‘Mirror’
By Anthony Smith
We were, well the three of us, we were all reaching our limit to say the least. We should’ve died from hunger by now, but somehow we’d managed to stretch 4 days worth of food to almost 3 weeks. I gave up trying to keep track of time, a manual task since we’d had to divert all of the ships power to recycling the air into breathable oxygen and to sending our distress signal. That was at about day two.
It was a dumb miscalculation, leading to our ship floating without any propulsion. We’re freelance research scientists you see, researching asteroids around the Solar system for space mining companies. For some months now we’d been on a scavenger hunt for some of the rarer ores to be found about a remote asteroid belt we were investigating and it seemed we had been a little too ambitious. We’d been chasing after an extremely valuable asteroid and it was moving quickly through the belt. If we hadn’t chased it then and there, it would have been lost to us.
To make a long story short, we were a little too haphazard in our pursuit of it. The asteroid, even as small as it was, it was worth more than our ship many times over, which is perhaps why we didn’t pay much mind to the scrapes that we thought were to be minor at the time. When space debris worked its way into our thrusters, we were screwed to say the least. We weren’t supposed to be in the asteroid field, and especially not with an ill-equipped ship like ours we’d come to discover.
Our only chance was to calculate a means of intercepting a research outpost with our ship with what little momentum we could get from firing the engines and coasting after the thrusters broke down completely. Given our calculations, we’d come within radar distance of such an outpost in about another week and a half. That’s assuming our calculations were correct in the first place, and that neither us nor home base have shifted their trajectories.
My co-habitant of the ‘Gemini’ is still quite young. Chris has neat, short hair, glasses, a thin, tall build and only a couple of years experience behind him. I had many years more experience than he did, but that much could be betrayed by my bearded and wrinkled face. He was taking it about as well a young man such as he could. Shaky optimism was about all we had between us left.
That and a dog named Stein, the third member of this ship. A short little Welsh Corgi with patches of orange and white across its fluffy coat of fur. I think Chris’s dog was probably coping with it a little better than the rest of us. Shaky optimism and a Welsh Corgi made up the glue holding us together.
Chris was staring out the window, not expectantly, more hopefully perhaps. Stein was curled up in a corner, probably hungry since his food was being rationed as well. Anything had to be better than this. The cold, white interior of the Gemini that we couldn’t leave no matter how much we wanted it. It’s a ship that has seen me travel all across the solar system, doing various forms of research. There’s enough room to conduct research, store materials and food, as well as eat and sleep. It was by no means a large ship, only having enough room for a few people, but it was mine. Though, safe and familiar as it was, I didn’t want to die inside of it.
As the days wore on, Chris and I stopped talking as much. At this point it seemed like an extraneous action, and maybe it was a good thing since my wife used to always tell me I would get grumpy if I got too hungry. We’d already talked about everything we possibly could. We talked about similar situations, about what we were gonna do when we got back with the asteroid, I talked about different experiences, and told Chris how much he had ahead of him. It wasn’t fair for a young guy like him to be put in this kind of situation.
Now, it seemed like conservation of our energy was more important than anything and maybe the effort that seemed to come with holding a conversation at this point is what made it easy to avoid one particular subject. We were running out of food, we had enough food to last us perhaps two more days before we’d have to start starving as well. Add to that, our water supply would not last the three of us another four or five days.
Maybe Chris realised it too, which is why he started talking before I had a chance to bring it up when I approached him. “Greg, what if...” he seemed to turn towards me, drawing the ‘if’ out as he met my eyes with his. “What if we took the spare solar sheet and draped it across the nose of the ship?” there was no sincerity in his voice, not quite shaky, but not very convincing. The solar sheeting he talked about was much like a blanket that was designed as a backup for re-entry resistance.
“Now what good’ll that accomplish?” I’d momentarily forgotten why I wanted to talk to him. It seemed like an absurd thing to waste energy doing in this situation. “Now, now, listen. That solar sheeting is good for more than protection on re-entry,” he paused, putting his hands up and making a gesture with them, as though it would convince me, “It’ll be like a mirror, it’ll reflect light that hits it and bounce it out,” he explained with a bit more conviction than before.
