Drinking Heavy Water

One On my last day in this weirdly toxic universe, I put on a pressure suit and went outside for a long last look at the world that bound Earth’s civilization together. The suits had great fishbowl helmets, straight from classic second millennium movies. I could gawk up and down the rocky shoreline of the glittering, pristine lagoon, saturated with bioluminescent blue algae that reminded me of a high-quality opal. It was broad enough that I’d have a rough time swimming underwater the whole width. Every spot changed color as the placid waves rolled in, aquamarine to white to brilliant green. Past the lagoon, out in the reef, the water grew rougher and rougher until it escaped the shelter of the looming horseshoe cliffs and crashed into the ocean. The ocean looked gentler only because nothing resisted it. The sun here looked about the size of my palm. The rich dark green around it faded towards purple where the water met the sky. Even now, at local noon, it wasn’t bright enough to obscure all the stars from the sky. More documentaries have been filmed about Tritium than any other universe. Growing up, I’d watched most of them. My parents didn’t mind documentaries, or any serial featuring teenage love triangles, but Mom totally lost it when she caught me watching something un-girly like Not Enough Universes or Voidlost. Yes, I liked Voidlost. An orbital station jumping between universes, trying to get home? I know, the science is completely wrong, not to mention that the Montague Corporation would never build a Portal outside Uruguay let alone off Earth, but what’s not to love? All those documentaries couldn’t capture the reality. Even an immersive hologram wasn’t the same as standing on a perfectly smooth walkway blasted out of a spur of alien basalt, separated from the beach’s fine obsidian-black sand by only a few layers of fabric and a transparent plasteel helmet. The air handler strapped to my back weighed down my shoulders. The suit’s legs were tight around my thighs and calves, but no matter how I adjusted the belts I still had a gap behind my butt. I didn’t go outside often enough to rate a personal, custom-fitted suit. A stiff breeze tugged at my over-pressurized suit. Fine sand brushed the suit’s outer shell, hissing before the electrostatic charge could push it away. The helmet was so clear that I expected to feel the breeze on my face and sand in my eyes. The way the sand hit the utterly transparent helmet and skittered around seemed surreal. I should have smelled salt and seaweed. Instead I tasted only pure filtered air, imported from Earth and recycled for decades. Add in the way that gravity ebbed and surged, and no Earthly simulation could match it. After six months, keeping my knees bent and riding the slow changes was automatic. For a fraction of a second, I weighed as much as I did on Earth: the heavy. Then it eased, making me lighter over a second, until my weight was maybe twenty percent less: the light. Up and down, back and forth. Some days the pulses were slower, others faster. If a gravity storm hit, my weight might as much as double. Those days, everyone kept to their beds. The secret to coming home from Tritium was to ride the gravity. And whatever happens, don’t breathe the air. For a moment, my weight fluxed almost in time with the waves breaking on the basalt, but that was no more than random chance. In another couple seconds the synchronization would dissolve, and if I let myself follow my eyes rather than my weight I’d wind up on my butt. I didn’t mind a fall, but every square centimeter of land around Tritium Facility was monitored and recorded. I didn’t want to walk into the cafeteria to discover tonight’s dinner entertainment featured “Security Third Aidan Redding Plopping Onto Her Butt Like A Newbie.” I’d starred in that kind of video at my last assignment, and hoped to escape Tritium safely anonymous. Both my hands burst into fierce itching, followed by my pulse pounding in my neck. Calm. Yes, on Freefall you had half a hand chopped off. Then on Wemm Station, you cooked the other one. They’re regrown good as new. And Tritium is the most boring assignment in all of Montague. I had nightmares of having no hands to tie my shoes. Or open a door. Eat. Sweat ran down my back. In the pressure suit, I couldn’t even wipe it away. Nothing is going to happen. Nobody’s going to ask you to drink the water or breathe the air. Even if something broke, the air’s fine in small doses. You’d have a good twenty minutes until you could never go home again. The facility’s near the South Pole, away from all Tritium’s psycho wildlife. The worst risk here is a gravity storm, and the next one’s not until two weeks after you’re gone. I turned to watch the gleaming tanks and scaffolding of the tritium extraction plant atop the left-hand cliffs. While the living quarters and equipment were safely buried inside the stone of the barren island, going all the way down beneath the waterline, the plant had to be exposed. Pipes big enough to suck up a person ran out far from shore, where the water was over a kilometer deep, and filtered pure water out of the depths. This universe’s water was just like ours: two hydrogen atoms nailed to an oxygen, into a molecule of good old H two O. The difference was, the atoms all had too far many neutrons. On Earth, they would be unstable and often radioactive isotopes. Here, such atoms were stable. The H was all fusion-friendly tritium, a fiercely potent fuel for Earth’s fusion reactors. For over a hundred years, the Montague Corporation had printed profit by importing pure tritium from this alien universe. And, incidentally, built a human civilization so wealthy that most people didn’t need to work. Staring fixedly at the purely human workmanship of the tritium extraction plant helped me slow my breath and heartbeat before the suit flagged my life signs and Ops told me to get back inside. White plumes of cooled oxygen freed from that water billowed from towering chimneys, to be shredded by the constant breeze. Tortoise-bots crawled along its side, meticulously scrubbing away the salt spray and persistent orange algae. I’d had some hard assignments. Most people worked for Montague for years without needing anything regrown. I intended to keep all my bits for the rest of my career. That wouldn’t be a problem, unless I decided to solve every issue by maiming myself. My only worry was my own fear. I’d told the therapists that I felt fine. I didn’t need