The Future We Wish We Had

COLD COMFORT by Dean Wesley Smith

‘Houston Space Center, do you copy?”

I sat in the big command chair, leaning back, listening to nothing as the time lag between the asteroid belt and Earth played out. The time lag wasn’t as bad as it used to be during the early days of the Martian missions, thanks to some new developments in laser communications cutting through a close-warp space, but it still took some time. About four seconds each direction from this far out. Nowhere near as slow as the speed of light, thank heavens.

Although, at this point, it didn’t much matter.

I glanced around at the five empty chairs in the big control room of Asteroid Six, code-named Klondike after the gold rush back in Alaska. After all, that was what we had been out here to get. Minerals, from gold to anything else worth mining, to make part of this exploration profitable. I always knew that someone would get rich off of mining these asteroids, and we had proved that to be true, but now it wasn’t going to be me.

The big room with its six chairs facing six large control panels smelled of burnt wires and felt far too hot. Usually it smelled of cooking mixed with a faint odor of Captain Carry’s socks. Even with the faint burnt smell, the environmental instruments on the board in front of me were telling me everything was still all right in here, as much as it could be, considering.

The room felt even bigger than normal, with me being the only one left. I was used to this room with two or three people in it at all times. I kept thinking that one of them would come in and say something. After months together, I had gotten used to the constant interaction with the others. Now I missed it and wanted it back.

“Go ahead, Klondike. How are they doing out there, Ben?”

The voice was Devon Daniels, the day shift voice of Mission Control, and one of my best friends. He had stood up for me as my best man when Tammie and I got married twenty-two years ago. We had come up through the space program together in the late 1980’s, flying missions to both the moon and Mars. Together, we had helped establish the first bases on both places. He’d been grounded because of a bad lung condition after his sixth Mars trip, and I had planned on joining him on the ground after this mission. Now he was lucky he wasn’t on this mission. He’d be just as dead as the rest were and I was soon going to be.

I took a deep breath. “Can we go to visual? And get some recorders on this, some extra ones? I got a lot to download.”

I sat back, waiting as they brought everything online at Mission Control, thinking over the last two hours. I had been asleep, off shift, tucked in my bunk when the grinding crash had snapped me awake.

Our pilot, Toby Terhume from the European Union, had been scheduled to land us on an asteroid with a number for a name that was longer than a worldwide phone number. We were to do the same tests we had been doing on other rocks for the last two weeks. It was the tenth such landing. Standard procedure. From what I could tell, he misjudged the timing on the spin of the thing and instead of landing the Klondike on the rough surface and clamping on, the ship hit, tipped over, and then bounced.

And we bounced hard.

We lost Kevin Chin because he was also off shift and it was his cabin that just happened to be the one that got hit by a large rock jutting out of the asteroid. The automatic controls sealed off the rest of the ship, but it was far too late for Chin. We all figured his body was going to have to ride in there until we got back.

I had liked Chin. He was young, this being his first real mission. he didn’t deserve to die like that in his sleep.

It didn’t take long for the rest of us to discover what else was wrong. The collision had damaged some relays to the engines and they had to be repaired. Outside.

Until they were, we were just more floating debris in this field of debris, with no way to move out of the way of drifting rocks.

The five of us remaining were all heavily experienced on outside work, so we drew straws and I got the short one, meaning I’d man the controls while the other four went out to get the work done as fast as possible.

We told Mission Control what we were planning and they agreed that time was of the essence.

They had only been out there less than five minutes when an asteroid on my screen appeared out of nowhere, a rock the size of a small house, spinning slowly.

I tried to warn them. But with our speed and the rock’s speed, it happened fast. Far too fast. It scraped all four off the outside of the ship like so much crap off a shoe. If the engines and side thrusters had been working, the computer would have automatically moved the ship just a few feet out of the way as it had done hundreds of times in the past two weeks.

Instead, that nasty grinding sound of my friends dying would be something that would haunt my last hours.

Suddenly, I was alone, farther from Earth than any human had ever been, drifting in a field of debris without power, or any way to get power that I could figure out. That last rock had pretty much taken out a good part of the port side of the ship, leaving me with air and environmental systems in the control room and the galley only. I suppose I could say I was lucky to have survived as well.

I didn’t feel lucky.

I had enough to eat; I had enough oxygen to breathe for months. But in this mess of swirling rocks, I wouldn’t last that long. I’d be lucky to get through the conversation with Earth.

Again, I didn’t feel lucky.

“We’re set up, Ben,” Devon’s voice came back on strong; then a picture flickered into place.

I clicked on my uplink, then without a comment ran the recorded events of what had happened.

