by Zaslow Crane
Arna paused. “But that’s not the disturbing part….”
Rhonda leaned in.
“We have space hitchhikers who can live on the outside of our ship—in space—and that’s not the disturbing part?”
Rhonda was unable to keep the disbelief from her voice. This was not orderly and explainable. It bothered her.
Arna looked around to each of her crew mates.“Tardigrades are microscopic.”
“Yeah…?”
“Really, really tiny….”
Get on with it! Tonya thought.
“The really weird part is that I didn’t need to magnify them very much at all to see what Claudia brought in. If you look really closely, you can just make them out…And that’s without a microscope.”
“So they’re big now?” Tonya prompted.
“Yes. And…they’re growing.”
“Growing? I don’t understand. In order for life, as we know it, to exist, there needs to be an energy source, a stable environment, liquid water and…a food source.”
Suddenly she put together all the information that was presently available.
“Oh my God!! They’re eating the ship?!”
Arna gestured feebly, “I…I think that’s it.”
Rhonda was incensed. “Their food source is the ship?” “I think so. Yes.”
“Thoughts on how this happened?” She looked at the other two crewmates.
“Canaveral does its best to keep Ops sterile but there’s only so much they can do,” Rhonda began.
Claudia jumped in with her thoughts, “The solar activity. I was joking about The Hulk, but that may be what has happened. Maybe those bugs mutated. And if they get bigger, they need more food; more food, more reproduction…more, more, more…pretty soon…no more us.”
“Okay, Claudia, as soon as you’re honestly ready to go back out, go. Don’t rush yourself. I don’t want accidents because of you or anyone else, being tired. Now that you know what you’re looking for, Arna can guide you. Get us an idea of how badly we’re infested. Capture as much as you can on your chestcam. Once we know what we’re facing and have some idea of how bad it is, I’ll apprise Canaveral. Rhonda, you and I will assist Arna on this. She is the lead. Let’s get these bugs under control.”
“Yeah…We’re a bit far out of town to call in an exterminator…”
lll “I’ve tried heat, then cold. It’s 2.7 Kelvin out there, so I didn’t think cold would do anything but…you know…covering my bases.”
“How about chemical agents?”
“There are so few chemicals that are usable in a vacuum, and that we might have…and some are radically changed by a vacuum, so, thus far, I held off on chemical agents….”
“Yeah, I get it. Keep me posted.”
“Of course, Cap.”
“How about radiation?”
“Well, since that was how we got here, I was holding off on that too….”
“X-rays?”
Arna fidgeted a bit, unused to so much scrutiny.
“Well, there was an X-ray component of the gamma bombardment…So, no, I didn’t try that. Visible light doesn’t seem to bother them, in fact they might like being inside…I was going to try infrared…sound, but nothing has even bothered them. I confess, I’m worried, Cap.”
“Me too Arna, but I’m not giving in yet. Keep at it.”
“Ay, Cap.”
lll “We must have had a few onboard when we launched. Then they went into hibernation while Mars Leap was being readied. My best guess is that the gamma rays did, in fact, cause them to mutate. Now, they seem to be resistant to anything I’ve tried to degrade their ability to grow and reproduce. I’m still trying things…I confess, that I’m running out of ideas, though….”
“Thanks,Arna. Keep at it.We’re not at ‘scrub’ yet. Canaveral seems to think that we could detach our cargo and fling it at Mars and turn around and limp home. We’re still working on the rate of infection, and since their growth rate seems to grow unabated as well as their individual size, it’s difficult to assess and arrive at a contagion rate. The contagion rate will eventually tell us how long ‘til hull breach.”
lll
Over the next few days Claudia and Rhonda suited up and EVA’d. Even though Arna was EVA two she was tasked with finding something that the Tartigrades didn’t like. Arna marveled at the figures onscreen in front of her.“They’ve established a sort of thermal equilibrium, even out there…almost absolute zero,” she pointed to the wall of the ship.
