A day in the life of a spaceman

His day began when he woke suddenly to the icy cold air and his ears burned with screaming, and there was not enough oxygen left. Much later, the man slammed the button, locking the door, and turned exhausted to slump on the floor next to the blinking panel. There was not enough oxygen left. Five inches of clear plastic lay sheathed in metal and rubber and outside of this the blue planet lay still and silent and beautiful and the stars rotated in their thousand-year orbits and everything was very quiet. The filters cycled softly and the rhythmic hum of computers wheezed and coughed and sputtered and the air was very clean, but there was not much of it left and the cabin was very cold. The man panted, slowing his breaths and rested his head against the steel door.

“For the love of god Sherman!” The voice shrieked and frantically clawed upwards from the ice and silence and penetrated two layers of re-enforced aluminum and the sound was pushed and prodded along in its laborious journey across the increasing vacuum by a sudden violent pounding on the door. Against wild thrashing, the door did not budge, and the man closed his eyes, weary from the ordeal. There was not enough oxygen, and there was not enough time. “For the love of god Sherman!” The voice cracked halfway through, punctuated by a low muffled sound as bones and flesh and clothes slumped defeated to the surface of the cabin on the other side of the door. The voice continued, low and moaning, but the man did not listen. He could not listen. He had a job to complete and he would not allow her to get in his way.

After awhile he felt his strength returning, ebbing back into his bones and muscles like a cautious ocean returning to shore. He pulled himself to his feet and maneuvered unsteadily in the low gravity of the room. Catacomb pillars pressed in from all sides, and everything was steel and plastic, but there was a single window that perforated the hull and through its thick and stodgy surface, the vibrant and energetic stars danced and threw their refracted beams of light carelessly and laughed at the plight of the man in the cold. He pulled himself to a station and forced practiced eyes and hands over a console blistering with controls and gauges and screens and buttons. His attention was drawn through the thin air to a cluster of instruments in one corner of the console. Moisture from the air had condensed on the surface of the glass during the disaster and had flash frozen when the heating systems shut off, when he closed the door. He scraped his fingernails across the surface in a stupid and unwieldy attempt to defrost the display. Peering through the microscopic glacier, he squinted in the dim light at the position of the dial, frozen in position. He smiled weakly and exhaled a breath of relief. There was not enough oxygen left, but not everyone needed to die.

The air traced lightly around his padded suit and legs as he pulled himself into the nearest chair. As he swiveled around to face the closest window, empty candy wrappers and playing cards formed an orbiting debris field around his cold and stationary body. He tried thinking about the long journey that awaited him, but he could not focus on the details. He tried thinking about his family, only several hundred miles beneath him, but he could not remember their faces. Instead he focused on the movement of the stars and planets. Sudden slamming on the door behind him jarred him awake, but taking a quick peek at the display in front of him reassured him that there would still be enough. “Sherman!” the voice shouted through layers of metal and rubber and thin air. “Sherman!” the door cried out, the screaming slowly subsiding into low moans. “SHERMAN! You don’t have to do this! Please don’t do this!” The voice penetrated deep and he remembered. It was her.

He hadn’t known her two weeks ago, and they had different specialties on board, so it was very difficult for him to ever get a chance to know her very well. He remembered her red hair and her eyes that would often dart up from sheets of calculations, gauzy and red-rimmed from coffee and stim-packs, but the center was clear and piercing and he felt stupid to talk to her, so he didn’t. The voice continued, arguing and debating with an empty mantle of silence. The voice argued about possibilities and calculations and alternatives and slowly it grew quiet and muffled, and the only sound was in the man’s head, and he replayed scenes and sounds from his childhood, which seemed to come easier to him than those from his adult life. He could not think about her or her desperate pleas. He could not alter or stray from the path. He recognized the cruelty of the situation, but he had performed every calculation flawlessly and had considered every possibility. He knew with absolute certainty that there was not enough oxygen for everyone. He hoped enough remained for one person. He had to be sure. The scientist in him was curious, although the part of him that had grown small gardens in college and later in life was horrified and turned away and examined the beautiful scene slowly rotating in absolute cold and silence to the galactic rhythms of impenetrable and innumerable scale. And the two halves of him spent their various energies and utilized their various faculties, and so the man passed the time, unperturbed by the low and soft feminine wails, the rocking ocean of tears and sobbing occasionally peaking with white crested waves that rose in volume and broke upon magnificent levels of emotion and then were lost again amidst the quiet and constant din of despair. The door was locked and the lock had been sealed and there was not enough oxygen left, and the man knew that, and so nothing about the situation was changed by the crying.

