Book One
September 30, 2025
What does a man think about while he’s making history? A man thinks about his viscera. In the midst of the final countdown, on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral, while Mission Control is counting back from the double to the single digits, he thinks about his bile, his adrenal glands, his hemoglobin, his pancreas, his bowels. Ignoble, I agree. You’d think that a guy like me, Colonel Jed Richards, would be thinking about the judgments of future generations or about the next phase of space exploration, the one in which we travel out beyond the solar system. Or perhaps I’d be thinking about the great religious questions, about who exactly stage-managed the Big Bang, from her loom casting off the whorl of dust and gas and stars, in turn spawning the tiny wisp of our universe, of which but one puny rock is Earth. But no. I was not thinking about interstellar space. As you probably know, the commonest inquiry of schoolchildren as regards space travel has to do with the disposal of human wastes. And since this is the inaugural day of my Martian blog, I am prepared to deal with the question of human wastes, with irritable bowel syndrome and related difficulties. Yes, IBS is just one of the idiosyncrasies I had to sweep under the rug during my long climb through the ranks of astronauts and technicians who peopled the Mars Mission Recruitment Initiative.
Mission Control reached “fifteen,” and “fourteen” quickly followed, and while I was thinking about using the suction device in the restroom that I would attach to my lower self, and how there would be no chance to do so for at least an hour, I was also whiling away some milliseconds considering the possibility of my own incineration. In case of launch mishap, temperatures would reach 3,000 degrees, owing to the nature of the solid fuel in the first stage. We would be cinders. As did the other members of my space confraternity, whom I’ll soon get around to introducing, I understood that the two parts of the voyage most likely to bring about our incineration were liftoff and landing. Of these, the more dangerous was the landing. On, for example, the surface of the Red Planet.
We’d already written letters to our loved ones, explaining that we knew of the numberless threats on this epic flight. Time slowed around “thirteen” and “twelve” as I reconsidered the text of my own video letter, hesitating over the irony thereof, upon which I will elaborate soon.
Massive public and private fiscal outlay (consider the fuel costs, e.g.) had been spent by our rickety and fiscally strapped government in order to make a desperation wager on the Red Planet, the specifics dating back to a halfhearted boast by a less-than-mediocre president nearly a quarter century ago. Could we do it? Could we bring pride and dignity to a multiethnic post-industrial third-rate economy? Could we redeem a nation before it defaulted on certain kinds of government payments? With this launch did we not ask: Can we do anything right?
The knots in my lower intestines dated to my tour of duty in the Central Asian conflict of 2011. It’s possible that I caught some kind of genetically enhanced bug in that ill-begotten war, because, as you know, the bugs in that “police action” were often encased in warheads. They had exotic equatorial origins. Whatever the cause, in moments of great social stress, which have included but are not limited to my recent talk show appearances, an address to a joint subcommittee on funding space programs, and illegal espionage missions in desert landscapes, I have worn absorbent undergarments.
Occasionally, I vomit uncontrollably. Mercifully, my experience of IBS, which is widespread among military veterans, has not extended to zero-gravity simulations or piloting. I have been free from symptoms during crisis. Most of the time, anyway. Oddly, one pragmatic approach to dealing with my IBS involves proximity to household pets. Rabbits are good, as are guinea pigs. My cat, Havoc, sat in my lap just two nights ago, when I was last at the house. I was again committing to memory the manual that NASA had given us, the manual that was meant to cover each and every eventuality — in which the hull flakes off during our trip through the atmosphere, in which the oxygen fails due to an asteroid strike on the craft, in which fruits and vegetables fail to grow in the greenhouse on the Red Planet due to excessive ultraviolet radiation and insufficient atmospheric pressure and we slowly starve to death. Havoc sat in my lap, and he purred as I reread what NASA, that beleaguered agency, would suggest if, for example, one of the men in the Mars flotilla suddenly went insane. My bowels throbbed not even once.
Kids, did you know that for the Mars mission, we have brought along a special colony of bacteria that likes to eat human waste products? It’s true! Well, not all waste products. The kind of waste produced by human kidneys will be jettisoned from the capsule under pressure, into the vacuum of space. The other kind, the solid kind, will be eaten by this colony of bacteria, which will then excrete, amazingly, something close to phosphorus, which will in turn be amassed for use as fertilizer in the simple terraforming experiments we will undertake in our domed greenhouse on the planet Mars!
As I intimated earlier, one of the other personal conundrums of my life, the life of Colonel Jed Richards, that did not get disclosed to NASA before the launch had to do with marital status. At times like this, it is natural to speak of Colonel Jed Richards in the third person. And he admits, yes, that somewhere in the training period for the Mars mission, Colonel Jed Richards noted that his wife no longer seemed to be living at his address, and had, in fact, taken herself and their teenage daughter to a secure location nearby, namely the address of her brother, a Miami-based restaurateur. The stress of training in the Mars mission program, which was 24-7, did take its toll on families, and Colonel Jed Richards was not the first to plead with his wife to commit to a few cocktail parties and golf outings for the sake of appearances. When training for space, things happened, but in the rarefied realm of the interstellar, most of these things seemed irrelevant: Pan-Arabists of the Middle East fielding winning candidates in rigged elections across the region, Inuits beginning to firebomb the residences of ethnically European Greenlanders, Cambodian militias commencing reprisals in Vietnam, Australians invading East Timor, Americans adventuring in Turkmenistan (for the sake of a gas pipeline). Colonel Jed Richards did not pay attention to these international developments, nor to government defaults, nor double-digit unemployment. That was earthly crap.
It did get his attention, however, when the wife of Colonel Jed Richards, also known as Pogey Stark-Richards, absconded from their joint address. Maybe it was his training with fighter planes over the desert, maybe it was bombing raids over Indonesia and Syria, maybe it was coaching girls’ middle school soccer and taking them all the way to the statewide play-offs. Maybe it was his love of life and his desire to do good, maybe it was his belief in a state-sponsored divine entity, in whatever it was that caused the Big Bang, which in turn first caused the Milky Way and then this speck on which we live, but Colonel Jed Richards just didn’t see his mission as being limited to his wife. He loved his wife, he loved his country, he loved his planet, he loved his cat, Havoc, but most of all he loved the expanse of stars in the night sky, and it was there that he would do for history what he could do, no matter the cost.
I was so preoccupied with my thoughts and with the contractions in my lower intestine that I almost missed it when Mission Control called “ten.” Before I had time to register that we were finally in the single digits, we were on or about seven, a prime number and “the key to almost all things,” according to Cicero, whom I read at the academy.