Читать книгу Aurora: A Child of Two Worlds: A Science Fiction Novel - David A. Hardy - Страница 10

ARSIA MONS

Rock. Rock and more rock. Black rock, ochre rock, amber rock. Nothing but rock everywhere you looked. Anne Pryor chipped at the flank of Arsia Mons with her geologist’s hammer and carefully placed the latest fragment in her sample case. She spoke the identifying data into her helmet mike, tonguing on the recorder; writing was difficult wearing the gloves of the Mars environment suit. That said, the flexible and almost skin-tight Mars suit was a big improvement on the bulky Apollo suits. For a while it had looked as though the type of “hard suit” produced by ILC Dover with Hamilton Sundstrand, as used on the International Space Station, would be pressed into service here too. But, although in space legs are almost superfluous, here on the surface of Mars mobility and freedom of movement were paramount.

The colors around here, she mused for the umpteenth time, were surprisingly drab. Despite her training, she had still expected rich reds, oranges and yellows—the colors that appeared in just about all the photographs and space art she had seen. But the reality—at least in this locality—was mainly pale brown, with variations into buff, yellow and tan. The scenery in the central area of Iceland, where she had spent some weeks on a field trip, had been very similar. And almost as cold....

That was an exaggeration, she acknowledged wryly. Tharsis was cold, even for Mars.

That was one of the reasons why the area had been chosen for the expedition. The strange parallel ridges on the lee side of Arsia Mons, looking curiously like ploughed fields, had turned out to be a recessional moraine; that is, dirt and rubble left behind by a glacier. It had been known for many years that clouds often blew over the volcano; these precipitated as storms of ice crystals. And the ice stayed where it fell on these high slopes. It had been building up for a long time.... She had seen similar layered glaciers in Iceland, too; those had been caused by the ash from repeated eruptions. One of her tasks here was to see if these layers on Arsia Mons could have the same cause.

Apart from that, Arsia Mons was the southernmost of a set of triplets, three shield volcanoes of very similar size, the other two being Pavonis and Ascraeus. To the northwest stood the far mightier Olympus Mons, which towered above the plain to a height ten times that of Earth’s Mount Everest. Olympus Mons was too big, really, for it was impossible to take it all in, except from out in space. Earth’s largest shield volcano—Mauna Loa on the big island of Hawaii—provided a similar visual effect, dominating the landscape only as a long, low hill. But the volume of Olympus Mons was over fifty times than even that of Mauna Loa. There was evidence that there could have been thermal activity in this area, millions or possibly just thousands of years ago. Ever since the highly controversial discovery in the mid-1990s of “fossil life” in a Martian rock—ALH 84001—found in the Antarctic and the Pathfinder and other unmanned missions that had followed, scientists had hoped for The Big One: the unequivocal discovery of life on Mars.

It might seem hard to believe, but even working on an alien world like Mars could become commonplace after a while. Not boring, precisely, but, even so, as Anne Pryor worked her mind kept drifting back to the events that had led her here.

* * * *

After leaving London, Aurora had gone back up to Scotland, as she’d said she probably would. For a while she had stayed with her brother Stephen; but he was now 40, and looked it, with his receding hairline, greying hair and bifocal spectacles, while she still seemed like a teenager. It was bound to cause comment, especially as Steve’s wife, Brenda, was hardly any older than Aurora and yet looked nearly as old as her husband.

So she didn’t stay there for long; just long enough to recuperate and review her plans for the future. She decided to go back to school and try to make up for all her wasted years.

With her artistic talents it hadn’t been difficult to doctor her birth certificate; she wanted to avoid questions about the disparity between her real and her apparent age. Looking at her, no one would think to query her new age of seventeen.

Many times, as the years passed, Aurora did puzzle over her own appearance. (When anyone commented on her youthfulness, she would quip: “Ah, but you should see the portrait in my attic!”) There was nothing she could do about it, and nor could she explain it; so she supposed she should just be grateful.

And she was never ill. Oh, her body protested when she abused it, as she had done back in the late Sixties, but she had never caught even the usual childhood diseases like mumps, measles or chickenpox, let alone anything more serious. What should she do? Tell a doctor that “I look too young and I’m never ill”? At best she would become a guinea pig for medical research, at worst a freak for the media to parade before a sensation-hungry public. No, best to keep a low profile, and, when necessary, keep moving on....