I scratched my grey, neatly trimmed beard as I thought it over and realised that there was a bit more merit to this than I thought. “This is the science outpost we’re talking about, maybe they’ll do a light source scan and pick it up as an irregularity?” Chris threw it out like a possibility, when in reality, he probably thought it through very carefully and knew that we had to bank on that chance.
I turned slightly away from him and shrugged, “That’s a slim possibility we’re talking about here,” but he was quick to meet me again as I turned, thinking I was somewhat convinced.
“But it’s worth a try right? They do scans like this at least once or twice a month right?” I didn’t look him in the eyes this time. I’ve seen situations like this unfold plenty of times as a freelance space researcher. They’re not even looking for us, Chris should’ve known as well as I that they we were not being expected by anyone at the moment.
It took us a while, but a short space walk saw us drape the sheeting across the ship’s nose. There weren’t many times when I’d have an excuse to get out in the space suit. Usually if we predicted the need to work outside the ship, we’d have a few more crew members about us. Floating in space like that seemed to bring forth that lethargy from doing next to nothing for three weeks. It seemed like it would be too easy to just float there until I died, floating in the darkness of space. I knew that these thoughts were wrong, I knew that I needed to have the mental will power to push them away, but I couldn’t deny their presence there.
“Greg?” I snapped from my daze, Chris was calling me with the short wave radio in our suits, “Let’s go Greg, it’s done”.
It was done, but what good did it do? A few more days passed and nothing, absolutely nothing. More of Chris staring out of that god **** window and more of that dumb mutt whimpering for food. Our supplies were running out. Our food, water and air. They were all almost completely gone.
“Chris,” I began, catching the attention of his bespectacled eyes. “We’re running out of everything, and we won’t have food and water to survive the next few days if we don’t...do something”. I skirted around what needed to be said. I knew how attached Chris was to that dog, but hell, I wasn’t going to die because of it.
“What? What are you saying?” his eyes went wide, fittingly like an animal in the head lights of an oncoming car.
“I mean Stein, Chris,” I clarified with a stern tone, ”We can’t keep him nourished, hydrated and breathing without sacrificing what little we have left,” my voice quietened towards the end. My intention had to of been very clear by then.
He stood up to face me, “You can’t be serious!”
“We should never have tried to keep him alive in the first place, and you know it!” I yelled back. “I’m a ****ing fool for letting us feed our supplies to him in the first place!”. I’ve yelled at Chris many times, scolding him as a mentor should, but this time was different. This time we were two men on the brink of death, arguing about how best to survive all of this.
Chris’s rage at what I was insinuating was growing rapidly. “Fine, you know what? ****ing fine!” he turned and headed straight for Stein, picking him up and carrying him over to me. He held the dog in my direction, the dog staring me in the face with its tongue hanging out. “Kill him then, go on!”
When Chris put it that way, I couldn’t. Maybe it was the air thinning out from all the shouting and thus, the quick breathing we were doing, but looking at Stein like that, I knew I wouldn’t be able to bring myself to do anything to him. I covered my face, rubbing my forehead and started breathing slowly. We weren’t too different, it seemed. We were both greedy, and we were both idiots. The two of us were stretched as thin as the sustenance left on the ship, neither of us hoping to survive more than a few more days.
In him I could see a glimpse of myself back in the day. In those days I was young and ambitious, as though nothing would stop me. I would have been shattered at something like this, but, like an idealistic young fool, I probably wouldn’t have agreed to sacrifice a crew member, human or not. Looking at Chris clutch Stein as he did made me feel guilty, or maybe I didn’t care anymore. I was far too out of it to even make that distinction.
Then something happened. For the first time in almost a month, a foreign sound crackled through the silent void. A feeling shot through my whole body, and I’m sure through Chris’s as well. Like that feeling you get when your name gets drawn from a hat for something really important.
“...Is th...re...freque...hello?” a long distance broadcast.
Even as we were, both of us draped and lost in the vast expanse of space, somebody found it. That single little light.
