The Terranauts

by T. C. Boyle

  He dodges off-camera briefly, then comes into view again, looking what you could only call furtive, and my first thought is he’s going to sneak some bananas or papayas from the trees or even dip into the Purina Monkey Chow Gretchen sets out daily in half a dozen feeding stations to sustain the galagos, who’re having a hard time dietarily on what E2’s providing in terms of insects and fruit. Next thing, he’s off the path—and this is pretty much discouraged because Mission Control wants the wilderness biomes to remain as undisturbed as possible. But what is he doing? I shift the camera, refocus. The image is grainy, the colors washed to shadow. He seems to be preparing a place to lie down, as if he’s going to take a nap, which doesn’t make any sense since his bed is just minutes away. Is he going for the nature experience, is that it? Sleeping with the ants, mosquitoes, cockroaches and frogs? Is he our nature boy, our true nature boy? I don’t have a clue.

  When he lays himself down, the vegetation screens him so all I can see is his lower legs—his shins, which cast a faint glow—and his feet. He’s doing something there, something vigorous which make his legs stiffen and his feet stir, and it isn’t till I notice that his shorts are in the picture now, bunched at his knees, that it comes to me like a dirty secret. I flush. Gawk. Smile to myself: now I have something on him too. But I stop right there—the fact is I like him, and honestly, no matter what anybody says, I’m not that kind of person. What he does privately is nobody’s business but his and I know in that moment I won’t report it. Unfortunately, as I say, Malcolm has no such scruples. He’d seen something on his shift (I never found out what, exactly, but it had to do with Gyro, so I can pretty well guess), then went back and reviewed my tape, which he brought to Judy and Dennis, and Judy and Dennis watched it I don’t know how many times before they summoned me.

  They’re in the command center, sitting before one of the monitors, and they’re the only people in the room at the moment. Judy gives me one of her automatic smiles and Dennis, his little spit-curl frozen in place on his forehead, barely glances up. “We just want to know what you saw, when was it, Dennis? Four nights ago? When you were on night shift?”

  Dennis looks up now, his face neutral (and you could have tortured him, pulled out his fingernails and toenails and cut off his ears before he’d acknowledge even the faintest glimmer of what had once passed between us), and pulls out a chair for me.

  “So what we’re wondering about is what looks like an anomaly with one of the crew,” Judy goes on, pressing the “play” button on the recorder before her so that the screen springs to life, the picture murky, jumpy, a slice of movement, Gyro, the rain forest, night. Across the top of the screen, the time scrolling in fuzzy white relief, seconds, minutes, hour, and the date—06/14/94—blinking in confirmation. “This is your feed, right? You were on duty that night—?”

  “Yes,” I say, and I’m not giving up anything.

  “Listen, Linda”—Dennis now—“we were wondering why you trained the camera here, on Gyro. Were you, I don’t know, suspicious or—?”

  “Or what?” I say.

  “Bored, maybe,” Judy puts in.

  I look round the room, the sun bright in the windows so that they seem glazed, chairs and desks untenanted, everybody conveniently on break. “If you’re asking if I was tracking him because he was out there in the middle of the night and I didn’t know if he was repairing something or what he was doing, then the answer is yes. That’s what I’m supposed to do, isn’t it?”

  Neither of them responds. For a minute, a full sixty seconds that seems ten times longer, the three of us watch my cinematic efforts play across the screen to the climactic moment—the stiffened legs, the intent feet—before Judy punches the “off” button and the image dissolves. Judy turns to me, her mouth tight. “Do you have any idea what this is? What he was doing?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I was just recording an, an anomaly, that’s all.”

  The fact is, the literature on small group interaction is rife with anomalous behavior, from violence and mental instability to the formation of cliques and factions and the total breakdown of societal norms. One overwintering crew at the Antarctic Research Station split off into two separate factions—gangs—that raided each other’s food supplies, though there was more than enough food to go around, and even adopted identifying insignia and colors as if they were Crips and Bloods fighting over turf. By the time the relief crew arrived in the spring, there had been two all-out brawls (the first over whether the movie of the night would be Ice Station Zebra or The Sound of Music), resulting in a fractured ankle, a broken wrist and two misaligned noses, and one faction went so far as to try to falsify the other’s data. Which, of course, defeated the whole purpose of their being there in the first place.

