Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

Even as he worked, Jupiter cast its eerie amber light through the domed ceiling. He’d orbited it before; in the game, narrowly avoiding being tugged into the planet’s fierce gravity a hundred times. It was more dazzling in real life, of course. Those furious red rings, whorls and flurries surging and descending on convection currents across its gaseous surface.

What would it be like to see Saturn from this vantage? When he’d been young, Jesse had imagined the texture of each of Saturn’s rings was spiral-grooved, like a vinyl record. That he could roller-skate across their flat surface, taking in the heavens. In Dalton, he’d learned that the rings were actually made of millions of shards of ice and rock, some of them small as a grain of sand and others large as a car.

They were accelerating every second, and in eight months they would be the first humans to see the planet and its giant moons close up. But the thought of reaching it frightened Jesse a little. He’d once heard Sheppard refer to it as ‘the Rubicon’ – the point of no return. Once they approached the planet, Igor would launch the gravity-assist drive. An engine that would push them through the gravitational field of Saturn at the right trajectory to pick up some of its gravitational energy. They would begin to travel at about one seventh the speed of light, fast enough to soar into interstellar space and towards James Dalton’s binary stars. Once they’d reached their neighbouring solar system, they would swing by the planets in the opposite direction, at the right angles, to slow their speed and allow the Damocles to finally be captured in the orbit of Terra-Two. By then, both Eliot and Harry would be in their forties, skilled enough to steer the ship and perform the engine burn entirely without the senior crew. And Igor would not be there to see it.

It was this fact that upset Jesse the most. Igor would never see Terra-Two. Finally, one evening, Jesse mustered the courage to talk to the old man about it. ‘Doesn’t it bother you?’ he asked, lingering behind in the kitchen once their group lesson was over for that afternoon. ‘I heard that the reason you defected from the USSR, the reason you agreed to work on this mission, was because you knew you would be old by the time the project was over but the UK Space Agency promised that no matter what, you could fly with us.’

‘You heard right,’ Igor said.

‘But I don’t understand why,’ Jesse said, ‘when you…’ He didn’t want to say it out loud. He looked down and fiddled with a loose thread on his overalls.

‘I will have completed my own mission,’ Igor said. ‘We all have a different mission, Jesse. We’re all compelled by different gods, fleeing different demons. Shall I tell you something?’

Jesse leant across the table and nodded.

‘You know, I was one of the first men to set foot on Mars.’ Jesse nodded again. Everyone had seen the historic picture of the Soviets pushing their flag into the surface of Mars. Four astronauts. Igor had been the youngest man on the team. ‘I returned like a man in love,’ Igor said. ‘Once I was back on Earth, I longed for the flight, for the sight of my planet from a vast distance, for a vision of the stars unobscured by atmosphere, for the sensation of weightlessness that was so natural to me it was as if I’d been waiting for flight the entirety of my life.’

He spoke with such fervour his eyes lit up. He spoke about how he’d gone on to serve longer and longer missions in spartan hab-labs on the surface of the red planet, digging trenches to shelter from solar storms, performing experiments and broadcasting his results back to Earth. It was not an easy or glamorous life, but it was everything he had ever wanted. When Earthbound, he’d slump into a depression, slip out of the bed where his wife slept, pass his children’s bedrooms to stand outside and behold the sky. Aching like a lovesick mariner.

‘When I learned about my sickness,’ Igor said, touching the bony hollow of his chest, ‘I knew what I had to do.’ He left his wife, his children and grandchildren behind in Norilsk and smuggled with him the plans for the gravity-assist drive — the key to interstellar travel.

‘So,’ he said to Jesse, ‘I try my best. I kept myself healthy as possible until launch. When we reach Saturn, my work will be done.’

His wish was for his body to be launched naked into the vacuum of space, where his cells would not decay and he’d drift for eternity by icy moons and elliptic galaxies, the Eagle Nebulae and the Pillars of Creation, by star nurseries and the resplendent remnants of supernovae. Some part of him would be an eternal witness to the collapse and creation.

‘There are worse things,’ he told Jesse, ‘than death.’ And, for the first time, Jesse believed it.

Chapter 37 JESSE

^07.02.13

A NEW DATE FOR the Orlando mission was selected by the NASA and UKSA directors in London and Houston. This time, it happened to fall on Jesse’s twentieth birthday.