Avant-Pop Literary Magazine

A Portrait of the Artist as a Middle-Aged Voyager

Written by sorryhyungwon

Winner of the "Welcome to the World" Contest.
Prompt: A small group of people have landed on a brand new planet far away from earth. They want to colonise the planet but face certain challenges.

Sergeant Major Collins had been the one to make the decision, and it hadn't been an easy one. With their low fuel tanks, their only shot at returning to Earth - not that that had been the plan in the first place - was to attempt slingshotting around the unknown planet. If they managed to about face in the approximate direction of Earth, they'd then have to cut their thrusters and drift through space aimlessly to save fuel, trusting their original path and trajectory to carry them back to the Milky Way, and then only reactivate the thrusters once within an astronomical stone's throw of their home planet. That was all on the assumption that they'd managed to secure the correct exit angle from the slingshot maneuver; an error of 0.5 degrees would catapult them to a separate galaxy entirely. And that they hadn't been pulled into the planet's gravitational pull and smashed on its surface.

Kindly put, it was a suicide attempt if Collins had ever heard one. He'd opted for a different course of action, one that most didn't agree with; although they all spoke different tongues, their general resentment carried well enough through harsh tones and narrowed eyes. Instead of attempting to make it back to Earth and face the consequences of a failed attempt to colonize outside their galaxy, they would simply land on the closest planetary structure, conserving whatever fuel they could, and pray that it was sustainable for life. It was nearly as improbable as the first option, but nearly was the key word, and it was that margin that Collins had weighed his decision upon.

They had a chance for survival here. Not much of a chance, and maybe not long of a survival, but there were innumerably more risks with any other choice.

And so they'd set down on Planet Zarathustra. That was what Collins, fancying himself a novice philosopher and pioneer of space, had deemed it in his own mind. He was the only American on board the Argonaut, and although there were several other English-speaking humans on board the vessel, he hadn't had much contact with them. Each person had been chosen purposely from every pocket in the world - doctors, technicians, scientists; each had earned their spot on the Argonaut. No two people had been chosen from the same nation. The selection process had been lengthy and precise; the chosen ones couldn't be so vital to Earth that their absence would influence profound negative consequences, but they had to be invaluable to the mission. Collins had been chosen to take command, likely because there weren't many others worth snatching from America despite its demand to be represented.

The sheer intellect of the personnel at times weighed on him more heavily than the induced gravity holding them down, but they'd faced the most common difficulty from day one - the barrier of communication. At most, he could only address twenty to thirty percent of those on board at once; English was his primary and only language, and even among those who spoke it as a secondary tongue, his reach was low. He considered it a rather large blessing that the head pilot spoke English, or else things would have gotten very sticky very fast.

At present, he was trying to explain their next steps. He'd managed to get everyone suited up - there were approximately 50 non-crew personnel in addition to the 10-man team running the Argonaut and Collins himself - but he was having difficulty explaining that he wanted to assemble an exploration party to take a quick look around the unfamiliar planet. After having no luck with language and hand gestures, he finally went to the side and pulled out the easel. Most of their trip so far had been one giant game of Pictionary, only in the end, he had no authentic verification that they'd guessed correctly.