Текст книги "The Martian"

Автор книги: Andy Weir

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The Hab is a dome. If I take canvas from near the floor, I can pull the remaining canvas down and reseal it. The Hab will become a lopsided dome, but that shouldn’t matter. As long as it holds pressure. I only need it to last another sixty-two sols.

I drew the shapes on the wall with a Sharpie. Then I spent a long time re-measuring them and making sure, over and over, that they were right.

That was all I did today. Might not seem like much, but the math and design work took all day. Now it’s time for dinner.

I’ve been eating potatoes for weeks. Theoretically, with my three-quarter ration plan, I should still be eating food packs. But three-quarter ration is hard to maintain, so now I’m eating potatoes.

I have enough to last till launch, so I won’t starve. But I’m pretty damn sick of potatoes. Also, they have a lot of fiber, so…let’s just say it’s good I’m the only guy on this planet.

I saved five meal packs for special occasions. I wrote their names on each one. I get to eat “Departure” the day I leave for Schiaparelli. I’ll eat “Halfway” when I reach the 1600-kilometer mark, and “Arrival” when I get there.

The fourth one is “Survived Something That Should Have Killed Me” because some fucking thing will happen, I just know it. I don’t know what it’ll be, but it’ll happen. The rover will break down, or I’ll come down with fatal hemorrhoids, or I’ll run into hostile Martians, or some shit. When I do (if I live), I get to eat that meal pack.

The fifth one is reserved for the day I launch. It’s labeled “Last Meal.”

Maybe that’s not such a good name.

LOG ENTRY: SOL 388

I started the day with a potato. I washed it down with some Martian coffee. That’s my name for “hot water with a caffeine pill dissolved in it.” I ran out of real coffee months ago.

My first order of business was a careful inventory of the Hab. I needed to root out anything that would have a problem with losing atmospheric pressure. Of course, everything in the Hab had a crash course in depressurization a few months back. But this time would be controlled, and I might as well do it right.

The main thing is the water. I lost 300 liters to sublimation when the Hab blew up. This time, that won’t happen. I drained the water reclaimer and sealed all the tanks.

The rest was just collecting knickknacks and dumping them in Airlock 3. Anything I could think of that doesn’t do well in a near-vacuum. All the pens, vitamin bottles (probably not necessary but I’m not taking chances), medical supplies, etc.

Then I did a controlled shutdown of the Hab. The critical components are designed to survive a vacuum. Hab depress is one of the many scenarios NASA accounted for. One system at a time, I cleanly shut them all down, ending with the main computer itself.

I suited up and depressurized the Hab. Last time, the canvas collapsed and made a mess of everything. That’s not supposed to happen. The dome of the Hab is mostly supported by air pressure, but there are flexible reinforcing poles across the inside to hold up the canvas. It’s how the Hab was assembled in the first place.

I watched as the canvas gently settled onto the poles. To confirm the depressurization, I opened both doors of Airlock 2. I left Airlock 3 alone. It maintained pressure for its cargo of random crap.

Then I cut shit up!

I’m not a materials engineer; my design for the bedroom isn’t elegant. It’s just a six-meter perimeter and a ceiling. No, it won’t have right angles and corners (pressure vessels don’t like those). It’ll balloon out to a more round shape.

Anyway, it means I only needed to cut two big-ass strips of canvas. One for the walls and one for the ceiling.

After mangling the Hab, I pulled the remaining canvas down to the flooring and resealed it. Ever set up a camping tent? From the inside? While wearing a suit of armor? It was a pain in the ass.

I repressurized to one-twentieth of an atmosphere to see if it could hold pressure.

Ha ha ha! Of course it couldn’t! Leaks galore. Time to find them.

On Earth, tiny particles get attached to water or wear down to nothing. On Mars, they just hang around. The top layer of sand is like talcum powder. I went outside with a bag and scraped along the surface. I got some normal sand, but plenty of powder, too.

