He was only hours away from touching the surface of
Earth’s sea, after three years of having remained suspended around the planet
Mars. And although the longing to reunite with his loved ones was immense and
impossible to postpone, he knew that the time his descent would take would
coincide with the final hours of his life.
Television cameras, eager and unblinking, traced the
trajectory of the capsule, awaiting the decisive instant: to find out whether
the astronaut’s body would disintegrate or not as soon as it exited the
capsule.
Despite the insistence of science that current
technology still could not guarantee the survival of any astronaut subjected to
the environmental conditions of Mars, the president of the country leading the
mission had ordered that the journey to the red planet be carried out under his
administration. I don’t want everything my administration has invested in
technology to be capitalized on by another president—much less if he’s a
socialist, as my intelligence service warns me my successor might be.
The order was given, and panic spread among the
members of the mission, who, fully aware of the mortal risk of orbiting Mars
for three years—that is, the progressive and irreversible loss of bone
mass—chose to resign from the mission and take shelter in academic teaching at
whatever universities were willing to take them in.
As long as that loudmouth remains president, we will
not set foot on that space station again, the former crew members told their closest
relatives, since a public declaration of that magnitude would have earned them
the president’s unchecked wrath.
But there was one who accepted the challenge. Only
one. He was the sole Australian in the group. His name was Larry Nolan, from
Kalgoorlie, the same town that saw the birth of the physician Barry Marshall,
whom Larry had admired since his youth. A devoted reader, he had been
fascinated to discover that in 1984 Marshall infected himself with Helicobacter
pylori in order to prove, in his own body, that stomach ulcers had a bacterial
origin and not a psychological one, as was believed at the time.
That radical act of scientific commitment caused him
severe gastritis, which he later managed to cure with antibiotics. But the most
important consequence was another: medical doctrine was transformed forever.
Thanks to that reckless and profoundly human gesture, ulcers ceased to be a
surgical sentence and became treatable worldwide, saving millions from chronic
pain.
Humanity, through the Swedish Academy, recognized that
brave and almost romantic act by awarding him the Nobel Prize in Medicine in
2005.
Larry decided to become the Barry Marshall of
astronautics. He would be the living—or dying—proof that exploration cannot be
improvised, that even in the face of glory-hungry leaders it is necessary to
respect the timing, the processes, and the limits of science.
And so he volunteered as the sole crew member of that
mission to Mars which, after three years and several months, was returning to
Earth. And there was the capsule, detached from the spacecraft, held aloft by
several parachutes that made it sway and descend with the delicacy of a
feather, carving its way down to the sea.
A boat sped at full speed toward the exact point of
splashdown. The timing was millimetric. Everything was calculated—just as
calculated as what scientists had anticipated would happen the moment the
capsule opened and Larry re-entered Earth’s atmosphere.
For a barely perceptible instant, a gloved hand
emerged, like a salute directed at millions of invisible eyes, or perhaps like
a mute signal that the mission had been accomplished. The next second, that
same hand deflated and fell, vanishing from sight.
The occupants of the boat could not hide their
surprise or their terror before the cameras. Though they looked like tiny ants
in the vastness of the shot, the emotion was transmitted intact to the entire
world.
That hand, suspended in the air for less than a
second, was enough to show that human resilience can be unpredictable when it
sets its mind to it—that even if life expectancy upon re-entering the
atmosphere was technically zero seconds, those milliseconds aloft were enough.
But the authoritarian president, deaf to any technical
warning, remained in power and in public favor when, shortly thereafter, he
announced that he had just appropriated the oil of a country invaded under
cover of night.
Larry’s gesture was relegated to the footnotes of the
newspapers. The next day, it was nothing more than a forgettable anecdote.
One year later, someone resurrected the episode as a
meme: at children’s parties and bachelor parties alike, a hand-shaped balloon
was released, which had to be popped in less than a second.
Neither the winners nor the losers of the challenge
ever knew who Larry Nolan had been.
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