Using tiny movements of his eyes, the man raked his trained vision across the displays and smiled inwardly at the increasing concentrations of oxygen. Yes, there would be enough. Yes, now the plan had sustainability; had life. All was not lost, and this fact stimulated his mind and he rose out of the cold darkness and promptly fell, his weak legs crumpling beneath him. He laughed softly at the ridiculousness of the situation. How long had he been sitting there? Four minutes? Five minutes? He checked his watch, but the hands had frozen almost instantly when he had locked the door several hours before. Continuing onwards, he crawled slowly, pulling himself over the floor to the other side of the room and crawled up the very wall of the console and leveraged himself to a sitting position, his shoulders burning with the exertion. He checked the screen. A swirling matrix of lights and information restlessly assembled into an organized fashion and the man waited and saw that his window of opportunity was very slim indeed. He could not think about the numbers now, the advanced math he had spent his life mastering slipped quickly away from the surface of his brain. He was no fool; he had written them down hours before. His thoughts flashed briefly to his home. His wife had always despised his predilection for planning, a subtle but dark hatred at his quiet and meticulous manner. He lived in his mind, and now he lived only in his mind, and he thought no more of anything beyond the present as he awkwardly fumbled with his pocket and retrieved a crumpled piece of yellow notepaper. Half of the small sheet had been stained red, but it was not his blood and so he was not overly concerned. He shifted his weight and squinted and read the numbers and laboriously entered them into the panel, each consecutive depression of the keys throwing up a tiny sparkling shower of ice particles and dislodged accumulations of crystallized dust. The computers seemed slow. They seemed to share his feelings of morbid lethargy. After a short eternity, the computer beeped once and glowed a comfortable shade of green and the mission was complete. The numbers ticked down and the man turned around slowly as he sunk once more to the floor of the room, carefully modulating his breaths. The window now lay across the room from him and he resigned his mind to the quiet contemplation of the intricacies of the galaxy beyond, his view of which was restricted by the size and position of the window to several square inches. It was a pitifully tiny space, but it grew in the vacuum and gradually encompassed his entire vision, and as the blackness of the picture naively courted and danced with the dim shadows of the room at the edge of his vision, the scene of a handful of scattered stars erupted in their full beauty and showered the deepest parts of the man’s mind with the sheer scale of their magnificence. They put on a show that was unlike anything the man had ever seen before.

As the filters slowly cycled and the numbers ticked down slowly on the screen behind him, the galaxy was free and joyous and gay and the man became the first one of his kind to witness the true parade of colors and spectacles that lay behind the opaque and distant surface. He saw the birth of stars and the death of worlds and the entire cosmic spectrum existed, for a very short moment, as an intimate and warm personal drama; of family members interacting with each other as they went about their daily lives. The numbers clicked to zero and the screen flashed red and emitted a loud beeping, but the man did not see the change in color or hear the beeping, and he had forgotten long ago about the sound of the woman pounding on the other side of the door, and he did not notice the low and terrible shaking as the hull split cleanly in two and the door that had once separated the kitchen from the bathroom now separated both from the very essence of space, and the smaller portion of the metal box swung away in a low arc and disappeared into the cloudy, brilliantly blue depths of the planet below and was lost amidst a fountain of superheated flame and gases as the atmosphere, grumbling its angry acquiescence, allowed the saved ship-half to re-enter the thick and humid air below. This saved ship-half with its minimally tolerable concentrations of oxygen returned to the wetness of the planets oceans, and the life inside was saved for future nights of coffee and red-rimmed concentrations and laughter and sex and births and deaths. Floating in an eternal orbit above, the spaceman in the other half bore witness to none of this, and the screen behind him flashed twice and automatically turned off. His gaze remained fixed on the small window on the other side of the room as he, in absolute silence and amidst a galactic festival of color and light and beauty, returned home.