Sometimes, though, she did feel very lonely. Was there really nobody else in all the world like her? More: her brief time with the Gas Giants seemed to have left her almost drained of emotion. It was as if she had packed a lifetime of what most people would regard as normal, personal feelings into that short period, but that her near-death experience had then wiped these from her brain.

As she had once told Lefty, she was clever at scholastic matters as long as she put her mind to them. And this she did. Within a few years she had a crop of O- and A-levels to her credit, and she followed these up by applying for and obtaining a place at Birmingham’s redbrick university, which her enquiries showed to be one of the best for scientific subjects.

Aurora’s appetite for education was insatiable now, and the more she crammed into her brain the more her ability to learn seemed to expand. But she would stay with one subject for long periods, often sighing with frustration at the amounts of data available, impossible to assimilate in one lifetime. On the other hand she did not let this deter her; if her appearance and her physical and mental abilities were any guide, she could well have a very long lifetime ahead of her in which to absorb it all. She studied chemistry and physics, finally obtaining her doctorate in astrophysics, specializing in asteroids, comets and impact craters.

She also took a course in computing, and spent many hours in the evenings doing her own private work, much of it on the internet. Linked to computer networks all over the world, she could hack into the files of record offices and create a succession of new identities for herself, at the same time planting a virus program that destroyed all traces of her previous identities and then of itself, as and when it became necessary.

For another five years Aurora stayed around universities, largely cocooned from the realities of life, doing research and some lecturing. At last she decided that it was once again time to experience the real world. By now she had been forty-eight, but looked perhaps twenty-two. During all this time she had formed no strong personal relationships, though generally she seemed to be well liked. Some men, spurned, put about a rumor that she had lesbian tendencies, but she laughed these off. The plain fact was that she simply was not interested.

Unable to find a fulfilling job in Britain—or, for a while, any job at all for which she was not “overqualified”—she left for the United States. There she found the climate—cultural, scientific and atmospheric—much more to her liking. She had flirted with NASA but found it lacking, dogged by problems as it had been since the Challenger shuttle tragedy, and moved on to the California Institute of Technology. In the academic atmosphere of CalTech she seemed to be in line for a professorship, only to find that this time her declared and apparent youth worked against her, despite her obviously superior experience and qualifications. She had left in high dudgeon and found a position as a geologist in a California oil company, GeoTek. The job mainly involved using advanced computer techniques and high-definition satellite imagery, but there were enough field trips to keep her interested and satisfied.

The personnel at GeoTek consisted mainly of bright young men and women, and she fitted in well. For a while. Whether it was real or imagined she couldn’t tell, but after a time she began to feel that her colleagues were looking at her strangely, and so she left. A number of similar positions followed. She worked on an ocean-floor mining project; then for an environmental organization doing research on the hole in the ozone layer over the Antarctic; then there was a spell among the observatories on Mauna Kea on Hawaii....

Her stay in the Pacific Islands sparked an interest in volcanology, and for some years she visited the Earth’s wildest places, researching plate tectonics and continental drift. She gradually found she preferred these desolate and rugged areas to the more populated areas of Planet Earth.

She took up painting again, as a hobby, and produced some spectacular canvases of volcanoes, rift valleys and glaciers; accurate yet romantic, some of them were almost worthy of comparison with nineteenth-century American “field” artists of the Hudson River School, like Frederic Church and Thomas Moran, who had travelled to the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone or Antarctica and exhibited their massive canvases to an awed and sometimes disbelieving public. They had been responsible for these areas becoming National Parks.

Always Aurora kept half an eye on what was happening in the field of space research, hoping for a resurgence in interest in manned missions, such as had fired mankind in the 1960s and 1970s, but the picture was dismal. Still, she was at JPL when the Voyager images came in from Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, becoming excited by the volcanoes and geysers on Io and Triton.

Several times she had to call upon her secret computer program in order to explain away her appearance and start a new life, but it was difficult, and she lived in constant fear of meeting someone who had known her twenty or more years ago. She had become an expert forger, with the help of computers and high-definition printers. She changed her appearance, too, more than once, growing and cutting or even dying her hair, sometimes wearing glasses, other tricks.... Also, in order for her to get work, each new self needed qualifications. Really, though, this was only a matter of altering the name and dates on the genuine ones she possessed—no one would be likely to query her abilities once they saw her results.

