“So are you going to allow me to get out of this bed now, Debbie?”
“No,” she said flatly.
“Well, at least help me loosen these straps, because my legs are asleep. I’m not going anywhere. I will listen as long as you want.”
“Listening is exactly what you’re going to have to do, Abu, because I’m going to tell you something that you don’t know about. What I’m going to tell you about is a certain bacteria, a bacteria that is so classified that almost nobody has ever heard of it. And the reason that it has never been heard of is because it was only ever seen on Earth twice. The first time was when they found that Mars rock in Antarctica. And the second time anyone ever saw it was in the Mars missile that the robot mission from 2015 sent back.”
“That was just another mapping and atmospherics mission, and the robots locked up solid after that dust storm three months in.”
“Abu,” Debbie said, “that’s what they want you to think, of course. Have you seen any photos of the robots lately?”
“Why would I have seen any photos?”
“Well, I have seen photos of them, and they were in one of the basins, and then they traveled from there, hundreds of miles, and they were taking samples wherever they went, and they found all sorts of bacteria along the way, frozen bacteria that blossoms out of its dormant state not just at a certain time of day, but only at a certain time of year, and only when the planet is on a certain tilt on its axis, which means only maybe every seventy thousand years or so, which is to say not very often, and so it was kind of hard to figure out, at first, whether this bacteria was of any use on planet Earth.”
“Wait,” Abu said, trying to keep her going for the sake of the intercom, and praying all the while that Steve was transmitting so that Mars mission guys back in Houston were getting all of this. “You’re saying that they had some reason to suppose that there was a bacterium that had certain properties, and they were planning to harvest it for experimental purposes on Earth.”
She was tired. Planetary Exile Syndrome has exhaustion as one of its key features. And this kind of histrionic and desperate behavior was tiring too. And her exhaustion was causing her to be sloppy. Her eyes were ringed with red, and puffy. And her cheeks were striated from where the tears had coursed across them.
“You bet your ass, Abu. And they fired it back to Earth in this little rocket, and it splashed down in the Indian Ocean, and they had an aircraft carrier, and a bunch of Navy SEALs, and all kinds of stealth aircraft, and every other thing they have, tactical warheads, trained on anyone who might want to get to that payload before we got to it. The only problem with it, Abu, was that they had no idea what would happen to it at Earth temperatures. They just had no idea. It was a completely new bacterium! Because who knew how long it had been frozen, and under the kind of air pressure where most things evaporate? Who knew? Thousands of years? Tens of thousands of years? Millions of years?”
He’d freed his arms, calmly, slowly, during the speech, and he was thinking that it wouldn’t be too hard to overpower her, because she just wasn’t paying the same kind of attention to the soldering gun, but he wanted, if possible, not to injure her or startle her unduly, since it might inhibit her recovery from her delusional state, and so he waited yet a little longer.
“And what was the special property of the bacterium, Debbie?” Abu asked.
“That’s what I’m about to tell you. The special property of the bacteria, Abu, is that—”
This was the moment when Steve Watanabe hit Debbie Quartz in the neck with a hypodermic. He’d crept down the ladder silently, drifted behind Debbie while she was talking, and then looked for a good spot for the injection, since he wasn’t a doctor (the only doctor on the mission is Arnie Gilmore, on the Pequod). I guess Steve hadn’t had time yet, or authorization, to tell Gilmore, or any of us on the Excelsior, about the situation. The way Steve told me the story, injecting an unwilling and delusional person in zero gravity is not the easiest thing to do, and he had to be sure that he was right up next to her, without running the risk of being heard, which is exactly what he did. There was the risk of rupturing an artery, sure, with a predictable heavy blood flow, brain damage, all of that, but what had to be done had to be done. And so Steve plunged the needle into Debbie’s neck, and she screamed like, well, like a stuck pig, and she tried to keep him from depressing the plunger, until Abu finished unstrapping himself and lurched into the middle of the conflict to help restrain her — Debbie screaming, telling Steve he had no idea what he was doing, what he was bringing down on himself, the disaster that lay in wait for him on the Red Planet. But then Steve managed to depress the plunger, while nearly strangling poor Debbie, with whom he had played many enjoyable games of cribbage back when we were all in Florida. He watched as Debbie writhed for a couple minutes and then slept. Sleep as a rare interval of happiness, or as an interval of oblivion, descended on her. She drifted over toward one wall, her limp body, like she was a coil of NASA hose.
The two men hovered idly in the silent cargo hold, watching their sedated colleague. They didn’t want to believe what had just come to pass. They knew what it was. Big trouble.
“You had word from Houston, huh?” Abu asked.
And Steve, wordlessly, removed the clipboard from his back pocket and handed it over to Jmil. On the screen: “Immobilize Quartz. Narcotics in first-aid kit. Follow dosage guidelines. Advise when completed.”
November 18, 2025
We were about seven weeks out, and halfway to the Red Planet. Things had been a little tense around the Excelsior. In order to depict just how tense, I suppose I need to render for you more of the conversational stylings of José Rodrigues, science officer, your favorite character in this weblog (at least as judged by posts from you in the comments section: “How would José order in a French restaurant?”). What better time than now? Besides, never was “graveyard shift” a more appropriate term. Though really all the shifts were graveyard shifts in the soda can. I’m going to work on my José Rodrigues impression by hand, that’s right, by hand, with specially designed ink pen and paper. What the hell else do I have to do? (Well, I have been contacting my daughter, Ginger, once a week or so, during which time we have extremely strained conversations about whatever rumor she heard about the heavily expurgated version of these diaries. For one thing, I couldn’t become accustomed to her implanted PDA. I can’t understand why kids would want to have a digital communication device implanted subcutaneously in their wrists. It’s so ugly! Never mind the ones in the skull. And all they do on there is shop. Call me old-fashioned. Maybe some of you can explain the phenomenon to me. During our last conversation, my daughter typed, with one hand, some nonsense about her grades, or she went on and on about some boy who visited her nightly at the pizzeria. All to get rid of me as quickly as possible, while she had teenage teleconferences. What was I to her? A postage-stamp-sized image on her PDA? The one with six weeks’ growth of beard? The one whose messages she neglected to save?)
Anyway, José Rodrigues, to get to the point, spoke almost entirely in acronyms. You know, kids, that space travel is noteworthy for its acronyms. It’s a part of what we do and how we live. If not for NASA and space travel, maybe acronyms would never have achieved the cultural acceptance they now enjoy. There are so many things in life that one is tempted to abbreviate. Acronyms worked for us, for astronauts, just as for military personnel, and so certain persons were disposed to use them for any and all purposes when a regular word would have served as well.