“And a very prosperous town at that.”
“Yes, a university town. With first-rate departments in several sciences.”
“But still in pieces.”
“Yes. But I kind of like it that way.”
Sunset was mandatory return-to-habitat time, and in the dusk she would stumble into the lock and inside, and eat another small cold meal sitting on her bed, listening to the talk around her which mostly concerned the day’s work, and the arrangement of the tasks for the next morning. Frank and Maya were supposed to be doing this, but in fact it was happening spontaneously, in a kind of ad hoc barter system. Hiroko was particularly good at it, which was a surprise given how withdrawn she had been on the voyage out; but now that she needed help from outside her team, she spent most of every evening moving from person to person, so single-minded and persuasive that she usually had a sizeable crew working on the farm every morning. Nadia couldn’t really see this; they had five years of dehydrated and canned food on hand, fare that suited Nadia fine, she had eaten worse for most of her life and she paid little attention to food anymore, she might as well have been eating hay, or refueling like one of the tractors. But they did need the farm for growing bamboo, which Nadia planned to use as a construction material in the permanent habitat that she hoped to start building soon. It all interlocked; all their tasks linked together, were necessary to each other. So when Hiroko plopped down beside her, she said, “Yeah, yeah, be there at eight. But you can’t build the permanent farm until the base habitat itself is built. So really you ought to be helping me tomorrow, right?”
“No, no,” Hiroko said, laughing. “Day after, okay?”
Hiroko’s main competition for labor came from Sax Russell and his crowd, who were working to start all the factories. Vlad and Ursula and the biomed group were also hungry to get all their labs set up and running. These three teams seemed willing to live in the trailer park indefinitely, as long as their own projects were progressing; but luckily there were a lot of people who were not so obsessed by their work, people like Maya and John and the rest of the cosmonauts, who were interested in moving into larger and better-protected quarters as soon as possible. So Nadia’s project would get help from them.
When she was done eating, Nadia took her tray into the kitchen and cleaned it with a little swab, then went over to sit by Ann Clayborne and Simon Frazier and the rest of the geologists. Ann looked nearly asleep; she was spending her mornings taking long rover trips and hikes, and then working hard on the base all afternoon, trying to make up for her trips away. To Nadia she seemed strangely tense, less happy about being on Mars than one would have thought. She appeared unwilling to work on the factories, or for Hiroko; indeed she usually came to work for Nadia, who, since she was only trying to build housing, could be said to be impacting the planet less than the more ambitious teams. Maybe that was it, maybe not; Ann wasn’t saying. She was hard to know, moody – not in Maya’s extravagant Russian manner, but more subtly, and, Nadia thought, in a darker register. In Bessie Smith land.
All around them people cleaned up after dinner and talked, and looked over manifests and talked, and bunched around computer terminals and talked, and washed clothes and talked; until most were stretched out on their beds, talking in lower voices, until they passed out. “It’s like the first second of the universe,” Sax Russell observed, rubbing his face wearily. “All crammed together and no differentiation. Just a bunch of hot particles rushing about.”
And that was just one day; and that was what it was like every day, for day after day after day. No change in the weather to speak of, except occasionally a wisp of cloud, or an extra-windy afternoon. In the main, the days rolled by one like the next. Everything took longer than planned. Just getting into the walkers and out of the habitats was a chore, and then all the equipment had to be warmed; and even though it had been built to a uniform set of standards, the international nature of the equipment meant that there were inevitable mismatches of size and function; and the dust (“Don’t call it dust!” Ann would complain. “That’s like calling dust gravel! Call it fines, they’re fines!”) got into everything; and all the physical work in the penetrating cold was exhausting, so that they went slower than they thought they would and began to collect a number of minor injuries. And, finally, there was just an amazing number of things to do, some of which had never even occurred to them. It took them about a month, for instance (they had budgeted ten days) just to open all the freight loads, check their contents and move them into the appropriate stockpiles – to get to the point where they could really begin to work.
After that, they could begin to build in earnest. And here Nadia came into her own. She had had nothing to do on the Ares, it had been a kind of hibernation for her. But building things was her great talent, the nature of her genius, trained in the bitter school of Siberia; and very quickly she became the colony’s chief troubleshooter, the universal solvent as John called her. Almost every job they had benefited from her help, and as she ran around every day answering questions and giving advice, she blossomed into a kind of timeless work heaven. So much to do! So much to do! Every night in the planning sessions Hiroko worked her wiles, and the farm went up: three parallel rows of greenhouses, looking like commercial greenhouses back on Earth except smaller and very thick-walled, to keep them from exploding like party balloons. Even with interior pressures of only three hundred millibars, which was barely farmable, the differential with the outside was drastic; a bad seal or a weak spot, and they would go bang. But Nadia was good at cold weather seals, and so Hiroko was calling her in a panic every other day.
Then the materials scientists needed help getting their factories operational, and the crew assembling the nuclear reactor wanted her supervision for every breath that they took: they were petrified with fright that they would do something wrong, and were not reassured by Arkady sending radio messages down from Phobos insisting they did not need such a dangerous technology, that they could get all the power they needed from wind generation: he and Phyllis had bitter arguments about this. It was Hiroko who cut Arkady off, with what she said was a Japanese commonplace: “Shikata ga nai,” meaning there is no other choice. Windmills might have generated enough power, as Arkady contended, but they didn’t have windmills, while they had been supplied with a Rickover nuclear reactor, built by the US Navy and a beautiful piece of work; and no one wanted to try bootstrapping themselves into a wind-powered system: they were in too much of a hurry. Shikata ga nai. This too became one of their oft-repeated phrases.
And so every morning the construction crew for Chernobyl (Arkady’s name, of course) begged Nadia to come out with them and supervise. They had been exiled far to the east of the settlement, so that it made sense to go out for a full day with them. But then the medical team wanted her help building a clinic and some labs inside, from some discarded freight crates that they were converting into shelters. So instead of staying out at Chernobyl she would go back midday to eat and then help the med team. Every night she passed out exhausted.
Some evenings before she did, she had long talks with Arkady, up on Phobos. His crew was having trouble with the moon’s micro-gravity, and he wanted her advice as well. “If only we could get into some g just to live, to sleep!” Arkady said.
“Build train tracks in a ring around the surface,” Nadia suggested out of a doze. “Make one of the tanks from the Ares into a train, and run it around the track. Get on board and run the train around fast enough to give you some g against the ceiling of the train.”
Static, then Arkady’s wild cackle. “Nadezhda Francine, I love you, I love you!”
“You love gravity.”
With all this advisory work, the construction of their permanent habitat went slowly indeed. It was only once a week or so that Nadia could climb into the open cab of a Mercedes and rumble over the torn ground to the end of the trench she had started. At this point it was ten meters wide, fifty long, and four deep, which was as deep as she wanted to go. The bottom of the trench was the same as the surface: clay, fines, rocks of all size. Regolith.