Martian Panahon Virus
An epidemic begins when a young Filipino prospector escapes from Mars infected with a Paleolithic virus.
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Apollo was feeling a little better with food in his stomach. He smiled. “She sounds exciting,” He stood to walk to the toilet. Halfway to the bathroom a wave of nausea swept over him. He rushed to the bathroom, but did not make it. He began vomiting all over the bathroom door. He tried to step in, to vomit again, but collapsed, hitting his head on the doorframe. “Apollo?” Sonia dropped her bread as she sprung to her feet. She rushed to her falling companion. He was unconscious. “Tessie, bring the medic probes!” Sonia’s worst fears were realized. The food in Apollo’s stomach had triggered a neural shock wave. The elevated brainwave activity in his hypothalamus stopped. Most mental functions had gone flatline. Only the involuntary neural activity seemed to be functioning, and those signals were erratic. His temperature, pulse, and respiration were fluctuating and abnormal. She carried him back to a bunk. He was motionless. For a half-hour she stared at Apollo. He did not move, did not twitch, did not blink. His pulse slowed and his breathing became minimal. His temperature dropped to one-hundred. His brainwave patterns remained unchanged. She had enough medical training to know what this meant. Apollo had lapsed into a coma. Suddenly, Sonia felt alone. Even if he had been sick, Apollo would wake occasionally and talk to her. Why had she insisted that he eat? If only the rover had medicines. There was so little for this type of situation. She was convinced that if he did not get to a doctor, a real doctor, Apollo would probably die there in that isolated Martian desert cave. Sonia began crying. She thought of her best friend, Fisk, dead in the gold mine. She thought of her parents, dead during the war. She thought of Apollo, her one remaining link to humanity in this most desperate situation. He was dying. She bawled uncontrollably for a half hour, unable to think clearly. Finally, she looked up at Tessie, who was trying to treat Apollo. The vital signs remained unchanged. Sonia wiped her eyes, and then stood up. “Apollo, I am not going to let you die on me. At least not here.” She went to her seat at the control console, and looked up at the traffic control map. “Where can I go? Where do I have friends?”
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About the Book
Martian prospectors Sonia Androff and Fisk Banzer are convinced that they are too threatened to use local mining teams to establish a claim on a suspected rich gold discovery. They hire a primitive support crew from the Philippines to help dig out gold in a remote Martian canyon. During an on site cave exploration, Apollo Panahon, a teenage miner with that team, discovers a Paleolithic ice puddle with tiny fish embedded in the ice. When he thaws and tastes the fish, a virus in the fish infects Apollo with a disease that has a side effect that duplicates Nostradamus’ ability to communicate through time. Apollo’s sense of events -- yet to come -- enables him to warn Sonia that they must flee to survive. The two barely escape the claim-jump murders of their companions. However, their freedom is precarious. In desperate need of medical attention, both survivors are infected, both are getting worse, and both slip into comas while on the run. Media journalist Terra Newton, at a conference on the Moon, gets distracted by strange events surrounding the epidemic that has her friends from a Filipino barrio in quarantine. She identifies the odd side effect of the virus as a Nostradamus Syndrome, the ability of some of the afflicted to communicate through time.
About the Author
Kevin Owens grew up in Tacoma with a little boy’s fascination for the wonders of space, such that when Mars was making a close approach to Earth in 1958, his excitement peaked. He read about Percival Lowell’s observations of the Martian canals, and about the Martian civilizations conjured in the fiction prose of H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Ray Bradbury. He got a kid’s telescope to see Mars for himself. Unable to see more than an orange globe with a white polar cap, he none-the-less applied what he had learned to win first place in his 1959 school’s science fair, with a creative presentation on what was known and what speculated about Mars. Kevin’s fascination with space science continued as he grew up. He joined the Air Force in 1962 when President Kennedy warned of an imminent nuclear war in Cuba. He spent his tour of duty preparing design drawings of experimental rocket engines for the Rocket Propulsion Laboratory at Edwards AFB. Following the tour of duty, Kevin worked several years for Boeing. When Boeing laid him off in 1970, along with one third of its workforce, he moved to Washington DC, to work with an electrical contractor. Maintaining his space enthusiasm through the years, he followed closely the progress of the many NASA probes that showed, that although Mars appears to remain lifeless, a dynamic planet is waiting for us to make it a frontier. Kevin married a Filipina immigrant, and they raised two daughters, both now married with professional positions. On his own time, as his daughters were growing up, he started writing for his girls a series of science fiction stories about the future.