Lately, José and I had been meeting up when our shifts overlapped. Usually during his dinner. I could have eaten then myself, but I’m not sure his daily fare of freeze-dried rice and beans would have agreed with my delicate stomach, not for breakfast. Moreover, I had been making sure when José and I were on the same shift that he didn’t get anywhere near my food. The surfaces of the interior of the capsule quickly became rather slick, with biowaste of various kinds, human excrementa, because of our disinclination to expend water rinsing down. We had onboard antibacterial disinfectant, and it was part of protocol to use it weekly on everything inside the capsule, but the truth was that most surfaces were reasonably sterile, it being space and all. We didn’t bring that much organic life with us! Anything we were liable to catch from one another we had long since caught. Because we’d been here for more than a month. So probably the warm, sticky layer was just moist material from our hands, our perspiration, the linings of our lungs and colons, and the petroleum jelly we used for cracking lips and skin. But that didn’t mean you wanted to eat the stuff. And José liked to simulate cooking.
It was at our shared meals that I’d begun noticing, and detesting, the proliferating use of acronyms. This compulsion of speech resembled a space version of alphabet soup. For example, José would say he was going to have to squish some KRs (for K rations) out of the little plastic squeeze-paks from which we take our convenient meals. (Squeeze-paks or gelpaks, that’s how they are designated on the side, by the official licensor to the Mars mission, whose corporate logo I have been advised to avoid in my blogs.) These José referred to as squeeze-p’s. Not shorter, you might notice, in terms of linguistic savings. Just different.
José got the KRs out of the squeeze-p’s, in the kitchen area that according to one early blueprint of the capsule was to be called the culinary engineering zone, and thus José was in the CEZ, where he further squished out some succotash and some chipped-beef flakes (CBFs), the latter of which he mixed with some water (using the traditional chemical abbreviation thereof), and washed it down with some RCJ, or reconstituted cranberry juice, decrying in the midst of his meal, though I was pretending not to listen, the absence of onboard FMBBs, otherwise known as fermented malt and barley beverages, and when he was done, he headed around the corner for some minimal privacy at the WEP, which I’m sure my younger readers already know to be waste-evacuation privy, all of this being narrated for me, during and after the fact, including consumption of m-salts, or magnesium, which he took to insure regularity, “because we got a C&R [composting and reformulation program] for a reason.”
Yes, as I mentioned earlier, we were obliged to make phosphorus and other fertilizer products out of our solid wastes, for the cultivation of genetically modified soybeans and other vegetables. That is one of our most important experiments on the planet Mars, genetically modified wheat, soybeans, and other vegetables that could exist in very low temperatures, with boosted levels of carbon dioxide, and in ridiculously low atmospheric pressure. Not to mention solar radiation. These soybean seedlings were provided by the licensed agricultural supplier to the Mars mission.
José was also liable to refer humbly to his occasional bouts of masturbation, or FSAs (fits of self-abuse), which he regarded as a mission-related obligation, in order to maintain good health through “reproductive-fluid release,” and I’m betting you know what the acronym for that is, as well as the acronym for “bagging and disposal” of the relevant ejaculate.
I’m only exaggerating a little bit. What happens after a while, in a tiny little soda can halfway between two planets, is that you stop talking to one another entirely, in order that you might begin talking primarily to yourself. My mother, the schoolteacher, who was used to lecturing in front of audiences, was the person in my family most opposed to talking to oneself, viewing this as a sign of mental illness. And yet this was the communication modality most perfect for the eavesdropper. On the Excelsior, I began to grow quite weak, listening, despite my misery, to José’s nasal whine, “… because the MMEs are suggesting that the shipboard calcs are giving bad results on the SRBs that boosted us into EPT, and since we aren’t an ELV, we have high levels of sig error, which means that in terms of landing trajectory, we will be wanting to make sure we have an SSM.” Was he saying these things to me? Or was he saying them to whatever sleep-deprived kid, fresh out of MIT, whose job it was to listen to José by radio this night? Was he trying to impress this young astrophysicist, as well as whoever else might be listening on the radio transmissions that NASA organized each day? Or was he actually saying something substantive? Jim didn’t talk to himself — he would have regarded it as unwise from a security perspective — but he had a strange snorting thing that he performed. For example, he snorted when he was about to say something that he knew was not entirely true. These snorts had gotten more pronounced in recent days. I knew, therefore, that Jim felt that José was up to no good, as I have already said, and so there was some kind of all-purpose cognitive dissonance that created this need to know. What he was saying was out of phase with what he was actually thinking, and so he was always snorting, before almost every sentence. And the snorts, which sounded a little bit like what a pachyderm might do in extreme cold, were achingly vulnerable, human, especially since they implied that the three astronauts on the Excelsior were now in a state where all privacy and dignity were vanishing away.
So what did I surmise, you might wonder, when I heard José saying to himself, “… as far as the Geronimo goes, the SO is probably an eject, if you want to know what I think, she’s EVWE.” What did I surmise? When he was describing a fellow astronaut in terms of “extra-vehicular waste ejection”? Did I mark this moment as the moment when I was alerted from checking supermarket prices back on Earth to hearing the origins of conspiracy? There are times in a man’s life when ordinary complacency and a basic good-guy, can-do attitude simply have to give way to greater concerns — moral concerns — and this was one such moment.
“Do you mean you’re suggesting they eject Debbie Quartz from the Geronimo?” I called past Jim’s sleeping body.
“I have to have close contact with the other SOs because we’re coordinating missions. I have a duty to coordinate with them, and one of the SOs, as you are aware, is so loaded on narcotics that she probably can’t operate heavy machinery. I’m supposed to go to the surface of the planet and work with her on terraforming, mining, and industrial projects?”
“What kind of industrial projects?”
“You will know when it’s NTN for your clearance level. As of 1900 on 18 November, that’s a negative. The mission is a matter of national security. Some of us around here are actually worried about maintaining appropriate security protocols, policing our IODs and our blog posts, and if others were as conscientious, things would go smoother all around. An unconscious malcontent is a problem, sure, which is why, yes, Jed, I think they ought to make like she’s EVWE.”