Analog SFF, September 2010 (20 page)

"How's it hanging?” Quentin asked, the same question he always asked, no doubt because it was even more inane than usual in free fall.

"Good,” Michael answered automatically. Both of them spoke loudly, not with macho bravado but out of necessity. All the cooling fans and circulation fans on board the ISS gave it the background ambience of a railroad yard.

"Yeah?” Quentin let the word hang between them for a moment, an invitation to talk if Michael wanted to.

"Yeah, things are actually . . . actually just about perfect. I'm in space! It's been my dream for as long as I can remember."

Quentin grinned. “Mine too. It's not quite the Buck Rogers scout ship I imagined as a kid, but here we are. I'm kind of sorry to be going home next month."

He'd been on board for five months already. Duty tours had settled down to a regular six-month schedule now that the Russians were responsible for all the flights. Michael had come up with the last supply rocket, and the cosmonaut he'd replaced had ridden it back down. Quentin would go on the next one. Two months after that, Larisa would go, and Michael would be the old-timer on board until his replacement came.

Quentin gestured at the walls, festooned with equipment Velcroed, tied, or simply wedged into place against every available surface. “Good thing the place looks like such a dump in the photos, or the competition for space up here would be even worse than it is, eh?"

"Right, good thing,” Michael said.

"Enjoy it while you've got it,” Quentin said.

Michael tried. He succeeded, too, but the problem was, he seemed to be enjoying it too much. In the days that followed, he teared up over the most trivial things. The sight of Earth curving away from him out the window, the smell of dinner in the otherwise nearly antiseptic space-station air, even the sight of the tiny crocuses in the Ukrainian high-school experiment that he, as both the biologist and the low man on the totem pole, had to tend each day.

It was a simple experiment. The high school class had decided to watch one of their country's native plants through an entire growth cycle and see how the lack of gravity affected it. They had chosen
Crocus angustifolius
, the “cloth of gold” crocus, because it was small, responded well to cultivation, and had pretty yellow blossoms. They had sent up a cylinder about a meter long and a third that wide, already planted with half a dozen corms that had sprouted within days after Michael had watered them and switched on the light.

The whole experiment had nearly come to an early end. On his first full day on board the station, when he was still getting used to maneuvering in free fall, Michael had underestimated his inertia and had careened into the experiment rack, busting a big chunk out of the Plexiglas cover with his elbow. He had duct-taped it back together, but it didn't fit tight anymore, so he had to be extra careful when he watered the plants.

Nobody had said anything, but he could imagine what went unsaid. The hotshot biologist had nearly blown the simplest experiment on the station. Wonder how he'll do on the DNA sequencer?

Not half bad, it turned out, except for the day when he burst into tears at the sight of a zebrafish genome. One of the fish strains that had been on board for nearly five years was developing longer, lacier fins, and he had found the genetic sequence that controlled it. Researchers on the ground had long ago shown that the
fgfr1
gene affected fin growth and regeneration, but this was the first proof that evolutionary pressure could switch it on. When Michael had realized he was looking at the very blueprint of evolving life, he'd lost his self-control and the next moment he was crying like a mother at a wedding.

Fortunately, he was alone this time. Larisa was asleep in the crew quarters, and Quentin was across Node 2 in the Kibo module. Michael sniffed and dabbed at his eyes and bit his lip and clenched his fists and took deep breaths, and he eventually brought himself under control again, but later that day he got out the medical kit and self-prescribed an anti-depressant. He was supposed to confer with Mission Control first, but like any astronaut from Alan Shepard onward, he had learned not to involve the flight surgeon's office in anything he didn't have to. The only thing those guys ever did for astronauts was ground them if their health wasn't absolutely perfect. And an astronaut who couldn't control his emotions was sure to be grounded. If word of this got down to Mission Control, it would be Michael, not Quentin, who would be headed back to Earth on the next supply ship.

