Straying From the Path

She wasn’t bleeding, air wasn’t

hissing out of any cracks in the hull. So matters couldn’t have been too cataclysmic.

“What?”

“Data’s gone. I went to transmit and got an error message. Zero bytes to transfer. I had it all on the chip, Barrie. A gig of data, ready to go, then a second later it was gone. Just disappeared. Where did it go?”

The same place as the wrench? “So something’s wrong with the computer.”

She covered her eyes with her hands and moaned. “Please tell me there was a backup.”

“Isn’t that your job?” I squeezed past her through the narrow corridor and went to control.

The message light still flashed on the display. Zero bytes. Nothing to upload. Communication canceled. I punched up some commands, searched the memory. The computer contained stored copies of previous reports for the last three months, but no sign of this week’s. I searched every database.

So the computer had a bug. I could almost hear the thing scratching away at our systems, carrying away loose gigabytes and wrenches.

If I listened very closely, I could hear it tapping on the hull outside the station. Something scraped hard nails on Benjamin’s steel shell, as though looking for a way to get inside.

“Maybe you didn’t fix the transmitter after all.”

“I don’t think the transmitter could have eaten the data.” The transmitter had never left dormant mode. But something made a noise, tapping on the hull hard enough for the vibrations to travel through the steel, through the station’s atmosphere, to my ears as sound. “Do you hear something?”

“The air cycling. The electronics.”

“No. Something outside.”

“Are you joking?”

There I was, hallucinating twice in as many days. I wasn’t even outside this time. I couldn’t blame it on bad air.

I changed the subject. “You think I should go back out and check the transmitter?”

“I think we should run some diagnostics first.” She pushed me out of her seat and dove into the computer systems herself. Last night, we ran tests on my space suit. The diagnostic came up clean, no obvious malfunctions.

I retreated to the sensor and observation deck, where most of the scopes and other receivers were mounted. There, a bubbled viewport revealed the space outside.

The streaked gray surface of Europa filled most of the view, Jupiter most of what was left. The light reflecting from them both washed out the stars and most of the well-defined shadows characteristically formed by the unmediated sunlight in space.

One shadow—long, slender, like a raised arm—lying along a bare curve of the ship that shouldn’t have held a shadow, remained. Something slipped along the hull. I saw movement—I shouldn’t have, not outside the probe.

“Alvy, I’m going back out,” I said, passing through control on my way to medical.

“But I don’t think it’s the transmitter.” She followed me; I hardly noticed.

“It wouldn’t hurt to check.”

“Barrie, do you think you should go out? After yesterday?”

I acted confident, assured. Shoulders straight, chin up. “I’m fine.”

She lifted a skeptical brow. She knew me too well. I usually slouched, and only straightened my shoulders when I was nervous.

“It’s probably not the transmitter,” she said.

I’d already climbed into the body of the suit, checking seals and oxygen charges as I went. Reluctantly, she helped me with the gloves and joint bindings.

“Why do you really want to go out? Some getting back on the horse thing?”