The Voyages of Man

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. Then again if you needed to scream in the vacuum of space, you’re probably already dead. The only sounds that could be heard are phantoms, creations of our mind to fill the void of nothingness. We fill the blanks in with what we think we’d hear, like a whirring of a black hole or the blaze of the fiery sun exploding balls of fire into space.

Then again, not like we’d know. Does a tree make a sound in the woods when it falls, and no one is around to hear it? The answer is yes, it makes a sound, but it is a question of whether the tree exists separately from the possible listener’s existence. In the case of space, the vacuum just swallows the sound, stops it in its tracks. You could be dying out there, truly screaming, just like a tree when it falls in the woods when it comes crashing down; except there is someone standing right in front of you, unable to hear a peep from the squeals that you’re emitting.

You’re doomed out there. No one will rescue you, because no one can hear you, let alone come to your rescue quick enough before the vacuum of space kills you. I’ve seen it before. He was on a walk, maintaining the hull of the ship. No one heard anything, but we all saw it. The moment it all went wrong, we all imagined the sound of the snap as the cord tore through his suit. I’m certain it was our minds filling the blanks because we all swore we heard the screams; a screech for help resonating through the thick air-tight windows. The reality is, there probably was a scream, but the vacuum of space sealed it, sapped the sound out of him.

I remember the look on his face when they picked him up. His face was swollen, puffy, frozen with horror and anguish. I’m not sure if his lungs collapsed the moment his suit tore or if the lack of oxygen took him. If he was lucky the snap of the cord killed him instantly. The gash on his chest didn’t look deep enough. He must’ve suffered for a few moments when he realized he was struck. They put his bloated body in a casket to send him home.

It was a rare occurrence. Walking in space was relatively safe during routine maintenance. A freak accident is what it was. No one knows what caused the cord to snap or why the accident occurred, but it did, and his time was up. Traveling through space is quiet, uneventful, but when something happens, you never forget it. It’s always a life-or-death situation when something happens in space, a random event out of your control. You just pray it isn’t your time to be sent home in a casket.

If the ship goes down, you die. If you’re lucky enough to make it to a boat, there’s always the probability that the boat doesn’t release in time or gets lost in space. Anything can happen and it all leads down one inevitable path of death. I’ve yet to see a ship sink, well, few people have and lived to tell such a tale. It’s certainly not like the Titanic where it takes a few hours and then the ship is lost to the ocean. No, in the vacuum of space it’s seconds, minutes if you’re lucky. It’s funny really. We call spaceships, ships, just like ships on an ocean. The life rafts are just smaller boats, just like the escape pods in a spaceship, and so we call them boats too.

Man was always meant to travel the cosmos, through the vacuum of space. It is no different than crossing the blue oceans of Earth. Earth is far away now. Our ship is headed to an asteroid belt to mine the precious metals our Earth lacks. The work we do is vital for humanity. It can be dangerous work, but it’s good money. Asteroid belts and stars are more dangerous than the vacuum of space, they’re the fish in the sea, the harsh and stormy waves of the ocean. It requires a diligent and wary captain to steer the ship, to avoid the many crashing waves, the many rocks before us.

Our captain for this voyage is a woman, supposedly the best in her class, but that’s what they all say to alleviate a crew’s mind. No one ever wants to hear the captain is middling or a failure. If they were, it’d spell certain doom. She is a good captain as far as I am aware. We aren’t dead yet. I’ve heard this wasn’t her first time and hopefully not her last, but even the most experienced captains can err and an error in space equals death. A captain is also only as good as their crew. A poor crew leads to accidents that not even the best captain can prevent. The crew must always be diligent, ready to take orders on a moment’s notice. Act efficiently and precisely to help alleviate what would likely be an impending death.

Humanity has not been among the stars for long. We’re still learning, but what we have learned is to minimize accidents, lessen deaths to the best of our ability. You would think this was a natural course of action, for the good of the people on board voyages like this, but you would be wrong. It was natural for humanity to minimize casualties and shipwrecks in space because it is expensive to build a new ship, to train a new man to take the previous man’s place, and the legal repercussions back home that would be incurred.

When the first ships started to mine asteroids or travel the cosmos merely to explore it, the cost of the ship was astronomical. The metals to build it, impossible to find. When they were wrecked and those aboard the sinking ship died, the entities responsible for the building of the ship, the training of the personnel, or whatever investigative finding is found to be at fault, are always punished. I remember the story on the news. One of the world’s largest corporations at the time built humanity’s first successful spaceship to mine an asteroid. The company is defunct now. They made an obscene amount of money, an amount I cannot define. Yet, they were dismantled. Every penny they ever earned lost, not to poor spending or financial management, but because their ship sank, and the bodies came home in a casket – at least the ones that could be retrieved.

