Linda Ryu

I have a confession to make, something even Dawn doesn’t know about. On top of everything else, what with sorting out my feelings about the mission and trying to be productive and keep up the pretense, I wind up becoming a snoop—a spy—no different than Ramsay. It’s not something I’m proud of really, but it was more a question of evolution than anything else (and I won’t say survival of the fittest because Mission Control makes a joke out of any notion of fair competition). I’m still furious over the way I was passed over—screw them if they think they can look down their noses at me and then turn around and throw me back into the competition for Mission Three with the also-rans and the new candidates, every one of which—or whom—I would have rejected on sight. So what I do is I became a cog in Mission Control, as essential to them as the air they breathe in the command center. It’s funny really. All at once I’m on the inside of the outside, if that doesn’t sound too pathetic, trying to impress G.C., Judy and Dennis with my rigor and focus, which, of course, means doing their bidding whether I like it or not.

When I’m not bent over a hoe in the test plots or cleaning and maintaining and whatever else they want me to do, I’m right there in Mission Control, monitoring the cameras and the phone line and the computer too, reporting back to Judy and Dennis on even the pettiest things like who’s wearing the same clothes three days in a row or staring into space during team meetings, looking for what Judy calls anomalies. We’re building psychological profiles on each of the crewmembers as a component of the sociological and behavioral experiment going forward here, just as Richard, with his blood-pressure cuff, urine samples and monthly strip-down physicals, is documenting the physiological side of things. NASA’s interested. So are a handful of universities and government agencies doing research in Antarctica and Greenland and looking to us for real-time lessons in group dynamics. And if I happen to extend my role to include snooping into what Mission Control’s doing—what Judy’s doing—then as far as I’m concerned it’s only tit for tat.

Judy and Vodge. That’s the big secret I turn up, not that I didn’t have my suspicions all along, but it’s a shock, believe me. It’s not so much him—nothing he does would surprise me because he’s as slimy and two-faced as anybody I’ve ever met in my life—but Judy. Yes, she can be gratingly obnoxious one minute and pour on the charm the next—and Dawn and I mistrusted her from the start, her motives and her methods both—but even so I never thought she’d take that kind of risk for someone like Ramsay. If G.C. finds out, she’ll be gone in a heartbeat and he’ll find a replacement in the beat after that because there’s no shortage of women out there just dying to be a Terranaut—or even to be mentioned in the same breath with one. If he finds out. That’s a big if, but the thought of it, of what G.C. might do and the repercussions that would surely rock E2 right on down to its stainless-steel cradle, makes me grin inside. I’ve been powerless to this point, powerless and cast off, a footnote in the Terranaut narrative, but here’s something I can build on, maybe even use to my advantage.

This is how it comes about. One afternoon, late, no more than a month or so after closure, I happen to be passing by in the hallway and see Judy sitting there in her office in the command center, the phone cradled under her chin and her face running through so many changes you’d think she was a contestant on a game show. It’s that late-afternoon interval between the end of the day shift and the arrival of the night shift, nobody really settled yet and the offices quiet while people pass each other on the stairs or in the elevator, some going up, some going down. The phone—this is the line into E2, the only line, since for this round of closure Mission Control is strictly limiting the crew’s access to the outside world—has four connections in the command center so G.C., Dennis, Judy and one other person, who might or might not be G.F., can do conference calls with Vodge or Diane when they don’t want to videoconference, or even when they do because the hookup only has one microphone and more often than not the audio’s fuzzy.

I’m on my way to the restroom before heading home for the day—back to Residence 2, that is—but now, seeing Judy there, seeing her face, I pull up short. What makes me slip into the command center and beyond that into G.C.’s office, I can’t say. An intuition, I guess. Luckily, G.C. isn’t there—he’s off in Boulder for the week, doing something at the Naropa Institute—and if I’m concerned about somebody coming in (like Little Jesus, for instance) and catching me where I’m not supposed to be I don’t let it stop me. I can always make something up. I needed such-and-such a report from the filing cabinet and since Judy was on the phone and I didn’t want to bother her, here I was—there I was—in G.C.’s office, where G.C.’s phones, outside and inside lines both, squat on his desk in molded plastic relief. I shoot a glance out the door (Judy’s back, the empty office), then pull it softly shut and pick up the receiver.

Nothing. It’s dead. I try the other phone, thinking I’ve got the wrong one, and I’m rewarded by a dial tone. Which is odd. Beyond odd—it’s suspicious. A moment’s investigation reveals that G.C.’s inside line, the one that communicates directly with E2, has been disconnected—unplugged, that is. By Judy, no doubt. It’s a revelation, a thrill—something’s up—and before I can think I plug the phone back in, lift the receiver ever so carefully, take a deep breath and put it to my ear.