By Anthony Smith
We were, well the three of us, we were all reaching our limit to say the least. We should’ve died from hunger by now, but somehow we’d managed to stretch 4 days worth of food to almost 3 weeks. I gave up trying to keep track of time, a manual task since we’d had to divert all of the ships power to recycling the air into breathable oxygen and to sending our distress signal. That was at about day two.
It was a dumb miscalculation, leading to our ship floating without any propulsion. We’re freelance research scientists you see, researching asteroids around the Solar system for space mining companies. For some months now we’d been on a scavenger hunt for some of the rarer ores to be found about a remote asteroid belt we were investigating and it seemed we had been a little too ambitious. We’d been chasing after an extremely valuable asteroid and it was moving quickly through the belt. If we hadn’t chased it then and there, it would have been lost to us.
To make a long story short, we were a little too haphazard in our pursuit of it. The asteroid, even as small as it was, it was worth more than our ship many times over, which is perhaps why we didn’t pay much mind to the scrapes that we thought were to be minor at the time. When space debris worked its way into our thrusters, we were screwed to say the least. We weren’t supposed to be in the asteroid field, and especially not with an ill-equipped ship like ours we’d come to discover.
Our only chance was to calculate a means of intercepting a research outpost with our ship with what little momentum we could get from firing the engines and coasting after the thrusters broke down completely. Given our calculations, we’d come within radar distance of such an outpost in about another week and a half. That’s assuming our calculations were correct in the first place, and that neither us nor home base have shifted their trajectories.
My co-habitant of the ‘Gemini’ is still quite young. Chris has neat, short hair, glasses, a thin, tall build and only a couple of years experience behind him. I had many years more experience than he did, but that much could be betrayed by my bearded and wrinkled face. He was taking it about as well a young man such as he could. Shaky optimism was about all we had between us left.
That and a dog named Stein, the third member of this ship. A short little Welsh Corgi with patches of orange and white across its fluffy coat of fur. I think Chris’s dog was probably coping with it a little better than the rest of us. Shaky optimism and a Welsh Corgi made up the glue holding us together.
Chris was staring out the window, not expectantly, more hopefully perhaps. Stein was curled up in a corner, probably hungry since his food was being rationed as well. Anything had to be better than this. The cold, white interior of the Gemini that we couldn’t leave no matter how much we wanted it. It’s a ship that has seen me travel all across the solar system, doing various forms of research. There’s enough room to conduct research, store materials and food, as well as eat and sleep. It was by no means a large ship, only having enough room for a few people, but it was mine. Though, safe and familiar as it was, I didn’t want to die inside of it.
As the days wore on, Chris and I stopped talking as much. At this point it seemed like an extraneous action, and maybe it was a good thing since my wife used to always tell me I would get grumpy if I got too hungry. We’d already talked about everything we possibly could. We talked about similar situations, about what we were gonna do when we got back with the asteroid, I talked about different experiences, and told Chris how much he had ahead of him. It wasn’t fair for a young guy like him to be put in this kind of situation.
Now, it seemed like conservation of our energy was more important than anything and maybe the effort that seemed to come with holding a conversation at this point is what made it easy to avoid one particular subject. We were running out of food, we had enough food to last us perhaps two more days before we’d have to start starving as well. Add to that, our water supply would not last the three of us another four or five days.
Maybe Chris realised it too, which is why he started talking before I had a chance to bring it up when I approached him. “Greg, what if...” he seemed to turn towards me, drawing the ‘if’ out as he met my eyes with his. “What if we took the spare solar sheet and draped it across the nose of the ship?” there was no sincerity in his voice, not quite shaky, but not very convincing. The solar sheeting he talked about was much like a blanket that was designed as a backup for re-entry resistance.
“Now what good’ll that accomplish?” I’d momentarily forgotten why I wanted to talk to him. It seemed like an absurd thing to waste energy doing in this situation. “Now, now, listen. That solar sheeting is good for more than protection on re-entry,” he paused, putting his hands up and making a gesture with them, as though it would convince me, “It’ll be like a mirror, it’ll reflect light that hits it and bounce it out,” he explained with a bit more conviction than before.
