Kate Day - In the Quick

That’s a crazy story—

It was supposed to be us, he said. Everyone said it would be. Amelia, Theresa, Simon, and me. But when I saw that I knew their team would be chosen. They didn’t work like individual people under that water but like one body with many limbs. Afterward, on the drill deck, when they were dripping and hugging each other, they seemed huge. Superhuman. Bigger than anything space might throw at them.

He stood up and started pacing the room, his limp making his stride uneven.

I’ve tried every angle, every possibility, he said. But every change I’ve made to the cell has been incremental, and Inquiry needs something more than incremental. It needs something revolutionary, and I know only one person who could make that kind of leap.

My uncle.

That’s right.

I felt the big, empty, sprawling station around me. Its twisting blue-lit corridors, dark airlocks, empty bunks, and dusty control room. There was no one in this place but the two of us. Well he’s not here, I said. But we are.

We stood across the table from each other in the workshop, where the smell of machine oil and air canisters mixed with the hot plastic smell of a 3D printer. A long metal table had a mess of parts on top of it, and the walls were lined with shelves full of tools, equipment, and materials. James made a space in the middle of the table, put a half-built cell in its center, and told me what he’d done. He spoke slowly, methodically, in a kind of monotone.

He had developed a modified venting system, he said, and a new kind of sealant that protected the cells from temperature fluctuations. He’d reduced the size of the cell by nearly half.

You’ve done a lot, I said.

But there’s still the core problem, he said. These cells have to function as part of a moving object. They have to withstand acceleration, deceleration. And vibration. Always vibration.

I picked up the cell. It was much lighter than my uncle’s, but at the same time, I felt the weight of all the hours James had worked on it. When I was younger that would have seemed like some kind of paradise—a problem that needed to be solved, access to a wide range of materials and tools, and almost complete solitude in which to solve it. But I didn’t feel that way anymore. Now it just seemed incredibly lonely.

Can we take it apart? I asked.

Yes. Sure. He began to dismantle the cell and lay all the pieces on the table, each plate and board and screw. I watched his scarred hands. They were careful, but there was a finality in the way he set the parts down on the table with a tap or a snap or a tunk. Like he didn’t want to pick them up again. As he did this he explained the modifications he’d made. What he’d tried. What had worked and what hadn’t.

I asked questions and he gave short answers. I picked things up and put them back down and proposed a different configuration for the cell’s O2 connectors. He said it wouldn’t work. I described how I thought it could succeed, and he explained why it wouldn’t. His voice had an edge of irritation, and when I pressed the idea, he pushed the pieces of the cell aside, grabbed a big sheet of paper and a marker, and drew the problem as he saw it.

I took the marker and sketched what was in my mind, or tried to. He leaned over the paper, his head close to mine and I smelled smoke on his skin. He asked me a question. I thought hard and answered. He took the marker back and drew again.

Like this?

Yes. But make it more— I made a shape with my hand, and he crossed out the drawing and began again.

He drew and I talked. Then I drew and he talked. We argued, then agreed, then argued again. We went through four or five sheets of paper and the air seemed to tighten around us. Our hands were moving quick, our minds quicker. We had a hold of something, the start of an idea. It pulled taut between us like a thin, invisible cord.

We drew and talked and worked until our voices became hoarse. Until the room turned stuffy with the heat from our bodies and the 3D printers, until metal shavings and bits of stripped wire casings and discarded bolts and screws grew thick on the table.

We didn’t leave the workshop that night. The next day we slept for a few hours, got up, drank coffee, ate cereal, and were back at it again. We let the maintenance crew worry about the solar field and the power and oxygen supplies. Other tasks we delayed or abandoned. Days and nights began to run together. I knew only the hot room, his hands, my hands, the cell in parts, the cell put back together, the cell in parts again. I recalled other things only in outline. Amelia. Simon. The Sundew. Carla and Lion and Nico. My aunt. These memories were devoid of color and texture; they seemed to have no claim on me. Not in comparison with the cell—its shiny casing, its delicate boards and intricate wiring, its impossible connectors. And not in comparison with James.

He was still quiet about a lot of things. He wouldn’t tell me what it was like at the Gateway before I came and wouldn’t talk at all about Theresa. Or my uncle. But we spent so many hours together he became familiar. I knew what his face looked like when he woke up, the dark stubble on his cheek. I knew the rough sound of his voice late at night. He kept things to himself—thoughts about the cell, qualifications, corrections—but I learned how to draw him out. Or ignore him if I could guess what he was worrying about and didn’t think it was important. His anxiety would eventually burst forth in some angry way, but I didn’t mind. Even when he was grumpy or irritated or angry I felt more at ease with him than any other person, including my uncle.

On the eighth day (I think it was the eighth day) we worked through the night, until the sky through the porthole turned the color of a carnation. The workshop smelled like sweat and adhesive and the table was littered with dozens of drawings and a messy jumble of parts from the old and new cells.

We were long past talking in full sentences but used shorthand, interrupting, talking over each other, our words mixed up, not wholly his or mine, but some amalgamation of the two.

Try this, not that.

What about the other—

Yes, the other.

No.

Yes, yes!

Why didn’t I think of that?

You did.

I didn’t.

It wasn’t me.

You said it.

No, that was you.

It doesn’t matter; just hand that cable to me. Let’s finish this tonight—

I reached for the cable and he did too and our fingers touched. We were always grabbing at the same tool as we worked across the table, but this time we both held on. We didn’t look at each other and we didn’t let go. Silt batted against the porthole and a soft ticking came from one of the 3D printers. He let go.

We sat down; he went back to soldering the expanded circuit board and I returned to reconfiguring the O2 connectors. The task wasn’t complicated but I did it poorly and had to start again. I was exhausted. My stomach was empty and raw from too much coffee and too little food. I put my head on the table and rested it in the crook of my arm. From this angle, in the rosy early morning light, the detritus on the table looked like the craggy landscape outside, and I thought of my uncle’s drawings of the Pink Planet and how I used to imagine myself in them, climbing the planet’s ridges in a bright white suit.

James stared at the board in front of him and rubbed his eyes. I can’t see straight, he said. He pulled the stool closer to the table and its loud skidding hurt my ears. He laid his head down too. His face was close and his breath warm. He shifted his elbow close to mine and tapped it lightly and I felt a tight shiver run down my back.