The Echo (16 page)

It is more evidence. Somehow, Inna is on the other side of the anomaly because she is alive. Somehow, because they have died, Tobi and Lennox’s bodies are back with us.

‘What’s happening?’ Tomas asks. None of us answer. Wallace presses his hands against the internal airlock door, and he cries. I swear I can hear the beep you hear in a hospital when somebody dies, even though there is no beep at all.

According to Hikaru’s clock, Inna has maybe an hour of air left. She is left floating there, still presumably unconscious. There is no reason for her to wake up. The suit will regulate her temperature: she will be neither hot nor cold, and then she will just die. Maybe she will wake up when she runs out of oxygen. Maybe she’ll look at us, desperate, and then work out what has happened. We have abandoned her, she’ll think. We’ve let her die in there.

I think about her as we stand around and wait for her time to run out, and I imagine what might have been. I don’t know, and I don’t know if I am right, but I imagine that maybe we could have had something. I have never had a relationship. I am my age, and I have never had this, or anything.

‘Look,’ Hikaru says, and I expect Inna’s body to be creeping towards us, her limbs slackened and dead; but instead she is shaking, and she is awake, and her eyes are open.

‘What’s happening?’ she asks, in a tiny, terrified voice. ‘Please god, what’s happening?’

She’s alive.

I think that I have been in love, but know that it has never been reciprocated. I have loved women, and I have idolized them. I have met them and learned their names, and I have thought, I could be with you. We have had common interests and beliefs, and they have wanted to know about my work. They have asked me if I can see a future with them, and I have wondered. I have wanted them; but now, with Inna, this is something different.

I cannot explain it better than that.

‘Can you hear me?’ I ask, and she screams, so I tell her to calm down. ‘Please, Inna,’ I say. ‘We want to help you, but you have to listen to me. You have to answer me.’ She stops.

‘It hurts,’ she says.

‘Can you move?’ I ask her.

‘I don’t know,’ she says.

‘Do you know what’s happened?’

‘I can’t move. No,’ she says.

‘Tell her to not try, then,’ Wallace says. He is watching, sitting on the floor behind me, back against the wall. ‘Tell her to save her energy.’ He knows what I know, or what I have posited: that she is here until she runs out of air, and then she will die. I wonder if I should just be making her comfortable, trying to make this easier on her. That is what you do when it is inevitable.

‘Listen,’ I tell her, ‘try to stay still. We are doing everything that we can to get you back here.’

‘Why can’t you come and get me?’ she asks. She is asking me, I think: not the rest of the ship. Why can’t I. ‘Please, Mira.’

‘It’s complicated,’ I say. ‘There is a problem, with the anomaly. I need you to see if you can move, and to check that you’re okay. Check that you’re fine.’ I watch her move her hands, flexing them, and her arms. She flexes and looks around.

‘Where are they?’ she asks. ‘Lennox and Tobi, where are they?’

‘Don’t worry about that,’ I say. ‘Do you remember what happened?’

‘The ship started,’ she says. ‘The ship started, didn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ I say.

‘I can barely see you through this,’ she says. ‘Please, turn the lights brighter.’

‘Okay,’ I say. Wallace does it, and the relief on her face is immediately visible. I look through her camera myself: it’s better, but she’s right. This is like looking through the murk of dark ink.

‘Tell her to push the anomaly. To see what she can do. Maybe she can find a way through it or something.’ Wallace speaks quietly. I tell Inna to do it, and I watch as she presses the wall in front of her. From here, it is as if she is trapped behind glass: a prisoner, desperately pawing to get out. Her hands move against it, as if she is a mime; as if this is all an act.

‘What is happening?’ she asks, and she sounds desperate. She breathes quickly, gasping air in, and Wallace pushes himself to standing. He doesn’t look up; he stays hunched at the side.

‘She needs to calm down. She doesn’t have enough air to start panicking.’ He rubs his side, with his hands; and then moves one hand to his neck, and rubs that. He is breaking, I know, but I need him to hold it together. I don’t know if this is something I should say to him or not; if that might risk pushing him over an edge of whatever he is facing. ‘You need to get her to calm down.’

‘Can we get her more air?’ I ask.

‘We can’t open the airlock until she is back or we cut her safety cord. We can cut the cord, if you want.’

‘But she can’t come back until she’s dead.’ We stand and watch her panic: from here, even, I can see her breath fogging up her helmet.

‘Can’t she use Tobi’s?’ Tomas asks, and we realize that he’s right.

