The clicking of Arthur’s wall clock was the only sound in the control room. Space Corps astronauts were allowed to bring a single overhead suitcase of possessions, and his crewmates razzed him about his choice.
“There are digital timers literally everywhere. Why bring a crappy analog clock? It won’t survive the trip,” one of his crewmates sneered.
“It’s comforting. I always bring it. I like to see the hands move through the day, and the clicks keep me company, like a pet cricket. If I need a little break, I watch the second hand go around once. It feels good when it finally reaches twelve again. Like everything has been reset.”
Arthur was the oldest member of the crew and the least senior in rank. He’d been on dozens of missions but passed over for promotions due to an incident on Titan during his early days in the Space Corps.
***
On a year-long mission to an outpost on one of Jupiter’s moons, Arthur was selected as team leader. Most Space Corps recruits were athletic, strong-jawed, outgoing, adventure-seekers of the type featured in the Space Corps recruitment commercials. Arthur, quiet and calm, with a gift for physics and electrical engineering, was their counterpoint. Space Corps recruited men and women like Arthur to curb the riskier impulses of the others. These engineer astronauts also acted as an analog back-up to the multiple binary systems on which the outposts relied. If the power failed or the computers collapsed, technicians like Arthur could save the day.
Two weeks into their mission, as the team was mining frozen methane, the tip of a pneumatic drill overheated. The methane instantly vaporized causing a violent explosion. In the low gravity, the blast blew the team a kilometer in all directions. Hamut, the charismatic and strapping Norseman who was operating the drill, suffered a crack in his helmet and a large tear in his pressure suit.
Arthur ordered everyone to rendezvous at the moon buggy, but Hamut didn’t make it. The moon was about to advance into its dark phase, and temperatures would quickly drop far below what the spacesuits could handle. There was just barely enough time to rescue Hamut, but if anything went wrong the whole crew would be lost. Arthur calculated the chances of success and returned to the base.
“We might make it,” he said, “but we’ve already had one accident today. One more and we all die.”
At first, the crew supported his decision. Then Hamut showed up two days later and called Arthur a coward for leaving him behind.
“You of all people should know everything up here is over-engineered! My pressure suit kept me alive, which is more than you ever did!” Hamut complained.
Arthur could only say, “I’m glad you’re alright.” Hamut was given several days to rest and recover, and in that time organized a rebellion.
Arthur agreed to step down as leader, relinquishing the role to Hamut. Arthur was shunned for the remaining eleven months of the mission. He had to be careful he wasn’t the last one back in the moon buggy, or alone outside the building lest he be “accidentally” left behind. When the team returned, an investigation supported Arthur’s decision to abandon Hamut. But his inability to regain command meant he was stuck in promotional purgatory and never moved up the ranks.
***
As he faced his sixty-first birthday, Arthur continued to serve in the Space Corps. He had no trouble passing the physical but had bad knees, compressed discs in his back, shoulders that crunched like a bowl of cornflakes, and every year the cold felt a little more cruel. Arthur silently suffered the nicknames his cocky crewmates gave him: Grandad, Pops, Old Timer, Snap-Crackle-Gimp, Crip, and Cautionary Tale. Arthur kept to himself, did his work, and tried to gently point out potential problems to his less experienced crewmates. Advice they never heeded.
***
Stationed on Earth’s moon, Arthur worked at a relay base for Amazon’s network of cell phone satellites circling the planet. They had carpeted the sunny side of the moon with cellular antennas. Arthur’s outpost converted moon dust into fuel to power generators boosting cellular signals and download speeds. The team was on a routine check of the antenna dishes when Arthur’s knee gave out. He fell, landing in a drift of moon dust collected in a crater. In the low gravity, the soil was fluffy like whipped egg whites. He disappeared beneath the surface, suspended like a peanut in a marshmallow pond. He struggled to get some purchase in the fluff, but only sank deeper as he flailed. The high iron content of the dust blocked his radio signal. He eventually managed to wiggle enough to sink to the bottom. Crawling along the floor, he finally found the wall of the crater and started to climb. It was like scaling a cliff in a sea of oatmeal.
As he crested the lip, Arthur looked around and realized his crewmates had left him behind. Dusting himself off, he walked back to the station but found the latch to the decompression chamber locked. Arthur radioed for help but got no response. He activated his emergency alarm which lit up sirens throughout the station, but still no answer. The irony that Hamut had faced a similar situation so many years ago was not lost on Arthur, except that he had done it to protect the crew. Arthur had been left behind because his crewmates were pricks.
He had two days’ worth of air, but it was three more days until another inspection of the antennas was due. The cold started to stiffen his hands, made his feet numb, and was turning his brain to putty. He had to get inside, but could only do that if he could force the crew to go outside.
Arthur’s many years in the Space Corps gave him an intimate knowledge of every outpost circling the solar system. In this case, he knew that the outer shell of the station was made of carbon fibers bonded to a nylon tarp. When the station was constructed, the tarp was wrapped around a frame, and construction robots sprayed the interior with structural foam that set up like concrete. The flaw in this early method of outpost construction was a gap of air that formed between the nylon and the foam. This gap allowed radiation to degrade the fibers making them brittle. With the heel of his boot Arthur was able to kick a hole in the tarp and easily break off a large piece. The broken edge of the woven strands was sharper than surgical steel and made an excellent saw blade.
Around the back of the building, multiple waist-high power cables wormed their way to the antenna dishes. Each of the giant, snake-like cables featured triple-redundant wiring with an argon gas fire suppression system and alarms that sounded the instant a circuit was interrupted. Curiously enough, carbon fibers conduct current quite well. As Arthur calmly sawed through the cable’s outer casing and into the first electrical line, the current flowed without interruption. As soon as he hit the second supply line, it arced with the first causing the carbon fibers to glow white hot. He stepped back as the heat melted the outer casing like a giant drop of molten glass. It burned through the remaining cables and cut power to half of the antennas. Alarms sounded inside the station, outside the station, and back on earth. Arthur walked the long way back to the decompression hatch as the team inside suited up in a panic, grabbing all the gear they thought they might need.
Arthur waited behind the hatch, counting the team members as they hustled out the door. When the last one had gone, he paused, watching them run to the melting power cable. He saw a crew member drop a fire extinguisher. As she turned to pick it up, she saw Arthur. He waved as he stepped inside and locked the door. Arthur turned off the control room computer, and the alarms went silent. All he could hear was the clicking of his wall clock. He went to the fire suppression system and switched the argon supply line with oxygen. The melting cable ignited like a fire hose shooting lava.
Arthur reconnected the argon gas line and watched on a monitor as it extinguished the burning cable. He could also see his incinerated crewmates, like charcoal stick figures frozen in the act of making moon-dust snow angels. With the aid of his trusty wall clock, Arthur turned on the computer and reset its timer. He paused to watch the minute hand complete a full turn. Arthur called central command to let them know of the brave, tragic deaths of his crewmates defending the download speeds of the people back on earth.