What I hear, though I’ve come in in the middle of the conversation, leaves no doubt in my mind. Her voice is low and throaty, not at all like the voice she uses with us, which is all angles and sharp edges. “Would you like that, huh?” she breathes. “Tell me. Would you?”

He says he would. And then he says, “Even the inmates at the penitentiary get conjugal visits,” and she says, “And you don’t. Pity, huh?”

Next thing—bingo!—he asks her if she’s seeing anybody and she throws it right back at him. “Are you?” That’s when I know I have them, though beyond that they really don’t say anything incriminating and it isn’t as if I’m taking notes—though I wish I’d had a tape recorder. The rest is business, Lola, Luna, Gretchen, PR and more PR. I wait till they say goodbye (“See you”; “Yeah, see you too—on PicTel”) and hang up before easing the receiver back into its cradle, unplugging the phone again and tiptoeing out of the office. Out in the hallway I run into Malcolm Burts, the night spy, and if I pass him by with barely a nod of the head it’s because I’m not any part of his world, not anymore. I’m beyond that now. Down the stairs I go, exultant, holding my secret close, as if it’s a gift-wrapped package meant for me and me alone. News! I have news!

The campus is quiet, the tourists back in their motel rooms by now or maybe doing a little vicarious eating and drinking for the Terranauts at El Caballero or Alfano’s, the day crew gone and the night crew already on the job, so I have the place pretty much to myself. It’s my favorite time of day, everything in shadows except for the peaks of the Santa Catalinas, the thermostat turned down and the desert creatures venturing out into the stillness. That’s one of the perks of being here—E2 is out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by wild nature and views to kill for. Before G.F. bought up the 3,500 acres that make up the property, there’d been no development of any kind, which means the flora and fauna have remained undisturbed. There are javelinas here—I see them all the time, brown scurrying little pigs that aren’t really pigs at all but an entirely unrelated species. There are deer too, rabbits, roadrunners, bobcats—even, rumor has it, the odd coatimundi or ocelot drifting north out of Mexico.

As I make my way across the plaza out front of Mission Control and start down the gravel road to Residence 2, I spot a Harris’s hawk, its wings aflame with the late sun, drawing a tight circle over a cluster of saguaro, as if searching for something. I stop a moment and stand perfectly still, watching it, until suddenly it makes a knifing dive into the scrub and comes up with a kangaroo rat clenched in its talons, right place, right time. I can’t help seeing it as a sign. And right then, a new mantra—a little song, actually—begins looping through my brain. Judy and Vodge, I sing to myself, Vodge and Judy, Judy and Vodge, Vodge and Judy, and it sustains me all the way home.

But then I’m in my apartment, immersed in the familiar, the dirty pans on the stove, books, magazines, the clothes I’ve been meaning to wash and haven’t got around to, and my mood evaporates. What I need is to get out, I realize that right away. It’s Saturday, Saturday night, and I haven’t been off campus more than two or three times since closure, and only then to run errands. I picture the bar at Alfano’s (not El Caballero, because there’s no way I’m going to go there again, ever), and see myself leaning back on a barstool drinking chianti and dipping a crust of Italian bread into a little cruet of olive oil. But who to go with, now that Dawn’s unavailable? The members of the old crew, the losers, aren’t even worth considering because I’m not a loser and when we look at one another it’s with downcast eyes, with shame, and I’ve been shamed enough as it is. Really, no joke, I’ve begun to wonder how I’ll ever get through a two-year closure with any of them when our time comes—if it comes. And the newbies, as Malcolm likes to call the eight new candidates Mission Control brought in to fill out the extended crew and keep us all on our toes, aren’t much better. At least from what I’ve seen of them so far, all burning eyes and nose-to-the-grindstone and all of them absolutely one hundred percent certain they’ll ace us out and be among the final eight for Mission Three. They’re younger too, mostly in their twenties (like Rita Nordquist, Sally’s replacement) and they don’t show a whole lot of diversity except for one of the men, Francisco Viera, who’s from Uruguay, though he speaks English without an accent and has his Ph.D. in oceanography by way of Scripps.

I go to the cupboard where I keep a bottle of the snake wine my grandfather brought back from Seoul on his last trip and which I told everybody is for emergencies only because I don’t want them getting the wrong impression, all the while mentally thumbing through the faces of the new crewmembers until I hit on Gavin Helgeland, who’s funny and sympathetic and really goes out of his way to be nice to me (but then they all do, sucking up to us veterans in the baldest way, as if that’s going to do them any good). I shake up the bottle to get the scales of the pickled mamushi viper inside floating around like those little white flakes in a snowglobe, then pour myself a drink and throw it back neat, still high on the secret I’ve brought home with me, the Dragon Lady herself. Still, standing there at the counter blinking my eyes against the sting of the drink, I begin to reconsider. We’re teammates, yes, and I’m one of the only ones with a car—Dawn’s car, now mine to keep and use and chew up into little pieces if I want—but nonetheless it would be awkward to just stroll over to his apartment in Residence 1, knock on the door and say, “Hey.”

