What else is going on?
There’s another team in Materials lab. They’re working on some kind of adhesive tape. I’m worried they’re going to beat us.
So don’t let them.
The picture distorted for a second and then went back to normal.
Lion won’t be able to help for a while and we’re stuck on the wrist—
Amelia scrubbed her face with the washcloth, and her body drifted in the air. I recognized the water pump behind her. My uncle had brought one home once and we’d taken it apart.
Is that a BREE pump? I asked.
Who’s that?
Carla sighed. June.
Amelia’s face broke into a smile. June Reed. You’ve gotten bigger. Not by much though.
I moved closer to the computer, leaned across Carla so I could see. That’s the third-generation pump, right?
What do you know about it?
I know that if you don’t change the filter every seven days, instead of every ten like the manual tells you to, it spits water.
Amelia laughed. Hey, that’s true. She clipped her washcloth to the wall and pulled a shirt over her head. Then she floated out of the frame.
Amelia, I said quickly. Can you tell us about the rescue mission? About Endurance?
Her voice came from off-screen. Carly, I told you not to talk about that.
Carla glared at me. She shifted her chair so it blocked me from the screen. Amelia, she said. The wrist—
Amelia reappeared and loosely strapped herself into her seat. She still wasn’t wearing any pants.
All right, tell me the problem—
A beeping alarm sounded. Someone in a blue uniform blocked the screen. A man’s voice said something I couldn’t make out.
Sorry Carly. I’ve got to go.
You just got on—
Next time, okay? Listen, you might not hear from me for a while.
Why?
I’ll call again. Amelia unstrapped herself from her chair, started floating away.
When?
We heard her voice and the man’s voice, but all we saw was her empty chair, the restraints waving in the air.
Amelia, Carla called. You haven’t hung up—
The voices continued.
Amelia, you’re still on!
Her face appeared again. Oops. Then the screen went black.
Carla whipped around. What were you doing, interrupting like that? Her voice got higher. My sister doesn’t want to talk about a stupid water pump—
Seemed like she did, Nico said.
Carla’s face was furious.
You know your sister’s kind of weird, he said.
I don’t think she’s weird, I said. I think she’s—
No one cares what you think, Carla said.
She went outside, and Nico and I followed. A few wet snowflakes were falling.
Carla walked fast up ahead and Nico caught up to her, leaving me alone on the slippery path. It looked like he was trying to make up with her, to make her laugh. He picked up a handful of snow, packed it into a ball, and gave it to her. He said, loud enough for me to hear, Go for it. Right here. He pointed to his chin.
She threw it right at his head, hard, and he made a big show of wiping the dripping snow from his face. There was a big red spot on his cheek, and Carla laughed. They walked toward the cafeteria together, and didn’t look back. I stood still for a minute on the frozen walkway, and then I turned around and went back to Building 4. I sat down at a computer, opened up the Inquiry feed, chose a channel at random, and turned it up loud.
19
Every day I listened closely to the news reports about Inquiry; every morning I set my tray down on a chilly table in the cafeteria and felt certain today would be the day NSP would announce the rescue mission. But I was always wrong.
I kept returning to Building 4. I’d open up the Inquiry communications feed and click through all the recognizable channels, the sm or galley or stowage, and then through some with more inscrutable labels, listed as simply ext or int or aux followed by a number. Occasionally there was a distinct crackle or blip on the line, but when I asked Nico about it he said it was just meaningless interference, caused by any number of things between Earth and NSP’s deep-space satellites—a passing station, a random piece of space junk, a natural satellite.
I think I listened to every single channel for at least a few seconds. Each of them was different, and it was sort of fascinating, the contrasts in sound and volume. Some rushed like ocean water; another crunched like car tires on gravel. One sounded exactly like the steady patter of rain.
On the weekends I’d listen to the feed for hours, and certain channels became like old friends, their sounds familiar and comforting. I thought about how each was supposed to connect Earth and Inquiry, and a picture formed in my mind of threads that stretched deep into space, like a spacesuit’s tether cord but millions of miles long.
Sometimes I listened so long I thought I heard patterns in the feed’s seemingly random crackles. But when I told Nico about it, he said I was crazy.
You think you’re going to hear something NSP hasn’t? He laughed. Dream on.
But I kept listening and started plotting the crackles in a notebook of graph paper. Date, time, length. Pages and pages I filled in. But my system didn’t take into account intensity, or sound quality of any kind. I began listening carefully to discern differences in the noises, and after a while I came up with a code for recording each crackle and blip. A letter to denote sound quality, a number to denote length.
On some channels a sound appeared once and then never again. But on others there were little blips I got to know. A high whine, a quick tick, a bubbling hum. A3, E2, F5. On one of the auxiliary channels I regularly heard G1 and H2, which were maybe not two sounds but one because they always came together: a hum of low static and then seven snapping pops.
I kept asking Nico to come and listen, and he finally agreed. Once we were in front of the computer I pulled up the AUX27 channel and played back G1 and H2.
What do you think is causing those sounds? I asked.
It could be a million different things—
They come together every three days, I told him. Approximately every seventy-two hours, give or take a few hours.
His mouth turned up on one side, a slightly crooked smile. I’d only ever seen him smile that way at Carla. Whatever you think you’re doing, mission control has already done it, he said. And they found nothing or it would be on the news.
Nico, wait, I said. Can I ask you something?
I’ve listened to enough static for one day, he said.
The wind rattled the walls of the building. It’s about the hand.
What about it—
It’s not good enough, is it? Number five.
The thumb helped, he said.
A little.
Yeah. He shrugged. Only a little.
What can we do?
Not much unless you’ve got a better idea. He grabbed his bag. Then he paused. Do you?
I thought of the blown-up and shrunk-down hand that hung in my mind in Materials lab, and the hand prototype I’d left on James’s desk. But I shook my head no. Nico got up and told me he’d see me at dinner, and I stayed and listened to the hums and crackles of the AUX27 channel for a long time.
20
Lion was at breakfast the next morning; he walked slowly and his eyes were tired. I asked him how he was feeling and he said he’d woken up with a bad headache but it was better now. When we all sat down at a table with our cereal and toast I said I wanted to talk about the hand. I started to explain what was in my mind, slowly. I took out the notes I’d made when I was building my hand prototype. But Carla and Lion and Nico weren’t paying attention—they were looking at the television. On the screen a woman was talking about Inquiry. She said there was going to be an announcement momentarily, and the clank of utensils and the clatter of trays went silent.