Straying From the Path

“Are you sane? Are you coming back here now?”

“I’ve got air packs with me. Just give me static.”

Alvy did as I asked, so I couldn’t hear anything but hissing, the white noise of a data stream. No singing. When I opened my eyes, the woman, the vision, was gone.

I used a compressed air pack attached to the suit to jet back to the airlock. A couple of controlled bursts was all it took. My breathing stayed normal, the danger was over. In fact, it seemed long gone. Like a dream.

Alvy met me at the airlock. Her shoulders were bunched to her ears with tension. It was good to see her.

She was talking before she even lifted off my helmet. “No more kidding around, Barrie. What’s up with you? What’s happening with you out there?”

Sullen, I clenched my jaw and stared at the floor. Honesty. Partnership. That’s what pulled me back from the song, but I still couldn’t open my mouth. I couldn’t just tell her: I’m going insane.

“Talk to me, Barrie.”

“If I tell you, you’ll tell Command, and they’ll ground me planetside.”

“If you don’t talk, I’ll tell them you’re completely off-balance, and they’ll ground you anyway.” That was Alvy, eminently practical.

“The data—electromagnetic, radiation. Have the readings been—strange?”

“Strange how?”

Maybe an effect of the swirling storms of radiation, the battling tides of gravity in the Jupiter system—its effect on people—had escaped detection until now. Regularly scheduled mining and survey missions to the other moons were only just starting. Maybe our prolonged exposure had affected our perceptions—

I so wanted to believe in an outside explanation.

“Maybe I’m just tired.”

Anxiety induced delirium. The simplest explanation was probably the correct one. The greatest proof supporting this was my readiness to rely on folklore for excuses.

Command gave us a timetable and programmed trajectory for the burn out of the system. We spent the next week collating data and shutting down our instruments. I spent some of that time on the observation deck, watching the view of Europa slip past. We’d found what all previous observations told us we’d find: silicate rock; oxygen; masses of frozen water, their surfaces cracked and scarred, broken and slushy from the heat generated by tidal flexing. We found the ingredients necessary for life, but not life, not so much as a colony of bacteria growing by an underwater thermal vent. Gray, somber, dead, she drifted.

Anything else I’d seen—I had no proof it hadn’t been my imagination.

I saw shadows of movement at the edges of my vision and decided not to look at them. I had been so desperate to find life, to be the one to make that discovery. So desperate, I saw phantoms.

We had an hour-long fuel burn to accelerate, then a day of travel to take us far enough out of Jupiter space to use a Mandelbrot jump to Mars space. We spent the hour strapped into our crash chairs, adjusting to the sensation of weight, stuck with our thoughts to pass the time. Even with my eyes closed, I could see the shadows dancing, calling.

I’d never had any kind of breakdown on a mission before, and I helped open Mars Polar. That statement usually got spacers to buy me drinks and pat my shoulder sympathetically. But maybe this was a sign; I’d been doing this too long. Maybe it was time to let Command ground me. If there wasn’t actually anything out there.

“Alvy,” I said, my voice sounding loud in the cabin. “Have you ever lost so much equipment on a mission before?”

“No. Why?”

“What if there really is something out there?”

“Something. Like what?”

Something. Sirens that lured sailors to their deaths, the fairy maids that seduced young men only to drown them, imps that stole one sock of a pair out of the cleaner—

“Something that causes wrenches and data chips to disappear, and a seasoned veteran to want to take off his suit during an EVA.”

Whatever had taken Alvy’s wrench had taken my mind. Or maybe I’d just misplaced it, and I hadn’t looked hard enough. We had a few days until we reached Mars. Maybe Alvy could help me find it before the post-mission psych evaluation.

Alvy stared at the monitors. The thrust of burning fuel rumbled through the ship, a pleasant background noise, preventing silence.

When she spoke, her voice was calm, like a computerized countdown. “I’ll find that missing gear. As soon as we’re home, I know I will. It’ll all be under a deckplate. I put it there and forgot it, part of a little hallucination, just like you had. Objects do not just disappear off spacecraft.”