Masked (2010) (25 page)

I was flown to Munich, Germany, at the heart of the European Union. A driver met me at the airport and drove me into the city. I had never been to Europe before. I had never seen such wealth, even in Canada, never seen so much greenness, so much water.

We arrived at an imposing campus-like institute. Here, I met
Professor Stix for the first time. “Welcome,” she said, and shook my hand. “I am Professor Maria Stix.”

“Hello, Maria.”

“You may call me Professor Stix.” She led me to her office.

She was perhaps forty. Her figure was sturdy yet voluptuous, her face beautiful but severe, her cheekbones set off by the way she wore her brown hair neatly swept back, her blue eyes if anything enhanced by the spectacles she wore. I lusted after her. I was nineteen years old. I lusted after many women.

In her office, which was equipped like a doctor’s surgery, she immediately began a preliminary medical exam. “This is the Max Planck Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften,” she said briskly, as she measured my (rising) blood pressure. We spoke in English; her accent was light, not German. “Founded in 1911 as the official scientific research organization of Germany, and funded by the national government and later by the European Union to perform research in areas of particular scientific importance and in highly specialized or interdisciplinary fields.”

I stumbled over the words. “And am I an interdisciplinary field?”

She smiled. “Your survival is a puzzle.”

“And who’s paying to solve that puzzle?” I asked bluntly.

“The European Space Agency. You can see the practicality.” She sniffed, elegantly. “I myself am French. The Germans have something of a history in the field of extreme medicine, dating back to experiments performed on prisoners during the Second World War. You may debate the ethics of using such data.” She grabbed my testicles. “Cough.”

That was the beginning of an extensive survey of my peculiar condition. I was pulled and prodded, scanned and sampled at every level of my being from my genetic composition upward. It was not long before Professor Stix, with my consent, subjected me to further vacuum exposures, in a facility designed to test robotic spacecraft in conditions approaching space, a chamber like a vast steel
coffin. My exposure was gradually increased from seconds to minutes, though Professor Stix did not dare take me anywhere close to the fifteen minutes to which I was exposed after the accident on the Canadaspace flight.

After some weeks of this she gave me an informal précis of her results.

“Your recovery times are actually improving,” she said.

“Thanks.”

“Yet ‘recovery’ is probably the wrong word. Your body accepts vacuum as an alien yet survivable medium, rather as my own body can survive underwater without ill effects.”

I said nothing, imagining the professor’s elegant body underwater.

“Your body has a number of mechanisms which enable it to survive. Your lungs and indeed your bowels are unusually efficient at venting air.”

I grinned. “I fart well.”

“Hmm. And with internal gases removed, other conditions such as a rupture of lung tissues will not follow. In vacuum, most of us suffer ebullism, which is a swelling caused by the evaporation of water in the soft tissues. Your tissues, on the other hand, eject water rapidly through the pores, at least as deep as a few millimeters, and the outer skin collapses down to a tough, leathery integument. Like a natural spacesuit, protecting what lies beneath. There is also a unique film over your eyes, an extra layer which similarly toughens to retain your eyes’ moisture, though they are always prone to frosting. Meanwhile the pumping of your heart adjusts, and the balance of venous versus arterial pressure reaches unique levels in your vacuum-exposed body. Oxygen-rich blood actually seems to be trapped in your brain, thus nourishing it beyond normal limits and reducing the risk of hypoxia.”

“How long could I survive in vacuum?”

She shrugged. “We could only discover that by testing you to destruction. I would suspect many hours—even days.”

The next briefing she gave me, some weeks later, was rather less encouraging.

In her office once more, she opened a drawer in her desk and produced a jar that she set on the table. It contained a kind of grub, dark brown, only a millimeter or two long.

“What is this?”

“A tardigrade. Known in some countries as a water bear. Very common.”

“Ugly little thing.”

“Tardigrades can survive desiccation. Some have been known to last a decade without moisture. There are other creatures which can survive extreme dryness—rotifers, nematodes, brine shrimp. And this makes them capable of surviving in space, for as long as several days in some flight experiments.”

“Like me.”

“Yes. You also, it appears, have the capability to recover from moderate doses of radiation better than the average human. You have a mechanism which I suspect is rather like that of the bacterium
Deinococcus radiodurans
with the capability of repairing cellular damage, even recovery of damaged DNA strands. It has always been an open question why such creatures should have facilities to enable them to survive in deep space for extended periods. Perhaps this is a relic of our true origins, if we came here from another planet, wafted as spores across space. These traits may be ancestral.”

This sounded fanciful to me. I asked, indicating the tardigrade, “What has this to do with me?”

She said she believed she had discovered the cause of my peculiar abilities. There were traces of viral activity in my DNA, which had modified the genetic information there, leaving sequences which had some correlation with the genes of
Deinococcus
and the tardigrades and so forth. “This appears to be the result of an infection when you were very small. There is no trace of similar modifications in your parents.”

“Something in the air.”

“Possibly something artificial,” she said. “Created and released, perhaps globally. I am speculating. Why would anybody create such an infection?”

