Cold Eyes (First Contact), page 8
As if space wasn’t already awash with radiation, traveling at a significant fraction of the speed of light makes things worse. This is the reason for the starship’s arrow-like shape. Interstellar dust and cosmic rays become a lethal cocktail of supercharged particles. Without shielding, the craft would have been ripped to shreds over the years. Sandy told him it would be like driving a car in a hail storm.
The Falco drive is what made the journey possible. It’s a sub-light warp engine. In essence, it compresses spacetime out in front of the Magellan and the spacecraft falls forward toward that ever-moving point. It’s like leading a donkey with a carrot on a stick. The Magellan is drawn toward the fake gravitational field in front of it, but it can never reach it. The effect is subtle, but it allows for a constant acceleration of just a few centimeters per second to be maintained over decades without the need for absurd amounts of fuel.
“Five hundred meters… Picking up the local gravitational vector… Firing thrusters… Slowing approach… Bleeding off our speed.”
Kari’s bringing them in following a vast arc. Dali can feel the various jets sticking out from the sides of his pack firing in short bursts as she adjusts their final approach. Kari avoids a steep cliff face, steering them in toward an open, rocky patch on the asteroid.
“Copy that,” is the reply from Sandy.
Everyone’s so goddamn calm. To Dali, it’s crazy how relaxed everyone is about a maneuver that’s utterly surreal. Rocks pass hundreds of meters beneath his boots.
Dali taps on his wrist pad computer, enlarging the view of the Magellan behind him, wanting to focus on something other than the gigantic mass of boulders looming beneath him.
The cockpit on their interstellar spacecraft is the shape of a spearhead. A thin probe extends almost fifty meters from the nose cone, projecting a layered electromagnetic field in front of the vehicle. The charge alternates between positive and negative every few meters. The idea isn’t to absorb or repel particles, merely to deflect them over the sleek lines of the craft. Neutral particles tend to have lower velocities so they’re not as much of a problem. They slip through the shield, but they’re mechanically deflected by the streamlined shape of the cockpit itself.
“Two hundred meters at ten meters down and thirty forward.”
Asteroid Kenshin is looking a helluva lot bigger than it did from the cockpit of the Magellan. Dali doesn’t want to be here. He really doesn’t want to be on this mission, but he wanted to show he could function as a competent part of the crew. Now, he’s fighting a panic attack.
“Don’t look at the rocks,” he mumbles to himself after making sure his microphone is still glowing red and not transmitting. “Look at the Magellan. Just think about the Magellan. You’ll be back there soon enough.”
Once the Magellan dropped out from behind its fake Falco bubble of spacetime, the torus was inflated. Being located behind the cockpit, the torus living space is set on super-cooled, frictionless bearings. It was spun up to almost a gee. As humans sleep for roughly a third of every twenty-four hours, their rest periods double as gravity therapy. Apparently, white blood cells and bone marrow are reinvigorated while they sleep. Dali’s not sure who told him that. It could have been Sandy a few days ago or eighty years ago. From where he is, he can’t see the transfer shuttle that allows them to move between the weightless cabin and the living quarters, but he knows it’s there.
Kari continues talking through their approach. The asteroid is looking pretty damn big as it looms before them. Distances are difficult to judge. To Dali, it feels as though he could reach out and touch the surface.
“One hundred meters at seven down and twenty-two forward.”
Dali distracts himself, thinking about the overall mission. The design is ingenious. To conserve resources, the crew were born in transit as the Magellan plowed through the interstellar medium. Sandy told him that from conception to hatching, gestation plus eighteen years of growth was squeezed into barely eighteen months. Dali finds that disconcerting. Perhaps that’s what unsettles him most about being on the edge of a galactic spiral arm.
Humans—regular humans—have eighteen years to get accustomed to the novel sensation that is conscious life. For him, being self-aware is unsettling. People take their existence for granted, but it’s not normal. Rocks are normal. Ice is normal. Black holes are normal. The scorching hot surface of a star soaring to tens of thousands of degrees is normal. A radiation-soaked vacuum is normal. A minuscule collection of atoms floating around thinking for itself is decidedly abnormal. Since when did an assortment of wet carbon get so damn cocky? And it’s a temporary arrangement. That’s what really bothers him.