I had the Hab maintain the one-twentieth atmosphere, backfilling as air leaked out. Then I “puffed” the bag to get the smallest particles to float around. They were quickly drawn to where the leaks were. As I found each leak, I spot-sealed it with resin.

It took hours, but I finally got a good seal. I’ll tell ya, the Hab looks pretty “ghetto” now. One whole side of it is lower than the rest. I’ll have to hunch down when I’m over there.

I pressurized to a full atmosphere and waited an hour. No leaks.

It’s been a long, physically taxing day. I’m totally exhausted but I can’t sleep. Every sound scares the shit out of me. Is that the Hab popping? No? Okay.… What was that!? Oh, nothing? Okay.…

It’s a terrible thing to have my life depend on my half-assed handiwork.

Time to get a sleeping pill from the medical supplies.

LOG ENTRY: SOL 389

What the hell is in those sleeping pills!? It’s the middle of the day.

After two cups of Martian coffee, I woke up a little. I won’t be taking another one of those pills. It’s not like I have to go to work in the morning.

Anyway, as you can tell from how not dead I am, the Hab stayed sealed overnight. The seal is solid. Ugly as hell, but solid.

Today’s task was the bedroom.

Assembling the bedroom was way easier than resealing the Hab. Because this time, I didn’t have to wear an EVA suit. I made the whole thing inside the Hab. Why not? It’s just canvas. I can roll it up and take it out an airlock when I’m done.

First, I did some surgery on the remaining pop-tent. I needed to keep the rover–airlock connector and surrounding canvas. The rest of the canvas had to go. Why hack off most of the canvas only to replace it with more canvas? Seams.

NASA is good at making things. I am not. The dangerous part of this structure won’t be the canvas. It’ll be the seams. And I get less total seam length by not trying to use the existing pop-tent canvas.

After hacking away most of the remaining tent, I seal-stripped the two pop-tent floors together. Then I sealed the new canvas pieces into place.

It was so much easier without the EVA suit on. So much easier!

Then I had to test it. Again, I did it in the Hab. I brought an EVA suit into the tent with me and closed the mini-airlock door. Then I fired up the EVA suit, leaving the helmet off. I told it to bump the pressure up to 1.2 atm.

It took a little while to bring it up to par, and I had to disable some alarms on the suit. (“Hey, I’m pretty sure the helmet’s not on!”). It depleted most of the N₂ tank but was finally able to bring up the pressure.

Then I sat around and waited. I breathed; the suit regulated the air. All was well. I watched the suit readouts carefully to see if it had to replace any “lost” air. After an hour with no noticeable change, I declared the first test a success.

I rolled up the whole thing (wadded up, really) and took it out to the rover.

You know, I suit up a lot these days. I bet that’s another record I hold. A typical Martian astronaut does, what, forty EVAs? I’ve done several hundred.

Once I brought the bedroom to the rover, I attached it to the airlock from the inside. Then I pulled the release to let it loose. I was still wearing my EVA suit, because I’m not an idiot.

The bedroom fired out and filled in three seconds. The open airlock hatchway led directly to it, and it appeared to be holding pressure.

Just like before, I let it sit for an hour. And just like before, it worked great. Unlike the Hab canvas resealing, I got this one right on the first try. Mostly because I didn’t have to do it with a damn EVA suit on.

Originally, I planned to let my bedroom sit overnight and check on it in the morning. But I ran into a problem: I can’t get out if I do that. The rover has only one airlock, and the bedroom was attached to it. There was no way for me to get out without detaching the bedroom, and no way to attach and pressurize the bedroom without being inside the rover.

It’s a little scary. The first time I test the thing overnight will be with me in it. But that’ll be later. I’ve done enough today.

LOG ENTRY: SOL 390

I have to face facts. I’m done prepping the rover. I don’t “feel” like I’m done. But it’s ready to go:

Food: 1692 potatoes. Vitamin pills.

Water: 620 liters.

Shelter: Rover, trailer, bedroom.

Air: Rover and trailer combined storage: 14 liters liquid O₂, 14 liters liquid N₂.

