The Terranauts

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  All right. The public understood that. The press ate it up, feasted on it. E2 was everywhere, from national TV to the New York Times and Time and Newsweek and every talk radio show in existence. And what happened? Within twelve days after closure one of the crew—Roberta Brownlow—had a medical emergency, the seals were broken, and the deal was off. She was out in the world, your world (what we like to call E1, the original ecosphere) for less than five hours, but even if it had been five minutes, five seconds, the whole thing would have collapsed. Because it was the conceit that counted, and couldn’t anybody see that?

  If they were on Mars, she would have died. They all would have died. If not from O2 depletion, then starvation. The fact was, the Mission One crew was to go on to break closure in a panoply of ways during the course of the mission—once the precedent had been set, they all figured why not?—and the public saw through that and labeled the whole thing a sham. Goodbye. Adios. Forget the lessons learned. Forget ecology. Forget modeling and the Intensive Agriculture Biome and the elegant interaction of the wilderness biomes and all the rest. All that mattered was that the crew had broken closure, reneged on a promise, on the deal, and that was laughable, it really was. What did E.O. Wilson say? If those committed to the quest fail, they will be forgiven. The moral imperative of humanism is the endeavor alone, whether successful or not, provided the effort is honorable and the failure memorable.

  Well, he was wrong. There is no forgiveness and there won’t be the next time or the time after that and we weren’t about to make the same mistake. Tell me: what does closure mean? It means closure. Period. The good news was that Mission Control was on board with that, one hundred percent. Of course they were—learn from your mistakes, right? They did a whole lot of fast backpedaling and settled into prophylactic mode, as in let’s anticipate the problems before they arise. They’d made Gretchen Frost have her wisdom teeth removed, and T.T. (Troy Turner) took a course in emergency dentistry, just in case, and we all lauded that. They didn’t go as far maybe as Louis Leakey when he refused to send his ape ladies (or his Trimates, as he called them, Goodall, Galdikas and Fossey) into the jungle if they didn’t agree beforehand to have their appendixes removed by way of foreseeing the unforeseen. Because Leakey, like Wilson, a humanist as well as a scientist, didn’t want to run even the infinitesimal risk of having one of them turn septicemic and drop dead on him hundreds of miles from any kind of even semi-acceptable medical intervention. Or the blood supply. Imagine the blood supply back in the sixties and seventies in West Africa and Borneo? Or even now. Now it was worse, far worse, with HIV, AIDS and maybe even Ebola pulsing through the circulatory pathways of our criminally expanding species, pandemic, everything a pandemic, apocalypse festering in the blood. But don’t get me started.

  Mission Control would have liked it if we’d gone under the knife too, I’m sure, but the medical detection these days is far more sophisticated than what it was and they were able to fairly well rule out any signs of incipient appendicitis among the final eight. And, as I said, even if one of us had something catastrophic occur once we were inside—ruptured appendix, gangrene, heart failure—it wouldn’t have made an iota of difference. That would be it. Death was as much a part of natural processes as life, and in strictly Darwinian terms, practical terms, that is, it would be a boon for the other seven. As it was, we’d be hard-pressed to feed ourselves, if the Mission One crew was any indication, and to have one less digestive tract up and working would go a long way toward taking some of the pressure off.

  I’m talking theoretically here, of course, and strictly in terms of caloric intake—the loss of any of us would be a public relations disaster and an emotional one too, because we were a team and we were dedicated to one another no matter what anybody tells you. There are going to be strains in any enterprise that truly breaks new ground, that’s only to be expected—witness the Russian Bios experiment in which one of the men wound up sexually assaulting one of the women just three months after closure. Actually, since I’ve started down this path, I suppose you can never underestimate people’s appetite for the sensational—if somebody were to die inside, there’s no doubt our public awareness factor would shoot up. Simple as that. Not that it was going to happen, but we were prepared for anything. If the eight of us had stopped short of lacerating our palms and taking a blood oath, we’d made our pact nonetheless. Nothing in, nothing out. That was our mantra.