Dali never asked for life. Now he’s got it, he’s not sure he ever wants to let it go, but that’s not something he can control. Oh, the atoms that make up his body will never die. They’ll continue on for trillions of years without him. They’re effectively immortal, but not as long as they’re alive. Dali’s an interruption in their otherwise banal, seemingly endless existence. Once he’s gone, they’ll be normal again.
“And we are at fifty meters. Six meters down at fifteen forward. Feeling that pull now. Applying a light touch on the thrusters to resist.”
“Dali?” Sandy says, snapping him back to reality.
“Yeah. All good.”
Three words. He’s getting better at lying.
Dali blinks. He was daydreaming. He was so focused on the Magellan he’s not ready for the vast wall of rock in front of him. To avoid overshooting the target zone, Kari spins them around, bringing them in like a paraglider circling a landing spot. She loops in front of and below a cliff face before pulling away again. Dali blinks and the cliff is gone. Once again, he’s looking into the darkness, trying to ignore the boulder field racing up toward him. Although Kari is in control, Dali can’t escape the feeling they’re about to crash.
“Twenty meters. Three down. Seven forward.”
“Looking good on approach,” is the reply from Helios.
“Slowing to one at one at one… and we are coming to a stop… Magellan, we are down.”
“We copy you down. Nice work, Kari.”
Dali’s boots touch lightly at the rocks.
“You good?” Kari asks, unclipping her harness and returning control to his suit jets.
“I’m good.”
Dali removes his tether.
Kari has already turned around. She starts unpacking items from the instrument rack, sorting through equipment.
Dali bumps his reaction controls. He’s not sure exactly what just happened. He didn’t blackout, but he has no recollection of consciously moving. Instead of standing on the surface, he’s suddenly floating parallel with the rocky ground, levitating just above it, slowly settling.
“Easy,” Kari says.
It’s only then he realizes he knocked the controls on his orientation jets. His suit rotated him by 90 degrees, automatically firing jets to start and stop his motion in accordance with a command he didn’t realize he gave with his loose fingers. Dali finds himself staring at a wall of rocks in front of him instead of the ground beneath him.
Up is a crazy sensation in space. Up is wherever he wants it to be, only it isn’t. Any direction can be up and yet no direction is up. As Dali is now facing the asteroid, it appears as though he’s standing on nothing before a cliff made out of loose rubble. He’s drifting, slowly moving toward the surface, being drawn in by the asteroid’s microgravity. Or he’s under it being pulled up. Or above it, falling down. His brain hurts.
Kari moves like an acrobat in a high-wire circus act. Her motion is graceful. It’s as though the various nozzles protruding from her backpack are an extension of her body. She kicks her reaction-control micro-thrusters into action, swinging her legs out in front of her and changing her orientation. From Dali’s perspective, it looks as though she’s about to karate kick the rocks. After unloading the tray, she aligns herself with the asteroid. For Kari, up is now the dark void, while the rock pile is down. Dali performs the same maneuver. He uses his jets to push himself away from the asteroid. Then a slight puff of gas sets him in motion, rotating him around his hips. A second puff brings him to a halt. Now, the asteroid looks like the black and white desert of some ancient cowboy western—minus the cactus and tumbleweeds.
“Gravity is 5 millimeters per second squared,” Kari says, as though that means something to him. She anchors the instrument bay to the asteroid with a pneumatic gun, firing a bolt into a boulder. Dust billows in silence.
Dali descends without the use of his jets. Slowly, he accelerates, but never at more than a leisurely pace. It takes eight or nine seconds to fall a couple of meters back to the surface. By the time he touches down, he’s moving at almost a meter a second. His boots sink into the loose rocks. Pebbles drift around his legs, being kicked up by his motion. They fall back to the surface in super slow-mo.
“Nice, easy movements,” Kari says. “You could jump off this thing like a superhero if you tried.”
“Cool,” Dali says.