I sat and stared at Devon’s face for a few seconds as he just waited for the time lag; then he got my video uplink transmission and his face went white.

For a moment, I thought he was going to be sick as he watched. I knew exactly how he felt. There had been a camera on all four of them out there. What had happened was not something anyone would want to see in the news services.

And besides that, they had been my friends. And Devon’s friends.

After a short time, I punched a few buttons and sent the next compacted data streams toward Earth. “Telemetry on the ship’s status being fed now.”

At least they would know exactly what happened and why.

I gave them everything, downloaded it all, to show everyone back at Houston Control just how screwed I was. That way they wouldn’t go off half-cocked trying to come up with some harebrained scheme for me to fix this mess.

There was just nothing to fix.

I might die at any moment from some stray rock. Or some weakness in this cabin’s walls caused by the two crashes. Or I might live until my food and air ran out. I was betting on a stray rock taking me out very shortly.

“Give us a few moments to look over all this,” Devon said, his voice barely holding back the emotion I could see in his eyes.

Then he cut the link and I was alone again.

“Hope I’m still here,” I said into the silence of the big control room.

At least some of the cameras and sensory equipment were still working on the outside of the ship. That way I could see what was going to kill me. I think someone once called that a cold comfort.

I tested the main computer and it seemed to be up and running as well, so I worked to plot my course as best I could in relationship to the big rocks we had charted. Banging off two different rocks like a bad game of billiards could send a ship going in some very strange directions, and the Klondike had been no exception.

After about ten minutes, I had figured out that at least I wasn’t going to go head first into any of the bigger asteroids for at least a few months. In fact, the last impact had sent the Klondike upwards and slightly out of the main debris field. So it was going to have to be a small piece of rock that finally took me out. And there were far, far too many of them just in my neighborhood for even our best computers to try to track.

I might see it coming. Maybe two, three seconds ahead was all.

The connection to Houston remained blank, so I stood and moved around, stretching my muscles as best I could in the zero gravity. My magnetic boots held me to the deck, so, as I had learned over the years, I used that force to work against doing my exercises.

I wasn’t sure why I was doing that. Just force of habit, I suppose.

What else could I do while waiting to die?

Poor Tammie. I could see her long, brown hair, her big eyes, her small but wonderful smile. I had been gone almost more than I was home over the last two decades. From what I could tell, she had lived the life perfectly, keeping her own interests in teaching, sharing in mine when I was there, saying goodnight to me every night, no matter how deep into space I was, or what she was busy with.

A perfect astronaut’s spouse.

She never really mentioned, and we never really talked about, the fact that I might not come home. It was just understood, part of my job.

I suppose I took her for granted far too much. The job of exploring space had always come first for me. The adventure was what I loved. I had to admit I had let the marriage just coast along. When I got home after this trip, I had planned on making up for that.

Too late.

I finally sat back down and stared out the forward viewport, watching the shadows of the dark rocks turning slowly, blocking out the background stars as they moved around and past me.

It was like a bunch of ghosts moving through a very dark night. Only these ghosts were real hard. And real deadly.

May 23, 2008. This would be a day that would be remembered as a footnote in the history of space exploration. All six of our names would be put up on the big golden obelisk sitting on the mall beside the United Nations building. It was a fantastic way to remember the dead. It was over thirty stories tall, yet no more than seventy feet across at the base. Standing back on the UN Plaza, staring up at it, the entire thing seemed to be reaching up for the stars. On its sides near the base, in large block letters, it held all the engraved names of those who had given their lives in the adventure of space.

Unless someone else died while I was sitting out here waiting, I would be the three hundred and twenty-sixth name on the memorial.

I knew exactly where my name would be. I had stood under those names many, many times, remembering all my friends who were on that memorial.

I had no doubt Tammie would stand there as well. I always felt it was too bad we had never had children. Now I was glad. I would never want to put a son or daughter through what Tammie was going to have to go through.

It took Houston a good twenty minutes before they got back to me. Guess when there was no hope, time suddenly lost its importance.

“Ben,” Devon said. My friend’s face looked drawn and older, far older than he had looked just a half hour before. “I don’t know what to say. I’m sure you know the situation.”

“Yeah, I know it,” I said. “Got any friendly neighborhood aliens with spaceships to stop by and pick me up? I could use a lift.”

After the few seconds’ timelag, Devon would smile at my corny joke, since we had both loved that story, published when we were kids, of an alien rescuing a stranded astronaut. Where was a good alien when you needed one?

“We’re seeing what we can do,” Devon said. “And don’t give up hope just yet. We’re still working on this.”

