Letters II :: THE DOOR IS OPEN

Some said it was the Captain's secret liquor cabinet. Some said Private Peters kept murdered bodies in that room (to be fair, after being cooped up inside Mars Station Raleigh for four months, listening to the unceasing sandstorm batter the hull, your imagination would get a bit darker too).

But the mystery remained, of the locked door in the back of Transformer Room B. The men, aggressively idle, had asked Engineer McCarthy about it, and he replied in stolid Scottish that 'he didn't know'. They had dug through the Station's blueprints, but none existed of Transformer Room B whatsoever. Had they burned them for heat when the power failed last week?

One man hadn't heard of the Locked Door: Lt. S.F. Carpenter. He was working on a Project, a Project which gave him such a perfect way to waste his time -- it was as mindless as it was important -- that he had retreated into his shell and his routine, his thoughts going stale as they echoed around him.

And then the Door came for him. Private Peters, trudging wistfully down Hall D for the thousandth time, heard an odd muffled pounding coming though Lt. Carpenter's wall. Peters (not wasting the opportunity to do so) immediately kicked down Carpenter's door, and found the Lieutenant in tears, ripping his Project to shreds as excruciatingly slow as possible. They dragged him off to Medical, where his friends showed up with a bottle of rubbing alcohol (I mean vodka) and a deck of cards and poker chips.

But at 0300 that morning, when he was alone with only the emergency lighting shining like little white stars, he woke up, and snuck out of Medical to Transformer Room B.

The Locked Door was found open, and behind it an empty janitor's closet. But Lt. Carpenter had stepped out of existence, and that's when the men really started to freak out. In the Mess Hall, above the crowdnoise and the smell of what was basically dog food (and had been every day), Peters confessed to the Private who tenanted the bunk above his, Nekrasov, "I think I know why Carpenter disappeared. It wasn't being stuck inside that made him do it. It ain't the hunger nor the fear of breathing all the oxygen: it's the drudgery of this place. Carpenter tried to cope by acting like a senseless machine--" but here he was interrupted.

The whistle sounded: surprise inspection in ten minutes, and Peters and Nekrasov jostled back to Hall C to wriggle into dress uniform, shave, clean the graphite from under your nails, and generally look like the blissfully ignorant soldiers on the recruitment posters back home. Home -- why had men come to colonize the Final Frontier if they were going to live like zombies? Peters discreetly rolled his eyes at Nekrasov (four months!) and they stood to attention. And stood. Sgt. Clancy didn't enter. Rumor spread like anthrax -- the Sergeant had last been seen walking into Transformer Room B.

In the following days (the following cycles of artificial light-and-dark, at least), the men demanded that the closet in the Transformer Room be utterly destroyed, the ruins filled with garlic, and an armed guard posted in front of it. To the mens' chagrin, that guard consisted of Peters, Nekrasov, and their peers.

The guard were surprised to find themselves sitting cross-legged, staring questioningly at the door-frame -- the door had been removed and the closet blown up, but the frame happened to be part of the metal skeleton of the Station, and necessary to maintain structural integrity.

Into the uneasy stillness, suddenly Nekrasov spoke: "I don't think that door is Death. I think it's something more meaningless, like getting drunk or having an affair. People do those things, because man is not meant for drudgery. Work, yes. Pain, yes. But what we can't stand is to be a cog in a purposelessly-spinning machine. Everyone on this Station, I think, has a dash of wisdom and a measure of courage. But the virtue of having fun well, that is the pursuit of adventure: that none of us have. And sooner or later the pressure becomes massive and you start to look for an escape, and on a Station with neither alcohol nor women, you walk through that Door, wherever it leads, just to feel like a living person."

It is in the pursuit of adventure, dear Selene, that I have begun writing.

-Private Leontes, Mars Station Raleigh, 1/8/2079