Martian Mice

By Marianne J. Dyson.

Illustrations by Michael Carroll.

            “Yī, èr, sān, sì,” Mariah counted the lab mice in Chinese.

The mice were part of an experiment. Mariah wanted to discover how long the mice would live on Mars. Martian gravity was a little over a third as strong as Earth’s. Would the mild gravity of Mars cause the mice to live longer, shorter, or just the same?

Some scientists were doing a similar experiment with mice in the weightless environment of an Earth-orbiting lab station. Another group of scientists were observing mice in a lab on the Moon, where the gravity is one-sixth as strong as Earth’s. Mice lived about three years on Earth, but Mariah felt sure her Martian mice would live longer than on Earth, or the Moon, or the lab station. Martian gravity, she thought, is not too heavy, not too light—it’s just right.

            Twenty mice occupied the cages, ten males in one and ten females in the other. Every day for the past Martian year, Mariah removed their waste, checked their water, and refilled their feeders from a bucket of special food. The cages were mounted in a mostly empty rack that ran down the middle of the lab module, from ceiling to floor, with walking room at either end. At age 11, Mariah was already more than 1.5 meters tall and no longer needed a stool to reach the cages. She finished the cage of males and slid the food bucket down the rack to the females’ cage.

Her gray cat, Apollo, watched from atop a nearby table. He followed her everywhere. When he was a kitten, he had jumped from the table and stuck himself to the screen on the outside of one of the cages. The mice scattered to the other side. The disappointed cat gave up when his claws got tired. Ever since, he’d been content to stare at the mice from the table top.

            “Yī, èr, sān… No!” Mariah gasped. One of the mice lay still and unmoving. “Wake up!” she ordered the mouse. “You’re too young to die!” The mouse didn’t move. Mariah dashed to a work bench, her long dress swishing. She donned a pair of heavy gloves and snatched a pair of tongs. She had to remove the body from the cage and refrigerate it so the vet could find out why it had died.

            As she returned to the cage, she remembered that she was supposed to shut the lab door whenever she opened a cage. Then if a mouse escaped, it could easily be recaptured. Mariah hurried over and shut the door, listening for the familiar hiss as it sealed. Then she ran back to the cage.

            “It’s okay,” she said softly to the mice as she opened the cage. “I won’t hurt you. I have to take your friend away to find out why she died.” Mariah thought it ironic that she was on number four when she noticed the dead mouse. The number four in Chinese, if pronounced incorrectly, meant death. Her parents had encouraged her to learn and practice Chinese. The Chinese were building settlements on Mars, and Mariah’s parents hoped to some day trade goods with them.

            Mariah gently picked up the dead mouse by the tail using the tongs. She swung it out of the cage. “Ah!” she screamed as Apollo leaped from the table and nabbed the swinging mouse from the air. He landed gracefully and skidded out of sight around the rack with his prize in his mouth.

“Apollo!” Mariah shouted. “Come back here!” She slammed the cage door shut and chased after the cat.

            Apollo jumped onto another lab bench, the one with the old Bunsen burner, and then up on top of an equipment cabinet that had lab notebooks and jars stacked on top of it. “Get down from there!” Mariah ordered. “Don’t you dare eat that mouse!” She yanked a swivel chair over to the cabinet so she could reach the cat that was now perched on top of a stack of lab books.

            Still holding the tongs, Mariah grabbed the cat’s hanging tail. “Got you!” she said.

But she spoke too soon. In a blur of motion, Apollo sprang off from the stack of books and leaped over Mariah to the floor. The force of his back feet started the notebooks cascading to the side. As Mariah reached to stop the books from falling, her chair rolled the opposite way. She lost her balance and crashed to the floor. The books and jars fell down between the side of the cabinet and the wall, with papers and green algae pellets spilling everywhere.

Mariah untangled her slippered feet from the chair and sat staring at the mess in disbelief. Apollo padded over to her and dropped the mouse like an offering for forgiveness, and then bounded away to the other side of the rack. Little tufts of fur poked out oddly around the neck of the dead mouse.