“Not cool,” Kari says. “Dangerous. Without your jets, you’d come back down hard. Remember, there’s no air resistance—no terminal velocity. Go high enough and you’ll come down like a cannonball.”
She sets the instrumentation sled on a flat stretch of rock. Although it would weigh five or six hundred pounds on Earth, Kari maneuvers it with ease. She moves slowly, carefully managing its mass and inertia, bringing it to rest on the rubble.
Kari uses a construction gun to fire more bolts into a large rock, fixing anchor points to secure a series of tethers. These allow her to move around without the use of her jets. With each shot, dust lifts from the surface of the asteroid in a radius of several meters, reacting to the shot as though it were an earthquake. Kari hooks herself into one of the anchors, allowing her to conserve fuel as she pushes around.
“What can I do?” Dali asks as Kari sets up a deep core drill.
Kari knows what needs to be done. Dali is a spare wheel.
She points. “See that cliff over there?”
“Yeah.”
“The white stuff in the shadows is ice. I need to know if that’s dry ice or some kind of water ice. Why don’t you take a collection kit over there and bring me back some samples?”
“Sure.”
Dali’s the water boy. He doesn’t mind. He’s slowing Kari down anyway. Best he goes off and plays elsewhere. Besides, the asteroid fascinates him. It’s a rock quarry. Large cliffs and mountains dominate the distance. The steep slopes are covered in rocks. Boulders lie strewn across the curved plane of the asteroid. It’s crazy to think entire planets started out like this.
Dali grabs a collection kit and clips it onto his waist harness. Time to play Buck Rogers. Who’s Buck Rogers? Dali’s not sure, but the name lingers in his thoughts. He orients himself using his thrusters, lifting himself out of the rubble with a light touch on his wrist pad controls.
At first, Dali was confused why Sandy wanted to send him out here. He figured he’d need lots of training, but she’s right. It’s child’s play. Spacewalks were dangerous in the early days. Now, they’re routine. Far from being freeform, his controls have preset ranges and large arrows that make it easy to maneuver. With a touch of a button, he can pivot by 5, 15, 25, 45, 90 or even 180 degrees, changing his orientation with a single motion. It’s dial-a-direction. His transit jets are designed to take him wherever he looks. Glance at a rock and it becomes a waypoint with a virtual flag appearing on his HUD.
This is fun.
“Not too fast,” Sandy says over the radio. She’s switched to a private channel. The microphone on his Snoopy cap lights up in blue rather than green or red, letting him know their conversation is confidential.
After an initial burst, Dali’s pushing two meters per second. It’s not that fast, but this close to the surface, rocks and boulders zip by beneath his boots. Gravity slowly pulls him down.
“Weeee,” he says, unable to suppress his delight, knowing it’ll elicit a grin from her on board the Magellan.
Dali’s easily distracted.
His HUD lights up with the dominant chemical composition of the various regions drifting by beneath his feet. His suit computer tells him about the presence of carbon, iron, copper, lithium, silicon and aluminum trapped in various molecules and compounds. Dali makes the mistake of staring a little too long at a patch of gallium sulfide glistening in golden yellows beneath the distant star. His HUD picks that as a waypoint and responds with a burst of gas to correct his course. Before he can override the action, he finds himself plowing into the side of a hill. Rocks scatter. Dali tumbles. Pebbles go flying. Dust is kicked up, spraying out across the asteroid. Dali flips end over end, diving into the rock pile.
“Dali!” Sandy yells over the private channel.
“I’m okay. I’m good,” he replies, raising his hand through the rocks that have gathered around him, half burying him. “That was actually fun.”
“Don’t do this to me,” Sandy says under her breath, clearly trying to hide her conversation from Helios back on the Magellan.
“It was like landing in the ball pit at McDonald’s,” he replies, climbing out of the rubble. Kari has noticed. She’s gone up to an altitude of twenty meters and is facing him, watching as he climbs out of the rocks. She looks like a superhero ready to spring into action.
“Is everything okay?” she asks on the main channel.
Dali offers a thumbs up and says, “All good,” being sure to switch back to the open channel.