“Sure,” I said. “Has it got out to the press yet?”

“No,” Devon said. “We’ve kept a lid on this for the moment, and no one’s paying any attention. It was just a regular day for you guys out there.”

“Yeah, real regular,” I said. “After you guys finally figure out that my goose is cooked, I’d like to talk to Tammie.”

“Copy that,” Devon said, nodding, as if my request didn’t just go in. “We’ll be back in a half hour.”

With that, the screen again went dead.

“He sure trusts that I’m still going to be here,” I said out loud. My voice echoed in the empty control room.

I sat back and stared out the front port at all the twisting shadows cutting out the stars and then blinking them back on as they moved past, a slow-motion light show.

I glanced at the clock that told me what time it was in Phoenix where Tammie and I lived. Five in the morning. She would still be asleep. What horrible news to wake up to.

We had built a wonderful home on top of a rock ledge overlooking the green fairways of a private golf course that wound through the rocks and cactus in the valley below us. Actually, Tammie had built it while I was on one of my Mars runs. And I didn’t play golf, but that scene was so beautiful, I had decided I liked the place.

I commuted to Houston, being home on most weekends when I could and when I was on the ground.

Last time I was home, Tammie said she had learned how to play golf, had been taking lessons. She said she really loved it. I had planned on joining her on the links after this mission, although, to be honest, I just couldn’t see myself being happy doing nothing but that. I wanted to move into test piloting some of the new suborbital planes being developed.

I stared out the viewport. I just hoped all the drifting shadows out there gave me enough time to at least say goodbye.

Suddenly, a very large shadow seemed to block out all of the stars in front of the viewport. I could see nothing in the pitch black, and the brains back at Mission Control had just never thought that headlights on these ships were worth the expense.

Looks like I wasn’t going to get to say goodbye to anyone.

I braced myself and held my breath.

Nothing happened.

The shadow remained in front of me, covering every star as if someone had just put them all out like candles on a cake.

Then there was a slight tingling in my arms and legs, and the next moment I found myself standing, facing my best friend.

Devon was sitting in a huge, ornate throne that seemed to fill a very strange, very massive chamber covered in ornate drawings and strange lights of red and blue and purple. It felt like you could put a basketball court in the space and still leave room for a lot of spectators around the edges.

He was wearing the same clothes he had been wearing on the communications link.

And he was the only one in the chamber besides me.

I stood there, staring, trying to grasp what I was seeing, but my mind felt numb.

Nothing made sense, nothing felt right. Even the air smelled of great age, not burnt wires.

“Sorry it took so long, buddy,” he said, smiling. “We had to make sure the situation really was as bad as it seemed.”

“I’m dead. It doesn’t get any worse.”

My voice sounded just damn silly and was swallowed like so much silence in the massive chamber.

“To the rest of the world, yes.” Devon said. “The Klondike, in about two minutes, will be completely destroyed by the impact from a four-meter wide asteroid.”

“But…?”

I stared around, trying to figure out a pattern in the strange lights, then back at Devon, the pitiful question sort of hanging there.

“But what’s all this?” Devon asked, indicating the vast chamber around us. “This is the Peace-Maker, on loan to us for missions like this from the aliens everyone in the tabloids refer to as the Grays.”

I nodded. “Now I know I’m dead. Or being gassed by some environmental leak.”

“Well, this is the future we always wanted,” Devon said, laughing. “Remember as kids how we used to dream about going to the moon, going to Mars, exploring out here and beyond? And finding friendly aliens to help us along the way? Well, they found us.”

“ Roswell?” I asked, shaking my head at the stupidity of my question.

“Actually far before that. Roswell was just an accident with one of their small training ships as we were trying to learn how to fly them.”

“Come on, Ben,” I said to myself. “Wake up. You’ve got to wake up, check the gas levels. You’re hallucinating.”

“Yeah, I didn’t believe it either,” Devon said. “But the truth is, you’re alive, but to everyone else, you are officially dead and you can no longer show yourself to anyone. You’ll either live and work at Area 51 or on the base on Titan.”

“Titan? We have a base on Titan?”

“Actually, the Grays do, and they let us use parts of it. The Grays will be returning for their next visit to our system in twenty-three years, and we’d like to impress them with our progress. You’re going to be a great help to us. We need some experienced test pilots for some new deep spacecraft we’re testing.”

I wanted to slap myself, but didn’t. This was one hell of a hallucination for a dying person.

Devon reached out and touched something in the blank air in front of him, and half the wall to my right vanished, showing me the blackness of space and the Klondike floating there. I could see the extensive damage from the two impacts. For such a proud ship, it looked very, very sad and small and helpless.

