Titan (41 page)

He could see that some of the wheat crop would need reseeding. Several generations since leaving Earth, the yield of the crops was reducing, and although he could see no gross morphological defects there was some evidence of discoloration and perhaps malformation of the stem growth. He reached into the trays and took out a couple of stems as samples. He was sure he would find problems in cell division, nuclear and chromosomal behavior, metabolism, reproductive development and viability.

He understood, deep down, that it had always been a gamble that they could make this little farm work, and they were just going to have to work their way through the problems as they came up. The truth was, nobody knew what the long-term effects of microgravity and GCR would be. The handful of experiments on biological systems in space—in
Salyut, Mir,
and a few unmanned satellites—had not shown up enough data to provide much insight. Still, he thought, it was a shame to see the farm degrade from the triumph of the earliest months of the mission, when it had returned satisfying yields.

Libet had been the most assiduous farmer; her absence, here, among these fragile green things, was keenly felt.

In his softscreen he made a brief list of the main problems he found, to raise at a crew meeting later, and he began to strip off the protective gear.

Back in the hab module he had to climb past the wreckage of the laundry, which, it appeared, Benacerraf had been disassembling. The front cover was drifting loose, and he had to shove it aside to get by. It took a little experimentation; if he pushed away from the line of its center of mass the cover just spun, or oscillated in space. There was also other debris from the half-finished job, mops and small tools and a little clear plastic bag of nuts and washers, cluttering up the air.

He looked absently inside the laundry. Benacerraf had opened up the exit vents, and he could see there was some kind of growth in there, what looked like a black algae, coating the walls and vent grilles. He’d found some of the same growth himself on the shower curtain. Microorganisms tended to flourish in the habitable compartments, surviving on free floating water droplets in the air.

But the problem was deeper than that. Their miniature biosphere had fundamental problems of scale. It was poorly buffered; the biota were connected with a much smaller reservoir of biogenic materials than on Earth. Carbon dioxide, for instance, was recycled through the
Discovery
system in a few hours or days, compared to several years on Earth. So minor imbalances could significantly affect the composition of the buffer in a short time, and imbalances could run away rapidly.

This algal growth was a typical, relatively harmless, example. The others bitched about scraping this stuff out of the shower, but things could get a lot worse: if, for instance, the levels of cee-oh-two rose or fell away from nominal too dramatically, the whole life support system could crash altogether.

Nobody knew what was really going on in here, and they just had to cope with it as best they could. Rosenberg felt he understood this, that he’d understood it before he got on board
Discovery.
It was part of the life he’d chosen.

As he waited for his mail to open on the softscreen he listened to the continuing slow rattle of Mott in the arm. He wondered if he ought to get her down out of there. These long periods in the arm wouldn’t do Mott any harm, but if she started giving them all an excuse not to do their hours in there she could damage them all…

One of his messages, from the surgeons on the ground at JSC, was a little worrying.

They had been monitoring the routine electrocardiogram readings Rosenberg had been sending down the loop. All five of them had suffered minor heart irregularities over the last twenty-four hours. Rosenberg himself had suffered a so-called bigeminy rhythm, in which both sides of the heart contracted at once. Rosenberg thought he could feel his own heart thumping now inside his chest, huge and vulnerable, as he tried to digest this piece of information. He checked the time of his bigeminy. He didn’t remember anything wrong, except maybe feeling tired. He frowned. He’d have to look into this later; the surgeons wanted more EKGs taken of all the crew, and they had a number of suggested causes for the irregularities…

He moved his analysis of the farm plant samples up his mental priority list. He was becoming convinced many of the problems with the biosphere could be related to deficiencies or surpluses of trace elements. The plants, on analysis, would be a good check of such problems.

He looked again at his checklist.

He couldn’t find any excuse to avoid his patient any longer.

Siobhan Libet was slung in her sleeping bag, and her cramped little quarters had been made over as a kind of miniature hospital ward. The place was cluttered, but it was clean and smelled fresh, if a little antiseptic. That was thanks to Mott, Rosenberg knew. As far as he was aware neither Benacerraf nor Angel ever ventured in here.

