Voyage

It was the first time for Miles Levenage. He couldn’t believe what he was experiencing. He’d had the laptop almost a year - rather fittingly, it was coloured ‘space grey’ - and he hadn’t tried out the speakers until today. What had he been missing? How could they do that? It was just a laptop, with no hidden extras, small and light enough for him to bring along. Yet, as the track played, drums and hi-hat emanated convincingly from a point about a foot to the left of the device. The vocals, similarly, were coming from somewhere well east of the return key. How many more things could this thing do, that he’d paid for and hadn’t known about? And now, perhaps he would never know the full extent of its capabilities. “You can’t always get what you want,” sang Mick Jagger.

Miles’ thoughts turned to home. Suddenly, he missed fresh air. He longed as never before for damp, earthy dawn wind over dewy grass. From the window before him, he could take in the vastness of the azure sea and the verdant green land. Lulled by the hiss of the recirculation pump, he had to make a conscious effort to stay awake as his eyelids grew heavier.

In that warm, drowsy twilight, he was both surprised and not, by his own serene calm. As an adolescent, he had often wondered how he would cope when this moment came. He’d come to the conclusion that he’d not worry too much, given life’s finite inevitability. Miles was gratified to learn that he’d been right; he’d anticipated his future self remarkably well.

For some, the close of life would be a gradual slide down a gentle slope, as the sands of ageing streamed, with measured pace, toward a wholesomely dignified exit, family and friends all around. For others, it was more sudden, the first intimation of their imminent mortality perhaps a crushing chest pain that heralded their last few minutes, or maybe a solemnly delivered, morbid revelation from a brow-furrowed doctor.

Miles closed his eyes and he was back by the sea. The salt wind whipped his cheeks as keenly as if he were really there, the waves lapping up to his toes on the dark, sticky sand. Seagulls wheeled and screeched as the gusts knocked the foamy tops off the wavelets. A mile or so out, a fishing boat pitched and tossed, its retinue of gulls in ever-hopeful pursuit. Miles’ memory replayed the scene in perfect detail, although it was over two years since he had been there. His favourite seaside spot was not one frequented by holidaymakers, for the swampy, pebbled beach did not lend itself to sunbathing and sandcastles. It was a walker’s beach, raw nature at its best. Miles had wanted his ashes scattered here. No chance of that now. At least, not for another ninety-two thousand years. Miles found himself able to smile.

Certitude that he would never see them again intensified Miles’ recollections. Mick Jagger was right, and the impossibility of getting what he wanted made Miles want it all the more. Hot tears prickled as his ex-wife came back to him in a warm rush. For a moment, as he closed his eyes, she was there with him, hair soft, perfume fragrant, lips soft and parted. Then there was just the hiss of the recirc, the empty cabin and the reality that she’d left him five years before, for another man. Did she feel a sense of guilt now? Perhaps she did, but there was no way for her to contact him.

Communication had been ended by mutual agreement, a little more than an hour ago. It was the way things were done. Lessons had been learned from the Mars mission disaster when the life support system had failed shortly after the spacecraft entered the Hohmann transfer orbit that would eventually bring it to apposition with the red planet on the far side of the Sun. The crew had, of course, known they were doomed, with no hope of return to Earth, nor of rescue. When HG Wells 1 reached Mars, it would be carrying three dead men. They had transmitted their farewell messages and then availed themselves of the only means of escape at their disposal, the Pentothal-cyanide last resort capsules that were carried by the mission commander, to be issued at his discretion. Years hence, after several elliptical laps around the Sun, HG Wells 1would again encounter Earth, and perhaps their bodies might be brought home for burial. No promise had been made. The thing was, the last hours of Tom Nisbet, Gordon Le Craft and Jonty Nolan were spent in the forced company of seven billion nosy humans, each transmission downloaded and recorded for the posterity of social media. There had been an inquiry, with impassioned pleas from the men’s families for more privacy at the end, including a moving speech from Jennie Le Craft, aged fourteen. “When I look up at the stars at night,” she said, “I know my daddy is there. I have lots of time to think about him now. I hope he had time to remember me, when he was so busy talking to mission control, at the very end of his life.”

And so it had been resolved that, if an astronaut was marooned, communication with the spacecraft would be terminated while sufficient time remained for him to spend his last moments in quiet reflection. Miles had no family; his parents had died years before and there were no siblings. Suzy had not been contactable and he found he wasn’t sorry; he would settle for the wedded-bliss memories he could still summon.

Earth was getting smaller now and Miles could no longer distinguish land from sea with the unaided eye. The planet’s beauty didn’t diminish with distance. Like a pale blue marble, almost glowing, it hung there against the black backdrop as Miles hurtled toward the Sun, keeping perfect pace with the enormous, dirty snowball to the immediate left of his spacecraft.

He knew exactly what had gone wrong and he had been aware of the danger before volunteering. Rendezvous with a long-period comet meant consuming an enormous amount of propellant to inject his spacecraft into its fast, tight orbit around the Sun, retaining a comparable propellant reserve to deorbit from the elongated ellipse and enter a transfer path to rendezvous again with Earth. Failure at that second stage meant he would continue along the comet’s track forever, climbing far out, past the orbits of all the planets, all the time slowing down like a cricket ball thrown vertically upward, until he grazed the distant inner Oort Cloud, turned and began to plunge sunward again, repeating one cycle every ninety-two thousand years. And that was exactly how things had turned out. When the first burn ended, the engine had shut down exactly as planned, but the propellant valve had jammed open, the liquid ammonia simply boiling off into space. Although invisible, the propellant molecules now surrounded the capsule in an expanding, taunting cloud, ironically destined to accompany Miles and his interplanetary coffin on their never-ending shuttle loop around the solar system.

Earth was just a dot now, almost white, hard to distinguish from the stars. It was getting distinctly warm in the capsule as it neared the Sun’s fiery disc; had the mission gone to plan, he would have broken away from the comet’s orbit before reaching this point, having gathered all the information he could, and taken the photographs and selfies that would assure his place - and that of his country - as the first to mount a manned rendezvous with a long-period comet. Now, he would be remembered as his country’s fourth astronaut to be marooned in outer space.

Miles knew the life support system would fail when the cooling coils could no longer dump the excess heat and cool the air inside the capsule, so he had to act before then. He reckoned he had a maximum of an hour. He reached for his laptop once more, parking it in the air above his now-useless control console, and started up his music library program. There could really only be one choice. He turned up the volume and Gustav Holst’s Planets Suite reverberated through the spacecraft, as Miles fingered the pink-and-white pill in his left hand.