, chance. He puts him into his bed and does the straps up.

‘We should say something,’ he says, which nobody did for Guy, but he’s trying to be nice, trying to be considerate of Emmy’s feelings. She obviously cared about him. ‘Do you want to say anything?’ She doesn’t reply. He turns on the computer screen, the camera. ‘We’ll tape this, so we’ve got something to show when we get home.’ The blunt insistence that we’ll be saved, that the technology will work. Everything should have told him that this was a folly. He endeavours. ‘We should say stuff about him, like we did for the others. I’ll start, if it’s too hard.’

‘Go to hell,’ Emmy tells him. He looks hurt.

‘Fine,’ he says. ‘I’ll write something.’ He leaves her at the table, strapped in – where he did the straps himself, to keep her in one place, to let her calm down – and sits at the computer, starts to type. He opens a new file, and I remember this: he writes an update, talking sadly about the accidental death of Quinn. He leaves out any suspicion that Emmy might have been involved, because he can’t bear to imagine that she would have anything to do with it. He thinks too highly of her.

This was my last day with any of the rest of the crew, because tomorrow he’ll sedate Emmy permanently, sealing her bed, putting her in the equivalent of a coma until they get home, because she can’t be trusted, because she’s too far gone. I’ll bet that if I read it, that last piece of writing still has something resembling hope in it. Tomorrow, that will be all but gone.

He asks Emmy if she wants to eat, but she doesn’t, and when he lifts his own bar to his mouth she swipes at it, scratching his face. It’s not hard enough to break the skin, but it’s an attempt. She unbuckles herself, pushes off the wall towards the computer, then down the hallway. The me follows her, stuffing his meal bar into his pocket, and I mirror him as he drifts down the corridor.

‘Emmy,’ he says, ‘why are you doing this?’ She gets to one of the engine room and shuts the door behind her. He doesn’t try to force it open. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asks again, as if her answer might suddenly change. She doesn’t say a word, so he gives up, floats outside the door and then returns to the cabin and stares at the faces of his dead crewmates.

I always wondered if the DARPA people listened into our conversations. When we got into the training facilities, there were always faceless, personality-free rooms that we were given to stand around in, to make cups of coffee and talk about ourselves. The morning that I found out I had made the cut – over Terri, noxious Terri and her over-eager ways – was the morning that I told my future crewmates that Elena and I had argued, and that she had left me. She had taken a bag, packed it with her best clothes – the stuff she wore when she had important meetings, when she wanted to impress somebody – and left. She smashed my mobile phone, throwing it into the bath (which was empty, but a hard porcelain, and the phone screen smashed all over the plughole); she tore at my shirts when she filtered through for hers, pulling them off hangers, tearing the occasional seam; she took the car, and didn’t tell me where she was going. I got a phone call – to the house phone, which barely ever rang – telling me that she was leaving me and never coming back.

‘Every single thing you have done the past year tells me exactly what I need to know about you,’ she stammered, ‘what sort of man you are.’ She sounded as if she had written this down and was reading it out. I could almost hear her mother standing behind her, egging her on. We had never seen eye to eye. ‘You have proven that you’re unwilling to make this work, and have betrayed my trust in the gravest way. What’s done can’t be undone.’ I could see her mother bent over, scribbling the words onto the page. ‘When you leave our home, please don’t expect to come back. Don’t call me.’ I could see her mother calling the lawyers, telling them what an awful person I was.