No, not fur, stuffing!

Mariah instantly knew the only person who would play such a mean joke on her: her brother’s best friend. “Tregon!” she yelled. “You're going to pay for this!” She checked the lab for the camera he must be using to record her reaction to his prank. “I know you're watching, you mutated troll! Look at this mess you made! If you don’t get in here right now and help me clean it up, I’m going to tell your mother what you did!”

Mariah’s wristcom blinked. “Answer,” she commanded, standing up and brushing smelly green algae pellets off her favorite blue dress. If she changed into her green dress, she’d have to redo the ribbons woven into her pigtails, too. Because of Tregon, she’d be late for class!

“Oh that was perfection unlimited!” Tregon said over the wristcom. “I can’t wait to post it on my vblog!”

“You will not because your mother is going to ground you for a thousand sols!” Mariah shouted. Inwardly she worried, though. Tregon had always found ways to get his vids out on the net even when he had access suspended.

She stood up and surveyed the mess. The notebooks were all jammed down the side of the cabinet and would be hard to dig out and sort back into order. Amazingly enough, the crash had only broken one jar of algae pellets. “Are you coming to help, or am I going to report you?” Mariah asked. She picked up the books that had tumbled onto the floor and shoved them back on top of the file cabinet. She rolled the chair back to the lab table.

“Sorry doll,” Tregon said, “but it’s your cat that made the mess, not me. If you tell my mother, I’ll show her the vid, and she can see for herself why that cat belongs in a cage!”

“It wasn't Apollo’s fault, and you know it,” Mariah countered. “If you had scanned those lab books every season instead of letting them pile up, he wouldn’t have had anything to knock over.”

“We fourteen-year-olds have more important things to do than scan the reports of useless studies.”

Mariah felt her face flushing with anger. Even the science projects that the elementary kids did on Mars were worthy of a doctorate on Earth, and Tregon knew it. He was just trying to get her to have a tantrum in front of the camera. Well, she was not going to do that! She would use her energy in a good way: to clean up the mess. Or at least clear the floor. She’d leave the books for Tregon to sort later.

The pellets were everywhere, and she didn’t want to stain her slippers. She opened the equipment cabinet and extended the vacuum-cleaner hose out and around to the end of the lab rack where the algae pellets had rolled. She flipped the switch to turn on the motor, and—

Flash!

The light nearly blinded her. An invisible force threw her clear to the other end of the lab as if she were a rag doll. She slammed against a cabinet and slid to the floor.

            She awoke moments later to sirens blaring and red lights flashing. She sat up and screamed at the intense pain in her right shoulder. She turned her head to look at it, and saw that her hair ribbons had melted and stuck to her pigtails! And it felt like the left side of her face was on fire! It even hurt to moan.

            The siren and flashing lights added to the throb of her shoulder and skin. The automatic system repeated, “Emergency! Fire detected! Seal all hatches and await instructions. Emergency! Fire detected! Seal all hatches and await instructions.”

.A fire? She remembered the bright flash. A flash fire. Something had exploded when she’d turned on the vacuum cleaner. The blast had thrown her right side against the cabinet, and burned her on the left.

Mariah knew what she had to do next. She’d been trained to follow glowing arrows on the floor to find the door in an emergency no matter how dark or smoky it got. She was thankful for that training now because the lab had filled with a hazy fog. Too dizzy to stand anyway, she crawled to the door and pressed the red emergency button. The door did not open, but at least the siren shut off.

“Let me out!” Mariah yelled. She coughed and gasped at the pain in her chest. Had she broken some ribs?

The red emergency lights continued to flash. That meant the air in the lab was not safe to breathe. Mariah reached into the cubbyhole where the oxygen masks were kept. She yelped in pain as she slipped the mask over her tender scalp and across her burnt left cheek. She flipped the switch to start the oxygen flowing from its canister.

Tregon shouted at her from her wristcom. “Mariah! Mariah, can you hear me?! There’s methane leaking into the lab! Any spark could cause another explosion. Do you understand?”

