Kate Day - In the Quick

You disagree.

I shook my head. I don’t know which way is right, not for sure. So we’ll pick one and go with it.

He blinked his good eye. Really—

I don’t want to waste time talking about it. It’s done. Let’s move forward.

All right. He got some paper from a cabinet and we made a list of everything that needed to be done, divided the tasks evenly between us, and set to work.

The interior of the mobile habitation unit was loud and its lights glaring in contrast to the quiet and dimly lit workshop at the Gateway. The space was tight, the table small. All the tools and 3D printers and supplies were crammed onto one shelf. We began our individual tasks and didn’t talk. It was strange not to talk. My mind churned with thoughts and ideas and questions but I held back, kept silent. I was aware of the billowing whir from the vents and the clicking hiss from the oxygenator. I was aware of his body near mine, his shoulders tense and his movements awkward. He listed to one side in his seat as he divided a tangle of cables; he squinted and blinked his good eye. When he got up he walked at a diagonal and dropped tools and bumped into things in the narrow space. Sometimes he cursed under his breath.

When he began to count and stack circuit boards, some of them needed new screws, and the hardware was tiny and the screwdriver clumsy in his hands. It was too hard to watch—I got up and started typing specifications into one of the printers. Behind me a screw dropped to the table with a small snap. Then another. Snap. Snap. Snap. There was a low growl and the sound of his chair skidding on the floor.

He had pushed himself up from the table and the screwdriver was clenched in his fist. He pulled his arm back like he was going to throw it, but then he let his arm fall. He sat down and laid his hands in his lap.

I’ll help you, I said.

I leaned over him, took the screwdriver from his hand, and installed the four tiny screws. His hair was longer—curls brushed the collar of his shirt—and his face thinner, but he smelled exactly the same.

I shouldn’t have done it, he said and his hands made a tight ball in his lap.

Pieces of his hair were snagged in the bandage that crisscrossed his eye and I felt a strong impulse to reach over and brush them away.

But you shouldn’t have left, he went on, his voice soft and strangled. Do you know what it was like when you were gone?

When Theresa was gone you mean.

He turned in his seat and we were eye to eye. No. You.

You destroyed the cell because of her.

He was quiet for a minute. She said it was hubris. That we weren’t meant to be here. Maybe we’re not.

I thought of Earth and the people I’d left behind there. My aunt sitting in her bedroom surrounded by soft and beautiful things. Lion diving into one of the neutral buoyancy tanks in his wet suit, falling fast, surrounded by shining bubbles. Carla and Nico standing together inside a cold hangar, preparing a rocket for a test launch, their breath making clouds in the air.

Just because Theresa didn’t belong here doesn’t mean we don’t. I picked up the next board in the pile. You sort, I’ll tighten, I said, and pulled my seat close to his.

At the Gateway we took off our suits just inside the cargo bay airlock and I recalled the first time I saw James in this corridor, a dark shape behind a bright light. His broad chest and wild hair. Now his suit bagged around his thin frame. His face was gray with exhaustion, his T-shirt stained with sweat. He limped toward his room and I wanted to follow, to help him change his clothes and rebandage his eye. I wanted to help him into bed. But he gave no indication he wanted company; he moved slowly down the dim corridor and disappeared into the darkness.

In the galley I made coffee and ate a bowl of oatmeal. Then I took my mug and went looking for Amelia in the control room; only Simon was there, typing fast on a computer. I guessed he was writing to Anu so I left him alone. The corridors were familiar again. The runner lights glowed blue at my feet. The temperature fluctuated as I walked through them, from cold to warm to cold. I opened doors to bunks. Amelia and Rachel were in the room opposite to my own. Amelia lay on top of the covers still in her jumpsuit, her good hand hanging off the side of the bed and her prosthetic hugged to her chest. She was already asleep and snoring. Rachel was curled next to her, wrapped in a blanket, her hair spread across the pillow.

I should have been tired but I wasn’t. In my bunk my old locker was still under the bed. I rummaged through it for a change of clothes, grabbed a shirt and tights and a pair of wool socks. I shook out my old Candidate Group sweatshirt and a spray of papers fell to the floor—my uncle’s fuel cell schematics. I pulled the sweatshirt over my head and spread the schematics out on the bed. They were curled at the edges and smelled of dust and, ever so faintly, of pen ink. Paging through them, as I had done as a child, I watched the evolution of the cell from inception to near completion. I was taken again by the brilliance and daring of its design. The notes in the margins were faded slightly but still legible—five scripts belonging to my uncle, James, Theresa, Amelia, and Simon.

But when I began reading I saw something I hadn’t recognized before, a kind of arrogance in their exchange. I paged ahead and it seemed to me that the people who wrote these words were playing at something. Their dialogue read like a game, but the scenarios they described were real. And the horror the Inquiry crew would face if any of these things happened to them was real also. Simon was the only one who seemed to fully grasp how multiple and inscrutable the dangers could be—I could tell because he was the only one of the five who sounded scared.

I got to the part where James and Theresa argued about the benefits of open versus closed stacks. Theresa wanted an open modular casing, James a closed one.

Lose less power this way, he wrote next to a drawing of the proposed case.

What if something goes wrong? Much harder to fix, Theresa answered.

Do you want someone messing with what we’ve built? he asked.

Simon’s neat print joined the other two. Something always goes wrong.

This was where my twelve-year-old handwriting joined theirs. I read my responses, my clumsy attempts to describe what was in my mind. Some of it was intelligible; a lot of it wasn’t, and I felt an overwhelming urge to get a pen and correct what I’d written. To answer my uncle’s questions again and to make sense of what had only partly made sense before.

When I looked up James stood in the doorway. He appeared to have slept, although it couldn’t have been for more than an hour or two. His hair was flat on one side, and a slight indentation lined his left cheek, below the bandage on his eye.

What are you reading? he asked.

I gathered the papers into a pile. The original schematics for my uncle’s cell.

He came closer, his body tilting slightly to the left, and picked up the top page. He squinted at it and smiled. He paged forward and then back and began reading. We thought we knew it all.

It was a revolutionary design, I said.

With a fatal flaw.

It didn’t have to be fatal.

He didn’t answer; he was engrossed in a particular page. There’s something here I don’t remember, he said. This is your handwriting. Or very like it.

It is mine.

This is where we argue about open versus closed stacks, he said. Theresa’s argument is convincing. He rubbed his good eye. But my case for a closed system is strong too. He pointed to the middle of the page. Here’s where I bring her over to my side. He paused for a second, reading.