I'd said I would do everything I could. But I'd already tried everything I could think of, including arguing with both Dae-jung and Mission Control, and nothing had helped.
Just then came a knock on the door. It was Kabir. “Hey, can you give me a hand with something here?”
I was still grimy and exhausted from my EVA, as well as depressed, but I knew Kabir wouldn't ask for help unless he really needed it. “Yeah, sure,” I said.
It was the electrical system again, of course.
The small nuclear plant on the other side of Bathtub Ridge provided more than enough power for our needs. But the omnipresent dust, ultraviolet light, and extreme temperatures made insulation crack, switches short, fuses blow, and backup batteries fail, adding up to a rickety mess that could barely meet our needs on a good day.
And today was not looking to be one of the good days. We'd lost power in half of Deck 2 and none of the usual tricks had brought it back.
Kabir's legs protruded from an access panel in the ceiling of Deck 1. “Try again,” came his muffled voice.
I flipped the circuit breaker. It immediately tripped again. “Nope.”
Kabir cursed and squirmed around, still looking for the short circuit. While he searched, I peered at the tangle of conduits leading upward from the panel. I was trying to figure out where the problem wire came from and where it went, but they were all the same color and it was almost impossible to trace each one visually. “Hang on,” I said.
“Mmph?”
I ran my eyes along the wire again. “That wire you're looking at isn't even connected to anything. It just loops around.”
Kabir pulled his upper torso out of the access panel. His hair was filthy with red dust. “So where's the short?”
“I don't know, but . . .” If that wire was just a dead loop, then the short had to be on this one. I followed it away from the panel, peering closely as it snaked along where the wall met the floor.
Then something caught at the back of my throat. “Huh.” I closed my eyes and sniffed.
Yep. Burnt insulation.
“Here it is.”
“You're kidding.”
“No. Look.” I pulled the conduit away from the wall, revealing a blackened spot and exposed wires.
“How the hell . . . ?”
I smiled and tapped my nose.
Kabir shook his head in admiration.
Now that we'd found the short, fixing it only took about ten more minutes. Everyone cheered as the lights and fans came back on.
But what we'd learned disturbed me. “If that whole conduit is just a dead loop,” I said, pointing, “that means the main and backup power systems are both routed through the main panel. Single point of failure.”
Kabir shrugged. “Dae-jung told me the secondary panel blew out a couple years ago and they had to rewire it. But the systems are still completely separate . . . they're just in the same place.”
I sighed. Just another one of those things we didn't tell Mission Control about. “It'll have to do, I guess. Let's get everything closed up.”
After we finished, everyone who happened to be in the wardroom when we reported our achievement toasted us with tea, heated up with the newly restored power.
“Gary's got the Magic Nose,” Kabir said.
I waved a hand dismissively. “I was the super of my apartment building for a few years in grad school. I didn't get a lot of sleep, but the rent was cheap. I never dreamed I'd be using those same skills on Mars!”
Just then Dae-jung came in, and we told him we'd fixed the electrical failure. He humphed and nodded. “Good work.”
I decided to press my advantage, small though it was. “So can I blog about it?”
He stared at me across the scuffed plastic table, while Suma and Kabir and the others looked on. Finally he blinked. “Very well. But you must emphasize the solution, not the problem, and I will still review your work before submission.”
“Of course,” I said, and tried to be glad of the small victory. It wasn't much, but it was a small note of human interest that I could use to leaven the usual scientific blah-blah-blah.
* * * *
It helped, but not as much as I'd hoped. Three weeks went by—twenty-one days, twenty-four-and-a-half hours each, filled with clambering over rocks in my sweaty spacesuit, sifting through endless samples looking for microfossils, and constant battles with balky, malfunctioning equipment—and though I emphasized the positive enough to get some of the interesting bits past Dae-jung, my ratings remained less than stellar.
At least I'd been able to make myself useful. After the incident of the Magic Nose I'd gradually taken over more and more of the small repair and maintenance tasks that took up so much of Kabir's and Suma's time, leaving them free to perform some major system upgrades that had been put off for far too long. It wasn't how I'd planned to spend my time on Mars, but I found it more satisfying than working on posts that I knew were going to get edited into mush and then ignored by most of my potential audience.
On Monday night, washing dishes after yet another bland rehydrated meal, I reflected that when I woke up I would probably find my blog pulled from the front page and my ratings reduced to the low single digits. “I'm going out for a walk,” I said to Suma and Audra after I'd dried and put away the last plate.
Technically, we weren't supposed to go out on EVA alone, for safety's sake. But that rule had been relaxed to the point that you could solo as long as you didn't get out of sight of the hab. I suited up, got Suma to check me out, and cycled out to the surface.
The thing about being on the surface of Mars is that it's quiet. I'd grown accustomed to the many sounds of the hab, from the whir of fans to the hammering thud of the water pump; in fact, I'd gotten to the point that I noticed immediately if the sound changed, indicating that something wasn't working the way it should. But out on the surface, even with the echo of my breath and the soft clack of valves in my helmet, I felt something relax in my neck and jaw and I realized just how badly I'd needed to get away from the constant barrage of noise.
