When both Sheila and Jason were gone, I turned to Sarah and asked, “Are we sure this was a wise thing?”
She laughed and said, “We’re forcing him into a move of some kind and if he did kill David, then that move might be fatal for one or both of us. We might have overplayed our hand but I think it was something that we had to do.”
I leaned back and clasped my hands behind my head. I kept my eyes focused on the Earth displayed on the flat panel.
“If we stay awake for the next few hours, or, if you want, you can sleep while I watch, then he won’t be able to do anything to either of us. We just have to remain alert so that he can’t sneak up on us and be ready for any attempt on us. He missed with the last one.”
Sarah snorted and said, “I thought I’d left all this suspicion and worry back on Earth. I thought I would be up here with the cream of the human crop and altruism would be our motivation. Now I have to worry about being murdered in my bed in a closed system and there are only four of us here.”
This was a good point. Almost anywhere on earth you could be in danger from murderers and terrorists. That was a fact of life. But when you stepped into space, where everyone has been analyzed, studied, tested, prodded, poked, and interviewed, you expected that your colleagues are going to be of good moral character, or, at the very least, wouldn’t kill you while you slept. But the situation on Earth had changed all that and the basic instincts and primal urges of some had blossomed on the station, in a limited fashion.
That is, if David had been murdered and Jason had tried to kill us in a very subtle fashion. Of course, our own paranoia could be the real problem and we were thinking of Jason as evil because everyone needed an enemy once in a while.
“This won’t last long,” I said, not sure exactly what I meant by that.
“You mean he’ll kill us?”
She didn’t seem at all to be frightened by that. She must have believed that I meant something else. She must have believed that I meant Jason would finish his work.
“No, I mean that we’ll either get back to Earth or something will happen to Jason so that we won’t have to worry about him anymore.”
“You mean you’ll kill him?” she asked in a tone of voice that suggested she wasn’t overly surprised by the idea. That she had been thinking about this for some time herself.
“That’s not what I mean.” I didn’t elaborate on it.
Sarah took a deep breath and sighed. “This just isn’t what I expected when I was selected for astronaut training. I expected some danger but not this.”
There wasn’t much to be said about that. She’d already made the point and I wondered if she just wanted to talk for a while and not think about our situation. Engage in the kind of philosophical discussions that students held in college. They never went anywhere but sounded sophisticated and intelligent.
Changing the subject, I said, “I don’t think it would wreck the rationing,” I said, “if we looked for a little snack especially if Jason is planning to leave in a couple of days.”
I said it because it was something to do other than scan radio broadcast bands or study the new and unrecognizable planet below us. Over the last couple of days, we’d seen the cloud decks breaking up so that more of the surface was visible and it was a heart stopping sight. I’d spent years, as had nearly everyone else, sitting in various classrooms from grade school to grad school, in the Army and later at NASA looking at maps of the world and getting so used to them that I wanted to see something else. I had wanted to see some change. I wanted to see some variation.
This I accomplished by looking at maps of the prehistoric world, at the time of the dinosaurs and beyond that. I searched out maps of what the continents looked like in other ages, and what they would look like if the most dire of the global warming theories was correct. I saw the face of the Earth under slow, geological change.
And I wondered how the land masses would arrange themselves on other Earth-like planets. A single large continent? Huge islands but no real continent-sized mass. A distribution of land over the face of the world with large, deep lakes rather than oceans.
Looking down at Earth, I had gotten my wish for the change and it was heartbreaking. Nothing looked the same and at night, rather than a sea of lights from civilization there was only the dark of night. If there were any people on Earth, their fires were too small to see from space. If they had electricity, they weren’t wasting it on lighting. I suppose as the forests and cities burned after impact we could have seen them, but now they had been extinguished too. The Earth was a dark globe with no sign of human life.
We got to the galley and sat down at the metal table bolted to the floor, in chairs that were bolted to the floor. I found the candy bars and took one out. It was a king-sized Snickers and I supposed our stock here was the last that would ever be made. The company, the stocks on Earth, the recipe and the ingredients were all lost in the impact. I was holding the last of the Snickers bars and I tried not to think about that.
I wondered why these thoughts were coming to me now. The impact had happened weeks ago and suddenly I was beginning to understand what it meant. Not just a period of change for the planet but a change in civilization. We had lost, suddenly, in minutes, what had taken humans millions of years to obtain.
Maybe it was the shuttle that Jason had built. Maybe it was the promise of our return to Earth as if that would somehow improve our lot. No longer would we be running on a time table to oblivion. We’d be on the surface of the planet where we would be able to restock our food supplies, find water, breath air that hasn’t been recycled a thousand times and breathed in and out by everyone on the station.