No matter. A second drink does the trick (and what is Bem Ju for anyway, if not strength and resolution?). I change into a dress and strappy sandals, do my face, tame my hair as best I can by pinning it up and spraying detangler right on down to the roots, then go back out the door and up the road to Residence 1 to see if Gavin’s in the mood for a drink—and who knows, maybe more? Be bold, that’s what I tell myself. And if I’m asserting my prerogative as veteran crew, wielding what little power I have over somebody who has even less, so much the better.

Still, I’m tentative about the whole thing, nervous, actually, nervous as a high-schooler, as I knock at Gavin’s door, especially when nothing happens and I have to knock a second time. I stand there listening for movement, then I hear a thump and the shuffle of feet, and there’s Gavin, in a set of headphones, bobbing his head to a beat only he can hear. His apartment is just like mine, only messier, and he isn’t alone. Two of the other crew—Ellen Shapiro, a newbie, and (this throws me) Tricia Berner—are sitting at the kitchen table, sharing a marijuana blunt and a bag of potato chips. “Hi,” I say, or more likely, chirp, because I tend to chirp when I get nervous. “Hi, Gavin. Hi, Ellen, Trish—but hey, it’s Saturday night!”

I’m still standing there at the open door and all three of them are just gazing up at me with a look of surprise, as if this is the last thing they expected (and am I really all that threatening or stand-offish or whatever? Is it really so out of bounds that I might show up for some R&R with my crewmates? Somebody help me out here, that’s what I’m thinking).

“Saturday,” I repeat, but with maybe just a tad less enthusiasm this time. What had I expected? Gavin (six-two, one hundred eighty pounds, the exact same eyes and ragged haircut of that singer in The Cure) sitting home alone doing crossword puzzles or playing solitaire?

But it’s okay, everything just as cool and stress-free as it can be, the spell broken in the next instant and all three of them glad to see me and as eager to take me up on my offer of a drive into town (maybe nine or ten miles one way and no joke after dark when the cars come at the lone bicyclist like mythical beasts, like dragons) and I begin to wonder, despite the exhilaration of the news that crackles deep inside me, if I’m just being paranoid. They like me, they do, smiles all around. Everybody’s happy. And everybody’s in motion now, Gavin slipping out from under his headphones, the two women getting up from the table with big stoned smiles plastered to their faces, and here’s the blunt, freely held out for my inspection—and use, that too. Don’t be surprised if I tell you I took a hit or two—we weren’t nuns and we weren’t saints, but Terranauts-in-waiting who were no less tuned-in than anybody else, or maybe even more so. It was marijuana, that was all, another fruit of the earth. Rumor had it—and Winston Barr confirmed it after the closure ceremony when we were all standing around with drinks in our hands and the band kept on playing—that the Mission One crew had not only clandestinely grown marijuana inside but ayahuasca too. That was all right. And so is this, sharing a blunt with my crewmates while the snake wine slithers through my veins. It’s all good. Just as long as Mission Control doesn’t find out.

My eyesight, I have to admit, isn’t the greatest, and once I get behind the wheel things seem to blur even worse than usual, and the pot isn’t helping. Still we somehow manage to make it into town undetected by the guardians of the law and roll on up to a parking spot conveniently located right in front of Alfano’s, just as if it’s been reserved for us. All this is prelude to what doesn’t happen—no accident, no arrest (which would have spelled certain doom in Mission Control’s eyes)—but what does happen isn’t exactly in the realm of anything that anybody, Dawn especially, would have called good. Or even neutral.

Have I mentioned Johnny? Or that I don’t have much use for him? Well, he’s there that night, propped up at the bar on one elbow, a drink in front of him (Johnnie Walker Black, and isn’t that just too coolly ironic for words?) when by all rights he should have been down in Tucson playing in some bar with his bar band. The dining room’s full, but we haven’t come to dine—we couldn’t afford it, in any case—but to drink, get loose, listen to whatever the jukebox is giving up and confine ourselves, strictly, to the bar. Which is crowded, with tourists and locals both, locals like Johnny.

