The Terranauts Read online

  Dedication

  For Neal and Shray Friedman and

  Roy and Edicta Corsell

  Acknowledgments

  A portion of this book appeared previously in Narrative, under the title “Dawn Chapman.”

  Author’s Note

  I would like to acknowledge my debt to the accounts of the original Biospherians, especially Abigail Ailing and Mark Nelson’s Life Under Glass and Jane Poynter’s The Human Experiment, as well as to Rebecca Reider’s thorough history of the project, Dreaming the Biosphere, and John Allen’s foundational Biosphere 2: The Human Experiment.

  Epigraph

  Never doubt that a small group of committed, thoughtful people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

  —MARGARET MEAD

  L’enfer, c’est les autres.

  —JEAN-PAUL SARTRE, HUIS CLOS

  Contents

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  Epigraph

  Part I: Pre-Closure Dawn Chapman

  Ramsay Roothoorp

  Linda Ryu

  Part II: Closure, Year One Dawn Chapman

  Ramsay Roothoorp

  Linda Ryu

  Dawn Chapman

  Ramsay Roothoorp

  Linda Ryu

  Dawn Chapman

  Ramsay Roothoorp

  Linda Ryu

  Part III: Closure, Year Two Dawn Chapman

  Ramsay Roothoorp

  Linda Ryu

  Dawn Chapman

  Ramsay Roothoorp

  Linda Ryu

  Dawn Chapman

  Ramsay Roothoorp

  Linda Ryu

  Dawn Chapman

  Ramsay Roothoorp

  Linda Ryu

  Part IV: Reentry Dawn Chapman

  Ramsay Roothoorp

  Linda Ryu

  About the Author

  Also by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Part I

  PRE-CLOSURE

  Dawn Chapman

  We were discouraged from having pets—or, for that matter, husbands or even boyfriends, and the same went for the men, none of whom were married as far as anybody knew. I think Mission Control would have been happier if we didn’t have parents or siblings either, but all of us did, with the exception of Ramsay, an only child whose parents had been killed in a head-on collision when he was in the fourth grade. I often wondered if that had been a factor in the selection process—in his favor, I mean—because it was apparent he was lacking in certain key areas and to my mind, at least on paper, he was the weakest link of the crew. But that wasn’t for me to say—Mission Control had their own agenda and for all our second-guessing, we could only put our heads down and hope for the best. As you can imagine, we all sweated out the selection process—during the final months it seemed like we did nothing else—and though we were a team, though we pulled together and had been doing so through the past two years of training, the fact remained that of the sixteen candidates only eight would make the final cut. So here was the irony: while we exuded team spirit, we were competing to exude it, our every thought and move duly noted by Mission Control. What did Richard, our resident cynic, call it? A Miss America pageant without the Miss and without the America.

  I don’t recall the specific date now, and I should, I know I should, just to keep the record straight, but it was about a month before closure when we were called in for our final interviews. A month seems about right, time enough to spread the word and generate as much press as possible over the unveiling of the final eight—any earlier and we ran the risk of overkill, and of course Mission Control was sensitive about that because of what fell out with the first mission. So it would have been February. A February morning in the high desert, everything in bloom with the winter rains and the light spread like a soft film over the spine of the mountains. There would have been a faint sweetness to the air, a kind of dry rub of sage and burnt sugar, something to savor as I made my way over to the cafeteria for an early breakfast. I might have stopped to kick off my flip-flops and feel the cool granular earth between my toes or watch the leaf-cutter ants in their regimented march to and from the nest, both inside my body and out of it at the same time, a female hominid of breeding age bent over in the naturalist’s trance and wondering if this earth, the old one, the original one, would still be her home in a month’s time.