I scratched my grey, neatly trimmed beard as I thought it over and realised that there was a bit more merit to this than I thought. “This is the science outpost we’re talking about, maybe they’ll do a light source scan and pick it up as an irregularity?” Chris threw it out like a possibility, when in reality, he probably thought it through very carefully and knew that we had to bank on that chance.
I turned slightly away from him and shrugged, “That’s a slim possibility we’re talking about here,” but he was quick to meet me again as I turned, thinking I was somewhat convinced.
“But it’s worth a try right? They do scans like this at least once or twice a month right?” I didn’t look him in the eyes this time. I’ve seen situations like this unfold plenty of times as a freelance space researcher. They’re not even looking for us, Chris should’ve known as well as I that they we were not being expected by anyone at the moment.
It took us a while, but a short space walk saw us drape the sheeting across the ship’s nose. There weren’t many times when I’d have an excuse to get out in the space suit. Usually if we predicted the need to work outside the ship, we’d have a few more crew members about us. Floating in space like that seemed to bring forth that lethargy from doing next to nothing for three weeks. It seemed like it would be too easy to just float there until I died, floating in the darkness of space. I knew that these thoughts were wrong, I knew that I needed to have the mental will power to push them away, but I couldn’t deny their presence there.
“Greg?” I snapped from my daze, Chris was calling me with the short wave radio in our suits, “Let’s go Greg, it’s done”.
It was done, but what good did it do? A few more days passed and nothing, absolutely nothing. More of Chris staring out of that god **** window and more of that dumb mutt whimpering for food. Our supplies were running out. Our food, water and air. They were all almost completely gone.
“Chris,” I began, catching the attention of his bespectacled eyes. “We’re running out of everything, and we won’t have food and water to survive the next few days if we don’t...do something”. I skirted around what needed to be said. I knew how attached Chris was to that dog, but hell, I wasn’t going to die because of it.
“What? What are you saying?” his eyes went wide, fittingly like an animal in the head lights of an oncoming car.
“I mean Stein, Chris,” I clarified with a stern tone, ”We can’t keep him nourished, hydrated and breathing without sacrificing what little we have left,” my voice quietened towards the end. My intention had to of been very clear by then.
He stood up to face me, “You can’t be serious!”
“We should never have tried to keep him alive in the first place, and you know it!” I yelled back. “I’m a ****ing fool for letting us feed our supplies to him in the first place!”. I’ve yelled at Chris many times, scolding him as a mentor should, but this time was different. This time we were two men on the brink of death, arguing about how best to survive all of this.
Chris’s rage at what I was insinuating was growing rapidly. “Fine, you know what? ****ing fine!” he turned and headed straight for Stein, picking him up and carrying him over to me. He held the dog in my direction, the dog staring me in the face with its tongue hanging out. “Kill him then, go on!”
When Chris put it that way, I couldn’t. Maybe it was the air thinning out from all the shouting and thus, the quick breathing we were doing, but looking at Stein like that, I knew I wouldn’t be able to bring myself to do anything to him. I covered my face, rubbing my forehead and started breathing slowly. We weren’t too different, it seemed. We were both greedy, and we were both idiots. The two of us were stretched as thin as the sustenance left on the ship, neither of us hoping to survive more than a few more days.
In him I could see a glimpse of myself back in the day. In those days I was young and ambitious, as though nothing would stop me. I would have been shattered at something like this, but, like an idealistic young fool, I probably wouldn’t have agreed to sacrifice a crew member, human or not. Looking at Chris clutch Stein as he did made me feel guilty, or maybe I didn’t care anymore. I was far too out of it to even make that distinction.
Then something happened. For the first time in almost a month, a foreign sound crackled through the silent void. A feeling shot through my whole body, and I’m sure through Chris’s as well. Like that feeling you get when your name gets drawn from a hat for something really important.
“...Is th...re...freque...hello?” a long distance broadcast.
Even as we were, both of us draped and lost in the vast expanse of space, somebody found it. That single little light.
