The Explorer. James Smythe
a course, we stick to it, we get home. Simple.’ In the film I would pause the tape at this moment, freeze him on the screen. Famous last words. I think that’s how the film might start, with that chunk of premonitory exposition, that interview, and then the freeze, then a draw back to reveal me alone in the craft, the others dead, in their beds, and then pull back further, the ship in space, puttering along as the fuel gauge flicks numbers over like an antique railway station clock. Cut to: The opening credits.
There is a way to fix this. Guy knew it, he could have done it. He died too soon. If he was me, the last one, last of the Mohicans, he could have gotten home, told them what happened.
‘I spent so long alone!’ he could have cried. ‘Alone!’ And, ‘I had these messages, and they didn’t mean anything, so I ignored them!’
As if by magic, another beep, another flash of the red light. 250480. The message never changes, telling me that there’s something wrong, but not what that something is. I just can’t fathom it. I write it over and over as I write my blog entries (which I’ve maintained, even now, alone, with no idea if they’re reaching home or not). I contemplate writing it on the walls, all over the crisp whiteness, so that if I’m ever found they’ll think I have succumbed to Space Madness, but decide that it’s a pointless joke. It’s not a systems warning, not a fault, and, as best I can tell, not a message. The AI in the computer hasn’t become sentient. I don’t believe it’s an alien trying to reach me – there’s nothing out here, that much is clear when you get here into the stillness, the darkness – so it’s just a beep. Perhaps it’s a way of telling me that there’s a problem with the fuel. Perhaps it’s just nothing. It stops, the light, the beep, just as the computer drops to 9%. There’s stillness again.
4
I write my blog entries into the computer every day, and I send them, telling Ground Control what’s been happening, just so that there’s no confusion. I want them to know that it’s just me up here now – or, me and Emmy, really, if they wanted to save us, two bodies, not one – and I tell them about the warning, the numbers, because they might find a way to send me a message back. They probably could. Or: they always told us that they could travel faster, just not for as long. Maybe they’ve fixed that? Maybe they’ve had a breakthrough in the last few weeks, and there’s a ship roaring towards us right now, and it will pull alongside us and lower its doors and I’ll get to drift over, and I’ll be saved. I write that in the blog, and everything else, even down to my dreams and what I’ve seen outside the ship, to give them a better idea of where I am. I write them and then I click Send, and then I don’t look at them again, because I really can’t stand the thought. It’s one thing to watch videos of the others, seeing stuff through their eyes for a second. I couldn’t stand to relive this trip through my own eyes, I don’t think.
I miss gravity. So many days into nothing, into my floating inside the ship that is floating in space, like a Russian doll, and I have decided that I want to feel the floor beneath my feet again. We were never going to put the gravity field online when we started off: all I know is that it burns through the piezoelectric batteries like nothing else on the ship.
‘The sheer energy required to sustain it is monumental.’ I can’t remember which one of the crew told me that. I flick the switch, and there’s a humming coming from all around the walls, making us shake, a subtle vibration, like a washing machine, and I push myself towards a standing position for when it kicks in. I am suddenly pushed to the floor, and there’s a sound like jumping on twigs. Something in my leg snaps. The pain is monumental. It roars up my side, and I collapse to the floor, my other leg buckling under my weight, twisting behind me. The sting from that one is negligible: the injury in the other has caused blood to start spilling out of the root of my trouser leg, puddling out around me into a pool. Amongst all of this, the beeping starts again, and I am heaped on the floor, unable to see the screen. Deal with the leg first. There are bandages in the medical cupboard, I’ve seen them, and painkillers, and probably whatever else I’m going to need. I try to roll the trouser leg up but something stops it, something hard and sharp and like being stabbed, and I assume that it must be a bone. Scissors. I need to cut it free.
I drag myself across the floor to the table, trying not to look at my leg, trying not to let it drag – or worse, snag on anything, the jutting bone facing outwards like a little hook looking for a catch – and hoist myself to the seats. The cupboard is above that table, and I manage to get it open without having to push myself up any higher than the seats themselves. From there, the scissors. My shaky hands don’t do justice to the fabric, tearing and ripping as best they can, until I can finally see the damage itself. With the pink of the blood, the yellow of my skin, it looks like coral. It looks – as with coral – almost aerated, fine holes, bubbles running throughout. This is my shin, pushed out and upwards and through the skin, a one-inch punch, as neat and delicate as my own surgery on the trouser leg.
In the kit there is a huge roll of bandages, some elastic strips, some plasters, a self-cleaning syringe with multiple doses of morphine in it, another with some sort of anaesthetic, another with antiseptic. There should be tens of bottles of painkillers, as well, but the tray is nearly empty, their slots sad and vacant, only one bottle left. I wonder which of the crew was using them; we were warned that they could be addictive, that the headaches, the sickness we might feel would pass, that the painkillers were strictly for emergency use. There’s a metal splint. I take the syringes and the splint and the bandages and shuffle backwards on the bench, pulling my leg by the thigh until it is flat – or as flat as I can get it – on the bench with me. The beeping persists from the computer. Fuck.
I use the base of my hand to hold my leg at the knee, pressing down to stem the blood, tying a bandage off around it, pulling my hand free. The blood is already darker, already congealing. I wonder if blood finds it harder to do its job in space? I wonder if bones heal the same? Technically, I suppose, it’s a surface wound. Two injections of antiseptic, two of anaesthetic, the morphine on the side for when I need it. I clean the area around the rupture, wipe it down, and then put one hand on my calf, the other on the nape of the bone, using the base of my palm. I brace myself, count to three, breathe, and then push down. The bone – seemingly my whole shin – shifts, sliding down, and there’s an almost satisfying click as it meets whatever it is that it slots into, like the clunk of a car door sliding shut. It doesn’t really feel like anything. I inject another antiseptic, wipe the area down, bandage it, and then extend the splint, rest it on the front of my leg and wrap the arms around my calf. Activating it makes it tug itself tighter, and I can feel the pressure on my bone, and then the pain starts to come back, just as the splint thinks it’s found the right level of tautness for my muscles, and it hisses as it shuts itself off. The pain crescendoes, and I take the morphine, inject it into my neck. Pain, or morphine, or something, makes me pass out.
I dream of space. At least, I think it’s a dream: otherwise, it’s just nothing.
I wake up to the beeping, still. My leg is swollen, but the pain has subsided slightly. I inject more anaesthetic into the puffed skin around the bandages and give myself a far smaller dose of morphine than I took last night and shuffle to the edge of the seat. It’s five metres to the control panels, maybe slightly more. In zero gravity, that’s two pushes, maybe. Here? I put my good leg onto the floor. It winces, but only slightly: the second injury was just a mild twist, I think, nothing fatal. (Ha! That I should worry about fatality! Here!) From there I push myself to standing, and from there grab part of the bulkhead and shuffle myself towards it. I grab the inside wall and pull myself along until I reach the chairs in the cockpit section, and sit down in the pilot’s chair. I have avoided this one until now: I’ve always used Quinn’s. I don’t know why.
The computer tells me that there’s an ALERT, and that the battery is down to 10%. It must be the gravity field. I had no idea it took that much power. I’ve just managed to lose a week of my life, all so that I could shatter my leg apart. Fuck it. I switch the engines back on. I start drifting upwards as the battery power percentage disappears to a corner where it displays a recharging symbol, and the 9% moves back to the centre of the screen. 9% of fuel, and the life support ticks down on cue, matching that number. 9%. My life, in single digits.
I