Up in the rocket, Maxon heard his own breathing inside the helmet. He heard the voices of the pilots talking to each other, quieter now, less frantic. He felt the rocket shifting effortlessly through space. It all felt okay, it felt normal. His pulse was elevated, but his bones were not broken. He had not been smashed to pulp. He had not exploded into fragments.
He tried his voice. “Phillips, what’s the status?”
“Uh, Genius, we’re going to need you to sit tight,” came the voice.
“What happened? Was it an explosion?”
“Think we got hit, brother,” said Fred Phillips. He was miles away by radio wave in the headset, but he was right next to Maxon, so close he could have reached over and patted the man’s gloved hand.
Conrad’s arms were moving frantically, his fingers tapping at a keyboard. Maxon wondered if he should help.
“It is, ah, a bad outcome here? Did the meteor damage us?”
“Yeah, Genius, any meteor that hits you is a bad outcome, okay?” Phillips’s voice was raised higher than normal, which Maxon knew from his notebook indicated tension and lack of patience. Maxon frowned.
“We are going to restore communications first,” Gompers put in. “Then we can assess the damage and take action.”
“Are we on course?” Maxon asked. “Are we going to rendezvous with the cargo piece as scheduled?”
“Maxon, we’re kinda working on making sure we have airlock and oxygen right now,” said Phillips. “There’s a process to these things, a process we have to follow fucking meticulously, or we are all fucked to hell, okay?”
“Relax, Phillips,” barked Gompers.
“But are we on course? What is the status of our course? Have we deviated?”
“Listen, brother, if we don’t establish communication with Houston soon, and with our satellites soon, and with the entire fucking world of electronics outside this rocket real soon, we’re not going to be able to work out shit for a course, okay?”
“Phillips!” barked Gompers. “You will control yourself. Another outburst like that and you’re in quarters.”
A blue ink pen floated past Maxon’s face. He clicked the release to let his arms free from the chair, reached up, and unclipped his face mask, letting the shield up. He took a deep breath.
“We have oxygen,” Maxon said. “Now how the fuck about our course? We were looking for orbital insertion, Phillips, do we have it or do we not? Do we have engines? Do we have power to the engines? We need to fire rocket two at sixty throttle for eight seconds. That was the last order. Did you execute?”
Phillips slammed his hand down on the keyboard inside its white glove but also unclipped his helmet and took in a deep breath. His face was moist, and Maxon knew that meant he was nervous. He turned his head, now six inches away from the end of Maxon’s nose, as they were shoulder-to-shoulder in their seats in the rocket. His words came out with a little spray of spit from his tongue, clipped and bitter.
“I appreciate your interest in our progress. I appreciate you are on a mission here too. But until I tell you otherwise, you are only allowed to sit there. Do not take off your suit. Do not shit your pants. Do not ask me again about the fucking container.”
“Can I say ‘Fix it! Fix it! Fix it!’ until you fix it?” Maxon asked, unblinking. Gompers began to laugh.
“You are a jackass,” said Phillips. “A true jackass.”
He turned his face back to the controls in front of him, and Maxon sighed. He did not like waiting for information. He did not like standing aside while others did the thinking and the work. He did not like to delegate, ever. He felt if he could switch places with Phillips and sit at the green and black screen, he would be able to perceive all of Phillips’s errors, communication could be reestablished, and they could rendezvous with the container as planned.
However, communication could not be reestablished. The satellite fixture had simply been sheared away by the meteor and was not functional. No tapping on buttons, no words and numbers on the green and black screen could bring it back. It would take a space walk to reach the place where it had been, and even if they got to it, and stared hard at the twisted metal and shattered fiberglass that was the only remnant of the place where the satellite fixture had been, they would not be able to bring it back. Without it, they were without comms, and they were undeniably off course, falling directly into the moon and out of orbit, if Maxon was not mistaken, and he never ever was.
Phillips and Gompers became more and more intense, while Conrad stayed cool, his face ashen. They kept running checks, they ran checks on everything, everything checked out, except the communications, which were completely down. Without the ability to talk to Houston, without the resources at their disposal at Mission Control, the mission was over, and there was no getting home. While contingencies could be planned for, those contingencies did not include being knocked off course by a meteor and the resulting adjustments. Those could not be made by the astronauts in a rocket with no comms. They needed a way to get a link home, and nothing else would do. Maxon sat in his chair, crossing and uncrossing his fingers, steepling and unsteepling them, his eyes focused inward, trying to be patient, for the sake of Phillips and Gompers.
“If we could get our position,” mumbled Phillips, “if we could get a triangulation…”
“Without our numbers, we have nothing,” said Gompers. “We are decaying right now. We are going to land very hard, very fast. We are not even equipped to land, in this thing, you realize? This thing lands, that’s where she’s going to stay. We need orbit. We’re going to fire the rockets.”
“Wait, in what direction? You think you can just fly it blind? We need Houston, we need information. We can’t even see properly up here.”
“I have an idea,” said Maxon firmly. His voice cut through the close, dry air. He had been so calm through the whole ordeal that the other men were beginning to wonder if he was actually aware of the situation they found themselves in.
“Whatcha got, doc?” asked Gompers.
“We know where the container pod was, right? We know where it was and what its orbit was. If we parallel its speed and its trajectory, we should be able to safely establish a solid orbit. Once that has been accomplished, I can go over to it, and get one of the Hera models to build us a phone.”
“Go over to it? In what, your car?”
“There’s a jetpack suit in Cargo B,” said Conrad.
“I know,” said Maxon. “I’ll wear the jetpack and go over to the container.”
“Do you understand the severity of this situation, sir?”
“No,” he said, “but I’m about to Google it, and by the time we get there, I’ll be well informed.”