Increasingly she experienced that feeling, which she had once mentioned to Lefty, of “searching for something”. The problem was, she had no idea what it was she was searching for.

Meanwhile, the world changed.

There were upheavals in Eastern Europe; the Berlin Wall came down, Communism was all but banished from the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union itself fragmented into a loose confederation of independent republics. To those space buffs who had seen a collaboration between the USSR and the USA as the only hope of a manned mission to Mars, it seemed that their dream was shattered. The “fossil life” controversy and the astounding high-resolution images from Mars Global Surveyor, which in 1999 provided indisputable evidence of water on Mars, briefly gave hope that the USA would go it alone with a manned mission, but the public—and thus the government—was divided on whether it was worth the expense.

For a while it had seemed that NASA’s much-vaunted “faster, cheaper, better” policy of using small, unmanned probes would win the day. But the arrival and prompt disappearance of both the Polar Lander and the Climate Orbiter—switched off by little green men, jeered the media—showed clearly that, while perhaps faster and cheaper, this method was certainly not better. The losses proved a blessing in disguise for those who had always wanted humans, not machines, to be the ones to explore the red world.

Eventually a sort of stability returned to the Soviet Republics. East–West trade flourished in an open-market economy, and somehow the European Community also settled most of its differences. The year 2001 became famous—infamous—not for bases on the Moon but for the horrific events of September 11th, and for a while all governments were side-tracked by the so-called War on Terrorism. At best it seemed that an uneasy truce existed between the nations, but eventually governments turned to the idea of an international space extravaganza to divert the eyes of the world from their own problems, to boost investment and employment in technological areas, and (the official line) to foster goodwill and cooperation among nations. Fortunately the latest Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, was in favor of space travel; the spectacular demise of the space station Mir in 2001 had left his country with an unrivalled amount of experience of living in space, but no way to use it. Putin did not like his country’s demotion from a leading power in space to an also-ran.

A joint project was announced, involving the USA, Japan, the former Soviet States, Europe (from which the leading partner was France) and Canada, which latter, early in the twenty-first century, had tripled its spending on space research—in other words, basically the same countries as had been involved in the building of the ISS. Britain, of course, was not a partner this time around, since its governments had stubbornly refused to invest in the adventure of space—and had thus allowed some of the country’s best brains to depart abroad.

In 2001 Aurora joined the Mars Society which, under its dynamic leader Robert Zubrin, seemed to have the requisite drive and the best ideas for a manned mission. Such was the groundswell of interest that NASA was eventually persuaded to allow some collaboration with such organizations, and even industry; multinationals became involved, noting the plethora of opportunities for sponsorship and commercial endorsements of products to be used on the first mission. For all contributions, expertise and experience were valuable; and the Mars mission was going to be expensive—though this aspect could be put into perspective by comparing it with the $12 billion spent every year in the USA and Europe on perfume, almost the amount of NASA’s budget....

NASA, true to form, insisted on a launch date of 2028, meaning that humans would be on Mars to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing.

Attempts had already been made to convert the formerly Soviet military–industrial complex to more peaceful ends, but it is not always easy to beat swords into ploughshares. There were many stories about what had happened when manufacturers of military rockets turned to making bathroom fittings and suchlike; the results had been disastrous, with poor-quality equipment being made by workers with low morale and no real interest in the product. How much better to put such expertise into making the power-plants for the motors of a Mars mission.

Yes, Mars was the answer. But this time, to satisfy the world, the mission had to be no mere Apollo-like landing—pick up a few rocks and return to Earth within a few days. That would in any case have been impossible, due to the orbital dynamics of such a mission—though, thanks to the development, mainly by the Johnson Space Center, of a new plasma drive that achieved a temperature of one million degrees Celsius contained by a magnetic bottle, the journey could take three months instead of the six or more that years earlier had been envisaged by planners whose horizons had been limited to chemical propellants. Chemical propellants would still be needed to take the ships above the Earth’s atmosphere and to land on Mars, but the plasma drive would be effective for the journey in between. The higher acceleration possible with the plasma drive also solved the very serious zero-gravity problem. The crew would be constantly under one-third gravity, since they would be under power all the way. And neither would they need to depend upon solar panels for electricity.