At first he doesn’t seem to see us. Gavin finds us a table just behind the door, which we soon discover is the worst table in the house, since every time someone comes in, the door swings wide and cracks the edge of it, wood on wood. We get a round of drinks—beer for me, though I’m sensitive about my weight and so’s Mission Control—because I’m feeling the effects of what I had back at the apartment and the marijuana too and don’t want to get totally out of control. I wonder what my hair looks like. We had the windows down coming into town, a sweet mesquite-smelling breeze and seventy-eight degrees of temperature wafting in to fan our mood. Tricia Berner’s going on about the play—The Skin of Our Teeth, which G.C. decreed was to be performed both inside and out, the Mission Two crew responsible for an array of roles (in a play I personally find corny, endless and outdated), and we of the extended crew for dividing those roles up in sixteen ways for a performance to be given consecutively with theirs, ours at Mission Control and theirs in the command center on the second tier of E2. She’s talking up the role of Sabina, the best role really except maybe Antrobus himself, and you can see she’s priming herself for it, when I cut in to say, “Yeah, but why this play when there’s like a million other choices out there?,” trying not to sound too negative but only interested in the question rhetorically, in the way of a theater lover who’s totally on board with it.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Tricia (waist-length hair, brunette, with a pretty-enough face if you like freckles, moles and pre-cancerous lesions) waves her drink at me. Gavin and Ellen Shapiro lean into the table with knowing smirks. This is a topic that’s been batted around before. “G.C. is Mr. Antrobus. He did invent the wheel. And fire. And everything else.”

“Plus,” Gavin puts in, “there’s the whole environmental thing—”

“And Biblical,” I say.

“What’s wrong with that?” Tricia’s studying me closely, an ironic look on her spotted face and her eyes blunted with what we smoked at the apartment and in the car too. “E2 has all that going for it, New Eden and all, so it just seems natural—”

“God the Creator,” somebody says in a voice rumbling like a garbage truck going down a back alley, and everybody’s looking up now, looking behind me, and I turn my head to see Johnny slouched there, drink in one hand, cigarette in the other. “God the Financier,” he says, a singsong lilt to his voice. “Little Jesus. Judas.”

Johnny’s wearing a cowboy shirt and cowboy boots, but he doesn’t look like a cowboy. More like a round-shouldered lounge lizard dressed up as somebody’s idea of a cowboy. He takes a pull at the cigarette, puts the drink to his lips. Gavin, Ellen and Tricia just gawk, the conversation fallen off a cliff. What they’re wondering is how this interloper, this poser in the blue satin shirt with white piping sewed around the breast pockets, has access to these cryptic identifiers—and more, how he can pronounce them aloud. In public. “But I don’t know,” he says, another puff, another sip, “for my money the play’s pretty lame. If I remember rightly. From high school. Isn’t that the sort of thing you only see in high school?”

“Hi, Johnny,” I say.

He squints his eyes against the smoke, smiles. “Hi, Linda.”

“Tricia? You know Johnny?”

She shakes her head.

I make the introductions, starting with Tricia, then Ellen and finally Gavin, who can’t resist saying, “That’s not the point. The point is it’s got relevance for us, for E2—Wilder was way ahead of his time there. I mean, global warming. Glaciers. The flood.”

“Johnny’s Dawn’s boyfriend,” I say, to clarify things. I give him a sidelong glance, as if we’re playing cards and I’m stealing a look at his hand. “Or was. You been to see her?”

He just smiles. “You?”

The same songs repeat on the jukebox, the dining room clears out, the bar gets noisier. No one asks him to join us, but at some point Johnny pulls up a chair and settles in and the conversation drifts away from us and our hermetic worries and obsessions to bands, baseball (Ellen’s a huge Padres fan), bow-hunting for javelina, hiking the Santa Catalinas and what bottled beers are recycled horse piss (Johnny’s term) and which ones you can actually drink, with taste-testing following hard behind. For my part, maybe I’m a little icy at first, but after the third beer—or is it the fourth?—I feel a warm glow come over me and my secret rises to my lips where I keep it like a dab of raspberry-flavored gloss, tasting it over and over with the tip of my tongue. Everybody at the table’s a good person, a very good person, the best, even Johnny—no, especially Johnny—and my apartment and E2 and Dawn and Mr. Vodge Ramsay Roothoorp are far off in the distance like some sort of mirage. Is Johnny hitting on Tricia, right in front of me? Maybe. Maybe he is. But somehow I don’t really care, because I just fall right into the deep trough of his voice—and because he’s hitting on me too.

That’s how it is. And once we’ve left, once I get my fellow Terranauts-in-waiting back to their apartments without incident and pour myself one final little nightcap of Bem Ju, I guess it doesn’t come as all that much of a surprise when the knock echoes through the apartment and I open the door to see Johnny standing there, propped up in his grin. “Can I come in?” he says. And what do I say? I say, “Why not?”

