Pioneer 10 at the Heliopause
by David Barber
Spacers have a saying that home is never where you left it. Worlds tumble away and always have to be found again.
Perry had shipped out with the Zaibatsu 12, in the days when ice was bought and sold, and Kuiper debris was worth jockeying back to markets in the Inner System. The Zaibatsu was not a happy ship, and Perry vowed never to crew a company vessel again. Now back on Vesta after eight months in the Dark, there was a message waiting that said her father had died.
Her parents had settled on Ceres, currently on the other side of the sun and, since there was no quick way home, and an hour’s time lag hindering conversation, all Perry could do was write a difficult reply.
Perry had no intention of spending another second with her crewmates and found herself alone in a bar called Heavy Weather, pricey because of its trademark holos of Earthside climate. Rain rattled against windows like someone tossing handfuls of gravel. There was even a wet, green smell along with the downpour.
She unfolded her pad on the tabletop and lit up the keyboard. She was still staring at Dear Mom ten minutes later.
What year would this have been?
Perry could remember the scene clearly. She’s telling her father the Pioneer 10 story, while her mother sits at the table, studying. In time, her mother would become a Phage Manager for Ceres Green, so this was before she qualified, when Perry was still in her teens, eager to become a Spacer like her father.
He’d promised to call in a favour from some shipowner to take her on. That’s how it was done back then.
Perry’s memories of him were mostly from around then, ill-shaven and vague, with muscle-twitches flickering across his face. Spacers crop their hair, but his was sparse and straggling. He was back after two years in the Dark and would never ship out again.
She had walked in on Captain Chen talking to her mother. This must have been in their old rooms on Ceres, the ones in Occator Crater.
“He went outside with empty tanks,” he was saying. “Forgetting to check.”
The captain’s gaze had rested on Perry, then turned back to her mother. “Vacuum does not forgive.”
Her father would get the same share as the rest of the crew, Captain Chen promised, and no one begrudged him that, but he could no longer be trusted to jockey ice. This was how he put it, not mentioning the Blight.
The Blight was what Spacers called the long-term effects of zero-g. Blindness from fluid pressure on the optic nerve was common, kidney problems, and also subtler damage to the brain. A generation later, a simple drug regime would take care of all that.
Years after, Perry shipped out with Chen on the Franklin, and would learn he was not a sensitive man, so perhaps it was the look on their faces that prompted such delicacy.
“Francis Lee and Karl Ford thought up a scheme about Pioneer 10,” Perry would begin. She remembered this was how the story always began. “They’d salvage it and sell the probe to a museum on Earth.”
Sometimes her father would interrupt. “It was a derelict, you see.” He nodded in all the right places because it was a story he used to tell her.
In later life, Perry would recognise it as one of those tales of luck and misfortune that Spacers tell in bars. She would even have one of her own, the time she brought the Franklin home, the only survivor of a blowout.
Lee and Ford had worked vacuum, but not in the Dark. They needed a ship and a pilot. In fact, her father knew de Silva, owner of the Estrada de Silva, from the old days.
“That ship was a rattle-trap. Lunar Industries, the one with the framework spine.”
His shaking hand would mime habitat, tanks and drive, hung along that spine.
Next would be the part that made him anxious: Lee and Ford cutting corners. The story was often set aside while he tried to list all the supplies you’d need to ship out into the Dark.
“He should have known better,” her father might volunteer in the middle of dinner. Meaning de Silva. This was where the story had progressed in his head. He never blamed the other two, they weren’t Spacers.
So the Estrada set out for Pioneer 10, even though the outer planets were wrongly aligned. A gravity assist around Jupiter might have made all the difference. Her father would interrupt conversations to say they should have waited.
“What am I waiting for?” he added once, and Perry and her mother had exchanged looks.