Even the first flight would be a long-stay mission of over two years. Also, a commitment had to be made to establish a permanent base, small at first but eventually self-supporting. Robot landers would be sent ahead to set up a base, and to deposit supplies. Another incentive was that Mars could then become a staging post for the asteroids, where Earth’s industry would find mountains of minerals, such as almost pure nickel–iron, there for the taking. Further valuable materials would be available from Mars’s two moons and from the surface of Mars itself. Martian soil contains forty per cent oxygen chemically bound up with iron (hence the rusty color of much of Mars), plus magnesium, sodium, sulfur and chlorine, while the atmosphere contains nitrogen. Carbon is available aplenty from the asteroids and from Phobos, the nearer satellite.

Aurora had found the whole prospect completely exciting, and impossible to resist. It was as if there were something—something stronger than herself—dictating to her that she must take part in the great Martian adventure, and doing so became her obsession. She had had little difficulty in obtaining a position back at NASA, and quickly she got to know all the right people.... She had made sure she passed all the fitness and aptitude tests—which she did with no problems—and ended up as a member of the geology team. Not as a British member, of course; she had become an American citizen years ago. She wasn’t the only one in this situation: the Canadian member, Dr. Bryan Beaumont, a volcanologist as well as co-pilot of the Lander, was also of English descent, his parents having emigrated just before he was born.

So here she was, on Mars. Now known as Dr. Anne Pryor, she was seventy-eight and looked perhaps thirty-five.

She had come up with the theory that she must be one of a new breed of human, resistant to both time and disease. What other answer could there be? She took to scanning the media and the more specialist journals for reports or even hints that others of her kind existed, but with increasing disappointment and puzzlement. If they did, they were keeping as quiet as herself. Sometimes she felt a deep loneliness, but she knew no way to relieve it.

* * * *

Anne Pryor, Aurora, came out of her reverie, suddenly dazzled by low evening sunlight blazing through a cleft between two lava outcrops. Near the shrunken Sun the sky was a washed-out blue, but the color shaded through deep pink to a deep indigo only a few degrees higher.

It must be time to return to the Hut—an empty propellant tank which had been parachuted down and landed on small retro-rockets and inflation bags. Sectioned into two halves, the Hut contained living and sleeping quarters plus a laboratory and an admin and communications center.

A rising plume of ochre dust showed that the rover was approaching on its daily round to pick up crew-members who’d been left at various locations.

Aurora packed up her equipment and walked a few meters to where she would be easily visible to the driver.

* * * *

The next day was a rest day for Aurora. Recreational activities were very important on such a long mission, to avoid boredom and the stress of working continuously in close proximity with the same people day after day. Some of the crew spent hours recording messages that were squirted in one short burst on the radio link to their loved ones on Earth, or composing e-mails. Others read, watched video films, wrote, played chess, listened to or played music, or engaged in various games—the physical ones being made more interesting by the low gravity and, when played out of doors, by the thin atmosphere.

Golf was a favorite, out on the desert. Players used a ball which was less massive than its Earth equivalent and made of a plastic material full of holes, like a sponge, so that in the one-third gravity it travelled about the same distance as a normal ball back home. The Martian golf ball was fluorescent green so it would show up against the reddish terrain. Even so, lost balls were common. Since the supply of balls was not inexhaustible, each also contained a microminiaturized radio transmitter, similar to those sometimes used on Earth to tag birds and small animals.

Aurora enjoyed a game of golf herself, but had decided to become the first artist on Mars. (Not the first in space, for Alexei Leonov and Alan Bean had long ago beaten her to that landmark.) Before leaving Earth she had tried to inveigle a friend who worked in the laboratories of a paint company (had she but known it, a distant, multinational descendant of Dobson & Dart, next door to which she had lived as a small child) to produce pigments and a medium which would work in sub-zero temperatures and a carbon dioxide/nitrogen atmosphere with a pressure only one per cent of Earth’s. All attempts had failed. A polymeric paint with an electrically heated palette and “brush” had been the most likely contender, but even with it the results had been lumpy and unsatisfactory. Chalks or pastels could be made to work, but she never felt that they produced “real” art.