I do see Dawn. Nearly every day. Or at least communicate with her. Sometimes, when the phone’s free, we just chat, or gossip really. She’ll tell me about what’s going on inside—what I don’t already know, I mean, and no, I’m not working her or pumping her for information or anything like that, just talking. Call it girl-talk. Or if that sounds dismissive or sexist or whatever, I’m sure boy-talk would be pretty much the same thing, like when Dennis and Ramsay connect, which they seem to do just about every day. Ditto Judy and Ramsay. Though, as I discovered, that was a whole different animal: girl/boy talk. I never caught them at anything beyond that one incident, by the way—I never got the opportunity—but what I’d overhead was enough to pack into a bomb and bring the whole creaking edifice down.

More than the phone, though, Dawn and I wind up talking at the visitors’ window, where we can see each other, which makes things more personal. Sometimes, sitting there on opposite sides of the glass, it’s almost as if we’re out in the world, free of all this artificial maneuvering and the constraints that go with it. She asks me about Johnny, who’s visiting her less and less often, and I tell her I hardly ever see him because there’s no point in risking our friendship over what happened—once and once only—that night after the celebration of my brand-new shiny secret at Alfano’s. And I don’t tell her about that either. That’s something I’m holding on to in the way the Russians are holding on to their nukes. Pow! Boom! The Dragon Lady strikes!

We’re well into May now, the world I live in growing hotter and drier by the day while the world she lives in stays at a fixed temperature with humidity up in the range of a steam bath, the sealed pipes that deliver hot and cold water constantly tweaked by the maintenance staff in the power plant. As for rain, as I’m sure most people know, the crew just turns on the overhead sprinklers whenever it’s needed—and that’s Diane’s call, unless G.C., who’s always studying the data and consulting with her and Vodge, decrees a shower over the marsh or the savanna, but don’t misunderstand: this is internal water only, what’s locked in and re-created hour by hour, day by day. Drinking water comes from condensation on the air handler coils in the technosphere (basement, that is) and the rest is recycled from the kitchen, the animal pens, the bathrooms and the biomes and collected in settling tanks in the basement and in the two lungs that rise out of the ground like big white mushrooms on either side of the main structure.

G.C. and his engineers might have got a lot of things wrong, by the way, but not those lungs. As far as I’m concerned they’re the truly groundbreaking innovation in a project that is, as advertised, groundbreaking in every way. I’m sure others can explain the concept and its function better than I can, even if I have made it my business to know as much about every aspect of E2 as I possibly can, good student and every bit her overachieving mother’s daughter that I am, but I’ll give it to you in short. The lungs are essential as a kind of pressure valve, regulating the internal air pressure so as to keep E2 from exploding when the outside temperature peaks or imploding when it’s cold. Two long tunnels—walkways—lead to these two big circular arenas that are roofed in rubber and weighted down by a sixteen-ton aluminum saucer so they can expand and contract along with the air pressure, thereby keeping the thousands of glass panels from popping and allowing E2’s atmosphere to spew out and mingle with the earth’s. Mingling is what we don’t want—not of air or people either. Nothing in, nothing out.

Anyway, I do stick with Dawn and gradually I begin to get over my jealousy—the thing with Johnny helped, both with my self-esteem and in finding common ground with her, or maybe that sounds too blunt. She’s locked up, but so am I, and all that one night with Johnny represented was a jailbreak, that’s all. It’s not as if he cares about her. He proved that in my bed. And the fact is, Dawn needs me more than ever, not only as a confidante but as a buffer between her and Mission Control. I’ll give you an example. G.C. and Judy are really pushing for the play, as if we all aren’t exhausted enough with the hours we have to put in every day, and I’ve come to dread rehearsals as much as Dawn. But at least I have a pressure valve that operates in E1 just like those lungs in E2: I can get in the car and take off for anyplace I want. Dawn’s stuck. By choice, yes, but stuck all the same.

The part G.C. assigned her (he’s directing both productions, inside and out) is Mrs. Antrobus, who’s basically just an airhead and performs a thankless role that’s so distantly pre-feminist it really is beyond the pale. But this is comedy and firmly tongue-in-cheek absurdist, the way G.C. (and to tell the truth, most of us) likes it and after the earnestness of what we’re doing day in, day out, a few laughs are just what the doctor ordered. My own part, or parts—and I’ll admit up front that I’m one of the worst actors on the extended crew, far too self-conscious to let go the way somebody more natural would be able to—is really like what you’d expect from an extra in a movie. I put on a papier-mâché helmet and mope around as the Mammoth, and I’m one of the Muses and one of the Conveeners and a Drum Majorette as well. Of course, we’re not going overboard by way of stage setting and scenery since we’re playing for ourselves only. (Or actually, via live-feed TV, the Terranauts-in-fact are playing for the Terranauts-in-waiting and vice versa—and for our God and Creator, which goes without saying.) Basically, we’re doing something that falls between a line reading and a walk-through, but still G.C. insists that we learn our lines and block out the action. So, though we’d both rather be doing something else, Dawn and I wind up spending a whole two weeks of our evening free-time in late May of Year One Closure standing at the visitors’ window feeding each other lines.