  The fact was, I’d been up since four, unable to sleep, and I just wanted to be alone to get my thoughts together. Though I wasn’t really hungry—my stomach gets fluttery when I’m keyed up—I forced myself to eat, pancakes, blueberry muffins, sourdough toast, as if I were carbo-loading for a marathon. I don’t think I tasted any of it. And the coffee. I probably went through a whole cup, sip by sip, without even being conscious of it, and that was a habit I was trying to curtail because if I was selected—and I would be, I was sure of it, or that was what I told myself anyway—I’d have to train my system to do without. I hadn’t brought a book, as I usually did, and though the morning’s paper was there on the counter I never even glanced at it. I just focused on eating, fork to mouth, chew, swallow, repeat, pausing only to cut the pancakes into bite-sized squares and lift the coffee cup to my lips. The place was deserted but for a couple of people from the support staff gazing vacantly out the windows as if they weren’t ready to face the day. Or maybe they were night shift, maybe that was it.

  Somewhere in there, mercifully, my mind went blank and for maybe a split second I’d forgotten about what was hanging over us, but then I glanced up and there was Linda Ryu coming across the room to me, a cup of tea in one hand and a glazed donut in the other. You probably don’t know this—most people don’t—but Linda was my best friend on the extended crew and I can’t really explain why, other than that we just happened to hit it off, right from day one. We were close in age—her thirty-two to my twenty-nine—but that didn’t really explain anything since all the female candidates were more or less coevals, ranging from the youngest at twenty-six (Sally McNally, who didn’t stand a chance) to forty (Gretchen Frost, who did, because she knew how to suck up to Mission Control and held a Ph.D. in rain forest ecology).

  Anyway, before I could react, Linda was sliding into the seat across the table from me, gesturing with her donut and giving me a smile that was caught midway between commiseration and embarrassment. “Nervous?” she said, and let out a little laugh even as she squared her teeth and flaunted the donut. “I see you’re carbo-loading. Me too,” she said, and took a bite.

  I tried to look noncommittal, as if I didn’t know what she was talking about, but of course she could see right through me. We’d become as close as sisters these past two years, working side by side on the research vessel in the Caribbean, the ranch in the Australian outback and the test plots here on the E2 campus, but the only thing that mattered now was this: my interview was at eight, hers at eight-thirty. I gave her a tight smile. “I don’t know what we’ve got to be nervous about—I mean, they’ve been testing us for over a year now. What’s another interview?”

  She nodded, not wanting to pursue the point. The buzz had gone round and we’d all absorbed it: this was the interview, the one that would say yea or nay, thumbs-up or thumbs-down. There was no disguising it. This was the moment we’d been waiting for through all the stacked-up days, weeks and months that seemed like they’d never end, and now that it was here it was nothing short of terrifying. I wanted to reach out to her and reassure her, hug her, but we’d already said everything there was to be said, teasing out the permutations of who was in and who was out a thousand times over, and all we’d done these past weeks was hug. I don’t know how to explain it, but it was l
ike a coldness came over me, the first stage of withdrawal. What I wanted, more than anything, was to get up and leave, and yet there she was, my best friend, and I saw in that moment how selfless she was, how much she was rooting for me—for us both, but for me above all, for my triumph if she should fail to make the grade, and I felt something give way inside me.

  I knew better than anyone how devastated Linda would be if she didn’t get in. On the surface, she had the sort of personality they were looking for—ebullient, energetic, calm in a crisis, the optimist who always managed to see her way through no matter how hopeless the situation might have looked—but she had a darker side no one suspected. She’d confided things to me, things that would have sent the wheels spinning at Mission Control if they ever got wind of them. It would be especially hard on her if she didn’t make it, harder than on any of the others, but then I wondered if I wasn’t projecting my own fears here—we all wanted this so desperately we couldn’t begin to conceive of anything else. To make matters worse, Linda and I were essentially competing for the same position, the least technical aside from Communications Officer, which we both agreed Ramsay had just about locked up for himself because he was a politician and knew how to work not just both sides but the top, bottom and middle too.

