The Flip of a Coin
Please, God, let him telephone me now.
I just want to get this over with.
She waited, half eager, half dreading, for her husband's call. After an hour of these thoughts, the
call came, on time, as it always was. The growth of her anxiety was misplaced, yet it remained.
She steeled herself; she knew little she said would be true.
They spoke for eight minutes, eleven seconds of the hour-long call. Most about the mission, how
far they had now traveled, how close to plan they were, new data about their hopeful world.
Some about the children, the four of them with him. To lose them, even as they traveled to a new
hope, was the most painful part.
The delay was now nearly ten minutes. They talked each at great length at a time rather than
waste transmitting time on pleasantries, making their conversation cold and scientific. Even so
there was still a warmth to it she couldn’t describe. She would never see Robert again, not in the
flesh, yet some semblance of their connection remained. To speak with him, even as their
conversations became more akin to spoken letters, was to lose her troubles in the moment.
Twice, she nearly told him the truth.
They ended the call. They had given each other the same briefing as they always had. The world
seemed again as hopeful and as hopeless as it ever did as they inched toward their destination, a
coin flip for the future of humanity. And Earth seemed nearly hopeless, as it always did. This is
what she told him.
It was the first time she had ever lied to him.
In every part of their lives, in every moment, she had always been completely, fully, totally
honest with him, and he with her. Even when she has found herself in the arms of another and
hated herself for it, she told him. Her darkest, most painful secrets were always free to him.
But not this.
As she put the phone back on the desk holster, she turned to stare at the plot of dirt behind her.
She should feel hopeful, triumphant, elated. But all she felt was dread.
A tiny stem, bearing a pair of opposing leaves, stuck two inches out of the dirt plot behind her
desk. Ever-present commotion swarmed around it as it had for days. Every scientist in the
program, in the building, across the entire complex, wanted to poke and prod and test and find
the same results all for themselves. They would check against one another later. They would all
find the same data, more or less.
She had not recalculated the survival odds of the Earth yet. She would not. She could not bring
herself to. She knew, beyond the inkling of a doubt, that they were now far ahead of those of the
new world to which her husband and her children were headed. For not the first time that day,
she felt tears welling in her eyes. This time, she let them fall.
She worked through the day in a haze, like all the days before it since the sprout had first
appeared. She returned to her dormitory and slept fitfully, dreaming that the sprout burst into
flame or became infected or otherwise wilted and died. She woke each day with an anxious hope,
wishing her dream had become reality and removed from her the necessity of choice and
consequence. She was always disappointed and came early and bleary-eyed to her station to be
greeted by the sprout; a little bit taller each time. This day, though, the deadline she had set for
herself, the one extended time and time again, had run out. She had told her coworkers this in an
effort to force accountability in herself. They watched her today, a silent sorrow on each of their
faces. Not for themselves, but for her. The day had come.
For years they had sent materials through the Gate, long ago constructed over the new world and
providing limited data. It hadn't been built for that; it was first sent in a time of great plenty.
Non-living substances could pass through where living could not, and this is what they had been
doing. Seeding the world with resources, minerals, the precious few machines left to help,
whatever they could guesswork through the planet's atmosphere without destruction, trying to
raise the odds of survival as high as they would go. They wouldn’t truly know how successful
they had been until the colony ship was much closer. It was, however, much better than doing
nothing, putting all they had into giving the incoming colonists the best opportunity they could.
Now, though, those materials, those minerals, those machines were indescribably more valuable
on this world than that one. They could do so very much here. And so, having hoped every
moment since the sprout had greeted them that her husband's next call would give improved
odds, today she finally gave the order to stop supply drops, to close their side of the gate, to
divert all to their biologists, botanists, chemists and engineers. It was an irreversible decision;
they did not have the resources to reopen the gate once it had closed.
It was a simple touch of three buttons. She wept for hours after, laying fetally beside the console.
She prayed, pleaded, and hoped her family would reach their destination, would find it a
paradise, and never know her abandonment. She resolved to think past the other possibility. She
cried herself to sleep that night, finally free of the dream of dead and dying plants. When she
returned to work the next morning, she found those around the dirt plot standing solemnly, no
longer bustling. There were still those performing tests and sharing data, but most stood silent.
She circled the group to get a better view.
The sprout was brown and wilted. Dead overnight. Her hand flew to her mouth as tears welled in
her eyes. A man and woman closest to her noticed her and turned to give her pitying glances.
One reached for her and said something comforting. The words passed over her like a breeze
unfelt through thick clothing. Fleeing the room for the next, she ran to the gate, hoping beyond
hope there was a way to reverse all she'd done.
There was not.
Holding back tears as best she could, she willed herself to bring the ship's trajectory up on the
nearest screen, her fingers missing and flying over keys as her mind outpaced them. Through
wet, blurry eyes she counted the thousands of kilometers it traveled toward a world equal parts
their hope and doom, now beyond any help or hope they could give, all because of her.
Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five.