“Jack. Nice to meet you.”
“Gustavo,” the man said without a smile.
His sagging denim jeans were cinched up high on his frightfully thin waist with a leather belt. It was no surprise when Gustavo quickly excused himself for being unwell. Jack stood aside to let him pass; it was difficult to get out of the way in such a small room. Gustavo kicked off worn leather shoes and unbuttoned his linen shirt. Stripping down to jutting bones and dingy white underwear, the poet climbed nimbly up to his top bunk and drew its curtains for privacy.
Jack glanced around their stateroom, but there wasn’t much to see. The boxy cabinets, bunk beds, and closets were made of cheap sheet metal. On the wall to the left of the door hung a phone with a pager directory. Farther along, there was a small sink with a cabinet and vanity mirror and then a couple of desks and chairs. Jack saw nothing on Gustavo’s desk—not a phone, laptop, book, magazine, or journal. The poet must have been sitting in the dark at the mercy of his own thoughts.
Jack dumped his bags in the closet that stood open and empty. He was still jet-lagged from all the travel and followed infantry wisdom: Never miss an opportunity to sleep, eat, or shit. Jack took off his sneakers and jeans, climbed into the bottom bunk, and drew its curtains closed.
* * *
JACK WOKE AFTER three in the morning. He turned back and forth in his narrow bunk, but the same premonition of danger kept him alert. Outside his stateroom, Healy’s corridors were lit with red light like the darkrooms from Jack’s earlier days developing film. A network of exposed cables and pipes ran along the ceilings. In the red light of after hours, they looked like arteries or intestines inside a great beast, like Jack was Jonah in the whale.
In his restless wanderings, Jack found the science lounge on 02 deck. It had long tables with computers and chairs, cheap couches, and widescreen TVs. There was only one other person: a youngish woman hunched over the keyboard of a Mac Mini workstation against the wall. Her straight black hair was gathered into a thick ponytail that stopped just short of the floppy hood of her dark sweatshirt. After the woman didn’t turn to acknowledge him, Jack walked to one of the inferior HP laptops on a long table in the middle of the room.
He signed in to a guest account and pulled up a browser. His fingers strummed with impatience as each webpage loaded slowly until the woman cleared her throat in annoyance. Jack searched “conspiracy UD3” and skimmed the reader comments sections beneath online articles. One user posted:
Fake news! Photo made with CGI!
Jack scrolled up to the image accompanying the article and saw a caption beneath it that read, Artist rendering of a comet in space.
The only plausible conspiracy theory was that the comet was invented by NASA after its Asteroid Redirect Mission was defunded back in March. Jack finally logged off and looked to the woman sitting by the wall. If he could have a real conversation about the comet and exorcise that topic from his head, then he might be able to sleep.
The woman didn’t hear him approach but remained mesmerized by the white-blue glow of her screen, which washed out her skin and reflected in the lenses of her glasses. Jack apologized for startling her but couldn’t help glancing at her screen at the negative image of stars. The largest black splotch was circled in red and labeled UD3.
“Doesn’t look too intimidating,” he admitted. “But isn’t it weird that NASA hasn’t released any details?”
She sighed and turned her body toward him. Block letters on the front of her sweatshirt spelled out BERKELEY.
“I don’t know,” she admitted with the shrug of one shoulder.
“But you’re worried?”
“I wouldn’t be sitting here instead of sleeping if I wasn’t worried.”
She wasn’t trying to be rude, just stating a plain fact. The woman added that there had been quite a few scientists reading into the night but they left one by one to try to sleep before sunrise. Jack wished her goodnight and let her be.
He left the science lounge and wandered farther down Healy’s corridors. The crew lounge was delightfully noisy. Jack ducked in for a peek and blinked at the harsh fluorescents. A few computer workstations lined the walls, and several laptops rested on long tables, but none of the Coasties were using them. The mood was lighter and friendlier as a dozen graveyard-shifters enjoyed downtime.
Two men stood in front of a large flat screen, swinging their arms as they watched their Mario Tennis Aces avatars on Nintendo Switch. More lounged on couches in their socks or played cards at a table. Three women gathered in a corner knitting and chatting about work in a good-natured stitch ’n’ bitch. The crew already had the company of friends and familiars. Jack wished he could just walk in, sit at the table, and ask the dealer for a hand of cards.
Back in his stateroom, Jack tried to be as quiet as possible as he returned to his bunk. In the silence before sleep, he heard muffled sobbing from the man lying parallel less than five feet above him.
THREE
Arrival
Kourou, French Guiana
August 2
AMY MADE THE BEST of a jet-lagged, early morning. She had just finished ironing her best silk blouse when there was a knock on the door of her hotel room. Amy peeked through the door’s fisheye lens and saw Ben’s colleague Chuck Maes. He had accompanied them on the flight from Los Angeles to French Guiana and now stood yawning in the hallway, wearing rumpled khaki shorts, thong flip-flops, and a T-shirt. Ben emerged from their foggy bathroom moments after she opened the door. Like Chuck, he dressed in the same anti-style of someone who didn’t need to give a shit about appearances. In less than five minutes, Amy changed into a denim skirt, sandals, and one of Ben’s science conference T-shirts knotted at her slender waist. When in Rome, do as Caesar does.
The three of them piled into a courtesy shuttle before dawn, armed with their laptop bags and paper cups of coffee. Their hotel was on the edge of the town of Kourou, less than five minutes’ drive from the Guiana Space Centre. Chuck asked Ben if he had received any updates.
“Nothing,” Ben said, reflexively checking his phone again. “I assume the Professor wants to debrief me in person.”
There was a nervous silence before Ben launched into their continued discussion of the plan. Amy opened her laptop and put on her tortoiseshell cat-eye reading glasses. She listened to Ben and googled terminology, organizations, and especially people until motion sickness forced her to look out the shuttle’s windows at the moving landscape.
On the flight, Ben told Amy that an equatorial launch at the European Space Agency’s spaceport would leverage the rotational velocity of the Earth and provide extra speed. There wasn’t much knowledge of world geography between the three Americans, however. Amy stared at her laptop keyboard a bit before giving up and typing “Where the hell is French Guiana?” into a search engine.
The French region was on the northern coast of South America, bordered by Suriname to the west and Brazil to the south and southeast. The elevation was low, and most of the thick vegetation had been cleared, leaving only scraggly palm trees, grass, and clumps of bushes along the road. Everything was remarkably green compared to California’s rain-starved terrain. The tropical temperature was already 88°F, but the interior of the shuttle felt like an icebox. Amy considered asking their driver to turn down the air-conditioning, but Chuck was heavyset and Ben was a nervous ball of energy; both were sweating at the temples.