  “But you didn’t report it,” Dennis says.

  “I didn’t think it was anything.”

  Judy—she’s the dragon lady, not me—lets out an exasperated puff of air. “He was masturbating, for Christ’s sake. Do you know what would happen if, god forbid, one of the visitors should see anything like this? Or the so-called reporters out there that are just praying for us to fall flat on our faces?”

  “It was night,” I say. “Who’s watching at night? And besides, you can’t be sure. Maybe he was, I don’t know, getting into his naturalist’s trance—”

  “Don’t be cute. Or naïve. Or whatever you’re playing at—he was jerking off and you know it perfectly well.”

  This is a warning. My job, above all else, is to suck up to Mission Control if I ever hope to get what I want, and what I want is to go inside and spin out my own anomalous behavior. I keep my mouth shut.

  “Apes do it, monkeys,” Dennis says, leaning in so he’s too close, encroaching on my personal space, working me. “In the zoo, especially. You see them whacking off all the time. It’s a boredom thing. A cooped-up thing.”

  Judy stiffens, makes a face. She’s uptight. Humorless. The manager, managing. “We’re not apes,” she says and gives Dennis a look that’s like a warning shot across his bows.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, “but that’s exactly what we are.” I know something about Judy that Judy doesn’t know I know. A soft smile comes to my lips. “Technically speaking.”

  Dawn Chapman

  People always asked about intimate things, body-function things, like how the toilet worked and whether we took vitamins (we did: vitamin D, because UV rays didn’t penetrate the glass panels) and what we women did about birth control and our monthly cycles. I got questions like these from journalists when it was my turn to sit for an interview via PicTel or at the visitors’ window and I got them from friends and from my own mother too. It wasn’t anything I looked forward to, but I wasn’t embarrassed—or tried not to be. Daily life at its most basic—exercise, respiration, caloric intake, personal hygiene—was the gold standard of E2, the way forward for any off-earth colony that was to follow us in the future. How do you do it?—that was what people wanted to know. How do you recycle waste, protect the environment and balance out natural processes in a closed-loop, bio-regenerative, self-sustaining system? Or, actually, how do you live without Safeway, Walmart and the CVS pharmacy?

  As for birth control, we all had the pill, which Mission Control insisted on, though as far as I knew only Stevie was taking it. This was something Mission Control wanted to play down, of course, and initially they’d put out a couple of bland press releases couched in the language of a family planning brochure and emphasizing our status as scientists, as if to imply that scientists, interested only in their experiments and observations, were above expressing anything so primitive as sexual needs. Since we were all unmarried, there was endless speculation in the press about which of us might pair up, one rag even going so far as to post odds, while on the other side, the moral watchdogs hissed and blew and the Just-Abstain sect demonstrated out on the main road for the first month or two. Really, I think Mission Control would have been happier if we’d all been sterilized at the outse
t.

  What Diane did, I never knew, but both Gretchen and I felt pretty strongly that we didn’t want to put anything artificial in our bodies—again, wouldn’t that be a violation of the compact we’d made with the ecosystem of E2? I did get fitted with a diaphragm—to be used as needed. Or not. But I went off the pill the day I stepped inside, and so did Gretchen. For their part, the men were supplied with condoms and Richard had a reserve supply, just in case, but everybody tiptoed around the whole issue, at least at first. Living this intimately was sticky enough as it was, and we all tried to keep a professional outlook, as if E2 wasn’t any different from a rooming house. Or a coed dorm, where you could keep your door shut for privacy or leave it open when you wanted company. The condoms, incidentally, were of biodegradable lambskin (lamb’s caecum, that is) and not plastic, which was strictly excluded from E2 in any of the myriad forms that study after study had shown to be degrading the earth’s ecosystems and working its way up the food chain so that animals as disparate as polar bears and Kemp’s ridley’s turtles harbored its by-products in their tissues. By the same token, tampons were banned and we had to use a silicone cup instead, reusable, disinfectible and non-polluting, but a pain for all that, and whoever said living under glass was going to be easy?