Although he’s still wading through the rubble kicked up by the impact, she descends and continues working on the drill mount. Kids! Am I right? Yeah, Dali thinks. You’re right.
“Dali, please,” Sandy says, still on the private channel. “You’ve got to be careful.”
“I remember,” he says, switching back to the private channel. “The balls. They were red and green, right?”
“What balls?” Sandy asks, confused. “What are you talking about?”
“There were other colors too. Yellow and blue, but it’s the red ones I remember best.”
“I—I?”
“The ball pit at McDonald’s,” he says. “And it wasn’t a farm. Old McDonald’s was a—a—it was some place where they gave you food, right? I mean, you had to exchange money for it, I think, but they had tiny sticks of potato and thin slivers of overcooked meat shoved inside crushed bread.”
“That’s good, Dali,” Sandy says, humoring him.
“I think I liked it.”
“I’m glad you’re remembering,” she says. “But please. One meter per second. No faster, okay? Give yourself time to react. And purge your jets. Make sure you don’t have loose rubble in those thrust nozzles.”
“Yes, Mom.”
He can hear her sighing into her microphone.
Dali takes Sandy’s advice and drifts at one meter per second over toward the base of the cliff.
Passing from the starlight of the nearby red dwarf into the shadows causes an abrupt transition. It takes his eyes a few seconds to adjust to the darkness. The way the asteroid rotates leaves this region in perpetual darkness, allowing various forms of ice to persist in the extreme cold.
Dali comes to a halt using his jets. He reorients himself and settles the last few feet, allowing the microgravity of the asteroid to bring him in gently.
“Like a pro,” Sandy says, subtly letting him know she’s continuing to monitor his video feed.
A thin sheet of ice crunches beneath his boots. Dali crouches, but even the slightest flex of his muscles has him drift up from the surface. It’s difficult to collect samples. Rather than walking across the asteroid, he finds it easier to lie flat on his stomach and float face-first up against the rock pile. With the lightest touch of his fingers, he can crawl over the rocks without disturbing the surface. Flakes of cryogenic snow drift with his motion. For him, it’s like swimming in the shallow end of a pool. He feels as though he’s pulling himself along the rocks at the edge of a lake.
Dali collects various ice deposits. His HUD identifies them as being made from frozen water, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen. The lights on his helmet catch the complex layers of crystals. He places each sample in a vial within the collection case.
“Nice work,” Sandy says.
Dali pushes off the icy surface, turning around so he can face the Magellan high overhead. Red starlight catches the side of the hull as the spaceship orbits the asteroid. Most of the craft is hidden in the shadows.
“Can you see me?” he asks Sandy as he drifts back against the rocks and ice.
“Oh, I can see you.”
Dali moves his arms and legs back and forth a few times, rubbing the icy surface.
“What are you doing?”
“Making you a present. This is a gift for you.”
“What?” Sandy says, sounding surprised.
Dali scoots off the surface with a light push and engages his jets, moving out to twenty meters.
“A snow angel.”
Sandy laughs. “You goofball.”
“That’ll be there for hundreds of years.”
“Thousands,” she says. “Possibly millions.”
“You’re welcome.”
Although he can’t see her, he knows she’s smiling.
Collecting Rocks
Dali needs to go number two. It’s not that he needs to do a nervous poo. He did one of those on the Magellan before suiting up. This is nothing more than one too many protein bars for breakfast. Thankfully, he’s read up on the suit’s waste management system. In the old days, astronauts would wear diapers. They’d float around in urine and feces until their marathon 14 to 16-hour spacewalks were complete and then clean up back on board. Of course, none of this made it into the recruitment brochures. Who wants to go to Saturn, play among the rings, and shit themselves? But every spacewalk was accompanied by space wipes in the airlock.
To be human is to be a biological entity. Respiration, metabolization, and excretion—they’re essential for maintaining the homeostasis that is life. How does he know that? Some fragment of his training is slipping through into his consciousness. Right now, all he knows for sure is he’d like to poo without everyone within 12 light-years watching him. Sitting in the darkness, resting on a boulder in the shadows of the cliff, he activates his waste disposal system. Within his suit, rubber suckers position themselves over his anus and the head of his penis. They’re cold. That tiny detail wasn’t included in the instruction manual. Dali spooks himself. It’s easy to go when you need to, hard to go when you want to.
