Temi Oh - Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

Something strange and wonderful occurred to Astrid then. The fight was finished. For the first time in her life, even if she did nothing at all, she would be in space.

SOMETIMES HER FATHER WOULD call upon new believers to tell the story of how they came to faith. Their testimony. And this was hers. Astrid had grown up knowing that there was a distant planet outside her own solar system, a green twin of Earth orbiting dual stars. The first day that a longing to go there awoke inside her, she had been in assembly. All the children in her year group had been ushered into the school hall to watch a video, part of a presentation delivered by a team from the UKSA. ‘Another habitable planet,’ announced one of them across the darkened room and the screen lit up with dazzling vistas of an alien land. Astrid saw an ocean, lush mountain ranges and terracotta canyons ridged like jewel-box shells.

‘They call it a “New Earth”,’ said the young astrobiologist with exaggerated air-quotes, ‘but our findings actually suggest that Terra-Two is many millions of years older than our own Earth; truly, we’re living on Terra-Two.’

Under the collar of her shirt, Astrid’s neck prickled with goosebumps. She sat up as if she had been called by name, and in a way she had. This, they’d told her, was a place for the intrepid. The first settlers would not arrive until they were middle-aged, even if they left today. Their job would be to chart terrain, and to explore the land, to name the secret schools of fish that swept through the coral reefs, and photograph night-blooming flowers. Someone in this room, they’d said in a reverent whisper, may be the first to set foot in the crystalline caves that had formed underground. Astrid had imagined herself descending to find her own adult face reflected in the frosty mineral beams.

This is a job for the brave, they’d said, a job for dreamers, for people who, like Astrid, woke every morning longing for another world. ‘Imagine it,’ the recruiter had said. And Astrid had.

That week, she’d bounced around with the hyper energy of a new convert. She would get into Dalton, she would specialize in astrobiology, she would be accepted into the Beta and she would go to Terra-Two.

Astrid would remember the years after that assembly and before the launch as a single shining line of triumph. The shortest route between point A, the naming of her desire and point B, leaving Earth – its sole zenith of realization.

Later, they would ask what she had been thinking when the hatch slammed shut. Had she been contemplating what a slow labour their mission was, how many minds and hands it had taken to get her to this point, to this two-minute launch window? Or was she counting every sacrifice, every year of her life she had given and was still to give?

As the flight director commenced the countdown, she heard Professor Stenton’s measured voice crackle through the headset. ‘Take care of yourself,’ she said, the thing she said whenever she bid them goodbye from the driveway before a school trip, or at the start of a holiday with the sun in her eyes.

They would ask Astrid if she had been afraid and she would answer ‘no’ every time. And if she ever looked back at the strange arc of her life and wondered if any moment had been as perfect as dreaming of it, she would say, ‘that one’.

The shuttle launched. Astrid burst through the luminescent atmosphere and into the black firmament beyond. She had been longing to leave her whole life, and finally nothing was standing between her and the stars.

13.05.12

LAUNCH

IT TAKES OVER A million pounds of fuel to launch a shuttle into space. A fact that occurred to Juno when the engines fired and the fear came. The shuttle pitched and rolled. Juno felt the back of her seat drop away from under her and she gasped.

This was the dangerous point. Just before the solid rocket boosters lit, the computers could still call off the launch. It could be anything that forced them to abort: an overheated pump, a broken coolant valve or something more dangerous like a tank rupture. They had practised emergency escapes, jumping out of the hatch and running back across the access arm into the metal slide-wire baskets that would release them down the 400-metre drop to a shielded bunker to take cover from an explosion.

As mission control counted down the final seconds, Juno was sure that something had gone wrong, because she felt as if the orbiter was about to roll right off the launch pad. Perhaps some bolt had ruptured too early and the shuttle had ceded to gravity at this first hurdle.

But, by the time the flight director said ‘One’, they were upright again and then they were flying.

‘Lift-off!’ came the exultant voice from mission control, the same way men shout, ‘ Goooooooal!’ during a football match, ‘We have lift-off!’ and over the headset, Juno could hear laughter and applause.

It was a brutal ride. The vibration rattled her bones and her muscles seized against the shockwaves. It felt as if the rocket was strapped right onto her back. As they shuddered up into the sky, she clenched her jaw to stop her teeth from smashing like china. Her arteries flooded with adrenaline and her heart thrashed against her sternum.

Outside the window, the ground disappeared. And then, as they cleared the cobalt stratosphere, the solid rocket boosters burned the last of their fuel. Juno sensed the instant they detached because, for a second, the shaking stopped. She pictured the two cylinders falling back on themselves through the sky and into a foreign sea. Then the next stage fired and her spine was slammed back into her seat.

It was a little like being on a rollercoaster, that quick point when the carriage swings up and the passengers are pushed down, momentarily heavier.

The crew were speeding to twenty-six times the speed of sound, and for Juno, the acceleration was terrifying. She felt it first in her arms; when she tried to lift them up they crashed back onto the armrest like felled trees. Then the force intensified. They accelerated at 3g and her eyes were pinned open. Juno felt the pull of the force in the sides of her face and around her mouth as the soft tissue peeled away from her bones.

Six minutes into the flight, she weighed almost four and a half times as much as she did on Earth, and it felt like being buried alive. Her chest was trapped in a tightening vice and drawing every breath was a struggle.

All the senior crew – the veteran astronauts – had snapped their fingers and told her that the moment of suffering would fly by, but, for Juno, it felt like hours. She couldn’t think past the pressure on her lungs. How long until a bone snapped? What if her heart tore loose from the sinews holding it in her chest and collapsed like a punctured balloon? It felt possible.

She had seen a video of a pilot sitting up at 3.5g. It took only a few seconds for the blood to drain from his brain into his feet, and for his eyes to roll back as he convulsed into unconsciousness.

Juno was saved from this because she was lying on her back and because her suit was designed to grip her body and stop her blood pressure from dropping too low.

When she was finally thrust into orbit, she instantly went from weighing four times as much as she did on Earth to weighing nothing at all. Her brain tried to process the sudden change and for a while – although she was still strapped in her seat – she could not shake the dizzying sensation of tumbling forwards again and again into the control panel by her feet. She had to close her eyes to fight the tide of nausea whirling in her gut.

When she opened them again, everyone was laughing with nervous relief. The checklist in Dr Golinsky’s hand had begun to float and the mad-eyed statue of St Joseph of Cupertino that Igor had affixed to the dashboard for luck had come unstuck and was hovering in the air.