“Hold still. I’m going to take some photos,” says Warren as he aims a camera at me.
“For the scrap album?”
“For the god damn textbooks. You just made me the foremost expert on the adverse effects of vacuum exposure. I’ll be the top speaker at conferences around the world for years. You made my career, David.”
“Happy to help.”
I’m still dazed and trying to piece things together.
I sit in quiet agony as he uses the camera to get close-up shots of my extremities.
When I look down, I notice two things: I’m only wearing a towel over my junk and my body is purple and yellow.
My knees are swollen cantaloupes and my toes rub together like fat plumbs.
“Amazing, right?” Warren puts the camera down. “How squeamish are you?”
“What do you got?” I nervously look down at my groin.
“Oh, don’t worry that should still work. You didn’t happen to keep any records on size and girth beforehand, did you?”
I shake my head, not sure if he’s kidding or not. While everything is numb down there, I’m vaguely aware of the feeling of what might be my swollen balls pressing against my inner thighs.
Oh dear lord.
“Any permanent damage?”
“We’ll have to wait and see. Individually, you should see improvement over the next couple days. Children might not cry on sight in a couple weeks.
“Get me a mirror…”
“I don’t know if I’d recommend that. Oh hell, you’re a big boy.”
Warren takes a small plastic mirror from a drawer and holds it in front of me.
“If you have any questions, just ask. I’m still making up names for some of the shit that happened to you. Fucking incredible.”
Holy. Crap. The face looking at me is unrecognizable. In a sentence: Yellow-pumpkin-face-boxer.
I’d heard anecdotal stories from older pilots about secret military facilities where accounts of alien experiments came from. They told me the real story behind the story was that these strange, distorted, swollen-headed creatures witnesses saw were pilots of high-altitude reconnaissance planes who had pressure suit malfunctions.
The face looking back at me is too primitive and malformed to ever be confused for a higher lifeform. I look like I’m suffering from some kind of genetic disorder.
“Should we send that photo to your mother?”
“Let’s wait until Mother’s Day.”
Warren puts the mirror away and picks up the camera again. He starts taking pictures of something on the floor.
My neck screams as I turn my head to see what he’s aiming at.
There on the ground is the remnants of my space suit. Cut to tatters so they could get it off my body: Warren has roughly arranged it back into human form so he can capture it for posterity.
“Jesus Christ,” he mumbles. “A space suit out of duct tape.”
“Technically, that’s high-cohesion amorphous polymer tape.”
“Technically, you’re lucky I know how to remove that stuff or you’d be looking at a full body skin graft — which isn’t a real thing.”
“Thanks.”
“Actually, thank Dr. Turco. She’s the one that was able to make the solvent so we didn’t have to rip off your flesh. If it wasn’t for her, I’m not sure we could have got your lungs working in time. You had a lot of fluid in there. I’m probably going to have to drain you later.”
“Joy.”
“And I’m going to stick my scope down there to take some more pictures, just because I can.”
My head begins to clear a little, which gives me some clarity but also makes me aware of the excruciating pain all over my body.
“Did they catch them?” I ask.
“Catch who?”
“The person who sealed me into the storage unit and ejected me.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“The storage module. The one I was inside of. Someone set off the release.”
“No. That’s not what happened at all. The station’s micro-meteor impact alarm went ape shit and everything sealed up automatically.”
“Someone locked me in.”
Warren shakes his head. “Maybe you tripped the alarm. All I know is I was sound asleep and all hell broke loose. We had no idea you were even missing until you smashed into the airlock.”
Fifty-Two
Outpatient
I know I saw someone through the window. My module ending up adrift right as I discovered the missing canister is no coincidence. Someone wanted me dead — and still wants that to happen.
Warren checks my wounds and fusses over some monitoring equipment while I sit here and privately fume. I can’t make a big deal about what I saw right now. I’m in a rather vulnerable position. I just have to give the swelling a few more hours then make my way to my lab where I can make a secure connection to Earth and tell them what really happened.
For the time being, I have to wait this out and not mention that I saw someone try to kill me — because that person is on this station, possibly in this room.
I watch Warren out of the corner of my eye. It’d be very easy for him to do something now that would end me. A bubble in one of the tubes feeding my fluids… “Accidentally” give me the wrong medication… Hell, he could just put a pillow over my face and say I suffocated from fluid build up. How many coroners have ever looked at a body with this kind of damage?
Although, from Warren’s reaction, I can tell this is mostly superficial. I’m bruised and swollen, but nothing appears to be failing. Still, he knows a hell of a lot more about how the body works and can be made not to work than I do.
“Okay, David, just sit still for a while,” he says, heading for the door.
“You’re leaving me?”
“Yeah. It’s kind of boring in here. I hate hospitals.” He taps a wrist display. “I’ll monitor you from this. If you’re still experiencing pain in an hour we’ll see about medicating that. For now I just want your body to do its own thing.”
“Taking advantage of millions of years of adapting to harsh airless environments?”
“You’re still alive, aren’t you?”
“Thanks to duct tape and my brain.”
He glances at my space suit and shakes his head. “Your brain. Good one.”
He’s probably an amazing doctor and saved my life, but I’m kind of glad when he leaves. There’s not much point to arguing with him that the primary reason I’m alive is because I figured out how to survive in space a little longer than a human should be able to.
Let him think that his god-like powers are the reason I’m still alive.
Despite the pain, or because of it, I manage to doze off a little.
I wake up a little while later to the sound of a sponge being wrung into a bowl. When I open my eyes, Samantha is gently washing my forehead.
I get self-conscious about my little towel then realize that I’m covered with a thin blanket.
“How’s it going?” I give her a smile.
I can see from the reaction she’s trying to hide that I’m still hideous.
“It’s okay, you can say it,” I tell her.
“I once set my American Girl doll on fire. She looked better afterwards than you do right now.”
“So the make out session has been canceled?”
“Uh, yeah, for the time being. Have you looked at your lips?”
“Puffy?” I run my tongue across them and feel how cracked they are. “Oh. Gross.”
“I’ll put some moisturizer on them. To be honest, we got to put a lot of things all over you.”
I try to make a growling sound and fail miserably, only producing a pathetic gurgle.
“What was that?”
“I think I’m thirsty.”
She puts a straw to my lips. “Sip.”
Water trickles out the corner of my mouth. She uses a towel to wipe away my spittle.