“It’s a suicide mission,” I said. “It’s not like we’ll have a line of people saying, ‘Oh, me! Please! Please me! Pick me!’”

“Actually, we do have that,” Stratt said.

Lamai poked me in the arm. I looked away. I get a little queasy when I see my blood squirting into a tube. “What do you mean, we have that?”

“We’ve already had tens of thousands of volunteers. All with the complete understanding that it’s a one-way trip.”

“Wow,” I said. “How many of them are insane or suicidal?”

“Probably a lot. But there are hundreds of experienced astronauts on the list too. Astronauts are brave people, willing to risk their life for science. Many of them are willing to give their life for humanity. I admire them.”

“Hundreds,” I say. “Not thousands. We’ll be lucky if even one of those astronauts qualifies.”

“We’re already counting on a lot of luck,” said Stratt. “May as well hope for some more.”

Shortly after college, my girlfriend Linda moved in with me. The relationship only lasted eight months beyond that and was a total disaster. But that’s not relevant right now.

When she moved in, I was shocked by the sheer volume of random junk she felt necessary to bring into our small apartment. Box after box of stuff she had accumulated over decades of never throwing anything out.

Linda was absolutely Spartan compared to Rocky.

He’s brought in so much crap we don’t have places to store it all.

Almost the entire dormitory is full of duffel-bag things made of a canvas-like material. They are random muddy colors. When visual aesthetic doesn’t matter, you just get whatever colors the manufacturing process makes. I don’t even know what’s in all of them. He doesn’t explain. Every time I think we might be done, he brings more bags in.

Well, I say “he” brings them in, but it’s me. He hangs out in his ball, magnetically attached to the wall, while I do all the work. Again, this is very reminiscent of Linda.

“This is a lot of things,” I say.

“Yes yes,” he says. “I need these things.”

“A lot of things.”

“Yes yes. Understand. Things in tunnel is last things.”

“Okay,” I grumble. I float back to the tunnel and grab the last few soft boxes. I maneuver them through the cockpit and lab down to the dormitory. I find a spot to cram them. There’s very little space left. I vaguely wonder how much mass we just added to my ship.

I manage to keep the area near my bunk clear. And there’s a spot on the floor that Rocky picked out as his sleeping locale. The rest of the room is a mad tangle of soft boxes taped to each other, the wall, the other bunks, and anything else that would keep them from floating loose.

“Are we done?”