You would think that the sight of Earth’s largest carnivorous land mammal less than two hundred meters away would inspire the same instincts in everyone, but no. Sergei’s instinct had been to get to the rifle. Everyone else’s instinct had been to stare at the bear. The bear’s instinct had been to stand up on its hind legs and show that it was, indeed, a very, very large bear. It dropped back down to all fours and began moving in a circle, which is bear choreography for hunting. By then Sergei had gotten to the truck, and had the rifle. He had instructed the others to group together, to begin backing up slowly to the truck, to make a lot of noise. He had kept the rifle trained on the bear, which ignored all the yelping humans and kept its eyes on Sergei. Paul set off a few flares. The bear stopped. There had been discussion in the truck. Because of their depleted numbers, you could no longer shoot a polar bear on sight, and anyway, there was great reluctance to shoot. Especially when they were all in the truck and could easily drive away, and be good people. They shouldn’t leave an expensive piece of equipment, so Sergei was ready to fire a warning shot if the animal decided to attack Bugs. This didn’t happen. Even a bear knew the thing was a piece of crap. Eventually, the bear simply moved off, and they loaded up the Hopper and returned to base.
For the next week, the other three had told one another the experience over and over, reviewing all of their thoughts and feelings. They re-created their antibear ululations. They thought out loud about how lucky they were, and paid tribute to the majestic awesomeness of the bear. Sergei kept silent, because what he wanted to say was, “Paul, you fucking moron, you had one job to do.” He had also felt a little bit of guilt, because there had been a moment when the bear was taking Sergei’s measure, and Sergei had experienced a flash of intuition—these sometimes came to him—that the bear was considering him not as prey, but as deliverance. The bear had wanted Sergei to shoot him. The bear wanted to die, did not want to die slowly, unremembered and alone and aching, but the bear did not know how to commit suicide on its own. Evolution had come up short for the polar bear, its habitat destroyed before it developed the capacity for conscious self-slaughter. Why did the bear not charge and force the issue? The bear wanted to be understood. Let there be no mistake about this. Have the courage to release me, not as self-defense, but as an act of grace. But Sergei had not done it.
The screen behind Luke is now showing an image of an ocean floor: two divers in spacesuits, posing in front of a barnacle-covered portal.
“NEEMO,” says Luke. “NASA’s underwater research station. Although stays here are short—typically ten to fourteen days—participants receive a full range of physical stressors: fatiguing work, loss of body heat, sleep disturbances, increased chance of ear infections, disorientation, crowded conditions, diet restrictions.”
Sergei enjoyed his NEEMO rotation on Aquarius. Great time, great crew. Gareth, a British guy, marine biologist, very smart, very funny—they’d become especially good friends, the way you can when you are spending fourteen days with someone nineteen meters underwater in a pressurized sardine can looking at giant grouper out the window. At the time of their expedition, Gareth had just buried his father, and so had Sergei. They’d exchanged stories about going fishing with their dads, although Sergei’s father only took him once. To Kamchatka. Sergei was nine. Just him and his father, not any of Sergei’s three sisters or his mother. The sight of his father scaling the fish while the fish were still alive had bothered Sergei. His father told him that fish do not feel pain like people, and handed him the scaling knife and told him not to be meek. Sergei hesitated. Not out of meekness, but because he did not believe what his father had told him. That is, he had not thought that his father was lying, he thought that his father was ignorant of the facts. It had been a source of great sadness, to see that his father could be ignorant. It made him physically ill, actually. Sergei scaled and gutted the fish under his father’s precise instructions and then vomited next to the cleaning station. His father washed both vomit and fish guts away with a hose. Sergei told this story to Gareth, and they’d had a good laugh, because Sergei was an amusing storyteller and Gareth’s dad had also been kind of an asshole.
Luke moves on to a series of images from submarines. Pressurization concerns, catastrophic outcomes for loss of power, radiation exposure, severe space restrictions.
Gareth told Sergei that current research suggested fish do not experience pain in the way humans do. “Pain in humans,” Gareth explained, “is a process. The nociceptors send electrical signals through nerves and the spinal cord to the neocortex of the brain, which then processes the data into conscious pain sensations. Fish don’t have a neocortex and they don’t have the C nociceptors that mammals have.”
“So, my father was right,” Sergei said.
“Well, the only thing we know is that fish probably do not have pain that is humanlike pain,” Gareth said.
So, his father was still wrong. Fish could have fish pain. Which could be worse than human pain.
Luke has a new image up on his screen: two men and one woman on the space station. Flushed, smiling faces, shorts and T-shirts, sunglasses, goofy smiles. He recognizes the module: Kibo. One of the women is Helen. Great legs, Helen, even in micro-g, where everybody got chicken legs.
“Like submarine crews, astronauts on the International Space Station need to be able to function at the highest level in the face of imminent catastrophe,” Luke says. “And like winter-over teams in Antarctica, they also have to tolerate boredom and low levels of stimulation. Basically, we have all the stressors of the three previous extreme environments and a few new ones. Of course, daily life on the ISS is dominated by microgravity conditions, which—because of the centrifuge—will play only a very brief role in the MarsNOW mission. But certainly, as the space station comes to the end of its mission and lifetime, we must acknowledge how much it has taught us . . . ”
That polar bear I didn’t shoot is almost certainly dead by now, Sergei thinks.
The next slide is a triptych: Helen, snow-suited and beaming in front of Dome C; Yoshi, wetsuited and grinning next to the portal of the NEEMO station; Sergei, T-shirted and smiling on the ISS.