Authors: Christine Gasbjerg
I’m saving the remainder of the oxygen in the tank for a ‘rainy day’. There’s less than half an hour’s worth of oxygen in it. I can still fill the suit with smelly air, and walk around in the light during the day for a little while. But generally, I just get out at night in the dark and stay close to the holes. Or stay in one of the holes.
Some holes are more smelly than others, so I’ve got my favorite holes. The holes provide me with nutrition too—the green slimy stuff stuck to the inside of the holes. Just around sunrise, it gets covered with dew as well, so that’s when I drink. It seems like the dew and the green slime contains enough liquid and nutrition to keep me going.
The days and nights here are much shorter than on Earth, so I’ve got to sleep in one of the holes, where there’s always oxygen, or else I risk not waking up again.
As a scientist, I could go and explore the planet, but I’m choosing to stay right here, near the black holes. I’m hoping that the Apollo will come back for me, and if it does, I reckon it’s likely to return to where it left me. Right here.
I want to see Kurt again. I pray he’s alright. I recall the situation when he gave me the raw diamond. I try to dissect it, to reveal the truth behind his words and the gesture. I end up concluding that he might just have been inspired on the spur of the moment... just because the diamond was suddenly there, I was there, and for no other particular reason. I mean, if he’s in love with me, or even wants to marry me, then surely he’d make that clear to me, right? And he hasn’t, so I better not get my hopes up too high. Do I even really want him? Like forever and ever? It’s a big question that I’m hesitant to answer. Perhaps we’re better off just staying friends. Then nobody gets hurt.
I still want to see him. Madly. Right now, there’s no one else in the entire universe that I want to see more than Kurt. I guess I’ve grown more than just a little bit fond of him.
The lovely thing is that the air on the surface of the planet is not smelly like it is in the holes. I much prefer staying in the dark at night on the surface in fresh air, without my suit. I’m not keeping track of time. It’s inconsequential now. The only thing that matters is wellbeing, oxygen, and green stuff. Funny. On Earth I was stressed out, and cut my life down to what I considered to be the bare minimum. But I know now, that life can be even simpler than that. Apart from staying alive, all I do is lie on my back in the dark looking into space. I do my best to refrain from panicking, and try to be at peace and enjoy myself as much as possible under the circumstances. I feel my body, and notice how my negative thoughts can create tension and adrenalin rushes. The more I focus on it, the more aware I become of the discomfort and absence of peacefulness, that it brings when I hold negative thoughts in my head. So I try to keep my thoughts joyful and clean. I frequently imagine the Apollo coming to get me. Sometimes I write my heart out in the blood-red sand. Even if nobody will ever read it, it feels good to create something tangible.
I’ve noticed that I occasionally see what I wish to see—like a mirage. Several times I’ve seen something moving in the night sky. I’m always convinced it’s the Apollo, but it never is. Now I’m seeing something moving again. But it doesn’t look like the Apollo. I reckon it’s another mirage, or perhaps a comet at best.
The sun is coming up soon, and the air is getting thin. I leap down my favorite hole, marked by the love rock, for a snooze. I call it ‘the diamond hole’, because I never moved the diamond. It’s still lying there next to the first hole I fell into, like a faithful guard dog. The Pink Planet is a quiet place. Rarely even as much as a wind is moving. But now suddenly dust is blown into the hole. I cough a little, and hear a distant noise.
Are they here to get me?
The sun is just rising, and there’s no way I can get out of the hole without my suit. It’s easy to get out of the hole without the suit, but difficult with the suit on. So I take a deep breath, jump out of the hole, into the suit, seal the suit, and open the remaining oxygen supply. There’s not much oxygen left, but I take my chances. I’ve gotta go see if it’s them, if the Apollo has come back for me.
As I reach the edge of the crater, I see a small vessel make a crash landing on the plain, where the Apollo was. It’s really not very big or impressive, like the Apollo, but I’m pretty sure it’s not a mirage. I run as fast as I can, like a clumsy elephant stampeding towards the small ship.
It looks like a four-seater emergency pod. One of the three legs broke in the crash landing, so now it’s lying face down.
“Hello? Who’s in there?” I knock on the hull of the pod.
There’s no reply.