So instead she used a device which had become popular with avant-garde artists on Earth: a “canvas” which combined computer graphics and the latest flat-screen technology. It was less than a centimeter thick. The brush was a type of light-pen which could be adjusted by touching a key-pad to produce wide, flat strokes, thin pen-like lines, or gradated airbrush effects—or anything in between. With a virtually infinite range of colors, the resulting image could be saved and its crystal matrix finally fixed so that no further changes could be made, accidentally or even deliberately. Once the key-pad unit was unplugged and detached, the image became a one-off, permanent work of art, ready for hanging.

So now she was back on the southern flank of Arsia, sitting on a light metal stool just inside the entrance to a lava tube, the tube’s opening serving as a natural frame for the terrain which she was attempting to capture. As she had done many times before, she marveled at the realness of the scene before her. At times it was easy to forget that she was on an alien world and to find herself thinking that she was back in Iceland or Kamchatka. Then, with an overwhelming wave of emotion, she would realize where she actually was. She had seen space art back on Earth, of course—had even tried her hand at imaginary planetary scenes herself—and of course she had seen the photographs taken by the unmanned rovers and airprobes which had preceded the manned mission. But observing the landscape for hours made her see minute details—textures, veins, cracks, color differences, qualities of light and shadow, reflections—which would otherwise have gone unobserved. No artist based back on Earth, and no photograph, could hope to capture these in the way that she could. Yet some scientists wanted to send only robots to this world, she thought. How absurd! Those scientists must be as soulless as the robots they thought we should send. And as lacking in imagination....

Against the dark cave entrance the sky was a luminous lavender. Below it an intersecting network of small crevasses was proving difficult to sketch. She had already blocked in some weird formations of twisted lava that formed the foreground.

To the east, against the slope of the volcano, a pale plume rose. She glanced at the watch built into the sleeve of her silvered suit. Surely it was too early for the rover? Yes, of course it was. The angle of sunlight was telling her that it was only early afternoon. And surely, anyway, that plume was too white to be dust?

Intrigued, she got up and, in an astronaut’s slow-motion steps, picked her way across the rugged ground to where the haze was still visible, over a kilometer away. By the time she was within a few meters from the spot her pulse was racing. From a deep pit surrounded by a rough cone of tumbled lava, a nebulous mist rose, dissipating quickly in the thin air.

Aurora tongued her radio-mike on. “Pryor to Base. Pryor to Base? I think I have an anomaly here.”

“Anomaly!” The unemotional language of science.

“Roger, Pryor, Base here—Vitali speaking. What do you have, Anne?”

She was glad that it was Vitali Orlov who was on duty, as she had formed quite a friendship with the bluff but genial Russian engineer. Of course, like the rest of the team she was grateful to him, too, for having got them down to the surface safely: he had been the pilot of the conical Lander. A genuine democracy existed among the crew, since each was an expert in at least two fields, and took his or her responsibility to the rest very seriously, but Orlov was nominally in command of the landing party, having seniority because of his much greater experience of space travel. He had helped build and had served in the International Space Station, and had flown many Soyuz flights to and from that.

“I suggest that you get some of the geology team out here, a.s.a.p., Vitali. I’ve got some sort of activity coming from what looks like a hornito.”

“Activity? Have you got your water-bottle filled with vodka—or is it bourbon?”

“If it wasn’t full of water, which it is, it would be a good single malt whisky! No, listen, I’m quite sober, and dead serious. Now move your ass and get someone out here right away with instruments and cameras—especially video.”

There was a beep and a second voice broke in: “Rover 1 here, Claude speaking. We’re already on our way over in your direction, Anne. Our seismometers picked up a small quake—only about two on the Richter Scale—about an hour ago, but we hadn’t been able to pinpoint it. So, thanks for your input; you can go back to your daubing now!”

“Anne here. You have to be joking! I’m not about to miss this, rest day or not!”

Twenty minutes later the rover appeared over a low scarp, bouncing across the uneven lava on its metal-mesh “tires”. But, by the time it had drawn up and its own dust cloud had dispersed, the white mist had disappeared apart from a few fitful puffs. The funnel-like walls of the little cone were crusted with a rime of ice crystals, glittering like tiny diamonds.

French geologist Claude Verdet was the first to give his opinion. His choice as a crew member had been a masterpiece of political diplomacy. To be sure, France had a big stake in the mission, but so had Germany, and the Germans had provided much of its ground support. Claude, although French, had been on attachment via ESA to the Sänger company in Germany for some years, and was thought of as part of their establishment. In addition, he was of Creole ancestry and black enough to satisfy the vociferous organizations on Earth who insisted on the inclusion of minorities in just about every undertaking. Such political considerations might have had to be overruled on the Mars mission, where everyone’s lives might at any moment depend on one or other individual crew-member; fortunately Verdet would have been the natural choice anyway.