The Falco drive is what made the journey possible. It’s a sub-light warp engine. In essence, it compresses spacetime out in front of the Magellan and the spacecraft falls forward toward that ever-moving point. It’s like leading a donkey with a carrot on a stick. The Magellan is drawn toward the fake gravitational field in front of it, but it can never reach it. The effect is subtle, but it allows for a constant acceleration of just a few centimeters per second to be maintained over decades without the need for absurd amounts of fuel.
“Five hundred meters… Picking up the local gravitational vector… Firing thrusters… Slowing approach… Bleeding off our speed.”
Kari’s bringing them in following a vast arc. Dali can feel the various jets sticking out from the sides of his pack firing in short bursts as she adjusts their final approach. Kari avoids a steep cliff face, steering them in toward an open, rocky patch on the asteroid.
“Copy that,” is the reply from Sandy.
Everyone’s so goddamn calm. To Dali, it’s crazy how relaxed everyone is about a maneuver that’s utterly surreal. Rocks pass hundreds of meters beneath his boots.
Dali taps on his wrist pad computer, enlarging the view of the Magellan behind him, wanting to focus on something other than the gigantic mass of boulders looming beneath him.
The cockpit on their interstellar spacecraft is the shape of a spearhead. A thin probe extends almost fifty meters from the nose cone, projecting a layered electromagnetic field in front of the vehicle. The charge alternates between positive and negative every few meters. The idea isn’t to absorb or repel particles, merely to deflect them over the sleek lines of the craft. Neutral particles tend to have lower velocities so they’re not as much of a problem. They slip through the shield, but they’re mechanically deflected by the streamlined shape of the cockpit itself.
“Two hundred meters at ten meters down and thirty forward.”
Asteroid Kenshin is looking a helluva lot bigger than it did from the cockpit of the Magellan. Dali doesn’t want to be here. He really doesn’t want to be on this mission, but he wanted to show he could function as a competent part of the crew. Now, he’s fighting a panic attack.
“Don’t look at the rocks,” he mumbles to himself after making sure his microphone is still glowing red and not transmitting. “Look at the Magellan. Just think about the Magellan. You’ll be back there soon enough.”
Once the Magellan dropped out from behind its fake Falco bubble of spacetime, the torus was inflated. Being located behind the cockpit, the torus living space is set on super-cooled, frictionless bearings. It was spun up to almost a gee. As humans sleep for roughly a third of every twenty-four hours, their rest periods double as gravity therapy. Apparently, white blood cells and bone marrow are reinvigorated while they sleep. Dali’s not sure who told him that. It could have been Sandy a few days ago or eighty years ago. From where he is, he can’t see the transfer shuttle that allows them to move between the weightless cabin and the living quarters, but he knows it’s there.
Kari continues talking through their approach. The asteroid is looking pretty damn big as it looms before them. Distances are difficult to judge. To Dali, it feels as though he could reach out and touch the surface.
“One hundred meters at seven down and twenty-two forward.”
Dali distracts himself, thinking about the overall mission. The design is ingenious. To conserve resources, the crew were born in transit as the Magellan plowed through the interstellar medium. Sandy told him that from conception to hatching, gestation plus eighteen years of growth was squeezed into barely eighteen months. Dali finds that disconcerting. Perhaps that’s what unsettles him most about being on the edge of a galactic spiral arm.
Humans—regular humans—have eighteen years to get accustomed to the novel sensation that is conscious life. For him, being self-aware is unsettling. People take their existence for granted, but it’s not normal. Rocks are normal. Ice is normal. Black holes are normal. The scorching hot surface of a star soaring to tens of thousands of degrees is normal. A radiation-soaked vacuum is normal. A minuscule collection of atoms floating around thinking for itself is decidedly abnormal. Since when did an assortment of wet carbon get so damn cocky? And it’s a temporary arrangement. That’s what really bothers him.
