The End Is Nigh

Annie Bellet — GOODNIGHT MOON

Neta Goodwin allowed the control box for the array she’d been working on to snap shut and brushed at the pervasive regolith coating her knees and rose carefully. It was impossible to keep the moon’s fine powdery dust out of anything—worse than being on a beach. The surface of the Daedalus crater where the Far Side Array and the International Listening Base were located looked like dirty snow. It made Neta homesick for her and Paul’s Montana farmhouse, the ridged powder of the moon reminding her of the way the snow scuffed and lumped as they tread paths all winter between houses and barns.

There would be no snow when she returned home in two weeks. It was late July, though Neta had to constantly remind herself of the date. Down in the Den—as she and the six other scientists had nicknamed their base—time had little meaning. Up here on the moon’s surface, time had a different way of catching her off-guard. It was easy to spend uncounted minutes staring into the dark of space.

Which was exactly what she was doing now. Neta gave herself a little shake. She turned and waved to Anson Lefebvre to signal that they were finished and started the careful, bouncing walk back to the Den, the thin Frenchman following in her wake.

She stole glances at the sky and felt a familiar ache. She wanted to go home, yes, but she loved the moon. The low gravity that let her fifty-something bones rest more comfortably, the vast expanses, the dome of stars undimmed by human light. It took willpower not to tear off the tight, suffocating helmet and leap into the sky. She wished Lucita, her daughter, could share this. Last she’d heard though, her not-so-baby girl was studying art history at Berkeley.

That would be the best part of going home, she knew: the air. For nearly three months she hadn’t taken a breath that someone else hadn’t breathed first. The air in the Den wasn’t much better than the canned air inside her suit. She missed wind.

The Den was dead silent by the time she and Anson finally made it through the locks, stowed the moon-walking equipment, and descended down the long ladder into the base. Usually there was music playing outside of the listening chambers, everything from David Bowie to Mozart to the Black-Eyed Peas rattling down the narrow hallway from the common room, which served as both galley and crew mess. The Den was laid out like a tree, with the main hallway acting as a narrow trunk that anchored the small, box-like rooms branching off of it.

Ray Fulke—one of her fellow Americans at the base—leaned his balding head out into the hall. “Anson, Neta, get down here.” His voice sounded high and the tiny hairs on the back of Neta’s neck prickled.

Neta and Anson exchanged a glance and went. Neta felt the same dread she’d had right before the phone had rung and told her that her nana was in hospital, that she needed to say goodbye. The common room smelled more heavily of sweat and coffee than usual, the anxiety in the air almost chewable.

Neta looked around the grim-faced room, everyone sitting with tablets in front of them. Shannon Delaney, from the EU like Anson and the only other woman on the base, looked about ready to cry, her thin shoulders shaking as she rocked slowly back and forth on the edge of her chair. Ray, too, looked near tears, his eyes puffy as though from lack of sleep. Jie Lin, a brilliant young astronomer from the China National Space Administration, was muttering in Mandarin and twitching through data on his tablet, his dark eyes fixed on the screen.

Neta sat down heavily next to Kirill Bagrov, an analyst from ROSCOSMOS. He was a big man, rawboned and friendly. Ray, Neta, and Kirill had all bonded by being the scientists over fifty, teasing the younger ones about the “good old days” of the space race. His gray eyes wouldn’t meet Neta’s brown ones, his big hands shuffling a mostly empty cup of coffee back and forth on the scuffed metal table.

“Well, since we’re all here, I know no one has died, so someone spit it out. What could possibly have happened in the last six hours?” Neta spoke more sharply than she meant to, but the lack of eyes meeting her own and the tension scared her.

“We’re all going to die,” Graham Moretti said. His mohawk, which had been steadily growing out in the two months he’d been on the far side of the moon, looked as though he’d spent the last few hours running his sweating hands through it. He finally met Neta’s eyes and all she saw in them was despair.

“What?” she said.

“That data, that weird interference we had for last week? Today we figure it out.” Kirill lifted his cup and drained the last of his coffee. A few drops caught in his beard, like muddy tears.

Neta shivered and looked helplessly at Ray.

It was Shannon who spoke, however, “There’s a dwarf planet heading for the moon. Or we’re heading for it. However you slice it, we’ll be in the way of it in less than forty hours.”

“The array you fixed today, the one that got hit by debris last week, it confirmed the vectors and gave us enough of the picture,” Ray added.

“Merde,” Anson said. “Why did we not see this?”

