17:10.01 Earth, September 22nd, 2012

John took Beth’s hand and walked up the sidewalk to the house they now shared. Behind them the bus honked two toots good-bye, as the Graham Mining Company transport, a dingy light blue, rambled on down the road. The cornfields surrounded them, reaching toward the sky as the sun set beyond them, a haze drifting over their land.

The mines were where they worked now. John down in the dirt, covered in dust and clay, always coughing. Beth was up top, administrative, always ready with a doe-eyed smile and a hearty slap on the shoulder. She knew what it was like down under, she was married to one of the men. She was used to the blood leaking out of John’s ears, the vomit left in the toilet, a thin ring of black. She worried about John. She worried all the time. Sometimes on her lunch break, she’d hide in the bathroom, crying in the stall, holding her stomach and praying for a child. It might be all that she would have of him.

The giant crater in central Illinois had been in existence for years now. Digging into the earth, deeper and deeper, there really was no other choice. So many fossil fuels had run low, or were gone. The switch to solar and wind was slow and painful. The government dug deep, into the planet, with varying levels of success. Most of the population now worked under ground, where the labor was needed the most. The trucks that drove out of the hole in the ground, they were massive in size – four stories high. John had never seen machines like these before, never knew they existed. Beth would often stare up at them, shielding her eyes, her mouth hanging open.

They paused on the porch to breathe in the cool air. Fall was almost here. Their night was planned – new Beam tonight, it was all the talk at work. They were aiming for Mars this time. With each successful new Beam installed NASA moved farther and farther from Earth.

As much as John loved watching the live Beams, he knew all about Beth’s past. She’d dated a Beamer, not long before John. Abe was nothing special, in John’s eyes. Except his atoms had been arranged several times. For some, for Beth, that had been exciting. These were the modern day astronauts. They had stories to tell, things they had seen. Most were lies. They took the shot, they took the risk, and they were paid a lot of money. Some made it, but many did not.

The first time that John met Abe, Beth’s ex and intergalactic hobo, there was nothing to indicate Abe’s status. Well, there was the small crowd around him in the bar, the black t-shirt with the iridescent letters crawling across his shoulders: I-Beam. The women always commented on the physical traits, the bare patch on the back of his head, where the hair wouldn’t grow anymore. The fingernail that grew out of his forearm, they couldn’t stop touching it, their eyes glazing over. What else was strange and deformed, what else did he now know? What they didn’t see, when Abe was in the bathroom, were his eyes filling with yellow, the stream of blood that mingled with his urine, the twitch in his left eye while he washed his hands.

The first time Abe had come back from his Beam, the first time he and Beth had made love, strange thinhad happened. Something wasn’t quite right, thought Beth, and it felt as if she was being prodded inside by some kind of wriggling caterpillar. They never spoke of it, Abe and Beth, and she ended the relationship shortly after. The bald spots, the random fingernail, Beth could put up with that. But she wouldn’t put anything unsettling inside her, and she kept her distance from Abe. His touch made her jump and though it had been over a year now, she couldn’t bear to be that close to him, a hug akin to fingernails on a chalkboard.

They stood in front of the house and held hands, sighing for a moment, content to stare at the road, the corn, the distant windmills on top of the ridge, spinning blades ripping across the horizon. For a moment they pretended that it was like this everywhere. The would tell themselves that the rest of the United States was still basically the same, that the cities weren’t under domes, that the bulk of the country wasn’t a wasteland, burnt and dead. Nobody knew how many cities were still around, the communication was spotty at best. For a moment they could pretend.

Abe was going tonight, he was one of those beaming. They wanted to see him go, and they wanted to see him come back. For John, it was difficult, never wishing for the man to splinter into bits, preferring to see him come back whole, shaking and stuttering, but alive. It wasn’t healthy, but he didn’t care. John wasn’t always very nice. That’s what Beth liked about him.

“You thinking about Abe?” John asked.

“Yeah. I am. That bother you?”

“No, I was thinking about him too.”

“He’s got a fifty-fifty shot, right?” she asked.

“For a new Beam? Unproven? I think that’s right. But what a payout. Those last three jaunts, those were proven, maintenance really. This one, it’s risky.”

“I know,” she said.

John took a coin out of his jeans, and held it in his palm. They stared at it, the Kennedy half-dollar. It was something they did.

“How many?” Beth asked.

“Five guys I think. All Beamers, no newbies.”

“Okay, I’m ready” she said, wiping her forehead with back of her hand.

John looked at her, licking his lips, inhaling. “It doesn’t mean anything,” he said.

“Is that what you think?” she said.

He stared at her, her brown eyes now tinged with gold flecks. They didn’t talk about it. They pretended it didn’t really happen.

“Do you know their names, Beth?”

“Yep. Abe of course, Malcolm, Stephen, BeamDog, what a dick, and Shane.”

“Have you decided?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“You sure? It was only that one time, and he was drunk.”

“You wanna pick?” she asked.

“No, I want no part of it. Well, beyond this part of it.”

She dusted of her thighs, shook her head back and forth, cracking sounds popping out of her spine. A light sheen settled on her face.

“Heads they live, tails they die,” she said.

“Yep.”

John flipped the coin into the sky and caught it in his open palm. Five times they did this and four times Beth called out heads. One time she called out tails. They would see Abe later that night. The Beam was fast going there but even faster coming back. They’d see him down at the Tumble Weed Lounge, or the Tumble Inn as they called it. Abe would laugh, he’d drink free beer all night, the women touching him constantly. And at one point in the evening he’d look at them, at Beth specifically, and mouth the words THANK YOU. John and Beth would smile, sip at their beers, and maybe sneak a kiss. The bar would fill with cigarette smoke, and nobody would talk about the BeamDog. Nobody, especially Abe, would talk about the brick red splatter on the sides of the receiving room, the bits of hair stuck to the walls, the fifth signal gone to static and white noise on television sets across the nation. Some people even gambled on it. BeamDog was a dick, a drunken fool who had groped the wrong girl in the name of space travel and heroics, sliding his hand up between her legs, whispering horrible things in her ear. Beth had learned a lesson that night about hanging out in the back of a bar on a night the Beamers came home. And BeamDog learned how to die. His widow would be compensated, handsomely, and she would laugh into her white wine, knowing what had happened, and glad that the BeamDog was gone.