  Was Roberta Brownlow’s situation unfortunate? Yes, of course it was. And I’m sure you remember the flap over it—furor, really—and how the press came howling after her like hyenas on a scent. Or jackals, I suppose, since hyenas don’t howl, do they? She was Mission One’s MDA, very good-looking, stunning actually, an exemplar of what our species has come to consider prime breeding stock, with a robust figure, abundant hair and teeth like piano keys—the white ones, that is—and she had a way with the press that was just short of flirtatious on the one hand and all business on the other. She was a perfect choice, not simply by way of looks but because she was first-rate at what she did, which, though it involved the least scientific knowledge or discipline, was on some level the most essential function of the crew: to provide food. She wasn’t “Supervisor of Field Crops,” the title that would go to Diane Kesselring on our mission, but the lion’s share of her work went into food production, more than anyone else’s. So she was a fit, Roberta Brownlow, and we were all proud of her. (Yes, we: I came aboard, as most people will know, two months before Mission One closure, putting my head down and working support staff till training started for Mission Two.) But accidents happen. And if you’re timid—afraid, that is, cowardly, trembling like preschoolers scared of their own shadows—you lose your head, and then everything, if you’ll excuse me, goes to shit.

  Twelve days in. She was in the basement where all our internal support systems are located—the big air handler units, the water treatment tanks, machine shop—feeding rice stalks into the threshing machine with the crew’s medical officer, Winston Barr, whose turn it was to pitch in with the ag work that morning (a lucky break at an unlucky time), when she lost track of what she was doing. The thresher, the same one that’s in place now, has a lower cylinder attached where the hulls are separated from the stems, and she was attempting to clear a blockage there when the roller took hold of her right hand. By the time her scream alerted him and he shut down the machine, the damage had been done. Without thinking, in that instant of shock before the pain hit, Roberta snatched her hand back and when she did a geyser of blood erupted from her middle finger, spattering the thresher, the wall behind it, the shirt Winston Barr had just washed and dried the day before. (How do I know that? The shirt detail, that is? He told me. Personally. And I relate it to you because it’s one of those maybe overlooked minor details that underpin the meaning of everything that happens in our lives, from the prosaic to the tragic. And this was tragic. Beyond tragic: it was fatal to the mission.)

  Two of the other crewmembers, summoned by walkie-talkie while Winston applied pressure and Roberta went from pale to parchment and had to sit heavily on the floor with her head down between her legs, picked through the hulls until they found her severed fingertip so that Winston could sew it back in place. He knew what he was doing. He was dexterous, good with sutures and good with the patient too, but he wasn’t a hand surgeon and the medical lab wasn’t a hospital. Three days later, when the fingertip, which Roberta held up to the visitors’ window for Mission Control and the best hand man in Pima County to examine, turned the color of blood sausage, Mission Control made the call and summoned an ambulance. Which meant breaking closure. Which meant the shitstorm was about to commence.

  All right. I wouldn’t want to get too critical here, but you can see my point, I’m sure: what’s a fingertip compared to the sanctity of the mission and the vow the crew had made to the world? Nothing. If it were me, I’d have given up all my fingertips, all ten digits—hell, if it came to it, I’d have snipped off my toes too. You think Shackl
eton worried about appendages? Or Sir Edmund Hillary? But you’re not martyrs, people would say. You’re not really on Mars. It isn’t life and death. People would say that—maybe you’re saying it now—but they’d be wrong. A pledge is a pledge: nothing in, nothing out.

  And that’s just where things spiraled out of control. Roberta Brownlow was outside for just five hours and during that time, while she went to and fro in the ambulance and they cleaned and re-stitched and re-bandaged the wound at the hospital, she’d breathed in no more than something like five thousand lungsful of E1 air and consumed exactly one granola bar and a Coke Classic—no lobster Newburg, no caviar, no steak tartare or pigs in a blanket—and yet it didn’t matter. Every instant of it was photographed and splashed across the front pages of newspapers around the world—and that was just the beginning. When she went back in, when she breached the airlock for the second time, she was carrying two bags with her. Two bags! What was she thinking? What was Mission Control thinking? This was the moon, this was Mars, this was material closure, not some greenhouse you could just stroll in and out of whenever you had the urge, and why not order up a pizza while you’re at it? Pepperoni, anybody? Extra cheese? No. The whole thing was a travesty. And what was in those bags—medicine, machine parts, bourbon, a book of crossword puzzles and the latest CD from the King of Pop? Nobody knew. And nobody ever found out, not even me.

