No Laughing Matter

The NASA ground control team in Houston watched with awe as the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft docked flawlessly with the International Space Station. It was an important mission, hastily arranged, so the ground team were relieved when Chief Science Officer, George Maddox, engineering genius and all-around nice guy opened the Quest Air Lock hatch, smiled at the ISS on-board camera and emerged into Unity Node 1.

The Houston team high-fived.

“Why is Maddox like a mushroom?” said the EECOM, a junior member of the ground control team.

“No idea,” said Flight Activities Officer, Gary Blackstone.

“Because he’s a fungi to have around!” said EGIL, another junior member of the team.

EECOM was not happy that EGIL stole his punchline, and FAO Blackstone rolled his eyes at the two NASA-bros. Meanwhile, sitting in the shadows, Ellen Rossiter, NASA’s Psych-Ops officer took a dim view of these antics, and made a note in her little black book, accordingly.

Aboard the ISS, Commander Cathy Rector was worried about the oxygen problem, and eager to get rid of Olaf Olsen. The outbound Norwegian Science Officer was a test of her patience; either obsessively morbid, or manically elated, often sleepy, and she seriously doubted his fitness for duty in space. Aside from mood-swings, he seemed furtive or sketchy. Science Officer Maddox, by contrast, had a stellar reputation as an engineer, and was known to be a witty, light-hearted man. Moreover, being an expert on life control systems, Maddox would be - quite literally - a breath of fresh air because the performance of the Oxygen Generation System had deteriorated over the last few weeks despite Olsen's supposed attempts to clean it up. The air quality aboard the ISS was very poor, especially in the dreaded European Lab module. The Commander was not sorry to see Olsen earth-bound, aboard the departing SpaceX module.

Maddox, right-stuff handsome with a nine o’clock shadow, settled in quickly.

“Why did Oxygen and Magnesium get divorced?”

Commander Cathy Rector was an attractive square-jawed woman with piercing blue eyes, gave it serious thought but had no idea.

“O-M-G, it’s a long story!”

Cathy Rector was an earnest, serious person, doing serious things, so it took a while for Maddox to explain the joke, at which point she laughed in an unpracticed manner, like a cat with hiccups.

“CSO Maddox,” I think it’s time to get to work on the Air Revitalization System,” said the Commander once she’d recovered her dignity.

“You bet your ARS, Ma’am!”

Commander Rector thought the Oh-My-God joke was very clever and very funny, but she was also Captain of the Ship, a responsibility that weighed heavily on her, and CSO Maddox was on a serious mission which required urgent attention.

“Where is it?” said Maddox.

“Where is what?” said the Commander, breathing deeply of the sickly-sweet air.

“Where is the ARS?”

Cathy Rector was appalled that the CSO didn’t know the location of the system he was supposed to be working on. “Up top, Node 3.”

“That would be up, the ARS?” said Maddox.

“Yes, Maddox! That would be up, the ARS,” she said, irritated by this hole in the man’s knowledge.

With a deft shove and a suppressed smirk, Maddox disappeared through the narrow aperture of the Leonardo Module, leaving Commander Cathy Rector with the distinct impression that he was making fun of her.

The onboard air-monitor indicated a rapid deterioration in the oxygen content aboard the ISS. Houston was stumped by the problem, but the Flight Activities Officer, Gary Blackstone, had total confidence in Maddox, and Cathy had complete confidence in the FAO. Ellen in Psych-Ops listened in on the lovefest and scribbled something in her little black book.

Maddox returned from the ARS with a smile on his face, and there was a notable improvement in the particulate matter count as represented on the on-board air-monitoring system. Maddox had replaced the ARS filters, which were full of hair, skin cells, plastic granules and traces of a white chalky substance.

“I just don’t get the point of air filters,” said Maddox. “They just sit there and collect dust.”

Commander Rector was beginning to have doubts about Maddox; he was a human non sequitur and had strangely fluted high-pitch voice that she found a little irritating. She held a conference with Ground Control when Maddox went to the bathroom.

“Maddox is the best of the best,“ said the EECOM officer, who looked ragged at the edges on the monitor.

“He knows more about life support systems than we’ve forgotten,” said the EGIL officer, blurred by an orange aura.

FAO Blackstone reassured the Commander that “if Maddox can’t fix it, nobody can.”

“But he didn’t know where the ARS was located,” she complained, frowning. FAO Blackstone looked like the Cookie Monster, so she gave the monitor a sharp blow, and the Sesame Street image of the three men sharpened into a NASA-like normality.

“Yeah, roger that,” said FAO Blackstone. “We heard that conversation.”

“So how can I trust him?”

Ellen from Psych-Ops pounced from the shadows and appeared on the monitor, “How can you trust anyone?” she said, darkly into a sinister silence.

FAO Blackstone felt compelled to lighten the mood and clarify the meaning of the dust-collector joke, incidentally elbowing Ellen of Psych-Ops in the ribcage.