I shrugged. “What’s next for me?”

This was the bad news. The European Space Agency had hoped to use lessons from my anatomy as part of a conditioning regime for their own astronauts. But because my condition was genetic, and the result of agents Professor Stix had yet to identify, I was of no use.

I was disappointed. “Perhaps I could become an astronaut.”

She smiled, not unkindly.

“Then is it over?” I was already forgotten as a space hero. Was I now to be discarded even as a medical specimen? And, worse, was the flow of money from the Planck Institute to my family about to be cut off? Was it back to the slurry wells for me?

Professor Stix seemed on the point of saying yes. But then she pouted, quite prettily. “Not necessarily. Let me give it some thought. In the meantime I will book you more time in the vacuum chamber.”

Once more I submitted to my ordeal in that metal coffin.

But I noticed a change in the testing regime. The intervals I was exposed to the vacuum were gradually increased. And, rather than lie inert on some bed with wires protruding from my body, now I was asked to perform various physical tasks—to walk around, to move weights, to complete small jobs of more or less complexity.

It was obvious to me, even before Professor Stix admitted it, that this was no longer a medical study. I was being trained.

After a couple more weeks, having thought it through, Professor Stix put her proposal to me.

“It seems a shame to waste your unique abilities. You have already demonstrated your value in an emergency situation. But a tolerance of vacuum is useless at sea level in Saudi Arabia. You
have no place in ESA’s exploration program, but there are many commercial enterprises operating in near-Earth space—suborbital and orbital flights, hotels, factories, research establishments. At any given moment many hundreds of people are in orbit—and therefore subject to the a risk of blowout.”

“What are you suggesting, Professor?”

She smiled. “That we hire you out, to the commercial organizations working in Earth orbit. You would serve as a fail-safe in case of the final catastrophe. Of course, you could only be in one place at a time. But having you on hand, visibly present and ready for disaster, would be a profound psychological comfort for a lay passenger—much more so than theoretical assurances about fault trees and failure modes. You would be a luxury item, you see, in demand by high-paying customers. People fear decompression, however irrationally; people will pay for such comfort. It is very unlikely that you will ever have to face a real emergency again. I’ve already discussed this in principle with various insurance companies.”

I smiled. “I like the idea. Tusun ibn Thunayan, life saver!”

“Oh, that’s rather bland.” She glanced over my body, evidently sizing me up. “We should think about branding. A costume of some kind. You would be your own walking advertisement.”

“A mask! I could wear a mask.”

She nodded slowly. “Anonymity. Yes, why not? It might protect your family from ruthless competitors who might seek, in vain, to find another like you among them. You would need a name.”

“A name?”

“Such as Rescue Man.”

“That sounds rather unspecific,” I said.

“Perhaps.”

“Blowout Boy!”

“Ugh! That sounds pornographic. . . Vacuum Lad,” she said thoughtfully.

I think we both knew immediately that was the one. “I like it! You know, my brother Muhammad has many advantages over me, but not a secret identity.”

“Hmm. We will have to consider how to launch you as a commercial proposition. Once the costume is ready, other promotional material, a sound financial base in place, we should mount a demonstration to show your capabilities.”

“‘We’?”

She smiled, as sweetly as she ever had, at me. “Do you have an agent?”

The public launch of Vacuum Lad went spectacularly well.

Professor Stix and I ran up a certain amount of debt, for the costume and various marketing materials, and most significantly for the hire of an orbital shuttle from a Britain-based spaceline. Our flight lasted four full orbits, for two of which, in the world’s electronic gaze, I cavorted in space for up to ten minutes at a time. I performed simple tasks, demonstrated my lack of any supporting equipment, and, glamorous in my costume of silver and black, I shot through space powered by a small jetpack (with, at Professor Stix’s insistence, the backup of an invisible monomolecular tether back to the shuttle).

The orders for my services came pouring in, through our chosen partners in the insurance industry. So did demands for media interviews, carefully filtered by Professor Stix. My family and countrymen rejoiced in my exploits. And then came the usual fringe contacts, from people who wanted to marry me or compete with me or assassinate me. (And that was the first I heard of the Earth First League, who opposed all human presence in space, and, therefore, me.)

Our debts were soon cleared, and we were in business.

Then followed months of a strangely idle, yet strangely exciting, life. I was assigned to flights with various spacelines and stays at orbital hotels, each of whom devised simple but effective failure-mode procedures for me to carry through in the event that my peculiar services should be required. In the uneventful hours I spent in flight, or the weeks I spent in the hotels, I was a celebrity, unmis
takeable in my dramatic costume. In return for my enigmatic company I was bought fine meals and wines, laden with gifts I shipped back to Professor Stix—and received offers of companionship, not all of which I turned down. Well, would you? I liked to boast about it to Muhammad. I did, however, often dream of the lovely Professor Stix, rather than focus on whatever vacuously pretty rich girl was in my arms at the time. And I always kept my mask on.

The professor had assured me that I would very likely never have to deal with a genuine disaster again. Yet she was wrong.