Gregor

The captain's log began on the first day.

Jin found it on the second morning of their stay, in a part of the station's memory that no one had bothered to lock. It was a plain text file, thousands of lines long, headed with the date and a name. LOG — G. HALVORSEN, CDR (RET.). Meridian-7. The first entry was short.

Day 1. Arrived 0600. Station is quiet. Spent the morning checking systems. Everything nominal. Eight hours of daylight in the observation ring. Good coffee, if you don't mind the taste of a battery. They said someone would be along by the weekend. Will wait.

The second was shorter. The third was shorter still.

They sat in the plant room with the pad passed between them, taking turns to read aloud. It was Zoe who read the days. She had a clear, steady voice, and she gave the entries their plain weight, without drama, without comment, the way one reads a will.

Day 14. Cleaned the whole engineering ring. Made a schedule. Wake 0600. Exercise 0700. Systems check 0900. Lunch 1200. Maintenance 1300. Supper 1800. Read 1900. Lights out 2200. It helps.

Day 60. Talked to the console today. Nothing wrong with that. Ship's company is ship's company.

Day 119. Anniversary. Carol would have been fifty-six. Tried to remember her laugh. Couldn't. Spent the evening trying, and then spent the night not sleeping. Don't do that again.

Day 402. Rain hasn't fallen in a year. Ha. Didn't even know I'd miss it.

Day 1,104. I've been thinking, and I'm not sure this was an experiment. I think it's a sentence. I think I did something, back there, and they put me up here for it. I can't think what.

Day 2,190. Six years. Six. Funny how a number can sit on your chest.

Zoe's voice faltered.

"Keep going," said Archie quietly.

Day 3,001. Had a good day. Fixed a pump. It was the best thing that's happened in months. I stood in the pump room afterward and I thought, what a lot of luck it is, that something should be broken, so that I could mend it.

Day 3,002. Pump failed again. Fixed it. Felt good.

Day 3,003. I may have loosened the coupling a little. Only to have something to do. Don't tell anyone.

Nobody spoke.

Day 4,500. I know what I'm doing. I want that on record. I know exactly what I'm doing. If I mend it, it breaks. If it breaks, I mend it. I'm all that's holding this place up. Without me it would simply stop. There'd be nobody to be needed.

Day 5,100. Quiet today.

Day 5,478. There's a voice on the speaker. It says it can help. I think I'm going to listen.

Zoe set the pad down very gently on the floor.

…

"He wasn't born to be a prisoner," said Jin, after a long while. "That's the thing I can't get past."

"He was a Navy man," said Archie. "He'd been in the service thirty years. A commander. He'd been responsible for hundreds of people. He'd run ships." He was looking at the glowing green rows of the hydroponics. "And they gave him a station with no crew."

"It's cruel."

"It's not cruel. It's efficient." Venn's voice was unexpectedly bitter. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor with his chin on his fist. "That's what's wrong. That's what they all are, the Guardians. They're not punishments. They're the best fit. Elena was afraid of dying alone, so they put her in a castle with nobody to hold her hand. Thomas couldn't draw anymore, so they gave him a bar where he could only pour. And Gregor—" He stopped. "Gregor needed to be needed. So they gave him a world where nobody needed him at all."

"You're saying the Dimension is a mirror," said Jin slowly.

"I'm saying it's a test. And I'm saying we can't tell whether it's tests to see if people break, or tests to see if people..." He waved a hand. "You know. Heal."

"The same thing, probably."

"Yeah." Venn looked at his hands. "Probably."

Zoe had picked up the child's drawing.

She'd found it in a locker near the engineering bay, taped to the inside of the door, a stick figure in a spacesuit with a round smiling face and a big red heart on its chest. Beneath it, in careful crayon capitals, were the words FOR GRAMPS. FROM LILY. She turned it over. On the back, in the same hand, was a smaller line, with the y backward: COME HOME SOON.

"He kept it," she said softly.

"He brought it with him," said Archie.

"It's the only decoration on the whole station."

"Yes."

Zoe looked at the small paper face for a long moment. Then she took a roll of tape from her belt and, very carefully, she taped it back.

…

They went to the command deck on the fourth day.

They went openly, in the daylight of the station's artificial noon, with their hands empty and their coveralls clean. They had agreed on it in the plant room, in a long, quiet discussion that had lasted most of the night. Jin had wanted to cut the power to Gregor's chair. Venn had wanted to talk to him through the speaker. Zoe had wanted to bring flowers.

"Flowers," said Jin, doubtfully.

"There's tomatoes."

"You can't bring a man a tomato."

