Commander Augustus Mason hated this part of his assignment the most: exchanging mission specialists. First of all, it required him to return to Earth orbit from his current survey location. Granted, faster-than-light travel reduced the trip to effectively no duration worth thinking about, but once there he had to wait around in orbit with very little to do until one mission specialist could be shuttled back to Earth and debriefed and another could be brought up to the ship.
If the boredom of the waiting period weren’t bad enough, what he hated even more was having to get new mission specialists in the first place. It had never been a question of adjusting to a new personality or work routine. They were all more or less the same: as smart as they come and brimming with naive enthusiasm at the prospect of being part of history. This was, after all, the natural extension of the original SETI. Only now, after having solved the problem of interstellar travel, the search could be conducted much more directly.
Without fail, their excitement inevitably turned to boredom, then quickly to irritation, and ultimately to despair. Over the course of the past three years since Mason had taken over as the mission commander, no fewer than a dozen mission specialists had cracked under the pressure. He had taken three of them back to Earth under restraint; unless sedated and confined to their quarters, they surely would have injured Mason or themselves, or possibly even jeopardized the entire search by damaging the ship.
The new mission specialist would be arriving within the hour. Ground control had sent up her bio a few days ago--her name was Virginia Tucker--but Mason had put off reading it until today. He was glad that he had delayed because he hated her immediately. The next few months or weeks (or days, depending on just how naive she was) would be bad enough without the extra time stewing over her biography. The hassle of cleaning up in zero gravity was the only thing that kept him from retching when he opened the file and saw her picture. She was thirty, but had such youthful features that she could have passed for a high school student. But worse than her youth was the ridiculous grin plastered across her face. Mason had long since lost all patience or tolerance for anyone who could be described as “bubbly.” Degrees in mathematics and engineering from prestigious universities, stints with NASA and the ESA, etc.--there was nothing at all unusual about any of that. She would be like all the rest, he convinced himself. As he got to the last line of the bio, his skin crawled at the thought that she might ask him to call her by her nickname, “Ginny,” which had been appended to her bio seemingly as an afterthought.
Ginny tried to catch a glimpse of the storied Commander Mason through the window near the airlock, but he was nowhere to be seen. As her shuttle moved closer to the Adventure, the ship that would take her farther from home than she thought possible to imagine, she ran through the docking procedure checklist one last time.
Since she made up the other fifty percent of the crew and they were on a hurried mission timetable, she had not expected any sort of fanfare upon her arrival. She had held out hope, however, that the Commander’s reputation was not quite as crusty as it had been made out to be. Given the secrecy of their mission, information was difficult to come by. Mission specialists signed a nondisclosure agreement that was harsh enough that no one had yet dared to test its limits. The technology that enabled them to survey the far corners of the galaxy was developed by private investors--investors that wanted both their names and their project results to remain unknown. There were only a handful of people who knew exactly how the technology worked and what it had taken to develop it. Information about the FTL drive was dispensed on a “need to know” basis and Ginny had come to accept that a lowly mission specialist such as herself did not really need to know.
The airlock clicked open and she pulled herself out of the shuttle and into the small room that sat just off the cockpit area and served double-duty as the galley and exercise space. She peered into the cockpit and ventured a tentative “Commander?” She knew that he must be in the cockpit; there were only so many places anyone could be on this ship and they were scheduled to depart Earth orbit almost as soon as she arrived, unloaded, and initiated the shuttle’s surface automatic re-entry protocol.
“In here,” came a gravelly reply from the direction of the cockpit. That part of his reputation, at least, lived up to expectations. A previous specialist had described his voice as “Johnny Cash with laryngitis” and Ginny found it to be a fairly apt description. She pushed off from the edge of the airlock and slipped into the cockpit, stopping herself by extending a hand against the back of the chair where she would be seated for flight operations.
“Commander Mason, I’m Virginia Tucker, your new mission specialist.”
