When I woke he was moving around the room. He was naked, but in the gloom his body was full of shadows. There were distinct shapes: the muscles in his abdomen, shoulders, thighs. But also the softness of his cheeks and the hair on his chest. He seemed natural in this state. He didn’t grab a robe or a towel, and I had a strange picture of him like this, unclothed, just skin and hair and bone, not in a room but outside the station on the rocky pink surface. Nothing between him and the salty air. I thought the idea was funny.
Why are you smiling? he asked.
A picture in my head, I said.
Of what?
You.
I’m glad I amuse you.
He came closer, leaned over me. His breath was slightly sour. I didn’t care.
He kissed me, gently, tugging at my lips with his.
I want to see that picture, he said.
He kissed me again, harder this time.
I don’t know if I want to see what’s inside your head, I said, and put my hands in his hair, which smelled like the wool blanket on his bed and also faintly like…what? A soldering iron. I wrapped my fingers around his head, felt his skull underneath. What’s in it?
A bad temper.
That’s all?
He rubbed his beard against my cheek, rough and scratchy, little hairs dragging against my skin. That’s all.
I hope there’s a picture of a modified cell in there, I said. One that can withstand more than a year of vibration.
He squinted, looked up at the ceiling, and then frowned. No.
He got up, pulled on a pair of shorts. I lay back against the pillow, watched him walk around the room. An image drifted into my mind—black lines waving in an expanse of white, like the painting that used to hang in my bedroom at my aunt’s house. Then I saw the fuel cell, just one, outside its stack. No fixed hardware or sealant. Its interior parts floating freely in the air.
I sat up. What we’ve been working on, I said. It’s a good start. But—
I know. It’s not enough.
What if we go back to the beginning? I asked. To what a fuel cell is. What it does.
He shrugged and pulled a shirt over his head. It transforms one kind of energy into another. Chemical energy to electrical energy.
So that an explorer can use that electricity to power its engines and systems.
Are we just going to say things we already know to each other?
Yes, I said. I pulled on my tights and T-shirt and started looking for my socks.
Okay. He opened a drawer under the sink and pulled out a toothbrush. The generation of energy creates vibration. Vibration will always be a problem when an object is in a fixed space—
He held his toothbrush in the air.
I looked at him.
Who says it has to be in a fixed space? we said together.
We didn’t finish dressing. We went to the workshop, picked up all the parts on the table, and dumped them onto the shelves behind us. He grabbed paper and a marker.
It needs to be— I made a movement with my hands. So it’s free to move—
—the way it wants to move, he said.
He drew and I talked and gestured. Then he talked and I drew. We hauled the pieces of the cell back onto the table and took it apart again.
We didn’t stop to explain ourselves. We just said what was in our minds—a shape, a movement. A feeling. A sound. We stood close and reached over each other for tools and parts. It was different than before. It didn’t feel like we were two bodies, two minds anymore. We had a hold of something, a growing, pulsing idea. It had a charge like electricity. It was like a great sparking cloud above us, a tiny electrical storm.