It was dark out there too. I climbed a slight rise a couple hundred meters from the hab, switched off my headlamp, and looked up at stars scattered thick as salt spilled on a dark tablecloth. Twinkling just slightly in the thin atmosphere, they burned bright against a background blacker than any on Earth. Even through my scuffed faceplate they were awe-inspiring.
Then, as I turned back to the hab, it struck me hard that the few dim lights that shone from its windows were the only lights on the entire planet. We were alone here, entirely alone, and farther from home than any human beings had ever been before.
That's when I saw the flash.
It was brief and silent, but quite bright, and for a moment after I couldn't see anything at all. But then the stars gradually reappeared, and I realized what I was seeing . . . or, more to the point, what I wasn't seeing.
The hab's lights had gone out. There was nothing but blackness below the horizon.
“Hello?” I called. Suma was on comms duty.
No response came on the radio.
I switched to channel 8. “This is Gary, on EVA, to anyone in the hab. Do you copy?”
Nothing. Not even static. Digital comms give you perfection or nothing at all.
I stood blinking into the endless dark. Heart pounding. Waiting.
Communications on channel 8 were automatically routed to the main speakers. Everyone in the hab—every single human being on Mars—should have heard my call. If no one was responding . . .
I switched on my headlamp and headed down the slope toward the hab, moving in a tiny rust-colored ellipse of illuminated soil. My breath was very loud in my helmet and I had to remind myself to take it slow and careful. Tripping and cracking my helmet would only make the problem worse. Whatever it was.
When I got close enough to illuminate the hab with my headlamp, I couldn't see any damage. The lights were still out, but as I walked around to the side where the main
airlock was I could see flashlights moving around inside. That simultaneously reassured me and deepened my fears—some people at least were still alive, but what kind of failure could knock out both the primary and backup power systems?
Then the answer appeared around the curve of the hull.
A big elliptical hole, two or three meters long and maybe half a meter wide, slashed diagonally across the hab's skin and part of the airlock door, ending in a fresh one-meter crater in the dirt. Meteorite strike.
Jets of gas spewed silently in several directions from the edges of the gash, showing where the meteorite's grazing path had cut through pipes carrying water, air, and other fluids and gases. Nothing came out of the gaping void in the middle of the hole, though, indicating that whatever compartments the damage had breached had already lost all their air.
Fighting down panic, I forced myself to focus on the problem at hand. Which compartments were behind the damaged sections of wall? The main airlock, of course, and the EVA prep room next to it. What was on the other side of the prep room's back wall?
Aw, crap. The engineering workroom.
No wonder the power was out. The damage cut right through the main power panel. Where the main and secondary systems came together.
Single point of failure.
As I tried to visualize the Deck 1 floor plan, I realized the problem was even worse than I'd thought. If the EVA prep room and engineering workroom had both lost pressure, anyone left alive inside would be cut off from both the main airlock and the engineering airlock—and those were where the spacesuits were stored.
The two upper decks were equipped with survival balls, airtight spheres that could keep one or two people alive for a few days. But once you crawled into one of those you were dependent on someone in a full-service spacesuit to fix the problem or haul you to safety.
And that came down to me.
I realized I was hyperventilating. I adjusted my air mix and bent down, hands on knees, until I got my breathing under control.
Okay. Priority one was to assess the situation. Did that. Priority two was to ensure my own safety, then that of others. Priority three was to prevent further damage, then initiate repairs.
I was in no immediate danger. My suit had power, air, and water for almost seven hours, though heavy physical activity would reduce that. How about the rest of the crew?
I peered up at the windows in Decks 2 and 3. Flashlights still moved there. At least two, maybe three, maybe more.
There were handheld radios in the same emergency kits as the flashlights. I called all the handheld frequencies but got no response. Why?
After I gave up on that, I stepped back and waved, but got no reaction—probably nobody was looking out the window at the moment. Even throwing small rocks at the windows didn't prompt a response.
Well, they'd be okay for a few hours at least. Even if there were nine survivors and they were restricted to the top deck, that was still over a hundred cubic meters of air. Without power that air would get cold and stale pretty quickly, but the gouts of steam from the meteorite scar had slowed and stopped—they weren't losing any more of it.
The situation was stable, but it wouldn't improve by itself. After one more radio call—still no response—I headed back to the hab to see what I could do.
The main airlock's outer door was too damaged to open.
The gash made by the meteorite was too narrow and ragged to risk slipping through.
The engineering airlock door, around the back of the hab, appeared undamaged but wouldn't open. I hauled at the handle, but it simply refused to budge. I peered through the small porthole in the outer door with my headlamp. Nobody was in the airlock that I could see.
I stopped to think. If both airlock doors had been closed at the time of impact, and the engineering workroom was open to Mars's near-vacuum, then the engineering airlock would be an island of air between the vacuums of the exterior and the interior. That air was doing nobody any good, and preventing me from opening the door.
I pried open the emergency manual depressurization panel and opened the valve I found there. Air jetted out—I regretted the loss but couldn't think of an alternative—and soon the pressure was equalized; I was able to open the door with no problem.
