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Junk World 4

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     The view was stunning from just outside the atmosphere.

​     We were grateful for this, since we were sick of each other.  Two rookies stuck on a ship for over two years.  Damn near forty months of running utterly empty of new things to talk about.  Trying like hell to give each other some space.  Outside the window all the space imaginable.  Inside, the size of a hallway.

​     We knew something was wrong with the ship as soon as we entered the atmosphere of Junk World 4.  At that altitude engine trouble is enough to turn even a gorgeous view like this one into something ominous.

​     I looked across the cockpit at Frank who had the orange glow of a strange planet’s light reflected on his face.  He frowned and shook his head at a row of gauges and dials on the wall.  

     “We shouldn’t be losing power.  That’s not good,” he said.

     “How bad?” I asked.

     “Bad.  It’s the old magnetic field, I’ll bet anything.”

     “So we pull out.”

     Frank raised his eyebrows. “This close?”

     “Yeah.”

     “With the landing sequence activated?”  

     “Back up,” I said, “one more pass, run a landing test.  Then we decide.”

     “Too late,”  Frank said, and he was correct.  We were suddenly being tugged as if in a current toward the dream-like view out the window.  It was the first good strong gravity we’d felt since leaving New Earth two years before.  The point of no return had been reached.  We had to take the dive and just hope.

     I tried like hell to flatten out as jagged hills rose up to meet us.  Stalagmites stretched up from the surface like huge fingers.  I weaved us through a pair of them.  Then came the crash.  We scraped off rock, caught air again, took another violent jolt.  Then came what we wanted to avoid most: a hard skid over the ground for perhaps a mile.  Then we stopped.

     Puffs of acrid electrical smoke seeped out of the control panel behind Frank.  Fuses were blown, cables hung down in the cabin.  The ship was in one piece, but in bad shape.  I looked at Frank.  He had the background in engineering.  Mine was flying.  Frank was good, maybe the best I knew.  But still…

     Mental health side note: Frank was a top notch engineer, but he irritated the last fucking nerve out of me some times.  Two years locked up together would do that to anyone.  He and I were no exception.  His sayings and mannerisms were repeated to the point of madness.  He’d get in his Ain’t Life Grand mood and croon, “Sure thing, sure thing,” to just about everything. 

     Back home he played the drums, so while working he often tapped out drumbeats with a pair of screwdrivers.  Aggravating beyond telling, especially the type of beats he would tap out while in his Ain’t Life Grand mood.  

     Ain’t life grand, ain’t life grand.  The guy drove me nuts!  But what really killed me was the way he whistled lunatic melodies.  It sounded like he was trying to whistle all those god damn drumbeats!  I wanted to tell him, YOU CAN’T WHISTLE A DRUM BEAT.  He just went right on.  

     And then there’s the way he smacked his lips on candy.  Sometimes he would float through the ship smacking on that god damn strawberry shit he insisted on bringing.  Claimed that ever since he quit smoking his blood sugar would crash so he needed the candy.  He’d float through the ship, chewing the stuff in crunchy drumbeats as loud as thunder.  Handful after crunchy handful.  He simply couldn’t eat the stuff quietly.  And sometimes he’d leave the empty candy packages to float through the cabin.  Drove me nuts!

     But I have to admit, there was no one else in the universe I’d want around if the ship needed repair.

     So after we crashed, we went for a look out the window at the world we had traveled an entire light year to smash into.  

     My first impression of Junk World 4 was that it truly was named well.  The landscape had a packed look to it.  Stretching out to all horizons, hills and sunken valleys comprised entirely of ancient garbage—huge frozen waves the color of rust.  The planet had been used a long time ago as a disposal site.  A worldwide landfill.  Sea to shining sea.  The fact was, humans produced astonishing amounts of garbage.  

     Junk World 4 had once looked much like the old planet Mars a thousand years ago, before Mars had been oxygenized and then colonized: a barren rocky world.  This particular Junk World had been designated one of five planets with oxygen-rich atmospheres suitable for use as a landfill, as the oxidization allowed for fastest rate of decomposition.  

     Back then, fleets of ships would come daily from nearby inhabited solar systems, dip beneath the ozone of the Junk World and open their beds, sending megatons of garbage crashing down from the sky.  Of course this practice was abolished over three centuries ago. 