I remember one night, both of us flat-out exhausted, when the whole thing kind of breaks down. We’re doing Act I, Scene 1, and I’m reading Sabina’s lines and Dawn’s playing from memory, or trying to. Sabina’s just stepped out of character to say that she doesn’t understand a word of the play and then, back in character, “Yes, I’ve milked the mammoth,” so that Mrs. Antrobus can fret over the fact that they’ll have no food or fire till her husband comes home and conclude by saying, “You’d better go over to the neighbors and borrow some fire.” But after I say my line, Dawn just stares at me through the glass, looking desolate. “I’m drawing a blank,” she says. “Really, I mean you can’t imagine the kind of day I’ve had. It’s been shitty, really shitty.”

I don’t have anything to say to this. She’s having a shitty day? What about me? What about all the rest of us who aren’t famous, who aren’t inside, who haven’t been plucked up and rewarded for the thousands of sweaty malodorous overworked hours we’ve put in? Who’re getting five hundred bucks a month and a pat on the back? Who’re the workers and drones to her queen bee? I watch her face, lines of privilege converging at her hairline, her mouth drawn down in a pout. Shitty day, shitty day.

“Have you lost weight?” I ask finally, going on the offensive because I know this is a worry of hers. She’s sensitive about her figure and she’s afraid the low-cal diet’s going to shrink her breasts down to nothing like with the aboriginal women in the outback who just have two little flaps of skin there even when they’re pregnant. “You’re looking thin.”

“No. Yes. I don’t know. I guess so. But it’s not that, it’s Diane, the way she was riding me today? And then Judas. She summoned me to the phone this morning after crew meeting to tell me I wasn’t getting enough milk out of the goats, and then she gave me a whole useless holier-than-thou lecture about how forty ounces a day wasn’t going to do it when you were splitting it eight ways because that was just five ounces per person per day, as if I couldn’t do the math, and how I had to give them better fodder when she knows as well as I do there just isn’t any, not till the savanna grasses get cut again, which Diane says isn’t going to happen for like three weeks yet. So I’m frustrated. So frustrated I could scream. And you know Judy, on her high horse, and it’s like I’m to blame if milk production is down or egg production or whatever, as if I have any control over it—”

“Judy’s such a bitch.”

She looks down at her lap, clenching her hands as if she’s trying to squeeze water out of a sponge. Her head is cocked to one side, pinning the phone to her shoulder. Her T-shirt—E2 MDA, it reads in cardboard-gray letters on a crimson background, a gift from her mother—seems to hang on her. Beyond her, the ag biome, flooded in evening light like the clerestory of a cathedral, shines a brilliant green in defiance of the desert that radiates out for hundreds of miles. I snatch a look at the lines of the script and try again: “‘Yes, I’ve milked the mammoth.’”

Her eyes jump to mine, but she doesn’t give me her lines. She says, “Does Judy say anything about me? Like job performance or anything? Or G.C.?”

“How would I know?”

“You’re there, aren’t you? Like all day?”

“Yeah, so?”

“You haven’t gone over to their side, have you? You’re not spying on us—you’re not reporting back?”

The smile I give her is tentative, cheesy, unconvincing I’m sure. “No,” I say. “Never. It’s still just you and me, right? I’m just staring into the monitors, that’s all. In case there’s an emergency. You know that.”

Again she’s silent. She switches the receiver from one side to the other.

“But you’re collecting data, right?”

“Well, yeah, that’s what they want. For the project.” I’m trying my best not to sound defensive, but I can’t help feeling irritated all over again.

“What about Johnny?” she says, and it comes out of nowhere. “You see him lately?”

“Not really,” I say, stalling for time. I don’t know how much she knows. Gossip runs from Mission Control to E2 and back as freely as the hot and cold water coming from the power plant. There’s no closure on gossip.

“I heard you saw him at Alfano’s?”

I tell her I did. That I’d been there with Gavin, Ellen and Tricia, that he’d come over to the table and we’d all had a couple of drinks together. And that he told me he was missing her. “He said he was lonely.”

“What,” she says, “no groupies?”

