Chapter 7:

That Which Exists in a Vacuum

The Sun was on the far side of the Earth. It would only rise for a few hours before Lucifer 6 slammed into the planet. Nathan had no idea how long until that happened. Until then, his world was composed of a dark, strange asteroid, lit only by a faint sliver of the Moon, and ten thousand stars.

Thanks to the ambitious destruction of his helmet, Nathan had only one light; a weak handheld unit that didn’t illuminate more than ten feet in front of him. He was lucky to have that.

Intrigued by the unexplained canyon, Marvelous found himself standing over the edge. Because of the strange nature of the canyon, NASA went against planting any TIMs near it, but agreed that if Nathan could complete all his chores in a timely fashion, he could explore it at his leisure. He was not to approach the chasm from the top. He was to approach it from the side1. Safety first.

Nathan stood over the top of it, shining his light down into the canyon, as he wondered at its nature. How did a small asteroid attain a canyon of such immense scale without being completely destroyed? This little world was halfway to annihilated before NASA even noticed it.

Instead of creeping down on hands and knees, or approaching prone to the ground, Nathan stood straight, and leaned from his hips. Peering down into the murk of the canyon, he saw points of reflected light and wondered; is it diamonds? Is it glass? Is it a high-gloss polymer plastic?

Further and further he leaned until suddenly he was tumbling head over heals into the canyon in very slow motion.

What a strange center of gravity… Nathan noted as he drifted into a knife’s edge canyon of highly reflective volcanic rock. Dangerous and beautiful, the edges moved slowly past Nathan as the asteroid’s weak gravity pulled him inexorably deeper.

He could not see the floor, and wondered if it was as sharp and jagged as the rest of the canyon. This would really be a problem if he was moving fast. Nathan didn’t like the idea of a severed limb. He may heal incredibly quick, but he wasn’t sure his body would manage to regenerate a hand or a leg. Not that he really had to worry about it. He was falling so slow that he felt he was falling asleep, not careening off a cliff, which was a sensation he knew.

Nathan wondered at the very nature of the stone around him. What pressures had formed this strange landscape? Was it smashed by some knife-shaped asteroid, and if that was so, how had that asteroid formed? Maybe it formed hot, a bit of burning rock spun off a glowing hot planet at the beginning of time. As it cooled, the interior expanded, bursting the thin, cold crust of this planetoid, and voila, alien canyon land. This theory accounted for the lateral breaks, the sharp edges jutting upward…

Something stabbed into Nathan’s leg, cold and sharp, sinking several inches into his thigh, and Nathan sucked his breath. His left leg was in excruciating pain, frozen from the inside, with the sharp hurt of the puncture. He’d fallen onto an outcropping and managed to impale his leg on a thin, nasty bit of rock.

Nathan glanced down, surprised to find himself only a few feet from the canyon bottom. Oriented with his head down and his feet up, he reached for the outcropping. Very mindful of the sharp pain in his leg, Slowly, Nathan lifted himself off the rock, careful not to break it. He did not want any debris stuck in his leg. Imagine if his skin healed over that! Then he’d have to dig it out with his pocket knife.

Slowly, gently, Nathan pulled himself off the outcropping. As he worked, one of the many status indicators turned yellow, and then red. Several others followed, turning first yellow and then quickly turning red, until all indicators glared red, as the rock had punctured more than his leg. It’d punctured his pressurized suit. Fear, uncertainty, and doubt rushed through Nathan, as he realized an excruciating death would soon follow.

Nathan completed the extraction of rock from his leg, and swung free, rolling onto his back in slow motion. The pain in his leg dissipated, and the chill of the rock evaporated with the warm rush of blood. He fell to the floor of the chasm, landing on his back. For several seconds he waited for death to take him in a rush, to freeze or explode him, or both at the same time.

But nothing happened.

A shimmer of hope overcame Nathan as he realized he should already be dead—or at least extremely uncomfortable as death rushed in—but he felt fine. He glanced down, hoping the puncture was nothing more than a veritable pinprick, a hole through which not enough air could possibly leak. After all, if he was still alive, his suit must not be nearly as compromised as the lights indicated. But the gash in his suit ran eight or nine inches up the side of his thigh, and once again, Nathan panicked. He gasped, hoping to hold his breath against the vacuum of space. He expected to explode, as happened to no few luckless adventurers in the movies. He should have noted that already there was no air to breathe, but such a thing did not register in this moment of considerable excitement. Goodbye, he thought, thrilled at the prospect of this unavoidable catastrophe. How would it feel? He wondered. The short hairs on his arms, legs, and the back of his neck stood on end.

Seconds ticked past and Marvelous did not explode, nor did he implode, or do anything so irreversible and messy. Marvelous opened his mouth and quickly realized that gasping for air did him no good whatsoever. There was nothing to breathe. He tried inhaling, then exhaling, but nothing traversed the short course from mouth to lungs. He noticed his lungs were warm and expansive, feeling not full, but expanded, despite the fact that he’d exhaled the last of his air. He knew there was no air to breathe, as Lucifer 6 was not big enough to maintain an atmosphere.

As if he were still breathing, his chest expanded and deflated, but nothing entered or exited his lungs. In a vacuum, shouldn’t his lungs collapse? Somehow his lungs resisted the void, and Marvelous realized that’s why they were so warm. Whatever muscles and tissues kept his lungs from collapsing must be exerting an incredible amount of energy, hence warmth.

That made sense.

He decided not to hold his breath, as the point was moot, so he continued to suck and pucker instead of actually breathing. He wondered how he was still warm despite the fact that the vacuum of space had invaded his suit. He noted that his left leg, the one that got stuck with the rock lance, was a bit on the chilly side, but it certainly wasn’t frozen through, as should have happened in -486° weather.

Despite all the red status lights, Nathan was still alive. He should not be alive if even one of the lights under the ‘vital’ column was red, never mind all of them—and all the little lights were bright, stop sign red, with one small exception. Only power showed green. Despite such inconveniences, he was surprisingly fine.

The spacesuit crumpled and pressed against his skin as Nathan peeled it off, but the loud material made no sound as it rumpled. He remembered how loud the suit was in the lander as he’d originally pulled it on. But now? Nothing. It was a disorienting sensation and he felt distanced from reality by a complete lack of sound.

Nathan’s mind reeled, careening through what he knew and what he didn’t, seeking correlations and answers that made any sense. He realized, despite the rip in his suit, there was an absence of horrific decompression, or super-cold flash-freezing. It was cold, yes, but despite what had happened, Marvelous was somehow completely fine. This led Nathan to conclude not only would he not die, chances were nothing could kill him.

Shocked at such a possibility, his heart sank as the excitement of the mission evaporated and danger once more vanished beyond his ken. Suddenly, he was bored. His plans, the mission, all but forgotten as introspection reared its ugly head.

Nathan shivered, the cold of space finally pricking his skin, as morbid and forlorn thoughts of his own immortality tormented him. He would march through the world, forever disconnected. Nothing would ever change; nothing except the unimportant, the small circumstance of conditions around him. He would never change. The Earth would crumble to dust, the Sun would go supernova, but Nathan would drift through space; bored, dwelling on life, on love, on a world too fragile to bare his exploration. With what amounted to a sigh, he leaned back and laid on the frozen rock.

1 To explain how this chasm appears, think of an orange split halfway with a knife. Now, squeeze the orange just enough to distort the sphere: a chasm appears. March your finger around the rim of this canyon, and think of yourself as a giant on a dwarf planet (or not).

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