She extended a hand, but Mason barely seemed to acknowledge her presence, let alone begin to return the gesture. He turned slightly away from his screen, but not enough to actually look at the Adventure’s new cohabitant.
“Cargo bay is to the aft, but I take it you already know that. Report here for pre-flight checks when you finish unloading. Welcome aboard, Tucker.”
“Thank you, Commander. Back home everyone calls me--”
“Dismissed, Tucker.”
Mason had just known that she would try to foist that awful nickname on him at the first opportunity, so he had no qualms about cutting her off. Authority and chain of command weren’t as strict as they might have been in the military, but with so many former military members taking part in this mission over the years, the lingo had come to be more or less accepted. Though he didn’t look, he was sure he could feel Tucker’s shoulders droop as she slinked, crestfallen, back to the cargo bay to go about her duties.
Ginny went about her duties as if nothing were amiss. Commander Mason was a busy man and now really wasn’t a good time for idle chats. She finished unpacking the payload which consisted mostly of their food for the next several months, along with items required for routine maintenance of the ship. The few personal items she was allowed to bring filled a bag no larger than a child’s backpack and was the last item she stowed away in her sleeping area before she returned to bid farewell to the shuttle.
It seemed as if she had practiced the airlock procedure frequently enough that she could do it blindfolded. After logging into the onboard computer system from the terminal near the airlock, calling up the program that would execute the automatic re-entry protocol was simple enough. Most procedures could be performed by the ship’s computer and only required one of the crew to confirm the settings and then initiate the command. Pressing “Enter” on a keyboard was utterly lacking in the sort of drama that befit the occasion, Ginny thought. Here she was, a hundred miles above the Earth, using a computer to automatically send a space shuttle back from outer space to the surface--an event that was utterly inconceivable not all that long ago--and the prospect of the operation ending in failure had not even entered her mind until this moment, only to be dismissed as virtually impossible. The shuttle gently drifted away from the Adventure and Ginny watched as the first set of retro rockets began to fire, positioning the shuttle to execute the remainder of the pre-programmed re-entry.
“Are you finished yet, Tucker?” Mason half-growled. “I need you up here for pre-flight.”
Ginny snapped out of her moment of contemplation. She folded the keyboard back into place and pushed off toward the cockpit.
Strapping into her chair, Ginny pulled up her portion of the pre-flight checklist procedure on the screen in front of her and got to work. The Commander was busy about his own checks and spoke to her only when the procedure required it. She tried to steal a glance at him every once in a while, carefully, lest he think she was marvelling at her new environment rather than preparing for their next leg of the search.
A glance at a time, she saw that although much of his reputation was accurate, her picture of his physical appearance was deficient. The official photograph that appeared at the top of Augustus Mason’s bio showed a man in his forties, with a mere suggestion of gray beginning to creep toward his temples; he was tan and fit, as if he had come straight from a shoot for the cover of one of those male health magazines. The man Ginny found circling the earth in the Adventure could have passed for the father of the man she had pictured. His hair, now, was almost completely gray and his skin had not only grown pale, but hung rather more loosely around his face and neck. He appeared to have stayed in remarkable shape despite his long time in space--the longest continuous time in space by any human, although likely no one else would ever know it--but his physique had more in common with someone exercising in a solitary confinement cell as opposed to someone making daily treks to the local gym. Given the premium placed on leg room when working in an interstellar spaceship, Ginny supposed that made sense. Perhaps what struck her more about the Commander’s metamorphosis was the perpetual scowl lines around the edges of his face. Here was a man who not only lacked the opportunity to smile, but didn’t exactly go looking for any such opportunity either.
The new involuntary companions finished their work in almost complete silence. Ginny wondered whether she would be forced to spend the bulk of her mission this way, with the only other human who knew where she was and what she was doing avoiding any interactions other than what was strictly required. Mason hoped that Tucker’s ability to keep her trap shut was real and enduring, rather than merely apparent and fleeting.
