Oceanworlds

  James smiled, turned it off, and went to bed.

  * * *

  13 “Let’s talk about bananas,” said Derya a few hours later, after corralling the other four into the cargo area. Sophia and Yi remained instinctively near the ship’s central backbone, a few feet further than the rest from Waltzy Mole and the nuclear reactor. “I know this is bloody painful to some of you, like writing a high-school paper on Shakespeare on your birthday. But, alas, we will abandon the cocoon of Earth’s magnetic field shortly, plus we’ll be turning on our small nuclear electric generator. So, our bodies will be exposed to and absorbing three types of ionizing radiation: solar, cosmic, and nuclear. On Earth, a person receives around one millisievert of radiation per year, but of course it all depends, right? If you go to the dentist a lot and get a bunch of X-rays, or are too keen on tanning at the beach, you may end up with one and a half—”

  “You’re losing me here, Derya,” James interrupted.

  “Precisely,” said Derya. “Hence the humble banana, which has a trace amount of the radioactive isotope potassium-40. So we can forget about millisieverts and rems and rads and talk bananas. One millisievert is equal to 10,000 bananas, so we absorb twenty-seven bananas per day on Earth. In space we’ll get about 700 millisievert per year, which equals to 19,200 bananas per day.”

  “Derya …”

  “Don’t know about you, but in this precise moment I have nothing better to do, besides practicing my left-hand grip—I’m a lefty, by the way.”

  “Bravo. Real highbrow, Derya,” said Sophia, more bored than bothered.

  Derya saw Yi surreptitiously checking his tablet. I thought space would cure us from short attention span disorder. He decided to wrap it up. “Anyway, that digital display sensor on the wall behind Sergei is the daily and cumulative radiation gauge inside Shackleton. I changed the screen units to bananas and attached a sheet for your reference.”

  The sheet of paper, taped to the wall under the sensor and titled “Single-Event Banana Count,” had the following handwritten information:

  “Dental X-ray: fifty bananas.”

  “Flight from London to New York: 400 bananas.”

  “Day in outer space: 20k bananas.”

  “Chest CT Scan: 70k bananas.”

  “One session of radiotherapy: 20 million bananas.”

  “Fatal Dose (death within two weeks): 40–100 million bananas.”

  “Solar Flare hitting Shackleton near Mars’ orbit: 100–1,000 million bananas.”

  After gliding to inspect the sheet, Sophia said, “Thank you, Derya, that was both confusing and spooky. But as your loving and devoted Mission Physician, it is my duty to allay some of these concerns. First—and I’m sorry D—I would completely ignore the radiation gauge and its scarecrow sheet, as there is nothing you or I can do about it beyond biting our nails until they bleed. Second, let’s dispel the myth about ionizing radiation. ‘Ionizing’ means the radiation has enough energy to damage the DNA inside the cells if it slams into it. Non-ionizing radiation is the kind emitted by cellphones, televisions, light bulbs, or microwave ovens. That’s all it is. Therefore, the health consequences stem from either a very high dose of radiation in a short amount of time or low accumulated doses over the long term. The former is what people at Hiroshima got or what we would get if a solar flare hit Shackleton. This kind is usually referred to as acute radiation sickness, and it kills the person in months to even minutes, depending on the dose. The latter—which is the one we should care about—is basically a story about cancer.

  “When a cell’s DNA gets damaged, the cell attempts repair. If the damage is too great and the cell dies, that’s okay. Cells die all the time. The problem stems from the few instances in which the repair is done imperfectly and it corrupts the DNA code, turning the cell into a zombie instead of a healthy specimen. In rare cases, the zombie cell begins dividing much faster than the other cells, expanding uncontrollably throughout the organs and the body. And this, my dear gentlemen, is called cancer.” She looked around. No one looked at ease anymore.

