Kate Day - In the Quick

So when my aunt was out I picked up one of the dogs, Duster, slipped inside the study, and shut the door behind me. I didn’t believe the TV report that said the fuel cells were to blame. I’d find my uncle’s schematics and study them, and then I’d know for sure.

Whenever I came in here I rarely touched anything. The room was so still, everything exactly as he left it, as if he had stepped out for only a minute and would be right back. It even smelled faintly of him.

I hesitated to move anything, so I walked around the room, just looking and thinking. Behind me the windows rattled as a test rocket streaked through the sky. On the walls were astronomical charts and pictures of planets. Opposite the desk was an artist’s rendering of the Pink Planet, glowing pink and white in an expanse of black; it had hung there since I could remember. The Pink Planet wasn’t really a planet but a moon, my uncle had taught me, and it wasn’t actually pink. The reflection of its atmosphere against the silty haze of its surface only made it appear that way. NSP had established a satellite outpost there the year I was born, and because of that my uncle had always called it June’s moon. He used to say it was a bit inscrutable, like me. And then he would laugh and say it was salty too, like me.

Duster whined at the door so I let him out. Then I sat at my uncle’s desk and opened a drawer and found pads of paper and mechanical pencils. In the next, extra hard drives, a graphing calculator, and a large magnifying glass. The top-left drawer rattled when I opened it, and it took me a minute to recognize the things inside—my aunt hadn’t thrown away my piles after all. Nearly a year had passed since I’d set these items on my uncle’s desk. Now they looked old and broken, their magic gone.

I closed the drawer and moved to my uncle’s filing cabinets and found indecipherable charts and spreadsheets inside. I opened drawers and riffled through folders. Time passed. The sun went down and the gray sky wrapped itself around the room. Test rockets vibrated behind the glass, and the room turned cold and my fingers stiff.

Then the windows went quiet. It was five o’clock, the silent pause between the day and night launches, when the sky stilled and it felt like the earth was holding its breath.

I kept looking, and finally I found something, a thick folder full of schematics like the one my uncle had shown me. Some of the schematics were more detailed than others, some in color and some not, with pages and pages of calculations attached. Some showed pictures of what the fuel cells looked like in real life, stacked fifty or sixty at a time inside the walls of Inquiry and NSP’s second and identical explorer, Endurance. Encased in thick graphite, they were each about the size of a bread box, and together they generated all the energy Inquiry needed for its major systems—propulsion, life support, communication—and also produced an essential by-product, water, used for drinking and for watering the crops in the explorer’s grow modules.

The schematics were numbered from one to thirty-two, and studying them in order I could follow the evolution of the cell from inception to completion. I laid them out on the floor in front of the window and read them page by page like a book. At first I focused on how the cell changed, in shape and size and complexity, from one page to the next. Each modification made sense to me, and the final design seemed perfect in every way.

Then I went back and read each sheet more carefully. There were notes on every page, in my uncle’s tidy hand and in other people’s too. I could guess whose they were—the team of students who had helped my uncle develop the cell while at Peter Reed, the school named for him on the NSP campus. While most of the engineers at NSP worked with a team of adults, my uncle liked to work largely alone, with only his students as collaborators. When he died he had four research assistants assigned to his lab—and there were four hands in addition to his own on the schematics. One was a bold print that indented the paper, another a lovely loping cursive. Also a dashing script and a print so narrow and neat I had to squint to see it. I guessed the first was James Banovic’s, the next Theresa’s, and the last two Amelia’s and Simon’s.

They had come to the house a lot when my uncle was alive, and I saw them when he brought me to work. There was an eight-year age difference between us, but I wanted to be like them and would hang around my uncle’s study when they visited for as long as my aunt would allow. James frowned a lot; he and my uncle were always deep in conversation. Theresa was beautiful and commanding. She had a clear, precise voice and a slight accent—she was born in South Africa—and everyone listened when she talked, including my uncle. Amelia was tall and strong and daring, and often impatient with the others. Simon was also tall and very thin. He was careful with his words and always had a book or notebook in his hand, and a pen. While the other three seemed to barely notice me when I hung in the doorway, Simon always nodded and said, Hello June.

Some of their notes on the schematics appeared routine, but others gave me pause. They had used the plans to dialogue about all the ways the cell could be better, how it could be fortified against possible failure once it was installed in Inquiry or Endurance. That’s when it would face the challenges of actual space travel: stress from extreme heat and cold, damage from humidity, deterioration from vibration or air pressure fluctuation, contamination from the chemical components of the air, acidity, basicity…on and on until my head swam with the possibilities.

They all had different priorities, things they brought up again and again. But James and Theresa drove the conversation. James wanted the cell to be a closed system, powerful and contained. Theresa didn’t agree. She thought the cell should be smart and adaptable—easy to modify on the fly. The dialogue circled back to this dispute on nearly every page. Amelia was usually on James’s side. But Simon was more cautious; his comments were reminders that the cell would keep four crew members alive—would keep the four of them alive if they won the competition to be Inquiry ’s first crew.

Threaded through their notes were my uncle’s. He didn’t take a particular stance one way or another but asked questions, played devil’s advocate, suggested alternatives the others might have overlooked. He was optimistic and upbeat; he sounded confident they would come to the end of all their questions and the cell would be a success. Until the last few schematics, when Simon returned to the question of the cell’s capacity to function at peak levels over time—not just over days, but months and years. Everyone chimed in, talking back and forth to one another, filling the page with ink. But then they seemed to get stuck. The last few lines were in my uncle’s hand at the bottom of the page, where he started to pose a solution. But his answer stopped midthought. I looked through all the pages again but found no continuation.

The sun went down and the room grew dim. I turned on a lamp, got a pen from my uncle’s desk, and read the notes again from the beginning. My uncle wrote something on page thirteen, about this question of how the cell might degrade over stretches of time, that could be interpreted two ways. At least that’s what I thought. I brought my pen to the paper, hesitated, and listened for footsteps outside the door. All was quiet, inside the house and out. I added one comment, and then another, and my writing filled in the blank spaces between the other hands. Page after page. When I got to the end, to my uncle’s unfinished sentence, I completed it. Then I wrote what I thought the others might say in response, and what I might say back.