            Mariah froze, afraid to move. Methane gas? They used to use methane to run the Bunsen burner, but it had been disconnected when the old lab was converted for student use. “Where is it coming from? Can I stop the leak?”

            “No,” Tregon said. “The falling books must have punctured a pipe. We shut off a valve upstream, but there’s more than enough to cause another explosion.”

            Mariah now understood why the door hadn’t opened when she’d pressed the button. The lab was full of flammable gas that had to be vented to the outside to prevent an even more powerful explosion, one that might crack the hull of the lab and endanger the attached greenhouse. It would also likely kill her. And Apollo! Where was Apollo? “Apollo, here kitty kitty,” she called.

            “Mariah, use the emergency airlock,” Tregon insisted. “You need to hurry and get a skinsuit on! The longer you wait, the more methane will build up in the lab. Mariah? Do you hear me?”

            “I hear you,” Mariah said. “But I have to find Apollo! Use his tracking chip and tell me where he is. I’ll put him in a bubble unit.” All emergency airlocks had two adult suits and at least one bubble unit for carrying infants, animals, or injured adults for short distances. Mariah shuddered at the memory of her old cat suffocating in a defective bubble unit during an evacuation drill. She was sure this lab’s unit was good though: she checked it every week. Apollo would survive.

            “There’s no time!” Tregon said. “If that methane finds another spark, it could kill you! Leave the oxygen canister behind. Too much could leak around the mask. You know fire needs oxygen to burn.”

            “I know,” Mariah said.

“Stay close to the floor. There’s less methane there,” Tregon advised.

“Okay,” she replied. She took one last deep breathe of oxygen from the mask and shut off the flow from the canister. Then she followed a set of orange arrows from the door toward the emergency airlock. The fog had cleared some, but now the floor was wet and slippery.

As if anticipating her concern, Tregon said, “Don’t worry if the floor is wet. It's only water produced by the methane reacting with oxygen during the explosion. Oh, and methane isn't toxic, just highly flammable. Of course if you breathe it instead of oxygen, you’ll suffocate. But first you’ll act like a drunk and embarrass yourself. So hurry up.”

“Real funny,” Mariah quipped. Mariah wondered how Tregon happened to know all this stuff about methane. She didn’t want to believe he was surfing the Spacenet at a time like this. Oh, he’s probably relaying data from the emergency response team! And joking to keep me calm.

She looked down at her hands. She would have to remove her gloves to change wristcom channels. But the gloves had saved her hands from the fire once already, and might do so again. She’d just have to put up with Tregon. It helped knowing that this was much harder for him than for her. The whole settlement was probably watching how he handled himself.

As she crawled past the end of the row of cages, calling out for Apollo, she remembered the mice. She couldn’t let them die! She searched for something to put them in. The blast had broken all the jars on this side of the lab. She’d have to tie up the mice in her skirt.

Slowly, so she didn’t pass out, she stood up, leaning against the rack with her left side. She could not lift her right arm anyway, so she held the skirt up with that hand and used her left to open the cage of females. Thankful for the gloves in case the mice bit her, she grabbed a handful of wiggling rodents and plopped them into her skirt. Another scoop and she had them all. She repeated this with the cage of males. She twisted the “pouch” of mice so they couldn’t get out. Then she slid back to the floor panting.

She followed the orange arrows until they stopped. Pretty arrows!

            “Mariah,” Tregon said. “Put on the space suit! Come on, the methane level is really dangerous. It could blow any minute.”

            Mariah looked down at the floor. Had she dropped a mouse? She picked it up by the tail and stared at it. Was it dead? It alternately turned red and then white in the flashing lights. She laughed, realizing what it was. “Red mouse, white mouse, fake Martian mouse!”

            “Mariah, you're not making sense. You need air! Crawl into a bubble unit, okay? There’s one right there beside you. You can do that, can’t you?”

            Tregon was always telling her what to do. Well, she didn’t have to listen! “Red mouse. White mouse. Fake Martian mouse!”

