‘Hello, Sally. What’s the matter?’
‘You looked like you were in pain so I woke you up.’
The smile dulled a little as Mikhail thought. ‘I was dreaming,’ he said.
‘What were you dreaming about?’
Mikhail frowned. ‘I think — I think I was dreaming about —’ he winced in pain, and held his face in his hands. When he resurfaced, his expression was normal again. ‘No, I don’t remember.’
Sally was worried for him. She knew he was having headaches, but she hadn’t seen one before, and it looked far worse than he was letting on. ‘Can I get you anything?’ she said. ‘For the pain?’
Mikhail smiled again, and shook his head. ‘No, I’m fine. Really.’
Mikhail did seem fine now, and continued to for the rest of the day. He was back to his cheery self in no time, and they laughed and joked their way through their daily routine, which was sprinkled with more of Mikhail’s wondrous insights.
But although Sally was happy, the expression of suffering on Mikhail’s face when she’d found him that morning stuck in her mind, and no matter how much he told her that he was fine, she couldn’t dismiss it. Over dinner, she brought up the topic again.
‘Do you think your headaches are getting worse?’ she asked, trying to sound casual while popping a piece of bread in her mouth.
‘Please,’ Mikhail said, patting her on the arm as if to reassure her. ‘You don’t need to worry.’
‘But do you think they’re getting worse? I want to know.’
Mikhail’s face dropped a little. ‘Yes.’
‘Why do think that is?’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t really know. The only thing I do know is that when I get them, it feels like a tap has been opened in my mind. The knowledge that comes flooding in is too much for me to hold. It’s like my head’s going to burst.’
‘What kind of knowledge?’
‘I don’t know — a bit of everything, really. Some parts I can actually understand, and that’s what I tell you, but there are other things that hurt to think about.’
He pulled a pained expression, and Sally chewed her bread, thinking.
‘Why do you think the vessel is doing this to you? Do you think it means to hurt you?’
‘No, I don’t think it does. I don’t know what it’s doing, but I don’t sense any malice in its actions. Perhaps I am too fragile. Too weak.’
‘Do you think you’ll survive?’
Just saying that made Sally’s throat go dry, and it caught Mikhail off guard, too. She watched him as he struggled to form an answer.
‘I — I don’t know. But if I don’t survive, I’ll die having experienced what very few ever have, so I think it’s worth it.’
A passionate longing, like she’d experienced when she wanted to get into CalTech; like when she’d submitted her research to the NuStar team; like when she’d first looked up to the heavens and decided she wanted to visit them, sparked a flame inside Sally. ‘Can I experience it too?’
This made Mikhail laugh for some reason, and without knowing why, Sally did too. She liked to laugh with him.
‘Soon,’ he said. ‘Soon.’
After dinner, they resumed Sally’s research. With Mikhail’s help, Sally was making incredible progress, recording data she never thought she’d get to see, which she stored and backed up on the station’s computers with religious zeal.
‘You have no idea,’ she said as she copied her data files across to the backup server, ‘how useful this information is going to be back on Earth. This stuff could give us a ten-year technological advancement in less than a year. It’s incredible.’
‘I’m glad I could help,’ Mikhail said as he switched off the equipment.
‘This is seriously going to move the field of quantum physics forward faster than anyone’s ever seen. God, I hope I can see the look on John Heisenberg’s face when this information gets presented. It’ll be a classic.’
‘Who’s John Heisenberg?’
Sally blushed — she felt a little silly for having brought John Heisenberg up at all. ‘He’s a guy I studied with at CalTech. He was a real jerk. I turned him down on a date, so he decided to make my life as difficult as he possibly could from then on. He even broke into a professor’s car to steal a paper of mine once, can you believe that?’
‘And it would be satisfying to show him this research?’
Sally played with her hands in the way she did when she felt awkward and uncomfortable. ‘Yeah, I suppose. He’s an accomplished physicist in his own right, and he did apologise to me a few years ago, but still — I’d like to show him what I can do.’
‘Do you like him?’
Sally nearly choked she was so taken aback by the question. ‘What? No! He’s quite cute, but I can’t get past all the horrible things he did to me. Not now, not ever.’
Mikhail smiled and nodded with a glint in his eye. They continued packing up and shutting down the equipment in silence.
‘What if you could go back?’ Mikhail said after a while.
Sally wasn’t sure if she’d heard him right. ‘Pardon?’
‘What if you could go back — in time, I mean?’
It was something Sally had considered on more than one occasion. With a retrospective look back to how things could have been, there were many possibilities — infinite, even. She did it often, about many aspects of her life, even though she knew it was just a futile waste of imagination. Of course, she had never given any thought to actually being able to do it.
‘I — I haven’t really considered it.’
‘It can be done.’
Sally wasn’t sure if he was mocking her or being serious; his face, however, suggested the latter. ‘How?’
‘Not only can you enter this universe from any of the others at any point you like, you can also enter it at any time.’
‘But how do you get from one universe to another?’
‘Through a doorway.’
‘What doorway?’
‘It is created. The vessel is a doorway.’
Somehow, that made sense to Sally. She thought about the times she had stared at UV One, and how it had shown her things she didn’t understand. Now she realised she had been staring through into another universe. ‘You’ve been there, haven’t you?’
Mikhail nodded.
‘What’s it like on the other side?’
Mikhail opened his mouth and then shut it. ‘I — I can’t really describe it,’ he said eventually. ‘Not with these words.’
‘Can you take me there and show me?’
The question made Mikhail look frightened. ‘No! I can’t take you, it’s much too dangerous. I wouldn’t know where I was going — we’d get lost for certain.’
Sally took Mikhail’s wide-eyed expression as a signal to move on. She finished packing up and went to the Cupola to take pictures, a hobby that she’d discovered during her research a week ago and found to be quite therapeutic. She had never been interested in photography on Earth, but on Earth she didn’t have a view like the one she had now. She tracked a cloud formation before snapping it as it passed over India.
‘Do you think humans are supposed to be in space?’ she asked as she framed another shot.
‘What do you mean?’ Mikhail said, looking out the window. ‘Ooh, there’s an interesting cloud just about to reach Oman — look.’
Sally aimed her camera at Oman and clicked. ‘You’re right. It looks a bit like a dog, doesn’t it? What I mean is, should humans be in space at all or are we taking things too far? For example, we can’t breath out here and we’d die pretty quick in a vacuum, so should we be floating around up here at all?’
‘I think the question is, why not?’ Mikhail said. ‘Exploration is the path to discovery — surely you agree with that?’