I manage to roll the pod over, so the door is unblocked. I knock on the door again, but realize that I can’t risk opening it, in case the astronaut pilot hasn’t got a suit on, or the oxygen distribution is damaged.
“Is anybody in there?” I try knocking again.
I brush the red dust off the window, and look inside. There’s only one person in the pod. I can’t see clearly through the window, and don’t recognize the pilot. But I take it as a good sign that the pilot is wearing a suit like mine. Or rather, a white clean suit, looking like my suit used to look. Now, my suit is just dirty green and smudged. I assume that I look like a hobo... an astronaut hobo!
The pilot mumbles and slowly comes alive. It sounds like a man. He’s clearly disoriented, and it takes a while for him to figure out how to release the safety buckle. He moves slowly.
“Hello.” I knock gently on the window so I don’t frighten him.
He still gets startled as he sees me, and instantly pulls back from the window, through which it must appear to him as if a crazy alien is looking in. Me! I wave and smile. I can only guess that my face is as green and smudged as my suit is. What can you do when there’s no water to bathe in? I must look like a green alien to the poor pilot.
“Millie?” the man speaks.
“Yes? Who are you?” I’m surprised and baffled to hear my own name.
“It’s me, Millie. It’s me.” The man sounds fatigued and worn out. “Thank god you’re alive.” He falls to the floor.
“Kurt? Is that you?” I don’t waste a single second, and fling the door open.
With finesse like an elephant, I manage to haul the pilot out of the pod.
Sure enough, it’s Kurt. My hero, my savior... perhaps even my love?
His oxygen is lower than mine is, so he might have passed out on account of low oxygen, or he might have passed out because of the impact of the crash landing. I haul him as fast as I possibly can towards the crater. He’s very heavy. It feels like twice my weight.
“Stay with me, Kurt! Stay with me!”
I feel adrenalin and panic pumping through my body, as I struggle to drag Kurt across the blood red plane.
“You’ve come this far to get me, please don’t leave me already.” I keep talking to him, hoping it’ll somehow help in keeping him alive.
The thought of loosing Kurt forever like this, breaks my heart, makes me want to cry, and makes me feel like giving up. I hit myself in the head to get a grip—just resulting in a loud awkward bang on my helmet.
I set aside all considerations for myself, and summon all my strength to get Kurt into the Diamond Hole. I let unknown strengths rise in my body, along with a deep and fierce growling. I haul like hell. I haul with anger, like I was lifting the entire planet.
Finally, we reach the Diamond Hole. Kurt’s body is lifeless. I pray it’s not too late. I open the safety visor of his helmet and plop him into the hole. I take a deep breath, jump out of my suit and into the hole after him.
“Breathe, Kurt, breathe!” I slap his cheeks, take a deep breath, and do mouth to mouth. I blow air into his lungs a few times, until he finally starts breathing again.
“Millie?”
“Yes, I’m right here.”
“I can’t see.” Kurt sounds weary.
“It’s dark here. Don’t worry. Just breathe.”
“What’s the smell?”
“We’re in one of the black holes. There’s air here. And green nutrition for lack of a better word.” I smile in the dark.
“Yes, green... I noticed that on my gloves. That’s what gave me hope that you’d still be alive. That’s why I had to hurry back here for you.”
“You’re my savior.” I gently caress his cheek in the dark.
“I had to come and get you.” Kurt’s voice fades.
“Just rest now. I’m right here.” I feel like nothing else matters in the world right now. Everything I need is right here.
TWELVE
stranded in space
Looking closer at the pod, it doesn’t seem all that damaged. Apart from one of the three landing legs being broken, there’s only dirt and surface scratches.
“I’ll pile up rocks to support the pod, where the leg is broken. That’ll give us a fair chance to take off.” Kurt is immediately on the job.
“Are we going to crash-land, without the leg being repaired?”
“Yes, we’ll crash-land again. Hopefully we’ll only have to land once, because I’m not sure the pod can take anymore crash-landings. And me neither, for that matter.”
“Where are we going?”
“I don’t think we have much choice.” Kurt makes a face. “There’s no way the pod can take us all the way back to Earth. E-corp’s space station is the closest harboring platform, and we’re lucky if we can even get back there.”
“Won’t we be apprehended?”
