Dawn Chapman

There are times in life when you have to do what your heart tells you, no matter who it hurts or what the consequences are. It would be hard for me to explain to anybody who hasn’t lived inside just what it means to meld wholly with your environment, body and soul, to be so much a part of something you can’t imagine it existing without you. When I was a girl I used to think of what would happen if I died, whether the world would go on as before—my parents, my brother, the kids at school—or just vanish as if it was my solitary dream and everything in creation belonged to me alone. That was how I felt about E2, whether it was justified or not. People called it a delusion, and that might have been the way it looked, I suppose, if you were viewing it from one perspective only—from outside, that is. Really, I heard it all. After word got out that I was hoping to stay on, I was accused of everything from child abuse to desertion. I was selfish. I was stubborn. I was engaging in risky behavior. I was a bad crewmate. I was jeopardizing my own future and my child’s and E2’s as well. I was a slut. A criminal. I had no right. There must have been some gas, people said, some spore, that had affected my brain chemistry. As I say, I heard it all.

Can I tell you that once I made my decision none of it touched me in the slightest bit? That all those voices might as well have been as far away from me as if I really was on Mars?

It wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment thing, not at all—there was nothing rash about it. It may be true that when I told Vodge that night on the beach, when the words were actually out of my mouth, I wound up taking myself by surprise as much as him, but looking back on it, I can see that the idea had been building in me as we got closer and closer to reentry—a prospect I’d begun to dread even as my crewmates reached a point where they could talk about nothing else except what they would do, where they would go, what they would eat, once Gyro shot the bolts and flipped the lever on the airlock. I’m going to have steak, steak and nothing but steak for a whole week; Me, I’m going to a concert, any concert, I don’t care—just to hear music, you know?; I just want to see the sky; Or drive, just to drive with the wind in your face, a convertible, of course, red, like maybe a Corvette, and the stars overhead, the real stars, the ones you don’t have to squint to see.

I heard all this, heard it repeatedly, and it tugged at me, it did, the tempting pictures my crewmates painted—and Vodge, Vodge was most eloquent of all, spinning out elaborate fantasies of our first day back, our second, our third, the whole first week—but nobody seemed to notice I wasn’t joining in. In fact, if anything shocked me about Mission Two, beyond what I’ve already laid out here, it was how everybody could just turn around and put everything we’d accomplished—and suffered for—behind them as if there was a button marked “Commitment” you could just turn on and off at will. I’m not going to criticize anybody, but if you want to talk about true colors, here’s where they really showed. I mean, just Stevie alone, willing to turn her back on the ocean as if it were a fish tank in a pet store somewhere she’d got tired of? Or Gretchen, leaving Lola and Lolly behind without a second thought?

Vodge said, “You’re joking, right?”

It was dark, the air its steady self, the ocean like a bath, my feet stirring there, the baby in my lap, the unearthly beauty of E2 all around us as if it were a cathedral built to sustain us, our little family, in just this moment. I didn’t know how to say what I had to because it was just coming to me then and I’d had no time to work it through or soften it either. I said, “No, I’m not.”

There was a long pause. I could just make out Vodge’s features in the light filtering through the trees from the Habitat. I thought he looked angry, but I couldn’t be sure—he was fixed there, then he blurred, then he was fixed again. “So let me get this straight,” he said, and yes, he was angry, I could hear it in his tone. “You’re actually saying you’re going to give up everything—the world, grants, publicity, money—for another two years of this? Are you out of your mind? And G.C. G.C.’ll drag you out of here if he has to—”

“Just let him try.”

“E., I can’t believe you—just listen to yourself. You can’t do this. Nobody can. There are hundreds of people involved here, thousands upon thousands if you think of everybody out there watching every move we make. And me, what about me? You really expect me to, what, go to G.C. and beg him to let us stay inside, which he won’t do. You think I could take two more years of this, that I would even want to? Shit, E., I wouldn’t stay two more days, two more hours, for Christ’s sake.”

“So what am I supposed to say—do you love me?”