Life Support: Oxygenator and atmospheric regulator. 418 hours of use-and-discard CO₂ filters for emergencies.

Power: 36 kilowatt-hours of storage. Carrying capacity for 29 solar cells.

Heat: 1400-watt RTG. Homemade reservoir to heat regulator’s return air. Electric heater in rover as a backup.

Disco: Lifetime supply.

I’m leaving here on Sol 449. That gives me fifty-nine sols to test everything and fix whatever isn’t working right. Then decide what’s coming with me and what’s staying behind. And plot a route to Schiaparelli using a grainy satellite map. And rack my brains trying to think of anything important I forgot.

Since Sol 6 all I’ve wanted to do was get the hell out of here. Now the prospect of leaving the Hab behind scares the shit out of me. I need some encouragement. I need to ask myself, “What would an Apollo astronaut do?”

He’d drink three whiskey sours, drive his Corvette to the launchpad, then fly to the moon in a command module smaller than my Rover. Man those guys were cool.

CHAPTER 21

LOG ENTRY: SOL 431

I’m working out how to pack. It’s harder than it sounds.

I have two pressure vessels: the rover and the trailer. They’re connected by hoses, but they’re also not stupid. If one loses pressure, the other will instantly seal off the shared lines.

There’s a grim logic to this: If the rover breaches, I’m dead. No point in planning around that. But if the trailer breaches, I’ll be fine. That means I should put everything important in the rover.

Everything that goes in the trailer has to be comfortable in near-vacuum and freezing temperatures. Not that I anticipate that, but you know. Plan for the worst.

The saddlebags I made for the Pathfinder trip will come in handy for food storage. I can’t just store potatoes in the rover or trailer. They’d rot in the warm, pressurized environment. I’ll keep some in the rover for easy access, but the rest will be outside in the giant freezer that is this planet. The trailer will be packed pretty tight. It’ll have two bulky Hab batteries, the atmospheric regulator, the oxygenator, and my homemade heat reservoir. It would be more convenient to have the reservoir in the rover, but it has to be near the regulator’s return air feed.

The rover will be pretty packed, too. When I’m driving, I’ll keep the bedroom folded up near the airlock, ready for emergency egress. Also, I’ll have the two functional EVA suits in there with me and anything that might be needed for emergency repairs: tool kits, spare parts, my nearly depleted supply of sealant, the other rover’s main computer (just in case!), and all 620 glorious liters of water.

And a plastic box to serve as a toilet. One with a good lid.

•••

“HOW’S WATNEY doing?” Venkat asked.

Mindy looked up from her computer with a start. “Dr. Kapoor?”

“I hear you caught a pic of him during an EVA?”

“Uh, yeah,” Mindy said, typing on her keyboard. “I noticed things would always change around 9 a.m. local time. People usually keep the same patterns, so I figured he likes to start work around then. I did some minor realignment to get seventeen pics between 9 and 9:10. He showed up in one of them.”

“Good thinking. Can I see the pic?”

“Sure.” She brought up the image on her screen.

Venkat peered at the blurry image. “Is this as good as it gets?”

“Well, it is a photo taken from orbit,” Mindy said. “The NSA enhanced the image with the best software they have.”

“Wait, what?” Venkat stammered. “The NSA?”

“Yeah, they called and offered to help out. Same software they use for enhancing spy satellite imagery.”

Venkat shrugged. “It’s amazing how much red tape gets cut when everyone’s rooting for one man to survive.” He pointed to the screen. “What’s Watney doing here?”

“I think he’s loading something into the rover.”

“When was the last time he worked on the trailer?” Venkat asked.

“Not for a while. Why doesn’t he write us notes more often?”

Venkat shrugged. “He’s busy. He works most of the daylight hours, and arranging rocks to spell a message takes time and energy.”

“So…,” Mindy said. “Why’d you come here in person? We could have done all this over e-mail.”

“Actually, I came to talk to you,” he said. “There’s going to be a change in your responsibilities. From now on, instead of managing the satellites around Mars, your sole responsibility is watching Mark Watney.”