  I watched her face, the steady slow catch and release of her jaw muscles as she chewed. “Stevie’s a shoo-in, isn’t she?” she said, her voice thickening in her throat.

  I nodded. “I guess.” Linda had tried to make herself indispensable, the generalist of the group, looking to fit into one of the four slots that would most likely go to women. She put everything she had into it, not only with extra course work in closed-systems horticulture and ecosystems management, but especially in marine biology. She’d logged more hours underwater than anybody else during our dive sessions off Belize and she was a champion recruiter of invertebrates, and yet to my mind Stevie van Donk had the inside track on the marine ecosystems. For one thing, she had an advanced degree in the field, and for another, she looked great in a two-piece.

  “She’s such a bitch.”

  I had nothing to say to this, though I privately agreed. Still, bitch or no, Stevie was in.

  It got worse yet: Diane Kesselring looked like a lock for Supervisor of Field Crops, and Gretchen was first in line to oversee the wilderness biomes. What was left, when you conceded the Medical Officer, Director of Analytic Systems and Technosphere Supervisor—all male-oriented at this point—was really a caretaker position: MDA, Manager of Domestic Animals, the pygmy goats, Ossabaw Island pigs, Muscovy ducks and chickens that would provide the crew with essential fats and animal protein.

  “Dawn, what’s the matter?” Linda leaned across the table and took hold of my hand, but I didn’t respond. I couldn’t. I was a mess. “You’re not going to break down on me, are you? After all we’ve been through together? You’re going to make it. I know it. If one person’s going to make it, you are.”

  “But what about you? I mean, if I’m in—”

  Her smile was the saddest thing, just a quiver of her lips. “We’ll see.” She looked away. The room was empty now, the people at the far table either gone off to work or home to bed, depending on their shift. My stomach felt bloated. I could feel the blue vein at my hairline pulsing the way it did when I was overwrought. Linda’s parents had kept horses, as well as chickens and Vietnamese potbellied pigs on their property outside Sacramento, and she knew barnyard animals like a veterinarian—but she wasn’t a veterinarian, only a B.S. in animal sciences, and forgive me for saying this, she was maybe a bit chunkier than the ideal and not really all that pretty, looking at it objectively, that is. Not that it should matter, but it did, of course it did. Mission Control was looking for the same thing NASA was, people who fit the “adventurer profile,” with high motivation, high sociability and low susceptibility to depression, but all of us fit that description, at least the ones who’d made it this far (to what Richard called the “Sweet Sixteen,” a sports reference I didn’t get till someone explained it to me). Beyond that, beyond the factors they ticked off on the barrage of tests they’d subjected us to, from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory Questionnaire to what they’d observed when we worked as a team under stress, I’d have been lying to myself if I didn’t think they wanted a candidate who looked good, someone pretty, prettier than Linda anyway.

  Am I out of line here? I don’t know, but sometimes you do have to be objective, and when I looked at myself in the mirror—even without makeup—I saw someone who’d represent the Mission to the public better than Linda. I’m sorry. I’ve said it. But it’s a fact.

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes. Yes. I’m praying you get in, I really am—as much as I’m praying for myself. More, even. Imagine the two of us in there, the two Musketeers, right?” I tried to smile, but I couldn’t. I felt my eyes fill with tears. The thing was—and I’m ashamed to admit it—they weren’t just for her.

  Linda set down the donut and licked her fingertips one by one. It took an eternity. Then she lifted her face and I saw that her eyes were swimming too. “Hey,” she said, sweeping the hair off her shoulder with a flip of her chin, “no worries. Whatever happens, there’s always Mission Three.”

