With his life-support system fully secured, Augustus opens the loading dock gate. A frigid plain of blue-white ice, crisscrossed by orange lines of radiated salt, stretches towards the horizon where it meets the dark vacuum of space. He plunges his ice axe into the ground and steps onto Europa’s surface. Since landing on the Jovian moon more than two months ago, Augustus spent most of his time confined within the cramped spaces of the Artemis. The only times he left the spacecraft was to inspect the large antenna, which had stopped working following the gamma radiation blast from extrasolar space. Atop the spacecraft, he opens the control unit to the large antenna. Using a wire stripper, he cuts through the outer plastic sheath of one of the coaxial cables, exposing the woven copper shield.

“Hey, Spaceman!” I was breathing heavy when Jimmy woke me from my daydream. He was sitting in the driver’s seat of the company’s white Ford Ranger. Beads of sweat were dripping down his round, sunburnt face. “Earth to Spaceman!” he said. It was muggy as hell that mid-August day in Northumbria Cemetery. Harry Belmont, the cemetery groundskeeper who also happened to be Jimmy’s dad, had told Jimmy and I to trim around the Chen monument on Section H. Harry said the “old biddy,” his term for the yet-to-be-deceased Mrs. Chen, was complaining again.