![[ EUROPA ]](europa.gif)
© 1994 Rainer X. Weitz
My dearest Barbara,
I dreamed it snowed last night, falling in thick flurries the way it had in Illinois when I was a child. Walking toward our house, down an empty street, I felt the wind sting my face. I tucked my chin and wrapped my arms around myself and kept on walking, but the snow fell faster and faster, until it was so thick that I could see nothing but an all-encompassing whiteness.
Soon I was struggling through snow up to my knees, and could feel it working its way down into my shoes. I tried to run then, but my feet were so numb that I barely felt the ground beneath them. Still the drifts rose, up to my waist, to my armpits, until I was swimming in snow, desperately trying to make it the last few yards to where our house awaited me, golden light streaming through the open door, but it was just out of reach. I felt myself sinking, being pulled down, encased in an icy cocoon. I could not move, no matter how I struggled. I opened my mouth to scream, but all that came out was a faint hiss, like the radio static of the cold, bright stars.
When I awoke, I was cold--as cold as I had been in the dream--but it hadn't snowed. It never snows here. Outside the viewport, the same endless fields of dirty gray ice extended for as far as the eye could see, curving away sharply to a horizon that, after all these months, still seemed much too close, until at last they brushed against the swirling pastel crescent of waning Jupiter, it's huge bulk filling nearly half the sky, and blotting out the brilliant stars of the Europan night.
Sometimes I sit watching it for hours. It fascinates me, the way it never seems to change, yet never looks quite the same. I often wonder what a snowfall on Jupiter might be like. Maybe snowflakes big as wagon wheels, tumbling down through an endless night, lit for a moment by jagged bolts of lightning, exposed in a flash of crystalline white, then falling through darkness once more.
I look up to the sky, hoping to see the bright, insistent flashing of red landing beacons, but nothing breaks the stillness. Not a single star even flickers. It could almost be a holographic display, a frozen tableau: still life with Jupiter.
Why don't they come back?
I ran in the centrifuge today. It helps relieve the endless chill. I kept it up for two hours, even though it's a tremendous waste of power, but I'm afraid if I give it up, I'll soon be too weak to return home, if they ever do come back for me.
Sometimes, when I'm in the wheel, I can close my eyes and imagine that I'm back on Earth, just out for a jog around the block. There's Sean and Denise's place. I can see it clearly, the fading yellow stucco and white trim, those two ancient elms in the front yard, Sean out polishing his old Corvette in the driveway, waving as I go by.
As I round the corner, I can see our house, looking just the way it did the day I left; the lawn needing a trim, and littered with leaves from the old sycamore leaning over the walkway; the broken porch swing still dangling from one chain. I open the gate, and look up to see Cheryl waving to me from her window. Then you're waiting for me, just inside the doorway. You put your arms around me, and tell me that you won't kiss me because I'm all sweaty, then kiss me anyway.
But when I open my eyes, I'm back in the wheel, going around in circles. I wonder if this is how a hamster feels, running round and round without ever coming any closer to freedom, though I would gladly trade places with any caged animal back on Earth.
Why don't they come back?
For nearly two months, I've had the temperature set just barely high enough to keep me alive, in an attempt to conserve my remaining fuel. I live inside my thermal suit now, and every morning, when I drag myself out of bed, I jump around to try to bring some feeling back into my numbed flesh. More and more though, I feel that I'm only postponing the inevitable. I won't be able to keep the generators going much longer. The reactor is cooling, it was never meant to go this long without refueling.
Charlie and I played a game of chess today. It ended in stalemate, like usual. He looked surprised, but he always looks that way, ever since the day he went outside to check the receiving antenna and discovered a hole in his suit. I check my suit thoroughly now, every day, even though there's no reason to go outside anymore. After I turned the temperature down, I brought Charlie inside to keep me company. He doesn't mind the cold.
It's seems funny, but since he died, I feel like I know him much better. We've become good friends. We were never very friendly before. Why should we be? This was only supposed to last six months, just a routine job at a scientific outpost, that paid ten times better than anything either of us could get Earthside.
Before his accident, I didn't even know his first name. It was always just Stanton'. "Hey, Stanton," I would say, "what's the flux reading today?", or "Yo, Stanton, could you give me a hand with the number three relay?"
Charles James Stanton, that's what his papers read. A bit pretentious sounding, but maybe his parents thought he would grow into it. I'm sure they never dreamed that he would end up sucking vacuum out on this god-forsaken, frozen mud-ball.
He has a wife back home named Suzanne. They were only married for a year when he made the trip up here. I've read all her letters. Charlie kept printouts of them in his locker. I read them aloud to him sometimes. Sometimes I even show him my pictures of you and Cheryl. "Cheryl will be eleven this month," I told him today. He looked surprised.
Why don't they come back?
If someone would only answer. That's why Charlie went outside that day. When the signals stopped coming from Earth, we were sure it was just some problem with the receiver, but after days of testing and retesting, we decided that it must be a failure in the circuitry of the antenna itself. What else could it have been? After all, even if they had chosen not to communicate with us, for whatever reason, we should have been receiving something. There's always a blanket of radio noise surrounding the Earth. It had been a constant background in all the messages we received, but now there was nothing except for the static hiss of the distant stars.
So Charlie put on his suit and went outside to look it over. At first, his silence didn't bother me--that was just how he was--but after about thirty minutes, I began to wonder. A standard vacuum suit has only enough air for an hour at the most, and that's if you're not exerting yourself at all. I called him on the radio, asking what the problem was, what was taking him so long, but I got no reply.
A cold feeling of dread clutched me, as I struggled into my own suit and waited for the airlock to cycle. Once it opened, I didn't have to look far. He lay just outside. It must have happened very fast. He never got past that look of shocked disbelief. It's the only reason I keep him inside with me now. It's such a human expression.
After the shock had worn off, I went back outside to check the antenna myself. You can imagine my frustration when I found that there was nothing wrong with it. I double-checked, then triple-checked everything, just to be sure. All the circuits tested good. That was when I first began to really feel alone.
Why don't they come back?
What happened? Was there a war? Some cosmic catastrophy? Sometimes I think I may be the last man alive. I'm sending this out in the hope that maybe you survived, that someone, somewhere, might get this message, and be able to pass it on to you, but hope is all I have, and a fragile one at that.
Meanwhile, I sit and stare through the viewport at the brightly colored bands of Jupiter, the raging storms that from here look so peaceful and serene, but that giant, unblinking, red eye seems to hold me in its gaze, and sometimes I think I hear the sound of laughter.
The End.