I hadn’t realized just how loud JanHus1 was when operating. Without the hum of filters and air-conditioning and screens, all I could hear was the ceaseless grinding. The purple phosphorescence provided only a fragment of light. I heard a quiet voice and felt around the desk for the earpiece.
“… ammit, JanHus1, respond, fuck…”
“Petr?” I said.
“Jakub. I can’t see you. Report.”
The vibrations ceased. The vision of the core covered the rest of my universe. It seemed I was so close that I could touch it. The layer of the cloud I found myself in was free of dust, free of any debris, like an atmosphere that had rejected everything else but me. The core no longer pulled. JanHus1 was perfectly still within this sphere of nothingness.
“I’m close,” I said, “but the gravitational influence has weakened.”
“Comms are the only thing that’s working. Not a single sensor in the ship is functional.”
Something landed on my cheek. I wiped it with my finger and found purple smeared on my fingertip. The flakes surrounded me now, falling from crevices in the ceiling. The air was stale and hard to breathe.
“Petr,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“I think the oxygen tank is out.”
I recovered a flashlight from the desk drawer and made my way through the Corridors. The electronic door panel leading to the mechanical bay was not functional, and I had to pull the levers and push with all my strength to open the hatch. I passed the engine control bay and entered the oxygen room, where a trio of massive gray barrels rested on the floor. As long as an electrical current ran through these tanks, allowing them to separate hydrogen and oxygen, they were perhaps the most crucial parts of the ship. Now they were simply three useless water towers tossed on their bellies like pigs about to be slaughtered. No fresh oxygen was being pumped into my world, just as the carbon dioxide was not being filtered out.
I informed Petr.
“Tell me when you start to feel dizzy,” he said. “And get your ass to the mainframe panel. Let’s fix this. Let’s get you out.”
I took comfort in his orders. Someone was in charge. As long as Petr was providing clear steps to follow, things could still be okay. I didn’t need to think about anything else.
I turned off the earpiece. “Hanu?!” I shouted into the Corridors. “Hanu?!”
The mainframe panel was cold and dark. At Petr’s instructions, I removed the panel cover and checked the wires inside. They were untouched, disturbingly clean just as they were when the ship was assembled. I took the panel apart, looking for burned-out motherboards, misplaced plugs. Everything was just as it should’ve been. I gave Petr a chance to say it before I did, but he was silent.
“Either the solar panel wiring got eaten through,” I said, “or the solar panels are gone.”
“Go put your suit on,” Petr said.
“The suit?”
“I don’t want you fainting when the oxygen drops. Put it on. I have to… I have to brief the people upstairs.”
The line went quiet.
I dressed first in the cooling garment, a sophisticated onesie that circulated water through a hose system to regulate body temperature, then pulled the thick mass of my space suit over my body. It smelled faintly of thrift stores and burning coal. On Earth, tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of humans were gasping at their televisions, obsessively refreshing the front pages of media blogs, their minds attuned to a single thought: what would become of their spaceman? Yes, it was more than likely that my journey on JanHus1 had captivated the imagination of all of humanity, well beyond my countrymen standing on Pet?ín Hill and groaning at the dark screen ahead. Show must go on, even when it is not seen.
While I trapped myself inside the suit, I did not worry, as the task of living remained methodical—pulling at straps, placing the Life Support System on my back, securing the helmet, greedily inhaling fresh oxygen. My toothache pulsed brutally along the right side of my jaw, now that my senses were renewed. Once the suit was on, however, I found myself without tasks. I shone the flashlight into the ship’s dark corners, almost expecting a daddy longlegs to crawl out.
I made my way into the Sleeping Chamber and I reached inside a drawer, feeling around underneath the sweatpants and underwear. I removed the cigar box and slid it inside the pocket of my suit. More than likely, this was the end, and I had to keep my grandfather close. Briefly, I considered hiding inside the spacebag, using the same invisibility cloak that had protected me from monsters in the night when I was a boy. I did not.
The Life Support System on my back was to give me three hours of oxygen, and those hours seemed like a lifetime. So much could be done. Within three hours, wars could be declared, cities annihilated, future world leaders planted within their mothers’ wombs, deadly diseases contracted, religious faiths obtained or lost. I returned to the mainframe and tugged at cables, kicked at the dead panels, saliva dripping from the corner of my mouth and soiling my helmet glass. Finally, a voice came back to me, but it was not Petr’s.
“Jakub,” Senator T?ma said. “Can you hear my words?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I’m speaking to you on behalf of the president and your country. I have taken this unfair burden from Petr. I sent you on the mission, Jakub. It is only right that we have this conversation together.”
“You sound calm,” I said.
“I am not. Maybe what you hear is how much I believe in your mission. In your sacrifice. Do you still believe?”
“I think so. It’s hard to think about a higher purpose during decompression. You’re a diver. You know the strange ache in your lungs.”
T?ma told me that sensor readings captured seconds before the ship’s power source had failed showed twenty different points of damage in the ship’s internal wiring, and two of four solar panels were disabled. The dust had cut through them like a saw. “Do you understand what I’m saying?” he finished.
I let go of the mainframe cables and hung my arms loosely along my body. “Yes.”
Replacing all the damaged wiring would take approximately twenty hours, he said, for which I had neither the oxygen nor the supplies. And more damage could have been done after the ship had shut down. Comms could fail at any minute—the independent battery powering it was also damaged and wouldn’t last much longer. “Do you understand?” he repeated.
“Senator. Of course I understand.”
My chest felt hollow. It was a strange sensation, the opposite of anxiety or fear, which to me was always heavy, like chugging asphalt. Now I was a cadaver in waiting. With death so near, the body looks forward to its eternal rest without the pesky soul. So simple, this body. Pulsing and secreting and creaking along, one beat, two beats, filling up one hour after another. The body is the worker and the soul the oppressor. Free the proles, I could hear my father saying. I almost cackled. T?ma breathed quietly. Don’t lose it on me now, I heard from a distance.
“Jakub. I could not be more sorry.”
“Senator. What happens now?”
“Tell me what it feels like up there, Jakub.”