The Echo - James Smythe

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up there with them, purely so that they could secure more funding. The day that they went, they found out that his wife had killed herself, and still they let him go! It was madness. Tomas was adamant: that sort of thing wouldn’t be happening on our voyage. On ours, our crew would be right for the task at hand, multi-disciplinary. The correct people, above all else. When we spoke about it, in my mind, Tomas was the one up here. I assumed, I think, because maybe he seemed to win more coin tosses than I did. But the rest of the crew, in my mind, were to be solid and able. If something went wrong – god forbid, if they lost a pilot, for example, due to whatever – anybody else in the crew could step in and take their place. All of us are expendable, to some extent. I know the research that needs to be done when we reach the anomaly, but if I were to die, Tomas would be able to talk somebody else through it.

      They all watch me push away from the bed, even as I squint through the brightness. I flail in the lack of gravity, somehow even less graceful than I was on NISS. Inna takes my hand and pulls me to one side, then puts it onto one of the rails that runs along the side of the room. She folds my fingers over it for me, and then puts her own over mine, putting pressure on it. The confidence of her, telling me that all of this will be all right.

      ‘Hold on,’ she says. I clutch onto the rail, and look at my hand, to focus myself. I can’t tell if the white is my knuckles or the residue of the spots in my eyes, but it distracts me and I let go. I haven’t got control, and I lose my breathing. I feel a hand on my shoulder: Hikaru, steadying me. He smiles.

      ‘Dr Hyvönen,’ he says. ‘You’re okay. It’s just a bit of residual whatever. Can’t have you ruined before we’ve even begun.’ I cling to him, and I try to make the feeling in my gut die down; I try to think of anything but how easy it would be to spin here, and how tired I am, and the whiteness behind my eyes, which doesn’t seem to leaving me no matter how many times I blink, no matter how many times I shut my lids and try to picture nothing but darkness.

      Hikaru and Tobi prepare the cockpit. They sit down and they check the pathfinder, the life-support systems, the drag. One of them is to stay here at all times, to ensure that nothing changes suddenly. We are to travel to, and then stop outside, the anomaly, as best we understand it, and take measurements and readings, conduct all of our tests from there. It takes a long time to stop this ship as well: and the force to do it is just as strong as the force it took to get it going. We have to have our wits about us. As they are preparing, they change the cockpit screens to show us behind the ship; and they call us over, both of them smiling. There is the Earth: spinning in the distance, the size of the smallest coin, and getting smaller and smaller as we watch it, as we are moving away from it so quickly that it would be unbelievable if Tomas and I hadn’t designed it to be so.

      I feel sick, unbelievably sick. Inna takes me to one side and clips me to the safety bars, and she gives me pills to swallow down that will settle my stomach, she says. I know what they do: they settle nothing. Instead, they suppress the brain’s ability to feel the stomach churning. I don’t say anything, because this is her job. I have no desire to undermine her. The rest of the crew start their checks: Tobi and Hikaru running through every possible fault-point, calling out features of the craft and running analysis on those systems, synchronizing the computers with the ship itself, checking the batteries, reporting back to Tomas to ensure parity of results. Wallace goes off down the corridor, towards the engine rooms, to check efficiency there, to ensure that all readings there are correct; Inna leaves me, patting me on the knee, and then goes round one by one, looking at the crew’s eyes, to make sure that there are no burst blood vessels (or, at least, that’s what she says, as she looks for signs of stroke or aneurysm); and when he’s been checked and okayed, Lennox pulls himself in front of me, smiling.

      ‘You want me to start doing something?’ he asks. His accent is bizarre. France by way of Jamaica, delivered with the drive of having studied in London. A proper mélange of an accent. We are kindred spirits in that, if nothing else. ‘I’ll call up exactly where we are.’

      ‘We know where we are,’ I say. The computer does all of that for us. We’re useless until we get to the anomaly itself.

      ‘I can set us up. Set your workstation up. Start pinging the anomaly.’

      ‘Fine,’ I say.

      ‘You want to check my settings before I begin?’

      ‘I trust you,’ I tell him, regardless of whether I do or not.

      ‘Okay.’ He pushes backwards, and he somersaults off. He’s graceful in a way that I never will be. ‘Listen, I just wanted to say: thanks for this opportunity, yeah?’ That seems an understatement, but it’s not. He’s humble. He’s a good kid, I suppose. I am too judgmental of ambition. He calls up a screen and starts the procedures, all of which log everything we’re going to be looking at. While we’re out here, we can do work that would, from Earth, take months. Maybe even years. He checks in with Tomas, and I hear them begin the work together. This is a partnership spread over thousands of miles, over space and time. When Lennox is going, Tomas asks to speak to me. Lennox channels it through to the station nearest me.

      ‘Is everything okay up there?’ Tomas asks. The speakers are focused and driven; and voice doesn’t carry, not here. Only I can hear him.

      ‘It’s fine,’ I say. I pause.

      ‘And you’re okay?’

      ‘I’m queasy,’ I say. ‘It happens.’

      ‘Everything looks wonderful from down here. Perfect. I’d say that this has been a triumph, wouldn’t you?’ He sounds thrilled. I can hear the grin in his voice – big, toothy grin, bending his cheeks, stretching and bending his birthmark. A clap of his hands together. ‘So now we’ve all got a job to do.’

      ‘Yes,’ I say. I don’t say anything else, and his pause is longer, as if he’s waiting for me to.

      ‘I’m going to get some sleep. Go home; it’s been a long day. Simpson is taking the post here now, okay? You need anything, you call him.’

      ‘Sure,’ I say, but he knows that I won’t. I can handle anything that comes up. And then he’s gone, and I’m alone again. I’m incredibly tired as well; hearing him saying it does something to me, like the involuntary contagion of a yawn. I shut my eyes, still floating there. Why can I sleep now? Why is it that when I am needed I could drift off and allow myself to be gone? Tobi shouts that she is hungry: I am startled awake. I don’t know if I could eat, not feeling like this.

      ‘Our first meal,’ she says. ‘Feels like we should have some sort of ceremony.’ They all float to the table, and I unclip myself. I have to join them, to stress my leadership, my skill here. I need their respect; Tomas and I long debated the importance of respect amongst a crew. I cling to the rail and I pull myself along towards the central dais table. I can feel them staring at me. They are still humouring me, because grace is something innate, that cannot be taught, but I know that I will have to get used to this. I will have to become better at it, in these confined quarters. On the NISS it was one thing; here, I may even have to go outside the ship, and I need to know that I am capable of that. The table divides the central part of the room. The shape, the construct of the room, is a triple loop, like an infinity symbol doubled-up: three circular rooms on top of each other. The cockpit, the table, the beds: all round. Tomas read books on psychology during the interior design stage of the project, and he read that circular rooms could help to offer an artificial sense of camaraderie. No nooks or crannies to hide in. That’s why the beds can be darkened and made private: in case we need alone time. There’s some wiggle room, but not much. The table has magnets for us to attach our suits to, like everything else. This wasn’t our invention. The suits have ten or so of the magnets, heavy duty, and every fixture and fitting in the ship has the other part. You let the two or so of them meet and voilà, you aren’t going anywhere. ‘Somebody should say something,’ Tobi reiterates. We all wait as Wallace comes back down the corridor and sits himself down.

      ‘Everything’s fine back there,’ he says. He calls down to Simpson, on the ground. ‘Temperatures exactly how they should be, working at 97 per cent efficiency. Batteries on 98 per cent.’ Better than

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