The Dentist of Mars
I was at the dentist, mouth full of cotton and instruments, staring at the ceiling, and the thought hit me: someone’s going to have to do this on Mars. Some poor soul is going to be pulling teeth in a habitat on another planet with limited supplies and no specialist to call. The mundane absurdity of that image wouldn’t leave me alone. The best science fiction, I think, lives in the ordinary details of extraordinary settings. Not the hero piloting the spaceship. The dentist fixing a cracked molar in a pressurized tin can thirty-five million miles from the nearest oral surgeon.
Dr. Evelyn Trask was the only dentist on Mars, and she was booked solid through 2089.
This was not because she was exceptional. She was competent, thorough, and possessed of a chairside manner that could generously be described as “functional.” She was the only dentist on Mars because nobody else had been stupid enough to apply for the position.
The Mars Colonial Authority’s job listing, posted in 2084, had been refreshingly honest: “Dental practitioner needed for permanent settlement of 4,200 colonists. No return trip available. Salary competitive. Benefits include free housing, free meals, and the knowledge that you are the sole person preventing 4,200 people from developing untreated dental emergencies 225 million kilometers from the nearest periodontist.”
Evelyn applied because she was forty-one, recently divorced, carrying a hundred and ninety thousand dollars in dental school debt, and possessed of a dark sense of humor that found the listing funny enough to take seriously. She expected to be rejected. Instead, she received a confirmation within seventy-two hours, a one-way shuttle ticket, and a packing list that included “personal items not exceeding 15 kg” and “any dental supplies you feel may be underrepresented in our current inventory.”
The dental clinic on Mars was in Habitat Ring C, sandwiched between a hydroponic lettuce farm and the colony’s only bar, a placement that Evelyn suspected was either architecturally inevitable or deeply symbolic. The clinic consisted of two treatment rooms, an autoclave, a panoramic X-ray unit that worked most of the time, and a supply cabinet stocked with enough materials to last approximately three years at normal usage rates.
Normal usage rates assumed a population with access to fluoridated water, preventive care, and a diet that didn’t consist primarily of reconstituted protein bars and hydroponic lettuce. The Mars colonists had none of these advantages. The water was desalinated Martian ice, mineral-rich but fluoride-free. Preventive care had been deprioritized in favor of keeping people alive. And the diet, while nutritionally adequate, was an absolute paradise for dental caries.
Evelyn’s first patient was the colony’s chief engineer, a man named Prosper Mbeki, who arrived with a toothache he’d been ignoring for six weeks because, he explained, he’d been busy preventing the habitat’s atmospheric processor from catastrophically failing.
“The processor takes priority over my molar,” he said, sitting in the dental chair, which had been designed for Earth gravity and required ballast weights to keep the patient from floating upward in Mars’s weaker pull.
“Your molar has a fracture that extends below the gumline,” Evelyn said, studying the X-ray. “If I don’t extract it, the infection will spread to the bone, and then you’ll be the chief engineer with sepsis, which will make atmospheric processor maintenance even more challenging.”
“Can’t you just fill it?”
“I could fill the Grand Canyon. Doesn’t mean it would help.”
She extracted the tooth. Prosper left with a gauze pad and a prescription for antibiotics from the colony’s pharmacy, which was run by a pharmacist who was also the colony’s only veterinarian, a combination that Evelyn found alarming until she learned that Mars had exactly zero animals and the veterinary qualification was essentially decorative.
Word spread. Evelyn was good. More to the point, she was here, and the alternative to seeing her was enduring dental pain on a planet where the nearest second opinion was seven months away by shuttle.
Her patient load grew. She saw colonists with cavities, cracked teeth, impacted wisdom teeth, periodontal disease, and the specific dental trauma that resulted from biting into a reconstituted protein bar that had been stored at incorrect temperature and achieved the consistency of concrete. She performed root canals with a precision that surprised her, given that she’d been a mediocre dental student and a merely adequate practitioner on Earth.
Mars made her better. Not because the Martian dental environment was conducive to excellence, but because it was conducive to necessity. With no specialists to refer to, no second opinions to seek, no safety net of any kind, Evelyn had to figure out solutions to problems she’d never encountered in her comfortable practice in suburban Phoenix.
She invented a dental cement using Martian regolith and medical-grade epoxy when her supply of composite resin ran low. The invention was born of necessity at 2 a.m. during an emergency that involved a geologist with a cracked molar and a supply cabinet that contained exactly zero of the materials Evelyn needed to fix it. She spent four hours in the colony’s materials lab, testing combinations of locally available compounds, running them through stress tests on extracted teeth she’d been keeping in a jar for exactly this kind of situation. (The jar was labeled “Dr. Trask’s Emergency Dental Archive” and was, according to Zola, the single most disturbing object in the colony.)
The resulting cement held. Not just held, but outperformed the commercial product it replaced, bonding to enamel with a tenacity that the materials science team found genuinely interesting. They published a paper about it. Evelyn’s name appeared in a scientific journal for the first time, credited as the inventor of a dental restoration material derived from Martian soil. Her mother, who received the news via a fourteen-minute-delayed video message, cried. Her ex-husband, who learned about it through a news feed, did not respond, which was consistent with his performance throughout their marriage.
She fabricated a temporary crown using the colony’s 3D printer and a scan of a similar tooth from a different patient (with permission, though the concept of dental privacy on Mars was somewhat theoretical). She developed a fluoride treatment program using trace minerals extracted from the colony’s water recycling system, a solution so elegant that the Colonial Authority’s medical director called it “the most creative public health intervention since hand-washing.”
