“You take the same pills they take?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Every day?”
“Yes.”
Yang lapsed into silence and turned her eyes back to the screen, as if she thought that by staring at it hard enough the answer would come clear.
Something nagged at Reed’s consciousness. Something peripheral, subliminal. As if they had touched on the answer without knowing it. As if…
It can’t be the vitamins, he told himself. I take the same dietary supplements that the others do every day. I watch them all swallow them down with their breakfasts every morning. The four in the rover are out of my sight, of course, but I check with them every day.
Could it be radiation poisoning? Something so subtle that the dosage meters aren’t equipped to detect it? After all, everyone else has been outside the dome much more than I have. I’ve stayed in here while they’ve been out doing their work.
That couldn’t be it. There’s no strange radiation on Mars. Naguib and the others have been measuring the radiation environment since we landed. And the unmanned probes were measuring it for years before we arrived here.
Still the unconscious thought pecked at him. Something about the vitamins.
Reed closed his eyes and envisioned his morning routine. He came to the infirmary and took his own vitamin pills, then went to the galley and made certain that there were enough there for all the others and that they took theirs with their breakfasts. He no longer mixed his morning cocktail; he wanted his head absolutely clear of drugs during this emergency. He personally watched everyone swallow their pills each morning, except for the occasional early bird who finished breakfast before he got to the galley. Since this malady had struck, there had been no one up and stirring earlier than Tony, not even Vosnesensky.
His eyes suddenly shot to the cabinet where the vitamin bottles stood. Each bottle held five hundred of the ovoid orange pills.
And locked in his medicine chest was a smaller bottle, the one he took his own pills from.
“Oh no,” he groaned.
Yang jerked from her self-absorbed study as if Reed had slapped her. “What? What did you say?”
“I don’t take my vitamin pills from the same jar as the others.”
She looked hard at him. “Does that make a difference?”
“It shouldn’t… except-”
Yang Meilin watched him expectantly. Tony could feel the anticipation radiating from her tense body.
“That first jar there,” he pointed to the glass-fronted cabinet, “was open when the meteor strike punctured the dome. The other jars have never been opened; they’re still in their original seals.”
Tony felt his face flush deeply with guilt. When the meteoroid had punctured the dome and all the alarms had gone off, that one big jar had been sitting open on his desk. He had knocked the bottle over in his rush to get out of the infirmary and into his hard suit. Afterward, when the emergency was over, he had picked up the pills scattered across his desktop and replaced them in the same bottle, discarding only those he had found on the floor.
Nothing wrong with them, he had told himself. Then he had transferred the pills to the smaller bottles that fit into the galley shelves.
His own supply of vitamin supplement was already in a smaller bottle, safely sealed in his medicine cabinet along with his amphetamines and other drugs. That medicine cabinet was not only locked; it was airtight.
“Their pills were exposed to pure oxygen,” he muttered.
Yang put a hand to her lips.
“Yes,” Reed said, putting the scenario together as he spoke, “the dome was pressurized with pure oxygen for almost thirty-six hours. It took a couple of days before we pulled enough nitrogen from the air outside to make an Earth-normal mixture in here again.”
“Pure oxygen…”
“Pure oxygen will destroy ascorbic acid,” Reed said absently, as if recalling some obscure test question from a college examination.
“The pills they are taking have no vitamin C in them.”
“Right. They’ve all come down with scurvy.”
“Scurvy!” Yang immediately grabbed the computer keyboard and typed furiously for a few moments. The machine hummed to itself, while Tony writhed inwardly in mental agony. My fault. Every bit of it is my own stupid fault.