“Coordinates and course are laid in, Commander.”
“Very good. Engaging drive power in 3, 2, 1 . . . ”
The Adventure arrived in a high planetary orbit without incident. Ginny had found faster-than-light travel to be not nearly as exciting as she had imagined. She remembered from her training that decelerating as they approached their destination would consume the bulk of the trip, and satisfied herself to pass the time devouring one of the books loaded onto her e-book device, one of her few personal items and the only electronic device on the ship that was not part of the ship itself. Although she had a private sleeping area where she could have gone to read, she preferred the open area of the corridor/galley/gym area. She hoped to be able to strike up a conversation when Mason asked her what she was reading, but the opportunity never came. The most conversation she seemed able to tease out of him was when he was polite enough to say “Excuse me” as he passed through the corridor on his way to or from the cockpit.
Although she had an almost endless supply of historical fiction novels to entertain her on her e-reader, she happened to be reading the only print book she had brought with her--a well-worn, black, softcover volume that she pored over on a daily basis--when Mason called her into the cockpit.
“Tucker, get up here. We’re about to finish our deceleration and shift into orbit.”
Ginny stowed her reading material and floated toward the cockpit. Situating herself at her station, she dutifully pulled up her display and double-checked all of her settings. She had found that for almost every procedure on the ship, Mason regarded her as little more than a second set of eyes. Whether he didn’t trust her or felt as if he didn’t need her, Ginny had not yet quite figured out. She looked up just in time to see the planet come into full view; Mason had plowed ahead before she had finished setting up.
It was, in a word, breathtaking. Nothing had quite prepared Ginny for the experience of seeing this new planet. Seeing Earth from space had been the experience of a lifetime, she had thought, back when she first went up to the aging ISS for NASA. But this was something entirely different. The readings showed that they were still almost 1,500 miles above the planet’s surface, but it already seemed to her as if its curvature were beginning to disappear. This planet was, to put it mildly, massive. It immediately reminded her of our own solar system’s Jupiter. It was “just” another gas giant and yet it somehow seemed that much more spectacular and fascinating due to its novelty.
“Snap out of it and start checking the math on the low orbit entry routine,” barked Mason. She knew he had caught her mesmerized by the view rather than focused on her duties. She tapped away on her keyboard without a word. If she had learned anything in her short time on the Adventure it was that Mason valued efficient execution of tasks more than an acknowledgment of his authority.
Mason, for his part, had been hoping for a much more mundane location for Tucker’s first survey. He had hoped the same thing with the last several mission specialists, but it seemed that that hope was mostly in vain. A dull, featureless planet sapped their enthusiasm away more quickly than something like this. He’d be lucky to get much quality work out of her now that they would be supplied with this sort of view. Were he younger and less-experienced, he might have paused to study and marvel at the swirling colors of the gaseous clouds and storms that raged below. But by now he had seen it all. One planet was more or less like all the others.
“The low orbit entry routine is programmed, Commander. We’ll be coming up to our transfer window in about six minutes.”
Mason executed the orbital transfer flawlessly and silently. They would begin their survey work as they passed over the pole, but that would be several hours after orbit was achieved.
Ginny ventured a question, more for the sake of making conversation than for the information. “Once we get started, how long do you think it will take us to get this one done?”
Mason suppressed a sigh and turned toward the instrument panel on his left so Tucker wouldn’t see him roll his eyes. It was always the same set of questions from the new folks. “Probably about a week . . . assuming you don’t do too much stargazing.”
Ginny half-stifled a chuckle. It had sounded like some good-natured joshing, but she was still unsure of Mason. He merely continued staring straight out the front of the cockpit.
“You can head down to the workstation and make sure the probes are ready. Let me know when you finish that.” It was well ahead of schedule for that, Mason knew, but otherwise she might keep trying to make conversation. He hadn’t quite reached the point where she was annoying enough to be blunt about the fact that there was no conversation to be had.
