In the Valley of the Kings: Stories (4 page)

Naturally Peterson was hurt. He and Stern had trained together, shared Naval Academy ties and a series of backyard barbecues in Houston, of which there is still a Polaroid taped over the galley microwave: two men, two women, the men wearing dark glasses, the women with the loopy shut-eyed look that comes from too much sun and a fast shutter. Their arms are mostly hidden: here and there a hand appears, disjointed beside someone’s neck. There is no indication who took the picture, but in my imagination I am the photographer, and I think this prevents my tearing it up. I am surprised Peterson did not take it with him: it was Stern’s second wife, but Peterson’s first.

JUPITER WAS ACTIVE
on the decameter band this afternoon, crackling and hissing like a witch and her cauldron. I piped it back into the hold all day while I worked there on one of the instrument packages. I have been dreaming again, a nightmare in which I am unable to awake. This makes the silence in the ship nerve-wracking: hence Jupiter. It reminds me of surf, and the hold can be my boathouse, my Ogygya. I may leave the radio on tonight, a mood record, like those used in nurseries to lull the babies with big soft noises—but something stops me. This is not a record.

At the suggestion of mission control, who want one instrument package sent to Io in place of the lost lander, I work in the lighted hold, holding on to handgrips with my toes as I modify the contents of the capsules—three featureless shells. They shine in the floodlights, smooth as pills rolling under your tongue, as hard to hold on to; so blandly polished their scale is as hard to grasp as their surfaces: from across the hold they can look as small as BBs, and the hold no wider than a mailing tube; sometimes they could be worlds, and at the hold-hatch I cling to the top of a well dropped down from heaven. The weightlessness does this.

I prefer to work inside them, where I curl comfortably. Their brushed-metal interiors give back no reflections (outside, the distortions are immense), only a dim shape that moves with me in the corner of my eye. Jupiter’s speechless hissing comforts me then, a voice tongueless as a radio wave. But I know when the cabin lights cycle off tonight and I float to sleep, I will not have the courage to keep a radio turned on in this ship. I possess already—perhaps I have dreamed it—a sense of how it will be when I wake suddenly to Jupiter’s voice pronouncing words, whole sentences, my name. I have enough trouble with my dream.

In my dream I am Peterson, or with him in his suit, and we are looking back at me, at the ship, as Peterson drifts away. His tether gone or never connected, tumbling through the stars revolving, looking out, looking back, we do not see my face in the cockpit window. In my dream I know the ship is deserted, and although it is I who have left it, I feel abandoned. Lights burn in every port along its length, and every port shows empty in the light. The hold stands open, open on a two-car garage, lined with lawn mowers, ladders. The cars are gone. Oil gleams darkly from the center of the floor, unreflecting. I change my mind. I am too sad, too tired or sick or small to go, and I want to turn back, but it is too late.

He took no means of rescue with him. Once he stepped outside the airlock unattached, once he jumped, he was committed. I think he knew the limits of his resolve, and surrendered himself to physical law before he could recant. In my dream, I open my mouth to speak but I cannot. There is no air. Tears puddle in my eyes but won’t fall. The absence of air, the suspension of gravity: I recognize these things. They return to me, as if I knew them once but long ago forgot. Breath, weight, those are spells finally broken, exceptions now set aside. This is real.

And only when I pass beyond denying this can I awake and remember the rest of the story.

I don’t know what woke me, the night Peterson left. The operation of the airlock is almost silent, and unless he made some sound, I cannot explain how I came to witness his leap of faith. I suspect he did signal me, deliberately, banging a wrench against a bulkhead until he saw me move, and then he turned to the open hatch, to crouch and spring. He was not far when I reached a porthole.

When I saw a spacesuit in free fall beside us, I turned to summon Peterson, to tell him there was a man out there, should we shoot a line? There was something terrifying about the absence of an umbilical between the suited figure and the ship: my mind refused to supply the missing connection. I was afraid to look behind me. Long seconds passed, in which the image of a human form, tumbling in somersaults, shrank. I floated, I froze, I gave no thought to rescue, to fear or pity, to anything but the gradual diminution of the figure, until I recognized his waving arms, and remembered the man they signified: I bolted overhand—away from the airlock, my eyes clenched shut. Blind momentum carried me to the cockpit, and the radio.