Aurora grinned wryly. Up here on Mars such concerns as race, nationality and skin-color seemed a very long way away—which of course in a very literal sense was true. Distance made them seem even more ludicrous than they already were, which took some doing. The lucky—politically speaking—coincidence of Verdet’s blackness had never crossed her mind until he’d mentioned it himself.

“The way I see it,” he was saying, “a slab of rock down below gave way under stress, and allowed an underground cache of ice to come into contact with a heat source. Maybe radioactivity—could be it even released a pocket of magma. The ice flashed into steam—et voilà!”

As usual, not everyone agreed, and the discussion became heated, turned into an argument that continued on through the afternoon. The most exciting aspect of the discovery of this heat source, and underground water, was the possibility of life—their main reason for being on Mars, after all. So far only microscopic worm-like fossils, similar to those found on the meteorite on Earth, had been discovered, and these were certainly not the sort of conclusive evidence they’d been hoping for.

What was needed was proof of indigenous Martian life, preferably still alive! As Viking had discovered, the surface of Mars, its regolith, had been thoroughly sterilized by the presence of peroxides. But the discovery, also in the late 1970s, that weird forms of life thrive in the absence of sunlight and oxygen around sulfurous undersea volcanic vents called black smokers had expanded the parameters considerably. Life exists in rocks a kilometer under Earth’s surface, and can lie dormant for up to 40,000 years until water arrives to reactivate it. Indeed, Earth has a greater amount of biomass beneath than on the surface. So hope was still high that some form of life would be found on or beneath Mars.

Naturally, Aurora played a full part in the debate, and did no more sketching that day.

As the Sun sank, the crew-members piled into the cylindrical rover and drove back towards their base.

The going was tricky, especially in the low sunlight, which cast long, slanting violet–black shadows. The slightest depression looked like a deep crater. Hayashi Minako switched on the powerful headlight as she edged her way cautiously along a ledge formed by a lava tube, her rather pudgy face, framed by dark hair, intent as she concentrated on driving, peering through the Plexiglas bubble of the cabin.

Suddenly, with no warning apart from a crunching sound heard through the chassis of the vehicle, the roof of the tube beneath them collapsed. The rover teetered along for a few meters at an alarming angle, then rolled over completely. It clanged against scattered boulders, overturned again and came to rest on its side in soft dust.

The crew picked themselves up.

“Is everyone OK?” asked Verdet.

There were cries of “I think so” and “Just bruises, I guess.”

Then they became aware of the fact that Aurora lay deathly pale. The right sleeve of her spacesuit had been ripped open on a buckled and jagged piece of bulkhead. Blood gushed from her shoulder, and white bone protruded. Someone grabbed the First Aid box, and before long was applying a tourniquet and pad. Fortunately, the cab of the rover was pressurized, and, although badly dented, its outer skin did not seem to have been fractured.

With difficulty, they winched the rover upright, and in a purple twilight the vehicle limped back to base.

* * * *

At first it seemed that Aurora was back in that strange yet familiar dream she had known before. It had reappeared several times since her brief yet spectacular sortie into the world of rock music—nearly always when she was for some reason at best semiconscious. She had come to call the experiences her “flashes”. But this time the white-gowned figures stood around looking down at her gravely. There was no music or gaiety. Behind them, the slopes of the volcano (could it be Olympus Mons? No, surely it was too small—and it was clad in green for more than two-thirds of its height) were wreathed in clouds. Suddenly the view was blotted out. Brilliant violet–white light flared, too painful to look at. She tried to cover her eyes, but her arm would not move....

* * * *

She screamed, and opened her eyes to see the tiny sick bay, partitioned off from the rest of the Hut. Robert Lundquist, the mission’s only qualified physician, leaned over and pushed her back into her pillow.

Much later, he gave his patient the news. “Anne, my dear, I don’t know how else to break this to you. If we were back on Earth a surgeon might just be able to help you. But there was nothing else I could do. Your arm was severed at the shoulder. I—I’ve had to amputate it. I am so, so sorry.”