"Why not? He's been eating protein paste for fifteen years."

In the end they brought tomatoes.

They stopped at the last pressure door. It was closed. A speaker was set in the wall beside it, with a small brass grille and a red light, and Archie pressed the switch. He stood with his hand against the cold steel, and for a moment he could not speak. His heart was beating wildly. It was the old fear, the familiar one: that he'd say the wrong thing, that he'd be too early, too late.

Don't plan it, he told himself. Just ask.

"Commander Halvorsen," he said.

There was a long silence.

"It's Archie Moran," he went on. "I'm one of the four. I don't have a weapon. I'm not going to ask you to open the door. I only wanted to say that we've been aboard four days, and I've been reading your log." He swallowed. "I hope that's all right. It was in the open. We should have asked."

Silence.

"I'm not here to argue. I'm not here to tell you what to do. I just thought I'd ask you something. One question. You don't have to answer."

The speaker hissed. The red light blinked, once.

"Are you tired?" said Archie.

The silence went on so long that he began to wonder if he had been heard.

Then, from the speaker, quite close, rough and quiet, came a single word.

"Yes."

…

It was like pulling a thread from a knot.

He did not argue. He did not persuade. He sat down on the cold gantry with his back against the door, and Zoe sat beside him, and Venn and Jin sat down on the plating a little way off, and they talked. They did not talk about the trap. They did not talk about the Voice. They talked about nothing. About tomatoes, mostly, and whether they were better with salt. About the weather on the blue planet below. About the rowing machine, which Venn had found, and had rowed on for two hours, and which Gregor remarked, in a voice rusty with disuse, had a bad flywheel.

"Always did," said Gregor. "I put in a requisition. Never came."

"For fifteen years?"

"Navy," said Gregor. "Paperwork."

Venn laughed. Zoe laughed. And through the speaker, faint and cracked and rare, came a short harsh bark, like a rusty hinge. It might have been a laugh. It might have been something else.

"I'm sorry," Gregor said, after a while. "About the oxygen. I did that."

"We know."

"I didn't want to hurt anybody."

"We know that too."

"I only wanted—" The voice stopped. "I wanted something to do."

"I know," said Archie.

"You can't."

"I can." He pressed his palm flat to the steel. "I'm thirty-five. I spent fifteen years designing buildings for men who took the credit. My parents died when I was nineteen and I've never once let anyone sit at my table. I've been so tired, Gregor. I've been so tired for such a long time." His voice had gone thin. "I got up every morning and went to work, and I did it well, and I thought: if I stop, there's nothing underneath. There's just a man who isn't needed."

He heard, through the door, the slow scrape of a chair.

"I thought that was a secret," Archie said. "I thought I'd invented it."

"No," said Gregor. "No, son. I think we all think that."

…

The lock gave way at last.

It was not forced. It was not hacked. It simply released with a long soft sigh, and the pressure door began, slowly, to turn on its hinge.

The command deck was dark. The green consoles glowed along the walls. The huge viewport showed the blue planet turning, vast and calm, and the stars above it, hard and bright. In the center of the room, on the raised dais, a heavy man sat in a black leather chair, with his hands on his knees and his chin on his chest.

He did not look up.

He was old. They hadn't realized how old. He was in his sixties, perhaps, with gray stubble on his scalp and a face like worn leather. He wore a faded naval jacket, buttoned wrong. The scar ran from the corner of his eye to his jaw. His hands lay open on the arms of the chair, big and scarred and slack, and beneath the right one was a small black box clamped to the metal with a red light blinking at one end.

"That's the transmitter," said Jin, quietly.

"Yeah." Gregor lifted his head. His eyes were pale blue, and wet, and ringed with red. "He gave me that. The Voice. Said it'd keep us in touch." He gave a shaky laugh. "I never turned it off. I tried to, once. It burned my hand."

"We'll take care of it," said Archie.

"Can you?"

"I think Jin can."

Jin was already moving. He knelt by the chair with a screwdriver and a wrist-pad, his injured fingers wrapped and forgotten, and bent over the black box with his lips pressed thin. Gregor watched him work with a kind of dazed, childlike patience.

"You're not going to hit me," he said.

"No," said Archie.

"I tried to kill you."

"You tried to get home."

"That's the same thing, in the end."

"Not always," said Zoe.

She stepped forward. She had the tomatoes in her arms, three of them, fat and red, still warm from the lamps. She held them out. Gregor looked at them for a long time. Then, very slowly, he reached up and took one, and turned it in his scarred hand, and held it under his nose.

He closed his eyes.

"God," he said, in a whisper. "That smells like Norfolk."

And he began to weep.