Kate Day - In the Quick

But I didn’t convince you, he said. You disagree. You say Theresa and Simon are right, and you explain why.

Yes.

When did you write this?

I was twelve.

There was a curious expression on his face. He bent his head to the page again. You say, We’re humans, not machines. We have to adapt ourselves to space. Not it to us .

That part I wrote just now.

He set the page down. I was wrong, he said. Theresa and Simon were right. You were right—

No. We’ve decided. We’re sticking with closed stacks.

It’s just the casing. He began moving to the door. We can change it—

You were adamantly against this, I said. And you convinced me. We give up power in an open system. We give up control—

I’m going to start now.

Stop, I said. A wave of exhaustion moved through my body, and a dull ache began to radiate at the back of my jaw, where my molar used to be. You’re injured. You need rest. So do I.

I gathered the schematics into a pile and set them on the floor.

We can make the changes, I said. I stood up and pulled him to the bed. In the morning.

His shoulders loosened.

I took the blanket from the bottom of the bed—it smelled of wool and salt. He laid his head down on the pillow, and I did too, and I drew the blanket around us both.

Every day in the workshop James and I sat close and worked and talked, and even laughed. He was more forthcoming than he’d ever been about lots of things. My uncle—what he was like as a teacher and a mentor. His training after Peter Reed. Even Theresa and what the Gateway was like when they first came here to work on the cell. One day we were easy with each other like this all afternoon, but as the sun went down and the workshop filled with a rosy glow, he turned quiet and taciturn. He finished what he was doing and got up from the table and moved at a slight tilt to the door.

I’m going to bed, he said, and waited in the doorway.

I put away what I was working on. Then I looped my arm through his. You don’t really want to be alone.

No, he said. I don’t.

Every minute I wasn’t working with James I spent in the station’s gym. My first morning the equipment was covered in dust and I started by wiping everything down, all the machines and weights and mats, and the chlorine smell of the cleaner filled the room. Simon came in, and Rachel too. Eventually Amelia showed up also, and we made a circuit, together, of all the machines.

We went on like this for a week, then two. Supplies arrived, and people. NSP officials took over and the station filled up with workers. In the control room a team of engineers upgraded all the equipment and ran launch sequences and communications models. In consultation with Simon and Amelia, a group of specialists from Earth worked to finish rehabbing Endurance and to outfit it for its mission.

Simon and I started working out twice a day, and most of the time Amelia and Rachel joined us. We upped the weight on the machines and added a predawn run in our suits up and down the rocky hills outside. I got stronger; I gained power in my legs and back. I watched my body change in the mirror, as I had at the agricultural outpost. My cheeks grew rounder; my stance was straighter and my shoulders wider.

But these changes made James’s condition all the more conspicuous. He was getting better, but slowly. Very slowly. He still limped. His eye was healing—the bandage was now just a single strip of gauze—but his eyesight was largely unchanged.

It was most striking when we were all together in the galley. It didn’t happen that often, but every few days the whole group would end up in the same room, eating or drinking coffee under the dusty yellow lights. One day I walked into the room and everyone was sitting at the table. James, Amelia, and Simon were talking and laughing about a drill they’d done in Candidate Group. They’d had to crawl in their suits through a pitch-black module full of obstacles to find and fix an unidentified gas leak, and they’d failed three times. When they finally completed the challenge successfully their drill supervisor had chewed them out for how long it took them. It was only later they’d found out that no team had ever completed the drill successfully, even with unlimited tries.

I made myself coffee and stood at the counter. I had my mission binder with me and I half read, half listened. After a few minutes James stood up. You should go through the launch sequences, he said.

I sat and led the group through the plans in my binder and he made more coffee. After a while he began to shift his weight on his feet and brought two fingers to his eye. Amelia was talking; she was going through the plan for capture when Endurance reached Inquiry. But James saw me watching him. He let his hand drop from his eye, and he nodded as if to say, I’m okay. I stood up so he could sit back down at the table but he stayed where he was.

At night he was restless in the bed next to me, and sometimes I got up—afraid I was disturbing his sleep—and made my way through the blue-tinted corridors to my own bunk.

One early morning when I slept alone in my bunk, I woke to see him sitting at the foot of the bed. I sat up. The room was still dark; silt pattered at the porthole. What’s wrong?

Everything’s going well, he said. Endurance will be ready sooner than we thought.

I wrapped my arms around him. You’ll be ready too.

He touched his head to mine and the wild scent of his skin and hair mixed with the antiseptic smell of his dressed eye. You know I can’t go, he said.

You can.

He took my face in his hands and looked at me. June.

I’m not leaving on a two-year mission without you, I said and my voice cracked.

His fingers were warm and firm against my cheeks. Let’s say things we already know. The silt tapped harder outside. I’m not going. But you are.

Time sped up and I tried to slow it down. In my mind I made bargains with it, asked it, cajoled it. But it didn’t stop moving forward. I paid attention to the light outside the porthole, how it changed over the course of each day. Noticed how the woolly light in the morning turned brilliant at midday, attended to the moment when the jewel colors of twilight transformed into the murky, silt-covered shadows of night. I paid attention to my body, its weight and strength, its aches and pains, its hunger, thirst, and fatigue. I noticed my own shifting moods, how I felt different from one day to the next and from morning to afternoon to night.

About one thing I felt the same any time of day—the fuel cell. It was complete; a team of engineers took over to install the stacks inside Endurance. But a single cell still sat in the workshop—the prototype that had been built by James and me, destroyed, put back together by James, and then rebuilt again.

The day before the launch I stood at the table in the workshop. The cell’s open casing gleamed; its red and white connectors were vivid in the low light. I heard my uncle’s voice in my head: What does it do? I laid my hands on top of it, and in my mind I made it work. I slowed time down and watched its chemical reactions and electrical connections in slow motion; I sped time up and watched the effects of heat and cold and air pressure and vibration over the course of days, months, and years.

It wasn’t going to degrade with vibration like the original fuel cell had—the flexible internal components James and I had developed had solved that problem. There was always the possibility of factors we hadn’t accounted for, a difficulty we hadn’t foreseen. But the stacks that housed the cells were open and it would be possible for my crew to respond to unforeseen challenges, to adapt or modify the cell en route if we had to.