Going Home

The most beautiful feeling flooded into George's body, warming and tingling radiating from his heart and outwards. Carried through his blood, it washed through his veins, affecting every body part. It even got its hooks into that familiar hollow pit just north of his stomach, and suddenly he didn't feel so empty anymore.

It was the feeling of going home.

"Going home," he turned the words over in his mouth, tasting them. They tasted good.

He fiddled with the thick card-stock note, flipping it over, making sure it was real. It had the right seal. It had his name blazoned across the top, on the subject line.

Dr. George Carson:

Approved for dismissal of duties. Your transport and replacement will arrive at 0800 on July the first. Prepare yourself for your journey home and thank you for your service. You are going home.

He read it again, slowly and loudly, letting the words hang in the stale air, reverberating off the bare metal walls of the station. He especially loved the last line: "You are going home." He read that the loudest and the slowest, savoring each word, each syllable, each movement in his tongue and lips that formed each sound. In that moment, he couldn't think of anything more beautiful. He was going home.

He checked the glowing, green numbers on the display above the hatch door. It was the night of June 27th. Three days. He was going home in three days. He sunk down onto the fold-out bunk that had been his bed for five years. He was overcome with this glorious feeling of going home. The promise of going home almost made up for being gone for so long. He drifted off into a light sleep, filled with the wishful thoughts of his homecoming.

When he woke up, he quickly went about his work. Going home was no excuse for slacking off at his post. He had to make sure that everything was ready to go. The notice didn't say who his replacement was, but he didn't care about their name or qualifications. At 0800 on the 1st, some other physicist would walk through that door. Some other young, idealistic kid hungry to get his hands on such an important sounding project would come in eager to be shown everything. George could easily remember being just like that. He decided it'd be best to leave the station exactly as he had found it.

First, he checked off his daily logs. The outdated computer fetched the most recent readings. He punched in the code to send it off to the main lab, and then entered the other code that saved the report to the hard drive. He also jotted the numbers and symbols down in the paper log. Redundancy. The whole project relied on his meticulous redundancy.

"All readings normal" he scribbled on the memo line at the bottom of that day's log sheet. He tore out that page and filed it away in the massive filing cabinet next to the desk. It would sit there with all its predecessors dating back until the beginning of the project 25 years ago. Each and every sheet had the same words scrawled on the bottom: "all readings normal". Every five years the handwriting changed, but the memo remained the same. "Thank god for that," he said under his breath.

He replaced the log book to its assigned place: standing up in a wire organizer to the left of the monitor. The black spine of the book was cracked and worn like a well-loved paperback novel. Its neighbor, however, had a pristine red spine — never opened. The spine was so pristine, in fact, that along the red there were still bright white letters that read “Change Logs”. 

In 25 years of the project, not a single change log had ever had to be filled out. If the readings ever changed over the course of a day, well, that would be bad. Frankly, there was no real need for either log book. If the numbers ever changed, there would be much more pressing issues at hand than filling out a piece of paper. But the best way to make sure that the one lone scientist at the station actually checked the readings was to make them send the report, save the report, and fill out a paper by hand to file away.

His job for the day done, George switched off the old monitor and swiveled around in the desk chair. It was time to get the real work done: preparing for his replacement. First, he swept the floor. He didn't often sweep the floor, having grown bored of such a mundane thing after his first month alone there. After dumping pan after pan of dust, hair, and et cetera into the trash, he felt a bit disgusted in himself. He had been living like this?

The floor cleaned, he gathered up the trash that had accumulated on top of the desks and counters that lined the walls of the small shelter. It was amazing to him how little he had noticed all the garbage before. He filled three bags with trash, dust, and crumpled up bits of paper he had thrown carelessly around over the years. The garbage chute opened with a loud, scraping noise and he sent the bags to be incinerated.

George felt good about his cleaning spree. The one-room station looked down-right presentable. As presentable as a one-room scientific outpost/bedroom/kitchen/bathroom possibly could, at least. It wasn't the Ritz, but at least he wouldn't have to shamefully avoid eye contact with the poor guy who would be taking his place.

The rest of his remaining days passed without incident. He made sure he had all his clothes and personal effects in order, he checked the readings as meticulously as ever, and he even managed to clean up after himself consistently while he waited for the first of July.

When July 1st finally arrived, he had barely slept. He was simply too excited. He ate his last breakfast of dehydrated foodstuffs and sat impatiently on his pristinely made bunk. He watched the green numbers on the digital clock tick closer to 0800. It couldn't come soon enough. He was finally going home.

He couldn't even focus his mind on what he'd do first when he got back. He hadn't written his family or made any calls to let anyone know. His return would come as a surprise, but he hadn't planned to make it a surprise. He simply couldn't wrap his mind around anything concrete. He just knew he was finally going home.

After that morning's bowl of foodstuffs, though, he did have one concrete plan for his homecoming. He was going to order the biggest plate of french fries possible and eat them all by himself.

At 0740 he was practically shaken. He hadn't checked the readings yet that morning, even though he typically did that at 0730 on the dot (0735 if he was feeling lazy or rebellious). The orders hadn't said if his replacement would be taking that over immediately upon arrival or not, but he figured he'd wait for them to get there. He could show them exactly how he does it. Plus, it only took a few minutes so why not wait? It was his last day.

