Atmosphere

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

She should have told him not to leave the airlock hatch open. One small shake of her head would have prevented this.

she could have prevented the blow to his chest if only she hadn’t gone along with his stupid fucking idea. Instead, he is floating in front of her, unconscious. Vanessa looks down to see Hank underneath her. She closes her eyes. Do not think of Donna pregnant this past summer. Do not think of the smile on Donna’s face the night they announced they were engaged.

When she gets to Steve, she holds in a yelp. He is lifeless, drifting. Dead man’s float. There are droplets of blood in the air around him, which he must have coughed up. She puts her hand to his neck and checks his pulse without an ounce of hope, confirming what she already knows.

“Houston, this is Navigator. Astronauts Steve Hagen and Hank Redmond are dead. John Griffin has suffered potentially critical internal injuries but is breathing. Do you read?”

“Roger that,” Joan says, her voice so gentle that Vanessa wants to cry. “We read that Hagen and Redmond have died. We have vitals on Griff. We believe Danes is alive as well. Please confirm.”

Vanessa looks past Lydia and sees where the hole was. She can barely stand to look at it. Such a fragile, cheap repair, and yet—if applied seconds earlier—might have saved them all. “Houston, Danes found the leak and sealed it with a clipboard and duct tape.”

“It was the last thing Lydia did before she passed out,” Vanessa says. “Yes, Navigator,” Joan says. “That is our conclusion as well.”

“Lydia has the bends,” Vanessa says.

“How long does that give her?” “She needs treatment within ten hours,” Joan says. “Griff maybe sooner.

We believe it is possible to have you home in as little as three revs.” “Four and a half hours? Is that even possible?” “We believe it is. We will begin deorbit as soon as we can.”

we ask that you prepare the deorbit checklist and, as you do, that you leave the biomedical sensors on Griff and attach a set to Danes as well, so that we can monitor her vitals from here alongside his.” “Roger that,” Vanessa says. And then she cannot help herself but to confess. “Houston…we…we left the hatch open.” “Copy that,” Joan says. “We already suspected that was how Griff was hit. We are just glad you were not. We need you up there.

is a mission specialist. But she has been begging to be given a chance to pilot this thing for years. And now, ironically, she will finally get what she’s asked for.

as Mission Control comes up with the plan, Vanessa grabs the deorbit procedure checklist and reads it.

she needs full use of the flight deck to land. And so, for Steve and Hank, she settles on the airlock. She nods, swallowing. A droplet of blood floats past her, and she pulls away. She grabs a Huggies wipe from the stash that has been ripped off the wall. She takes the wipe, opens it fully, and touches the corner of it to the blood droplet as it passes through the cabin. It absorbs into the sheet, gone from the air.

Afterward, she takes Hank and pulls him toward the airlock, the same as she did with Steve. She tells him that his joke earlier about getting home in time to watch M*A*S*H was funny.

Carefully, Vanessa unzips the top of Lydia’s flight suit and applies the sensors for respiration, temperature, and heart rate. She zips it back up and takes Lydia’s hand in hers for a moment. She squeezes. Wordlessly, she pulls Lydia to the flight deck and puts her in the chair behind the commander’s seat. She buckles her in.

Vanessa takes Griff in her arms and carries him to the flight deck, putting him in the seat next to Lydia.

Finally, Joan is back. “Copy.” “Prepare for a contingency deorbit. We can land at Edwards in three revs. They have full trauma center capabilities. We are going to begin the deorbit checklist.”

Vanessa will need to stow away all the equipment—including everything that was torn off the walls—and shut the payload doors. Then she will have to get in the pilot’s seat and begin the process of reentry.

In a crisis of this magnitude, you are best served by evaluating second by second. So Vanessa does not imagine herself back on Earth. She does not imagine landing this shuttle. She does not imagine preparing for reentry. Instead, she imagines strapping the lockers back onto the walls. That, she can do.

“Well, we are the stars,” Joan said. “And the stars are us. Every atom in our bodies was once out there. Was once a part of them. To look at the night sky is to look at parts of who you once were, who you may one day be.”

Because the world had decided that to be soft was to be weak, even though in Joan’s experience being soft and flexible was always more durable than being hard and brittle. Admitting you were afraid always took more guts than pretending you weren’t. Being willing to make a mistake got you further than never trying. The world had decided that to be fallible was weak. But we are all fallible. The strong ones are the ones who accept it.

So have a beer with me. We can ring in the new year together. You need to take a load off for a moment.” Lydia inhaled sharply and then took the beer. “Just until midnight.” “Great: for fourteen minutes, try to calm down, and then you can go right back to shoving coal up your butt and pulling out diamonds.”

Lydia stared at her. “That wasn’t funny.”

She was overwhelmed with love for him. Love in the sense that she trusted him, and saw all the good in his heart, and cared about him and wanted only good things to ever happen to him. Love in the sense that she would always be on his side, even if he was wrong, in the sense that he was one of the people on this Earth she believed in. And in that moment, the swelling in her heart was unbearable. Absolutely unbearable.

Now in her space suit, Vanessa enters the payload bay, tethered to the ship. She moves toward the forward bulkhead to inspect the right-side latches. She tries not to think about Hank. She tries not to think about what Donna must be going through right now.

When she gets to the forward bulkhead, a shudder runs through her. She can see the other side of the hole on the forward bulkhead. But then, in addition, the payload bay door is bent. It took a hit, most likely from the debris that flew from the explosive cords. “Houston, the right payload bay door is warped. I am going to attempt to manually latch it closed, but I am not positive I can get the edges to make contact.”