“We have Nomex III built into the innards of the skin to protect from excess heat. Maybe Heat? Maybe a lot of heat will dislodge them….”
The comm crackled, “Uhhh, Arn?”
“Yeah Rhonda?”
“There’ll be no convection or conduction, so it’ll have to be
all radiation. Maybe we can slowly spin the ship to maximize the heat of the sun, then….” Claudia cut in. “Give me an hour. I have an idea! Rhonda, I’m going to get some tools. Meet me at solar collector eight.”
“Eight?”
“It’s the easiest one to take out of the circuit and dismount.”
Rhonda finally envisioned Claudia’s idea, “Yes!”
In mere…well…hours, this is the vacuum of Space they were working in; the solar panel was being used as a giant reflector beaming down a great deal of radiant energy upon the ‘bugs.’
Meanwhile Arna had tried a light source and an optical element that served as a magnifying glass.
Tonya looked over her shoulder, “Ever roast ants with a magnifying glass when you were a kid?”
Arna was aghast, “No that would be willful and horrible. Ants are benign creatures!”
“Okay, forget I asked.”
lll
Meanwhile, a few meters and worlds away at the same time, Claudia and Rhonda had wrestled the huge but flimsy foil “wing” around to catch the full sun.
“Angle it down a bit,” Rhonda instructed.
“I can actually distinguish individuals now,” Claudia said in awe. “Not good.”
“No sh…right. Not good.”
“Arn?”
“I’m here, Rhonda.”
“Any positive results with your ant roasting in there?” “Why does everyone talk about roasting ants? What were
your childhoods like?”
“Sorry I asked. Any promising reactions from…our subjects?” There was a pause.
“Inconclusive. The heat and brightness seem to inhibit
breeding but not growth. They need dim lighting to mate? Sounds familiar….”
“Keep it professional, Ms P. This is serious.”
“You got it.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay but be the pros you are. You’ve got a big reflector
in full sun. Blast those guys. See if they die.”
“Heating them up!”
lll Claudia frowned and the disappointment showed plainly on her face.
“After a while, Rhonda and I gave up. I couldn’t see any improvement. So, we put the reflector back and re-aligned it. I went back into my tool kit and just started scraping them up and scraping them onto another putty knife back and forth until they fall off and fall behind.”
“Slow work.”
“Yeah. Too slow. Plus, I can’t get them all. There’s always some down in the cracks and crevices; enough for that colony to start again.”
“Let’s wake Cap up and see what she wants to do next.”
“No. Let’s not. She’s been up working on this for over two days straight. She got cheated out of her sleep shift. Let her sleep.”
Rhonda looked over at her compatriots. “Okay as Tonya says: “Ideas?”
lll
“Ready to electrify.” The three crew members, tired themselves, had decided to jury-rig a line from the generator and secondary power center to the ship’s skin. Being metal, they hoped that 320 volts DC that the ship and its solar array generated, would shock the Tartigrades into leaping off the “hot” ship
with their eight stumpy legs.
Rhonda had taken over in the interim. “Shut everything down. I want everything ‘safed’ before we light up our little home away from home.”
“Ready. We’re on isolated minimal power. Even the life support is offline, so don’t mess around too long okay?” Arna smiled nervously.
Rhonda nodded with guarded satisfaction.
“Okay. Claudia, please, go gently wake skipper and tell her to lie still and don’t let her touch anything metal, just in case. Everyone else, I’m counting down from ten, then we’ll have a ten second ‘burn’ and then ‘off.’ Then we run everything back up and Claudia or I will go outside to check on them to see if we’re bug free.
Claudia crept quietly into the tiny bulkhead room.“Skipper? Skipper? Don’t move, okay? We’re going to try to burn these little bastards off our hull. Don’t move.”
“Wait. What?”
“We just want you to be safe. Don’t get up. You might touch metal.”
“What are you doing?”
“We’re electrifying the hull.”
