Fiction
3 min
Freefall
Maxwell Schaefer
We always knew getting home would be the hardest part. We've sent probes to interstellar space, but we'll never see them again. Voyager still pings us every once in a while.
We know we can send machines across the solar system. Why not send people? People need to come back.
So when Ludwig Heisman declared his wish to be flung far into the heavens and never return, it caused quite a stir. We looked around uneasily. We scribbled calculations in shame. Juliette and I went out to smoke.
"Could we do it?" she asked.
"To Saturn," I confirmed.
So we said to hell with it, NASA's going to help an old poet commit suicide. He was thrilled. He flew in from Frankfurt to Houston on a charter jet and walked around mission control all day, stroking his beard, jotting notes, smiling for the fans who read his work in college.
We built him a nice, airy pod for some $5 billion, and he named it Odysseus. He was fine with Spartan conditions – freeze-dried food occupied most of the space, and he grudgingly accepted an e-reader. The spacecraft would be remote controlled. All he asked for was a strong radio so he could send his writings back to Earth.
"It'll all be worth it," he told us, "if I write it down."
That's why he wanted to go. He thought science had lost its poetry. He thought poetry had lost science. He wanted to write verses from the stars to shake the Earth right off its axis.
"Have you read his work?" I asked Juliette.
She nodded and lit another cigarette. "It's bleak as hell."
I was intrigued. I bought his collected poetry and stayed up all night before the launch.
We shot Heisman off the globe on a dew-drop January morning where the skies were warm and grey. He recited Schiller the whole way to orbit.
The first results were promising. With the whole world watching, he began sending us beautiful couplets in English and German on the escape from gravity, the texture of the moon, the shrinking Earth behind his wide window. The muse was unfettered.
Somewhere past Ceres, the transmissions stopped.
We knew he was alive. Odysseus still had fine telemetry, and we could read his vitals. (His heart was racing.) The machinery had failed.
The outcry was immense. America spent billions to send a German to Saturn, and now we wouldn't get to read his poetry? The literary magazines, the German embassy, and Congress all screamed at our carelessness. We screamed at ourselves. We despaired.
But the capsule kept on for years. Times changed. The world forgot Ludwig Heisman.
I never forgot. I stayed up late poring over his poetry. I made marginal notes. I wrote reviews for no one but myself.
"I should have asked him questions," I lamented to Juliette.
"Too late now," she said.
I wrote words, I wrote numbers. I spent years running the calculations, plotting the course, biding my time, and then I presented the plan to Juliette.
"You're insane," she said.
A one-way trip to dock with Odysseus, still in orbit around Saturn, and transmit Heisman's work back. I would be the only passenger. I called it Telemachus.
"You can't kill yourself," she told me, pulling out another cigarette.
"You're killing yourself now," I said, pointing to her fingers.
My mind was not changed, and the plan went public. The enthusiasm – and vitriol – was immense. I was valorized, condemned, ridiculed. I was poetry's greatest hero. I was a scripture-addled madman.
To myself, I was just a fan. It's all worth it if I write it down.
I had no affairs to put in order. I packed only my Heisman collection. Then I told Juliette I'd always loved her and hopped in my capsule before she could answer.
It has been four years since Heisman launched. It will be four more before I arrive. He has food for ten, but we have long since lost contact with his vital monitors. He may be dead when I arrive, in which case I will collect his writings, send them to Earth, and initiate a slow freefall down towards the core of the planet.
But if he is alive.
I sit trembling in my rocket, ready to launch, and picture the moment. I imagine myself sailing up alongside his capsule, emblazoned in red with his favorite phrase. I will unlock the hatch and give him a hug. I will ask him to read me his inevitable masterpiece, the most adventurous poem known to our species. Then we will sit a long while in our crowded spacecraft, recline in silence, look out the window, and behold the rings of Saturn.
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