     Since then, Junk World 4 and the other planets selected to house mankind’s detritus had been completely abandoned.  They orbited their stars polluted and forgotten, carrying with them eternally a global ocean of ancient shit estimated to be some one-hundred feet deep.  

     Our assignment was to take samples at various depths and measure the degree of decomposition as phase one of an ongoing remediation study.  Fact was, no one knew if these planets would be useful again in the future.  Different atmospheres combined with different microbiomes allowed for different speeds of decay.

     Frank and I took a long look out the window.  The terrain had a melted glass look.  There was a peculiar drippy watercolor pattern to the landscape.  Just outside the window I marked one particularly uniform object a good ways out in the debris fields.  It was roughly as tall as a man and shaped like a pyramid.

     “So,” Frank tapped out a drum roll on the wall of the ship and piped up, “at long last the garbage folks are here!”

     Ain’t life grand?

     I leveled my eyes at him. “Look, Frank, I didn’t want this gig any more than you did.  We need to check over the ship,” I said. “We better get started.”

     “Sure thing, sure thing.”

     I set the cabin pressure to adjust to that outside the ship so we could acclimate gently before stepping out onto the junk.  While we waited for the air to stabilize, the view outside once again caught our attention.  Brown Dwarf 122—this world’s sun—was directly overhead.  It was noon at the crash site.  

     122 was perfectly safe to look at with an unprotected eye.  The tiny sun shed only the vaguest hint of orange light onto the landscape, peppering the glassy rocks with a lava highlight.  Several of the neighboring stars were close enough to lend a hand, but Junk World 4 was never going to see a sunny Saturday.  Here shadows were prominent at the height of noonday.

     After a moment Frank said, “Lovely place. Truly inspirational!”

     “If you say so,” I said.

     “Looks like the shit is crystallizing.”

     “It’s shiny,” I said.

     “Like glass.”

     “Hell with the samples,” I said, “this crap isn’t going anywhere.  Just melting into glass.”

     “We’ve got the green," Frank said, "let’s go.”

     I shut off the air compressors and popped the side hatch.  We climbed out and stepped onto the debris of Junk World 4.  

     The air was cold and thick and smelled god awful, a dark green onion combo of nauseating sweetness and melted plastic.  The massive putrid stench seemed to crawl up the nostrils.  Under foot the junk crunched into dust.

     “Freezing,” Frank said, “probably the cold is slowing decomposition.”

     “Yeah, watch your step walking on this shi—“.  I took a bad step and plunged into the junk past my knees.  It was like trying to walk on a filthy snow pack.  And like snow it was cold beneath the surface.  Warm inside my boots just a minute ago, my feet now felt like ice.  Junk World 4 orbited too deep to absorb what little heat the Brown Dwarf could generate.

     So then we stood there, hesitant, just sort of looking around.  If not for the smell I could’ve almost believed I was standing on Old Earth’s moon.  

     Above, the sky was black and blazing with stars.  Spanning the horizon all around was a pale whitish glow of thin atmosphere.  

     All in all, Frank and I had travelled two years to a discarded world that would wait another thousand years for something to happen.

     Straining my ears, however, there was a sound, far off.

     sssssssssssssss . . .

     Snakey.  Watery.  It was distant.  Or was it?  I couldn’t tell.

     “You hear that?” I asked Frank.

     “No."  He frowned in concentration.  "Wait, I do.”  We listened.

     sssssssssssssss . . .

     Just when I thought I had it pegged where it was coming from—far off in front of me—it shifted to my left.  I looked left, out over waves of debris, and saw nothing.  Then the noise shifted around again, seeming to come from behind us.

     “Sounds are tricky here,” Frank said. 

     And suddenly I didn’t like that sound.  It was shifty, at times too close for comfort and getting louder.  It coalesced to a vibration that seemed to echo off the trash from every direction.

     “Some kind of storm coming?” Frank asked, looking around uneasily.

     “What, a garbage storm?”

     “Sounds like wind.”

     “It was just behind us," I said and pointed dead ahead.  "Now it’s over there."

     “See anything?” Frank asked.

     “No.”

     We fell silent.  

     Frank and I surveyed the eerie darkness of noon on Junk World 4.  

     Then I said, “I think we should get inside.”  I had to speak up.  The humming sound kept building up.

     “Yeah,” Frank agreed.  

     I started to head that way but in my peripheral I saw something move in the junk fifteen feet away.  I came to a halt, staring.

     “Frank,” I said.

     “What?”