At the time, Perry had no idea how desperate de Silva might have been. These days the junkyard orbits around Vesta are crowded with old Spacer craft, squeezed from the Dark by progress. Though even back then, Perry could see Lee and Ford’s plan only made sense if you burned non-stop out to Pioneer, then got resupplied on the way back. But resupply meant two ships, it meant money they didn’t have.
De Silva must have seen it coming. They went onto half-rations after a second algae tank soured.
“You boil it off to vacuum, then reseed it,” her father sometimes explained. It wasn’t part of the story, just a thing he’d done in his time.
Perry tried to imagine the conversations on that ship. Months to clear the Kuiper, with Pioneer still out beyond the heliopause. De Silva should have turned back. There was plenty of ice out there, so that’s your water, and oxygen to breathe and hydrogen to fuse. But do you slow to match orbits with an iceberg, or take the risk and mine it on the way back? In the end they burned the torch all the way to Pioneer.
“Bad decision.” She could see her father trying to mime a bad decision.
The Estrada de Silva was configured with unused cargo spaces along the spine. The idea was to secure Pioneer in one of them, but pictures of the probe showed instruments mounted on awkward booms that needed to be dismounted and stowed separately. There must have been a debate about dumping the plutonium in the probe’s RTG. But wouldn’t that have made it less authentic, worth less?
Karl Ford was cutting the magnetometer arm when he holed his suit. Her father was convinced the three of them would never have made it back anyway.
Perry thought de Silva should have taken charge earlier. Now he grabbed the famous gold plaque with its greeting to aliens and roadmap to Earth, before burning for home, leaving Pioneer 10 on its lonely journey to the stars.
As the Estrada headed back, things got worse. Another algae tank went sour, the air grew thick, and the mistake with the supplies hung over them. They put out a distress call, but distances out there are vast, and no one was close or in the right orbit.
Ice still needed mining, taking time the two of them no longer had. This was when Francis Lee went out an airlock and never came back.
That sacrifice made an impression on Perry. Spacers looking out for one another was something she would always believe in. Much later, she found there were those who thought Lee had no choice about the airlock. Many wouldn’t crew on the Estrada after that.
De Silva nursed an ailing life support all the way back to the orbit of Saturn, where he was finally rescued by an Earther long-haul rotating staff from the Titan science station.
“What happened to the plaque?” her mother had asked, lifting her eyes from her studies.
Lawyers from Heritage NASA argued that Pioneer 10 wasn’t a derelict but continuing its mission. If anything, it was piracy. Out of his depth, de Silva sold his claim to the plaque for a pittance. The new owners argued they were salvaging history that would otherwise be lost. The plaque, charged with ill-fortune, still lies like a curse in the darkness of a vault somewhere on Vesta.
Then, as was common with the Blight, her father had taken a sudden downturn, trouble with his eyesight, more trouble with his memory, motor control worsening.
“Remind me about Pioneer 10,” he would say and, because he grew agitated with Lee and Ford cutting corners, Perry remembered making a list of all the supplies needed to ship out in the Dark. They would go through it together like a prayer.
“Where’s that woman gone?” he sometimes asked, inclining his head to make sense of shadows. By then her mother had started work at Ceres Green, supporting the three of them.
“She doesn’t care, you know,” he would confide, suddenly cranky.
The next time it docked, Perry talked her way onto the Franklin.
Yes, Captain Chen remembered her.
Her father had promised to speak for her, but that wasn’t possible now, so she spoke for herself. In the end they shook hands on it, and Captain Chen said she would do well to become half the Spacer her father had been.
Her father, growing more confused, had started to worry that they were heading for Pioneer 10.
“Being out here’s a mistake.” His voice had become tremulous with the misgivings of an old man. “It all goes wrong, and we never find home.”
What could Perry answer, helpless in the face of the Blight? She was just a teenager. Her father had gone into the Dark and never come back.
“Give the word,” she remembered saying. “We can turn round, before we run short. Before anyone gets hurt.”
But it was no use. He had patted her shoulder. That wasn’t how the story ended. Her father knew that.
Copyright © 2022 by David Barber
