Читать книгу The Explorer - James Smythe, James Smythe - Страница 9

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 sleep, but I don’t remember actually dropping off. I remember lying against the bed, the straps tugging slightly at my side, my leg hanging limp. The lack of gravity makes this wonderful, my leg floating free and easy behind me, swinging like a cat’s tail. I remember wondering why I couldn’t sleep, getting annoyed at the hum of the engines, the light from the monitors. I remember thinking about Elena, and then the computer beeped to 8%, and I decided to wake up. I’m not even tired any more.

I put on Wanda’s videos, and in them she is cleaning the front console. ‘This is the fun part of the job,’ she says, ‘this is where the action is.’ She seems so sad, like she doesn’t want to be here.

‘Do you have to be careful when cleaning this stuff?’ Video-me asks. She shakes her head and leans in towards the camera conspiratorially.

‘No,’ she says. ‘None of this actually does anything; it’s all smoke and mirrors.’

As the computer ticks down to the 7% mark I am sitting at the backup terminal, reading about the propulsion systems. There is a schematic showing me the sequence and code to enter into the computer to accelerate the engines, to take us to maximum power. We are using most of the power of the ship, apparently. The piezoelectric batteries have barely charged, certainly not enough to make it worth my while to use them. I don’t want to wait, not any more. I’m going to end this. There’s a self-destruct, like how all the best old films and stories had one, built in to stop American technology falling into the hands of our enemies. I don’t know why it’s here; all I know is that it is. It’s called something else; it’s labelled as a ‘Crash Assist’, in case we were headed back to Earth too quickly, and we needed to shed the craft and let the stasis pods float back to Earth on their own, with their own in-built parachutes. It makes the hull break up into pieces, like Lego, and leaves everything else to fall of its own accord. Everything shatters. It feels appropriate. It makes the engines accelerate briefly, just for a few seconds, far beyond their natural ability, to short them out; and then the ship opens itself, and here’s all the people. I have just enough energy to do it, according to the computer. Just enough.

The guidelines tell me that, in case of emergency, I am to jettison all unnecessary cargo. I seal the main hull off from the back of the ship and open the external rear doors and the food stockpiles, the external suits, the oxygen tanks, everything gets sucked out. It’s much faster than I imagined, a real ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ moment. I shut the doors and read the next guideline. First, ensure the rest of the crew are safely in stasis. (Ha! Emmy looks at me through the glass, safe and sound, tucked in.) Next, prepare your stasis bed for yourself, and enter these instructions.

I type the complicated string of numbers into the computer. Ensure that everything is secure – hatches, doors, the stasis beds – and then press the Enter key. Caution! Upon pressing the key a countdown will initiate, and when finished, the engines will reach Maximum Efficiency. The countdown will last 30 seconds. I take one last look around the ship. There’s nothing here for me. I pull myself to Arlen’s chair again, stare out of the view screen: It’s so peaceful. There’s nothing but blackness for as far as I can see. I strap myself in, and lean over to switch the gravity on again. If I’m going to do this, I want to feel it: I don’t want to be floating, airlessly. I want the stress. I want to know what it feels like. I want to see it, and I don’t want to have battery backup left to keep me here, all broken bones and torn limbs, lying in pain, waiting to die, before finally choking to death, suffocating without air. I think I am saying all of this aloud, to nobody. I think.

Gravity kicks in immediately, and the pain clambers back up my broken leg with the weight I’m suddenly putting on it. I hit Enter, and the countdown starts. 30, 29, 28. My life, the last few weeks, has been dictated by numbers. 27, 26. I go years without thinking about them, thinking instead about words. 25, 24, 23. Suddenly I find them the most important things in the world. 22, 21. Countdowns, percentages, time: they all matter. 20, 19. And the message, the numbers on the screen. 18, 17, 16. I’ll die, never knowing what they mean. 15, 14. They’ll be a MacGuffin, always eluding me. 13, 12, 11. Like everything else, they’ll just fade, I suppose, 10, as I move on, wherever it is that I’m going, 9, and nobody will ever know that I didn’t know what it was, 8, just another batch of trophies and 7 commiserations on somebody’s 6 shelf, and I hope she 5 misses me as much as I 4 want her to, because oh, God, Elen3a, I miss you so 2 much, so much 1 it hurts.

I can’t move. I can barely see. There’s water everywhere, it feels like, and I try to gulp in breaths through my mouth, but I can feel it twist and move, and never actually get the air that I want from it. I can make out the shapes of the numbers on the screen, but they aren’t important, not any more. This is it. I stare at the window in front of me, at the cracks that are starting to form in the plastic (another me would have asked why they don’t test this!) and at the space; there’s suddenly something in the distance, blacker than the rest of it, somehow. It’s more tranquil than everything else I can see, with no stars, just an expanse of pure, absolute night, so black that it almost looks solid, like I could just reach out and touch it. I’m focused on it when the crack directly in front of me splits like my leg, and it pulls the window out almost wholly. All the sound dulls away, and I feel the clasps attaching me to the chair being pulled at, tugged, yanked. As we reach the blackness of space I come free and I can suddenly hear that blackness, that somehow, here in the vacuum, it has noise, a roar, a filthy, gasping roar, like a whirlpool, a maelstrom, but I’m spinning out of the ship, and out of myself, and out here, in the deepest part of space that man has ever been, it feels like somebody is holding me, telling me that it will all be all right as I take one last breath of air, of actual air, the last one left on the ship, and I swallow it down and let it wash all over me, knowing that it will be the one that I take as I die, and then I regret this, because maybe I gave up too soon, and Elena wouldn’t be proud of me, giving up like this, because she always told me that I was the strong one, and I see the blackness, worse than space, worse than anything, utterly black, and it swallows me whole.