Libet was unconscious. She’d been that way for three days now.

He pulled the door closed behind him, and started his examination.

Siobhan’s problems were multiple, and linked.

The effects of microgravity were marked in Libet, who, after all, hadn’t been able to get to the centrifuge for a hundred and sixty days. Her skeletal muscles were deeply atrophied. The wasting of her cardiac muscles seemed to have stabilized at about eight percent. That was higher than the crew’s average, and Rosenberg worried about eventual cardiac arrest. Libet’s hemoglobin was down by fifteen percent, enough to mark her out for treatment, on Earth, as an anemic. That hemoglobin count meant less oxygen being carried to the debilitated heart and skeletal muscles.

Her white cell count was down too, so her ability to fight off infection was reduced. Rosenberg was administering interferon to her, a protein involved in the immune system—production of which was also suppressed.

A couple of simple tests showed him that Libet’s flexor muscles had lost around twenty percent of their strength, the extensors twenty-five percent. Even the cell structure of her muscle fibers was changing, he knew; microgravity was working on her right down to a microanatomical level.

Libet’s bone calcium continued to wash out in her urine, at a half percent a month. Rosenberg thought there was a danger of her inner spongy bone, the trabeculae, vanishing altogether, without hope of regeneration. He didn’t have any way of monitoring the build-up of some of that calcium in Libet’s kidneys, which could lead ultimately to kidney stones. And on top of all of that, Libet was working her way through the classic symptoms of acute radiation sickness.

In the first few days after the solar storm incident Libet had suffered from nausea, pain, a loss of appetite, extreme fatigue, vomiting. After a couple of weeks she had started to suffer diarrhea, hemorrhaging from the mucous membranes in her nose, mouth and other parts of her body, and hair loss, from patches all over her scalp.

Libet had taken a dose of around five hundred rem. The textbooks said her chances of survival in the short term were less than fifty percent; and in the long term—when effects like cancer had time to work through—even more marginal…

He suspected she’d done well to survive so long, even to stay conscious.

He looked at Libet’s face: He could see tears leaking steadily, and when he raised a lid, her eye was bloodshot. That was partly due to the changed fluid balance, and partly to the dustiness of the air: in microgravity, dust didn’t settle out. The eyes produced tears, and blink reflexes cut in, intended to wash foreign bodies off the eye, into the lacrimal duct and into the nose. The nose was supposed to run, then, to wash the particles out of the system. But in microgravity there was no gravity feed to the lacrimal duct. The blinking could only redistribute particles over the eye; Libet’s cornea was, as a result, red and scratched. And the particles which were forced into Libet’s lacrimal duct did not run out of her nose, because her nose was almost stopped up by excessive mucous secretions.

If she ever pulled through this he didn’t want Libet to emerge with eye damage. So he had set Mott the task of bathing Libet’s eyes, and treating them with various drops…

Complex, messy, unanticipated problems.

As he worked, Rosenberg thought about death.

If—when—Siobhan Libet died, it would be Rosenberg who would have to sign her death certificate.

He would have to perform the autopsy.

He would have to provide standard and X-ray documentation, and subject tissue samples to toxicologic, bacteriologic and biochemical analysis; he’d have to take samples from the liver, a kidney, the brain, a lung, cerebrospinal fluid, vitreous humor, hair, skin, spleen, and the skeletal muscles…

The legal position wasn’t very clear.

NASA spaceflight crews were judged to be federal agency radiation workers, and so were covered by Occupational Safety and Health Administration radiation protection measures. But those measures had not been drawn up for spaceflight, and NASA had prepared its own standards for crew dosage. As far as he could make out, because of get-out clauses, there were actually
no
radiation exposure standards for human exploration missions.

For sure, though, they hadn’t adhered to the ALARA principle that the standards laid down: exposure As Low As Reasonably Achievable.

If the law suits started flying, Rosenberg might even be asked to preserve the body. That would mean, as far as he could see, mummification.

Jesus. What a situation.