His frequency was full of speech when I found it. A sob rocked the room before I could back off the gain, and then, gasping, Help me, and, I’m sorry.

I sat in my couch and looked out the windshield, where the galaxy slanted across the ecliptic, between Gemini and Orion. I tried to find the lines between the stars that make a pair of twins, a hunter, but the figures crumbled, forming trapezoids, triangles, and finally single stars burning red, blue, gold at the bottom of the black.

“What’s wrong?”

Nothing moved.

“What is it?”

Only stars far away, and his voice coursing on unnoticing, his remorse weighting me, and I stayed and watched the stars beyond the screen and listened, as if the voice were a lost memory, a dead child, a dream.

And even when I moved to ask the proper questions, he did not respond. I knew his receiver was finally
Off,
and it didn’t matter. I saw nothing when I returned to the cabin port, but his voice remained, lingering in the radio, where it cried and cried. His signal followed, fading too slowly, for hours: time enough to return, and return, to the sorrow and the emptiness. He thought it was a trick, an exercise, a game, but he was wrong it’s only empty space and I’m sorry. Help me.

I switched it off.

SO I AM
alone. Mission control approached me later with a surprising delicacy, a care to avoid certain words. Perhaps my inaction on Peterson’s behalf disturbed them: or perhaps out of the three they had most expected me to jump. They may no longer feel sure of whom they’re dealing with, and their delicacy is the caution demanded by a dawning sense of ignorance. Perhaps they no longer think me trustworthy. I think when they failed to take this up with me, they stopped being entirely candid.

THE SILENCE HAS
burrowed deep into my dreams. In them, human forms flash by, and I see their faces turning as they pass, their lips moving, forming one word. Always it is the same word, but the sound I hear is not speech, nor is it ever the same. One figure passes, my mother, who tells me it is a car’s horn honking. My physics teacher says it is a hissing fire, a gas jet. To my dead brother, it is the sound of stones dropped in deep water. I call after them, but can make no sound at all until I wake, tangled in my sleep-tether, whispering “Wait” into an empty cabin.

I wake from dreams into memories, moments long submerged resurfacing. Standing shivering by a swimming pool, my shadow beside me on the concrete a thin wavering, listening as an instructor down a line of slick-skinned children gave a command, and all down the line they flung themselves into the water. I remember watching a silver bubble burst and quiver above me, shimmering into the quicksilver sky, and then the ecstatic inrushing of water as if I too were rising.

Years later, in school I learned about specific gravity, the opposing forces of air and water, how the nature of air is to rise, how any solid body, even if of rock, can reach its equilibrium and float—in air, if need be, if air be dense enough. And I thought: This is why I like science; and I felt once more the possibility of rising. But going into space taught me again. I unlearned, and science is a consolation only to the ignorant.

CONSIDER THE NAMES
of the ships:
Mercury, Gemini, Apollo; Ares,
where I earned my wings, and now
Prometheus.
Think how the missions lived up to their names:
Mercury,
an aery theft of thunder from the Soviets;
Apollo,
to a chaste sister giving sacrifice by fire;
Ares,
and the terror it brought us to. God save the man who rides on
Kronos.

THE COMPUTER IS
my timekeeper, it is my courier and my library. It stores in its memory the pages I call up on the screen. For my collection I chose Shakespeare, Melville, the old myths. My crewmates left their libraries with me: Stern loved mysteries; Peterson was more a western man.

I spend hours at the screen now, and though I am grateful for the machine, it leaves me skeptical. I wish often for the weight, or at least the solidity, of a book, instead of the image of words on glass. The transience of the picture worries me, and I have caught myself calling back earlier pages, comparing them to my own memory to see if the text has been altered by the computer’s traffic with so much other information. Sometimes, I am tantalized by a suspicion—surely that word was not
noses,
but something starting with a
g;
and that was
cave,
not
save;
not
screen,
but—I catch myself, and read on.