“A perfect storm of events,” Ray said. “The object is coming down perpendicular to the solar system’s orbital plane. It has no atmosphere and is very dense. Plus it’s summer and the object has passed over the sun, coming in at a right angle to Earth. Earth probably won’t even see this thing until it’s hours away from impact. With us.”

“We only see because we have instrument pointing out, because we observe from off-planet, and we see too late.” Kirill shook his head.

Neta took a deep breath. Her job wasn’t to analyze data. She dealt strictly in things she could touch and manipulate. It was up to her to keep the arrays in working order, to clear dust and repair issues caused by incoming debris, radiation, and whatever else the solar system threw at them.

“So, basically, Pluto is heading straight at the moon?” Neta asked. “And we have no time to evacuate? What about the med-evac shuttle?” She twisted her hands together, willing herself not to panic, not to question. These were six of the smartest men and women she’d ever met. If they said something was about to happen, she trusted them.

“Not Pluto.” Kirill’s smile was small and grim. “Bigger.”

“The med-evac can hold two,” Shannon said. “We’ve been discussing that. We wanted to wait until you and Anson came back, didn’t want to call you in until we were sure.”

“Three,” Anson said. “It is designed for two, yes, but we tested it with three. It will be an uncomfortable ride, but three of us could make it back to Earth.”

“We have to go to the com station to warn them anyway,” Ray said.

The communications station was to the north at the crown of the moon, between Meton B and C . The team generally sent two people, Jie and either Anson or Graham, twice a week to send out status reports and collect news from home. Supply and staff changeover shuttles only came every three months. There was a single shuttle kept in a special structure next to the tiny com base that could take two people back to Earth in the case of medical necessity. It was checked for repairs and refueled every six months. In the three years that the Far Side Array had been operating with staff, no one had ever needed to use it.

“Can we make it back to Earth before Pluto’s bigger brother hits the moon?” Neta tried to keep her voice calm, to ignore the feeling of her stomach turning to ropes. The journey to and from Earth usually took about two days, sometimes a little less. It helped her to think about rational things, to fight the mounting panic as what the others were so rationally discussing started to sink in.

“If we leave in no more than three hours,” Ray said.

Silence. Jie set his tablet down. Kirill’s cup scraped on the table, back and forth, back and forth.

Unless she was chosen, she would never feel wind again. Never take a hot bath. Never kiss her husband’s cheek when it was soft and fresh from shaving. Never see her Lucita graduate from college.

“No air,” Neta gasped, her hands windmilling at the suddenly too small room. She tried to get up from her chair and bounced hard against the table. Arms caught her, Shannon’s soft London accent murmuring soothing words. Someone pressed the cool metal edge of a cup to her lips and Neta made herself drink. The water was cold but stale, as the water there always was.

No water without the stale aftertaste of saline again. No drinking in the warm summer rain as the air crackled with the aftermath of a thunderstorm. She was going to die here, stuck deep beneath a barren, black and gray and white landscape that would never be home for all its lonely beauty.

Unless she was one of the three. Neta grasped at that grim, dangerous hope and choked down another drink of water.

“Lo siento,” she said, then realized she’d reverted to her childhood tongue. “I’m all right.” She pushed away from Shannon and crawled back into her chair.

“I did the same thing when we put it all together,” Shannon said softly, patting Neta’s knee before she rose and went back to her own seat. “Only with loads more screaming.”

“So,” Graham said. He looked around the semi-circle. “We discussed drawing straws. Anson? Neta?”

Three could go. Four would stay.

“Anson should go,” Kirill said. He held up one of his large hands as Anson started to protest. “He knows most about the shuttle. He has flown it before.”

“I can explain to someone else,” Anson said. “It should be a fair process.”

Neta choked back a laugh. Of course it should. They were men and women of science. They needed to find a way to handle this rationally. To make it as objective and fair as possible. Her chest hurt as her affection for these sometimes annoying, always brilliant, and often impossible people shoved its way through the anxiety.

“No, Anson should go,” Ray said. “I’ll take myself out of the draw.”

“Ray, you can’t!” Graham shook his head.

“What about Laney, Morgan, and James? Don’t you deserve a chance to go back to your family?” Neta asked him. He had children, a spouse. Same as she did. How could he not take a chance to go home?

“My kids are grown. Laney and I have discussed that something could happen. That I might not come home.”

So had Neta and Paul. She felt a twinge of guilt. She was one of the oldest here. Her daughter was in college, living on her own. Her husband knew the risks of letting his wife go live on the moon for months at a time. He’d been so proud of her.

