Tess and Harry on the Dock
Tess had been ten when she read a book about the Apollo missions and encountered a new word.
“What’s quarantine?” she had asked her father as they lay on the dock gazing up at a waning moon.
“Do you remember when I read you The War of the Worlds?” asked her father.
“Yes.”
“What killed the Martians?”
“You said it was, like, a cold.”
“Tess,” said her father with a hint of warning in his voice.
“Sorry,” said Tess. “You said it was a cold.” Harry abhorred the misuse of the word like.
“Exactly. There are all sorts of illnesses and viruses on Earth that our bodies have learned to deal with.”
“What’s a virus?”
“A tiny speck, so tiny you can’t see it without a microscope, that can make you sick.
It’s sort of alive, but it needs other life-forms to reproduce—that’s why it likes people.
Now if we get exposed to a cold virus, our bodies are used to that.
We might get a stuffy nose or a headache, but probably nothing worse.
But the Martians had never been exposed to a terrestrial virus. ”
“What’s terrestrial?”
“Having to do with the planet Earth. The Martians had never been exposed to a terrestrial virus, so their bodies didn’t know how to handle even the common cold.”
“And it killed them.”
“Exactly.”
“Oh, and the astronauts were afraid the same thing would happen!” said Tess excitedly.
“Very good. They were afraid there might be a lunar virus…”
“A virus from the moon.”
“Right, a lunar virus that no one on Earth would be able to fight against. The same thing could happen to us as happened to the Martians in The War of the Worlds. So, they put the astronauts in quarantine. That means they put them in a room by themselves so that if there was a virus, no one else could get sick from it.”
“How long did they have to stay?”
“About three weeks, but that included the time they spent in the space capsule coming home from the moon. And after they got to Houston, they stayed in a bigger place with lots of rooms, and doctors and scientists to check on them who were also in quarantine.”
Tess considered all this for a long moment before asking, “But if a virus could survive on the moon, where it’s super cold—”
“And also super hot, when the sun is shining,” added her father.
“Right, if it can survive super cold and super hot and it can survive with no atmosphere and no life-forms for it to reproduce, don’t you think it might be able to survive inside an astronaut for three weeks without anybody finding it?”
“That, my dear Tess, is an excellent question.”