The Commander ended the conference call. “Muppets!” she said to herself. The joke about dust was not at all funny.

Maddox was pale in the face when he emerged from the ISS bathroom, otherwise known as the “Waste and Hygiene Compartment.” The vacuum pumps, both one and two, were a nasty surprise, not at all what he’d been trained for. And that sweet-sickly odor, everywhere! Maddox prided himself on having a strong constitution and a positive disposition, but something didn’t smell right aboard the ISS.

At least Maddox was quick about his business, thought the Commander, unlike Olsen who’d spent hours in the stall, only to emerge with a sourpuss on his large egg-shaped face. Never satisfied. She was so relieved that Olsen was gone! The Norwegian came aboard the ISS with lab animals, packets of fertilizers and high hopes of figuring out how to grow vegetables in space, but his mood fluctuations became intolerable, and his high hopes were dashed low when he lost his supply of Ammonium Nitrate somewhere in the European Lab. Neither of the two vacuums could empty that man of his inner demons. Neither time nor effort could rid the European lab of its strange smell of urine and whipped cream.

How does one lose kilograms of Ammonium Nitrate, anyway?

“Why did oxygen go to therapy?” said Maddox, thinking to restore himself to good humor with his own good humor.

The Commander was not going to get blindsided by Maddox a second or third time. It was another joke, and she would beat him at his own game this time.

“I don’t know, why did oxygen go to therapy?” said the Commander.

“Because it was feeling too negative?” The Commander did not get the joke, but she hiccupped some feline barks just so the Houston team, hearing this banter, didn’t give her a bad reputation; someone might blame her for Olsen’s spiral into despair, and then she’d never get another mission.

“Oh, that’s very funny, Maddox,” said the Commander. She waited for Maddox to finish typing out a status update on his laptop. When she was sure that he was finished and paying attention, she let rip her well-prepared riposte.

“You’d better get up the OGS now!” said the Commander, grinning ear-to-ear.

“Pardon?”

“Up the OGS!”

Maddox took a few seconds to figure out what she meant. The Oxygen Generation System was next up for his attention; the electrolyzer was the lungs of the spacecraft. Maddox felt too tired to explain the difference between the Commander’s lame attempt at humor and his own pun.

“Good one, Commander. Up the OGS! Good one.” Maddox patted the Commander on the uniformed arm.

The Commander felt deflated, like a tired party balloon.

Maddox, enervated, was a troubling sight for the boys in Houston. Ellen of Psych-Ops was intrigued,

“The Oxygen levels are dangerously low,” said Maddox in the video-call with FAO Blackstone. Maddox and Commander Rector were both staring at a downward-sloping trend-line. “It wasn’t the filter system," said Maddox.

“We seea aoia apera carbxandow perroadsiopa…” came the response from Houston, mixed in with a whole load of white-noise static.

Maddox looked at the Commander and hunched up his shoulders, deferring to her judgment.

“You go see to the Oxygen system; I’ll join you once I’ve re-connected with NASA.” squeaked the Commander, her throat strangely constricted.

“Later gator,” said Maddox. His shoulder bumped awkwardly against the bulkhead before his feet disappeared into the narrow aperture of the Leonardo module.

Later Gator. Maddox was too funny, thought the Commander. It triggered a memory from a care-free childhood.

The Commander re-set the communications system, but every NASA utterance sounded like a combination of Klingon and Portuguese. Did the communication breakdown have something to do with the oxygen deficiency? Commander Rector thought the coincidence strange. At a loss, she made the short, but disorienting trip - up, down, sideways, up - to Node 3, where Maddox had pulled open a panel and was examining a circuit board. It was easier to breathe in Node 3, less spoiled by the weird smell from the European Lab.

She’d rehearsed her greeting line several times but couldn’t remember why.

“In a while, crocodile.”

This was the funniest thing that anyone anywhere had ever uttered!Their laughter was stupid and infectious. Commander Rector and CSO Maddox twirled around. propelled by their own scatterbrained madness.

Maddox gasped for air. “It’s not... the... electrolyzer!” he said, breathlessly.

“Oh good!” said the Commander, tickled at the thought that her good buddy, the electrolyzer, was in any way, shape, or form, responsible for their asphyxiation.

“Nor the carbon dioxide scrubber.”

“It’s a Russian scrubber, you know!” she said.

“I know!” said Maddox, reeling hysterically. The idea that the entire ISS life support system depended on Russian technology struck them both as incredibly funny, and it took them a few minutes to calm down, recapture their breath, and reorient after the aerial acrobatics.

“I don’t know how to fix this,” said Maddox.

“Funny,” said the Commander.

“No seriously, Cathy, I have no idea what’s happened.”

Use of her given name was an inappropriate intimacy and sobered the Commander up.

“Hilarious, George,” she said, with a little venom.