That was the question, straightforward, risky, skirting the edges of heartbreak and going straight for what was real and not playacting, simple, binary, yes or no. He didn’t answer right away, didn’t answer at all. “That’s not the point—” he said.

And I said, “Then what is?”

The vote, because we did take a vote, was 7–1 against me. Can you believe it? Really, what was it to them? I wasn’t asking anybody to do anything, beyond being charitable and sympathetic and true to our ideals, and I have to say their reaction was maybe the unkindest cut of all. We were so close to reentry at that point I couldn’t fathom why anybody would object to my staying on, which was only logical and made absolute sense to me—if the galagos and goats and even the crazy ants and the volunteer scorpions and sparrows and leeches could pass down their genes through the generations of E2 to come, then why couldn’t we, why couldn’t I? Of course, my crewmates didn’t see it that way—Ramsay didn’t see it that way.

I was prepared for at least some degree of contention—everything was contention inside—and even jealousy. My eyes were open. Who was I to take this on myself, who was I to stand apart from the team yet again, blah-blah-blah? I got that. I did. But the antipathy, the depth of what I can only call rancor, really took me by surprise. Even Richard opposed me, even Diane. Things had been on an uneasy footing ever since my marriage and Eve’s birth, of course, and there were times I’d come to feel increasingly isolated from my crewmates, right down to having to take the occasional meal in my room because I couldn’t abide the hissing and backstabbing and the way everybody looked at me as if I’d intentionally gone out and sharpened a stake to drive through the heart of the mission. I’d learned to live with that, as much as it hurt me, but I have to say I wasn’t at all prepared for the kind of reaction I got the morning I made my announcement. Or plea, call it a plea.

It was at breakfast meeting, the day after I’d had my more or less shattering talk on the beach with Vodge, with my husband, and I’d asked Diane beforehand to let me have the banana after she was done with the day’s announcements. The breakfast was typical—porridge sweetened with mango and banana and featuring a squirt of goat’s milk each—though by this juncture we were depleting the seed stocks, a catalogue of which Diane and I had been meticulously keeping against Mission Three’s importation. (And we’d decided, along with Mission Control’s input, to reduce to two the number of pigs for Mission Three, while bringing in four extra she-goats for milk production, which would make up for the lost protein, as well as doubling our stock of ducks, chickens and tilapia.) The previous night’s meal had been particularly grim, Vodge having netted maybe a hundred inch-long mosquito fish for what he called a Friture des fruits du lac and Richard immediately labeled “a guppy fry,” and nobody was particularly happy. Even the porridge had begun to taste like nothing, like emptiness, because when you think about seven hundred–plus mornings with the same pale mucousy mess appearing in your bowl, you can’t help but revolt no matter how much your body cries out for it. Anyway, Eve had had her share and was gurgling and cooing in my lap, Vodge was beside me, scraping the bottom of his bowl, Diane was giving out the day’s assignments and I was feeling a bit tentative about what I had to say, expecting some objections maybe, but nothing like what was to come.

“All right,” Diane said, “everybody clear on everything?” And then, though Stevie was already holding out her hand for the banana, Diane slid it across the table to me and said, “E. has an announcement for us,” giving me a puzzled look because I hadn’t confided in her or anybody else yet. Except Vodge.

“I just want you to know,” I said, gazing at each of my crewmates in succession, “how much of an honor it’s been to serve with all of you and how it’s been the high point of my life—and I hope you feel the same.” I paused a moment to gather myself, even as everybody got that “What the—?” look on their faces. “So now we’re counting down and I know you’re all looking forward to reentry, but maybe some of you are saddened too by the thought that what we’ve had here is coming to an end—”

“All things come to an end,” Richard cut in. “Sic transit gloria mundi.”