  But enough negativity. I’ve been called everything from cold and calculating to the face of the mission and its beating heart too. My own assessment? Frankly? Somewhere in between. As for heart, excuse me, but I’m as soft at the core as the next person. I’m not some sort of machine or corporate stooge or whatever, no matter what you may have heard from people like Gretchen Frost or Troy Turner or who?—Linda Ryu, whose every comment and so-called insight is nothing but sour grapes, believe me. I get emotional. I get choked up. And you know what? That first official dinner, the one that capped off Selection Day? I’d had a pretty good idea who was in and who was out, but Mission Control could be fickle, and though I had little to no anxiety about my own position, still, after all the shared sweat and second-guessing and bonding, debonding and re-bonding with the other fifteen candidates, I have to admit I was fighting back tears when G.C. announced my name at the reception at Alfano’s and I stepped forward as the others applauded and Judy and Dennis beamed and the ex officio mission photographer clicked away. I don’t know how to explain it, but that night, the night before the press conference, we seemed to rise to an emotional height we never quite reached again. I’m talking brother- and sisterhood here, the solidarity of common purpose, wills united—and, I suppose, in no small measure, simple relief at having made it this far.

  But let me set the scene. No one would confuse Alfano’s with a quality restaurant, but it held pride of place in the little town of Tillman, Arizona, forty miles northeast of Tucson and gateway to a major tourist attraction that was pumping real dollars into the local economy—us, that is. Most nights, it was packed, and it was no different on this occasion. The space was typical of mall design, low-ceilinged but otherwise barn-like, with booths along both walls and tables that could be pieced together in just about any arrangement to accommodate a crowd. The lighting was subdued enough to hide the frayed industrial carpeting and marinara stains on the walls, and I had no complaints on that score: give me a couple of candles and I’m happy. As for the food, it was about what you’d expect from a generic Italian place no Italian chef had ever set foot in—heavy on pasta, light on substance. But, as I say, it was the best the town had to offer and it was the occasion rather than the cuisine that held us in its sway.

  We had drinks at the bar, one round only as G.C. didn’t want the celebration to get out of hand with two privileged members of the fourth estate looking on, and I’d ordered a double vodka on the rocks, which partially explained the rush of sentiment I was feeling. We all embraced three or four times, hovering over the bar, our voices garbled and giddy, and I liked the way E. was looking in a long black dress set off with a red belt and matching shoes, and I kissed her twice—on the lips—whereas I kissed the other three women, Gretchen, Diane and Stevie, only once each, and in what you’d call a more glancing manner, I suppose. “Jesus,” she said, “you are excited,” and her eyes were pinballs caroming off one baffle after another.

  “I’m excited?” I was rocking back and forth on my feet, grinning like a fool. “Look at yourself—you’re practically in orbit.”

  “Yeah,” she said, her voice soft and sugared and coming from someplace deep inside her, a voice of pure satisfaction and joie d’accomplissement. “I’ve never been so excited in my life. You too?”

  I nodded and even as I did I noticed Judy swing her head round at the end of the bar and give me a look. This was awkward. The fact was that while G.C. was planning on returning to Mission Control with Dennis after dinner to fine-tune things for tomorrow’s press conference, I was going to take Judy, very quietly and unobtrusively, back to my room, because as risky as it might have been neither of us seemed capable of putting a stop to what had begun as a not-so-innocent flirtation nearly a year ago—and now we had just a month left to get our fill of each other before closure dropped the curtain on it. That was the situation. That was the mise-en-scène. And if Judy had been watching me embrace at least one of my fellow Terranauts with maybe an excess of enthusiasm, what could I say? I flashed her a quick smile, then turned back to my crewmate.

  “But you knew in advance, didn’t you?” Dawn said, a teasing note in her voice, but something else too, something accusatory that should have set off warning bells in my brain, but my brain, as I’ve indicated, was riding high on the moment. And the vodka.

