RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: I could give you some recommendations. And I could tell you some more about what it’s like traveling in space. Do you want to know more about this? It’s like being stuck in the trunk of a Cadillac on your way to being rubbed out. The mobster drives you around for months. And you feel like you’re going to throw up or dump in your pants.
GingerSnap@sinisterteen.com: Thanks for sharing! I go to the observatory, you know, at the university, and also NASA lets me come down there pretty often and I go to the control room. Maybe once a week, even tho it’s a longish drive. I look at the surface of the planet, and I look at the pictures everyone has taken. Then I feel a little less worried. Hey, what happened to your blog anyway?
RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: I’m writing this sentence at 4:00 A.M., my time, honey. I have the alarm working so anytime there’s a communication on the computer log, it toggles this strobe light, and then I wake up to write you and hopefully I don’t bother the others. I don’t want to miss a chance. By the way, we’re doing fine. The biggest danger is boredom. When someone drills into a rock and finds something besides lava, that’s a big day. Half the time we don’t know what we’re finding until we hear back from NASA. As you can imagine, we’re not always first to hear. Many times, I’ve had to learn about us by reading the digest of the NASA website, which they send along in the morning mail. Abu and Steve, for example, from the Geronimo, have apparently found another good way to create oxygen as a by-product of chemical reactions they’re doing with the reactor. This is good news for us, because the air is thin, and we don’t have a limitless supply of the stuff.
GingerSnap@sinisterteen.com: Dad, I guess I did want to ask you about things I heard, because I guess people have been saying some things, and I don’t know what’s true.
RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: Like what? What are people saying?
GingerSnap@sinisterteen.com: Some people were saying that NASA can’t control the Mars mission. You guys aren’t doing what you’re supposed to be doing, and they don’t know if you’re ever going to come back.
RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: Who said that? Who told you that?
GingerSnap@sinisterteen.com: One of the other kids.
RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: Which one?
GingerSnap@sinisterteen.com: I guess he’s Debbie’s nephew or something. I’ve been calling him up some, trying to help him feel better about what happened, you know?
RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: Listen, Ginger, the thing I can tell you is that Mars is not just a distant outpost of Earth. It’s not just a rock that Earth is going to annex or that the NAFTA countries are going to annex. It’s not like if they annex it they’ll send a bunch of construction guys out (and a few hookers), and in eighteen months there will be golf courses. It’s not like that. Once you get here, once you go through the long journey, and you go through the experience of being separated from the home planet, you are changed, and you feel different. You feel, well, I guess you feel a little more free. What you find is that the freedom of this place, the blankness of this place, the clean slate of it, well, that’s what makes you feel differently. You feel like you are starting something new. And you feel that everything old and worn was kind of a mistake, and that if you have a chance to be part of what’s new, the society that is adapted to this place, to the severity of this place, then you don’t need all the mistakes of the past, the mistaken ways of doing things.
Let me put it another way. You know when you have a houseplant, a spider plant, let’s say, like that time we brought your spider plant from Michigan to Florida? Remember that the spider plant seemed to change shape a lot when it got to Florida? The leaves seemed denser, and it was sending off more shoots than before? That means that the spider plant is not the same as it was in Michigan. What it was in Michigan was a plant specifically adapted to that climate (and incidentally we did bring a spider plant to Mars, because they wanted to see how a common houseplant would do here). Now your spider plant is a Floridian spider plant, and even if it is not native to that place, it has adapted to the quality of light and water.
The same kind of thing is true of the human body after months of weightlessness. It’s different on Mars. But so is the human spirit. If I can use that term. So is human society, in fact, which is nothing more than a conglomeration of human psychologies. This doesn’t mean we have “gone native,” or have become “uncontrollable” and are running around in Martian loincloths. But, Ginger, when you start really experiencing life out in the universe, beyond the home planet, it’s life full of unpredictability, space-time curvature, and all of that. The reliable old truths about who humans are, and their relations to their bodies, these things become much more convoluted.
But I’m still your dad, and I still love you, and I miss you, and I’m not going to stay here on Mars forever, if staying here means I don’t get to see what new ghastly piercing you have perpetrated upon your body. However, it’s almost Martian dawn, and my pet moon, Phobos, is going over the lip of the horizon, and I better get some sleep if I’m going to have the energy to test the ultralight.
In the meantime, despite the great work Steve and Abu did extracting oxygen from the propellant stockpile, Steve has sunk into what Arnie is describing as a very serious clinical funk. I suppose I don’t trust the prevailing terminologies exactly, because they seem earthbound to me. Everyone here, to some degree, is struggling with feelings of misery about our lot. Abu has found that there’s some kind of rubbery silicone that is being produced as a by-product of the reactor and the propellant, and when he was through trucking spent fuel rods over to the fissure where we’re consigning them, he started trying to use the silicone goo to make Martian sculpture out there by the waste repository. Since then he’s spent a fair amount of time out in the desert, alone, erecting an army of these skinny, gooey-looking guys, as if to populate what is so unpopulated.
Maybe because Abu has become busy and, perhaps, a little tired of his suite mate, or more likely because his son, back on Earth, has had a bad reaction to a mild case of flesh-eating streptococcus, Steve just went into a serious tailspin. You’ll recall that this son had strep throat early in the mission, which resulted in some bad scarring and ongoing circulatory problems, and then a stint in the clinic resulted in an opportunistic germ. Apparently the boy infected a nurse, who didn’t have quite as easy a time. It’s really too unpleasant to go into. Steve obviously took it extremely hard that he wasn’t at home during this emergency. Arnie ordered him to sit under the sunlamps by the reactor, and to double the dose of daily SSRIs he’s taking in his fluids. (In fact, Arnie recommended this to everyone.) I don’t know how Jim felt about it, but the idea that the guys from the Geronimo weren’t doing well was, for me, a bad sign about our progress.
Similarly, Jim was spending a lot of time watching the rover on the radar screen. He honestly couldn’t figure out why Brandon hadn’t yet moved into the easternmost Valles Marineris. We’d tracked his movement over a few days, and we decided that maybe Brandon was just afraid to go to the canyon by himself, or perhaps had some reasonable hesitations about his project, what with the danger of wall collapses, avalanches, not to mention M. thanatobacillus itself. Or perhaps, Jim hypothesized to me and José, Brandon intended to remain within striking distance of the Excelsior. We had protective gear in our cargo bay. We had the ultralight. We had, via José, instructions on how to harvest the material. We had the best uplink with NASA. Jim felt we needed to keep a close watch on the encampment and its equipment. He radioed to the greenhouse and the reactor station and told them, as well, to lock everything down.