In the days when salt-sea sailors were charting islands and spearing seals, for example, the fo'c's'le hands called themselves Lobscousers, celebrating the liquid hash then prominent in the marine menu. The Limey sailor got the name of the anti-scorbutic citrus squeezed into his diet, a fruit known to us mariners of a more sophisticated age only as garnish for our groundside gin-and-tonic. And today we Marsmen are called Slimeheads, honoring in our title the Chlorella and Scenedesmus algae that, by filling up the spaces within, open the road to the larger Space without.
Should any groundsman dispute the importance of belly-furniture in history—whether it be exterminating whales, or introducing syphilis to the Fiji Islanders, or settling the Australian littoral with cross-coves from Middlesex and Hampshire—he is referred to the hundred-and-first chapter of Moby Dick, a book spooled in the amusement tanks of all but the smallest spacers. I trust, however, that no Marsman will undertake to review this inventory of refreshment more than a week from groundfall. A catalogue of sides of beef and heads of Leyden cheese and ankers of good Geneva would prove heavy reading for a man condemned to snack on the Chlorella-spawn of cis-Martian space.
The Pequod's crew ate wormy biscuit and salt beef. Nimitz's men won their war on canned pork and beans. The Triton made her underwater periplus of Earth with a galley stocked with frozen pizza and concentrated apple-juice. But then, when sailors left the seas for the skies, a decline set in.
The first amenity of groundside existence to be abandoned was decent food. The earliest men into the vacuum swallowed protein squeezings from aluminum tubes, and were glad enough to drop back to the groundsman's diet of steak and fried potatoes.
Long before I was a boy in Med School, itching to look at black sky through a view-port, galley science had fulfilled the disgusting exordium of Isaiah 36:12, to feed the Slimeheads for breakfast today what was day-before-yesterday's table-scraps and jakes-water.
The Ship's Cook, the man who accomplishes the daily miracle of turning offal into eatables, is in many ways the most vital man aboard a spacer. He can make morale or foment a mutiny. His power is paramount. Slimeheads remember the H. M. S. Ajax fiasco, for example, in which a galleyman leveled his Chlorella tanks with heavy water from the ship's shielding. Four officers and twenty-one Other Ranks were rescued from the Ajax in deep space, half dead from deuterium poisoning. We think of the Benjo Maru incident, too, caused by a Ship's Cook who allowed his algaeal staff-of-life to become contaminated with a fast-growing Saccharomycodes yeast. The Japanese vessel staggered to her pad at Piano West after a twenty-week drunk: the alien yeast had got into the stomach of every man aboard, where it fermented each subsequent bite he ate to a superior grade of sake. And for a third footnote to the ancient observation, "God sends food, and the Devil sends cooks," Marsmen will recall what happened aboard my ship the Charles Partlow Sale.
The Sale blasted off from Brady Station in the middle of August, due in at Piano West in early May. In no special hurry, we were taking the low-energy route to Mars, a pathway about as long in time as the human period of gestation. Our cargo consisted mostly of Tien-Shen fir seedlings and some tons of an arctic grass-seed—these to be planted in the maria to squeeze out the native blue bugberry vines. We had aboard the Registry minimum of six men and three officers. Ship's Surgeon was myself, Paul Vilanova. Our Captain was Willy Winkelmann, the hardest man in space and very likely the fattest. Ship's Cook was Robert Bailey.
Cooking aboard a spacer is a job combining the more frustrating tensions of biochemistry, applied mycology, high-speed farming, dietetics and sewage engineering. It's the Cook's responsibility to see that each man aboard gets each day no less than five pounds of water, two pounds of oxygen, and one-and-a-half pounds of dry food. This isn't just a paragraph from the Spacer Union Contract. It's a statement of the least fuel a man can run on.
Twelve tons of water, oxygen, and food would have filled the cargo compartments to bursting, and left a small ship like the C. P. Sale no reason to reach for Mars. By allowing a colony of Chlorella algae to work over our used air, water and other effluvia, though, three tons of metabolites would see us through from Brady Station to Piano West and back. Recycling was the answer. The molecule of carbohydrate, fat, protein or mineral that didn't feed the crew fed the algae. And the algae fed us.