The Echo. James Smythe

      

      

       Copyright

      HarperVoyager

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2014

      Copyright © James Smythe 2014

      Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

      Cover photographs: © iStockphoto (astronaut). Shutterstock.com (background)

      James Smythe asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

      A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Source ISBN: 9780007456789

      Ebook Edition © January 2015 ISBN: 9780007456802

      Version: 2014-12-10

       Praise for The Anomaly Quartet:

      ‘Utterly gripping and highly original … explodes off the page’

       Daily Mail

      ‘The Explorer has the dreamlike detachment of an Ishiguro novel … reminiscent of a 1970s space movie, where the darkness of the void mirrors the darkness of the human soul’

       Financial Times

      ‘Beautifully written, creepy as hell. The Explorer is as clever in its unravelling as it is breathlessly claustrophobic’

      Lauren Beukes, author of The Shining Girls

      ‘A wonderful examination of coping with loss, time and death’

       SFX

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

      Copyright

      Praise

      Part One

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

      Chapter 7

       Chapter 8

       Part Two

       Chapter 9

       Chapter 10

       Chapter 11

       Chapter 12

       Part Three

       Chapter 13

       Chapter 14

       Chapter 15

       Chapter 16

       Chapter 17

       Here’s an exclusive extract from No Harm Can Come to A Good Man

       Acknowledgments

       About the Author

       Also by James Smythe

       About the Publisher

       PART ONE

      The scientist is not the person who gives the right answers; he’s the one who asks the right questions.

      – Claude Lévi-Strauss

       1

      The sense of pressure on us is immense. There is a feeling that if this fails – and if it were to fail it would be because of me and Tomas, and we are both far too acutely aware of that – but that if this fails, we might not try something like this again. I have seen the receipts for this project of ours. Tomas has signed off on them on my behalf, and we have decided that this is an endeavour that we should undertake. The weight of this endeavour falls onto our shoulders: his and mine. We are separated by only thirty minutes, and soon to be hundreds of thousands of miles. It feels like more already: because he is down there, in the comparative safety of his little bunker, dressed in his shirt and drinking his drink and smoking his cigarettes; and I am here, waiting to leave. I still find it hard to believe that I am the one going. We decided it, as with so many things in our life, on a game. The top bunk of our beds? The front seat of our mother’s car? Always on a game, because somehow that made it fair. If he won, he went to space; if I did, I was the lucky one. Maybe part of the reason that we both wanted it so much is only because the other one did.

      But here I am. I am the one up here, and I will be the one going out there into the dark. Tomas has safety: of the lab, the bunker, the hotel that sits adjoining; and of a ground underneath his feet that will not rumble and shudder and shake, and that has no danger of tearing itself apart or falling out of the sky. And he has the girlfriend, the nice house, the nice car. In reality, it’s better that I am the brother who came up here. The only goodbye that I had to say was to him. We shook hands, which we have never ever done before.

      I came up here with the crew yesterday. One of the things that Tomas and I decided, when we began this process, was that we would launch from the International Space Station. We decreed changes that would need to happen – the changes that transformed it into the New International Space Station, the same as the old but with what amounts to a loft conversion, a conservatory bolted onto the side, the prefix at the start of the name – and they all happened. Every single one. This is, for now, important. We are important. From here, I can see the planet we left. I have put marks on my window with black marker pen, just to check that we and it are moving as we should. But of course we are: how could we not be? And, on the other side, I can see the moon. I can see all of it. Now, here, I see Mare Fecunditatis and Langrenus. I know these features – a lake and a crater, essentially, named by gravitas and a Latin education rather than utility – almost by heart. I have studied them all my life.

      I