Orb (11 page)

The sky came alive with radiant shades of blue becoming progressively darker—Persian blue changing to sapphire changing to midnight blue—until blue was lost to black and day was lost to night. A night unlike any seen on Earth for untold generations. Without pollution and light pollution. A moonless night of a million silver, red, and blue pinpoints of light shimmering in startling clarity clear down to the horizon.

The pleasant light breeze had stilled in the early evening; the ocean was eerily quiescent. We were about to retire when Thompson (of all of us, the most adept at identifying objects on open water, a skill honed from time spent as a boat pilot) sighted something moving far out to sea.

“At first glance I thought it was a star, a dim one,” he said, trying to point out the location, “but the object’s movement, both in velocity and direction, can not be explained by the planet’s rotation. Unfortunately, I don’t think the binoculars will do much to resolve this … I’m losing it now … gone. Anybody else see it?”

None of us could confirm what he saw.

“I can send
Ixodes
to that quadrant,” Melhaus volunteered.

“Violates operational protocol,” Thompson responded. “Not a good idea to move her about at night when we’ll all be sleeping.”

“I can monitor the submersible for a couple of hours and still get sufficient sleep.”

Thompson considered a moment. “OK,” he said, “but no more than two hours, then give it a rest. We can’t afford to put her in jeopardy this early in the mission.”

“Understood,” Melhaus answered.

“Perhaps it was some type of electric discharge into the atmosphere,” suggested Paul, his eyes following Melhaus, who was rushing into
Desio
with his AID in hand. “But, no, I can’t prove that.”

“Or maybe Kyle and I are starting to see objects that aren’t there,” Thompson added.

“There’s always that too,” Paul said. “If we take a page from Kyle’s psychology handbook, maybe you both want something to be there that isn’t. No offense to either of you.”

“Can’t fault you for thinking it,” I said. “Bruce, however, is less subject to seeing things than I am. A bit more grounded, shall I say?”

“A
bit?
” said Diana, mocking me, and then in the next breath, mocking herself. “If wishful thinking applied here, I’d be seeing something resembling plesiosaurs humping in the water.”

“Is that the best you can do?” I asked.

“Red ones? With gossamer wings?”

“That’s a bit better.”

“With that fantasy,” said Diana, “I think I’ll turn in. I’m exhausted.”

“We’re a tired bunch, no doubt,” said Kelly. “I’m ordering seven hours sleep.”

There was no disagreement and everybody headed into
Desio
for a welcome night’s rest. I held back, wishing to enjoy the night. And let the solitude, together with a million stars and a vast ocean, encourage introspection. Specifically, how badly I had reacted to Kelly’s expression of emotion.

I walked a hundred meters from the ship and found a suitable boulder to sit on. Angie was with me now, having gravitated back from Kelly. I had heard Paul predict that the nighttime temperature would be very comfortable. He was right. Hard to imagine that if I was sitting in this identical spot several months from now I’d be staring out at a frozen ocean. Of all the times, and there have been many, I’ve seen large bodies of water, never have they appeared so calm. The perfect flatness of a frozen lake. Stars reflecting off the surface.

Fascinating substance, water. Ubiquitous. Unifying. We equate it with life. Did I see something out there today? I could almost swear I
felt
something present, but the feeling, as intangible as the sighting, was harder to explain and I kept it to myself.

A multitude of stars above me, not one of them
the
Sun. I advised Thompson that being this far removed from Earth could result in adjustment problems for the crew. I provided what I thought to be valid reasons, including being denied the comforts of a wider society. Assuming I’m right, no two people would react the same way. As for me? Hard to assess when I often feel alone in a crowd. That wasn’t unique to me. More troubling, however, is that I sometimes feel alone when I’m with Kelly. One part of me abhors the isolation, another embraces it. A handy explanation of why I chose to become a writer. A lonely profession: Observation, essential; interaction, optional.

What, exactly, is the true value of introspection? How well do we know ourselves? How well
can
we? Can a person change? Case in point: I’ve avoided coming to terms with what happened today between Kelly and me.