‘She would need to get the body back,’ Wallace says, ‘and she’d need to unclip hers, plug the spare in. That’s assuming it’s intact.’ He bends down to look at their bodies in the airlock, and he tries to examine the packs. ‘Lennox’s is gone. Burned out, looks too melted. Tobi’s … It might be okay.’ Her helmet is cracked: her face behind it pale and dead. She was so worried about her eye, but did it matter? In the end, the time she spent concerned about it? Was it worth it? ‘I can talk her through it,’ Wallace says.

‘How long will she have to do the changeover?’

‘Seconds. If she doesn’t panic, stays calm, it should be fine. Tough part is the seal, because that’s behind her head. You can’t see that. The suits weren’t designed for this.’

‘Let’s do it,’ I say. I make the decision. One way or another, I seal her fate. Wallace leaves, to get one of the spare suits and to practise himself, so that he can talk her through it. I stay, and I talk to Inna. I explain to her what happened to Tobi, and to Lennox. I tell her that they are dead, and that she needs to pull Tobi’s body towards her to take her air supply or she will die as well. She cries, because it’s too much to take, but she does it: I watch Tobi’s body slink through space towards her, and I watch Inna pull the body closer, facing away from her; and then she holds it there, so that it cannot turn. She doesn’t want to see her face. She must have seen the faces of so many bodies; now, she is choosing not to.

‘What do I do now?’ she asks.

‘Just wait,’ I say. ‘Not for long.’ I watch Wallace doing the manoeuvre; he can barely get it right first time. He tries again, and again. At least he doesn’t look upset, now. He looks like he has something to preoccupy him. Keeping busy: it feels like a way past this tragedy.

Wallace stands at the glass and talks her through it. He holds the suit in front of him to make this easier. She has twenty minutes, and then she’s dead, and this has all been for nothing. The anomaly; the
Ishiguro
; Inna, Tobi, Lennox. Hikaru and I watch as Wallace talks to her.

‘The air in the other suit, that’s going to help you breathe for longer,’ he says. ‘So you have to move this one to your suit.’

‘How long do I have?’ she asks.

‘Long enough. We’ll do this, okay? I’ll talk you through it.’

‘What happens then? When I can breathe again?’

He looks at me, and he lies. ‘Then we come and get you,’ he says. ‘We have to sort this first. We’re close to working out how to get you out of there.’ I want to ask her what the anomaly feels like, really feels like: to take off her glove and touch it. I want to ask her to get a sample of it, to carve or dig at it, to see what she can do. I want her to help us, because we might not get another chance if she dies. Who will willingly send another person behind that wall? To test it, to see what they can find? I wonder if I am a bad person for thinking of science now, rather than Inna. Tomas would have an answer to that question, I’m sure.

‘You only have one shot at this,’ Wallace says. ‘We want to get your camera working first. Can you reach up? I want to see if it’s broken, or just fazed. There’s a button on the front of the helmet, like a depression. Press it.’ She does: on one of the little screens, her face appears, crackling through static. ‘Excellent,’ Wallace says. ‘We’ve got you.’ She smiles a little. Like she feels that this is putting her back towards normality. ‘Now, on Tobi’s body.’ He pauses; then continues. ‘You need to get the oxygen tank, find the cable that runs through to the back of the helmet. You know which cable it is?’ he asks, and we watch her pawing at the suit ineffectually. She stumbles on the cable by luck rather than judgment. ‘That’s the one. You need to find the catch on the end of it. Unscrew it. It’ll be tight.’

‘Won’t this let the oxygen out?’

‘It’s a membrane,’ he says. ‘Can’t come out unless connected to the suit. Stops leakages.’ She unscrews it. We can see Tobi’s dead face for a few moments, with its eyes rolled back and its cheeks blue. We try to concentrate on what Inna is doing. ‘Excellent. You’ll need to pull the oxygen tank off now, and then hold onto it. Okay?’

‘Okay,’ Inna says. She sounds more with it, now. More like herself. Survival instinct has kicked in. Everything else fades into the unimportant. Inna manages to do it, to free the tank, and she brings it close, coddles it. She steadies herself with one hand against the anomaly, and I want to ask her what it feels like: to do my research, even here and now.

Is it like treacle? Is it like tar?

Wallace continues. ‘Now this is the tough part, Inna. You with me?’

‘Yes,’ she says.

‘You need to unscrew your oxygen and screw this one in. You’ll still be sealed into the suit, but you won’t have oxygen for a while. And you have to screw this new one completely on, or it won’t give you oxygen. You understand what I’m saying?’