Maddox looked the Commander straight in the face, “Cathy! I don’t know how to fucking fix the problem!” He shouted, red in the face, temple vein throbbing, and a thin sheen of sweat on his soap-star face.

Cathy’s face was half-cocked, between panic and amusement, primed to go either way, but her clenched fists revealed a nascent understanding that the stakes were high, impossibly high. Her limbs felt light, and she felt euphoria and despair, mixed with an adrenaline rush of primal fear.

“George, tell me that this is a joke.”

Maddox stared at her, bug-eyed. “The oxygen level is below life support level. There’s a contaminant in the air.”

“So, what are we breathing?”

“I have no fucking idea,” said Maddox, laughing, blanking, laughing, blanking again, and grasping at air, grasping at anything that might save him from drowning.

Olaf Olsen bumped back to earth and the first thing that entered his mind was that he should go see a Houston-based dentist because his teeth were aching like crazy. He wondered if he’d been grinding his molars during the return trip to earth in the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft; it got pretty freaky during the re-entry phase.

“Welcome back to earth, Officer Olsen” said the Space X engineer as he opened the hatch to the aircraft, filling the module with fresh air, which cleared Olsen’s mind, and sharpened the pain in his jaw.

“It’s good to be back!” said Olaf, surprising himself with an octave-deep growl.

Olaf felt very peculiar, and he wondered vaguely, and with a little guilt, whether it had anything to do with the fertilizer powder that he’d spilled in the European Lab aboard ISS. It was a harmless oxidizing agent, Ammonium Nitrate, used in agriculture, industry and medicine… easily transformed into laughing gas… Most of it ended up in the ventilation system…

The EECOM officer answered the urgent and persistent phone call. As the officer in charge of emergency, environmental and consumables management, he was low on the NASA totem pole.

“Welcome back to earth, Office Olsen,” said the EECOM, surprised that the engineer’s first thought, only seconds after landing, was to contact a junior member of the ISS control team, not his mother or his wife? The EECOM assumed it was something to do with being European.

Olsen talked a mile-a-minute into his uncomprehending ear.

“You’ve got to be joking?” said the EECOM.

Olsen screamed profanities into the EECOM’s ear, so he handed the phone to FAO Blackstone, like it was a stick of dynamite.

“What in hell?” said FAO Blackstone, listening intently, white as a sheet. “Laughing gas?”

Ellen in Psych-Ops scribbled furiously in her notebook.

The three ground-control officers watched the video monitor in awe and horror. Two of NASA’s finest astronauts were jabbering like Alvin and the Chipmunks up in the space station.

“What can we do to save them?” said FAO Blackstone.

“Open the vents, purge the system, using the back-up oxygen in the old Nauka module”, said the EGIL officer, delighted to be of use for once.

“That’s the old Russian lab. Do we know how to operate the valves remotely?”

EGIL was on it like a flash.

On the ISS monitor Commander Rector and CSO Maddox appeared to be performing a Bavarian knee-slapping dance, and FAO Blackstone’s heart sank at the dreadful image - to be forever etched in his memory.

“Hurry EGIL, hurry!”

“The instructions are in Russian Sir!”

“They’re doomed.”

It was a low point in NASA’s feted history, FAO, EECOM and EGIL were at a loss. FIDO, GNC, INCO, IFM, MECH and MECH-2 were stymied.

Ellen of Psych-Ops, fluent in Chinese and Russian, was compelled by a deeply buried humanity into action, despite her keen interest in the business of oxygen-deprivation. She jumped into a seat at the console and scanned the Russian - soviet era - instruction manual. FAO Blackstone followed Ellen’s barked instructions, and the rusty-old Russian ISS systems sprang to life, oxygen gushed from Nauka, to Zvezda, through Zarya and into the main ventilation system. FAO, understanding the full meaning of Olsen’s telephonic rant, sealed the hatch of the European Lab module, sealed the stench, trapped the laughing gas.

The irony was not lost on Cathy and George, that a near-death experience bonded together as forever-friends. That, plus the joint embarrassment of being caught on video doing a Lederhosen space-stomp, though neither Commander Rector nor SCO Maddox had memory of this strange happening, nor could they explain their perfect stamp-slap-clap execution of the Tyrolian folk-dance - only that they’d felt something akin to unbridled joy in what they thought were their final last desperate moments on earth… near earth.

Through the small port-hole window they were able to spy on the European Lab, abandoned forever, mid-experiment, thick with vegetation, teaming with animal life. Beans the size of potatoes, potatoes the size of melons, the cucumbers were so long that they'd ran into and up the wall, ninety-degree bends. The chickens and rabbits had escaped their lab cages, and were fat, happy and vastly oversized, unmolested in their own smelly Eden.

“What is the difference between a rabbit and a cucumber?” said Maddox.

Commander Cathy Rector had no idea, and Maddox was forced to explain the joke.