S Morden - No Way

He could literally throw half the greenhouse out of the airlock, and still have too much.

He read further, and discovered that he needed to reserve seeds off some, for growing on. Other plants would fruit continually, and he had to keep them growing, even if he wasn’t going to consume the produce. The cereals: those he could harvest in a conventional manner, resow the seed, and build up stocks of grain—rice and wheat, maize and oats. That’d be especially important for him, since he’d still not been able to kill and eat a fish, though God knows he’d tried.

The paradox was that he was going to have to cull them anyway—the tilapia relied on the nutrient-rich waste water to make what was essentially pond scum, which they then ate. Fewer plants meant less water. He wasn’t looking forward to that moment.

But for balance, if he put half the area he was going to cultivate into cereals, and then kept the other half for salads, herbs, pulses, and soft fruit, then he’d probably do OK. It was subverting the Phase three plan slightly, but he ought to be able to make it work. Even if he’d never looked after so much as a pot plant before. Sure, he’d served his time cutting lawns, but that was purely mechanical. After the hard landscaping, he’d left the planting schemes to the professionals.

He examined the rice carefully. Each individual plant was confined to its own hole in the tray, and water seeped underneath, continually washing the roots in a mineral-rich soup. The minerals had all been brought from Earth in highly concentrated forms, in sealed containers baldly labeled A, B and C. Each batch of plants needed different proportions of each of the three mixed into their water hoppers, and servo-controlled syringes pushed out the concentrate according to timers.

Some of the syringes were nearly empty. He’d taken his eye off the ball for too long. It was time to get serious about survival.

He needed to identify what he could turn off now, and what he needed to keep going. The simplest choices first: the cereals stayed, the groundnuts stayed, the soft fruit—freeze-drying, why the hell hadn’t he thought of that before?—stayed. Start with the salad stuff: half of that could go now, but he needed to make sure that he caught some in all stages of maturity.

Each tray had a valve that controlled the flow of water into the hopper. He turned those he’d identified off, knowing that it’d be some time before the hoppers emptied. He could correct, for a while, any mistakes he made.

Yes, he’d be sad to see the plants shrivel and die. Zero’s hard work, consigned to… he hadn’t given much thought to what he was going to do with it. Stick it in the airlock, let the water boil out, and then bag the remains? There might be something in Phase three about that.

His tablet pinged at him. A response at last. But when he opened the app and looked, he was disappointed.

“Can you confirm the status of Lance Brack.”

Brack had a first name. Of course he did. Probably a middle name too. But was that all they wanted? He supposed that he hadn’t actually said what had happened to the XO man, though surely they must have guessed. Frank sat himself in the greenhouse chair, and considered how candid his response should be. He balanced the tablet on his knees and pecked out:

“He’s dead. He shot me, and some time later, I managed to stab him to death with a scalpel. He bled out on the floor of Comms. I wrapped his body in parachute cloth and I put him outside, along with Zero and Declan, next to the base. If you want photographs I can probably do that, but there doesn’t seem much point: you should be able to see that anyway. If he’d managed to kill me as he was supposed to, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

He tapped send.

He’d read some of the earlier messages, and one word stood out: chimps. Brack had called him—had called them all—that, while he’d been kicking Zero’s body. That was how he referred to them throughout. Chimps. He’d seethed for a while, and then he’d calmed down. He now had a plan. He needed to follow it.

There’d be no response for another half-hour. Chimps. He gritted his teeth and went back to work.

He took out a lot of the salad—there was only so many leaves he could eat, and they weren’t particularly high in calories anyway. The herbs he kept some of, knowing that he could dry what died and use them like that. The gourds and squashes, the zucchini and peppers, were prolific fruiters, and they wouldn’t keep. He left in a couple of those at each stage and wiped out the rest.

The space he’d make could be used for more energy-dense crops. The potatoes in their barrels of de-chlorated Martian gravel seemed to be doing well. That was one thing at least that movie had got right. He could expand the nuts and the cereals, and divert some of the water resources to them. Nut oil. He might be able to make fries. Then again, any oil hot enough to cook a potato was going to be hot enough to set off the fire alarms.

He’d probably done enough for now. What he really wanted to do was try and freeze-dry a strawberry.

He picked one of the reddest ones, put it in a small tray, and slid it into the airlock at the back of the greenhouse. Obviously, he couldn’t be doing this on single fruits often, because he’d run out of electricity to power the air pumps, but this was just an experiment. He looked through the window in the door and started pumping the chamber down.

The berry started to smoke and shrink, and it continued to do so until it was the size of a grape. It sat on the tray, small and red and wrinkled. Frank let the air back in, and retrieved the fruit.

It was like rubber, slightly yielding, like a superball. He licked it, and it tasted of strawberries. He didn’t know why he was surprised by that. He gnawed at it, and got intense strawberry flavors. The middle was still soft and undehydrated. Maybe slice it next time, and let the vacuum reach all the parts. But for a first attempt, it wasn’t bad, and even though he didn’t know how they’d keep inside, he could literally just store them outside in some of the unused cargo drums until he needed them. That might even be better, because it was cold outside, and if he put the drums into the area of shade cast by the curved hab, they wouldn’t heat up during the day either.

The tablet pinged again, and he went to see what XO had to say this time.

“Can you confirm your status? Your medical read-out is offline.”

Well, they weren’t going to win any awards for their bedside manner, that was for certain. They were as bad as Alice had been.

So, how was he doing? His arm, where Brack had shot him, seemed to be healing over well enough. The jelly-like plug had solidified into a dark, knotted mass that caused him discomfort only when he used that muscle. He’d cleaned it that morning, wiping away the crusty ooze that leaked from it, and unscientifically sniffing at it to see if it was infected. But the skin around it, though bruised, seemed not to be inflamed or hot to the touch. His chest, where he’d cut out the medical monitor that had been spying on him since he’d been fitted with it, was a bit more weepy, and the edges of the wound were puckered and replete with beads of ruby-red scabs. But it did appear to be healing up too.

It wouldn’t kill him. Not today, at least.

And the howling, existential terror at being all alone on Mars, that manifested itself as a sudden tightness across his ribs, so constricting that he couldn’t breathe, seemed to have lessened now he was actually talking to someone, even if that someone had wanted him dead, and probably still did. Strange how things worked out.

The message header told him it was twelfth of November 2048. Three months, give or take a couple of weeks, was between the beginning and end of February. February 2049. They had reckoned on Brack clearing up in that time, and it wasn’t as if they had spare astronauts up their sleeve.