“Right,” I said. “Which is why I want to tell you—to ask you—to think about continuing what we’ve accomplished here into Mission Three,”

Their faces were blank. Some of them were still eating, the rhythmic chime of spoon on porcelain as much a part of the E2 soundtrack as the chirring of the crickets and the hoots of the galagos. They weren’t getting it. I was just reiterating what our overriding team goal had been from the start, but I had to get at this somehow and I couldn’t help myself from wandering a bit, from talking in generalizations, in Ecosphere-speak. “So it’s an honor,” I reiterated, “and I love each and every one of you and I’ll miss you all terribly . . . but what I want to do, with your approval, of course—all your approval—is to stay on.”

Now their faces showed something. The spoons stopped scraping.

Troy, though he didn’t have the banana—I did—set down his bowl and said, “Stay on? Stay where? You’re not making any sense—”

Richard interpreted for me. “She means stay on at Mission Control, which I know several of us are planning to do—Troy, right? And Stevie? And you too, Diane.” He looked to me now, his features soft and forgiving. “There’ll be a place for you, E., I’m sure. I mean, we really haven’t discussed it as a group, but Judy and Dennis say they’re going to want us all to stay on, at least for the transition—six months, is what I hear.”

“No,” I said. “That’s not what I mean. I want to stay here, inside, for Mission Three—that’s what I’m saying.”

Suddenly everybody was talking at once, the banana snatched out of my hand, as if it mattered at this point. What I heard was, “Jesus, you’ve got to be kidding” and “You are the Queen Bitch, you know that?”

My husband—and it still feels strange to me to call him that—defended me as best he could, but even I could see his heart wasn’t in it. He started to reiterate my argument about genetic continuity as the cornerstone of the human experiment—Mars, what about Mars?—when Gretchen cut him off.

She leveled on me, so angry she actually rose from her chair, and when Richard tried to hand her the banana she swatted it away. “What is it with you,” she demanded. “Do you have a God complex or something? Maybe all the cover girl stuff went to your head, but this isn’t about you, it’s about us, about the team.” She gritted her teeth as if she was trying to chew something tough, chew me, then threw a wild look around the table. “Bottom line: we went in as a team and we’re going to go out as a team.”

Everybody seemed to swell up then till they were twice their size, blow-up dolls, puppets, monsters of ego. Gyro applauded. Troy said, “Shit yeah!” What followed, aside from Eve’s punctuating the dialogue—or harangue, or whatever you want to call it—by snatching at my water glass and sending it crashing to the floor, was a shouting session that ended only after Diane fetched the breadboard from the counter and slammed it down on the table so hard the whole foundation seemed to shake. “Enough,” she said. “You’re all out of order.” She had a glare for everybody, but me especially, as if I was the one who’d abandoned the rules and spoken out of turn.

“We’re still a team,” she said, her shoulders rigid, the breadboard lying there flat on the table like something she’d choked to death with her own two hands. “And what does a team do?” I reached for Vodge’s hand and gave it a squeeze, but he wouldn’t look at me. “A team treats everybody with respect. Dawn says she wants to stay inside, as incredible as that may seem, and I say we put it to a vote. Show of hands, people—how many say ‘aye’?”

Not a single hand went up but mine, not even Vodge’s.

After the meeting we all went our separate ways, except Gretchen, who followed me down the hall haranguing me till I ducked into my room and slammed the door in her face. Eve wasn’t hungry—she’d just been fed—but to calm myself I put her to my breast anyway, at which point she promptly fell off to sleep, and I was left alone to sort things out on my own. All I could think about was them overpowering me, main strength, six against two (that is, assuming Vodge would stand up for me), but it wouldn’t be just six—there’d be eight new Terranauts coming through that airlock too, none of whom would be all that thrilled to see me staying on. They were a team, same as we were, and all I had to do was summon the look of disbelief shading into outrage on Linda’s face to get that straight. But then this was going to hit Linda hardest, of course—if I stayed inside, Linda was the odd one out. And even if we converted some of the savanna to food production, as planned, there was no way E2 could support nine—ten, if you included Eve. There was the oxygen question too. While the O₂ levels had miraculously risen to stabilize at around sixteen percent (perceptibly shorter nights, a run of three weeks of sun-drenched days), getting enough air to breathe was going to be a continuing problem no matter how many Terranauts there were. Believe me, I wasn’t entering into this lightly—for one thing, it would mean the end of my friendship with Linda, and for another, it would involve my convincing Vodge too, and that wasn’t going to be easy.

