Энди Вейр - The Martian

Using the arm computer, I had the suit overpressurize to 1.2 atmospheres. The faceplate patch bowed outward, but otherwise held firm. The arm filled in, threatening to tear the new seam, but stayed in one piece.

Then I watched the readouts to see how airtight things were.

Answer: Not very.

The suit is designed for 8 hours of use. That works out to 250ml of liquid oxygen. Just to be safe, the suit has a full liter of O2 capacity. But that’s only half the story.

The rest of the air is nitrogen. It’s just there to add pressure. When the suit leaks, that’s what it backfills with. The suit has 2 liters of liquid N2 storage.

It absolutely pissed the air out. In 60 seconds it leaked so much it pressurized the whole airlock to 1.2 atmospheres.

Let’s call the volume of the airlock 2 cubic meters. The inflated EVA suit probably takes up half of it. So it took 5 minutes to add 0.2 atmospheres to 1 cubic meter. That’s 285g of air (trust me on the math). The air in the tanks is around 1 gram per cubic centimeter, meaning I just lost 285ml.

The three tanks combined had 3000ml to start with. A lot of that was used to maintain pressure while the airlock was leaking. Also, my breathing turned some oxygen in to carbon dioxide, which was captured by the suit’s CO2 filters.

Checking the readouts, I have 410ml of oxygen, 738ml of nitrogen. Together, they make almost 1150ml to work with. That, divided by 285ml lost per minute…

Once I’m out of the airlock, this EVA suit will only last 4 minutes.

Fuck.

RECORDING:

Ok, I’ve been thinking some more.

What good is going to the rover? I’d just be trapped there instead. The extra room would be nice, but I’d still die eventually. No Water Reclaimer, no Oxygenator, no food. Take your pick; all of those problems are fatal.

I need to fix the Hab. I know what to do; we practiced it in training. But it’ll take a long time. I’ll have to scrounge around in the now-collapsed canvas to get the spare material for patching. Then I have to find the breach and seal-strip a patch in place.

But it’ll take hours to repair and my EVA suit is shit.

I’ll need another suit. Martinez’s used to be in the rover. I hauled it all the way to the Pathfinder site and back, just in case I needed a spare. But when I returned, I put it back in the Hab.

Damn it!

All right, so I’ll need to get another suit before going to the rover. Which one? Johanssen’s is too small for me (tiny little gal, our Johanssen). Lewis’s is full of water. Actually, by now it’s full of slowly sublimating ice. The mangled, glued together suit I have with me is Beck’s; my original suit has a hole in it. That just leaves Martinez and Vogel.

I left Martinez’s near my bunk, in case I needed a suit in a hurry. Of course, after that sudden decompression, it could be anywhere. Still, it’s a place to start.

Next problem: I’m like 50 meters from the Hab. Running in 0.4g while wearing a bulky EVA suit isn’t easy. At best, I can trundle 2 meters per second. That’s a precious 25 seconds; almost an eighth of my 4 minutes. I’ve got to bring that down.

But how?

RECORDING:

I’ll roll the damn airlock.

It’s basically a phone booth on its side. I did some experiments.

I figured if I want it to roll, I’ll need to hit the wall as hard as possible. And I have to be in the air at the time. I can’t press against some other part of the airlock. The forces would cancel and it wouldn’t move at all.

First I tried launching myself off one wall and slamming in to the other. The airlock slid a little, but that’s it.

Next, I tried doing a super-pushup to get airborne (0.4g yay!) then kicking the wall with both feet. Again, it just slid.

The third time, I got it right. The trick is to plant both my feet on the ground, near the wall. Then I launch myself to the top of the opposite wall and hit with my back. When I tried that just now, it was enough force and leverage to tip the airlock and roll it one face toward the Hab.

The airlock is a meter wide, so… sigh… I have to do it like 50 more times.

I’m gonna have a hell of a backache after this.

RECORDING:

I have a hell of a backache.

The subtle and refined “hurl my body at the wall” technique had some flaws. It only worked one out of every 10 tries, and it hurt a lot. I had to take breaks, stretch out, and generally convince myself to body-slam the wall again and again.

It took all damn night, but I made it.

I’m 10 meters from the Hab now. I can’t get any closer, cause the debris from the decompression is all over the place. This isn’t an “all-terrain” airlock. I can’t roll over that shit.

It was morning when the Hab popped. Now it’s morning again. I’ve been in this damn box for an entire day. But I’m leaving soon.

I’m in the EVA suit now, and ready to roll.

All right… ok…. Once more through the plan: Use the manual valves to equalize the airlock. Get out and hurry to the Hab. Wander around under the collapsed canvas. Find Martinez’s suit (or Vogel’s if I run in to it first). Get to the rover. Then I’m safe.

If I run out of time before finding a suit, I’ll just run to the rover. I’d be in trouble, but I’d have time to think and materials to work with.

Deep breath… here we go!

I’m alive! And I’m in the rover!

Things didn’t go exactly as planned, but I’m not dead, so it’s a win.

Equalizing the airlock went fine. I was out on the surface within 30 seconds. Skipping toward the Hab (the fastest way to move in this gravity) I passed through the field of debris. The rupture had really sent things flying, myself included.

It was hard to see; my faceplate was covered by the makeshift patch. Fortunately, my arm had a camera. NASA discovered that turning your whole EVA-suited body to look at something was a strenuous waste of time. So they mounted a small camera on the right arm. The feed is projected on the inner faceplate. This allows us to look at things just by pointing at them.

I had to look at a rippled, messed-up version of the outside world. The faceplate patch wasn’t exactly smooth or reflective. Still, it was enough to see what was going on.

I bee-lined for where the airlock used to be. I knew there had to be a pretty big hole there, so I’d be able to get in. I found it easily. And boy is it a nasty rip! It’s going to be a pain in the ass to fix it.

That’s when the flaws in my plan started to reveal themselves. I only had one arm to work with. My left arm was pinned against my body, while the stumpy arm of the suit bounced freely. So as I moved around under the canvas, I had to use my one good arm to hold the canvas up. It slowed me down.

From what I could see, the interior of the Hab is chaos. Everything’s moved. Entire tables and bunks are meters away from where they started. Lighter objects are wildly jumbled, many of them out on the surface. Everything’s covered in soil and mangled potato plants.

Trudging onward, I got to where I’d left Martinez’s suit. To my shock, it was still there!

“Yay!” I naively thought. “Problem solved.”

Unfortunately, the suit was pinned under a table, which was held down by the collapsed canvas. If I’d had both arms, I could have pulled it free, but with only one I just couldn’t do it.

Running low on time, I detached the helmet. Setting it aside, I reached past the table to get Martinez’s patch kit. I found it with the help of the arm-camera. I dropped it in the helmet and hauled ass out of there.

Stumbling to the rover, I barely made it in time. My ears were popping from pressure loss just as the rover’s airlock filled with wonderful 1-atmosphere air.