a medical discharge, or permanent Earthside duty, or any restrictions. They’d offered more treatment, if I had any trouble at all. I only had to ask for help. But how would cracked under pressure look on my record? I still burned to see all the universes. I was ready for them. And I was fine, enough. Ready, enough. I pushed all that away. These were my last hours in Tritium. I hadn’t gotten any commendations here, but I’d also avoided scathing reprimands. After the debacle of my last assignment, I really wanted to escape this one without a black mark. At four AM the next morning, the Portal’s mathematics would rewrite my physiology to survive under Earth’s natural laws. I wanted to return with a report that said Redding can behave, who knew? Tritium would only be a memory, so I needed to soak up as many memories as I could. Don’t be panicked, be thrilled. I focused on the impossible world around me. Tritium wasn’t that different from Earth. The gravity averaged a little less than Earth’s. The atmosphere contained a little higher percentage of oxygen than Earth’s, a little more argon, a little less nitrogen. You could even drink the water, if you didn’t mind having your body’s hydrogen slowly exchanged for tritium and the oxygen exchanged for high-neutron variants. In most universes, passing back through the Portal would revert the change. But the whole point of Tritium was satisfying Earth’s rapacious thirst for easily-fusible tritium. The extra neutrons passed through the Portal unchanged. Step through the Portal with all your oxygen atoms replaced with high-neutron isotopes? They’d need a stopwatch to see how long you lived. All in all, the extraction facility looked like a ridiculously huge beached ship, bigger than those Oil Age container ships, its prow thrust out towards the ocean it would never conquer. The underground portion was even bigger, miles of curving corridors and chambers carved out of native rock, layered with insulating materials, and built into comfortable workspaces and quarters. The robots slowly and constantly dug deeper, following the basalt’s natural weaknesses while leaving the strongest parts to support the rest. When we needed more room, construction crews followed the robots deep into Tritium. Yes, we called the planet Tritium. The universe? Tritium. The base inside the cliffs and beneath the island where we lived, Tritium. We mine tritium. This was the only human outpost in this entire universe. You only need names when you have two of something. Enough of that. I’d see another Montague base on my next assignment, whatever that was. For now, I wanted to soak up the resort-quality fine black sand and the way the waves crashed and sagged through the beautiful reef-choked bay. I needed to see how the rich dark sky and the opalescent ocean merged at the horizon. I had to remember the ocean-hardened trunks of driftwood carried down from the more hospitable equatorial regions. Not that they were honest trees, but an Earthish ecology has Earthish niches. Tritium’s trees were more like ferns. Montague had chosen a barren island in Tritium’s high latitudes specifically to avoid the planet’s animal life. The worst we had here were squid-like fish that only grew to forty centimeters or so. I’d seen aerial footage of some of those other beasts from the initial surveys and agreed that we didn’t want to argue with house-sized porcupines or razor-toothed carnivorous elephants. Yes, Voidlost used those. I didn’t say that the show was original, just that I loved watching it. And now I lived it. Except I’d go home tomorrow. I basked in the high spiky gray stone cliffs and the way those dark green splotches of stubborn lichen hung like laundry draped over knobs of rock. I raised a hand to blot out the oversized but cool sun, wishing I could feel the ocean breeze against my face. Maybe for my next vacation I’d hit one of the ultra-decadent ocean resorts, like Rio or Marseilles or Lincoln City. Eventually, my shoulders started to ache with the weight of the pressure suit. And you can only watch waves caress beach and stone so long before your brain numbs to the fact that you’re standing on an alien shore. I sighed and raised my head to take one last look, all the way around. I wanted to nail the sights into my brain, so that they would remain there my whole life. One day, I’d bore my nieces and nephews with the sagas of Aunt Aidan’s Adventures Beyond the Universe. I studied every fine detail of stabbing granite spire and the little curls of bright blue seaweed cast to a cruel crusty death on the obsidian sand. If I hadn’t been paying such close attention, I might not have noticed the red spot out where the ocean met the sky. I stopped. I’d had the display wall of my quarters set to display the ocean every day I’d been here. In all that time, I’d never seen anything red. Intrigued, I said “Suit. Zoom visual.” The world rushed closer around me as the suit’s electronics tracked my eye movement, made my helmet opaque, and provided its own up-close version. The bizarre red spot was unnaturally square. My heart started beating harder. “Suit. Double magnification.” It was square. But it wasn’t red. The white stripes blended into the opal sea. The red stripes stood out. I licked my lips. My tongue had gone dry. “Suit. Double magnification.” The world zoomed again. I fought down a tremble of excitement. This time, my deep breath was an effort to still myself. “Comms. Security Third Aidan Redding to Security Operations.” The only sound was the hiss of wind against the helmet. I checked the compass on the display. Seconds later, a deceptively calm voice answered. “Security Third Bakula. Trouble, Redding?” Bakula often annoyed me, but right now her throaty voice and quaint High Brit accent delighted me. “No, sir. I’m on the walkway, I’m fine.” I swallowed. “But please have the cameras check the horizon at… twenty-two degrees.” “What’s going on?” “I’m requesting visual confirmation.” Bakula sighed. “Just a moment.” The radio went dead. The video check should be almost instantaneous. I waited a breath. Another. Finally I couldn’t take it any longer. “Operations?” Bakula still sounded calm. Security people can’t sound upset, especially when they’re sitting Ops. But her calm sounded like it was nailed over a bed of distress. “Yes, Redding. Sorry. I confirm.” “It’s a sail.” I said. “A ship. Isn’t it.” “Confirmed.” A sailing ship. On a planet without intelligent life. Have I mentioned that I really love my job?