The Habitable Zone

A soft landing was too much to hope for in this thin atmosphere, made up of methane and sulfur and some other shit that'd make lungs boil and froth. Still, not too bad, thought Surveyor Jeffries looking through the window at the steam rolling off of the sides of his ship, as he tried to discern the shape of the landing site.

A heavy sigh and a grunt as he pulled down the checklist from its slot in the ceiling. The first two pages he had checked off before even making orbit. By now this was routine--after thirty-six planets in as many weeks he'd learned to tell the difference between living and dead planets. Here's the trick: they're all dead planets.

No secret, of course. In the sixty years since both interstellar travel and the Surveyor Mission were initiated, tens of thousands of planets had been discovered and discarded out of hand. Not one in fifty was even worth a mining mission due to the generally toxic atmospheres--all of the junk in the air wrecked suits and equipment. Moons were better as they had little or no atmosphere, and who had the time to mine a whole planet, anyway?

Resource allocation was just the excuse to keep funding the Surveyor Mission, though. It had been a couple of decades since the roaring enthusiasm for the frontier had settled into institutional obligation. Reliable ships had been figured out after the first couple of years, and once the thrill of maybe dying had been all but eliminated, all that was left was the excitement of discovery. It took a while, but the grinding emptiness of the universe finally turned the mission into just another gig.

Jeffries unbuckled from his chair and walked to the back of the ship. Gathering his satchel and locking his helmet and air supply into place, he opened the airlock and climbed down the ladder to the surface. The gravity was not unpleasant, and there was no wind. He looked around, past the landing gear of the ship and out to horizon, a pale yellow line dividing two shades of pale yellow.

If there was a beauty in the place, it was up to some other Surveyor to appreciate it. Jeffries had fourteen more planets to finish before his shift flipped to a couple of weeks of desk work and then some months off.

He reached into the bag and retrieved a canister. The manual said to take a sample of each planet's soil and air. This was ostensibly for science, but of course, most of what could be gleaned from the physical samples was known already. Jeffries had already figured that this, all of this--the samples, the planets, the Surveyors--was momentum. They were all just clocking in, and okay. There were worse jobs.

Back on the ship, he ran through the last page of the checklist. If the landing was rough, the take-off was textbook. The planet receded in the viewscreen, no point in looking back at it. Jeffries switched the screen to show an image of his wife and daughter. Fourteen more, he thought, God, I could use a day off.

On Work

The rumor at the sorting plant was that ten years ago someone had come across an actual head mingled in with the milk cartons, boxes and aluminum cans on the conveyor belt. This was five years before Leonard’s time, but even still he couldn’t believe that the state of recycling had ever been that bad, or had come so far. First of all, nothing ever happened at the plant. The trash came down one end of the belt, and the workers pushed some of it one way, and some of it another, and that was that. 

Three shifts, seven days a week, the constant maneuvering of usable garbage.

Nothing happened to the people who worked there, either, for that matter. Leonard was, he’d tell anyone, not the most observant person, but there has to be something to observe, for starters. Miranda Bollin, who worked third shift, wore modest costumes for various holidays, but that was the most Leonard had ever seen.

The day that the earthquake destroyed and essentially swallowed the sorting plant was also the first day in two years that Leonard had taken a sick day. His own apartment just a couple of miles away was demolished as well, and as he walked to the sorting plant, his legs still a little wobbly from fear of aftershocks, he thought about Miranda and her St. Patrick’s Day costume—a button with a shamrock, a flashing LED-necklace and green goggles. He hoped to see her at the conveyor belt, even as he stepped around the plastic bottles, tumbling down the cracked and shifted street.