  “Not really.”

  “What do you mean, ‘not really’? Nobody dropped any hints? Since you’re so, I don’t know, tight with G.C. and Dennis. And Judy.”

  My smile was like the sun coming up over a big broad-backed river, dawn, that is, on the Mississippi or maybe the Amazon. How much she knew, I couldn’t say. “Not telling.”

  And her smile? Every bit as pleased—and flirtatious. I felt a stirring between my legs (strictly autonomous and of course I didn’t know then what I know now). Two years, I was thinking. Four men, four women. “Come on,” she said, putting her hand on my forearm, five shapely fingers that had grown tough as talons as a result of all that hard labor in the test plots and the IAB. She held her smile. “You’re not fooling anybody.”

  One more glance for Judy. She had her head turned, deep in conversation with Dennis and Troy Turner. “Maybe just a little,” I admitted, and here we were, locked in a grinning contest.

  Whatever might have happened beyond that, beyond your essential crewmate chumminess and gum-blistering expression of mutual admiration, never revealed itself because G.C., enthroned on a faux-leather-bound stool at the prow of the L-shaped bar, began rapping a spoon against the rim of his glass. Conversation died. Even the outsiders pounding away at their pitchers and shots at the Formica-topped tables in the bar stopped what they were doing and looked up.

  “Before we head in to dinner and start our countdown to closure,” G.C. intoned in his rolling melodic voice, “I just want to recognize the eight crewmembers who will soon be going where no man has gone before”—and here, incredibly, he nodded at E., and if my eyes weren’t deceiving me even seemed to wink at her—“or woman. Except, of course, the Mission One Terranauts, whose legacy Mission Two will seek to deepen and refine.” He went on in that vein for a sentence or two more but I wasn’t listening, baffled over the meaning of that gesture—why was he singling her out? A powerful aroma of deep-fried calamari and parmigiana penetrated the scene and we all shifted our eyes for a quick glancing moment to the waiter gliding beneath his tray to a table of outsiders in the far corner of the bar, and then G.C., without the fanfare he would make fulsome use of the following day at the official press conference, announced each of us—in alphabetical order—so that we could step apart from the group, b
eaming or blushing as the case may be, for our moment of preliminary glory. Of course, you’re all familiar with the names, no suspense there, but since this is an official record—or my personal official record, if that manages to avoid being an oxymoron—I’ll list them and their crew titles, just as G.C. announced them that day:

  Dawn Chapman, Manager of Domestic Animals

  Tom Cook, Technosphere Supervisor

  Gretchen Frost, Manager of Wilderness Biomes

  Diane Kesselring, Supervisor of Field Crops and Crew Captain

  Richard Lack, Medical Officer

  Ramsay Roothoorp, Communications Officer/Water Systems Manager

  Troy Turner, Director of Analytic Systems

  Stevie van Donk, Marine Systems Specialist

  We were photographed from the neck up, since we wouldn’t don our crimson jumpsuits until the following day for the press conference, and then we went in to dinner and sat down to a mediocre-to-fairly-decent meal that provided more calories from fat than we’d get in a week inside. I was seated between Stevie and Gretchen, Stevie on my right, Gretchen to my left. Judy, who saw to every detail with the fanatical devotion of a top-flight manager and anal-retentive A-type personality who can never delegate or let go, had drawn up the seating plan and inscribed the place cards herself in a delicate tracery so flawless you would have thought she was a Japanese shodō master, and we were arranged round the table in a male/female pattern as if at a conventional dinner party. Which only made sense, not simply in terms of etiquette but physicality too.

  E. was across the table from me, seated between Richard and Troy, and I tried not to stare, or even look at her for that matter, and what this sudden fascination with her was all about—excess of the moment, excess of testosterone, boredom with Judy or deep character flaw—I didn’t have a clue. Call it pre-closure jitters. Of course I’d noticed her before, fantasized about her—I’d have to have been blind or impotent not to—but there was something about the moment and how alive she was with this new rapture singing in her veins that just took hold of me and wouldn’t let go.