“I, too,” Kirill said. “I have no woman, no children. My parents are gone, God rest them. If you will take message for my sister, I will stay.”

“So five of us will draw?” Graham asked, looking at Jie, then Neta, then Anson, and finally at Shannon. His gaze rested on Shannon and the young woman blushed. Shannon’s arms unconsciously curled around her abdomen.

Graham and Shannon’s unspoken exchange whipped the twinges of guilt inside Neta into a full assault. Neta and Shannon shared a tiny room, shared a bathroom. In such a small place, around each other all hours of the day and night, there were few secrets anyone could keep for long. She’d suspected Shannon was pregnant for a few weeks. Now though—now it mattered more.

“I’m out as long as Shannon is guaranteed a spot,” Neta heard herself saying.

“But—” Anson started to say, then he looked at Shannon’s blush and her posture.

“And I need to record messages,” Neta added, though she had no idea what she would say to Paul. To Lucita. All she seemed to be able to say to her daughter these days were angry things.

Jie stood up. “I must send messages also, but I will stay,” he said in his perfect, clipped English. “A baby should have parents.”

Shannon was married, as was Graham. Not to each other. But living in such close quarters, both of them young and attractive, Neta didn’t need a degree in sociology to see why they had gravitated into a relationship.

“Baby?” Kirill said. He looked at them all and then said, “Oh.”

Shannon’s blush deepened. She gave herself a little shake. “I’m not even sure I’m pregnant,” she said. “I think I might be. I’m so sorry. I didn’t think before, I mean…” She trailed off and looked at Graham.

“Graham is a bad boy of science,” Anson said with an attempt at a grin.

“Mohawk, that tiger tattoo—who could resist?” Neta added with her own try at a smile, shoving away the whirlwind of thoughts. She was staying. Her, Jie, Kirill, and Ray. These would be the last people she’d ever talk to. The people she would die with.

“So, we agree? Anson, Shannon, and Graham will go?” Ray looked around.

Everyone agreed. No straws would be drawn. The faces around Neta showing different degrees of acceptance. Or shock. She wasn’t sure what she was feeling and had no hope of reading those around her.

“Is one hour enough to record messages?” Graham asked. “We’ll take whatever you guys want to send.”

A plan finally decided, everyone moved at once, threading their way out of the common room and to wherever they could find the privacy to say last words to family and friends.

Neta went back to the tiny room she shared with Shannon. She pulled out her tablet and sat on the narrow, neatly-made bunk. Shannon’s empty, unmade bunk stared back at her, pictures taped up to the thick plastic walls. She had slept in this box for months, but now it felt foreign, too small, too sterile. Not the place she had envisioned spending her last day alive.

Nothing felt real to her. Neta touched the slightly rough blanket, watched as her face appeared on the tablet and the app told her it was ready to record. Someone else’s hand was touching the blanket. Someone else’s face looked back at her. She looked so old, her brown skin too pale from lack of fresh air and real sunlight, her eyes dark, her face with more lines on it than she remembered.

If this was your last day on Earth, what would you do? What would you say? The old clichéd question rattled in her mind. Neta found herself laughing, the sound thin and hollow as it echoed around the tiny plastic and metal room.

She wasn’t on Earth. The normal answers didn’t apply. What would she say to Paul? To Lucita? What could she say in a final message? Certainly none of the things she was thinking.

She forced herself to calm down, to breathe deep that stale, recycled air, to try to look hopeful and composed. When the stranger’s face on the tablet camera looked the way she wished, Neta touched start to record.

She said all the things she felt she was supposed to say. She told Paul she loved him. She talked about how much fun she’d had in Hawaii for their twenty-fifth anniversary and how she would cherish that week with him right to the end. She asked him to look after Lucita, their little light—and as she said it she imagined her daughter rolling her dark eyes. Lucita went by Lucy now, feeling Lucy Goodwin was a more American name, shoving away her mother’s Puerto Rican roots as she came into her age of fierce independence.

She told Lucita to follow her joy, even if that joy wasn’t in the sciences. She told her she was sorry they had argued so much and not to hold on to those memories. Neta called Lucita Lucy in her final goodbye to her, to Paul. It was her way of apologizing, of saying all the things she didn’t feel strong enough to say aloud. She could only pray it was enough.

It was only at the end that she broke down a little, her eyes burning with tears she refused to show to the camera.

“Love her, Paul,” she whispered. “Give our little light all the love I won’t be there to give. And don’t hang on to me. I want you both to live, to be happy.”