“What? No!”
Meanwhile Rhonda had started the count down. 4…3…2…1…
“Belay that order! Now!”
Tonya was floating in her doorway, having shoved a woman twice her size out of the way in order to get to Control.
“Standing down.”
Rhonda seemed dejected.
“Did Canaveral okay this plan?”
She looked right at Rhonda.
“Well, no, but they didn’t seem to have any ideas, we’re waiting longer and longer imagining them scratching their pointed heads, and we’re in totally new territory with these things. We talked it out and it seemed like a good idea.”
Tonya walked over to the lab area. “Did you try electrocuting these guys in the lab? Do you know what will happen? Isn’t it possible that the energy that you flush through the ship will further nourish these guys?”
“We discussed it. It seemed to us that if we gave them everything we had; it might just be too much for them to absorb.”
“Did you test it first?” Tonya said pointing to covered petri dishes fastened with Velcro to a worktable.
Rhonda was going to plead her case but relented.
“No. No we didn’t. We figured that this was almost our last shot to get free of this infestation. Who knows what they are capable of? Besides how would we calculate a baseline charge for something so small and factor it up for an entire ship? Exponentially that’d be a factor of hundreds, or more- much more- if we calculated based on the mass of the ship, instead of the area of the skin.”
“Mightn’t it be that the energy represented by a huge charge of electricity and a blast from a bursting sunspot might be almost the same to such a simple animal? I’m disappointed…disappointed in all of you for not running tests first. Who knows what might have happened if you guessed wrong? You were gambling with all our lives, and even endangering the settlers on Mars.”
Tonya would have said more but she noticed an alarm. It began, slowly quietly, then began to build.
“What now?”
Claudia was nearest to the readout.
“Damn, boss. Minor hull breach. We’re losing air.”
Tonya scratched her head and rubbed her eyes impatiently.
“Okay everyone suit up. Fire up all systems except life support. Claudia, you and I are going to go see these little bastards in their natural habitat.”
“Yessir.”
No one had ever heard so much as the mildest curse from Tonya’s lips before, and it spurred them to their jobs as nothing else might have.
lll Tonya surveyed the skin of her ship and the ‘infected’ areas. Then she looked at her tools.
“This is what we’re down to? Pathetic. Putty knives, tube sealant and duct tape. Granted the sealant-tar really and duct tape has been re-imagined for use in space but that’s what it is. Tar and duct tape. Scrape those little killers off there so I can slap on a coat of sealant and tape over it. I’d very much like to keep our air inside where we live.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Claudia scraped back and forth on the knives until the black goo that they knew to be hundreds of growing bugs fell away from them. They were still traveling at the same speed but so long as they had no mode of propulsion save for their legs a few meters might as well be miles.
“I realize that tarring over them might only slow down their growth and reproductive cycles but I’ll take what I can get!”
“Maybe the tar will kill them.”
“Maybe.” Tonya sounded dubious.
“Cap?” Arna’s voice sounded almost childlike over the comm.
“What?”
“Another leak.Approximately thirty meters aft and starboard from your position.”
“Understood.”
Then her comm went offline for a moment. From her posture Claudia could only assume that she was howling in rage and frustration, but like that old movie poster once said: “In Space, no one can hear you scream.”
lll “I’m out of tar for now Arna. Also low on tape. Please tell me that you’re finished with the alarms for today.”
“Nothing new, Cap.”
“Humph. Sixth time’s the charm I guess, now that we’ve ghetto’d this beautiful ship up with the space equivalent of bondo and primer. We’re coming in.”
“Yes, please do. I’ve noticed something odd.”
“Define odd Arna. I know you’re from Iceland, but don’t leave me in suspense, give me a ray of hope if that’s what you’ve got.”
“Excuse me?”
Tonya sighed in frustration, but said none of the things that came to mind.
“Okay. We’ll try it this way. Odd that is good, or odd that is worse than today has already been? We’ve got to get to handoff at Mars.”