“Coming in from the right,” Devon said, his voice clearly upset by what was happening and what had happened to the rest of the crew.

I stood there, transfixed, watching what I was sure was my own death as the shadow seemed to appear out of nowhere suddenly, then smashed into the Klondike, ripping it apart and sending pieces swirling off in many different directions.

“You are now officially dead,” Devon said, his voice soft. “I just wish I had gotten here in time to save the others from real death as well. But we thought the repair plan would work.”

I stared at him, my mind still not grasping this, but I had one question that just pissed me off if anything about this dream was real.

“How come, if we have this, we let people like me go out into space on ships like that? How come we let them die?”

“Because we have to,” Devon said. “The Grays only lent us this one ship. We have to fight our own way out into space, prove that we can survive out here, that we belong out here, and that takes growth and sacrifice. We have to pay the price.”

“Five good men just paid a very heavy price,” I said, disgusted.

“Yes, they did,” Devon said. “And all six of you will have your names on the memorial in ten days, in a very large and impressive service. But what you learned out here won’t go to waste. As you discovered, there are vast riches out here, more than enough to keep the space program going for another hundred years, until we finally figure out how to reach the stars and find even greater riches.”

I glanced down, suddenly realizing my feet weren’t sticking to the floor.

“Artificial gravity?”

Devon nodded. “We don’t know how it works, but we know it exists and is possible, so there are a thousand scientists around the planet working on it in different ways.”

“You came from Earth?” I asked.

Again he nodded. “I was beamed aboard the ship where we keep it parked in a hidden orbit, and I flew it here to get you.”

“That’s one fast trip. It took us two months.”

“Some sort of dimensional jump engine,” Devon said. “Way beyond us so far.”

“Why you?” I asked.

“Mission Control figured I would be the best one to do the rescue since you were going to have trouble believing all this was real.”

“No kidding,” I said. “I’m still not.”

“I don’t blame you,” Devon said.

I walked over to the wall that seemed to be open to space and touched it. I could feel a warm, almost soft metal, even though it looked like I could stick my hand all the way out into the vacuum.

“We don’t know what that material is either, or even how it works.”

“But I bet we’re working on it,” I said.

“Oh, yeah, we are, but we haven’t even figured out how to analyze it yet, let alone reproduce it.”

“And you say this is the only ship they lent us?”

Devon nodded. “I wish we had more. That way we could shadow all the different missions going on in space, save more lives.”

I remembered my five crewmates who had just died ugly deaths. “Yeah, too bad.” The disgust and anger was clear in my voice.

Then I remembered Tammie. She was going to think I was dead.

“Can I take Tammie with me to wherever I’m going next?”

Devon shook his head. “I’m afraid not. Only very specific people can know this exists. No families allowed. Besides, you need her to keep up your legacy of what you did.”

I nodded. Tammie had always been the perfect astronaut’s wife. She would make sure my memory stayed alive and that my death wouldn’t be in vain.

“Can I at least say goodbye?”

Devon looked like I had just trapped him bluffing in a poker game. I knew that look. There was something he didn’t want to tell me.

“There is a way, isn’t there?”

He nodded slowly. “We’ve worked out a way that you can say goodbye.”

Devon ’s hands flew through the air in front of him, seemingly touching and brushing different things that I couldn’t see.

Suddenly, outside the ship, the stars seemed to blur for a moment. Then at the next instant, we were in orbit around Earth. There had been no feeling at all of movement.

I had to be dead. What had just happened wasn’t possible. That was all there was to it. I had just traveled the same distance it had taken me two months before to travel, and all in a fraction of a second without feeling a thing. Dead people traveled like that, not live ones.

“We’re above the Phoenix area,” Devon said. “The Grays have this nifty device they showed us how to use that transports you to a place where you can hear and see and talk to people, but not actually be there. You’ll stay here on the ship the entire time.”

“Like a projected hologram?”

He nodded.

“And Tammie will be able to see me?”

“As a sort of ghostlike figure. If you tell her you’re dead and just came to say goodbye, she’ll believe you, especially when you vanish. But it’s going to scare the hell out of her.”

“I don’t think that learning that I’m dead is going to do her much good either,” I said. “I assume others have done this before?”

Devon nodded. “This isn’t easy on either you or her, but at least you have a chance to say goodbye, if that’s what you really want.”

“Why wouldn’t it be what I want? She’s the woman I love.”

From his large, thronelike chair in the middle of the massive space, Devon looked down at me with an expression I had seen many times before. He was worried.