She shut off the tablet after marking the file. She would be long gone before her family saw the video. NASA and the government would have to review everything, but she trusted they would let the message through. It was the best she could do.

Neta made her way back to the common room. Ray was there with Graham, both of them looking as though they’d aged a decade in the last hour.

Ray poured her a cup of tea and Neta stirred powdered milk into it, staring at the swirls as she worked up the courage to ask more questions.

“What happens after the moon and this rogue dwarf planet collide? How safe will Earth be? How safe will the coasts be?” She asked, thinking of her daughter in California.

Ray shook his head. It was Graham who answered her. “We aren’t sure. We don’t have the programs and time we’d need to model it. The moon will be knocked out of orbit. Or at least into a new one. Or it might break apart. And yes, there will be a hell of a debris storm back on Earth. They have atmosphere to protect them, but this could get bad.”

“Bad?” Visions of Hollywood apocalypse movies churned through her brain and fear for her family wrapped freezing fingers around her ribcage.

“Well, it won’t be good. The tides and weather might go haywire, but the moon is going to save the Earth. At least in the short run.”

“True,” Kirill said as he ducked into the common room. “Without moon getting in way, everything would bchwhew.” He emphasized the exploding noise with a large gesture.

“I think we call it a ‘global extinction event,’” Graham said.

“So we’re lucky,” Neta said. She glanced around the room and saw the confused stares. “I mean, ‘We’ as in the human race.”

Ray nodded. “More or less. We should give our governments enough notice to move people out of low-laying areas and stuff like that. We’ve got a lot more man-power and computing power on Earth to deal with the fallout. I think we’ll come out okay.”

It went unsaid that all they could do was warn Earth and hope. That the four staying behind could do nothing at all.

The goodbyes were subdued. The four who were staying handed Anson their tablets containing their messages home and their data from the Array. There were no speeches. Tears were sniffled back or quickly wiped away. If anyone was panicking, they kept it deep inside.

Graham, Shannon, and Anson ascended the ladder for the last time, and Neta didn’t stay to watch them go. She returned to the common room and drank the gritty dregs of her cold tea.

“What now?” Ray asked when he came back in.

Neta shrugged. “How long?” She didn’t have to specify.

“Thirty-four hours-ish.”

“Ish? And they call you a scientist.” Neta smiled at him.

“I am going to bed,” Kirill announced from the doorway.

Neta agreed. It was too long to wait, staring at blank walls. She returned to her bunk and tried to sleep. She turned fitfully; the light gravity that usually let her sleep with a comfortable weightlessness she never felt on Earth was instead a constant reminder that she was here, not home. Her mind gave her disaster scenarios, visions of the Earth’s surface turning to giant, moon-barren craters and the seas churning and rising up, drowning her house. When she did sleep, she startled awake multiple times, thinking she’d heard Lucita calling for her.

Finally she gave up. Her little clock told her in bright green light that she had twenty hours left to live. Ish. Her mouth was thick with sleep-fuzz, and her nose caught the ghost of Paul’s citrus-laced aftershave as her brain struggled to shake off her dreams.

No one was in the common room. Neta made soup, forced herself to drink it, and then washed out her metal bowl. She rested her fingers in the dish, remembering her plans for when she returned home. The tepid water gave her an idea.

Neta pulled on her moon-walking suit for one final time. She climbed up the ladder but did not go outside. Pluto’s big brother would be visible to the naked eye now, from what Ray and the others had told her, but she didn’t want to look that closely at death, no matter how impressive it might seem. Besides, she wasn’t sure if it would bring debris with it, or if it would be safe to be out on the surface of the Daedalus crater.

Instead she went through to the big bay where they stored equipment for repairs and extra supplies for the Array—the items that didn’t need as much radiation shielding. They didn’t bother to keep this spares shed full of air. Neta searched the large NASA bins and found something that would work for her plan. She spent long sweaty minutes clearing out a barrel and hauling it to the ladder.

She dropped it down. On Earth, she wasn’t even sure she could have moved the plastic and steel barrel. Here, it was awkward, but not impossible.

Scraping and hauling it through the narrow hallway brought Kirill and Ray out of their room.

“What are you doing with that?” Ray asked. What little hair he had was mussed from sleeping; it looked as though he’d been as restless as she.

“Taking a bath,” Neta said. “It was something I planned to do first thing when I got home.”

Kirill laughed, and even Ray was able to crack a smile. They helped her get the barrel down to the women’s bathroom just past Neta and Shannon’s room. It didn’t quite fit in the tiny shower pan, so they left it just outside. Duct tape, some wires, a repurposed length of lab tubing, and a lot of swearing later, they had a way to fill the makeshift “tub.”

