V Mang on Board

Dr Nyanggodai “Terry” Mang woke himself up in the middle of the night by scratching his face with his own ragged fingernails. He groaned and massaged the weals he’d left. A plague of mites infested the entire Farnsær station, and they had a great thirst for mammal blood. Dr Mang had sworn up and down while creating the station that no unwanted life forms were going to be present. He had insisted on strict control of all DNA that came onto the station, living or dead. And despite his efforts, a race of tiny cone-shaped mites swarmed through every crevice of the entire structure after just four months in orbit.
They grazed mainly on the flecks and flakes of human hair and skin that shed continuously off the bodies of Dr Mang and his colleague, Thomas Thornfall. Air filters gathered these bits and pieces up and shunted them to collectors below the gardens. Neither Dr Mang nor Tom cared to poke around in the dust ducts, so the colony of mites grew to huge numbers of individuals, each about a third of a millimeter long. As their population swelled beyond the capacity of the Dr and Tom’s skinslough, they sought other nutrition.
Some of them began to burrow into the tough, chewy ropes that made up the walls of the corridor, and had emerged through microscopic tunnels into other quarters of the ship. They were small enough to escape immediate detection at first, and feasted on the film of food-oils on badly-cleaned plates, and the slurry of finger oil and skin cells that coated the keyboards and buttons. Soon they colonized the two humans, and lived surreptitiously in their eyebrows, heads, armpits and pubes.
A few days ago Dr Mang had scraped his cheek while testing the antimagnetic inertiabsorber – a minor wound which should have healed up almost overnight. Instead, it became a paradise of mites, who could reproduce at astronomic rates in the soft tissues of Dr Mang’s dermis. Twelve hours later, he was sitting at breakfast listening to one of Tom’s interminable monologues, and he could not stop rubbing his cheek. It itched through the morning, and began to produce tiny granules of translucent pink crust. Under Dr Mang’s magnifying goggles, the granules were rough, slightly asymmetrical octahedrons. Tom watched blandly as Dr Mang assembled the gold spatterer for the electron microscope, which had been sitting unused in its case for two months. Dr Mang was jumpy and frantic because he sensed an intrusive presence in his cheek, and it riled him all the more to see Tom, immobile as a pudding, observing him through half-closed eyes that looked like two monkeyfistfuls of gray jelly.
Dr Mang used the dull side of a scalpel to scrape some of the crust on a slide. He slid the slide into the newly-assembled device, which was about the size and shape of two beer steins stacked atop each other, with handles jutting out on opposite sides. At the bottom was a tripod, and on the top was a set of goggles that one leaned into to see the image. Dr Mang did so and was frankly horrified to see that each octahedron was made up of hundreds of mites, clutching each other with short, scaly legs. Each mite secreted a thick fluid that crystallized into the eight-sided granules. As Dr Mang watched, the little pebble of crystal began to shatter as the mites broke out of their shells and began to explore the inside of the microscope. There were at least a couple dozen in the single granule Dr Mang focused on.
He was disgusted to be parasitized, and what is more, he had an honest emotional outrage that such a creature was even on the station. His protocols had been foolproof in test trials in Wenatchee. A quick examination revealed he was entirely covered with mites from head to toe, and so was Tom. They took turns in the vacuum shower and used proteolytic shampoo. Then the cleaning robot doused every surface on the station with radioactive water while the humans huddled inside the lead-lined, antimagnet-shielded escape pod. It took twenty hours for the radiation levels to drop back down, and the cramped little chamber was the perfect venue for Tom to start talking about his book. It was a novel about a gambler and seemed to have no real chronological narrative flow, as far as Dr Mang could discern. It was painfully obvious that Tom had never gambled in his life; in fact, one of the reasons Tom had been selected for the assignment was his steadfast devotion to not taking risks. Tom’s sweaty custard of a face never seemed to change expression as he recited events from the gambler’s story. Dr Mang could not screen them out because Tom was right next to him.