            “Hey Mariah, wiggle the mouse for the camera,” Tregon said.

            “Like this?” Mariah said, giggling and shaking the mouse back and forth.

            “Oh!” Mariah screamed as Apollo pounced onto her lap, knocking the fake mouse from her grip. It fell on her lap and the real mice squirmed around, tickling her. Mariah laughed and threw her left arm over the cat. “Kitty! You came to play with me!”

            “That’s right,” Tregon said. “He wants to play bumper bubbles!”

            “Oh goody!” Mariah squealed. It had been a long time since she had played that game. “We are going to bump you clear to the bottom of Hebes Chasm!” she declared. She climbed into the bubble unit that was shaped like a small tub chair. The door automatically closed down over her, the cat, and the mice.

            “Air! Air! In the Chair!” Mariah and Tregon chanted.

            A few deep breaths later, Mariah’s head cleared. She was instantly aware of the intense pain in her shoulder and on the side of her face. She moaned, and that hurt, too.

“Mariah? You okay now?” Tregon asked.

            “No,” she answered truthfully. “I hurt all over. But I’m alive. And so are Apollo and the mice.”

“Your dad's in the airlock. He’s opened the outside vent, so the lab is losing pressure now,” Tregon reported.

            Mariah opened her eyes, shifting Apollo to her side so he wouldn’t disturb the mice. As the air in the lab rushed out, the temperature dropped quickly. "The bubble's getting frosty. I can't see out anymore,” she said. “Tregon, did you have me shake the mouse to get Apollo to pounce?”

“Yeah, I was tracking him, but didn’t want to interrupt you getting the mice even though I took some heat for that from your parents. That study is going to prove to everyone once and for all that Mars is the best place to live!”

This praise from Tregon surprised Mariah. She assumed he thought the study was a waste of time like everything else she did.

“Anyway,” Tregon continued, “I figured Apollo couldn’t resist pouncing on a swinging mouse.”

Mariah smiled, remembering that the whole crisis started with Apollo acting on that feline instinct. “Thanks,” Mariah said, hugging Apollo close to her. “And that was a good idea to use our old nursery game to coax me into the bubble unit.”

            “Yeah, well you’d do the same for me if I were about to croak from lack of oxygen.”

“Yeah,” Mariah whispered.

She really had almost died, but her training and Tregon’s quick thinking had saved her and Apollo and the mice, too. Sometimes she hated Tregon, but he was Martian-born, like her, and all Martian life, even mice and cats, were precious to her. She decided to forgive him for the prank—at least until the next one!

            The frost cleared on her bubble, meaning the air pressure was near zero. “Your dad’s coming in,” Tregon said.

The hatch of the emergency airlock opened and a space-suited figure stepped through. He pointed to his wrist to indicate her wristcom, and held up 3 fingers for channel 3. Mariah slipped off her right glove. “Tregon, I’m switching channels. Talk to you later.”

            “Yeah, sure,” he said. “And don’t worry about the vid. Only the emergency team will see it.”

            That was as close to an apology as she was going to get. “Okay,” Mariah said.

She switched to her dad’s channel. He praised her for sealing the lab door. If she hadn’t done that, the methane would have contaminated the whole section of the settlement. While he rolled her bubble out the airlock, he said that the methane was now all vented from the lab, but that the structural engineers had to check for cracks and leaks before they could reopen it. Another space-suited man waited outside. The two of them lifted the bubble onto a three-wheeled cart and drove her around to the main airlock.

Apollo took one look outside and ducked into her armpit, shaking. “It’s okay to be scared,” she whispered to him. “I am, too.” At least she was not alone and helpless like she had been during that one tragic evacuation drill. Poor Tigger kitty! I still miss you! Apollo’s warm furry self reassured her that he was very much alive. The bubble is not cracked. Apollo is not going to die! She squeezed her eyes shut. The salty tears stung her burned left cheek, but she didn’t care.