  “Which takes us to the good news! I’ll paraphrase Robert Zubrin here, the President of the Mars Society—he presides over it from Earth in case you thought I’m already going gaga from banana overdose. The increase in the risk of getting cancer will be about 2 percent per year, or around 15 percent by the time we return to Earth. Meanwhile, there’s a 20 percent increase in the risk for the average American smoker. Meaning, if you sent smokers to space without tobacco, they could actually decrease their chance of getting cancer. Last but not least, all this cancer stuff is probabilistic, random, stochastic. You could travel around the Solar System all your life and die at 110 years from boredom and old age. Or you could be watching the LA Lakers getting pounded while eating steaming popcorn with just-poured hot clarified butter when this one infinitesimal cosmic ray pierces through the atmosphere and slams into a few letters of the DNA code in one single cell of yours among forty trillion others, yet five years later you kick the bucket from terminal cancer. Such is life.”

  14 “Or look there, center-left. That blob of light is the closest neighbor and much bigger galaxy to ours, Andromeda. It is so distant as to be laughable. Einstein showed that traveling at the speed of light is an impossibility for any type of matter, but light is already ridiculously slow relative to the scale of galaxies. You and I can see it, despite that it’s 2.5 million light-years away. If we ever venture into intergalactic space, it will be a one-way street tens of millions of years long, even in the most optimistic cases of space travel technology. For some perspective, we, Homo sapiens, are barely 300,000 years old.”

  29 | Everyday Life

  August 23 2027. Day 68; 3 Years to Saturn

  OUTER SPACE

  At 7:00 AM, the speakers in each cabin burst into Mission Control’s wake-up call, “Fleeing Earthlings, the theme for today is one of the greatest movie openings of all time …” This one required no guessing. Yi instantly pictured a menacing organ, followed by trumpets, full strings, and marching kettle drums to the image of the Sun coming out from behind the Earth as seen from the Moon. Instead, he got the swaggering walk of a pair of leather boots and brilliant flared white pants accompanied by the funky guitar and bass rhythm of “Stayin’ Alive.”

  As an unrepentant space nerd he knew it all had started in 1965, when Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford—crammed inside their Gemini 6A capsule orbiting the Earth—awoke to the crooner Jack Jones’ parody of the Broadway hit tune “Hello, Dolly!” And the tradition stuck until today. It was a nice spin on the essential need to keep astronauts on a rigid sleeping schedule. Shackleton made it even less discretionary by turning off the gravity wheel, which comes to a full stop fifteen minutes later. So, it’s a choice of willpower or physics, but you are getting out of bed.

  The wake-up call was one of the most coveted platforms for artists and celebrities to jack up their popularity or amplify their message. The mix of line-up secrecy and one-upmanship had turned it into favorite listening for hundreds of millions. The previous day had been the Berliner Philharmoniker, the full orchestra opening with the explosive bull-fighting theme of the opera Carmen. A week prior was the Dalai Lama, whose youth was no impediment for dazzling depth and wisdom.

  Whenever Yi felt unsure whether he was dreaming up this far-fetched life as an astronaut, his hand instinctively reached for the carved Buddha against his chest. My totem, like Dominick Cobb’s in Inception. This time was no different. It also grounded and kept him humble as the palpable memory of his mother. Made with those aged, callused hands of hers. He remembered their shepherds’ small log house in the Inner Mongolian steppes. Yi Meng, predestined to follow my family’s ancestral trade in a world confined between the mountains surrounding the hamlet, is instead heading to Saturn. There was no arrogance, only pure wonderment and bafflement.

  Next door, James’ return to consciousness needed a much longer runway. Belinda’s water broke late the previous night and it was only after
B’s pleading that he went for the pill and pillow a few hours before.

  James entered Bacchus, running late with today’s meals from the pantry in the cargo area. His cheerfulness tempered upon seeing Sergei. As a father, he could probably relate to him better than anyone else. The official news they received three weeks ago was cryptic: Iman had had complications and the baby was no more. He had tried giving Sergei his condolences but it didn’t land well. The crew knew, yet there was no public acknowledgment. Whatever his misery, Sergei dealt with it alone. The only perceivable difference is his quietness, thought James. But a private message he received two days prior from the Russian’s mission psychologist hinted at deeper layers: Sergei blamed Iman for the loss and had not talked to her since before the tragedy. James was torn: he still wasn’t close enough to Sergei to talk about something this personal; however, he was certain that not talking to your better half was never a good idea.

