No doubt about it, I was cracking up.
And yet …
The company had barely given me any information about my predecessor’s death. The report I’d received had just said there’d been an accident resulting in the death of an employee while performing a lunar experiment and what was called a Quick Crew had come and retrieved the body before I’d arrived. The exact location of the site where he’d died had not been given and the files that had the info were locked in the computer as “Top Secret.”
I entered the Records Room and naturally it was empty. However, the company’s silver logo floated across the screen of the computer. At the bottom of the screen were the words “Access Granted.”
I went to the computer and clicked the mouse. The logo disappeared and a three-dimensional overview of a path from the base to a location with a green laser beacon marked “Crater” appeared.
Top secret or not, I was going to go take a look at the site for myself.
I hurried to the changing room next to the air lock, put my moon suit on, and then walked into the air lock and hit the “Open Portal” button on the wall. There was a mechanical grumble and the two metal halves of the circular door began to slide away from each other. Ten seconds later the portal was clear.
I stepped through it. The rover was parked next to a big gray boulder about thirty feet away from the portal and I walked over to it. Grabbing the two handlebars outside of the rover’s door, I pulled myself up, opened the door, and slid in. It was the first time I’d been in the rover in a few days and it felt good to be outside the base. I flipped the ignition switch and the dashboard and headlights lit up. Pressing down on the accelerator I gripped the thick steering wheel and accelerated forward.
For the next fifteen minutes I rumbled over rocks and up and down small hills towards the site. When I saw the beacon I pulled the rover up to it, climbed out, and walked over to the edge of the crater. It was about a hundred feet deep and maybe a mile wide.
At the bottom I could see a body.
I carefully sidestepped down the crater and over to the body. The nameplate on the suit said “Walker.” Kneeling down, I ran my hands over the suit and inspected the golden visor. No tears or cracks.
Whatever had killed him had been internal.
And the company had never actually come to get him or even give him a burial.
Loneliness sunk through me like a stone sinking in the ocean and I looked to the west. At the top of the crater a blurry white figure stood at the edge looking down at me. We stared at each other for a few seconds and then it seemed to just drift into the darkness and moon rock.
I nodded, stood up, and made my way back up the crater to the rover. When I got there I hopped inside and started driving back across the lunar desert to the base. I didn’t know what had happened to Walker and I’d probably never find out. But I’d return to bury him.
Because five hundred grand might have covered me cracking up, but it didn’t cover being haunted by a dead astronaut’s ghost while alone on Alpha Base 6.
I killed my dog when I was six.
She was a Maltese puppy, hardly bigger than a good-sized hamster when I killed her. It wasn’t an accident. It was childhood sadism, a mean streak that ther0apists claimed they’d managed to remove shortly after the death of the tiny pooch.
I don’t even remember her name any more, probably one of those dumb dog names small kids come up with, like Spot or Rover. I remember I thought she was a male for the first few months we owned her.
I hardly remember the deed, honestly. We were playing fetch with a stick, and I started to throw the stick at her. The next thing I knew, the sticks became rocks and my pet wasn’t playing anymore. Just whimpering. Then … not.
My parents sent me to a therapist, and the therapist told me to value life and become a hippie or a vegetarian or something. I wasn’t really paying attention. I did feel bad about my once-pet, though, and told my parents that I didn’t want to have another animal. It didn’t take too much convincing. I avoided animals for years after that, and they made it really easy to avoid me. When they saw me coming they would step back, stay away from me. I guess maybe they could smell what I’d done. I’d heard crazy stories about that sort of thing, dogs smelling guilt and earthquakes, like they have some sort of sixth sense.
I did eventually become a vegetarian—for health reasons, not because I valued the lives of the cattle. I had some gastro-intestinal issues that the doctors told me about without using a single word that I actually knew the meaning of.
One day, after school, as I was walking home, I noticed cats jumping in fear and running away when they saw me. I stepped on an anthill, but none of the insects bit me—they just ran away. I came into my home, our neighbor’s goat bleating and kicking at her fence, and told Genevieve to please shut up.
Why did our neighbors have a goat!? Eventually Genevieve bleated herself out and was quiet, so I could get started on my homework.