I knew that the Earth we would return to was not the Earth that we left. That Earth no longer existed and never would again. There would be a new civilization but it should be a better one than we had. Those who build it would be able to see the mistakes we made as we built ours.
That is, if they were able to find the historical record that we had tried to save. They would be able to avoid our mistakes and they should be able to return to our glory a lot faster because there would be documents to show them the way. Or, I hoped there would be.
I set the candy bar down and cut it in half. Half was more than enough for me and I was sure that Sarah felt the same. We all had gotten out of the habit of eating candy because of our training. Now it was a luxury, but like everything else, something we had to protect.
Sarah leaned back, took a small bite and said, “I really miss these. I really do.”
I ate part of mine without saying anything to her. We were comfortable enough together now that we could just sit quietly. I realized that it had been a long time since I thought of my wife, or Manhattan, Kansas. When the clouds began to break up, I didn’t even think about trying to find Kansas on the new Earth. I suddenly felt guilt about that.
A moment later I heard a noise and looked up to see Jason. He looked surprised and then grinned. “Stealing candy?” he asked, as if he had caught us doing something we weren’t supposed to be doing.
Of course, in a sense, he was right. We shouldn’t have been eating the candy, but then a single bar wasn’t going to change the outcome one way or the other.
“Not stealing,” I said, “just snacking.”
“Then maybe I should get one for myself.”
I waved at the pantry and said, “Help yourself.”
As he grabbed one of the bars, I realized that he had diverted the conversation nicely. Rather than asking what he was doing here, I began thinking in terms of defending our actions. We were eating candy when he caught us. We were breaking the menus that we had all agreed to keep.
When he sat down, I said, “I thought you had some testing to do.”
“Finished what I wanted tonight,” he said. “Thought I’d get some rest and complete the rest tomorrow.”
“And launch the day after?” asked Sarah.
Jason shrugged and said, “Depending on the weather. Looks as if things are clearing up rapidly down there. We might have a very good window of opportunity.”
We fell silent again. Just worked on finishing the candy. Sarah finally stood, looked directly at me and said, “I’m holding you to your promise. Good night, Jason.”
As she left, Jason said, “What promise?”
I had a bad moment and then said, “Her husband and my wife were basically in the heartland of America. We thought we’d travel there once we returned to see if we can find any trace of them. I doubt that they will have moved far beyond those points but it’ll be a difficult search.”
Jason finished his candy and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Seems rather pointless.”
I took a deep breath to calm myself. I didn’t like his words or his analysis and then wondered if he’d said it to keep me off balance.
“Pointless or not, it gives us a goal.”
“Goal?”
I nodded. “Yes. Something to work for. Something we can obtain.”
“Sounds like you took a page from David’s play book. Find a goal and move toward it.”
He sounded as if he didn’t approve but I figured it was just a generational thing. I had been raised in a different time and place and we didn’t have the idea that we were entitled to something merely by existing. But I said none of this because, I’d also been raised to keep these sorts of opinions to myself rather than start an unnecessary fight.
“Well,” I said. “It’s something.”
“You going to bed soon?” he asked.
“No, I plan to stay up for a while. There are some things that I want to do tonight. And I want to track the cloud patterns on Earth. Might provide us with a better chance of finding the right landing site.”
“It’ll wait until morning,” he said.
“Yes, it will, but I’m not sleepy now and it’s not as if there is a lot of diversion up here. Thought I’d work through it all tonight so that I didn’t have to worry about it some other time.”
He seemed annoyed by this and I didn’t understand it. I just sat there, quietly, studying the wrapper the Snickers had come in. I felt no need to leave and no real urge to. And then I realized that was what he wanted. He wanted me out of the pantry and away from the food. He wanted access to it with no one watching him.
I stretched as if to get up but made no move.
Jason sat quietly but impatiently and I wondered what he wanted. Of course, in the pantry, the answer was food but why didn’t he just take it. We’d all, except for Sheila, raided the candy store and we expected to move the rations to the shuttle at some point in the next several hours anyway.
In fact, he could have said that he was going to begin stocking the shuttle and would have gotten our help. Since he didn’t, it meant that he wanted no help and I didn’t want to follow that to its logical conclusion. At least nor right then.
After several minutes, Jason stood up and said, “I guess I’ll go to bed. Been a long day.”
As he walked away, I grinned, having thwarted his plan, though I didn’t know exactly what it might have been.