  We all essentially wore the same outfit to work, male and female alike—jeans, T-shirt and hiking boots, with a hooded sweatshirt for the cool of morning or the winter days when it could get surprisingly brisk—but on this particular morning I’d opted for a dress. Nothing too showy, just a pale-green tank dress I’d worn once or twice when a couple of us had gone out barhopping in Tucson, and I’d put on makeup and swept my hair back in a ponytail. My hair is one of my best features, actually, so thick you can’t see a trace of scalp even when it’s dripping wet from the shower—and it’s got body to spare, despite the low humidity. Stevie’s a blonde, part in the middle, no bangs, as if she’s trying out for a part in a surf movie, but her hair’s a lot thinner than mine and it just hangs limp most of the time, unless she puts it up in rollers, and who’ll have time for that after closure? But, as I said, she was in and Linda was out, or that was my best guess anyway, and it had nothing to do with the fact that Linda was Asian, but only how she looked in a two-piece. And the degree, of course. It might have hurt to admit it, but Stevie had her on both counts, and if I was going to get in, it would have to be over Linda’s back and not Stevie’s or Gretchen’s or Diane’s because I couldn’t begin to match their qualifications. My own degree was in environmental studies, which pretty well matched Linda’s B.S. in animal sciences, so that was a wash. As for the other three women on the extended crew, they weren’t really in the running, or not that Linda or I could see.

  Eight, that was the number. Eight slots. Four men, four women. And if we’ve been criticized for lack of diversity, just think about it. In the history of the planet, only twelve astronauts have walked on the moon, and all of them were men. Counting the second mission, we would number sixteen, and fully half that number would be women. Including, I hoped, me.

  By the time I’d finished up in the cafeteria, hugged Linda goodbye and whispered luck in her ear, I was running late and that just ramped up my anxiety one extra degree I didn’t need at all. I hurried across the courtyard, dodging the odd tourist, slammed into my room and stripped down for a quick two-minute shower (of which I was a past master, training myself for the mission, when we’d be limited to just seventy-five gallons of water apiece each day—for all purposes). I’d washed my hair the night before and laid out the dress, a pair of Mary Janes and the coral necklace I was going to wear, so it didn’t take me long. Lipstick, eye shadow, a dab of highlighter, and I was out the door.

  The air held the same faint sweetness I’d noticed earlier, though now it carried a taint of diesel from the pair of bulldozers scooping out the foundation for a new dormitory that would house visiting dignitaries, scientists and any friends of the project willing to contribute at one of three levels—brass, silver, gold—to its success. I didn’t run into any
body I knew on my way over to Mission Control, which was just as well given the way I was feeling. The tourists were gathered round in clusters, sprouting cameras, binoculars and daypacks, but none of them gave me a second glance—and really, why would they bother? I was nobody. But tomorrow—if things worked out the way I envisioned—they’d be lining up for my autograph.

  I took the stairs up to the third floor of Mission Control and if I broke out in a light sweat, so be it: the exercise calmed me. A simple thing: foot, ankle, knee, hip joint, breathe in, breathe out. I was in reasonably good shape from working the test plots and the Intensive Agriculture Biome and taking extended walks in the desert when I got the chance, but I wasn’t a runner and didn’t train with weights like so many of the others. No need, that was my thinking. The Mission One crew experienced rapid weight loss, the men averaging an eighteen percent drop in body weight, the women ten percent, and it was probably healthier to put on a few pounds before closure—Linda and I had gone over this time and again. The trick was, you had to distribute those extra pounds in the right places, because Mission Control was watching and Mission Control definitely did not want to present fat Terranauts to the public.

  Josie Muller, the secretary, waved me in with a smile, which I tried to return as if everything was normal, as if what was going to transpire in the next few minutes in the control room with its dull white plasterboard walls, oatmeal carpeting and panoptic views of E2 itself was the most ordinary thing in the world. “Just take a seat,” she said, “—it’ll be a minute.” We both looked to the polished oak door that gave onto the inner sanctum.

  I hadn’t expected this—a wait. I’d assumed my eight o’clock must have been the first interview of the day and I’d timed it to the minute, thinking to walk right in and let the tension flow out of me like water down a drain. “Is there somebody in there?”