The last four months had been a series of daily challenges as to how to screen Tom out, even within the relatively large area of the station. Tom was a single child, home-schooled, and had never had a meaningful relationship with any other human besides his parents. They had listened to his every utterance with utmost attention, and Tom never tired of uttering his life’s narration as he lived it. He was a prodigiously good scientist, and garnered the respect of his peers, but never their affection. He was slow to realize that other people were not as good at listening as his parents, and he was rarely invited to social occasions. Eventually he realized that people treated each other differently than they treated him, and he was gravely affronted. He began to only speak with a kind of sullen caution, which evolved into a mealy blandness of expression.
There was no denying his technical expertise and his ability to juggle hundreds of variables when applying himself to science and technology, which trait had attracted Dr Mang and Tuan Kudah. His math skills were almost supernatural.
Three of them came up, originally, but the third astronaut, “Mycorhizal” Michael Reiser, had returned to his home in Oregon after the superstructure of the station had been grown. Since then, Tom had grown to feel a bit too familiar with Dr Mang, and his loquaciousness returned like a tide. The worthy doctor had many relatives who liked to ramble on, so he had a fairly thick callus on his eardrum against the boredom that comes from listing to a person have an endless conversation with himself. He had therefore not made an effort to stave off Tom’s logorrhea when it first began to flow, and by the time Dr Mang’s hackles began to rise, Tom was well-habituated to having an ear in the vicinity of his mouth. Dr Mang had not anticipated the proximity that Tom was able to maintain within the closed corridors and chambers of Farnsær. Nor had he been able to foresee the double-stupefaction engendered by Tom’s near monotony and his plain-yogurt diatribes.
Despite the deep cleaning, the mites returned. Dr Mang fretted about how to combat them. Ranatra, on Earth, could not identify them from the pictures he took. They seemed to always return from somewhere. Dr Mang had begun to prowl the corridors with a spray-bottle of bleach, walking at a slow shuffle and chewing his fingernails as he examined every square centimeter of wall and floor. Tom ambled behind him, sharing uncomfortably intimate information about his main character.
Dr Mang soon had to accept that the mites could not be eradicated. He returned to the real work of the station, perfecting the Znepdrive through numerous iterations of experiment. When the two of them were busy, Tom was less apt to talk, and often Dr Mang would push the work until they were both exhausted. Then, one night, he dreamt that the mites were emanating from Tom’s nose and ears, perhaps from inside his head. In the dream the mites were trailing through the station in floating, unbroken streams, like strands of spiderweb, and Dr Mang accidentally brushed into one that had formed in his personal quarters. He tried to snatch it off his cheek, and his sleeping hand had done the same. The jagged, torn nails snagged into his cheek and scored two thin welts into his skin. He woke up with a groan.
Even in sleep, Tom intruded. He had a flabby moist snore, like bubbles through porridge, that found its way into the vents. Dr Mang listened to it for several minutes and found he could not fall back asleep.
He rose and toured the gardens and the reefs. Surprisingly, none of them had shown any sign of mites whatsoever. All the sea urchins were in rosy good health, and all the plants looked bright and vigorous. Dr Mang chewed a stem of basil and stared out into space. The other astronauts were arriving this morning. Tom would stay at the station and the rest of them would go to Quaoar. Dr Mang was immensely relieved by this prospect, but he wondered whether any of the other four astronauts would be as hard to suffer as Tom. The Ambria was smaller than Farnsær, and personalities would be amplified that much more. What if the problem was in Dr Mang, and not Tom? What if his problem was simply that he had a problem, and Tom was only a peripheral player, a mere mirror for Dr Mang’s psychic malaise? His mind reeled and wheeled like a shark chasing its own tail inside a giant washing machine that was rolling down the side of a mountain. Somehow, with that stem of basil in his mouth, time got the better of him and he was surprised by the jolt that ran through the station as the shuttle arrived from Earth. He spat out the stem, hurriedly donned his yellow jumpsuit, and ran to greet his friends.