The PLBDs can withstand some measure of variation. We would like you to get started so we can assess.” Vanessa looks around. The doors make the shape of a capital I on the top of the payload bay, and when closed, they are held together with a total of thirty-two latches. Eight on the forward bulkhead, eight on the aft bulkhead, and sixteen down the centerline. First, she’s going to pull the forward bulkhead latches closed as best she can.

In almost any other scenario up here, this might even be Vanessa’s shining moment. This is what she’s here for. The mechanics.

There can be no rushing in space, really. And in this moment, she is grateful that she is forced to work through the problem methodically.

Maybe rushing would be better. Maybe, if she didn’t have a moment to think, it would all be easier. Gravity is underrated. It gives us something to fight against. She tries to clear her mind. She aligns the ratchet wrench to the gearbox and begins to turn.

She puts the ratchet wrench back on the gearbox and tries to turn it farther, pulling the door in as much as possible. If the gap between the doors is sizable enough, the shuttle will burn up upon reentry into the atmosphere.

How has she never seen where this was headed, when it was so painfully obvious? You absolute child, she thinks. He was hit with shrapnel from an explosion two hundred miles above Earth, and you thought he’d survive? An abrupt and violent silence crashes into the room, and she snaps back into the moment. She sees the blood drain out of Ray’s face. “Flight, Surgeon. John Griffin is dead.” Joan can feel the liquid iron core of the Earth pulling her toward it, down into the depths of a hell she does not believe in.

Vanessa can hear the unsteadiness in Joan’s voice. But if Joan does not want to tell her what’s causing it, there’s a reason. “Roger that,” Vanessa says. Vanessa maneuvers over to the aft bulkhead. Each one of the eight latches snaps into place sequentially. That is sixteen of thirty-two down. Both the top and bottom bars of the capital I are done, however imperfectly.

if she can get this gearbox to turn and close this gang of four latches, it might pull the payload bay doors tight enough on the aft bulkhead end. Which means that even if she can’t get the rest of the latches closed, they still have a chance of making it.

Why, when they tell you that God created man out of thin air and then you learn about evolution, why does the whole thing not crumble for you?” “Because there are so many ways to define God and there’s still so much unknown about the universe. I could never say that science has obliterated the possibility of God. Certainly I don’t see that happening in my lifetime. And I think something would be lost, if it did. Or maybe I should say that I hope that if it did happen, it would only be because something even more incredible was discovered.”

“I’m passionate about the Milky Way,” Joan said. “And I think God’s in it.”

“Science is about figuring out the meaning of life?” “Science is about figuring out the order to the universe. Yes.”

“The theory of general relativity explains the rules of the physical world at large scales, the world we can see with our eyes. Quantum mechanics explains the subatomic world, like electricity and light.” “Gravity and electromagnetism—I’m

Everything that we know of since the Big Bang is ruled by those four forces. We are all connected by these four rules. That’s the beginning, at least, of learning how we are here. Now, we still need a unifying theory—our understanding of the laws of gravity and quantum physics are not currently compatible.”

“The Jewish philosopher Spinoza said that God did not necessarily make the universe, but that God is the universe. The unfolding of the universe is God in action. Which would mean science and math are a part of God.” “And we are a part of God because we are a part of the universe,” Vanessa said. “Or better yet, we are the universe.

We are a moment in time—when all of our cells have come together in this body. But our atoms were many things before, and they will be many things after. The air I’m breathing is the same air your ancestors breathed. Even what is in my body right now—the cells, the air, the bacteria—it’s not only mine. It is a point of connection with every other living thing, made up of the same kinds of particles, ruled by the same physical laws.

“The trees need our breath, and our breath needs the trees,” she continued. “As scientists we call that symbiosis, and it is a consequence of evolution. But the natural consequences of our connections to each other—that’s God, to me.

Life is God. My life is tied to yours, and to everyone’s on this planet.

“Someday, I want to take you flying over the Rockies early in the morning, when the sun is rising over the mountains and it hits the ridge just right and…it reminds me of the light coming through the stained-glass windows at the church my mother took me to every Sunday. And I just know you’re going to say, ‘That’s God.’ ” “I am going to say, ‘That’s God’! Not just because it’s beautiful, but because sunrise over the mountains is part of the universe itself. Everything, all of us, is God.”

Joan had not ever believed that God sent down two halves of a soul in separate bodies, destined to meet. She did not believe in a God that could. But she did believe in a God that had led them here. That led their lives to intersect.

But to love Frances was to be always saying goodbye to the girl Frances used to be and falling in love again with the girl Frances was becoming.

“Happiness is so hard to come by. I don’t understand why anyone would begrudge anyone else for managing to find some of it.”

Space belonged to no one, but Earth belonged to all of them. “It’s so small,” Harrison said, having just floated up beside her. Joan nodded. “It’s a midsize planet orbiting a midsize star in a galaxy of a hundred billion stars. In a universe of one hundred billion galaxies.” “With almost five billion people on the planet,” Harrison said. Joan nodded. “Hard to believe any one person has any significance,” he said. “I knew that before, but I never knew it, until now.

How was it that two people, right next to each other, given the rarest of perspectives, could draw two totally opposite conclusions? When Joan looked back at the Earth, she was overwhelmed with her own life’s meaning—and the fact that the only meaning it could have was the meaning she gave it. Joan studied the thin blue, hazy circle that surrounded the Earth. The atmosphere was so delicate, nearly inconsequential. But it was the very thing keeping everyone she loved alive.