It really couldn’t get any worse.
It was a case of one damned thing after another. He sat on the floor of the cave, watching his torch grow dimmer by the minute. He’d been fossicking around in the cave for less than an hour when the cave-in happened. The sound of the rocks crashing down at the entrance and the resulting thunder that roared back through the tunnel had left his ears ringing. He knew that the fading torch meant that his only source of light would soon be gone. Before any of this, the handle came off his little trowel and the strap on his multi-pocketed sample bag had snapped.
He wistfully thought about what might have been. What, he now felt, should have been. He’d been offered a job in his uncle’s company. Nothing more than dull paperwork, nine to five, but steady work. Then, he’d seen the poster, pasted up outside the local Space Research recruitment centre. ‘Work among the stars’ it said. The money was pretty good and the work was in no way arduous. He’d get to fly his own spaceship and take exciting trips in his personal shuttle craft. He’d be happily gathering soil samples from some of the less-visited planets around the outer edge of the galaxy. That wasn’t too bad, was it? At least he was very much his own boss most of the time.
But now, here he was, on this Godforsaken planet, trapped in a cave, in a stuffy space suit, watching his torch flicker. It finally went out!
He sat for a long time, reflecting miserably on his misfortune. As these minutes passed, he became aware of the fact that it wasn’t really dark at all, well, not completely. A faint glimmer was coming from back at the entrance. He carefully crept through the tunnel and discovered a wall of shattered rocks with a fist-sized hole, deep within the pile. It let enough light through for him to survey the area. There was only one option. He needed to start pulling it all apart.
It was obvious that to safely remove sufficient debris to allow him to crawl through was going to take a long time. But, he had heaps of that, he thought. So, he set to, carefully taking out one piece at a time and stacking them back along the wall of the passageway. Hours later, and he had no idea how many, the light failed. It was obviously night outside. Now it really was pitch black. He searched around for a piece of ground that felt as though it was fairly flat, put his head down, and went to sleep.
Naturally, the light woke him. He began the gruelling task again, although he was feeling tired and hungry. This fact seemed to slow him down a lot throughout the second day. But he had no choice about what he was doing, and when the light coming through began to diminish he could see that there was a good chance that one more daytime of work was all that was needed to give him freedom. He worked on until he could no longer see. He settled down to sleep again. He lay thinking about removing the last of the boulders and crawling outside. As he drifted off to sleep, he began to dream about climbing into his comfy chair in the shuttle and setting the controls on the console, with its tiny red light, using the navigation screen to take him back up to a ship that had food, and all the usual creature comforts.
Again, he woke to see the amount of work to be done and began with renewed enthusiasm. He’d only been shifting material for a short time when his dream came back to him. Walking back and forth with his loads he remembered it in more detail; sitting back into the soft, ergonomic seat with the red light showing… wait… showing?
He gently put down the rock he was carrying and stood thinking for a while. Why would he dream about the glowing indicator? After a few minutes he realised that it was because it was real. The light was on! At least, it had been. It was coming back to him now. As he left his seat in front of the console he had seen it. Yes, there was no doubt about it. He had seen the main power indicator glowing with a little red dot, telling him that he hadn’t powered the shuttle down when he left, and that was… he counted… three days ago! His head started to spin. He was giggling to himself when he found his sleeping area. There was no need to rush anymore. He would have a nice lay down.
After all, the only thing waiting for him outside was a one-man scout craft with a flat battery…