Antidepressants didn't just stop depression. They also moderated highs. They clipped both ends of the emotional spectrum, so Michael figured they might help him cope with his overwhelming feelings of joy. For several days they seemed to do so, which was probably the placebo effect since the package insert said it usually took at least a week for anti-depressants to kick in. Then one of the crocuses bloomed, and Michael dissolved at the sight of its pale yellow blossom reaching out toward the grow-light and just touching the top of its Plexiglas dome.

There was no hiding it this time. Larisa was just three feet away on his left, tending to her cryomanufacturing test equipment.

She looked over at him. “Problems?"

He sniffed and rubbed his eyes while he considered what to say. She had been all business with him from the moment he came on board. There had been moments of candor and mirth, as with any colleague, but never any real warmth. How much did Michael want to tell her?

She was the commander of the station. She had a right to know when one of her crew was compromised. So he said, “I'm having trouble controlling my emotions."

"In what way?” she asked.

He gripped the edge of the crocus experiment for support. “It's weird.”
Sniff.
“Normally people have trouble with negative feelings, but I keep becoming overwhelmed by joy.”
Sniff.
“I burst into tears at the slightest provocation.” His voice cracked.

"I see.” The corners of Larisa's mouth turned up in a hint of a smile. Michael instantly felt his fists and jaw clench in anticipation of the mocking laughter of his childhood, but Larisa merely said, “How long has this been going on?"

"About two weeks."

She considered that for a moment. “You are unable to control it?"

"Most times I can,” he said. “It's just when something catches me by surprise that I—”
Sniff
“—I go over the edge."

"You have tried antidepressants?” She didn't even pretend that a career astronaut would ask anyone first.

"Yes. They help, but apparently not enough."

Quentin drifted into the lab module, twisting to orient himself heads-up with the others. Then he saw the expression on his crewmates’ faces.

"Am I interrupting something?"

"No, this involves you too,” Michael said. “I'm having trouble keeping my emotions under control. I'm afraid if I can't get a handle on them, Mission Control is going to send me back down."

Quentin's face betrayed his first thought. If Michael went down in his place, Quentin could stay in space for two more months. But to his credit that expression came and went in an instant, replaced by genuine concern. “Something wrong at home?"

"No. Nothing's wrong anywhere. Maybe that's the problem. I'm at the pinnacle of my life, right here at the apex of my dreams, and the sheer magnitude of it all is apparently more than I can handle.” He wiped away tears with his fingers, transferring them to the absorbent fiber of his flight suit before they could drift loose.

Larisa said, “There are techniques for controlling emotion. Breathing exercises, thought stopping, aversion—"

"I've tried all that. I used to have this problem when I was a kid. I tried every trick in the book and invented some of my own. I beat it, too, until the last couple of weeks."

"You will have to beat it again,” Larisa said. “We can't have you crying in a spacesuit."

"Thanks for being so understanding,” he said.

She snorted. “I understand exactly. Men tell women all the time that we're too emotional. Unfit for command because we might burst into tears at a crucial moment. Every woman in Russia since Catherine the Great has learned to lock her emotions away if she is to succeed at anything. The fact that I'm here proves it's possible. You can do it as well."

Michael bit his tongue. For Larisa, that was a pep talk.

He turned to Quentin, who shook his head sadly. “Man, I wish I knew what to tell you. I'll cover for you however I can, but . . .” He left the statement hanging, either unable or unwilling to state the obvious.

"But I can't do EVAs,” said Michael, “and I can't do interviews, and I can't be depended on in a crisis."

"We don't know that,” Quentin said. “If the shit hits the fan, you'll probably be too busy tryin’ to survive to worry about how you feel about it."

"That's a comfort.”
Sniff.

Larisa's cryo unit beeped at her. “We're falling behind,” she said. “Let's get back to work.” To Michael, with as much tenderness in her voice as he'd ever heard, she said, “Try to concentrate on the job in front of you and not think about how you feel."

"No pink elephants. Roger, captain."

She wrinkled her brows. “Pink elephants?"

"Pernicious cultural referent,” Quentin said. “Once it's in your brain . . ."

"Pink elephants. Thank you for that image.” She turned away.