“What?” Mindy said. “What about course corrections and alignment?”

“We’ll assign that to other people,” Venkat said. “From now on, your only focus is examining imagery of Ares 3.”

“That’s a demotion,” Mindy said. “I’m an orbital engineer, and you’re turning me into a glorified Peeping Tom.”

“It’s short-term,” Venkat said. “And we’ll make it up to you. Thing is, you’ve been doing it for months, and you’re an expert at identifying elements of Ares 3 from satellite pics. We don’t have anyone else who can do that.”

“Why is this suddenly so important?”

“He’s running out of time,” Venkat said. “We don’t know how far along he is on the rover modifications. But we do know he’s only got sixteen sols to get them done. We need to know exactly what he’s doing. I’ve got media outlets and senators asking for his status all the time. The President even called me a couple of times.”

“But seeing his status doesn’t help,” Mindy said. “It’s not like we can do anything about it if he falls behind. This is a pointless task.”

“How long have you worked for the government?” Venkat sighed.

LOG ENTRY: SOL 434

The time has come to test this baby out.

This presents a problem. Unlike on my Pathfinder trip, I have to take vital life support elements out of the Hab if I’m going to do a real dry run. When you take the atmospheric regulator and oxygenator out of the Hab, you’re left with…a tent. A big round tent that can’t support life.

It’s not as risky as it seems. As always, the dangerous part about life support is managing carbon dioxide. When the air gets to 1 percent CO₂, you start getting symptoms of poisoning. So I need to keep the Hab’s mix below that.

The Hab’s internal volume is about 120,000 liters. Breathing normally, it would take me over two days to bring the CO₂ level up to 1 percent (and I wouldn’t even put a dent in the O₂ level). So it’s safe to move the regulator and oxygenator over for a while.

Both are way too big to fit through the trailer airlock. Lucky for me, they came to Mars with “some assembly required.” They were too big to send whole, so they’re easy to dismantle.

Over several trips, I moved all of their chunks to the trailer. I brought each chunk in through the airlock, one at a time. It was a pain in the ass reassembling them inside, let me tell you. There’s barely enough room for all the shit the trailer’s got to hold. There wasn’t much left for our intrepid hero.

Then I got the AREC. It sat outside the Hab like an AC unit might on Earth. In a way, that’s what it is. I hauled it over to the trailer and lashed it to the shelf I’d made for it. Then I hooked it up to the feed lines that led through the “balloon” to the inside of the trailer’s pressure vessel.

The regulator needs to send air to the AREC, then the return air needs to bubble through the heat reservoir. The regulator also needs a pressure tank to contain the CO₂ it pulls from the air.

When gutting the trailer to make room, I left one tank in place for this. It’s supposed to hold oxygen, but a tank’s a tank. Thank God all the air lines and valves are standardized across the mission. That’s no mistake. It was a deliberate decision to make field repairs easier.

Once I had the AREC in place, I hooked the oxygenator and regulator into the trailer’s power and watched them power up. I ran both through full diagnostics to confirm they were working correctly. Then I shut down the oxygenator. Remember, I’ll only use it one sol out of every five.

I moved to the rover, which meant I had to do an annoying ten-meter EVA. From there, I monitored the life support situation. It’s worth noting that I can’t monitor the actual support equipment from the rover (it’s all in the trailer), but the rover can tell me all about the air. Oxygen, CO₂, temperature, humidity, etc. Everything seemed okay.

After getting back into the EVA suit, I released a canister of CO₂ into the rover’s air. I watched the rover computer have a shit fit when it saw the CO₂ spike to lethal levels. Then, over time, the levels dropped to normal. The regulator was doing its job. Good boy!

I left the equipment running when I returned to the Hab. It’ll be on its own all night and I’ll check it in the morning. It’s not a true test, because I’m not there to breathe up the oxygen and make CO₂, but one step at a time.

LOG ENTRY: SOL 435

Last night was weird. I knew logically that nothing bad would happen in just one night, but it was a little unnerving to know I had no life support other than heaters. My life depended on some math I’d done earlier. If I dropped a sign or added two numbers wrong, I might never wake up.

