He wrote her an email, trying to soften the blow with the news that they wouldn’t have to be apart for six whole months after all, but he couldn’t help wondering if she would still want to spend the rest of her life as Mrs. Baby Bebe.
He sent pictures of the crocus flower to the Ukrainian students and added a p.s. that he wouldn’t be running the experiment for the full six months after all. He wrote a weaselly explanation full of vague references to personal problems that required his presence on the ground, then deleted it in disgust. If he started lying to high school kids just to save himself from embarrassment, then he had truly lost everything.
So he explained exactly what was happening to him, putting it in as scientific a context as he could manage. Something was clearly wrong with his mind, something apparently congenital that might even provide more insight into how the brain worked if he could find a doctor interested in studying it, but the space station was not the place to be experimenting with emotional instability. For the safety of the other crewmembers, and himself, he would be going back to Earth in a little over a week.
He sent the email, then for lack of anything better to do, started cleaning up his personal space. He could probably have waited until half an hour before his departure if he wanted to, since all his gear would barely fill a duffel bag, but he needed something to keep his mind occupied.
He didn’t expect a response from the high school class. It was the middle of the night in the Ukraine. But a couple of hours later he checked his email and found a reply from one of the students:
“Dear Mr. Bebe,
“I think not you have the mental problem. I think you have allergy. I have same problem with crocus, also iris and freesia. Is growth canister leaking airs?
“Wishing you luck the best,
“Anita Yelokovna”
He stared at the screen for a full minute, trying to wrap his brain around the concept that he might not be damaged goods after all. An allergy? How could it be an allergy? Tears were an emotional problem, not a chemical imbalance.
A little voice said, Tell that to a chef slicing onions.
But slicing onions didn’t lead to emotional instability. Being teased about crying, on the other hand…
His mother had grown crocuses. And irises too. They’d been all around the house when he’d been growing up.
The space station had emergency oxygen packs in every module. Michael removed the one beside his bunk space from its Velcro harness and slipped its mask over his face. He cracked the valve and made sure oxygen was flowing, then clipped the tank to his belt and pushed his way out of the Zvezda module and down the station’s long central axis to the science modules.
Quentin was in the Columbus lab. He looked up when Michael came in, saw the mask, and flinched as if he’d heard a meteor strike. “Is something wrong with the air?”
“That’s what we’re going to find out,” Michael said. The mask muffled his voice, but not so badly that Quentin couldn’t hear him.
He disconnected the crocus cylinder and pushed it ahead of him across Node 2 and into the JEM module, where he opened the inner door of the airlock that led to the vacuum exposure facility.
Quentin had followed along behind him. “Dude, you’re going to space the flowers?”
“No,” Michael said. “I’m going to seal them up in their own atmosphere, and you’re only going to open the lock to water them when I’m on the opposite side of the station breathing through an oxygen pack.” While he attached the canister to a tie-down inside and closed the airlock, he told Quentin what he’d read in the Ukrainian girl’s email.
“Allergies?” Quentin asked when he was done. “That doesn’t seem like—”
“I didn’t buy it at first, either, but the more I think about it, the more sense it makes. What if the allergy gives me all the symptoms of crying—the sniffly nose and tears in the eyes and tight throat and all that—so I’m right there on the physical edge of it already when I get an emotional trigger. Normally the trigger would just push me a little bit toward tears, but not enough to actually bring them on. But if I was already near the edge, it could push me right on over.”
Quentin nodded. “Yeah, okay, I could be convinced.”
“And I could stay up here for four more months if it’s true. Sorry, buddy.”
“Hey, it’s your tour if you can beat this thing.”
“Consider it beaten,” Michael said.
It took three days to convince the flight surgeon, but after breathing pure oxygen for two hours to flush his system and changing all the air purification canisters on the station, Michael knew. He could feel it. Where before it had seemed like he had an unseen companion looking over his shoulder, ready to attack him at any moment—exactly the way he had felt in grade school too—now he felt the security of a teenager in a shopping mall. He was in his element again, with a huge buffer zone between his emotions and trouble. He could look straight out the window at the Earth, watch the clouds swirling past beneath him, and not even blink.
For the acid test, he pulled up the picture of his son, David, his cheeks flushed red from playing among the autumn leaves. He smiled and wished he could reach out and run his fingers through the boy’s hair, but he felt nary a sniffle. Not even when he went down to the JEM airlock and looked through the porthole at the yellow crocuses—three of them in bloom now—did he feel the slightest urge to cry.
At the end of the week he watched Quentin leave on the supply ship and welcomed Quentin’s replacement, Olivia Rhodes, on board the station. She was everything Larisa was not: exuberant, friendly, talkative, and full of questions. Michael gave her the tour, but as he showed her through the station, he realized that she was everything he was not as well. A lifetime of fearing his emotions had given him more self-control than he’d realized, to the point where he must have come off as cold and distant to her, and probably to Larisa too.
He floated awake that night in his sleeping harness, wondering if he actually had the capacity to feel emotion like a normal person anymore, or if his lifelong overreaction to a simple allergy had robbed him of something basic. Maybe he needed to cultivate crocuses and keep one on hand in a sealed baggie for those moments when emotion was appropriate.
He was still wondering a week later when the Moon slid in front of the Sun, causing a total eclipse for people on the ground in a line running from Oregon to South Carolina. The space station raced through the shadow in less than a minute, but the real show was below, as the fuzzy pool of darkness slid across the face of the Earth, blotting out clouds, mountains, cities, and lakes in its relentless eastward sweep.
Olivia was snapping pictures through the cupola windows and squealing with delight. Larisa and Michael shared another window, quietly watching the display of celestial mechanics unfold beneath them. He wanted to take her hand in his, just for the human contact in such a once-in-a-lifetime moment, but he was afraid of how she would interpret it.
Then he heard her sniffle and looked over to see her rub a tear from her eye.
“Eta prekrasna,” she said. “It’s beautiful.”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, it is.” Something blurred the view for a moment, and it wasn’t until he blinked and it cleared that he understood what it was.
Throwing caution to the winds, he held out his arms in invitation. Larisa arched her eyebrows in surprise, but she smiled and snuggled in next to him. Arm in arm, they watched the shadow recede behind them.