The accolades didn’t interest her. What interested her was the daily absurdity of being the sole dental professional for an entire planet.
“I have the most exclusive practice in the solar system,” she told the bartender next door, a former school teacher named Zola Okafor-Barnes who’d come to Mars because she wanted to “teach children on another planet” and ended up mixing drinks because the colony’s school hadn’t been built yet. “Every single person on this planet is my patient. My market share is one hundred percent.”
“Monopolies are illegal on Earth,” Zola said.
“We’re not on Earth.”
“You could charge whatever you want.”
“I could. But what are they going to pay me with? Lettuce? The colony runs on a credit system. I make the same salary as everyone else. The chief engineer, the janitor, and the only dentist on Mars all earn the same number of credits per month.”
“Sounds like communism.”
“Sounds like Mars.”
The crisis came eighteen months into her tenure. A construction accident in the new habitat ring sent twelve workers to the medical bay with injuries ranging from lacerations to crushed limbs. Among the injured was a woman named Fen Tolvanen, who’d taken a beam to the face and presented with a shattered mandible, six displaced teeth, and a laceration that exposed the bone.
This was maxillofacial surgery. Evelyn was a general dentist. The difference between a general dentist and an oral surgeon was roughly equivalent to the difference between a family doctor and a neurosurgeon. She knew the anatomy. She understood the principles. She had never performed this type of surgery.
“Call Earth,” she told the medical director. “Get me a surgeon on video consultation.”
“The communication delay is fourteen minutes each way. By the time they see your question and respond, it’ll be a twenty-eight-minute round trip.”
“Then I’ll work in twenty-eight-minute cycles. I’ll show them what I see, they’ll tell me what to do, and I’ll do it before the next window.”
The surgery took eleven hours. Evelyn worked in the small dental clinic, under lights that flickered twice when the habitat’s power grid hiccupped, with instruments designed for fillings and cleanings, guided by an oral surgeon on Earth whose instructions arrived fourteen minutes after the situation they addressed.
She wired Fen’s jaw. She replanted four of the six displaced teeth. She closed the laceration with sutures so fine that the surgeon on Earth, viewing the post-operative images twenty-eight minutes after they were taken, said they were “better than what most of my residents produce.”
Fen recovered. The jaw healed. The replanted teeth took. Three months later, she was back on the construction crew, eating protein bars (carefully) and showing off her dental work to anyone who’d look.
“You saved my face,” she told Evelyn.
“I’m a dentist. That’s not really in my job description.”
“On Mars, everything is in your job description.”
This was true. Over the next two years, Evelyn’s role expanded beyond dentistry into general oral health education, nutritional counseling (the protein bars were destroying everyone’s teeth, and she waged a persistent campaign to reformulate them), and what she described in her reports to the Colonial Authority as “preventive community health intervention,” which mostly meant cornering people in the bar and lecturing them about flossing.
“You’re the most feared person in the colony,” Zola told her.
“More feared than the chief engineer?”
“Prosper keeps the air flowing. You keep people from being in pain. Pain is more immediate than suffocation.”
Evelyn considered this. On Earth, dentistry was a profession people associated with anxiety, sterile offices, and insurance paperwork. On Mars, it was an essential service that stood between a community of 4,200 people and the kind of suffering that could degrade morale, productivity, and mental health faster than any equipment failure.
She was, she realized, the most important person on Mars. Not because dental care was more valuable than engineering or medicine or food production. But because she was alone. Every other critical function had backup, redundancy, people who could step in if someone got sick or burned out. Evelyn had no backup. If she got sick, if she burned out, if she cracked under the pressure of being the sole person responsible for the dental health of an entire planet, there was nobody to replace her.
She dealt with this the way she dealt with everything: by going to work, doing the job, and complaining about it to Zola over drinks at the bar.
“You know what the worst part is?” she said one evening, three years into her tenure, staring at a glass of Martian-distilled grain alcohol that tasted like it had been filtered through a radiator.
“The isolation?”
“No, I was isolated on Earth too. Marriage will do that.”
“The pressure?”
“I thrive on pressure. It’s the only thing that makes me competent.”
“That’s an alarming thing for a dentist to say.”
“It’s an honest thing for a dentist to say. On Earth, I was adequate. Competent. I did fillings and cleanings and the occasional root canal and I went home and watched television and my patients forgot my name between appointments. Here, I’m performing surgery I was never trained for, inventing materials from volcanic dirt, and running a public health campaign against a protein bar. I’ve never been more alive. Which is ironic, considering I’m on the planet most likely to kill me.”
Zola poured herself another drink. “You’re the most interesting person in this colony.”
“I’m the most necessary person in this colony. Interesting is a byproduct.”
“Then what?”
“The protein bars. They’re going to give this entire colony periodontal disease, and nobody will reformulate them because the nutrition team says the calcium-to-phosphorus ratio is optimal, and I keep telling them that optimal nutrition means nothing if everyone’s teeth fall out before they’re fifty.”
“So what are you going to do?”
Evelyn finished her drink. “Same thing I always do. Fix what I can. Warn people about what I can’t. And bill the colony’s credit system for services rendered.”
“You charge the same as everyone else.”
“I know. But the paperwork makes me feel professional.”
She went back to the clinic. There was a patient waiting. There was always a patient waiting. She was the only dentist on Mars, and Mars was full of teeth, and teeth, regardless of which planet they were on, had a relentless tendency to cause problems.
She put on her gloves, adjusted the chair, and got to work.