But I did wake up, and the main computer showed the slight rise in CO₂ I had predicted. Looks like I’ll live another sol.

Live Another Sol would be an awesome name for a James Bond movie.

I checked up on the rover. Everything was fine. If I don’t drive it, a single charge of the batteries could keep the regulator going for over a month (with the heater off). It’s a pretty good safety margin to have. If all hell breaks loose on my trip, I’ll have time to fix things. I’ll be limited by oxygen consumption rather than CO₂ removal, and I have plenty of oxygen.

I decided it was a good time to test the bedroom.

I got in the rover and attached the bedroom to the outer airlock door from the inside. Like I mentioned before, this is the only way to do it. Then I turned it loose on an unsuspecting Mars.

As intended, the pressure from the rover blasted the canvas outward and inflated it. After that, chaos. The sudden pressure popped the bedroom like a balloon. It quickly deflated, leaving both itself and the rover devoid of air. I was wearing my EVA suit at the time; I’m not a fucking idiot. So I get to…

Live Another Sol! (Starring Mark Watney as…probably Q. I’m no James Bond.)

I dragged the popped bedroom into the Hab and gave it a good going-over. It failed at the seam where the wall met the ceiling. Makes sense. It’s a right angle in a pressure vessel. Physics hates that sort of thing.

First, I patched it up, then I cut strips of spare canvas to place over the seam. Now it has double-thickness and double sealing resin all around. Maybe that’ll be enough. At this point, I’m kind of guessing. My amazing botany skills aren’t much use for this.

I’ll test it again tomorrow.

LOG ENTRY: SOL 436

I’m out of caffeine pills. No more Martian coffee for me.

So it took a little longer for me to wake up this morning, and I quickly developed a splitting headache. One nice thing about living in a multibillion-dollar mansion on Mars: access to pure oxygen. For some reason, a high concentration of O₂ will kill most headaches. Don’t know why. Don’t care. The important thing is I don’t have to suffer.

I tested out the bedroom again. I suited up in the rover and released the bedroom, same as last time. But this time it held. That’s great, but having seen the fragile nature of my handiwork, I wanted a good long test of the pressure seal.

After a few minutes standing around in my EVA suit, I decided to make better use of my time. I may not be able to leave the rover/bedroom universe while the bedroom is attached to the airlock, but I can stay in the rover and close the door.

Once I did that, I took off the uncomfortable EVA suit. The bedroom was on the other side of the airlock door, still fully pressurized. So I’m still running my test, but I don’t have to wear the EVA suit.

I arbitrarily picked eight hours for the test duration, so I was trapped in the rover until then.

I spent my time planning the trip. There wasn’t much to add to what I already knew. I’ll beeline out of Acidalia Planitia to Mawrth Vallis, then follow the valley until it ends. It’ll take me on a zigzag route which will dump me in to Arabia Terra. After that, things get rough.

Unlike Acidalia Planitia, Arabia Terra is riddled with craters. And each crater represents two brutal elevation changes. First down, then up. I did my best to find the shortest path around them. I’m sure I’ll have to adjust the course when I’m actually driving it. No plan survives first contact with the enemy.

•••

MITCH TOOK his seat in the conference room. The usual gang was present: Teddy, Venkat, Mitch, and Annie. But this time there was also Mindy Park, as well as a man Mitch had never seen before.

“What’s up, Venk?” Mitch asked. “Why the sudden meeting?”

“We’ve got some developments,” Venkat said. “Mindy, why don’t you bring them up to date?”

“Uh, yeah,” Mindy said. “Looks like Watney finished the balloon addition to the trailer. It mostly uses the design we sent him.”

“Any idea how stable it is?” Teddy asked.

“Pretty stable,” she said. “It’s been inflated for several days with no problems. Also, he built some kind of…room.”

“Room?” Teddy asked.

“It’s made of Hab canvas, I think,” Mindy explained. “It attaches to the rover’s airlock. I think he cut a section out of the Hab to make it. I don’t know what it’s for.”

