All about the Math

The only thing worse than the red hue was the cacophony of the klaxon alarms, now passing one solid minute of noise blaring through the cabin.

“Silence that damn alarm, specialist!” Jim yelled over his shoulder as he continued scrolling through the touch screen monitor, trying to find what system had failed in the cramped crew capsule.

“Copy that,” Buck scrolled through the screen on the other side of the cabin, finally finding the alarm module and clicked ‘silence all alarms.’ The alarms stopped blaring their noise through the cabin, but the red lighting was still present.

“I swear, those engineer ass hats spent too much time watching old movies. There is absolutely no damn need for the danger themed mood lighting,” Jim yelled out, realizing too late that he was talking too loud given the sirens stopped.

Buck scrolled through the menu and found the setting to restore the lights to their normal bright white.

“Safety protocols disabled for visual and audio effects, sir. Have you found the problem?”

Jim scanned through two screens at once. He swore it felt like one eye was on each screen like a chameleon.

“It’s that solar flare. Mission Operations team was confident that it would pass through without affecting us. Probably same engineers did the calculations as the ones who think red alert means turn all the lights red.”

Buck continued to work his side of the capsule, scrolling through the monitors and listening for any hiss of escaping air. He heard nothing, aside from his own heavy breathing and that of his captain.

“How much exposure did we get?” Buck asked, starting to go through the charts in his head about radiation exposure. His mind raced through the different levels of known exposures-was it chest x-ray level? CT? Chernobyl? Demon Core? He began to sweat.

Captain Jim read off the readings from one of his monitors. “I can’t tell, yet. A couple of sensors are offline. It was probably high, but short.”

Jim turned slightly, his body still facing forward, “You’re the math genius here, what are you thinking we got exposed to?”

Buck kept working, scrolling through the systems and trying to get a last available reading from the sensors. “I, uh, I don’t know yet,” he stammered as he read through the logs. “The sensor on the nose says nothing, not a rad. Maybe it was just pointed away from the particle stream. Nothing on the door sensor either.” He paused as he continued to scroll through the readings. “All the lower sensors are offline. Nothing. I can’t even tell if they were online-”

Jim cut him off. “Specialist, keep to the facts. What else was recorded?”

Buck closed his eyes, and took a deep breath, all the while thinking about the silence of lethal radiation exposure. He continued searching the sensor logs.

“Sir, the radiation sensors on the reentry shield look like they recorded something. It spiked at,” he paused, and gulped, “eight point seven thousand rads.”

There was silence in the cabin.

“Spec-“, Jim caught himself at the severity of the reading. “Buck, what did you say?”

“Almost nine thousand rads. That’s a demon core level exposure.”

The captain took a long breath to steady himself. Years of training and space flight taught him how to deal with situations like this. He continued staring at his monitors without seeing them.

“Buck, we’re going to be OK. That was only one sensor. The others probably read nothing because there was nothing.”

Buck interrupted his captain, “Captain, this is a supply mission for the Europa flight that turned into an emergency repair trip, with me as the savior of the mission, with all my math skills. Now we’re dead and we don’t even know it yet.”

“Buck, there is nothing the matter with the ship. No breeches of the cabin, no loss of electronics- “

“Except the radiation monitors-“ Buck chimed in.

The captain kept his cool and continued, “Yes, except for a few sensors. “We’re only-“ he paused and looked at the mission clock, “47 hours away from our rendezvous with the Europa shuttle. We’re going to get there, and we’re going to be OK.”

“I’ve been exposed, sir, I might not make it.” Buck’s breathing picked up a little, not quite hyperventilating.

“Yes, we both have exposure but we are both protected. The crew capsule is lined with Kevlar and aluminum. We have our deep space suits if we need them. Even our jump suits are Kevlar. C’mon, Buck, do your math! We have protection against short bursts of radiation.”

Buck said nothing.

The captain turned around, forcing a smile to try and break his crewmate out of this spiral.

When he turned around, he looked at Buck’s jump suit, and his smile faded.

It was a beige jumpsuit; one issued by NASA during the training on the ground. Same beige, same number of pockets and same zipper that went from crotch to neck.

But, Jim realized that it was not the flight-ready jump suit. The one with Kevlar and interwoven fibers of polyethylene that could reduce radiation exposures to a fraction of the original dose.

“Buck, what are you wearing?”

Buck said nothing, just sitting in silence contemplating his own mortality.

“Buck?”

Buck began tearing up, already feeling a hot rash across his body. “I switched out my flight jumpsuit with the one from training right before the flight. It was too itchy, and I couldn’t concentrate to do the calculations. The odds were in my favor.”

Jim’s mind raced. His sole duty was to bring the supplies to the Europa shuttle, but more importantly, NASA gave up 420 pounds of supplies to send a 183 pound specialist and his necessities to the Europa shuttle orbiting Mars to update the navigation algorithms and rewrite the software. It couldn’t be done remotely; it had to be Buck and his unique skills.

Buck looked up at his captain, tears rolling off his rapidly reddening face as the acute radiation poisoning started to break down his skin. “I’m all about the math. But I’m not so good at packing for a trip, sir.”

Jim leaned against the wall. All his years of training did not prepare him to watch a man die of radiation poisoning over the next 24 hours, much less telling the fate of the Europa crew that they were going to be in Mars orbit for a very, very long time.