“I have a better understanding of you, pooch,” I said, nestling her little head in my hands, “than I do of most people.”

I lost track of time and started drifting when Angie, shifting in my lap, alerted me to someone’s approach. Kelly.

“You weren’t in your room,” she said. “You should come in and get some much needed sleep. Doctor’s orders.”

“I’m glad you came to get me.”

“Are you? I didn’t want to disturb you. I thought you might want to be alone out here.”

I reached out in the darkness and, taking her two hands in mine, urged her to sit beside me. I put Angie between us, where she wanted to be, where I needed her to be. For several minutes, and without saying a word, we gazed at the ocean and stars.

“Will you help me to understand something?” I managed to ask.

“Anything.”

“Is it right to feel lonely even when you’re with a person you care about?”

She knew I was referring to myself. When I was with her.

“Here’s one answer,” she said after a time. “I can say it applies to me, so maybe you, too. Loneliness is an unwinnable battle that never ends. You have the right to expect the person you care about to fight the battle with you. Don’t you realize, you did that earlier today … for me? You knew I was hurt and lonely and you gave me the best thing you could under the circumstances. You gave me Angie. That’s one of the reasons I care for you. And why, if you let me in, I’d do the same for you.”

Determined not to drain the life out of the moment, I squeezed her hand. My way of letting her know that I’d think about what she said. That it was not lost on me.

Then, with her tug of my hand, we went into the ship together. Kelly to her cabin, Angie and I to mine.

And that was OK.

I WAS STANDING alone on a floating island of clear ice, not knowing when, why, or how I got there. A misstep would send me tumbling into the ocean below. The air was warm, but the only ice melting was beneath the soles of my feet. I looked straight ahead—to find only an endless expanse of perfectly still water. Suddenly, at the periphery of my vision, I detected movement. I turned my head as far as I could to both sides but whatever was there stayed behind me, out of sight. I tried turning my body, but my feet … planted firmly in a growing puddle of water … my feet would not move.

I was laying flat on my back, in a spacecraft, on a planet of ocean, a wormhole separating me from Earth.

As it was, I had more than the usual difficulty establishing if I was awake or asleep, distinguishing reality from dream. My only clue was that reality has a tendency to linger. I jotted the dream’s ebbing imprint on an old-fashioned writing pad kept handy by my pillow in the hope, a writer’s version of the tooth fairy, that a creative idea would be found scribbled there in the morning.

One thing was for sure: I needed to haul my ass out of bed in order to be punctual for Thompson’s usual morning meeting. Angie, stretched out on the bed like a miniature sphinx, stared at me expectantly.

“What do
you
dream about, my faithful dog?” I asked.

Cupping my hand, I petted along the top of her head starting at her snout, rubbing over her eyes (she likes this immensely), and down across both ears. Her puffy tail began rapidly vibrating as she happily faced a world full of future prospects: Time to eat, time to drink, time to explore and, of course, time to pee—thereby scenting, and proudly proclaiming as her own, the entire planet. Like the humans on this trip, she was (thanks to specially designed nano-substitutions) microorganism free. We would have to find other ways to contaminate the worlds we visited.

Opening the door to my cabin, expecting a peaceful early morning, I was instead confronted by the disturbing sound of two loud voices. Exiting the ship, I observed Diana, as angry as I’ve ever seen her, shouting at Melhaus. At the same time I noticed Paul and Thompson, responding to the commotion, rapidly approaching from across the expanse of Red Square. A split second behind me, still adjusting her clothing, was Kelly.

The first sentence that I could make sense of was from Diana. She was right in Melhaus’s face.

“How could you let this happen?!”

“Apparently, Diana, you’ve completely closed your mind to any other possible explanation!”

“Have I? You’re the bloody math genius. What are the probabilities? Put forward a plausible one!”

“Are you trying to tell me a malfunction on
Ixodes
is impossible?!

“Are you
listening?!
Diana shouted. “Whatever happened, it was due to
your
fucking negligence!
You
left her unmonitored! Let’s call this what it is! It’s what you’d call ‘blatant incompetence!’”

