Dead on Mars

Chapter 66 - Sol Ninety-Eight, Scurvy, and Kidney Failure
Tomcat dragged Tang Yue in, closed the hatch, and took off the Radiant Armor’s life support system before pulling him out of the EVA suit.

Tomcat made Tang Yue lean on the wall as it crouched in front of him. It pinched Tang Yue’s toes and asked, “You had a cramp?”

“F*ck, don’t pinch me! It hurts!”

Tang Yue pulled back his leg as he slapped Tomcat’s paw away, only to massage his calf muscles slowly.

“It’s good that you are alright.” Tomcat threw up its paws. “I thought you would be half-paralyzed… If you were to be paralyzed, I’d throw you outside and leave you out there to perish.”

“Can you be more humanistic?” Tang Yue rolled his eyes.

“Throwing you outside is being humanistic. You wouldn’t survive more than three minutes outside the Kunlun Station. You’d die fast and not suffer much pain,” Tomcat said. “Trust me, you don’t want to be paralyzed inside and slowly die and rot. That kind of life would be worse than death.”

Tang Yue massaged his knee joint. His knees had suddenly felt a sharp pain before they had buckled, causing him to fall to the ground.

Tomcat circled around him and raised Tang Yue’s arm. After carefully sizing him up, the pair of cat eyes turned around as it began sniffing.

“What are you doing?” Tang Yue felt creeped out.

“Look down.” Tomcat pressed one paw on Tang Yue’s head, pressing his head down before pulling up his collar.

“Look up.” Tomcat held up Tang Yue’s chin and pushed his head up. He then touched Tang Yue’s neck. His careful observations looked like a slaughterer deciding which was the best place to deliver that incisive cut.

“Holy sh*t, what the f*ck are you…”

Before Tang Yue could finish his sentence, his face was being pinched by Tomcat.

“Ah—” Tomcat indicated for Tang Yue to open his mouth as though it was a doctor checking on him.

Tang Yue obediently went “ah.”

Tomcat pinched Tang Yue’s front teeth and stared at it for a while before nodding. It released Tang Yue, took a step back and sat down on a chair as it crossed its hind legs.

“There’s something wrong with your body.”

Tang Yue was at a loss. “What’s wrong?”

“From the symptoms you are currently exhibiting, your body is suffering from a calcium and Vitamin C deficiency. I just checked on you. There are signs of bleeding beneath the skin. There are also bruises on your back and arms. And your gums are swollen. They are classic symptoms of a lack of Vitamin C. Do you find your joints aching? This is also a result of Vitamin C deficiency,” Tomcat answered. “Calcium deficiency will also cause you to be weak and suffer cramps.”

With Tomcat sounding serious, Tang Yue lifted his arm. Indeed, he saw bruises and blood spots on the inner side of his arm. He had thought that it was a result of him donning the Radiant Armor.

Tang Yue wasn’t a doctor or biologist by training. He wasn’t as sensitive to details of nutrient supplements like Tomcat. In his current living conditions, all Tang Yue could do was guarantee that he had food to eat and sufficient energy. As for the eighteen micronutrients and eight essential amino acids, he didn’t bother with them.

Previously, the expedition team’s doctor was Maxwell Thorpe, who they called Max. He was an expert on aerospace medicine and physiology. The nourishment of the astronauts on the Mars mission was typically his responsibility. As the Mars mission was an extended space mission lasting two years, with the Orion’s passengers unable to receive frequent replenishments from Earth like the ISS, it was always a difficult problem to ensure the health of the expedition members. After all, treatment was difficult if any one of them fell ill.

Max stipulated strict health plans for the members. It included what they were to eat, how much they were to eat, how they were to eat, as well as physical exercise. This was to prevent any loss of calcium, as well as osteoporosis and muscular atrophy.

“How many vitamin capsules are left?” Tomcat asked.

“Half of them were given to Mai Dong. The remainder has mostly been consumed,” Tang Yue answered.

The vitamin deficiency was a problem with the food. Tang Yue recalled the menu from the recent month. The first two months were rather sumptuous, but as the reconstituted foods and canned food were depleted, Tang Yue had no choice but to mainly eat energy bars and compressed biscuits.