Teddy turned to Venkat. “Why would he do that?”

“We think it’s a workshop,” Venkat said. “There’ll be a lot of work to do on the MAV once he gets to Schiaparelli. It’ll be easier without an EVA suit. He probably plans to do as much as he can in that room.”

“Clever,” Teddy said.

“Watney’s a clever guy,” Mitch said. “How about getting life support in there?”

“I think he’s done it,” Mindy said. “He moved the AREC.”

“Sorry,” Annie interrupted. “What’s an AREC?”

“It’s the external component of the atmospheric regulator,” Mindy said. “It sits outside the Hab, so I saw when it disappeared. He probably mounted it on the rover. There’s no other reason to move it, so I’m guessing he’s got life support online.”

“Awesome,” Mitch said. “Things are coming together.”

“Don’t celebrate yet, Mitch,” Venkat said. He gestured to the newcomer. “This is Randall Carter, one of our Martian meteorologists. Randall, tell them what you told me.”

Randall nodded. “Thank you, Dr. Kapoor.” He turned his laptop around to show a map of Mars. “Over the past few weeks, a dust storm has been developing in Arabia Terra. Not a big deal in terms of magnitude. It won’t hinder his driving at all.”

“So what’s the problem?” Annie asked.

“It’s a low-velocity dust storm,” Randall explained. “Slow winds, but fast enough to pick up very small particles on the surface and whip them into thick clouds. There are five or six of them every year. The thing is, they last for months, they cover huge sections of the planet, and they make the atmosphere thick with dust.”

“I still don’t see the problem,” Annie said.

“Light,” Randall said. “The total sunlight reaching the surface is very low in the area of the storm. Right now, it’s twenty percent of normal. And Watney’s rover is powered by solar panels.”

“Shit,” Mitch said, rubbing his eyes. “And we can’t warn him.”

“So he gets less power,” Annie said. “Can’t he just recharge longer?”

“The current plan already has him recharging all day long,” Venkat explained. “With twenty percent of normal daylight, it’ll take five times as long to get the same energy. It’ll turn his forty five-sol trip into two hundred and twenty-five sols. He’ll miss the Hermes flyby.”

“Can’t Hermes wait for him?” Annie asked.

“It’s a flyby,” Venkat said. “Hermes isn’t going into Martian orbit. If they did, they wouldn’t be able to get back. They need their velocity for the return trajectory.”

After a few moments of silence, Teddy said, “We’ll just have to hope he finds a way through. We can track his progress and—”

“No, we can’t,” Mindy interrupted.

“We can’t?” Teddy said.

She shook her head. “The satellites won’t be able to see through the dust. Once he enters the affected area, we won’t see anything until he comes out the other side.”

“Well…,” Teddy said. “Shit.”

LOG ENTRY: SOL 439

Before I risk my life with this contraption, I need to test it.

And not the little tests I’ve been doing so far. Sure, I’ve tested power generation, life support, the trailer bubble, and the bedroom. But I need to test all aspects of it working together.

I’m going to load it up for the long trip and drive in circles. I won’t ever be more than 500 meters from the Hab, so I’ll be fine if shit breaks.

I dedicated today to loading up the rover and trailer for the test. I want the weight to match what it’ll be on the real trip. Plus if cargo is going to shift around or break things, I want to know about it now.

I made one concession to common sense: I left most of my water supply in the Hab. I loaded twenty liters; enough for the test but no more. There are a lot of ways I could lose pressure in this mechanical abomination I’ve created, and I don’t want all my water to boil off if that happens.

On the real trip, I’m going to have 620 liters of water. I made up the weight difference by loading 600 kilograms of rocks in with my other supplies.

Back on Earth, universities and governments are willing to pay millions to get their hands on Mars rocks. I’m using them as ballast.