I was starting to catch on. There was a mishap involving Melhaus and the submersible. I thought back to how he reacted to my story regarding the demise of the
Mars Orbiter
, how he expressed contempt for the missteps of the mission’s engineers and scientists. Now his own words were being repurposed as potent weapons, causing his face to flush red, leaving him groping for words.

Diana, momentarily taken aback by the marked effect of her insult, halted her assault and retreated a step. Neither antagonist was intending for this interlude to last.

Thompson, on the other hand, did. He jumped into the fray. With both feet.

“You two again?!”

“Well, he—” Diana started, but was immediately cut off.

“No, not another word from either of you,” Thompson said. “Unless it’s to answer a question from me. Is that perfectly clear?! If not, I will damn well lock
both
of you in the spare cabin.”

The combatants shifted their attention from each other to the mission leader. There was no doubt he meant what he said. He always did.

“Larry, your version,” Thompson demanded. “What’s going on here?”

“There is no signal from the submersible,” he answered.

Thompson’s jaw tightened and a look of concern flashed across his face, but he managed to pose the next question without missing a beat.

“Including the emergency transponder?”

“Yes.”

“Any precursor to this? Any record of a system malfunction prior to signal loss?”

“No. And I am unable to explain why, or what, may have caused such a complete failure.”

“Have you determined her last time and location?”

Melhaus hesitated. His eyes shifted back and forth.

“Well?” Thompson asked again.

“Coordinates were 361.2 and 423.1.”

“Is that where we agreed to send her?”

“Yes.”

“What time was the signal lost?”

Again, the hesitation.

“Come on Larry, don’t make me pull it out of you.”

“Zero one hundred hours.”

That was several hours past when the sub should have been placed in quiet mode. The incriminating response gave Thompson pause. In that brief interval Diana was poised to make a very bad mistake by speaking—were it not for Paul. Quickly intervening, he placed all imposing two meters of himself squarely in front of her, and that, together with an unmistakable and well-timed warning gesture, accomplished his saving purpose. Today, I thought, was shaping up to be full of surprises.

“That’s a good three hours past the time the sub was to have ceased operation for the evening,” Thompson said. “Why didn’t you bring her back sooner?”

“I programmed
Ixodes
for a specific quadrant of operation, then placed her on auto navigation. I fell asleep sometime before she went missing at zero one hundred hours.”

“How much before?”

“I can’t say exactly.”

“We’ll come back to that,” Thompson said, unsatisfied with the response. His expression told me he decided, as had I, that Melhaus’s choice of words was suspect. He turned his attention to Diana.

“
Ixodes
has gone missing. Now I understand why you’re upset. Fair enough. So, before you bust a gut, what’s your problem with Larry? Keep it civil.”

“Oh, you’re getting to it,” Diana said. “He doesn’t know exactly what time he fell asleep?!” Her voice took on a note of incredulity, then sarcasm. “First off, he never sleeps. And even if he did, it would have been
hours
beyond the time you ordered him to retrieve the sub and place her on standby. On standby, where established operational protocols
require
it to be—not subject to unsupervised risk!”

As Diana spoke, Kelly moved alongside Melhaus. She was taking a cue from Paul, ready to intercede, in any way she could, if Melhaus chose to unwisely speak out of turn.

“So let’s cut to the heart of the matter,” Thompson said. “You’ve come to the conclusion that Larry countermanded my directive which, in turn, resulted in the loss of the submersible?”

“Yes,” Diana said, sounding placated, believing Thompson’s succinct paraphrasing of her argument meant he was completely sympathetic to her angry reaction. What he said next disaffected her of the notion.

“So, taking this one step further, you then decided to inflame a bad situation by not only failing to bring the matter immediately to my attention but by also using incendiary and accusatorial language in your conversation with Larry?”

The assertion, taking Diana completely by surprise, was going to make her either more combative or contrite. If I had the measure of Thompson, he deliberately intended to force such a choice. Since he was an excellent judge of character, especially Diana’s, he already anticipated her response.