“Sure. They’ll probably lock us up. They might not even let us live for long.” Kurt takes a deep breath. “But what other options do we have? We can’t stay here, living a life confined to a hole smelling like fart.”
Kurt is right. We can’t stay here. We’d go crazy living in holes. The Virgin Planet has kept me and us alive, but isn’t hospitable enough to sustain a life. Better take our chances trying to get back to Earth. Even if we might not survive.
“Okay. I’m with you. Let’s go.” I go to pick up my love rock.
It’s the only souvenir I’ll bring.
Kurt follows, and we fill the suits with as much air as we can, to get back to the pod. The pod holds tanks with enough oxygen to provide what we need for the journey. It can work.
The take off doesn’t go smooth at all. The pile of rocks on the ground, replacing the broken landing leg, makes the pod go off spiraling at an awkward angle rather than straight up. The gravity of the planet then pulls the pod severely off track, catapulting the pod further into space, away from the direction of home.
It takes us a lot of precious fuel to get back on the right trajectory. Fuel, which we don’t have enough of.
I really really want to go home now that it looks like a possibility. Just over two months ago, I couldn’t get away fast enough, and I felt my life was so redundant, that I almost had a death wish. That certainly isn’t the case anymore. Now there’s nothing I want more than to go home... with Kurt. My attraction to Kurt has slowly crept up on me, and now it’s become so dominating that I can’t even think of any other man close to me. But I don’t know where Kurt is at. His gestures say he likes me too, but his words don’t. It confuses me, and makes me apprehensive. I try not to think of it, and just enjoy the time with Kurt, no matter what any of it means.
“All I remember was Lorenson walking up behind us, and then everything went dark. What actually happened?” I have been wanting to ask the question for a while. It finally seems like a good time to talk about it now.
“Erhm...” Kurt is obviously uncomfortable. “Lorenson walked up behind us and knocked you out with a stun gun. Before I could get on my feet to defend you, he knocked me out too. Next thing I know, I wake up in isolation on the Apollo as we’re docking back at the E-corp station. I suppose he must have drugged me after knocking me out with the stun gun to keep me unconscious. I don’t know why we were knocked out or why you were left behind. Only Martin managed to sneak in for a moment to speak with me. He said they were told we had a terrible accident, and that you died and couldn’t be rescued. He also said that they were heading back to Earth.”
“Then what did you do?”
“I felt fine an hour or so after waking up on the space station, but pretended to have amnesia, and unable to find my balance. I once read that the shock from a stun gun can have those effects on the human body, so I faked it, hoping they’d install me in the infirmary at the space station—away from the captain. And they did.” Kurt sounds intrigued with his own cunning. “As soon as they’d left me at the sick bay with a gullible doctor, I asked permission to go to the bathroom. Then I quickly made my way to the hangar, got the first unattended and fully fueled vessel I could find, and took off. There was a lot of activity in the hangar and around the station for some reason, so nobody seemed to take notice of me. I wasn’t even contacted on the radio.”
“But surely they know by now that you’re gone?”
“Who knows? Looking back, it strikes me how busy the E-corp station was when I left... almost as if the whole station was on red alert.”
“And the Apollo wasn’t scheduled to go back to Earth so soon either...”
“Right, so perhaps the Apollo was called back due to an emergency.” Kurt hesitates.
He looks like he’s thinking so hard, that I should be able to hear it rumbling.
“It makes sense that there might have been an emergency alert going on. The crew members I encountered looked either highly tense or flustered, and no one paid any attention to me walking around in conspicuous sick bay clothing. But I didn’t take notice at the time. All I thought about was going back for you.” Kurt sounds determined and a little guilt-stricken.
I feel a sudden rush of emotions. A lump in my throat prevents me from speaking. Tears are pressing behind my eyes. His words resonate in my mind. Kurt only thought of saving me... me? Does it get anymore heroic and romantic than that?
He’s my savior... Does that mean he loves me?
Or does it just mean that he’s a good and caring man, who couldn’t have another person’s life in his conscience? Would he have done the same for anybody else?
“Thank you, Kurt. Thank you, thank you.” I take his hand in mine and squeeze it. “You did a very brave thing.” I lift his hand, and press it against my chest above my heart, but I really want to put it everywhere else on my body too. I want to give myself fully to him. I want to surrender to him. I’m his for the taking.