  Every two months Richard gave each of us a thorough physical exam, including body measurements, blood and urine samples, pulse rate (both resting and after five minutes on the exercise bike), blood pressure and lung capacity. He did vaginal exams, checked our breasts for any sign of cysts or tumors and examined the men for hernias and prostate enlargement and/or cancer, concluding with a set of three full-body nude photos of each of us, front, side and rear. Why the thoroughness? Because, as G.C. explained at the outset, our bodies were laboratories in themselves, as invaluable to the project as anything either animate or inanimate in E2, and Mission Control was unwavering about our compliance here. To pick just one example out of many, during our mission it was shown that after six months our blood became flooded with lipophilic compounds (PCB, DDE and DDT) which had been released into our bloodstreams as we burned off the fat where they’d been stored, and there wasn’t one of us who wasn’t sobered by this evidence—evidence in the blood—of what was wrong out there in the world. None of us had been miners or worked in chemical plants or nuclear facilities. We’d lived normal American lives in the wealthiest country ever known and nonetheless wound up accumulating these toxins in our bodies just from having lived and breathed and consumed the food and swallowed the water in E1, and if that doesn’t tell you something, I don’t know what does. And that’s it, that’s it exactly—people were always criticizing us, asking Where’s the science? Well, here it was, right in your average American bloodstream.

  I remember one physical in particular, at the end of June of the first year, and I think it stands out because it was the first time I really got a sense of who Richard was, beyond the aura that surrounded him as our physician and healer or the persona he took on as the team member who could always manage to see the dark side of things and make us laugh about it at the same time. Which was an act, a way of lightening his load, because deep down he was a very giving and caring person who was there for us 24/7 and really did try to stay impartial when things got contentious. Or that doesn’t sound right. Of course he was there 24/7—where else would he be? What I mean is, no matter what your problem you could always take it to him and he’d make you feel better, and I’m not just talking about medication—he saw me through some rough patches, and I owe him, I do. His crew nickname was Lancet, for the obvious reason, but because of his wit too, the way it cut and sliced and revealed what lay beneath the surface of any issue we might be batting around, and yet for some reason it never stuck and mostly we wound up calling him by his given name (for a while there Ramsay tried calling him “Doc” and then “Bones,” after Dr. McCoy on Star Trek, but neither stuck). So he was Richard. Plain Richard. The elder amongst us at forty-eight, with hair transitioning from charcoal to gray, a serious nose with a little bump at the bridge of it and eyes that might have been set too close together but could laser right in on you, especially if you said something fatuous or sanctimonious, which some people (think Stevie) seemed capable of doing about fifty percent of the time. If not more.

  I was scheduled right after morning break, which happened at ten-forty-five punctually each day, and after I’d sat down with the handful of peanuts and mug of mint tea the chef du jour doled out, I followed Richard around the corner to his office.

  He shut the door behind me, lifted his lab coat down from its hook and shrugged into it while I slid myself up onto the examining table and let my legs dangle over the side. The table was covered with a sheet of the standard antiseptic paper you saw in any physician’s office, with the difference that this one wouldn’t be going to a landfill—it would be packed up with the others Richard would use today, then shredded and fed to the goats, who would process it in their unique goaty way so that at least partially we’d be getting milk from medical waste, which I bet really didn’t happen all that much in the outside world.

  I watched Richard’s back and the movement of his shoulders as he looped his stethoscope around his neck and pulled my chart from his filing cabinet, and if I was thinking about anything it was the uphill slope of the work I had to get through before lunch—weeding, mostly, and turning over the soil in the peanut plot we’d just harvested so we could plant it with a new crop of sweet potatoes—and wondering how much time this little interlude was going to cost me. I should have been relaxed, I know, but our schedules inside were infinitely more demanding than on the outside. We couldn’t just punch the clock, nine to five, and go home and forget about things—we had a whole world to prop up.