     “Did you see that?”

     “See what?”

     There was another streak of motion and this time we both saw it.  A glassy rock the size of a fist had moved.  It slid swiftly through the dust toward us, struck another chunk of debris with a clack like pool balls.  There was no grade there.  Then another piece of trash twitched.

     Then another.

     “What the hell…” Frank muttered.

     Then it went like popcorn.  All around us pieces of debris jumped and flipped and scooted toward us with no help, moving entirely of their own accord.  Shiny twisted chunks of ancient melted trash lurched and spun.  They formed a pattern of movement as constant as rain drops.  The glassy clacking noises accelerated to something like a rush of applause.  Several rapped loudly against the underside of the ship.

     You want to hear something crazy?

     Excited is the word I want to use to describe it.  Okay?  The debris hopped and bopped like popcorn, and I’ll be damned if it didn’t look excited that we had come.

     “Is it, like... magnets?” Frank breathed.

     Glassy brick-like pieces of trash started to accumulate around the ship.  

     “Let’s get inside before … you know…” I didn’t know how to finish the sentence.

     Back in the ship we stared out the windows as the shiny rocks jumped and jittered.

     Junk World 4 rotated about twice as fast as earth, so noon to noon was only about twelve hours long.  Now I noticed that the dwarf star had moved a surprising distance since the crash.  In another half hour it would be at the horizon.  The dark orange fire light slanted across the tops of the rubbish now, casting long shadows.  

     We sat in silence.  Several of the hills I had marked following our crash now appeared to be gone.  But that wasn’t quite right.  Rearranged was more apt.  Like ocean swells that moved too slow to see the movement.  Sludge waves.

     The protruding object I earlier thought looked like a pyramid was nowhere in sight.  Not precisely gone; it had simply moved.  The shiny debris was crunching and building around us, rising like popcorn.  It was trying to bury the ship.

     “Frank, we have to get out of here.”

     “I know," Frank said.  "Don’t you think I know??”

     “What are our chances of patching up the ship?”

     “Don’t know… don’t know.”  There was a shakiness in his voice I didn’t like.

     “Take it easy, Frank.  We'll get out of here.”

     “I’ll have to go back out there to get to the panels.  I don’t want to.”

     “We’ll both go.”

     “I need you in here to give me telemetry readings.”

     “Okay.”

     After a moment, Frank said, “Hand me the grey toolbox.”

     “Which grey one?  They’re all grey.”

     “The grey one!"  Frank snapped.  "Right there,” he pointed.

     I did as I was told.  

     Frank said, “I’ll get up there, see what I can do.  If it’s what I think it is—what I hope it is—I can fix it in twenty minutes, thirty tops.  If it’s… “ he trailed off.  He was peering out the window again.  His hand came up slowly, pointing.  He said: “Look at that.”

     In one spot the trash was no longer jittering like popcorn.  The random rainfall movements had ceased in this spot, and the junk was stacking up to form a vertical column, folding together like puzzle pieces.  Rocks flowed with aim, with purpose.  When one chunk of garbage crumbled to dust, another chunk bounced up to take its place.  The junk flowed upward to one common spot, where it swelled into a circular sphere the size of a small house.  It shifted to create a more distinct shape, an image.

     There was no question what it was.  It was Frank’s face. 

     “Do you suppose …” Frank breathed, “is that… ?”

     “It’s you.”

     The rock formation was remarkable, Frank’s likeness comprised of thousands of dark shiny stones.  

     “How can… how can… ?” he tried.

     “The junk is clever,” I said.  “Smart garbage.”

     “Smart garbage,” Frank said.  He reached for the box of candy in his shirt pocket, eyes fixed out the window.  “That’s me, smart garbage.”

     “Do you want to take a picture of it or do you want to get out of here?”

     “I know, I know.  It’s just that I’ve never seen … anything …”

     “Neither have I.  Let’s get the ship running, and then we can see what’s what.”

     Eyes still fixed out the window Frank’s jaw suddenly dropped.  I began to say, What’s wrong now?  But Frank’s hand came up and launched another handful of candy into his gaping gob.  I stifled an urge to shove him.  He crunched the candy in a crunchy drumbeat, swallowed and said, “What if they’re trying to be…friendly?”

     I bit back a sarcastic reply.  “Friendly?  Garbage?”

     “Yeah you know, they don’t have many visitors here so they honor them with a … a sculpture?”  Frank looked hysterical.

