Kate Day - In the Quick

During the day at school, bored with math lessons I’d already taught myself a year or more ago, I filled sheets of paper with drawings of baskets and mechanical feet. At home I worked close to the TV, even though the reports on Inquiry said nothing new. I started to put the things I’d collected together, and then to take them apart and put them together in a different way. I wasn’t systematic. I tried one thing and then another until I’d built something that roughly resembled my picture—a haphazard-looking wire basket with metal and silicone feet, and a battery pack screwed to its underside.

To test it I built a makeshift staircase in my room out of old boxes and duct tape and set my invention in front of it. Its articulated metal feet stood flat on the carpet, its basket level with the first step. I pressed the up button on the remote control, and the machine clicked twice and lifted its foot. But the foot only hit the step, tuc, tuc, tuc, like it was trying to get through it rather than over it.

Tuc, tuc, tuc.

Tuc, tuc, tuc.

I took it apart and put it back together again. Over and over until it started to look nothing like my drawing, and I didn’t know if it was better or worse. I tried five toes instead of three. A high heel instead of a low one. The loops of wire like toenails were a problem, so I replaced them with plastic nobs unscrewed from the bottoms of the dining room chairs. The screws I’d used to fasten the basket to its legs were too short; I switched to bolts.

The basket started to do what it was supposed to do in a very ugly way. It hobbled up the stairs like a person who had half forgotten how to walk. It needed to be faster, smoother. I made it faster. That was easy. But I got stuck on smoother. There was something heavy about the way its metal feet hit the floor. It stomped when I wanted it to half walk, half fly. I drew hundreds of solutions but none of them satisfied me. My mind roamed the house to find better materials, into every room, closet, cupboard. Nothing was right. I was stuck, and I pushed the basket under my bed.

I spent the weekend sitting close to the TV. They didn’t say anything new about Inquiry, just repeated things I’d already heard. But late in the afternoon on Sunday they started showing old video recordings of the crew. There was a clip of Anu Sharma, Inquiry ’s commander, dismantling an oxygenator in a timed training exercise. Another of the four of them floating in bright white suits in a neutral buoyancy tank, part of the underwater training facility that prepared astronauts for working in zero gravity. They were secured to the side of a mock explorer, their tethers like tails behind them. Anu held a wrench in her hand and waved cheerfully to the camera.

The video made their training look simple. But I knew it wasn’t simple because I’d watched Anu and her crew in that tank when my uncle was alive. A week before they announced which team would crew Inquiry —James Banovic’s or Anu Sharma’s—Anu’s team was scheduled for a routine exercise at NSP. I asked my uncle if we could go and watch, just for a few minutes, and he agreed.

When we opened the doors to the observation theater, rows of empty chairs stretched out before us and a deep blue glow came from the center of the room where the tank stood. In it was the mock explorer, a replica of Inquiry, complete with its arrays, equipment panels, egress hatch.

Bubbles filled the water as four people in white suits descended into the tank, tether cords twirling behind them. We watched as they crawled along the side of the station, moving their harness clips from anchor point to anchor point, and my uncle explained they were practicing a manual rotation of one of the arrays. The exercise was timed—a light on the side of the tank went from blue to green to yellow based on the number of minutes they had left, and it turned red when their time was up.

Anu went first—I knew it was her because of the commander patch on her sleeve—and got into position at the farthest point on the array. Dimitri and Lee followed, tethering themselves at the base of the array, and Missy took up position at a set of controls near the egress hatch. Anu retrieved a tool velcroed to her suit and loosened the hardware on the underside of the array. The light switched from blue to green as Anu, Dimitri, and Lee slowly turned the array.

They’re going to finish, no problem, I said to my uncle.

It looks that way.

They secured the array in its new position, replaced their tools, and began to move back to the egress hatch. But halfway there Dimitri’s and Lee’s tethers became tangled. Anu was behind them—her tether was fine—but she couldn’t move past her current anchor point. Dimitri and Lee attempted to untangle themselves, an awkward slow-motion dance of limbs and torsos and helmets. Up, over, around. They seemed to be making the problem worse. Anu gestured. The light switched from green to yellow. She gestured again.

Why don’t they just detach themselves? I asked.

Because in open space they would float away, my uncle said.

Dimitri and Lee finally managed to unravel the knot they’d created and they moved toward the hatch. When they reached it the light was still yellow. Anu was behind them, and she went from anchor point to anchor point swiftly and efficiently—but the light turned red before she got there.

She hovered for a moment at the hatch and I pressed my face against the cool glass, trying to discern her expression behind the dull shine of her visor. Then a harness descended into the tank to pull them up and the timer went back to zero.

Will they go again? I asked.

Another team was already descending into the tank.

No, my uncle said. They get their time and they have to make the most of it.

That day I stayed with my uncle in his lab through dinner, and when the sun went down I fell asleep with my head on his desk. I woke sometime close to midnight, my head full of images of the neutral buoyancy tank, its startlingly blue water, its shifting bubbles and glinting arrays.

My uncle was next door testing something in the vacuum chamber—I could see him through the glass. Across the room James and Theresa stood over a long table piled with needle drivers and circuit boards and tangles of cable and wiring. Their voices were low but intense; their heads were bent together.

That won’t work, Theresa said.

It will, James said.

You said yourself it wouldn’t an hour ago.

Maybe I was wrong—

You’re admitting that? Theresa laughed and touched her lips to his.

I felt strange watching them and ducked out of the room—they didn’t look up—and made my way to the observation theater. The hallways were dark and empty after the bustle of daytime, the sky a smudgy black as I walked across the catwalk between the research complex and the NSP training facility.

The theater was lit only with the blue glow from the tank. My eyes adjusted as I moved toward it. It was so quiet. The water was clear, the shape of the mock explorer distinct and still. It seemed to take up more of the tank than it had earlier in the day. Its hull made a long shadow; its arrays and antennae stretched and refracted light from above.

A plume of bubbles appeared and I jumped back from the glass. Three suits descended into the water. One of them had a commander’s patch—it was Anu. She landed at the egress hatch and tethered herself to an anchor point. But the other suits were oddly buoyant. I squinted through the bubbles and tried to understand what I was seeing.

The suits were empty. Anu had ahold of their tethers and they floated free. She started to crawl along the explorer and repeat the exercise from earlier in the day. Not actually rotating the array—that was a job requiring more than one person—but replicating all the motions involved.