MISSION CONTROL WANTS
me to look at the communications antenna, which is a paraboloidal dish big enough for a man to lie in. Servomotors aim it constantly toward mission control, so the dish faces back the way I’ve come, my Janus. They sound more worried than usual back in Houston, and although it could easily be an act, put on for reasons I may no longer guess, it seems they really are having trouble understanding. Somewhere in the system something’s wrong, but at their end or mine no one can tell: they want me to go outside and see if, perhaps, something grossly physical (and therefore beyond their power to control) has come unhinged. They sound desperate.

I switch on the aft external video and eye the dish. It eyes me back, pointed steadily at Earth, which is a white star off to port and well astern. The dish looks fine to me, I tell them, and wait. No, they insist, someone there believes a meteor may have knocked the antenna off focus: I must go see for myself. Without waiting for my reply, they begin to outline the procedure, the tools I will need, the complicated route along the ship’s back, how I must unhook my tether to clear the dish. Under Houston’s control, the inner airlock door slowly opens to receive me.

I listen as the voice clips through the cockpit speakers, each syllable enunciated so sharply it stands alone. They are giving me instructions. I am not paying attention. Jupiter has crept into the forward section of the windshield, striped and swirling, closer, and suddenly the pattern I have watched for weeks snaps, and as if a picture has jumped off a printed page and rolled into my lap I see the planet’s marblings turn, and turn into clouds, winds: weather. It is a place, not a pattern. The red spot stands dead center, a catseye blinking back at me. I feel exposed.

“Wait a minute.” I speak before I can catch myself. “This isn’t—” The airlock door waits, open like a mouth. I know now where I have heard all this before. My breath is taken away by the stupidity of the ploy. Do they think because I am out here I cannot remember old movies? Is no one back there capable of original thought?

Am I?

IN THE FORTY
minutes before they could respond, I watched Jupiter turn ahead: the red spot lay obliquely now; sleepily askance, it eyed the insertion point for the orbit I must assume if mission control’s plan to rescue the ship is to succeed. But it was the opening of the airlock door that reminded me: they can fire the engines for the braking maneuver just as well from Houston as I can here; better. How much better? How have they calculated my unreliability by now? How large is that factor in their equations? How does it balance with the safety of the ship?

I know how to balance an equation.

I ponder now how much of their talk has been of rescuing the ship, not me. Did they think an omission like that would pass me by?

I ask the computer: Is there enough fuel left to shake me from the dish and still save the ship at Jupiter? The computer gives the figures: fuel for the braking burn and some to spare. I stare at the screen, wondering if the answers are reliable, wondering if even now mission control is feeding me false data. Time elapsed from last transmission stands at 08:20, 21, 22. I am safe for thirty-one more minutes. And then? How much longer before they think up some subtler stratagem? If they grow desperate enough, will they simply open the outer airlock door?

The voice of mission control courses on, urging me to check the seals on my cuffs. Hurrying, I pull the spacesuit from its locker. High in my chest I feel the seconds ticking.

EMPTY SPACE. STARS
swarming in: I heard them humming in my headphones. I closed my eyes: darkness, stars shining through. I put my hands to my eyes, but the gloves fell flat on my faceplate. My head afloat in its helmet, sweat stung my eyes; I leaned my skull against the globe and through the glass heard nothing. No: there, between Castor and Capella, something flashed, faded, flashed again. Something whispered in my ear. Something reflected the sun as it tumbled. “Peterson,” I whispered, and it flashed. I watched, and the light neither grew nor faded, nor moved against the stars. It was following.

I turned and held hard to the ship, and though I felt the light flash behind me, counting its rhythm against my pulse I crawled along the hull. I passed portholes through which I saw the cabin, lighted and calm, where objects waited as if left by someone else. I reached the knot where I had spliced Peterson’s tether to mine. I passed over lettering painted on the hull: signs and insignias lay like shells on the seafloor, like fossils in rock. I waited for one of them to move.