I’m doing one more little test tonight. I made sure the batteries were good and full, then disconnected the rover and trailer from Hab power. I’ll be sleeping in the Hab, but I left the rover’s life support on. It’ll maintain the air overnight, and tomorrow I’ll see how much power it ate up. I’ve watched the power consumption while it’s attached to the Hab, and there weren’t any surprises. But this’ll be the true proof. I call it the “plugs-out test.”

Maybe that’s not the best name.

•••

THE CREW of Hermes gathered in the Rec.

“Let’s get through status quickly,” Lewis said. “We’re all behind in our science assignments. Vogel, you first.”

“I repaired the bad cable on VASIMR 4,” Vogel reported. “It was our last thick-gauge cable. If another such problem occurs, we will have to braid lower-gauge lines to carry the current. Also, the power output from the reactor is declining.”

“Johanssen,” Lewis said, “what’s the deal with the reactor?”

“I had to dial it back,” Johanssen said. “It’s the cooling vanes. They aren’t radiating heat as well as they used to. They’re tarnishing.”

“How can that happen?” Lewis asked. “They’re outside the craft. There’s nothing for them to react with.”

“I think they picked up dust or small air leaks from Hermes itself. One way or another, they’re definitely tarnishing. The tarnish is clogging the micro-lattice, and that reduces the surface area. Less surface area means less heat dissipation. So I limited the reactor enough that we weren’t getting positive heat.”

“Any chance of repairing the cooling vanes?”

“It’s on the microscopic scale,” Johanssen said. “We’d need a lab. Usually they replace the vanes after each mission.”

“Will we be able to maintain engine power for the rest of the mission?”

“Yes, if the rate of tarnishing doesn’t increase.”

“All right, keep an eye on it. Beck, how’s life support?”

“Limping,” Beck said. “We’ve been in space way longer than it was designed to handle. There are a bunch of filters that would normally be replaced each mission. I found a way to clean them with a chemical bath I made in the lab, but it eats away at the filters themselves. We’re okay right now, but who knows what’ll break next?”

“We knew this would happen,” Lewis said. “The design of Hermes assumed it would get an overhaul after each mission, but we’ve extended Ares 3 from 396 days to 898. Things are going to break. We’ve got all of NASA to help when that happens. We just need to stay on top of maintenance. Martinez, what’s the deal with your bunk room?”

Martinez furrowed his brow. “It’s still trying to cook me. The climate control just isn’t keeping up. I think it’s the tubing in the walls that brings the coolant. I can’t get at it because it’s built into the hull. We can use the room for storage of non-temperature-sensitive cargo, but that’s about it.”

“So did you move into Mark’s room?”

“It’s right next to mine,” he said. “It has the same problem.”

“Where have you been sleeping?”

“In Airlock 2. It’s the only place I can be without people tripping over me.”

“No good,” Lewis said, shaking her head. “If one seal breaks, you die.”

“I can’t think of anywhere else to sleep,” he said. “The ship is pretty cramped, and if I sleep in a hallway I’ll be in people’s way.”

“Okay, from now on, sleep in Beck’s room. Beck can sleep with Johanssen.”

Johanssen blushed and looked down awkwardly.

“So…,” Beck said, “you know about that?”

“You thought I didn’t?” Lewis said. “It’s a small ship.”

“You’re not mad?”

“If it were a normal mission, I would be,” Lewis said. “But we’re way off-script now. Just keep it from interfering with your duties, and I’m happy.”

“Million-mile-high club,” Martinez said. “Nice!”

Johanssen blushed deeper and buried her face in her hands.

LOG ENTRY: SOL 444

I’m getting pretty good at this. Maybe when all this is over I could be a product tester for Mars rovers.

Things went well. I spent five sols driving in circles; I averaged 93 kilometers per sol. That’s a little better than I’d expected. The terrain here is flat and smooth, so it’s pretty much a best-case scenario. Once I’m going up hills and around boulders, it won’t be nearly that good.

The bedroom is awesome. Large, spacious, and comfortable. On the first night, I ran into a little problem with the temperature. It was fucking cold. The rover and trailer regulate their own temperatures just fine, but things weren’t hot enough in the bedroom.