On the third day after arriving, Ginny was fishing one of the pre-packaged meals out of the small storage compartment in the galley area when Mason floated in.
“Grab one for me too . . . please.”
Ginny obliged him and gently nudged the package over to his outstretched hand. He unsealed it and removed the dessert to get to the entree which, for reasons he had yet to unravel, always seemed to be on the bottom.
“You get used to ‘em,” Mason offered, after watching his shipmate turn up her nose slightly at her first taste of her meal. “Which one did you get?”
“It says turkey.” The look on Ginny’s face said that she wasn’t sure that she could force her tastebuds to accept that claim as true.
“You know, for as long as I’ve been doing this, you would have thought they’d have figured out the food by now.”
At least the Commander was talking to her now, even if it was only to complain. “I’ve had better; that’s for sure,” she agreed. “But I guess it could be worse.”
Mason raised an eyebrow at her. “Worse? How exactly?”
“Well . . .”
“We already have to recycle and drink our own urine, Tucker!”
Ginny let a sheepish grin slip out and she was almost sure that she saw the hint of a smile creep onto the corners of Commander Mason’s mouth. For a moment he seemed something more than just the grizzled veteran of space exploration.
They were now eleven months into their mission; it would be five more months before the resupply drone came to drop off provisions and carry back samples. Mason had reached the limit of his ability to handle Tucker’s seemingly relentless optimism weeks ago. No one had ever lasted this long and those mission specialists who had lasted longer than others had only been going through the motions by the time they requested to be relieved of their duties. This Virginia Tucker was different and it annoyed him to no end.
They were completing the last stages of surveying what had turned out to be a completely uninhabitable ice giant planet in the HA 11347 system. Ginny watched as the final set of data came in, saved them to the appropriate backup folder, and then headed to the cockpit from the lab area. Even after all these months, the Commander seemed to prefer to work from the cockpit more than any other area of the Adventure.
“Commander Mason, the last set of data is ready. It looks like this one will go down as another NH”--that was the mission shorthand for “non-habitable.”
There was absolutely no reason for anyone to take offense at such an innocuous statement. But Augustus Mason was not just anyone and Virginia Tucker had to be the most obnoxiously optimistic person he had ever met. He always managed to keep the swearing under his breath, but he was past the point at which he could hold the rest in.
“Can you really just not give it a rest with the relentless optimism shtick? You’re about to make me vomit over here,” he practically bellowed. He had expected this to catch Tucker off guard, but if it had phased her she wasn’t showing it.
“Sorry, sir. I’ll be in the lab unless you need me here.”
She waited a moment before being dismissed by a disgusted flick of Mason’s wrist in the general direction of the lab area. Ginny had sensed the tension brewing for weeks now. The best thing she could think of to do--and she had been preparing for the inevitable boil over--was to apply herself to her work. When she was fully immersed in her work, time seemed to fly. So when Commander Mason came floating back toward the laboratory after what had seemed like only a few minutes, she was surprised to see that several hours had already passed. He settled in across from her and sat silently for a minute before speaking.
“Tucker, I hope you won’t hold that, uh, episode against me.”
It wasn’t exactly an admission of guilt and it certainly wasn’t an apology. But then, Ginny was not expecting to hear either of those things.
“I’m fully committed to the mission, sir. You don’t have to worry about me.”
“Look, I guess it’s just that you’ve lasted longer than any of the others have--you’ve pretty much lasted longer than any two or three of them put together. You spend that much time with anyone and the little things are going to start to grate on your nerves. It’s nothing personal.”
Aside from what was required to maneuver the ship and perform the survey operations, Ginny was sure that this was the most words that had been exchanged between the two of them since she came aboard. She could only guess how long it might be before she had another such opportunity.
“Is there something I can do differently, sir?”
“Well, for starters, let’s drop a bit of the formality. No more ‘Commander’ or ‘sir.’ Mason will do.”
Ginny simply nodded.