I was late that day getting back out into the IAB, where Diane, Vodge, Gyro, Gretchen and I were putting in the spring crops as diligently as we could, given the declining seed stocks, determined to leave things in the best possible condition for the incoming crew. After setting Eve down in her basket, I took my place beside Vodge, helping him plant our barley crop in the way of the ages—the stick, the hole, the seed—while the others turned over the soil in the vegetable beds. Nobody had much to say, even Vodge, who was clearly angry with me, and that would have hurt me even beyond what the morning had already wrought, except that while I’d been sitting there in my room with Eve, I’d seen a way clear of all this. I was determined to stay; they were just as determined that it wasn’t going to happen. That was the reality I was up against, but what they weren’t taking into account, atheists all, was that there was a God in our universe and He had the final say.

At lunch break, though Vodge was being sweet to me by way of making up (and, I knew, trying to maneuver me into doing what he wanted me to do) and Richard plunked himself down next to me to try and reason with me, I took my plate—and Eve—up the flight of stairs to the command center and sat down at the desk where the phone was. Now, as I’ve already stated here, the phone was tightly regulated, as was the computer, which had no outside access beyond Mission Control, but we could pick up the receiver, dial “0” and get through to Josie Muller instantaneously. Which was what I did now.

Josie, in her official tones, said, “Mission Control,” as if she were broadcasting to the nation, though, of course, there was no need since it could only have been one of us eight calling.

“Hi, Josie. It’s me, Dawn. I just wondered if Jeremiah’s around?”

“Jeremiah?” she echoed, as if she’d never heard of him.

“Yeah, I need to talk to him. It’s urgent. Or no, it’s an emergency, really—is he there?”

He wasn’t. He’d been in earlier but he’d gone home for lunch. She could try him at home, but he really didn’t like to be disturbed once he left the office . . .

I could feel my heart going. It was as if my life depended on this (and from where I sat that morning, I really felt it did). “Please, Josie, I’m telling you, this is an emergency—I have to speak with him, I have to.”

“Could I have him call you back?”

“Yes, please—”

“You’ll be there?”

“I’m not going to move a muscle. But please, hurry.”

The phone rang five minutes later and G.C. was on the line, sounding not peeved (we just didn’t call him directly; no one did), but friendly, cheerful, as if he’d been waiting for the past twenty-three months for me to interrupt his lunch and invade his privacy at home. “What’s up, E.?” he asked. “Everything okay in there?”

“Yes,” I said, too quickly. “Or, actually, no. There’s something I want to ask you—or propose, really. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time now—”

Would any of the others have gotten away with this? Vodge, maybe. Maybe Diane. But I had special status now, and if the others wouldn’t let me forget it, I wasn’t about to forget it either. I don’t remember what I said to him, not exactly, though I suppose I should have at least jotted down some notes, just for the record, but you already know my argument, which had all to do with practicality, continuity and, most of all, publicity. G.C., give him credit, heard me out (and of course, like the others he’d have to have assumed that the seven-to-one vote had put the matter to rest, if not buried it altogether). I waited, all tensed up, and listened to his breathing on the far end of the line. And then, as if musing to himself, he murmured, “Linda Ryu’s not going to like it—it’s really not fair to her, not at all, or Malcolm either—”

“No,” I said, “no—and she’s my best friend. I hate to do it, but just think of what this’ll mean for E2, for the mission—and the mission after that. Think of it, Eve growing up inside, the first child born off-planet in the history of—”

“What about Vodge,” he said, cutting me off. “He on board with this?”