  “Banana bar, Sergei. BBQ nut bar, Tweety and Jimmy. Ginger vanilla bar, Derya. Braised pork … with seaweed salad bar? Profe?” said Derya, distributing rations among his fellow diners at the communal table while James stored lunch and dinner in a cabinet. Their diet was fine-tuned weekly in calorific count and nutritional value for each crew member. Sophia’s daily target stood at 2,100 calories whereas Sergei aimed for 3,600, with James north of the middle. A far cry from Columbus and Magellan sea voyages, but not everything has improved. Bars are at the bottom of the totem pole for a reason. Sure, great nutrition-to-weight ratio, but you pay back in presentation, pasty texture, and that clingy leather shoe aftertaste—about the only thing all-natural in them.

  “Pass the pepper please,” asked Sophia. Yi threw her a container with pepper in a liquid form to season the dehydrated eggs she had recovered from the food warmer box, reconstituted with hot water. There was no sprinkling of salt or pepper in space, as it would float away, eventually clogging air vents or landing in somebody’s eyes or nose. In space, the inoffensive sometimes becomes threatening. A spilled saltshaker could become an emergency, even requiring the crew to don their helmets. James saw Sophia shaking the chili sauce over her eggs like a maraca. Weightlessness swells the head, which impairs the sense of smell, which dulls the taste, which causes Sophia to fight back by spicing things up.

  Spotting the lunch—freeze-dried, thermostabilized shrimp cocktail followed by precooked irradiated spaghetti and meatballs—Derya invoked a sudden return to his claimed vegan adolescence.

  “You? A German bratwurst of Turkish descent?” said James.

  “How come you’re American and know the difference between Austria and Australia? I would have assumed the US border constituted the edge of the known Universe for you too. No preconceptions mate,” said Derya.

  James saved Derya’s day by revealing an unexpected bag tagged, “Candy Coated Chocolates,” also known as M&M’s. And besides, tonight’s dinner would include the Olympus of the food pyramid in space, the earthy-type grown on board Shackleton, fresh produce. Or more specifically, two tomatoes, three potatoes (sour cream please), lettuce, and seven radishes.

  After dinner everyone had trickled out of Bacchus except for James and Sergei. As the latter was leaving, he patted James on the shoulder, “Everything will turn out all right.”

  And it did. At 11:06 PM, Emma Egger was born into the world.

  30 | The Asteroid Belt

  December 9 2027. Day 176; 2.7 Years to Saturn

  It was past midnight as James continued clearing an outsized inbox of messages. Even with people curating and pruning his emails, he spotted an intruder that passed the filter by way of impersonation. Billy Martinez was a close college friend; Billie Martinez—whose mail he was staring at—was not. Billie seems to have graduated from one of those flat Earth societies, but only very recently, thought James. I barely missed his diploma ceremony. By powerful inference, James was able to deduct that junior appeared to be a fervent believer in the Great Flood, with an ark riding high, “All my investigations point to a Universe no older than 6,944 years before our Lord.” But Billie had bigger fish to fry. He was a visionary, even if single-eyed and partially blind. “Jimmy, if I can call you that, let’s change history together.” You should have started by saying that. Now I’m really engaged. “The Earth is hollow.” I knew something big was coming. “But all those conspiracy theories are plainly absurd, not to be believed, and easily disproven by Christian Science or even regular scientists.” But when Billie linked Dante’s Eighth Circle of Hell with a secret passage that opened in Machu Picchu on the evening of Holy Friday, he decided to let it go. For now. We’re not done, Billie. Too high an intellectual dare for a tired body about to go to sleep.

  Let’s deal with the blushing. He had been finding pretexts to postpone the inescapable. He heard about it at dinner, laughs and mockery included. He abhorred the news-lite, scandal-thick, soft-porn, sensationalist tabloids, but he had been force-fed on regurgitated and distorted articles about Belinda and himself. The contempt was not reciprocal, they adored them. And when they couldn’t get material, they simply made it up. Somehow, they got hold of yesterday’s private correspondence with Belinda. Nothing racy, but no lack of intimate. The UK’s Daily Mail front page announced, “LOVESICK JIMMY SERENADES FAVORITE EARTHLING. NAKED!” Not true. Not naked. But yes, he was proving to be a blossoming, unapologetic romantic. I’m in love with one and a half women.