“But other than that, Tucker, I don’t want to make a whole ordeal out of this. You seem to be more predisposed to take the optimistic route and I’m just not. I was like you once, you know.”
Ginny found that hard to imagine, but didn’t question it.
“But I’ve been out here longer than any human has ever been in space. I’ve seen more of the universe than anyone a generation ago even thought possible. The search has been . . .”
Here he trailed off and looked down at his feet. Ginny wanted to peel back another layer on this complicated man with almost every fiber of her being, but she held back, afraid that this could quickly turn from a potential breakthrough to an irreparable breakdown.
He finally broke the silence. “Well, anyway, I’ll try to work on it; I’m sure you’ll do the same. I can at least respect someone who’s in it for the long haul like I am. I’ll leave you to it.” He nodded in the direction of the sample she was cataloging and left in the direction of his sleeping area.
Several weeks later they were finishing up another survey--on yet another planet with no recognizable signs of life--when Mason floated through the lab on the way to the cargo bay. Ginny looked up from her work and said “Mason, come take a look at this. I was just taking a look at some of the readings the advance probes took when they did the prelim survey of the next planet and--”
Mason cut her off. “I don’t care, Tucker.”
“Well, it’s just that the atmospheric oxygen--”
“I said ‘I don’t care.’ What part of that did you fail to understand?”
“I’m sorry, I just . . .” Ginny was at a loss for words.
“Have you been out here this long and you still don’t get it?” he said, the exasperation in his voice evident.
Ginny furrowed her brow, utterly confused. “Don’t get what? I . . .”
“This is all a huge waste of time. We’re alone. ‘Space is big. Really big. Vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big’ . . . fine, whatever . . . but it’s also completely lifeless except for us. We have more than enough data than to keep pretending otherwise.”
“Well, Mason, just because--”
“No, there is no ‘just because’ here. You know how this works, right? The advance probes conduct preliminary surveys to narrow down the prospects for the intensive surveys that the two of us do. We collect samples and report our findings, our results. Do you know what the results are?”
Here, Mason paused. Ginny knew the question was rhetorical, but hardly dared to breathe lest she break the silence. If it were possible to drop a pin in zero-g, you would have heard it hit the floor.
“Nothing. A whole lot of nothing. More nothing than our puny little ape brains can comprehend. When you went through orientation they probably led you to believe that the program was less than a decade old. The truth is it’s approaching half a century. Of course, it would be much harder to supply a steady stream of volunteers for this expensive pipe dream if they knew what they were in for, that they would never make history, because there is nothing out here with which to make any sort of scientific history. A warehouse full of rocks and gas tanks. That’s it. And they’ve been at it since our parents were in grade school. Pull up the full catalogue some time and look at how far-ranging the search has really been. You have access to that now, although that’s not part of your training either.”
“I have, actually,” Ginny managed timidly.
“Then you should know exactly what I’m talking about. Thousands of advance probes each doing prelim scans of thousands of potential planets for decades on end. We’re no closer to finding exterrestrial intelligence than we ever were. At a certain point you have to accept something, something all the other mission specialists got through their heads much quicker than you seem to be getting it: we are alone and there is nothing out here to be found.”
“I know.”
Mason continued as if she had said nothing.
“But because the stuff we do helps to line the pockets of some--”
“I know,” she said again.
“What?” He made a face she had never seen before. He was puzzled.
“I said that I know.”
“Know what?” he sneered.
“I’ve looked through the full catalogue. I know that the mission has been going on for decades. I know that we haven’t found anything. I’ve known since my first month aboard.”
Mason let out something that was some amalgamation of a huff, a sigh, and a chuckle. “Then I really just don’t get you.” He continued toward the cargo area.
She followed and caught up with him as he was beginning to move bins around to get to the one he needed. Noticing her, he turned and said “I said everything I wanted to say. Can we just get back to work?”
“But you didn’t let me finish.”
