I fell against the bed, shivering and sweating, and pressed my hand between my legs until the pulsing slowed.
I lay still next to him for a long time. His breath slowed and his arm rested heavy on my chest. He seemed to be dozing. But I didn’t feel sleepy at all; my arms and legs were restless, my face too hot. Behind my eyes the fuel cell worked with a buzzing hum. Worked and worked. I pushed his arm off me and opened my eyes.
Are you sleeping? I asked in the darkness.
I see that damn cell when I close my eyes, he said.
I hear its vents in my ears, I said.
He turned and I felt the heat of his limbs next to mine.
His face hovered; his curls brushed my face. You need another sound, he said, and blew in my ear.
I laughed and shivered.
He wrapped his arms around me tightly, pressed his whole body against mine.
40
When I woke he was moving around the room. He was naked, but in the gloom his body was full of shadows. There were distinct shapes: the muscles in his abdomen, shoulders, thighs. But also the softness of his cheeks and the hair on his chest. He seemed natural in this state. He didn’t grab a robe or a towel, and I had a strange picture of him like this, unclothed, just skin and hair and bone, not in a room but outside the station on the rocky pink surface. Nothing between him and the salty air. I thought the idea was funny.
Why are you smiling? he asked.
A picture in my head, I said.
Of what?
You.
I’m glad I amuse you.
He came closer, leaned over me. His breath was slightly sour. I didn’t care.
He kissed me, gently, tugging at my lips with his.
I want to see that picture, he said.
He kissed me again, harder this time.
I don’t know if I want to see what’s inside your head, I said, and put my hands in his hair, which smelled like the wool blanket on his bed and also faintly like…what? A soldering iron. I wrapped my fingers around his head, felt his skull underneath. What’s in it?
A bad temper.
That’s all?
He rubbed his beard against my cheek, rough and scratchy, little hairs dragging against my skin. That’s all.
I hope there’s a picture of a modified cell in there, I said. One that can withstand more than a year of vibration.
He squinted, looked up at the ceiling, and then frowned. No.
He got up, pulled on a pair of shorts. I lay back against the pillow, watched him walk around the room. An image drifted into my mind—black lines waving in an expanse of white, like the painting that used to hang in my bedroom at my aunt’s house. Then I saw the fuel cell, just one, outside its stack. No fixed hardware or sealant. Its interior parts floating freely in the air.
I sat up. What we’ve been working on, I said. It’s a good start. But—
I know. It’s not enough.
What if we go back to the beginning? I asked. To what a fuel cell is. What it does.
He shrugged and pulled a shirt over his head. It transforms one kind of energy into another. Chemical energy to electrical energy.
So that an explorer can use that electricity to power its engines and systems.
Are we just going to say things we already know to each other?
Yes, I said. I pulled on my tights and T-shirt and started looking for my socks.
Okay. He opened a drawer under the sink and pulled out a toothbrush. The generation of energy creates vibration. Vibration will always be a problem when an object is in a fixed space—
He held his toothbrush in the air.
I looked at him.
Who says it has to be in a fixed space? we said together.
We didn’t finish dressing. We went to the workshop, picked up all the parts on the table, and dumped them onto the shelves behind us. He grabbed paper and a marker.
It needs to be— I made a movement with my hands. So it’s free to move—
—the way it wants to move, he said.
He drew and I talked and gestured. Then he talked and I drew. We hauled the pieces of the cell back onto the table and took it apart again.
We didn’t stop to explain ourselves. We just said what was in our minds—a shape, a movement. A feeling. A sound. We stood close and reached over each other for tools and parts. It was different than before. It didn’t feel like we were two bodies, two minds anymore. We had a hold of something, a growing, pulsing idea. It had a charge like electricity. It was like a great sparking cloud above us, a tiny electrical storm.
41
For days nearly every minute was filled with our work on the cell. Thinking and rethinking it. Endlessly taking it apart and putting it back together. Each morning when I woke I heard my uncle’s voice in my head—What does it do?—and I would transform the cell in my mind, through all its revisions and permutations, to where we were now. Then I would thrust my mind forward three, four, five, or more steps ahead. I ran through them fast and then slow, trying to gauge their difficulty, how long they would take—and when we’d get to the very last one.
Our jumble of ideas sharpened and made a definite shape—a shape that solved the fatal flaw of the original cell. The new prototype did more than accommodate vibration. It incorporated it into nearly every part of its design. But there was still a gap between the half-built cell and our perfect idea—we couldn’t agree whether the cell should be housed in closed or open stacks. It was the old dilemma, the same question James and Theresa had argued about on the pages of the fuel cell schematics. James wanted to use closed stacks, as my uncle had, to retain power. But I wasn’t convinced; an open and modular system meant the cells would be easier to fix if something went wrong.
Then one morning I woke up and heard my uncle’s voice again—What does it do?—and saw that the perfect idea I’d been carrying around in my mind wasn’t the end at all. Even the decision to use closed or open stacks wasn’t the end. Of course it wasn’t.
I turned over; James wasn’t in the bed.
I went looking for him and he was in the workshop, bent over a 3D printer. We haven’t thought far enough ahead, I said.
He didn’t look up.
We have to stop working in isolation. We need to talk to Amelia and Simon, and we need to unseal Endurance.
He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. We’re not ready.
We are.
He was quiet for a minute. I haven’t talked to Amelia in a long time.
So what?
And the last time I saw Simon he punched me in the face.
Simon?
A week before Inquiry’s launch.
I remembered James’s black eye when we stood together at the airfields at Inquiry’s takeoff. Why? I asked.
I wanted him to talk to Anu again about the cell. To give her specifics this time, to show her the calculations we had made about vibration and time. If anyone could convince NSP to delay the launch it was her. But Simon wouldn’t do it, and Amelia backed him up. I told them if something went wrong, it would be their fault. That’s when he hit me.
That was six years ago, I said.
Right.
I think you can forgive him.
He looked at me. I guess that’s true.
The fastest way to send them a message is at the satellite station, he said.
So let’s go.
He got up from the table slowly. The maintenance crew has one of the rovers. And I took the tires off the other. I’ll have to put them back on.
I occupied myself with 3D-printing some sturdier bolts for the cell’s exterior base. But when I started installing them I broke my needle driver. I put the pieces of the driver in my pocket and searched for another in the cabinets and drawers in the workshop. I looked in the equipment room and James’s bunk too but found nothing. There were tools in the room containing the failing cells, I remembered, and I went into the south corridor, warm and dim as usual, its walls close.