Dali never asked for life. Now he’s got it, he’s not sure he ever wants to let it go, but that’s not something he can control. Oh, the atoms that make up his body will never die. They’ll continue on for trillions of years without him. They’re effectively immortal, but not as long as they’re alive. Dali’s an interruption in their otherwise banal, seemingly endless existence. Once he’s gone, they’ll be normal again.
“And we are at fifty meters. Six meters down at fifteen forward. Feeling that pull now. Applying a light touch on the thrusters to resist.”
“Dali?” Sandy says, snapping him back to reality.
“Yeah. All good.”
Three words. He’s getting better at lying.
Dali blinks. He was daydreaming. He was so focused on the Magellan he’s not ready for the vast wall of rock in front of him. To avoid overshooting the target zone, Kari spins them around, bringing them in like a paraglider circling a landing spot. She loops in front of and below a cliff face before pulling away again. Dali blinks and the cliff is gone. Once again, he’s looking into the darkness, trying to ignore the boulder field racing up toward him. Although Kari is in control, Dali can’t escape the feeling they’re about to crash.
“Twenty meters. Three down. Seven forward.”
“Looking good on approach,” is the reply from Helios.
“Slowing to one at one at one… and we are coming to a stop… Magellan, we are down.”
“We copy you down. Nice work, Kari.”
Dali’s boots touch lightly at the rocks.
“You good?” Kari asks, unclipping her harness and returning control to his suit jets.
“I’m good.”
Dali removes his tether.
Kari has already turned around. She starts unpacking items from the instrument rack, sorting through equipment.
Dali bumps his reaction controls. He’s not sure exactly what just happened. He didn’t blackout, but he has no recollection of consciously moving. Instead of standing on the surface, he’s suddenly floating parallel with the rocky ground, levitating just above it, slowly settling.
“Easy,” Kari says.
It’s only then he realizes he knocked the controls on his orientation jets. His suit rotated him by 90 degrees, automatically firing jets to start and stop his motion in accordance with a command he didn’t realize he gave with his loose fingers. Dali finds himself staring at a wall of rocks in front of him instead of the ground beneath him.
Up is a crazy sensation in space. Up is wherever he wants it to be, only it isn’t. Any direction can be up and yet no direction is up. As Dali is now facing the asteroid, it appears as though he’s standing on nothing before a cliff made out of loose rubble. He’s drifting, slowly moving toward the surface, being drawn in by the asteroid’s microgravity. Or he’s under it being pulled up. Or above it, falling down. His brain hurts.
Kari moves like an acrobat in a high-wire circus act. Her motion is graceful. It’s as though the various nozzles protruding from her backpack are an extension of her body. She kicks her reaction-control micro-thrusters into action, swinging her legs out in front of her and changing her orientation. From Dali’s perspective, it looks as though she’s about to karate kick the rocks. After unloading the tray, she aligns herself with the asteroid. For Kari, up is now the dark void, while the rock pile is down. Dali performs the same maneuver. He uses his jets to push himself away from the asteroid. Then a slight puff of gas sets him in motion, rotating him around his hips. A second puff brings him to a halt. Now, the asteroid looks like the black and white desert of some ancient cowboy western—minus the cactus and tumbleweeds.
“Gravity is 5 millimeters per second squared,” Kari says, as though that means something to him. She anchors the instrument bay to the asteroid with a pneumatic gun, firing a bolt into a boulder. Dust billows in silence.
Dali descends without the use of his jets. Slowly, he accelerates, but never at more than a leisurely pace. It takes eight or nine seconds to fall a couple of meters back to the surface. By the time he touches down, he’s moving at almost a meter a second. His boots sink into the loose rocks. Pebbles drift around his legs, being kicked up by his motion. They fall back to the surface in super slow-mo.
“Nice, easy movements,” Kari says. “You could jump off this thing like a superhero if you tried.”
“Cool,” Dali says.
“Not cool,” Kari says. “Dangerous. Without your jets, you’d come back down hard. Remember, there’s no air resistance—no terminal velocity. Go high enough and you’ll come down like a cannonball.”