Conrad blinked and then slowly began to chuckle. But Phillips reached over and punched him in the arm.
“Jackass!” he repeated. “Look, we can do this. With the software we have on board. We can repurpose the navigational software to function as a GPS. By radio, by radio if we have to.”
“But then what, how,” Gompers began, “how do we get Mission Control access to our numbers?”
“I promise you,” said Maxon blankly, “that I can fix you a way to talk to Houston, if you just get me over to that cargo container. One of the machines the robot Heras are going to build on the moon is a comm center. We only need a Hera. And I need silicon, titanium, iron.”
George and Phillips looked at each other. “Moon metals,” said Phillips. “We need moon metals.”
“Yes, those are minerals found on the moon, among others,” Maxon told them. “The robots are made to extract their own materials from the moon’s environment, can’t be shipping them plastics and aluminum from Earth all the time.”
“Well, where are we going to get silicon and titanium?”
“You can break down some of the equipment in Cargo A,” said Conrad.
“Will there be enough?” asked Phillips.
“I don’t need much,” Maxon said.
While Phillips plotted a course to intercept, Gompers and Maxon sifted through the rest of the rocket, looking for pieces that could be used as raw materials for the Hera to make a phone.
“Thanks,” Maxon told Gompers. “This will cover it. Now, Phillips, can you get us in line with that container?”
“Simple math, my friend. Simple math,” Phillips reassured him. “I gotta say, Genius, you came up with a good one this time.”
It took him two hours to put on the suit they used for space walks. It was a bulky contraption with a glass helmet, gloves, boots, heart monitor, brain scan, and a bodily fluid collector. There were layers and layers to install on himself, and he didn’t quite fit it, being too tall for the legs. The jumpsuit inside felt tight, like he was squeezing into a second skin. The sturdy exoskeleton fit over him and shut. He moved like a monster inside it, like a fifty-foot lizard, motions slow and deliberate, knocking over stuff in Cargo B, sending bits of equipment spinning across the room. The jetpack was operated by controls under his fingers, and with a few short instructions, Maxon was able to understand.
By the time he was ready to go, Phillips and Conrad had worked out the orbit of the container module, had mapped it, and had pulled up alongside it. “Godspeed, Dr. Mann,” said Phillips forlornly. “You have about six hours of working time in that suit. We’ll be in communication with you via the radio.” He went into the airlock. He could see Gompers and Phillips back in the rocket, looking in at him. Then there was a hiss, and the bay opened out onto space.
Without hesitation, he pushed himself off the door to the rocket, and went spinning outward. Did he worry about the jetpack? If it would fire when he pushed the button, if it would function properly? No. Maxon believed in machines. Believed they would do what they were built to do. It was like walking around with a kidney, or a lung. We all do this all the time, Maxon thought. We think nothing of depending on a lump of muscle to keep us living, a lump of biological matter that pulses moment by moment, day by day, on and on in the dark, without respite, without refreshment, and even when we starve it, or stifle it, or overdo it, that lump of pink continues to contract, contract, contract, without a will of its own, without a rest. Without the knowledge of its own sacrifice.
“You are already a robot,” he had once told a roomful of graduate students at a conference in Maine. “The most advanced robot ever created.” The heart pumps without awareness, and that’s why it pumps. Unless there is a mechanical failure, it continues to pump, and who can plan for that? You build your organs out of the best material available. You build them while you are still in the womb. While you are still on Earth, you build your jetpack that will take you out into space, and when you get out there to use it, you just have to trust that you built it right.
Out into space he went, amazingly free of connection. Without a cord to tether him, without a thought to pull him back into regret, he went sailing away. The boys in the rocket saw him silhouetted against the backdrop of the moon, with all of space behind him. He looked no longer human; they had to remind themselves of his flesh and his human soul inside that bright white mechanical suit.
He was human, but uncrushable; human, but breathing; he was human, but free. He could see the Earth, the moon, the rocket behind, and the cargo container in front of him. He had truly departed, and yet he was sort of unaware. Detached. There was no profound experience waiting for him in the depth of space. Other humans, in this situation, were moved to think inwardly. Not so Maxon. He only thought of his direction, of the corrections needed to keep himself on course, the distance between himself and his target. It’s literally all he thought about.
WHEN HE WAS A child, there were very bad times. There were times when his father hit him with a strip of leather. There were times when his father hit him with a brick. These experiences were not lodged in Maxon’s memory. They were not allowed to stay there. He had often been bent, naked to the waist, over his father’s foot locker, instructed to hang on to the bars of the bed. One of the man’s boots would clamp down over his rear, pinning him down while the belt fell again and again on the small of his back, his arms, his ribs. Nowhere for his head to go, nowhere safe. For failing to respond to a question. For failing to deliver an appropriate answer. For upsetting his mother. For being late. Then there was no flesh that would respond with a smack. There were only bones that would thud, and skin that would tear. He would deliver the punishments in the most secret places, to hide them. They would be hidden from view. So, did Maxon have a familiarity with divorcing his mind from a troubling physical situation? Yes. It was one of the first skills he mastered.
THE WALK ACROSS FROM the rocket to the cargo container took him ninety minutes. It was a long ninety minutes, one of total concentration. While he did not feel worry, or pain, or excitement, he did feel the cold urgency that he must succeed. He was his own man, out there, uncontrolled by anyone’s idea, unfettered by anyone’s inadequacy. He was as a body floating, as a speck of dust floating past a warm window in the afternoon, he was rudderless, detached, at the mercy of no wind, no gravity, only operated by the fuel and intention contained in his own white titanium skin. It didn’t take him long to get used to the feeling. He liked it.