She counted in Chinese while breathing slowly in and out, the way her mother had taught her to deal with her nightmares about that accident. They went over a bump, and her eyes instantly popped open on a view of pink sky. “Ugh!” She swallowed the bile that rose in her throat. The sky is not going to suck away my air!

Finally the cart stopped, and they carried her bubble into the outer airlock. “Apollo, we’re safe now,” she whispered. The mice seemed to sense the danger was over as well because they starting squeaking and squirming. She didn’t dare loosen her grip on her skirt because the mice might spill out. And Apollo would soon be recovered!

Thankfully, the dust cleaning routine went fast, and they entered the inner lock. Dad took off his helmet and opened her bubble. Mariah gulped the cool air like a fruit smoothie. Dad gently lifted Apollo out and placed him a cage held by the other man. He lifted the mice into another cage that someone had put in the airlock for them.

When Mariah leaned forward to get out of the bubble, the intense pain in her shoulder made her gasp, and the gasp caused a stabbing pain in her ribs. She hugged her side, and squeezed her eyes shut to keep from crying.

“Don’t try to get up,” Dad said. He knelt down beside her and gently stroked her singed hair. “You’ve been incredibly brave, and I’m so proud of you,” he said with tears welling up in his blue eyes. Mariah was too choked up to say anything as Dad reached in and scooped her up in his strong arms. She laid her head on his shoulder, breathing in his sweet “daddy” smell. He carried her through the final lock and all the way to the infirmary.

Hours later Mariah rested on a special water bed in the infirmary. Her parents and brother had finally left to get lunch, and promised to bring her some of her favorite red gelatin when they returned. The water pulsed cold and then room temperature, easing her pain and preventing swelling on her right side. Her dislocated shoulder was back in place, but her bruised ribs ached every time she took a deep breath or coughed. The doctor said she was lucky that she hadn’t broken anything. This surprised the doctors on Earth because they continued to think that children born on Mars would have weak bones. She was sorry for the circumstances, but glad to prove them wrong.

“Mariah? Can I come in?” a familiar voice asked.

“No, Tregon, you can’t! No cameras!” Mariah said, lifting her hands to cover her face before he could see her. The aloe vera salve the doctor rubbed on her ear and cheek had taken away the sting of her burns, but there was nothing they could do to remove the melted ribbons except cut them out of her hair. Her cheek would be red for days and her hair was simply ruined!

“I didn’t bring a camera, but, anyway, where do you want me to sit the cages?

Mariah spread her fingers and peeked through them. “What cages?”

            “Your Martian mice. The vet said they are perfectly fine, but some of the females might be pregnant.”

            “Pregnant! The males and females were only together for an hour,” Mariah said.

            Tregon laughed. “Hey, they are Martian mice after all!”

            Mariah could not help but smile. Her parents had endured years of teasing because they had started a family so soon after homesteading on Mars. People on Earth said the radiation pumped up their hormones or maybe the pink sky got them thinking about baby girls. It was all nonsense of course, but the fact was that life thrived on Mars. And she would enjoy raising some baby mice. She would add a new part to the study to see if the mice mothers lived longer than the other females. She guessed that they would.

            “How is Apollo?” Mariah asked.

            “Oh, he’s fine, too,” Tregon said. “The vet said she wants to observe him overnight, but I think she’s just making sure he won’t come and punch holes in your water bed tonight.”

            “Ha, oh, ow!” Mariah stuttered. Laughing made her ribs stab with pain.

            Tregon sat the cages down on a table with his back to her. Mariah thought how nice it was for him to show some respect for her feelings for a change. His mother must have grounded him. Standing between her and the mice, he said, “Well, for some reason I’ve been assigned to the lab cleanup crew, so I’d better get going.”

            Mariah smiled. She bet her dad had a hand in that. “Okay. Have fun. And thanks for bringing the mice over.”

            “No problem.”

            Mariah peered through her fingers until he was out the door. Then she turned her attention to the mice. She started counting them in Chinese, “Yī, èr, sān… Tregon! You are going to pay for this!” Half the mice were their normal white, and the other half were colored Martian red!

THE END