She sets the instrumentation sled on a flat stretch of rock. Although it would weigh five or six hundred pounds on Earth, Kari maneuvers it with ease. She moves slowly, carefully managing its mass and inertia, bringing it to rest on the rubble.
Kari uses a construction gun to fire more bolts into a large rock, fixing anchor points to secure a series of tethers. These allow her to move around without the use of her jets. With each shot, dust lifts from the surface of the asteroid in a radius of several meters, reacting to the shot as though it were an earthquake. Kari hooks herself into one of the anchors, allowing her to conserve fuel as she pushes around.
“What can I do?” Dali asks as Kari sets up a deep core drill.
Kari knows what needs to be done. Dali is a spare wheel.
She points. “See that cliff over there?”
“Yeah.”
“The white stuff in the shadows is ice. I need to know if that’s dry ice or some kind of water ice. Why don’t you take a collection kit over there and bring me back some samples?”
“Sure.”
Dali’s the water boy. He doesn’t mind. He’s slowing Kari down anyway. Best he goes off and plays elsewhere. Besides, the asteroid fascinates him. It’s a rock quarry. Large cliffs and mountains dominate the distance. The steep slopes are covered in rocks. Boulders lie strewn across the curved plane of the asteroid. It’s crazy to think entire planets started out like this.
Dali grabs a collection kit and clips it onto his waist harness. Time to play Buck Rogers. Who’s Buck Rogers? Dali’s not sure, but the name lingers in his thoughts. He orients himself using his thrusters, lifting himself out of the rubble with a light touch on his wrist pad controls.
At first, Dali was confused why Sandy wanted to send him out here. He figured he’d need lots of training, but she’s right. It’s child’s play. Spacewalks were dangerous in the early days. Now, they’re routine. Far from being freeform, his controls have preset ranges and large arrows that make it easy to maneuver. With a touch of a button, he can pivot by 5, 15, 25, 45, 90 or even 180 degrees, changing his orientation with a single motion. It’s dial-a-direction. His transit jets are designed to take him wherever he looks. Glance at a rock and it becomes a waypoint with a virtual flag appearing on his HUD.
This is fun.
“Not too fast,” Sandy says over the radio. She’s switched to a private channel. The microphone on his Snoopy cap lights up in blue rather than green or red, letting him know their conversation is confidential.
After an initial burst, Dali’s pushing two meters per second. It’s not that fast, but this close to the surface, rocks and boulders zip by beneath his boots. Gravity slowly pulls him down.
“Weeee,” he says, unable to suppress his delight, knowing it’ll elicit a grin from her on board the Magellan.
Dali’s easily distracted.
His HUD lights up with the dominant chemical composition of the various regions drifting by beneath his feet. His suit computer tells him about the presence of carbon, iron, copper, lithium, silicon and aluminum trapped in various molecules and compounds. Dali makes the mistake of staring a little too long at a patch of gallium sulfide glistening in golden yellows beneath the distant star. His HUD picks that as a waypoint and responds with a burst of gas to correct his course. Before he can override the action, he finds himself plowing into the side of a hill. Rocks scatter. Dali tumbles. Pebbles go flying. Dust is kicked up, spraying out across the asteroid. Dali flips end over end, diving into the rock pile.
“Dali!” Sandy yells over the private channel.
“I’m okay. I’m good,” he replies, raising his hand through the rocks that have gathered around him, half burying him. “That was actually fun.”
“Don’t do this to me,” Sandy says under her breath, clearly trying to hide her conversation from Helios back on the Magellan.
“It was like landing in the ball pit at McDonald’s,” he replies, climbing out of the rubble. Kari has noticed. She’s gone up to an altitude of twenty meters and is facing him, watching as he climbs out of the rocks. She looks like a superhero ready to spring into action.
“Is everything okay?” she asks on the main channel.
Dali offers a thumbs up and says, “All good,” being sure to switch back to the open channel.
Although he’s still wading through the rubble kicked up by the impact, she descends and continues working on the drill mount. Kids! Am I right? Yeah, Dali thinks. You’re right.
“Dali, please,” Sandy says, still on the private channel. “You’ve got to be careful.”