‘I understand,’ she says. She is shaking. Her eyes are so wide. I watch as she reaches behind her. It’s an awkward angle.

‘Don’t do this rashly,’ Wallace says, ‘take your time. Feel the connection first, and work out how you’re going to do this.’ She’s only got ten minutes left. Not more than that, certainly. She can’t take too long, but I don’t say that. Nothing worse than extra pressure in a situation like this. ‘So you unscrew it, then lift the other canister into place, then screw that nozzle on. The same place you unscrew the old one, that’s the place you put the new one. Remember that.’

‘Okay,’ Inna says. She fingers the connection a few times and then takes a breath, a deep one, and she unscrews it.

‘Good luck,’ I say, but I don’t know if it’s loud enough for her to hear me. She unscrews the old capsule fully and then lets it hang loose, and – her face the perfect picture of composure – lifts the other hose to her back, to the same spot. We all watch as she tries to find the hole but misses, so Andy tells her to take her time, find the hole with her finger and then attach it, but she misses again, and that’s all it takes. She’s flustered. Her eyes panic. Her mouth opens, and she breathes again and again, gasping in the last air from the helmet, and then there’s nothing left. She jabs the hose down over and over, trying to find purchase, and then by pure luck she gets it onto the hole – she can tell something’s right, because the panic turns to relief for a second – but then she tries to turn it the wrong way, and then the right way, but it won’t catch. It won’t hold. It doesn’t work. Her fingers twitch as she turns it weakly, and then they twitch again, and she stops turning the attachment altogether. ‘You’re nearly there,’ I say, but I don’t have the enthusiasm, because I know that she is gone, even before I see her face go still, and before I see her eyes turn dead.

None of us say anything because there’s nothing to say. We took a chance and it didn’t work. I leave the airlock and I sit in the lab and I start writing something for me to read to ground control, maybe something more public. Some sort of apology. We dabbled in that which we did not understand. We took risks. They did not pay off. Wallace slumps and sobs on the floor. He is lost. I tell him to wheel the bodies in, but he ignores me, and I stand there, ineffectual. It is as if no part of me works any more. Hikaru has started plotting a course home, I can see: but we must wait for official confirmation. What else is there to be done? I bring up Inna’s face on a screen, the monitor inside her helmet. It’s curious: how quickly one can look dead. How quickly the blood drains, and how grey the skin can become. I wonder if that has really happened, or it is simply how I perceive it to be.

This mission has been a failure. I say this to Tomas, and I tell him that he needs to talk to the UNSA. I wonder what they already know: how much he has shared. I don’t worry about the lag. This isn’t intended to be a back-and-forth conversation.

‘Okay,’ is all that he says.

‘That’s it?’

‘What else is there to be said? What if we tell you not to come home? Can you stay there, now?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘When are you leaving?’ Tomas asks.

‘Soon,’ I say.

‘Will you take more samples at least, before you leave? More readings? It seems a shame for you to be there and us to still have no idea what the anomaly is.’ He is right. I do not say it, but he is right. I question what is inside me, because I want to mourn, but there is more to this. ‘And the
Ishiguro
. That you should see it, here and now! The chances of that, Mira. They’re incredible.’

‘I know.’

‘Infinitesimal, almost.’

‘I know.’ He knows that they are not, because it has happened. He’s trying to get a rise. ‘We’ll try and take some readings,’ I say, ‘before we go. I think it makes sense.’ I don’t know what they would be, but he’s right. We’ve come this far. Time, and money, and space. We are only as good as the work we do; as the results we uncover.

I go back to the airlock, to pull Inna back in. Wallace is nowhere to be seen, and the room is dark and cold. I am about to press the button and wind her towards us, away from where she has been drifting, loose inside the anomaly, when I hear a noise: a rush, an inhalation, a shock, a scream.

On the screen, Inna opens her eyes.

‘What’s happening?’ she asks. ‘Please god, what’s happening?’ I don’t say anything: she has been dead too long to suddenly come back with no intervention. I do not say anything. She panics, and says some words in Russian that I don’t understand: her rolling tongue. And then she asks for me. ‘Mira? Why aren’t you answering me? What’s happened?’ She begins crying. I know that this is impossible: and yet, here she is. She gasps. ‘Where are you?’ she asks again. I look at her face on the screen: the colour back in her cheeks, and how alive she is, all of a sudden. She puts a hand out to the anomaly. ‘Hello?’ she asks.