Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

SOMETIMES HER FATHER WOULD call upon new believers to tell the story of how they came to faith. Their testimony. And this was hers. Astrid had grown up knowing that there was a distant planet outside her own solar system, a green twin of Earth orbiting dual stars. The first day that a longing to go there awoke inside her, she had been in assembly. All the children in her year group had been ushered into the school hall to watch a video, part of a presentation delivered by a team from the UKSA. ‘Another habitable planet,’ announced one of them across the darkened room and the screen lit up with dazzling vistas of an alien land. Astrid saw an ocean, lush mountain ranges and terracotta canyons ridged like jewel-box shells.

‘They call it a “New Earth”,’ said the young astrobiologist with exaggerated air-quotes, ‘but our findings actually suggest that Terra-Two is many millions of years older than our own Earth; truly, we’re living on Terra-Two.’

Under the collar of her shirt, Astrid’s neck prickled with goosebumps. She sat up as if she had been called by name, and in a way she had. This, they’d told her, was a place for the intrepid. The first settlers would not arrive until they were middle-aged, even if they left today. Their job would be to chart terrain, and to explore the land, to name the secret schools of fish that swept through the coral reefs, and photograph night-blooming flowers. Someone in this room, they’d said in a reverent whisper, may be the first to set foot in the crystalline caves that had formed underground. Astrid had imagined herself descending to find her own adult face reflected in the frosty mineral beams.

This is a job for the brave, they’d said, a job for dreamers, for people who, like Astrid, woke every morning longing for another world. ‘Imagine it,’ the recruiter had said. And Astrid had.

That week, she’d bounced around with the hyper energy of a new convert. She would get into Dalton, she would specialize in astrobiology, she would be accepted into the Beta and she would go to Terra-Two.

Astrid would remember the years after that assembly and before the launch as a single shining line of triumph. The shortest route between point A, the naming of her desire and point B, leaving Earth – its sole zenith of realization.

Later, they would ask what she had been thinking when the hatch slammed shut. Had she been contemplating what a slow labour their mission was, how many minds and hands it had taken to get her to this point, to this two-minute launch window? Or was she counting every sacrifice, every year of her life she had given and was still to give?

As the flight director commenced the countdown, she heard Professor Stenton’s measured voice crackle through the headset. ‘Take care of yourself,’ she said, the thing she said whenever she bid them goodbye from the driveway before a school trip, or at the start of a holiday with the sun in her eyes.

They would ask Astrid if she had been afraid and she would answer ‘no’ every time. And if she ever looked back at the strange arc of her life and wondered if any moment had been as perfect as dreaming of it, she would say, ‘that one’.

The shuttle launched. Astrid burst through the luminescent atmosphere and into the black firmament beyond. She had been longing to leave her whole life, and finally nothing was standing between her and the stars.

PART TWO

Chapter 9 JUNO

^13.05.12

^LAUNCH

IT TAKES OVER A million pounds of fuel to launch a shuttle into space. A fact that occurred to Juno when the engines fired and the fear came. The shuttle pitched and rolled. Juno felt the back of her seat drop away from under her and she gasped.

This was the dangerous point. Just before the solid rocket boosters lit, the computers could still call off the launch. It could be anything that forced them to abort: an overheated pump, a broken coolant valve or something more dangerous like a tank rupture. They had practised emergency escapes, jumping out of the hatch and running back across the access arm into the metal slide-wire baskets that would release them down the 400-metre drop to a shielded bunker to take cover from an explosion.

As mission control counted down the final seconds, Juno was sure that something had gone wrong, because she felt as if the orbiter was about to roll right off the launch pad. Perhaps some bolt had ruptured too early and the shuttle had ceded to gravity at this first hurdle.

But, by the time the flight director said ‘One’, they were upright again and then they were flying.

‘Lift-off!’ came the exultant voice from mission control, the same way men shout, ‘Goooooooal!’ during a football match, ‘We have lift-off!’ and over the headset, Juno could hear laughter and applause.