“I remember,” he says, switching back to the private channel. “The balls. They were red and green, right?”
“What balls?” Sandy asks, confused. “What are you talking about?”
“There were other colors too. Yellow and blue, but it’s the red ones I remember best.”
“I—I?”
“The ball pit at McDonald’s,” he says. “And it wasn’t a farm. Old McDonald’s was a—a—it was some place where they gave you food, right? I mean, you had to exchange money for it, I think, but they had tiny sticks of potato and thin slivers of overcooked meat shoved inside crushed bread.”
“That’s good, Dali,” Sandy says, humoring him.
“I think I liked it.”
“I’m glad you’re remembering,” she says. “But please. One meter per second. No faster, okay? Give yourself time to react. And purge your jets. Make sure you don’t have loose rubble in those thrust nozzles.”
“Yes, Mom.”
He can hear her sighing into her microphone.
Dali takes Sandy’s advice and drifts at one meter per second over toward the base of the cliff.
Passing from the starlight of the nearby red dwarf into the shadows causes an abrupt transition. It takes his eyes a few seconds to adjust to the darkness. The way the asteroid rotates leaves this region in perpetual darkness, allowing various forms of ice to persist in the extreme cold.
Dali comes to a halt using his jets. He reorients himself and settles the last few feet, allowing the microgravity of the asteroid to bring him in gently.
“Like a pro,” Sandy says, subtly letting him know she’s continuing to monitor his video feed.
A thin sheet of ice crunches beneath his boots. Dali crouches, but even the slightest flex of his muscles has him drift up from the surface. It’s difficult to collect samples. Rather than walking across the asteroid, he finds it easier to lie flat on his stomach and float face-first up against the rock pile. With the lightest touch of his fingers, he can crawl over the rocks without disturbing the surface. Flakes of cryogenic snow drift with his motion. For him, it’s like swimming in the shallow end of a pool. He feels as though he’s pulling himself along the rocks at the edge of a lake.
Dali collects various ice deposits. His HUD identifies them as being made from frozen water, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen. The lights on his helmet catch the complex layers of crystals. He places each sample in a vial within the collection case.
“Nice work,” Sandy says.
Dali pushes off the icy surface, turning around so he can face the Magellan high overhead. Red starlight catches the side of the hull as the spaceship orbits the asteroid. Most of the craft is hidden in the shadows.
“Can you see me?” he asks Sandy as he drifts back against the rocks and ice.
“Oh, I can see you.”
Dali moves his arms and legs back and forth a few times, rubbing the icy surface.
“What are you doing?”
“Making you a present. This is a gift for you.”
“What?” Sandy says, sounding surprised.
Dali scoots off the surface with a light push and engages his jets, moving out to twenty meters.
“A snow angel.”
Sandy laughs. “You goofball.”
“That’ll be there for hundreds of years.”
“Thousands,” she says. “Possibly millions.”
“You’re welcome.”
Although he can’t see her, he knows she’s smiling.
Collecting Rocks
Dali needs to go number two. It’s not that he needs to do a nervous poo. He did one of those on the Magellan before suiting up. This is nothing more than one too many protein bars for breakfast. Thankfully, he’s read up on the suit’s waste management system. In the old days, astronauts would wear diapers. They’d float around in urine and feces until their marathon 14 to 16-hour spacewalks were complete and then clean up back on board. Of course, none of this made it into the recruitment brochures. Who wants to go to Saturn, play among the rings, and shit themselves? But every spacewalk was accompanied by space wipes in the airlock.
To be human is to be a biological entity. Respiration, metabolization, and excretion—they’re essential for maintaining the homeostasis that is life. How does he know that? Some fragment of his training is slipping through into his consciousness. Right now, all he knows for sure is he’d like to poo without everyone within 12 light-years watching him. Sitting in the darkness, resting on a boulder in the shadows of the cliff, he activates his waste disposal system. Within his suit, rubber suckers position themselves over his anus and the head of his penis. They’re cold. That tiny detail wasn’t included in the instruction manual. Dali spooks himself. It’s easy to go when you need to, hard to go when you want to.
