Straying From the Path

“What spooked you, Barrie?” Alvy—Teresa Alvarez—loomed over me, where I sat on the bench in what served as our combination medical unit and EVA prep room. Together, we’d peeled off my suit; like a headless corpse, it slumped by the airlock door, waiting for a diagnostic.

Her short brown hair stood straight up, she hadn’t changed her jumpsuit in days, and her face was so pale and lined, she looked ten years older than her thirty-odd years. Twenty years older. Like she was ready for retirement.

I didn’t want to know how I looked. I could feel the stubble on my chin growing. “I couldn’t breathe. I thought—I thought something had happened to the helmet. I saw—” I hadn’t meant to say that.

“What did you see?”

My hands lay in my lap, too heavy to lift to even rub my face. Neat trick in weightlessness. “I didn’t see anything.”

“So you were hallucinating? Did something happen to your oxygen mix?” She punched a few commands into the panel of the suit’s control unit and snapped out the data chip, which she plugged in to the medical comp terminal. “Something must have happened to your mix. Maybe for just a second. Another problem to add to the list. Command’ll scratch any more EVA work now.”

A momentary glitch in the oxygen flow. It sounded so logical.

My rational self responded to that thought, and backed by years of training and drills, began to gather my scattered wits. “So I managed to get the transmitter on line before I—before the malfunction?”

Alvy didn’t turn from her data readout to talk. “Yes. But that just means we have to report to Command. If I decide I like the blackout better I may send you out to foul it back up.”

Her joke stayed with me the rest of the day. Not because it was funny—although these days, the strangest things seemed hilarious—but because I wanted to go out again. Rationally, logically, I told myself I needed to overcome a developing phobia, a sense of suffocation that crept up on me every few hours or every few minutes, a claustrophobia that would be crippling on a small, two-person observer probe like Benjamin. If I didn’t get back out and prove to my psyche that space did not (necessarily) mean an inability to breathe, I’d end up sedated in the med unit.

That was the excuse. It was a good excuse—if exaggerated. But truthfully, I wanted to go back to find what it was I’d really seen.

Benjamin’s mission was the pipe dream of the century reduced to a bureaucratic joke: life on Europa. After the possibility of life on Mars went bust, Europa gained prestige as the System’s most likely candidate for supporting non-Earth life. Several dozen fly-bys, a dozen probes, a handful of remote landings and a hundred years of scrutiny later, Europa had lost all that prestige.

Regulations stipulated that a world with the potential for sustaining native life must have direct human confirmation that no life existed before it was declared lifeless and opened to mining and industry. The purpose of this admittedly impractical rule was to avoid the sabotage of automated probes or corruption of transmitted data by unscrupulous economic interests. The crewed mission to study the moon was the final, preparatory phase before Trade Guild lifted the environmental quarantine and sent surveyors to Europa.

No one expected us to find life, but enough politicians and naturalist groups supported the ideal behind the regulation that Trade Guild Command had to make at least the semblance of a serious effort to look for life one more time. The trouble was, I really wanted to find life. I believed the automated data was still inconclusive, and that Trade Guild shouldn’t lift the quarantine. We may not have found life there now, but Europa might develop life in the future, if left alone. Some of us wanted to protect the moon, if we could.

Ours was a mission of pure idealism and wishful thinking, and it was doomed from the start. Ideological and political difficulties aside, mechanical problems had plagued us the entire three months of the mission. We’d had a series of equipment malfunctions; tools and gear went missing at least once a week. So far, these glitches were annoying rather than life-threatening. But we all felt that sooner or later a true disaster would strike. Alvy and I were battling time—any day now, Command would send a recall order, shutting down the mission because of the mechanical problems, leaving Europa open for mining.

The day after my own personal malfunction, life aboard Benjamin returned to normal. Things went wrong. I sat at my lab station, collating data gathered the day before from our dozen or so scopes. Alvy called to me from another part of the ship.

“Barrie, have you seen that chip?”

“What chip?”

“The one from your suit.”

“Did you leave it in the medical computer?”

“I checked already. Are you sure it isn’t in with your chips?”

“Yes. Did you put it back in the suit?”

“I checked there.” She always checked everywhere.

“Well, it has to be somewhere on board. It can’t have gone anywhere.”

“That’s what I said about my wrench last week. Still haven’t found it.”

I knew what came next; she’d search the ship top to bottom, the chip wouldn’t turn up, just like the wrench hadn’t, and she’d stew about how the universe had it in for her.

A couple hours later I had the scope data ready and gave it to Alvy with the rest of the probe reports. She made the weekly transmissions to Command. This week’s was three days late because of the malfunction in the transmitter, which had required me going out to reconnect a cable that had broken loose.

About when she should have been uploading the data to the transmitter, her shouted expletive filled the ship.

I thought she’d blown up the computer, sliced off her leg, something truly horrible—as horrible as losing one’s helmet on an EVA. Hand over hand, I pulled myself from my station to control, kicking in weightlessness, to see what had happened. She met me halfway.

“Data’s gone,” she said.