The vitamins contained in energy bars and compressed biscuits were clearly incomparable to canned vegetables and fruits.

However, he hadn’t expected the repercussions to show so quickly.

“Severe Vitamin C deficiency leads to scurvy.” Tomcat was very stern. “The radiation on Mars is too high. Due to the lacking atmosphere and magnetic field, this place is filled with high-energy charged particles from space and the sun, as well as secondary particles generated by the atmosphere and soil. They are mainly neutrons and gamma rays. This doesn’t exist on Earth.

“In environments with high radiation, antioxidants such as Vitamin C in a person’s body will rapidly deplete. The speed here is a lot faster than on Earth,” Tomcat continued. “You can eat compressed biscuits on Earth for three months, and the symptoms wouldn’t be as serious as the ones you are facing now. I believe that if you continue doing this, you won’t be too far from suffering scurvy.”

Tang Yue knew what scurvy was. In the seventeenth century, sailors on long-distance expeditions would end up with scurvy due to the lack of vegetables and fruits. The disease caused joint pains and bleeding under the skin. In more severe cases, it led to death. But in modern-day society, scurvy that was a result of Vitamin C deficiency had been eradicated. This was because such a disease could be treated by eating oranges.

But on the godforsaken Mars… finding an orange was as difficult as finding an extraterrestrial spacecraft.

In some ways, the passengers on the Orion spacecraft were in the same situation as the sailors on long-distance expeditions at sea. However, the sailboats had become spacecraft, and the ocean had become space. The only thing that didn’t change was the difficulty in acquiring material supplies. Be it the sixteenth century, or the twenty-first century with advanced scientific technology, the shelf life of tomatoes and oranges couldn’t last more than two months.

Scurvy, that had been long forgotten by people, had managed to seek out Tang Yue 60 million kilometers away.

Humans just had too many physical problems. Tang Yue had even believed that he would starve to death.

Now, in hindsight, it seemed uncalled for.

Before he starved to death, he might die as a result of scurvy, kidney failure, cardiac arrest, or even from a baffling allergy.

Tang Yue took out a white pill bottle from a drawer and placed it on the table.

“This is the final bottle of multivitamins.”

Tomcat unscrewed the lip and glanced at it.

“How long can these pills last you?”

“Not long. At most a month,” Tang Yue answered. “If I were to subsequently eat more canned food and fewer biscuits, probably longer… However, there isn’t much canned food left. They will be gone if I keep eating them.”

Tomcat was a little stumped.

A month ago, Tang Yue had finished the multivitamins and the canned fruit. As a result, his vitamin intake had drastically dropped, and following that were all kinds of physical problems.

This would be a trivial problem on Earth, but in the harsh environments of Mars, the problem was magnified a thousand times over. It became an insurmountable task, one that might even endanger Tang Yue’s life.

Tomcat paced about the Kunlun Station’s Hab. It had to find a method to replenish Tang Yue’s lack of nutrients.

“What replenishes Vitamin C?”

“Oranges.”

Tomcat kept mentioning oranges, but where could they be found on Mars? They only had minimal resources at hand, so it was impossible for Tomcat to pull oranges from thin air.

“Apart from oranges?”

“Tomatoes.”

Tomcat sat down and frowned. “Tomatoes… Tomatoes… Where would you find tomatoes in this godforsaken place?”

“Mr. Cat? Tang Yue?” At this moment, Mai Dong spoke up through the comms. “What were you talking about? I just heard something about tomatoes?”

“We are looking for tomatoes,” Tomcat answered.

“Tomatoes?” The girl had a tomato in hand. She shook it in front of the camera. “Here’s a tomato. Take a look!”

“We are looking for tomatoes on the Kunlun Station,” Tomcat said. “Tang Yue is suffering from vitamin deficiency. He needs to eat more oranges and tomatoes.”

“There aren’t any tomatoes on the Kunlun Station, but you can grow them,” Mai Dong suggested.

Tomcat and Tang Yue were taken aback.

“Grow?” Tang Yue asked. “How would I know how…”

“It’s fine!” The girl looked pumped as she said with confidence, “I’ll teach you! I’m an excellent teacher!”