“She has PES,” I said, employing the acronym with a hint of irony. José had finished putting away the last of the kitchen gear. He drifted over to where I was strapped down, and his unshaven face broke into a grin. I got a good look at his gold-capped incisors. This smile was impressively malevolent.
“She was a high-risk assignment right from the beginning. She’s weak. If you ask me, the public-relations people wanted more women. They already took one fella who wasn’t stable in the first place, Brandon, and now they got a bad apple in Debbie. What are we supposed to do? You know how long we’re out here. You know how long the mission is. There’s a likelihood we’re going to lose people, Jed, or we’re going to start to have problems with the Martian environment. The weak are going to go. You think I’m being hard, Jed? I’m not being hard. I just care about the rest of us. If you ditch her body from the Geronimo, then you use up that much less oxygen, which means more for the bubble when we touch down, more for the ship on the way back, and it also means less weight, which means less thrust. It just makes good practical sense.”
“There’s only one problem,” I said. “Even though she doesn’t have immediate family, she is nonetheless a person with a life, a social existence. There are friends and distant relatives who all care about her. The problem becomes, from their point of view, that they would like for her to stay alive.”
“If you call that alive,” he said. “But I guess you don’t get bedsores at zero g. If it were me I’d press the ejection button myself.”
“I’ll hold you to that.” At which he rappelled down the ladder into the cargo hold. And to think we let him look after the seedlings down there. Who knows what’s going on with those seedlings? They could be totally poisonous.
What did we do when José was off shift? Well, I wrote in my diary, and then I scanned the heavens for radio wave emissions that were otherwise unexplainable, by virtue of repetition — the indications of so-called intelligent life in the great nothingness, the nothingness that I know better than you, because every day, though days mean nothing to me now, in this expanse that is the general-relativity equivalent of forty days and forty nights, I experienced the nothingness, and I watched as the little red star in the distant sky got closer, until now you could almost see the polar caps on it, and you could see its dust storms, which were going to blind us every time we went out in them, perhaps asphyxiating us; you could see all of this, especially if you used the telescopic apparatus that we had to enhance the picture for you. And so I knew that I came from nowhere, that I was heading nowhere, that my life was no more, in the scheme of things, than the life of a match light snuffed out in a big wind. I was an insignificance between the orbit of the planet Mars, that elliptical orbit, and the orbit of the planet Earth. I was nothing, and soon I would be gone.
December 2, 2025
Belated Thanksgiving, all you readers! I know you understand the symbolism of that national holiday to us here on the Mars mission, where our three crafts are almost exactly like the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. It may interest you to know that at least two of those primitive ships were named after prostitutes, or so I am told by one interested reader in Bayonne, NJ. Meanwhile, what did we have to eat for Thanksgiving, here on the Excelsior? Well, we had turkey! The National Aeronautics and Space Administration knew how to pull out the stops, even two months in advance, for nine beleaguered astronauts, 25 or so million miles from home. The turkey was in little vacuum-packed containers, and there was some gravy that we were able to heat up in the microwave oven. We were even given authorization to have some of the hothouse lettuces from downstairs in José’s agribusiness lair. We could just cut a couple of pieces each from the lettuces, because they were doing pretty well, beneath the artificial grow lamp, and anyhow you don’t want lettuces to go to seed.
And there was a bottle of hard cider that I’d been given the okay to bring on the mission, and I’d been waiting these many weeks to drink that bottle of hard cider. You know, cider was one of the political issues of early American history. American farmers began growing their own apple trees; this symbolized a resistance to tyranny. We mean to effect a similar revolution on the Mars mission, and so this was another of the carefully crafted symbols in our little Thanksgiving dinner. There wasn’t a lot of talking at our dinner, and the astronauts on the Excelsior gulped their cider as quickly as possible, because in a slightly oxygen-depleted environment, you can experience a maximization of effects, especially if you force the drink, or chugalug, or whatever you young people call it these days. I did all the dishes, because the other guys had things on their minds. These events constitute an explanation of my silence since the Thanksgiving dinner. So let me re-create the drama of that day.
Long about dinnertime, or the time we agreed would be dinnertime, I get a communication from Laurie Corelli on the Pequod. I mean, literally, we are sitting down to eat, and I have served each of the guys a glass of hard cider, brought by me into interplanetary space at enormous personal expense. All of a sudden, there’s a light on the dash, as we like to say, indicating that Laurie’s trying to communicate. In fact, she’s trying to communicate with everyone — us, Houston, the Geronimo—all at the same time, having availed herself of the communication protocol that we refer to as the panic button — an intercom that automatically contacts all the relevant parties. Her face shows on the video screen, because the panic button automatically engages the video feed, and Laurie says, “Anyone out there? Please confirm when you get this message. We have a Code 14. Code 14 on the Pequod. Repeat, Code 14.”
Now, you will recognize, if you are astute readers of this forum, and if you have been reading the posts from various experts at NASA, that even in these technologically advanced times, it takes NASA a while to reach us when there’s information they want to send our way, and you know that this time lag increases as we near the Red Planet. At present, for every question Laurie wants to send back to the home planet, it’s seven minutes out, and then seven minutes for the answer to arrive. Therefore, it stands to reason that we on the Excelsior, and likewise the Geronimo, would get the transmission before the home planet, since we’re only ten or twenty thousand miles ahead of our colleagues on the other ships.
I get on the radio immediately and hail the Pequod.
“What’s up, Laurie? How can we help?”
Wait, did I explain what a Code 14 is? A Code 14 is when an astronaut has become dangerous to himself or others. This was the code Watanabe or Abu would have used to alert Mission Control to the Debbie Quartz situation, if they’d had time to transmit the news while the crisis was taking place. In case you were wondering about the specific numerical designation, I don’t know why it’s a Code 14, exactly. There are not thirteen other codes, although there is a Code 5, which is a dangerously low oxygen level, a Code 6, which is a hull breach, and a Code 7, which is fire of some kind. There is, for those who are curious about such things, a Code 22, which is designated for “ship under attack.” So far, no one has ever used a Code 22, in all the space missions of the past twenty-five years, since the codes were instituted. But there have been five occasions in which there was a Code 7, and seven examples of a Code 5. I’ll leave it to you to connect these codes to the various well-known mishaps.