The lawyers came and scavenged the company’s corpse. Obscene amounts of money given to all sorts of people, bereaved families, government, and lawyers. It bankrupted the largest company in the world that was making a number I could not fathom. To put it simply, economics, the stick and the carrot is what forced humanity to get good at space faring. No one dared enter the cosmos for many years after that incident, but someone eventually had the balls to do it, and here we are now.

Ever since they went under, a ship has a large crew. Lawyers who specialize in all the legal nonsense that was put in place to protect those on the ship by the government. The lawyers’ job is to keep their clients away from a similar legal disaster. Then you have the maintenance crew, the janitors, the operators of the machinery, the miners, and others. To mine an asteroid properly, a machine is unable to obtain some of the more precious metals. It requires delicate hands that have more precision and dexterity, like digging a fossil from the Earth.

That’s the most dangerous job on the ship. The one who goes out onto the asteroid and digs after the machinery is no longer able to do the job. I’m glad I don’t have to. I get to sit and watch. I’m the foreman, I oversee the operation and make sure everyone is doing their job correctly. If an accident occurs on my watch though, that’s the end of my career, if not my life. The man I replaced was thrown under the bus. Under his watch one of the miners drilled into the asteroid incorrectly and collapsed the whole thing. Wasn’t his fault, he was just watching, unable to do anything as the whole rock fell apart crushing the idiot along with any other poor sod still on the rock.

He lost his job. His career ended and he was sued into oblivion. The corporation makes all the money on jobs like these. We get paid your average working man’s salary. It’s no different than working a job on Earth, except a lot of jobs back home are automated or taken for one reason or another. It pays well enough, six figures at least. The minimum wage in space faring jobs is about ten to twenty percent more than your Earth job. We take on the risk of life and limb and the corporation gets the profits.

As the foreman I help the new miners get acquainted with their equipment. I teach them the protocol that they’ll follow when they get on the asteroid. We limit the number of people allowed on the asteroid at a given time in case a similar accident was to occur. It’s my neck on the line. I do this every day. I make sure they awake at the same time, sleep at the same time, eat properly, exercise, and practice. Good healthy habits are important to avoiding simple stupid mistakes. Sleepiness was always a major cause of many horrific accidents. A good night’s sleep can avoid a lot of unnecessary trouble.

I do this until we get to the asteroid belt. A quiet voyage is the best voyage. Then the hard work begins. I watch closely and carefully, from a safe distance, as the miners do their work. The machines dig through the rock searching its depths for the materials we need. Then the miners get to go in and carefully bring out the shiny metals hiding within. Everything is going as planned, routine, the usual. Then we leave and its on to the next rock. For days on end, we do this until the hold fills forcing us to head home to empty it out.

This goes on for days, sometimes even a week or two, hopping from rock to rock, extracting the materials we need back home. When we get back home, I meet the wife and kids, eat a family dinner, and then it’s back to work in space. Last time I saw them on Earth was nearly a month ago. I hardly recognize them when I returned. It’s a challenge to provide for a family you never get to see or enjoy or really know. You’re just out in the sea of nothingness with a crew you pray will get you back to solid ground safely.

It’s a shame I’ll never get to see the kids again. All grown up. The money I was making for them kept their bellies full and minds sharp. What more could I have wanted? To spend time with them is all I want, but alas here I am, working again. I could not hear the machine falling towards me. I was on the outside of the ship doing my job, watching the miners mine the final rock before I can see my kids again. It dulled my senses, the desire, the homesickness. I didn’t notice the shadow form in front of me fast enough to avoid the damned thing.

As the foreman I watch the miners from a relatively safe distance, but it doesn’t make me immune from danger, especially if another man working beside me doesn’t do their job right. It’s not my fault the crane fell. The operator made a mistake. He announced it far too late on the com. I just wish it crushed me. I would have died quicker, painless. I’m screaming and no one is coming. I suppose this was the momentary horror he had felt when the cord snapped.

The moment always stuck with me. How random and bizarre it was that no one went to save him. No one could save him even if they tried. Here I am in the vacuum of space, floating without a tether, screaming without a soul to hear me. The crane fell and because I had jumped far too late out of the way, it got hold of my tether forcing me to smack into the rock before snapping, hurtling me back into the nothingness. I don’t even know if my suit was torn. It hurts like hell, my back smashed into the rock, but oddly I don’t feel much. Just the despair of the inability to get help. The radio in the helmet is silent, I’m immobile, and all I can do is scream; But one thing I can be certain of is no one heard a thing in the vacuum of space.

End of Chapter.