“I don’t know how clean this thing is,” Ray said.

“What’s it going to do, give me cancer?” Neta waved them both out of the bathroom. “Go away so I can bathe in peace.”

The water was stale, and calling it tepid would’ve been generous, but she climbed into the barrel and sank down, curling her tired body up until only her nose and eyes were above the surface.

She half-floated and finally let herself feel the panic, the grief, the crushing weight of knowing she was going to die. She hung inside the barrel, her body wedged down in the water, and let herself breathe through the complete helplessness.

The tears that had been burning inside her eyes and throat all day broke free and were lost into the bath, her cries muffled by the water, her face washed clean even as she wept. She wanted to scream, to tear at her hair, to beg God or the universe or anything for a way to change her fate. Finally, exhausted, she just let herself cry until no more tears would come.

The water was cold and her fingers stiff and pruned when she finally climbed out. She dressed in clean clothing, pulled on a light blue sweater, and combed out her hair. She pulled out her small cache of pictures that she’d brought from home and went through them one last time, her wrinkled fingers tracing the lines of faces she loved and would never see again.

When her clock told her there were only a couple hours remaining, she pulled out the final item. Her nana’s rosary, the turquoise and wood beads smooth and dark from years of praying. Neta couldn’t bring herself to say the words aloud, so she touched the beads one by one as she mouthed the prayers. It felt weird to seek God now, when she’d devoted her life so thoroughly to science, but she had never turned her back on Him, only on the Church that she’d felt had no place in her modern life.

Neta set aside the pictures and tucked the rosary into her pocket. It couldn’t hurt to pray now. She hoped the dying would be forgiven a little hypocrisy.

She found Kirill and Ray in the common room. They’d exchanged tea and coffee for vodka, judging from the empty bottles and the smell that greeted her as she sat at the table. The men were in the middle of a game of Gin Rummy.

“Where’s Jie?” she asked.

Kirill and Ray froze. Kirill raised his cup and drained the vodka from it. Ray fidgeted with the cards in his hand.

“In his bunk,” Ray said when Neta half-rose, intending to go look for Jie.

She sank back down. “Not joining us, is he?”

“He left early,” Kirill said.

“Pills,” Ray said. “Went to sleep and wanted to stay that way, I guess.”

Suicide hadn’t even crossed Neta’s mind. She waited to feel anger or betrayal that the quiet young man would do that, would go without saying goodbye to her, to them, but she couldn’t find it in her to blame him. He had faced death his way. She had to face it in her own.

“The others will be well clear of the moon now,” Ray said.

“Going home,” Neta said softly. She appreciated Ray’s attempt to bring good news in the room.

“Vodka?” Kirill offered her the remaining bottle.

“You’re a walking cliché, Kirill,” she said with a smile.

“Some clichés are for reasons,” he said, playing up his accent and waggling his bushy eyebrows at her.

He poured a generous measure into her tin cup and then picked up his cards again. Neta watched them play in silence, cupping the alcohol between her hands as though she were warming them, but didn’t drink. It was strange, but she found she wanted to face the end sober, calm.

“I’m glad,” she said, as Ray dealt her into a new game of Rummy. “I’m glad I’m not alone.”

“I will drink to that,” Ray said.

“I too,” Kirill said.

The whole Den shook, a tremor like an earthquake rattling dishes and jouncing them well out of their chairs.

Neta left her cup after the shaking stopped and went to sit on the floor. Kirill and Ray joined her. They sat knee-to-knee in a tight circle as another tremor began. When she reached out her hands, Ray and Kirill took her cold fingers in their own warm ones.

“It’s the middle of the night in Montana,” she said. “I bet there is a warm wind coming from the Southeast. I wish I could tell Paul goodnight.”

“Goodnight, Neta,” Ray said, squeezing her hand.

“Goodnight, Ray,” she said. “Goodnight, Kirill.”

“I love you both,” Kirill said with a hitch in his voice. “Goodnight.”

As the Den shook, Neta closed her eyes and held on to their hands with all her strength forever.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Annie Bellet is the author of the Pyrrh Considerable Crimes Division and the Gryphonpike Chronicles series. She holds a BA in English and a BA in Medieval Studies and thus can speak a smattering of useful languages such as Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Welsh. Her short fiction is available in multiple collections and anthologies. Her interests besides writing include rock climbing, reading, horse-back riding, video games, comic books, table-top RPGs and many other nerdy pursuits. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and a very demanding Bengal cat.