The Future We Wish We Had

The big room with its six chairs facing six large control panels smelled of burnt wires and felt far too hot. Usually it smelled of cooking mixed with a faint odor of Captain Carry’s socks. Even with the faint burnt smell, the environmental instruments on the board in front of me were telling me everything was still all right in here, as much as it could be, considering.

The room felt even bigger than normal, with me being the only one left. I was used to this room with two or three people in it at all times. I kept thinking that one of them would come in and say something. After months together, I had gotten used to the constant interaction with the others. Now I missed it and wanted it back.

“Go ahead, Klondike. How are they doing out there, Ben?”

The voice was Devon Daniels, the day shift voice of Mission Control, and one of my best friends. He had stood up for me as my best man when Tammie and I got married twenty-two years ago. We had come up through the space program together in the late 1980’s, flying missions to both the moon and Mars. Together, we had helped establish the first bases on both places. He’d been grounded because of a bad lung condition after his sixth Mars trip, and I had pla

I took a deep breath. “Can we go to visual? And get some recorders on this, some extra ones? I got a lot to download.”

I sat back, waiting as they brought everything online at Mission Control, thinking over the last two hours. I had been asleep, off shift, tucked in my bunk when the grinding crash had snapped me awake.

Our pilot, Toby Terhume from the European Union, had been scheduled to land us on an asteroid with a number for a name that was longer than a worldwide phone number. We were to do the same tests we had been doing on other rocks for the last two weeks. It was the tenth such landing. Standard procedure. From what I could tell, he misjudged the timing on the spin of the thing and instead of landing the Klondike on the rough surface and clamping on, the ship hit, tipped over, and then bounced.

And we bounced hard.

We lost Kevin Chin because he was also off shift and it was his cabin that just happened to be the one that got hit by a large rock jutting out of the asteroid. The automatic controls sealed off the rest of the ship, but it was far too late for Chin. We all figured his body was going to have to ride in there until we got back.

I had liked Chin. He was young, this being his first real mission. he didn’t deserve to die like that in his sleep.

It didn’t take long for the rest of us to discover what else was wrong. The collision had damaged some relays to the engines and they had to be repaired. Outside.

Until they were, we were just more floating debris in this field of debris, with no way to move out of the way of drifting rocks.

The five of us remaining were all heavily experienced on outside work, so we drew straws and I got the short one, meaning I’d man the controls while the other four went out to get the work done as fast as possible.

We told Mission Control what we were pla

They had only been out there less than five minutes when an asteroid on my screen appeared out of nowhere, a rock the size of a small house, spi

I tried to warn them. But with our speed and the rock’s speed, it happened fast. Far too fast. It scraped all four off the outside of the ship like so much crap off a shoe. If the engines and side thrusters had been working, the computer would have automatically moved the ship just a few feet out of the way as it had done hundreds of times in the past two weeks.

Instead, that nasty grinding sound of my friends dying would be something that would haunt my last hours.

Suddenly, I was alone, farther from Earth than any human had ever been, drifting in a field of debris without power, or any way to get power that I could figure out. That last rock had pretty much taken out a good part of the port side of the ship, leaving me with air and environmental systems in the control room and the galley only. I suppose I could say I was lucky to have survived as well.

I didn’t feel lucky.

I had enough to eat; I had enough oxygen to breathe for months. But in this mess of swirling rocks, I wouldn’t last that long. I’d be lucky to get through the conversation with Earth.

Again, I didn’t feel lucky.

“We’re set up, Ben,” Devon’s voice came back on strong; then a picture flickered into place.

I clicked on my uplink, then without a comment ran the recorded events of what had happened.

I sat and stared at Devon’s face for a few seconds as he just waited for the time lag; then he got my video uplink transmission and his face went white.

For a moment, I thought he was going to be sick as he watched. I knew exactly how he felt. There had been a camera on all four of them out there. What had happened was not something anyone would want to see in the news services.

And besides that, they had been my friends. And Devon’s friends.

After a short time, I punched a few buttons and sent the next compacted data streams toward Earth. “Telemetry on the ship’s status being fed now.”

At least they would know exactly what happened and why.

I gave them everything, downloaded it all, to show everyone back at Houston Control just how screwed I was. That way they wouldn’t go off half-cocked trying to come up with some harebrained scheme for me to fix this mess.

There was just nothing to fix.

I might die at any moment from some stray rock. Or some weakness in this cabin’s walls caused by the two crashes. Or I might live until my food and air ran out. I was betting on a stray rock taking me out very shortly.

“Give us a few moments to look over all this,” Devon said, his voice barely holding back the emotion I could see in his eyes.

Then he cut the link and I was alone again.

“Hope I’m still here,” I said into the silence of the big control room.

At least some of the cameras and sensory equipment were still working on the outside of the ship. That way I could see what was going to kill me. I think someone once called that a cold comfort.

I tested the main computer and it seemed to be up and ru

After about ten minutes, I had figured out that at least I wasn’t going to go head first into any of the bigger asteroids for at least a few months. In fact, the last impact had sent the Klondike upwards and slightly out of the main debris field. So it was going to have to be a small piece of rock that finally took me out. And there were far, far too many of them just in my neighborhood for even our best computers to try to track.

I might see it coming. Maybe two, three seconds ahead was all.

The co

I wasn’t sure why I was doing that. Just force of habit, I suppose.

What else could I do while waiting to die?

Poor Tammie. I could see her long, brown hair, her big eyes, her small but wonderful smile. I had been gone almost more than I was home over the last two decades. From what I could tell, she had lived the life perfectly, keeping her own interests in teaching, sharing in mine when I was there, saying goodnight to me every night, no matter how deep into space I was, or what she was busy with.