A long, hard look through the porthole in the inner door showed nothing moving inside the hab. There wasn't any visible damage, though papers and other lightweight objects were scattered everywhere. After a reflexive check to make sure the outer door was shut—probably pointless, but by now it was a deeply ingrained habit—I tried the inner door. The handle moved easily, indicating no pressure differential, but the door itself met some kind of resistance.
I pushed against the resistance and felt something fall away with a soft thud that reverberated through my feet. With a sense of dread I pushed the door the rest of the way open and stepped through.
Oh, God. It was Suma. She'd made it as far as the airlock door. Now she lay still, eyes open and blood red, dark skin peppered with red blotches.
“I'm sorry,” I said aloud. The sound of my own shaking voice in my helmet made hot tears spring to my eyes, but I blinked hard and tried to sniff them back. I had no way to wipe my eyes.
I checked out the rest of the lower deck as quickly as I could. All the airtight doors had sprung shut as the pressure dropped, but with the hole slashing across so many compartments there was no air on either side of any of them. The main power panel was as badly damaged as I'd feared. And in the EVA prep room I found Audra halfway into her suit. She'd managed to get the helmet on her head and the air turned on full, but it hadn't been enough.
Damn. Damn, damn, damn.
The only good news was that all eight remaining suits were in their racks and appeared undamaged.
Okay. Time to head upstairs.
The airtight hatch at the top of the ladder was sealed and wouldn't budge. That was good news—it meant there was pressure on the other side. But there was no window in that hatch, and I still had no radio communication with the survivors for reasons unknown. I tried pounding on the hatch but got no response; even when I pressed the top of my helmet against the hatch I heard nothing. That didn't mean too much, though. The hatch was heavily padded on both sides—I myself had bashed my elbows and knees against it many times and welcomed the padding—so the sound might not be audible.
How to get them out, or get the suits to them, with no airlock? How to even let them know I was here and trying to help?
I clung to the ladder, breathing hard. The indicator on my wrist said I had enough air for another four hours at this rate. Damn.
Okay. Think, think.
From the top of the ladder I looked down, passing my headlamp beam over scattered papers and equipment and . . . oh God, Suma's body. I swallowed. Think. From the bottom of the ladder it was just ten or twelve steps to the engineering airlock and its emergency suits. Not far, but too far to walk in vacuum, and donning the suits would take much too long.
But still . . . it wasn't far to walk. In fact, it wasn't a very large space at all.
If I could force open the hatch, air would flood down from the upper deck. Shared between the upper and lower decks it would thin out dramatically, but might still support life, at least long enough to get to the suits and don them.
The claustrophobic tightness of the hab might save us all.
I scanned my headlamp around the space, considering my plan . . . but no, damn it, it wouldn't work. There was still a huge hole in the wall behind the damaged power panel.
I climbed down the ladder and examined the hole. It was about one and a half square meters all told, with ragged edges of torn metal and plastic. Heavy power cables and conduits crossed the gap, blocking easy access. Some of them might still be live.
How to seal it? Even temporarily?
We had expanding foam for small holes. This was far beyond what that could cover.
But we also had something else that expanded. . . .
I let my
self out through the engineering airlock and ran to the rover. The box still held six weather balloons. I grabbed three, just in case, put them in my thigh pockets, and ran back inside.
I put one of the folded packages on the floor about two meters from the damaged power panel and pulled the inflation tab. It inflated rapidly, and in less than a minute it had nearly filled the space, bulging out tautly between floor and ceiling.
It wasn't a clean seal by any means. The taut plastic film was tough, but far from immune to punctures. The balloon was full of potentially explosive hydrogen.
It would have to do.
I went to the EVA prep room and hauled all eight suits to the base of the ladder.
There was just one more thing to do.
I went back outside and flung a few rocks at the windows, then inflated another weather balloon. As it rose gently into the black sky I played a flashlight beam across it, hoping someone inside would notice.
It worked. A flashlight from one of the Deck 2 windows caught me in the eyes. Behind it I saw a waving hand. Still nothing on the radio, though. At least they knew I was here.
I ran back inside. I checked that the balloon was still in place. I made absolutely sure that every airtight door on the lower deck was closed and sealed. I climbed the ladder.
And then I put my shoulder against the hatch and pushed.
A hundred kilopascals of air pressure pushed back. It was like lifting a car. It was impossible. It didn't budge at all.
I pushed harder.
The plastic and metal of my suit's hard torso creaked as I put every bit of my strength into the effort. The edge of the neck ring bit painfully into my shoulder. I found myself grunting “Nnnnngh . . .” through gritted teeth.
I kept pushing.
A jet of air hissed across my helmet, letting me know I'd managed to open the hatch by just a crack. I was elated, but the pressure didn't let up at all. I kept pushing.
And then, just as I feared my trembling legs and back would give out altogether, I heard/felt a scraping noise in the hatch. I looked up and saw the scratched metal tip of a pry bar probing at the gap.
Analog SFF, June 2011 Page 13