Groupies. The term—the notion—makes me wince. He’d come on to me, that was the way it was, and I was as far from being a fan of his strutting pathetic regurgitation of other people’s hits as I was of intramural politics. On some level I’d slept with him for her, though I couldn’t tell her that, because on another level I’d done it because of her, to spite her, to get some of my own back in a relationship that was all one-way now. I pretend I don’t hear her.

“Linda? You there?” Her eyes go wide. “I was only joking. Because I know him and I know how the girls come on to him. I know it can’t last. But still, the more I think about him the more I think I’m in love with him. Is that crazy? Or is it just that I’m in fantasyland here?”

She’s looking pleadingly at me, the pressure of the phone at her chin compressing the flesh of her cheek into tight bloodless bands. What she wants is reassurance, the give-and-take that came so naturally to us for the past two-plus years, and I see that and register it, but all I can do is shrug.

Then it’s Gyro’s turn, and this has got to be one of the more cringe-worthy incidents of the Mission Two closure, which I wouldn’t even mention here except that it wound up being duly noted for the record in any case (Gyro wasn’t identified by name, but still it shows just how intrusive Mission Control could be). I was the first to notice him engaging in what Judy called “anomalous behavior,” but I wasn’t the one to record it in the log because to my mind it was just too personal, nobody’s business but Gyro’s. Malcolm had no such scruples, though, and so the whole thing came out, a matter of record and of debate too, the first rubbing of our collective noses in what my high school civics teacher quaintly called ethics. We’d reached June by this point, the fourth month of closure, the days stretched to the limit and both inside and outside crews looking forward to our summer solstice celebration (few of us had any religion beyond G.C. and E2 and so we built our feast days around the old calendar, the one that had existed before the current crop of gods came into being). We were going to coordinate our celebration with theirs, preparing the same dishes—and choking down the same rank banana wine—in solidarity. But that was only fair, wasn’t it? Or at least that was the question Dennis asked at team meeting, giving us all his best impression of an evil smirk.

As it happens, I’m on night shift that week, alternating nights with Malcolm while Tricia and Jeff Weston go to day shift—and the incident with Gyro’s a nighttime thing, definitely a nighttime thing. I have to say I don’t really care for the night shift all that much—it plays havoc with my diurnal rhythms—but Mission Control dictates the hours and I’m a dutiful little Terranaut-in-waiting (and also secretly pleased because it’s only the four of us who’re entrusted with the video monitoring, and that has to be a good sign as to who’s favored for Mission Three). So I sit there in the wee hours, most of the lights dimmed so as not to disorient the night creatures, reading sci-fi (Clarke, Bradbury, Salmón and especially Clayton Unger’s Bigger Bang series, about terraforming distant planets) and staring blearily into the ten TV monitors at Mission Control like a night watchman in a warehouse.

Every once in a while something of interest snaps me to attention, like a parade of tail-twitching mice (stowaways—that goes without saying) doing their thing in the IAB in defiance of the traps the crew set and baited with precious scraps and whatever cockroach meat they had on hand, or the galagos leaping red-eyed through the biomes, shifting range from one camera to another fifty times in the course of a night, but basically it’s just leaves and more leaves. But then Gyro’s there, triggering one of the rain forest cameras, his hands empty—no toolbox, so he’s not out to make any emergency repairs—and his feet bare, striding gawkily along in a pair of shorts and T-shirt. At first I think he might be going for a shower under the waterfall that cascades down from our artificial mountain, but then he slips out of view of the first camera and doesn’t reappear in the waterfall view. We have the ability to reposition the cameras and that’s what I do now, trying to keep him in sight not so much out of duty or even nosiness, but boredom, simple boredom, just that. Mostly when the crew goes out at night it’s to get away from the sterility of the Human Habitat and into a state of nature, which is what we’ve signed on for to begin with, ecologists all, people selected for their love of the outdoors. Or, in this case, this very special case, the indoors.

He dodges off-camera briefly, then comes into view again, looking what you could only call furtive, and my first thought is he’s going to sneak some bananas or papayas from the trees or even dip into the Purina Monkey Chow Gretchen sets out daily in half a dozen feeding stations to sustain the galagos, who’re having a hard time dietarily on what E2’s providing in terms of insects and fruit. Next thing, he’s off the path—and this is pretty much discouraged because Mission Control wants the wilderness biomes to remain as undisturbed as possible. But what is he doing? I shift the camera, refocus. The image is grainy, the colors washed to shadow. He seems to be preparing a place to lie down, as if he’s going to take a nap, which doesn’t make any sense since his bed is just minutes away. Is he going for the nature experience, is that it? Sleeping with the ants, mosquitoes, cockroaches and frogs? Is he our nature boy, our true nature boy? I don’t have a clue.