In the course of his med training, Rosenberg had had some preliminary introduction to psychology. It wasn’t exactly a subject he was interested in, but what he had learned had pretty much confirmed his preconceptions about NASA: that the psychological preparation of NASA crews, including this one, was pitiful.

Nobody had figured out how they should respond to a situation like this. What
would
they do if someone died? Hold a service? If so, what denomination? And if they had to store the evidence, what were they supposed to do with the mummified body?

Maybe the worst problem was that the five of them had, prior to Libet’s accident, come to some kind of accommodation with each other, and with their situation. But the injury to Libet during the solar storm, and now her likely death—the loss of her skills, her muscles, her dedication to the farm, her contribution to the collective personality of the crew—was likely to destabilize them all, he feared.

Or worse. It might destroy them altogether.

… In sleep, her skin was smoothed out, almost glowing in the soft light of her cabin’s reading lamp. She looked young, trouble-free, save for the occasional grimace, pain echoes which crossed her face.

It was an odd thing, but he’d never really gotten to know Libet, in the years they’d spent together training for this mission, even the months they’d been cooped up together in this hacked-up Space Shuttle. To him she was a kind of sketch, a collection of barely understood traits: her readiness to laugh, her obvious sense of wonder, her youthful impatience to fly in space, her relationship with Mott.

But then, he hadn’t really gotten to know any of the rest of the crew, except in so far as their interests crossed his own. It was only now, when he had been forced more or less to suspend his own work on the Titan data and had been reduced to a kind of low-level nurse for Libet, that he had started to see her as some kind of human being.

There was a person in there, he realized now: an interior presence as deep and complex as his own, inside this shell of damaged flesh. And she was suffering.

He hadn’t quite understood his own reaction when he saw how Mott, in her distress, held Libet, and how Libet responded to her. He had been baffled, angry, as if Mott was intruding.

It was a funny thing, but it was as if, out here, so isolated from all but this ill-assorted handful of people, Rosenberg was starting to gain some kind of psychic connection with his fellow-humans, for the first time in his adult life. And it wasn’t all that hard for him to figure out why he had gotten so angry at Nicola Mott, Libet’s grieving lover.

It was because—in a stupid, unworthy way, now that she was utterly dependent on him—he was falling in love with Libet himself.

Rosenberg was jealous.

When he got back to the common area, he found Angel and Benacerraf screaming at each other.

Paula had algal growth smeared over her cheek. “Were you aware of this?”

“Aware of what?”

“What he’s been taking.” She stabbed a finger at Angel, who loomed in the air beyond her, his beard floating, his body hunched over in the shape of a huge, brown-jacketed claw.

“Are you talking about drugs?”

Paula seemed to be trembling, so extreme was her anger. “God damn it, am I supposed to watch over every damn thing on this fucking ship? Rosenberg, you’re the surgeon up here. You got a responsibility for this stuff.”

“Woah.” Rosenberg held his hands up. “Back off, Paula. As far as I’m concerned all I have is a field assignment. I’m no doctor, and I sure as hell will not accept sole responsibility for our medical supplies.” Now it was his turn to point at Angel, who laughed at him. “If that asshole wants to shoot himself up, that’s his responsibility. There’s no lock on the cupboard, and I’m not prepared to hold any key—”

“Fuck this,” Angel snapped now. “Look, Benacerraf, I’m not taking any orders from you over this.”

“Then you can take them from NASA.”

“NASA are ten million miles away,” Angel yelled. “We’re on our own out here. Don’t you get it?”

Benacerraf tried to face him, but they were both bobbing in the air as they gestured, their centers of mass adjusting as they threw their arms back and forth. It added an air of absurdity to the whole situation, and was maybe even extending the row.

“Steroids,” Rosenberg said.

They turned to look at him.

“Anabolic steroids. That’s what this is about, isn’t it? He’s taking steroids, against microgravity wasting of his bones.”

“Steroids,” Benacerraf said, “and fluoride to promote calcium growth. That’s what I’ve been able to trace anyhow.”