“You’re not going to want to do this,” Devon said. “I think you should just let it go and we’ll beam into Area 51 and get you settled into your new life.”

“Why?”

“Just let her deal with her grief on her own, in her own way. It’s better that way. For both of you.”

I stood there, staring at my friend, thinking about what seeing me as a ghost would do to Tammie. Devon was right. It would scare her, and the news of my death was going to hurt her more than enough.

If I loved her, I didn’t need to hurt her any more.

But I did want to just see her one more time.

“I guess you’re right. Can the hologram he made so that she wouldn’t see me, or hear me? I’d still like to say goodbye in my own way.”

Now Devon looked really pained. “It can be, yes, but as your friend, I’m suggesting you not do that.”

“Why?”

Devon sighed. “Sometimes it’s better to just let memories alone, leave Tammie in your mind as you know her.”

“I’m still back in the Klondike, aren’t I? Having a horrid nightmare?”

“No,” Devon said. “You are very much alive, and we very much need your experienced help in our program. If the Klondike had come back on its own, we were going to try to recruit you into the program. We were lucky that circumstances at least saved you.”

“I don’t feel so lucky.”

“Let’s go to Area 51,” Devon said. “You have great memories of Tammie; just leave them that way and start the next part of your life.”

I laughed. “You know I’m not going to, unless you tell me what is so bad that I’m going to see when I visit her.”

Devon looked like the day he had swallowed his first oyster. I remembered laughing at him for an hour that night.

I wasn’t laughing now at all.

Devon sighed again, then said, “Maybe you should just go take a look. You won’t be seen or heard, and you won’t be able to touch anything. After that, we can talk more when we’re off this ship.”

It was as if the area around me on the ship suddenly changed into my home. Devon had put me in the living room, and everything was as tidy as Tammie always kept it. Outside the open window, the sun was just starting to paint the tops of the rock bluffs pink. We had a fantastically beautiful home. It was too bad I was going to miss retiring here.

I looked around. Actually, this wasn’t really my home. Granted, I had clothes here and all, but I had never really felt at home here. I had no sense of still being on the ship. This alien stuff was really amazing. Or my hallucination was very detailed and felt real.

“ Devon?”

“Right with you, buddy,” he said, his voice coming from my right and slightly above me. “Just let me know when you want to get out of there.”

“Only a moment.”

I headed for the bedroom where Tammie would be sleeping. I couldn’t really feel my feet touch the carpet, but the memory of walking without gravity boots made me think I was feeling it. Weird, really weird.

I tried to push open the half-closed door, but my hand went right through it, so I closed my eyes and just stepped forward and into the bedroom.

I was sure I was dead; now I was acting like a ghost. What more evidence did I need?

The pink morning light was gently filling the room through the closed blinds. Our big master bed filled the far wall under bookshelves loaded with Tammie’s favorite reading.

I moved about two steps toward the bed before I realized that Tammie wasn’t alone. A man, a young man, was curled up against her back, like he belonged there, like he had been there a very long time.

I had already been stunned over the last few hours with five of my shipmates dying, and then discovering that we really were friends with aliens and that I was going to live.

This sight just left me cold. I wanted to care, but for some reason, I just couldn’t.

I stared at my wife for a long minute, wondering why I didn’t care.

I should care. I should be angry.

But the image of my five friends’ deaths haunted me. Their deaths made me angry. Not this.

I couldn’t care because it really didn’t matter. My shipmates, my friends were dead. I was officially dead, but getting a second chance to move on to interesting challenges that I would love.

I couldn’t bring her anyway.

I stood and just stared at her. One thing was clear. She looked happy, contented in sleep.

I cared that she was happy. After being married to a man who had spent most of the last twenty years either in space or preparing for it, she deserved happiness in any way she could find it.

“How long have you known?” I asked my friend. I had a hunch that he was seeing what I was seeing with the fancy alien technology.

“A couple of years,” Devon said. “I’m really sorry.”

“It’s not a surprise,” I said. “As much as I was gone, how can I blame her?”

I moved over beside her, ignoring the guy behind her, and stared at her beautiful hair spread out over the pillow, at her cheek, at her slightly open mouth. I had been lucky to have the time I had with her, and all the support she had given me. I would miss that.

I would miss her.

But I couldn’t be angry at her.

I bent over and brushed my lips against her cheek. I didn’t feel anything, but her eyes fluttered a little and she sighed and then went back to sleep.

“Be happy,” I said to my beautiful wife. “You deserve it.”

Then I turned away.

“Get me out of here.” I stepped toward the door. “I got some new ships to fly.”

A moment later I was back in space.

Back where I belonged.