The Color of Emptiness

 

The Color of Emptiness

By Thomas Kraemer

                                                                 © 2020 by the author

 The stranger from deep space was coming in fast, and Phyllis had to find it. On her screen, she searched the black space between stars, clamping her moist hand onto the mouse. She dared not miss the stranger’s first trace as it approached the space probe’s camera. As the expected time of appearance approached, a charged feeling filled the room of thirty NASA project scientists and engineers hunched over their workstations. Their chatter dropped off. Twenty, thirty, sixty silent seconds passed. Then, the first tiny bluish flicker.

“First appearance,” Phyllis said, struggling to steady her voice, “at oh nine-thirty and four seconds.” The object’s trace flared on the room’s wall screen. The room remained silent. This was different from a successful mission landing or launch. It brought shivers instead of hurrahs.

#

Assignment to this mission as a new post-doc was incredible fortune for Phyllis. After eight years of work, with nothing certain other than student loan debt, she was here at the cutting edge, which could either make her reputation or slice her up. Phyllis started work at NASA Ames in Silicon Valley two days after approval of the crash mission to send a probe out to the stranger. She proved her mettle helping with the mad dash to design and assemble a probe that would photograph the stranger up close.

Photographing was all they could accomplish. It was moving too fast to dock with, nearly half a million miles per hour, down into the Sun’s orbital plane, between Earth and Mars. One of NASA’s best rockets was ready, planned for a lesser mission. It launched toward the stranger four weeks ago. Even the best rocket could go less than a tenth the stranger’s speed, so the probe flew at it nearly head-on.

This deep space visitor was different from the few others ever seen, all rocks and comets. Blurry telescope images showed it squarish, perhaps a sail to catch its home star’s light and accelerate it into deep space. And its stupendous speed meant something propelled it from where it started, many stars away. But the stranger was silent – no radio or light signals. It shined in reflected light, now from our sun.

NASA’s probe had automated guidance to keep the object dead center in its cross-hair. But the team stayed riveted, on guard to go manual if their hurtling probe veered in this one-chance encounter. Phyllis checked in frequently every night from home. She counted the hours until she might see any structure or markings.

#

“I’m on my way, Thad,” Phyllis said to her car phone. “Sorry I’m late.”

“It’s alright. Hey, let’s go back to that place by the lake. We can settle into a nice quiet booth and have a slow dinner. We can both use a little getaway.”

“Love it.” She almost said love you, but didn’t. “Be there in twenty.” They’d reached the point of knowing each other well enough that the tone and cadence often said more than the words, and there was something tense in him.

They’d shared escape in many little adventures that summer. But now he looked into the distance when he talked, more and more, about his work. When she talked about hers, he looked sideways at her, amused, like at something passing. Their embraces lately felt like collisions.

At the lakeshore restaurant, she did love that face coming toward her. Eyes looking for her, jaw as always firm and sure, but breaking wide in a smile when he saw her. That’s what had started it for her.

They looked at the moon and the stars while they ate, and sipped a drink. Then he turned to her and said, eyes wide, reaching for her hand, “I have a job offer, the one I wanted. It means moving to New York. Come with me. Marry me.”

She widened her eyes to match his. The space between them grew as his hand tightened.  “I need…to think,” she said.

#

In the morning, the wait continued at NASA. She heard the story on the radio on the way in. She saw it on video through the coffee shop window as she walked by. Faces were questioning. What message would the stranger bring from beyond?

At her station, she asked the engineer next to her, “What would you say’s the color of all that space between those hard white stars?”

“Black as night,” he said.

“Yep, it’s black on the screen. But out there,” pointing up, “it’s not any color at all. It’s really just nothing. There’s a lot more emptiness than anything else. Astronauts, way out on moon trips, with it all around them, struggle to describe it. It’s no color, just an infinity of blankness.”

He said, “And this thing has been hurtling through all that emptiness for friggin’ millennia, or more. God, I hope it tells us something before it goes.”

“It’ll have to be fast. It’ll be a brief encounter,” Phyllis said.

#

She asked Thad to meet her at the park, the next evening. They sat on a bench as the warm sunlight faded. She said, “I thought about it. It means a lot to me that you’d want me with you. But I’m not a follower. I’ve got my own path, d’you think about that?”

“Sure Phyll, but – “

“Did you think maybe about following me, instead?”

His dumbfounded stare said everything, and ended it for her. She said, “We’ve got conflicting momenta Thad. We’d be bound to damage each other.” And she got up, gently touched his cheek, shook her head and left.

Next day, Phyllis stayed intent as the bluish blur grew into a distinct shape. Then she saw the sail, a half-mile wide silver-blue square, hauling a tiny package behind it. She took over from the computer to center on just the package, commanding the camera to swivel, struggling to compensate for the signal delay.

She soon saw that the package was a cylinder. Then she saw markings, sinuous and linear, sculpted into the hull. A message from another world. In awe, she whispered “now we know.” There followed a scant twenty minutes of furious activity in the control room.

Then it just slipped past, out of reach. Gone.

And the emptiness out there came back.

It’s coming said we are not alone. But it was from so far and so long ago, that it felt even lonelier than before. The room stayed hushed for minutes, until the shutting down and shuffling away began.

Phyllis knew there was greater loneliness than her own.

But there were lots of stars in the sky.