  He was dozing off when a foreign sound lifted above his alert threshold. Adrenaline rushed thoughts in his confused, half-asleep mind. It sounds—it sounds like … radio white noise? He racked his brain trying to make sense of the unusual sound. It’s … a sandstorm against the hull. James jumped to his feet and ran for the ladder. At 40 percent gravity, his moves were feline. As he climbed toward the ship’s center, the artificial gravity broke down. He did a quick pull-up and the inertia lifted his whole body up, flying.

  He intersected an airborne Yi as they headed to the flight deck’s Observation Window. Sergei was already there. Soon after Sophia and Derya joined them as well. There was nothing but the black void in front with a deluge of stars in the fathomless background.

  “A micro-asteroid shower,” said Sergei.

  “A few microns in size at most, otherwise we would be dead … maybe an interplanetary dust storm …” said James.

  They all stood immobile, floating in silence. Slowly they discerned the change in intensity. It deescalated and then picked up, an erratic wave pattern of infinitesimal stones ricocheting against the spaceship’s fuselage.

  “It’s the Universe courteously knocking on our door,” said Sophia.

  “I commend the poetry, but what guarantees it doesn’t slam a fist-sized asteroid into us?” said Derya.

  “We are about an eighth into the asteroid belt. Since 1972’s Pioneer 10, fifteen unmanned spacecraft have crossed it unharmed,” answered Sergei.

  “That’s a pretty modest sample for me to fall back asleep to,” said Derya.

  “James, we should do a hull inspection spacewalk over the next few days,” said Sergei, the only one who still didn’t address the rest of the crew with nicknames.15

  * * *

  15 December 25 2027. Day 192; 2.7 Years to Saturn

  Before launch, every crew member had a strict weight allowance for nonessential personal items. Derya spent almost all of his on a telescope especially designed by Meade, the world’s largest manufacturer. With a twenty-two-inch aperture, it allowed 1,500x magnification and light-gathering power 5,000x that of the unaided eye. Back on Earth it would have been the most high-end expert recreational telescope available. Here, with no twinkling or optical distortion from the atmosphere, it became a mini-Hubble. Anchored to the center of the flight deck’s Observation Window, anyone mistaking it for public property would promptly see the tag: “Achtung. No touching w/o Derya’s supervision. Danke.”

  Sophia tried drumming up the Christmas spirit at dinnertime, but the most she got was Yi promising to watch Home Alone, alone. Instead,
she found herself accompanying Derya by his telescope. He had become a regular nighttime fixture around it. She still didn’t quite get him and sometimes he seemed insincere, even cunning to her. He’s also vain and even he seems to agree: there’s this Caravaggio painting in his cabin of Narcissus gazing at his own water reflection—hey, respect, know thyself. But, and it was a big but, he had proved rabidly loyal to James and the mission. And maybe, by transitivity, to us—besides, you don’t get to pick friends around here.

  “Want to check out Saturn?” asked Derya.

  “Grandma Yoo-bin was wise beyond her years. She once said if you ever came across a crystal ball you should run away as if you saw the boogie man. Saturn’s coming in three years. I would rather wait. But I would be honored to be shown asteroid Juju, your major-league discovery.”

  Derya cleared his throat. “Shackleton is crossing the asteroid belt, the giant ring of debris from the formation of our Solar System between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. If Jimmy was here, I’m sure he would add something like ‘with millions of asteroids over half a mile in diameter—a size sufficient to evaporate a country and disrupt Earth’s climate for decades—complex life on Earth may have only arisen thanks to the gravitational shepherding effect of Jupiter, the gas giant that maintains martial order and stable orbits over every denizen belonging to the asteroid belt,’ no? But as I’ve shown—as this mission has shown—instead of harbingers of death, asteroids form the essential building blocks of a Utopian future. Asteroids contain metals of both the standard and precious variety, in ultra high grade and virtually unlimited quantities. Platinum, the most precious metal on Earth, for example—thirty times rarer than gold, yet required in minute quantities in one in four manufactured goods. A single tiny platinum-rich asteroid contains more of it than has been mined in the history of humanity. People such as my friend Jeff Bezos—”