S Morden - One Way

He was dusty. He was always dusty. Everything was covered in a thin film of orange that proved almost impossible to remove. About the only thing that did it was water, and while they had some, they didn’t yet have plenty, and it didn’t work outside. Frank seemed to spend his life staring out of his helmet around the smears. Zeus told him it was a salt rime, but knowing what it was didn’t help much. The only cleaning cloths that they had were parachute material. It was thin and light and incredibly hard-wearing, but it wasn’t absorbent.

He opened up the back of his suit, and crawled out backwards. He was lean. Hungry all the time, yes, but wolfen rather than starving, though it was only because they’d lost Marcy and Alice that they’d had enough food to last them this far. He wasn’t the only one, and hungry men argued—not about calories, but about everything else that wasn’t.

He put on his overalls—dirty, torn in a couple of places, the number on the pocket losing its crisp edges—and put his suit on an empty hanger. He disconnected his life support and slid it into the rack, plugging it in to the power and the air. He needed the can, and at least this was now plumbed in to the water reclamation system. And there was space: he had three doors to choose from. One, another airlock, led into the greenhouse. Left went to what should have been, and what would be, the sick bay. Zeus hadn’t started unpacking the supplies yet, as he’d been too busy on the pipework. Right to the rec area—they called it the yard, even though it was inside—and the crew quarters.

Frank padded through the yard and along the corridor to the john. The non-airlock doors didn’t close automatically: they were supposed to be left open, to allow air to circulate better than the narrow between-floors ducting nominally allowed. Even shut they were only airtight up to a point, and it was up to the crew to seal them properly in an emergency, using the hard upswing on the door handle.

That something as basic as screens, doors, and curtains would make such a difference to him, to them all, had surprised him. Literally, the first thing they’d done after fitting out the greenhouse was put up the walls for the bedrooms. They slept alone, initially on their foam pads on the floor, and now on a bed base with storage underneath.

Not that they had anything to store. There was still no sign of their personal effects. Frank’s books and letters were nowhere to be found, and what little the others had managed to save from their former lives were likewise absent. Brack answered all questions on that with “I don’t know”. He was the only person in contact with XO. If he’d ever asked Mission Control where their gear was, he never let on.

Frank pulled the screen across the toilet cubicle’s opening, squatted down, read again the instructions for use—pull handle A, press button B, release handle A, pull handle C, press button B again—and rested his chin against his chest. He was tired. More tired than any of them.

Zeus still exhibited an endless appetite for physical labor, trying to prove his worthiness to a power even higher than XO. Dee and Zero were young men, and Zero spent all day in the greenhouse, planting seeds and watching them grow. Dee was more active, wiring up the habs with Declan, but the heavy lifting and the long hours outside fell to Frank.

He still hadn’t seen Brack do a scrap of actual work. He was their guard, their overseer, but they didn’t need guarding or overseeing. They all knew what was at stake, and Brack’s role was redundant. It was hardly a free ride, but he knew he wasn’t the only one to resent it. At the back of his mind, though, was the deal he’d made: Brack had to survive for long enough for Frank to book the trip home.

Frank pushed and pulled everything in the correct order, and washed his hands and face. Water, sterilized, lukewarm, splashed into his palms. He rubbed them against his cheeks and into his growing hair. His skin felt so very dry, the effect of spending most days in his suit, the blowers pushing air across already parchment-like flesh.

The air in the habs was wetter. They were making water, more every day, and storing it in repurposed drums on the first floor of the greenhouse, but it also got piped to the other habs using click-and-connect pipework that went through bulkhead walls and bypassed airlocks. Some of it evaporated, and made things a bit more pleasant. In the greenhouse, the walls streamed in the mornings. They had enough power to warm the air as it entered, but it was still cold. In all the habs bar the greenhouse, it was breath-condensingly chilly. They’d need to fix that, especially as their power demands were going to go up as they installed more of the lights and equipment. They were already tripping fuses when they turned something on, and one day they’d take out something critical.

Which was dangerous, as Declan told them, loudly and frequently, as he stomped off to find the offending circuit, isolate it, and restore power to the base. It was just one of the things that caused tension, and kept everyone on edge: still not enough of the basics, and always one accident away from disaster.

The plan to route hot water from the RTG and into the habs was still just that, a plan. It had been refined slightly to go in through the greenhouse first, since that hab needed to be kept warm anyway, and using the greenhouse to store the hot water in would free up the heaters to be used elsewhere. The details of the gravity feed loop were coming together, as was the permission to take apart the rocket motors and bleed the remnant hydrazine off.

Tomorrow, they’d move the RTG over to Santa Clara. Today, Frank was spent.

He dried his hands: no towels, so there was more parachute material which didn’t really work, and went in search of the others.

They’d eventually have a laundry in the crew quarters—even though the washing machine was designed to be hand-cranked. They’d also have an intercom, and computers, and gym equipment. They’d be able to download entertainment: music, films, books. They’d have chairs. Frank never thought he’d miss chairs, but apart from the drivers’ seats on the buggies, there weren’t any chairs on Mars.

Eventually. Some of those things were on the surface now. Some of them, he assumed, were in transit. Maybe that included his stuff. Maybe he should stop obsessing about that.

He turned out of the kitchen area and down the corridor to the cross-hab again.

Here was the paradox. The pure oxygen atmosphere, that kept him and everyone else alive, wouldn’t support plants. So the air in the greenhouse needed to be buffered with carbon dioxide. Only a little. A tenth of one per cent. Less than that would mean the plants would wither and die. More than that wouldn’t help, and increasing amounts would be dangerous to humans.

Hence the airlock between the greenhouse and the rest of the hab. The air needed to be carefully controlled, inside and out. Frank opened the outer door and walked in. The airlock, confused, because it could read the same pressure on both sides, showed green lights anyway, but Frank went through the cycle of closing the door, pumping the air, and waiting for thirty seconds before opening the further door into the greenhouse.

There were racks and racks of warm, dripping matting, already with their first flush of green. Blue-white lights were everywhere, directed downwards and suspended bare inches from the mats. The glare was painful, and left after-images.

The greenhouse was on two levels, with an open grid floor between them. Frank could see Zero below, adjusting the flow rate of precious water onto the capillary matting, and he dropped down one of the ladders to land next to him.

Without turning round, Zero held out a fist, and Frank dapped it with his own.