She blinked at him, mouth still open to speak.
“What does any of that matter now? Suppose we spend the next ten or twenty years researching this place and writing little notebooks full of our findings. So what? So those notebooks can lie next to our bones bleaching in the sun? If we can’t get home, none of it matters. You don’t seem to get that. And frankly,” a flare of embarrassment stained his cheeks, “frankly, I’m not so sure it wouldn’t be the best thing for Earth if we never did get home.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means…” He took a deep breath. “It’s exactly like this situation, Jill. All you see is the science, not the human equation, not our predicament. God! Don’t you think I know you were planning to work for the DoD? Even after we’d gone to Poland?”
She pressed her lips tight, looked away.
“Even now you can’t give it up. Can’t you see that whatever this species knows, it hasn’t done them any good? Why do you want it so badly?”
He didn’t seem to be angry anymore, more genuinely trying to express himself, to plead with her. But that only made his words that much more unbearable. A groundswelling of resentment pulsed inside her.
“I’m a scientist, that’s why! That’s my job. And, as long as we’re being honest here, why can’t you just do your job instead of whining all the time? If we’re stuck here, we’re stuck here! What do you want me to do about it? Lie down and give up? You’re a man, not a boy. Why don’t you act like one!”
He laughed. “A man? Really? I didn’t think you’d noticed. How am I not being a man? Because I’m reacting, for god’s sake? You can say that so blithely: ‘We’re stuck here.’ That would be fine with you, wouldn’t it? You’d be perfectly happy to bury yourself in work again. My god, it isn’t even the fame, is it? I always thought you were just incredibly ambitious. But there’s no chance of fame here. It’s just blind work. What is that? Escapism, is that what it’s about for you? Do you work so you don’t have to feel?”
She started to protest but didn’t know where to begin. His words were so malicious and so unfair.
He stood up, shoving himself back from the table. “Well, I, for one, don’t like this place. Maybe you’re content to spend the rest of your life eating little white food bars and being alone, never seeing your family again, and…” There was the angry edge of tears in his voice. “Forget that there’s no one to talk to, no TV, no books, no news, no food, no beer, no music, no anything—it’s so dead, Jill. The aliens… and this whole place—it’s sterile and lifeless and dead! Didn’t you see what I saw today? Don’t you get it? This place is a tomb!”
Jill was purposefully not looking at him, embarrassed by his emotion. She felt nothing but anger, but she was already cooling, had already decided that she wasn’t going to give him what he wanted, wasn’t going to have a big scene and allow herself to get all upset. It was the stress, she told herself, the effects of the altered one-minus-one on his system.
“I understand that you’re homesick,” she said in a let’s-be-reasonable tone. “But we have no idea what might happen down the road. We may find a way home. We may even be rescued. In the meantime, I see no excuse for wasting this precious opportunity. If you were thinking clearly, you’d feel the same, so I think we should just—”
“Rescued?” he laughed. “By whom?”
“You’ll feel better in the morning,” she said, with a deep sigh.
Nate, apparently, didn’t agree. He got up abruptly and went outside, flinging his chair aside as he went. The door wasn’t the kind you could slam, but Jill heard the noise in her head all the same.
Although she’d been tired for hours, Jill couldn’t sleep. What she really wanted was to be alone—alone, as in not having to worry about where Nate was or what he was thinking or when he would come in. She wanted a break from all of this, from the burden of the relationship, from feeling like it was her fault that he was here, that she needed to take care of him. But she wasn’t going to get a break from that responsibility. More to avoid another argument upon his return than anything else, she bedded down. She could have pulled his mattress farther away from her cot or even put it in another room, but she didn’t want to set him off again, so she left it.
She lay down and tried to sleep, but something was growing inside her. She felt a hollowness blooming, despite her determination to ignore it. It was a niggling doubt: What if Nate was right? What if they couldn’t get home—was it all pointless after all? And would it really be the best thing for Earth if she was lost for good, and the one-minus-one with her?
No. That was Nate’s idealistic hogwash. Progress was never bad. Learning, even if it ended up in a notebook next to her bleaching bones, was never for naught. It was her only god. She had to believe in it.
But the hollowness in her belly deepened, quenching her enthusiasm like coals being overwhelmed by dark, filthy water. The images from the clinic wouldn’t leave her. The poor female, chained to a bed and no male willing to go near her. How had this society come to that? How could beings who’d had enough of a spark of life to evolve from nothing, from microbes out in that desert, to a highly technological society suddenly lose the drive to reproduce, to live?
Nate came in. The lights went on automatically at his movement. She was lying on her back, and now she wished she’d been facing the wall. She squeezed her eyes shut. She heard him taking off his shoes, quietly, getting ready for bed. She wanted to say she was sorry, but she wasn’t sorry and didn’t know why she should be. The room was so still. He lay down. It got quieter. The lights went out.
That hollowness reverberated inside her in the silence, like a place where her name should be and wasn’t. Then her name appeared. At first she thought it was just in her head, but it was Nate. He had said her name, “Jill.” His tone, lingering in her ears, sent a shiver up her spine.
“Jill.”
Again. The hollowness, despair, was in his voice, too. It said a lot of things. It said he was sorry about the argument—not as in an apology but as in it didn’t matter anymore, not in the face of that overwhelming emptiness. She knew what he needed—human contact. A touch, comfort, something real, something from home, something to ease the chill. She wanted it, too.
She could reach across in the dark and take his hand. She could even imagine herself rolling off the bed in the dark and lying down next to him, putting her head against his chest. She almost did it. But the thought occurred to her: Then what? Where would it lead? Would he kiss her again? And then what? It had been such a long time since she’d been intimate with a man, not since her college days, and even then it had been a disaster. She’d felt sexual desire for Nate, god only knew. But the idea of being naked, vulnerable, here in this place—exposing herself so intimately physically and mentally at this precise moment of time? It terrified her.
“Jill,” he said again, this time louder, darker, demanding a reply.
She pretended to be asleep. The silence was so uncomfortable that she added a light snore, just to make sure he was convinced, to plug up once and for all the awful stillness.
19
Loved and honoured hadst thou lain
By the dead that nobly fell,
In the underworld again,
Where are throned the kings of hell,