Michael got through his shift without another outburst, but he felt on the edge every second. The watery eyes, the catch in his throat, the shortness of breath; all hovered just inside him, ready to break free at any moment. He concentrated on zebrafish genes and crocus plants and bacterial cultures until his mind felt so packed with data there was no room for emotion, yet the moment he relaxed at the end of the day it all rushed back on him and he spent half an hour soaking his sleeve in the deepest corner of the Kibo module before he brought it under control and headed for the crew quarters.

Larisa was fixing her dinner. “Pink elephants,” she said when she saw him. “All day with the pink elephants. Some of them were dancing. What have you done to me?"

"Were the dancing ones wearing tutus?” he asked.

"Tutus?"

"The frilly short skirts that ballerinas wear? Dancing pink elephants in tutus are the most common form of hallucination in America."

"Stop!” She held her hands over her ears.

"Better than—"

"Stop!” she yelled again, but she was smiling.

And a moment later Michael was weeping like a father at his son's graduation. He couldn't control it any more than he could have breathed vacuum. He pushed past Larisa, grabbed his towel from his sleep station, and dabbed at his eyes, but the harder he tried to bring himself under control, the worse it grew until he was sobbing uncontrollably, the towel wrapped around his head to muffle the sound and possibly, hopefully, smother him before he died of embarrassment.

The realization that Larisa was holding him in her arms shook him out of it, shut off the waterworks like a switch. The universe was seriously out of kilter if Larisa was acting motherly.

Michael took a couple of deep breaths, wiped his eyes and nose on the towel, and slowly extricated himself from both the towel and Larisa's embrace. “I'm okay now,” he said. “I'm . . . thanks."

They looked at one another for a moment, then she turned away and busied herself with her meal.

"I've got to let Mission Control know about this, don't I?” he said.

She nodded. “It would be better coming directly from you.” The implication was clear: If he didn't, she would.

"And thus ends my career as an astronaut."

"Nonsense,” she said. “Valentina Tereshkova was an astronaut to the end of her life, and she only spent three days in space. Deke Slayton was an astronaut even when he was grounded due to a heart irregularity."

"Neither of them went psycho."

"You're not psycho. You're emotional. There is still much you can do within the space program."

"But not up here."

She looked at him for a long moment before she said, as softly as she could and still be heard over the background of the circulation fans, “No. Not up here."

The conversation with the flight surgeon went just as he expected. The doctor offered a great deal of sympathy, but no magic cure to flatten Michael's emotional roller coaster. Anti-depressants were the only medication on board the station for that sort of thing, and if they weren't working, then nothing else could be done besides bringing Michael home on the next supply ship.

He switched the radio to standby and looked up at Larisa and Quentin, who looked back at him as they might look at a ghost. Surprisingly, he felt no urge to cry now. He thought he might throw up, or perhaps suffer a debilitating stroke if his heart wouldn't quit pounding, but the enormity of his downfall had knocked him so far past emotion that he could have attended Melissa's funeral without a sniffle.

He wrote her an email, trying to soften the blow with the news that they wouldn't have to be apart for six whole months after all, but he couldn't help wondering if she would still want to spend the rest of her life as Mrs. Baby Bebe.

He sent pictures of the crocus flower to the Ukrainian students and added a p.s. that he wouldn't be running the experiment for the full six months after all. He wrote a weaselly explanation full of vague references to personal problems that required his presence on the ground, then deleted it in disgust. If he started lying to high school kids just to save himself from embarrassment, then he had truly lost everything.

So he explained exactly what was happening to him, putting it in as scientific a context as he could manage. Something was clearly wrong with his mind, something apparently congenital that might even provide more insight into how the brain worked if he could find a doctor interested in studying it, but the space station was not the place to be experimenting with emotional instability. For the safety of the other crewmembers, and himself, he would be going back to Earth in a little over a week.

He sent the email, then for lack of anything better to do, started cleaning up his personal space. He could probably have waited until half an hour before his departure if he wanted to, since all his gear would barely fill a duffel bag, but he needed something to keep his mind occupied.