When he lays himself down, the vegetation screens him so all I can see is his lower legs—his shins, which cast a faint glow—and his feet. He’s doing something there, something vigorous which make his legs stiffen and his feet stir, and it isn’t till I notice that his shorts are in the picture now, bunched at his knees, that it comes to me like a dirty secret. I flush. Gawk. Smile to myself: now I have something on him too. But I stop right there—the fact is I like him, and honestly, no matter what anybody says, I’m not that kind of person. What he does privately is nobody’s business but his and I know in that moment I won’t report it. Unfortunately, as I say, Malcolm has no such scruples. He’d seen something on his shift (I never found out what, exactly, but it had to do with Gyro, so I can pretty well guess), then went back and reviewed my tape, which he brought to Judy and Dennis, and Judy and Dennis watched it I don’t know how many times before they summoned me.

They’re in the command center, sitting before one of the monitors, and they’re the only people in the room at the moment. Judy gives me one of her automatic smiles and Dennis, his little spit-curl frozen in place on his forehead, barely glances up. “We just want to know what you saw, when was it, Dennis? Four nights ago? When you were on night shift?”

Dennis looks up now, his face neutral (and you could have tortured him, pulled out his fingernails and toenails and cut off his ears before he’d acknowledge even the faintest glimmer of what had once passed between us), and pulls out a chair for me.

“So what we’re wondering about is what looks like an anomaly with one of the crew,” Judy goes on, pressing the “play” button on the recorder before her so that the screen springs to life, the picture murky, jumpy, a slice of movement, Gyro, the rain forest, night. Across the top of the screen, the time scrolling in fuzzy white relief, seconds, minutes, hour, and the date—06/14/94—blinking in confirmation. “This is your feed, right? You were on duty that night—?”

“Yes,” I say, and I’m not giving up anything.

“Listen, Linda”—Dennis now—“we were wondering why you trained the camera here, on Gyro. Were you, I don’t know, suspicious or—?”

“Or what?” I say.

“Bored, maybe,” Judy puts in.

I look round the room, the sun bright in the windows so that they seem glazed, chairs and desks untenanted, everybody conveniently on break. “If you’re asking if I was tracking him because he was out there in the middle of the night and I didn’t know if he was repairing something or what he was doing, then the answer is yes. That’s what I’m supposed to do, isn’t it?”

Neither of them responds. For a minute, a full sixty seconds that seems ten times longer, the three of us watch my cinematic efforts play across the screen to the climactic moment—the stiffened legs, the intent feet—before Judy punches the “off” button and the image dissolves. Judy turns to me, her mouth tight. “Do you have any idea what this is? What he was doing?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I was just recording an, an anomaly, that’s all.”

The fact is, the literature on small group interaction is rife with anomalous behavior, from violence and mental instability to the formation of cliques and factions and the total breakdown of societal norms. One overwintering crew at the Antarctic Research Station split off into two separate factions—gangs—that raided each other’s food supplies, though there was more than enough food to go around, and even adopted identifying insignia and colors as if they were Crips and Bloods fighting over turf. By the time the relief crew arrived in the spring, there had been two all-out brawls (the first over whether the movie of the night would be Ice Station Zebra or The Sound of Music), resulting in a fractured ankle, a broken wrist and two misaligned noses, and one faction went so far as to try to falsify the other’s data. Which, of course, defeated the whole purpose of their being there in the first place.

“But you didn’t report it,” Dennis says.

“I didn’t think it was anything.”

Judy—she’s the dragon lady, not me—lets out an exasperated puff of air. “He was masturbating, for Christ’s sake. Do you know what would happen if, god forbid, one of the visitors should see anything like this? Or the so-called reporters out there that are just praying for us to fall flat on our faces?”

“It was night,” I say. “Who’s watching at night? And besides, you can’t be sure. Maybe he was, I don’t know, getting into his naturalist’s trance—”

“Don’t be cute. Or naïve. Or whatever you’re playing at—he was jerking off and you know it perfectly well.”

This is a warning. My job, above all else, is to suck up to Mission Control if I ever hope to get what I want, and what I want is to go inside and spin out my own anomalous behavior. I keep my mouth shut.

“Apes do it, monkeys,” Dennis says, leaning in so he’s too close, encroaching on my personal space, working me. “In the zoo, especially. You see them whacking off all the time. It’s a boredom thing. A cooped-up thing.”

Judy stiffens, makes a face. She’s uptight. Humorless. The manager, managing. “We’re not apes,” she says and gives Dennis a look that’s like a warning shot across his bows.

“I’m sorry,” I say, “but that’s exactly what we are.” I know something about Judy that Judy doesn’t know I know. A soft smile comes to my lips. “Technically speaking.”