As we left the lounge, Sarah caught up to me and asked, “Can we talk?”
“Certainly.”
“Not here,” she said, looking slightly conspiratorial.
“Lead on.”
We walked through the station toward the hydroponics. This was one of the few really enclosed sections of the station because we didn’t want to contaminate the experiments being conducted there. We wanted them isolated, as much as possible, from the normal environment of the station, which meant a closed hatch. It was also warmer and certainly more humid in there and sometimes, when I felt chilled, I would use the hydroponics to warm up.
Sarah opened the hatch and waved me through and then stepped in herself. She closed the hatch and dogged it shut which didn’t really lock it, but would let us know if anyone else was about to enter. That hatch made enough noise to raise the dead, especially as it sort of echoed through the station.
I waited as she looked around, as if searching for a spy, then, keeping her voice low, she asked, “Do you think anyone on the ground is still alive?”
After all this, after all we had talked about, this was the reason that she had brought me here. To ask a question that could have been asked anywhere on the station. We didn’t need to hide in the hydroponics to talk.
I said, “I think that the loss of life below has been horrific. I think that nearly everyone in Africa, in the Indian subcontinent, most of Europe, most of Asia, and all the coastal regions inland for a couple of hundred miles have been wiped clean. I think everyone living on an island, regardless of size, was probably killed. If anything is alive in those regions it is a very small number of very lucky people. At least in the sense they have survived to this point.”
“That doesn’t answer the question.”
“Well, after a fashion it does because I haven’t talked about the interiors. With the strikes falling mostly in the Old World, I think the interiors of North and South American, Australia, and Asia, have survivors.”
“What about Tulsa?”
I had figured this is where she was going when she began asking the questions and I said, “Tulsa probably made it. At least through the first round. I don’t think the tsunamis made it that far inland. After that, I don’t know.”
“You think people are alive down there?”
“Sarah, we’ve gone through this before. I don’t know any more about it than you do. I just don’t know. I hope, but I don’t know and until the clouds begin to break up or we get some kind of radio or television transmission from the surface, we’re not going to know anything for sure.”
“I read up on extinction level events,” she said. “Only the tiny, burrowing creatures that number in the hundreds of billions survive these sorts of events. It was why the mammals survived but the dinosaurs disappeared.”
I was going to point out that she was wrong, but there wasn’t any real point in it and we didn’t know if human life had been swept from the planet by the disaster. For an instant I wondered what the environmentalists would say about this but she interrupted that line of thought.
“I know that Sheila and Jason have hooked up.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I caught them in the lounge, though I didn’t get to see much.”
She gave me a dirty look and said, “Voyeur.”
“Well, that’s about as close as I’m going to get to anything sexual for awhile, so I might as well look.”
“I think Tom has died,” she said suddenly.
“What?”
“I don’t know. I just feel like I’ve lost him. I didn’t feel that way when the asteroid hit and when some of the debris began to fall all over the place. I think he got to Tulsa, but I don’t feel like he’s around anymore. I just think that something has happened to him.”
I took one of her hands and said, “Sarah, you can’t know that. You’re just feeling depressed. You’re upset by this. We all are.”
“No, it’s more than that. I used to feel him. I used to have a connection with him. I mean, I just knew he was around and I knew when he was hurt or sick. I didn’t have to be near him, even in the same city. I could sort of feel him. I don’t have that feeling anymore.”
I didn’t really know what she was trying to say or why she felt she had to say it in one of the few places where we wouldn’t be easily overheard. Or in one of the few places where we wouldn’t be interrupted. And I didn’t know why she wanted to say it to me.
“We might be all that is left of the human population. Just the five of us.”
“And those people on Mars,” I said.
“I don’t think they’ll be leaving Mars. I think their chances to survive are better there and if things get rough, then they can start the long voyage home, but I don’t think they’ll make it without ground support from Houston.”
“Sheila and Jason have paired off,” she said. “David is too old to be much good.”
I grinned, remembering the stories of eighty and eight-five-year-old men who had managed to get some much younger woman pregnant. Men, it seemed, produced sperm for their entire lives and while the sperm in older men might not be as numerous or as spry as those in younger men, it really didn’t take very many to get a woman pregnant. She, on the other hand, only produced eggs for a relatively short time.
“I mean he isn’t that attractive to me.”
“Sarah,” I said, “I’m married.”
“Not here you’re not.”
Well, there was something to be said about that. But the tie I felt with the Earth had not been broken as far as I was concerned. It still existed and while Sarah might believe her tie had been severed, she really didn’t know.
And now I knew why she had wanted to talk in here. She didn’t want to have anyone overhear the proposition. I was taken a little aback by it because I really hadn’t been thinking that far in advance. Maybe my testosterone levels were down because I was out of my twenties. Maybe, given the tragedy below us, I was in the wrong frame of mind. I just didn’t know.
Before I could say anything, she said, “I’m scared. I’m really scared.”
I was about to ask what had scared her, but I knew that answer. She knew that our food wouldn’t last forever and, in fact, there was a finite supply. We had enough for several months, but that was all. We couldn’t replace it. We couldn’t grow our own or rather very much of our own. We’d run out and that would be it, unless we thought of something else. There was that ray of hope that David had alluded to, but Sarah had seen that for what it was, talk to keep the morale of the troops up in a losing fight.
I said, in a philosophical way, “Well, there’s not much we can do about it. We’re here and nobody else.”
“But it seems all so unfair . . . so useless. We survive the impact. We have the knowledge of the whole human race at our fingertips, we know how to apply it and there isn’t anything we can do to help those on the ground and maybe nothing we can do to save ourselves.”
I let that hang in the air for a moment because I could think of no response to it. I could say something that was placating, but that would be so much noise. I could talk about the greater good for humanity, but that would be so much noise. I really had nothing to say that wasn’t so much noise.
She moved closer and I was suddenly aware that she wore very little. I suddenly understood the real reason she had bought me to this place, where we would be more or less alone, where we wouldn’t be easily seen so that there would be no accusations by the others later. Just two people who helped each other over a rough patch, which, I think, explained her strange confession about Tom. She was trying to convince herself that what she wanted right now would hurt no one below.
The thing is, I was thinking the same thing. I didn’t know where my wife was for certain, or if she was still alive, and I knew that I would probably never return to the Earth and even if I did, the odds were against me finding her. I was stuck here for the rest of my life and I wasn’t thinking of it in terms of years any more. I was thinking in terms of months, though I didn’t really dwell on that. I just knew that I would probably be around tomorrow and at the moment that was about the best I could hope for.
Her hand moved up my arm to my shoulder and I knew that I should step back, step away, but like everyone else, I needed the human touch. The human feeling. I didn’t say anything. I just reached out to her and pulled her closer.