So I had to go and get Vodge and we had to share the phone while G.C. thought out loud and it was just like the time at the glass when he’d dictated the terms of our marriage to us, only this time his voice alone had to carry all the freight of what he was saying, and it changed during the course of it, changed radically, from the open cheerfulness he’d begun with to the kind of hectoring tone you’d expect from Judy, but that was all right because it meant he was taking me seriously, and, as it turned out, had been anticipating some version of this ever since Eve had been born. But he was afraid too, afraid of things going wrong with the other crewmembers, with Linda, but most of all with Vodge.

“You behind her?” he demanded.

Vodge mumbled something neither of us caught.

“Speak up—I’m asking if you’re on board with this, because the complications here . . . I don’t have to tell you. But the way I read you is you’re as hot to get out of there as anybody, or am I wrong?”

Vodge looked straight at me. Eve would have been snatching at the cord, making her little noises, smiling maybe—she was a serial smiler at this juncture—and I must have looked scared, because there was no going back from this. “Truthfully? I can’t really say. I mean this is taking me by surprise as much as you—”

“Don’t presume, my friend, because I could see this coming a mile off, and it’s something I didn’t dare hope for, but just think of it, think what this is going to do for revenues—it’s a sensation, it really is, and I’ve got to give you the credit, E. E.? You there?”

I whispered into the phone, two little words—“I’m here”—but there were marching bands parading inside of me, flags waving, the sun bursting over hills. Could it really be this easy?

Vodge, staring at me still, never wavering, his eyes locked on mine, murmured, “Can I at least have some time to think it through?”

“Yeah,” G.C. said, “sure, think all you want. But I don’t have to remind you the time’s getting short, and, of course, we’re going to have to make a few adjustments since we’ve already named the Mission Three crew, but it can be done, anything can be done . . . So what I’m saying? Think fast.”

If anything, the day of reentry—March 6, 1996—was an even bigger production than all the hoopla of the closure ceremony two years before. G.C. trotted out his celebrities, the TV cameras, the Girl Scouts and the bands, and he, Judy, Dennis and Vodge had been busy priming the pumps of public awareness, but this time there was to be a black-tie event too, as well as a speech by Martin Rodbell, the biochemist who’d co-won the Nobel two years earlier for his discovery of G-proteins and their role in signal transduction in cells. And, of course, there was the irresistible draw of watching the Terranauts dig into their first outside meal in 730 days, and we’d each already submitted our first choices to Mission Control, which ranged from Richard’s lobster tail to Troy’s pepperoni pizza and Gretchen’s butterscotch sundae to my shrimp scampi with angel hair pasta, though what no one knew—yet—was that I wasn’t coming out, so the Girl Scouts or reporters or Judy herself would have to polish it off in my stead.

What we’d decided, privately, quietly, just G.C., Vodge and I, was to time the announcement to coincide with reentry—to make it a surprise, a shock, the sort of thing that would galvanize the public and all but assure us of being the lead story of the day on all three major networks. Vodge and I would don our red jumpsuits along with the others, looking for all the world as if we were about to parade through the airlock and wave and whistle and sink our teeth into our favorites for the cameras (he was going for the calories, Big Mac, fries, large Coke), but there was the kicker, there was the hook, as he called it: we weren’t going back out into the world. Or, actually, he was, but just for the two hours of the ceremony while staff members positioned the Mission Three supplies and livestock just outside the airlock so that when the new crew came in they could bring it all with them in a matter of minutes, minimizing any transference of gases between E2 and the outside world. I was to stay inside. That was my choice.

In the aftermath, people said I was too hard-core, that I was really overdoing it, but as far as I’m concerned you just don’t bend your principles or what’s the worth of them anyway? I didn’t want to have to take a single breath of E1 air, which would defeat the whole purpose of continuous closure. If I was going to stay inside, to break the record for the most consecutive days anyone had ever spent in an enclosed self-sustaining system—and keep on breaking it with every minute of every day of the next two years—then it would be beyond ridiculous to throw it all away for a plate of shrimp scampi, wouldn’t it? I was famous, yes, but famous for what? For this. Only this. And now I truly was going where no woman—or man—had ever gone before.