     “We’ll show our appreciation after the ship is running.”  I clapped him on the shoulder, a little harder than I meant.  I got up, and was glad when Frank followed me to the roof hatch.  Beyond the window, the  sculpture of Frank began to dissolve.

     Once Frank was on the roof of the ship and rooting through the control panels, I took a moment to turn it over in my mind.  Decaying trash can’t form intelligence.  But on Junk World 4 it had.  A world full of garbage that was aware.  Some kind of microbiome gone haywire with time.  Glassy crystals that could not only move on their own, but form an image consisting of thousands of parts.  Ancient piles of junk that somehow formed a portrait of Frank’s face.  The ability to do that begged something else: did the debris have eyes?  

     I banged on the roof of the ship. “How’s it look, Frank?”

     “Fine!” he yelled back but there was a catch in his voice.  He had to shout over the constant thunder of shifting and shuttling debris.

     I peered at him through the window. “Then get down here and let’s fire up!”

     His eyes met mine across the ship and I could see frustration.  “No, that’s the problem: its fine!  I’m not seeing anything wrong.”

     Something smacked squarely off the underside of the ship.  I couldn’t see what it had been from my vantage point, but now I was sure the layer of trash surrounding us had inched a little higher.  It was collecting around us, piling higher as if trying to…

     Outside Frank frowned into the panel and launched another handful of candy into his mouth.

     Gathering and piling higher, and it wouldn’t be long before…

     NASA had been aware of this planet for eons as void of life.  There had never been any signs of changing geographic features either.  My mind began repeating the phrase Life as we know it. Life as we know it. Life as we... 

     I watched Frank flip switches and twist wires inside panels as rocks smacked off the sides of the ship.  More shiny rocks rolled in from all directions, some bouncing eagerly, most just rolling up to add to the pile.  Thousands.  Millions.  An endless symphony of glass chunks clapping and smacking off each other.  The similarity of that sound to the sound of applause had me uneasy.

     Frank pulled back, frowning at the panels.  He upended the box of candy, sending one final round of sugar into his mouth. 

     He tossed the empty container over the side.  

​     It struck me again: the idea of decomposing matter that thought, that saw.  An alien mycelium.

     ​“Ow!” Frank yelled, followed by a loud clunk!

​     I shoved up through the hatch.  “What happened?”

​     “Son of a bitch,” Frank hissed and rubbed his ankle.

​     “Did one of them clip you?”

​     “Yeah!  I tossed a candy box over.  Think I made them angry.”

​     “That’s cra—“ I was cut off abruptly as a smooth oval of glass leaped up in a perfect arc and struck Frank squarely in the face.  He tumbled backward and over the side.

     “Ah shit,” I muttered.  I ran to the edge of the ship.  

     “Frank!”  I reached for him, but when I leaned over the side he was too far below.  

     He was covered in brown dust and was drifting on his back like a crowd surfing rock star.  The debris was slowly moving as one in thick sludgy waves.  Arms out for balance, Frank uttered an hysterical laugh.  Excited rocks rose and fell around him like droves of hyper active puppies at play.  Frank tried a feeble backstroke which only sent him over the crest of a junk wave and sliding down the far side.  

     He looked back at me, and the distance between us had grown too quickly.  Panic contorted his face.  He tried to get to his feet, lost his balance and fell back to the junk, crunching through three feet deep.  The tide rose again and was clearly inching Frank away from the ship.  

     “The wire!” he yelled, “throw me the wire!”  

     I grabbed a hefty spool of electrical cable, wrapped the loose end around my palm and heaved the spindle out to him.  It smashed into the glassy surface to Frank’s left.  Immediately the junk leapt at it, trying to bury it.  Frank was able to snag it.  I planted my feet and began to pull Frank back.

     But that was when a flying rock struck above Frank’s right eye and split open his skull.  

     I screamed.  

     Frank’s arms dropped limp.  The wave motion continued beneath him, and he was once again eased further away from the ship.  Only now Frank was not laughing like a rock star and his arms were not out for balance. 

     “Oh my God.  Oh my God!”  Feeling sick head to toe I lost my mind for a moment.  I looked over the edge again, I had to.  I couldn’t have just seen that.  The rocks were still forming new crests, moving Frank’s lifeless body out further.  

     I nearly jumped down there thinking I had to pull him out.  The urge was definitely there.  But it would’ve been suicide.  