“Might be good odd. Might…be…something….”
“I’ll be right there.”
lll “Okay, I agree. These little guys look unhappy. No motile activity. Reproduction has slowed to a crawl, judging by the footage from earlier today. What did you do?”
Arna looked sheepish, “That’s just it. I didn’t do anything. This is a comparatively new batch culled from our testing stock.”
“You must have done something.”
“I’ve been wracking my brain; gone over every step….”
Tonya thought for a moment. “Okay then, we’ll help. Rhonda, throw the cabin cam up on the monitor. Let’s back up the clock to say, late yesterday. Claudia, please make us all something to eat. We’re going to sit here until we figure what made these little guys so unhappy, because we need them all to be really, really unhappy!”
Tonya thought about the crew electrifying the ship and shuddered. If it had worked, great, but if it ‘fed’ them as she suspected, then they all would be saying their goodbyes to friends and family right about now. I’m not ready to die. And I sure don’t want to die in space; I want to be an old lady who dies in her bed.
lll They felt the hours grind by, but stayed at it because they knew that they might be on the brink of something.
Finally, Tonya’s eyes, now red and tired, bugged out.
“Wait! There. Go back.”
“What? What?”
Since the cam went to whoever had made the last motion or had spoken, it was constantly shifting; following the action. Sometimes what Arna was doing was in the foreground, sometimes not.
“There. The cleaning. You skipped a step.”
“I did? I must have been tired.”
Tonya’s blue eyes danced. “You got tired and we might have just gotten lucky! Go back again…right…right…there! I was watching your routine. You skipped a step in cleaning. What is that step?”
“It’s a rinse. I bleach everything so any traces of the earlier solutions are cleaned, then I do a complete and thorough rinse.” She paused and her jaw dropped as the enormity of what she’d discovered hit her, right between the eyes. “I skipped the r
inse. Bleach! Bleach kills them!”
“Bleach?” Claudia couldn’t get her head around this new information.
“Sure, why not?” Rhonda said, grinning ear-to-ear. “The common cold killed the Martians.”
“It did? When was that?”
“Around 1900 or so. You’ve never read War of the Worlds?”
“Clearly my education was lacking. What’s that got to do with bleach?”
“It’s the Tartigrades’ Kryptonite!” Rhonda smirked.
Claudia nodded. “Okay. That one I get.”
Tonya was suddenly optimistic.
“Arna, please administer a quarter of a dropper full of bleach on this colony.”
They began dying almost immediately. In moments, none of them stirred.
“Let’s try some older, maybe more established, more robust colonies.”
Each time, there was almost instant death.
“Well, that’s something,” Tonya said. She allowed for the first really full deep breath she had taken for days.
“That’s all well and good, but we can’t use bleach ‘outside;’ the liquid will boil away before it even reaches them.”
Rhonda’s bright eyes were hooded and guarded.
“It won’t even pour, Boss.”
“Okay. Right…you’re right. Okay. Claudia…Everyone…calm. This, at least is a weapon. Now we need to find a way to deploy it.”
A cheer rose up among the crew. Then when it died down. Tonya said, “Quiet a sec. What’s that?”
Indeed, now that it was as quiet as the ship got, there was a small noise; a scraping sound mixed with the push of air and a small status indicator noise. It was very small and difficult to get a fix on.
“You don’t suppose…?” Claudia looked around trying hard to pinpoint the source.
It was from outside.
“Okay. That’s it! We are now officially on the clock. Find me a way to stop these things!”
Only then did the alarms begin.
Thanks, but we’ve got it. Tonya thought grimly.
lll
The viewscreen lit up Rhonda’s face.z “Boss! I found it!” Rhonda shrieked in delight. “What? What?” Tonya had dozed off and was fast asleep on her forearm while still seated at the common room table.
She wiped a bit of drool off her face that due to lack of gravity had smeared her cheek in the oddest way.