Vodge wasn’t so scrupulous. He wanted the outside world, needed it in a way I didn’t and didn’t think I ever would again. He might have been the most committed among us in terms of keeping the purity of the mission intact through our various crises, fighting with everything he had to keep that airlock inviolate, but now the mission was over and he wanted out. I didn’t blame him. Who could? It took a full three days of badgering from me and G.C. before he finally caved into the pressure, before he said, “Yes, okay, for the sake of E2 and for both of you, for you E., and Eve too, I’ll sign on or re-up or whatever you want to call it, but you’ve got to give me this. No joke, but I really think I’ll go out of my mind if I can’t at least walk through that airlock with the others.”

All right. I understood that, I gave him that. And I understood what a sacrifice he was making, and so did G.C., who kept insisting he had to stay on if I did because he was the father of Eve and we were a family and it would have been awkward in the extreme to explain to the public just why he was turning his back not only on the project but his own wife and daughter into the bargain. So Vodge was going to go out and raise his arms in triumph, give his speech and eat his Big Mac and reap his portion of the glory, which to his mind, and I’m sorry to have to say this, was spelled m-o-n-e-y down the road, and then he was going to come back inside. With me. And Eve.

That was the plan. And as a hint to the press and the larger world they served, a delicious little clue to our intentions, only six of the Mission Three crew showed up that day in red—the other two, Linda and Malcolm, were right there, front and center, but they were in brown, turd-brown, as Linda put it. Why? everyone wondered. Had they run out of red cloth? Or . . . was this a signal that something was up? Something outrageous, something that was going to turn the whole world of E2 on its head? The cameras zeroed in. Every face in the audience turned to G.C. This was the moment.

Inside, as the minutes counted down to reentry and we lined up at the airlock, boy/girl, boy/girl, everybody was so excited they could barely stand in place. Gyro, especially. He was always squirrely, the gangling hyperactive nerd with the too-big nose and too-small head, but he was our nerd, my nerd, the one who’d plied me with M&M’s and worn his heart on his sleeve, and I was going to miss him. Richard too, Richard who’d coached me through my crisis and tucked my daughter into my arms. A sadness so vast came over me I thought it was going to engulf me like a shroud, like an eight-foot-deep hole and all the dirt it would take to fill it back up again. I was going to miss them, miss them all (except maybe Troy and Stevie, and, I’m sorry to have to say it, Gretchen, sour Gretchen), because despite our differences and the feuds and hostilities that inevitably emerged, we’d been through something together no one else but the Mission One crew and a handful of astronauts ever had. That was bonding, true bonding, the kind you could never get from all the exercises and research voyages there ever were.

I was in tears as G.C. stood poised outside the airlock, microphone in hand, counting down the final sixty seconds—all the pictures from that day captured me with a crumpled face, my eyes glistening, my nose red and my cheeks wet, looking for all the world like a mourner at a funeral. I couldn’t help myself. The fact that this was the end of something just seemed to overwhelm me, even though it was the beginning of something too, something unprecedented and joyful to the highest degree and no matter the sacrifice I was getting exactly what I wanted. I was inside now, inside for good.

What else? My crewmates were in the dark, totally, as to what was to come. They assumed, to a man and woman, that the vote had settled everything, thought that G.C. was on their side, that team order took precedence over everything. If I had to fight Diane over my place in line—“Last? Why would you want to be last?”—she wound up accommodating me (just to make sure, I’d gone behind her back to G.C. so he could weigh in if need be). It only made sense that the stars of this enterprise—Vodge, Eve and me—would be the last ones out of the airlock, just like any other stage act. I hate to put it this way, but really, we were the headliners. The rest of them didn’t like it, but they didn’t suspect a thing either—the truth of it is they were too concentrated on themselves, their lives outside, escaping, to really focus on what was going on here.

So we lined up. And G.C. counted down, “Five, four, three, two, one,” and the airlock was breached and for the first time in two years the atmosphere of E1 comingled with the atmosphere of E2. And seven Terranauts, in their bold bright designer uniforms, marched through the open door and into the arms of the crowd, and one stayed behind.