     I sat there for a short time.  Soon the waves of garbage swept him out past the point of visibility.

​

     ​The next thing I recall I was back inside the ship, absently messing around with tangles of wire in the cabin’s electrical compartment, looking vainly for some obvious fix.  There was a manifold dangling by a single braid of wire and a thick black cable sticking out that looked like the end of jumper cables.  Frank had shown me this cable a few months into our flight.  He'd said something about a direct bus from an auxiliary battery strip that packed a tremendous electrical charge. 

     Looking at it hanging there lifeless, I couldn’t fathom that Frank was gone.  The life beaten out of him by a chunk of ancient trash.  The same trash that had gathered to form his portrait.

​     Did the flying chunk mean to do it?  Or had it been a… a clumsy puppy moment?

​     My untrained eye found no solution in the wires hanging down in the cabin.  Foolish to think I would.  The ship had taken on the mild rocking motions of the waves of Junk World 4.  

     And there was something else.  Sinking…. The ship was either sinking or being pulled into the garbage.  The surface of the debris was now just below the level of the window.  I was going to die.  I was no good with electrical routings and auxiliary bussing and I was going to die.  I tried accept that as fact.  Death was to find me on a strange planet of intelligent decay that had killed my co-pilot. 

     I was surprised to find acceptance of death wasn’t so bad.  Soon the rocks would pile themselves high enough so that they would be level with my eyes as I looked out at them.  And then?

​     Then I’d be under.  At least I’d have the ship for a coffin.  Unlike Frank.  Frank was just… drifting with the tide.

​     Through the windshield Dwarf Star 122 was now on the horizon.  I sank down in my pilot’s seat, watching the tiny sun set on Junk World 4 and listening to rocks flap and clap.

     The ship was now half buried in the debris.

     I shoved a snarl of wires hanging in front of me and that was when the thick black wire that resembled jumper cables touched my shoulder.  The ensuing jolt through my body was brief yet huge, lighting me up from head to toe—but the ship’s interior lights blinked.  A moment later the cabin lights rose to full intensity.  Out the window was something new: a glow from the ship’s exterior beams lighting up the debris mounds.

     The engines hummed with life.

     ​In disbelief I tested the rockets.  The ship groaned and shook, trying to pull loose from its half burial.  I eased up for a moment to compensate for the extra weight of glass and debris.  It was seriously in question as rocks and glassy chunks skittered down the sides of the ship.  The ship shook loose with a tremendous grating sound that made me wince... and then we were up.  

     Unbelievably, we were up.  

     I rose gradually through the inky black atmosphere, setting an initial return course with shaky fingers.  Back toward Old Earth’s neighborhood in the Milky Way.  It would require further programming later, but I was content for now just to be moving.

     I looked back, just once.  I had to.  I was leaving Frank behind.

     “Sorry, Frank.”

     ​By the ship’s clocks I’ve been on this course now for twenty earth days.  I still have a very long trip back.  To pass some time I decided to write this account of what happened on Junk World 4.  I wish Frank was here.

     I feel terrible for my irritation with the guy.

     The ship has some glitches.  Something is still wrong with the electrical system and the engine that failed on our descent into Junk World 4 is dead.  But three other engines are working fine, so I have a chance to make it on what fuel and electric power there is.

     If I get back I can tell the story myself.

     And if I don’t, if the ship fails again… well, I’ll be floating out here a long time.  Either I’ll starve first or the oxygen generators will be depleted.  If that happens I guess we’ll be spotted and picked up eventually.  At some unthinkable point far down the time line.  I wonder if the pile of bone dust that had been me will have decayed down to glass by that time?

     ​Before I fine tune the course, there is one last thing.  

     I hesitate to include it here because I’m not sure I actually saw it.  It was just after I fried my shoulder on that cable.  During the ascent from Junk World 4 I took one last look back at the mounds of debris.  Back toward where, in my best estimate, Frank had been swept away.  Far below on the endless sea of garbage, something caught my eye... the thing which I can’t say for sure I actually saw.  The debris did not form Frank’s portrait as it had earlier, but what it did form...

     I think maybe I really did see it.

     As the distance between ship and disposal world increased, the smooth pattern of eroded dunes and valleys appeared to shift.  Three words I either saw—or didn't—emerged among the shimmery dancing popcorn:

     AIN’T LIFE GRAND

     Then it was gone.