Despite their greater level of familiarity, he could still, technically, accuse her of insubordination. He stopped what he was doing and folded his arms across his chest.
“No, the search so far hasn’t turned up new life. You say we’re alone, and that’s one way to think about it.”
“That’s pretty much the only way to think about it, isn’t it?” He was quickly getting annoyed again, she could see.
“What if, instead, it means we’re unique? What if it means there’s something special about us humans?”
“Okay, good one, Tucker.” She was making an attempt at a joke, he thought (and not much of an attempt at that) to diffuse the situation.
“No, I’m serious. You’ve seen me reading my Bible--the only print book I have up here. You know how I believe we got here in the first place. You’re convinced that these expeditions will never find any other life in the universe. There’s enough data in our files to make that conclusion not so far-fetched. But there’s something I think you’re not asking yourself.”
“What’s that?” he almost spat.
“Why is there any life anywhere in the universe? We might be ‘alone,’ as you put it, yes, but if life is just so impossibly hard to find, why is there something rather than nothing in the first place?”
“Save it. I’ve heard it all before. I’ve gotten this far without all that religious nonsense and you’re definitely not going to be the one to change my mind.”
Ginny let out a sigh that had more of resignation to it than frustration. “No, I don’t suppose I probably will. But at least now you know why. You know what it means to me to be out here, exploring the depths of a universe that has a Creator.”
He wasn’t buying it, but he wasn’t cutting her off either, so she kept going.
“If humans haven’t found what they’re looking for, I can’t help but think that maybe they’ve been looking in the wrong places for the wrong things. Don’t get me wrong: I’d love to discover evidence of some other beings out here, but discovering what the universe can tell me about the Supreme Being is more than enough for me.”
“All right, Tucker. I get it. We have work to do.”
For Mason, the next months until resupply passed slowly. Not only would there be needed supplies on the soon-to-arrive drone, but it would also be the best opportunity for Tucker to catch a ride back to Earth. They had not yet broached the topic of her decision one way or the other. In fact, since that day back in the lab, he had tried to avoid talking to her at all unless absolutely necessary. For her part, she seemed not to notice, and was as pleasant as ever. It puzzled him to no end.
He found her, as expected, in the lab area, going over supply lists and updating the spreadsheets on the nearby terminal. He left her to her work and headed back toward the cockpit.
On his way, as he was floating past her sleeping area, something bumped him in the shoulder. He turned to see that Tucker’s Bible had somehow slipped out of her storage netting. He grabbed it to put it back, but not before his curiosity got the better of him and he opened it to where Tucker had left her bookmark. One passage had been underlined and he read:
1 Lord, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory
in the heavens.
2 Through the praise of children and infants
you have established a stronghold against your enemies,
to silence the foe and the avenger.
3 When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,
4 what is mankind that you are mindful of them,
human beings that you care for them?
5 You have made them a little lower than the angels
and crowned them with glory and honor.
6 You made them rulers over the works of your hands;
you put everything under their feet:
7 all flocks and herds,
and the animals of the wild,
8 the birds in the sky,
and the fish in the sea,
all that swim the paths of the seas.
9 Lord, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
He gazed back in the direction of the lab, wondering whether he had learned something about Virginia Tucker, the person, then shook his head and went back to his work.
The day the drone arrived and Mason had still not said anything to Tucker about her being on board to go back to Earth. He was sure she had had enough of him, by this point. So it was no small surprise to him to see her relaxing in her sleeping area, yet again reading her Bible, when the drone came within range. None of her things were packed and she showed no signs at all of being prepared for a return to Earth.
She looked up from her reading. “Need me to assist with the docking, Commander?”
“No, Tucker. Carry on.”
“Manned space flight is an amazing achievement. But it has opened for us thus far only a tiny door for viewing the awesome reaches of space. Our outlook through this peephole at the vast mysteries of the universe only confirms our belief in the certainty of its Creator.”
-- Dr. Werner von Braun
Great story, liked the twist!