  “So, how are we feeling, E.?” Richard asked, turning round to face me. “No complaints, no pulled muscles or back spasms?” This was a reference to the lower back issues I’d had a month or so ago after a couple of especially strenuous days, going from cutting back vegetation in the rain forest to climbing up with Stevie and Vodge to scrub the windows over the IAB, which had begun to sprout a brownish scrim of mold that was blocking enough of our sunlight to become a problem.

  “I don’t know,” I said, “the usual. A few twinges maybe, right here?” I reached back to indicate the muscles just over my hips. “But nothing, really. Not like that first time.” (Which had laid me up in bed and cost two full workdays, much to the irritation of Little Jesus. And Judas.)

  “Good,” he murmured, “good,” and he listened to my heart and lungs and checked my blood pressure, which, at 110 over 68, was in the range of what you’d expect from a long-distance runner, or so he told me. “You haven’t been competing in any marathons lately, have you, E.?”

  “Not that I can remember.” I gave a little laugh. “Maybe in my dreams, does that count? But wait a minute, you’re wearing glasses.” He’d slipped a pair of standard-issue spectacles over the bump of his nose, black frames, rectangular lenses, the sort of thing you’d find on a rack at the drugstore. They made him look studious. And old. Or older anyway. “I didn’t know you wore glasses?”

  “I don’t,” he said, ducking his head, and it might have been my imagination but he seemed to be blushing. “These are just for up-close, for reading—I picked up two pairs at Walgreens a week before closure, just in case. They’re an aid, that’s all. A tool.” He laughed. “It’s not like I’m getting old or anything.”

  “No,” I said, “none of us are.”

  “Uh-uh, not in here, no way. E2’s the fountain of youth.”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say. Technically, Richard was old enough to be my father, though my actual father was eight years older than him.

  He peered over the frames of his glasses like a lecturer looking up from his notes and he was Richard again, the Richard I knew. Or thought I knew. “Seriously, though, with our diet and work schedule and the purity of this place and no communicable diseases it’ll probably add ten years to
our life span. I mean nobody’s going to need a flu shot. And I think I can confidently declare the common cold extinct in Ecosphere II.”

  “Oh, I like that. That’s great. Tell you the truth, I hadn’t really thought of it—not in those terms. But it makes sense, doesn’t it?”

  “Absolutely.”

  I looked at him and felt a whole new wave of appreciation rising in me. We were safe here, safer even than I’d imagined. Diseases had been driven to extinction in the larger world—smallpox for one and polio not far behind—but they’d never even existed in our world. We had only what we’d brought in with us. I’d say it was a humbling thought, but it was just the opposite—if ever I’d felt privileged, like one of the gods, like the original Eos spreading her rosy fingers across the horizon, it was in that moment. Everybody outside was vulnerable, even G.C., but not us. “Okay,” I said, even as another thought came to me, “I’ll grant you that—but how can you be sure? I mean, what about all that sneezing Diane was doing at breakfast this morning? That’s not a cold?”

  “Allergies. Mold spores, pollen—that stuff’s going to be concentrated in an environment like this, even what we’ve got in the soil, what with the aerators. We’ve got to watch out for that, yes, but any communicable disease that didn’t come in with the crew isn’t going to show its face. We’re clean. We’re pure. World, get over it.”

  Flu had twice stricken the Mission One crew, or so we’d been told—by G.C., as a sort of object lesson. They’d broken closure right at the beginning, as everyone knows, but during the second year they began to pass medical samples through a sleeve to the right of the airlock, and incredible as it might seem, the flu virus came in on the surface of the new test tubes sent in to replace the exported ones and everybody got sick. Another little parable about the corruption of the outside world and the need for an absolute unwavering commitment to material closure.