0800. Time to go. He stood up and re-smoothed the scratchy blankets on the bunk, making sure it was perfect. He grabbed his duffel bag that contained all his things and set it on the counter closest to the hatch, ready to go at a moment's notice.

Again, the letter hadn't gone into specifics, but George was a smart man. They'd be punctual. They'd knock three times on the hatch. He'd knock twice. They'd knock once. And then finally he would undo the 5 latches along the door, and then start turning the wheel that would unscrew the giant bolt that kept it shut. That was the procedure. That's how he got in the station in the first place, and that's how he'd retrieve the supply cache every three months. So that's how it would go. Any second now.

Any second now.

0801. George was trying not to be nervous. It was one minute. Maybe the clocks weren't synchronized properly. Maybe the high winds had made it difficult for the truck to traverse the icy sheets that served as roads out there. He tried to calm himself down.

"George," he told himself, "not everyone is as prompt and punctual as you." Punctuality was one of his top virtues, but he knew everyone had different values. Some people, for instance, wouldn't have let their living quarters get nearly as filthy as he had.

All he could do was wait. They'd be here soon.

He stood at attention, facing the door. He strained his ears, listening for the three thuds against the metal door. Maybe they just weren't knocking hard enough, he thought. But that was unlikely. It was always the military types that did the knocking and they always knocked like they were trying to kill the door.

0825. Now he was nervous. He let himself be nervous. He paced around, alternating between pulling at his hair and gnawing on his nails. Where were they?

Panic wasn't the answer though. Maybe there was a storm. Maybe the truck broke down. Just because the resupply caches were never late before doesn't mean that it couldn't happen. Maybe he hadn't ever changed the clock for DST and it was actually only 0725 after all. He had to get his mind off it. 

He sat down at the desk, taking deep breaths to calm his nerves. He flicked on the monitor to take the readings. The new person would just have to figure it out themselves without his hands-on guidance.

He carefully poured over all the readings just like he had every day for five years. He had the regular logbook with its cracked black spine ready to jot down the numbers. But the numbers were wrong.

He didn't quite understand what he was looking at. Every measurement was off, and not by a little either. By a lot. This had never happened before.

A cold sweat broke out on his forehead as he tried to think through what he was seeing. He read over the metrics again, praying that he had just read them wrong. Maybe in his anxious state he had simply lost control of his ability to process visual information. He had a vague recollection of having heard of that happening to someone once.

But even on the third and fourth glances the numbers remained how they had been: completely and utterly wrong. George struggled to comprehend the implications of these readings, but the thought processing parts of his brain were seemingly on vacation. He felt numb.

His procedural training took over. He put away the black notebook and grabbed the red one. He clicked the save icon on the screen to save the report to the hard drive. He clicked the send button to send a copy to the main research station back in the States. He wrote down each number carefully on the very first page of the change logs.

Writing the numbers down snapped his brain back into functioning. The orders of magnitude in variation between these new readings and the normal levels were... astronomical. It was like looking at an alien planet. If these metrics were being taken from Earth, then, well, no wonder his replacement never arrived.

Everyone was dead.

An irrational part of him popped to the forefront. It couldn't be true. It was a mistake. There must be some interference with the measuring devices.

First, he rebooted the computer, but that didn't help. It just wasted five minutes and he was left with the same readings. So the computer was probably fine, which didn't make him feel any better at all.

The problem had to be with the array of equipment itself, and that was outside. If he had any hope of fixing the equipment and getting the proper readings, he'd have to go out there, which was strictly forbidden in the training manual. Going outside that door was a three-person job. No one was allowed to go out there alone or there would be no way to keep him from falling to his death, or take the readings tomorrow if he did.

According to the training manual, to the procedure that had been set for this station, the proper thing to do was to remain in place until help arrived. He had sent the report. The main facility knew that there was an issue with the equipment and would be sending a repair team. It was his job to stay in there and monitor the readings, making new change logs as necessary. He knew this.

But what if it wasn't a problem with the equipment? What if the equipment was functioning properly? What if those numbers were accurate?

There would be no replacement. There would be no repair team. There would be no going home for Dr. George Carson. There wouldn't even be a home to go home to, as a matter of fact.

Theoretically, those readings meant an absolute end to all life on Earth, that the atmosphere had entirely eroded at the same time as the Earth's crust disintegrated as the molten core spread outwards towards the vacuum of space. In practice, George wasn't entirely certain how fast those things could happen. He wasn't certain when the station, buried into the side of a cliff in Siberia with its six foot thick steel walls would give way. He wasn't sure what his death would look like.

It was possible that there was time still to go out there and make certain that the equipment was functioning, just in case the worst was not upon him. It was possible that he could poke his head out and see for himself what the death of this planet would look like. It was also possible, however, that the second he opened that hatch he would die instantly.

Of course, if he stayed inside he'd likely be dead with a matter of days anyway. One thing was certain, Dr. George Carson was not going home.

The grim revelation set in and he felt almost calm in this predicament. He knew what he wanted. He wanted to see the sky. He wanted to see what it looked like to have the layers of the atmosphere strip away inch by inch. He wanted to know which would reach him first: the asphyxiation or the magma. And since he could never go home, why wait?

He didn't bother to put on the heavy parka he'd readied for his return home. He didn't bother to drag out the air canister to supply him with fresh oxygen. He just set about unlatching the door.

The metal clanked and thudded and creaked as he turned the wheel.

It was so bright outside.