Actually today should be a good day. The mission plan said that Stone had some optical tracking work to complete in advance of the TCM-2, tomorrow’s course correction maneuver. It was a mission highlight he’d been looking forward to since the flight plan had been drawn up.

But he had a lot of crap to get through first. [Hr:Min:Sec] 08:15:31

After the usual slow, messy breakfast, the crew’s first task of the day was to swab down the walls of the Mission Module with disinfectant wipes.

This had to be done every couple of weeks — more often sometimes, if the boffins on the ground told them that bacterial activity in the Mission Module was becoming unacceptably high. It was a microgravity problem. Microorganisms tended to flourish on free-floating water droplets, and they collected in odd corners of the module. On top of that, microgravity lowered the crew’s immune response: something to do with reduced numbers of lymphocytes in the blood.

After that, the three crew drifted to the Space Ark.

The ark was a collection of cute-animal experiments, some suggested by high-school kids. There were plastic cages of varying sizes, bearing minnows, six mice, a few hundred fly pupae, and a spider called Arabella. There was even a box of worms. Stone tapped a Perspex wall; he could see that the minnows were swimming about in tight circles, evidently disoriented by the lack of gravity.

During mission planning York had been earnestly skeptical about the validity of the ark’s science, and Gershon had flatly refused to have anything to do with such crap. But Stone noticed that both of them were drawn to the little kit.

Stone found the worms interesting. They were called palolo, from Samoa. They lived in tunnels gnawed deep into coral reefs, and they timed their emergence, to mate, by the last quarter of the October Moon. Every year. But nobody knew how the worms did this. At Samoa, the tides, linked to the Moon, were too small to be noticed by the worms. And moonlight could hardly penetrate more than an inch or two into the worms’ rocky burrows.

So this experiment was to find out what would happen to the worms when they were no longer in Earth’s gravity field.

Meanwhile, the spider was contained in a shallow box, labeled Araneus diadematus A healthy web, at least a foot across, spanned the box, with the spider plucking at its heart.