Her lungs still felt full. The last dregs of air expanded under the hundredfold pressure drop outside.
She set her course. Around the hab, first.
Each step seemed to take forever.
The skin makes a pretty fair space suit, a lecturer had said once, somewhere, somewhen.
Pressure wasn’t the problem. Her pounding head could not think very well but it reminded her to keep her mouth open. Let the gas laws work for you.
She had gone ten meters and her legs were like logs, thumping her feet down. Coming around the round hab walls, she studied the landscape with a floating curiosity.
All details were sharp, hard. She was still exhaling, a fog falling from her, ice crystals shimmering in it. Her face was starting to hurt. Lips freezing.
Time for another blink. Her eyelids slid down and wanted to stay there. Run blind?
Thump, thump, thump, went her feet, so very far away.
An idea there—? Keep eyes closed, stop the corneas from freezing.
Maybe the eyelids will freeze to the corneas. Hard to open them then. Thump, thump.
Cranking up the eyelids was like lifting weights. Gravel in the gears somewhere.
She was farther along the curve of the hab now. Here came the lock, looming on the hab horizon like a tarnished promise.
Stiff, slow, her legs churned. No more helpful air boiled out of her. Nothing but a hollow feeling left. Something biting hard in her throat. She tried to force out a last packet of air, first shout ever on Mars, but there was nothing, nothing.
The lock. She saw it coming toward her, wobbly as it came, like a child bounding out, glad to see her.
The exterior buttons were sharp and clear and all she had to do was bring her arms up to punch the green CYCLE button. It took a long time, though, long enough to wonder why everything was taking so much effort.
Her arms were not working right. It was dark all of a sudden except for a narrow tunnel of filmy light, straight in front of her, a flashlight beam. In it she watched her right hand come up and punch for the CYCLE and miss it.
Try again. Can’t be that hard… Missed again…
Her hand would not do what she told it to.
Try the other? No, it would not get here anytime soon.
Something else. Movement. Not her hand.
The lock.
Opening out.
So fast, too. She stepped back and tried to get her breath and felt something pop in her chest.
Marc. He looked so big in his green suit.
But he tilted back and fell away and the sky was there. Soaring.
A dark hole at the top of it. Black on pink. Beautiful.
25
JANUARY 25, 2018
SHE FELT FRAGILE, JUST LYING IN BED LIKE A RAG DOLL.
She lay still and listened to the hab warm up. It stretched and groaned as the metal expanded, a slow long clamor that marked both dawn and dusk. Not the sighing of soft breezes through drooping paper-bark trees, but it would have to do.
She’d slept restlessly, moaning and thrashing intermittently, according to Viktor. He’d looked at her with a solemn, searching expression, a furrow between his eyes. Later he’d insisted that she just rest up the whole day, and part of her wanted to do just that.
A quiet throbbing ran down her throat and into her chest. At times she felt that she carried the medals of a Soviet field marshal on her chest, pinned not to a uniform but to her skin. Her lips were swollen from their near freezing and the dehydrating effect of the tenuous atmosphere. Her eyes still felt sandy, an effect Earthside medicos found intriguing—which meant they didn’t understand it. Nobody had ever survived a “vac event,” as space station jargon called it. Sure, there had been suit ventings, quickly patched, but nobody had run for their life before. The external cameras had caught most of her frantic, slobby sprint—big, loping strides in the low gravity, a wreath of pearly fog trailing her head the whole way.
And with the video had come her terse descriptions of Martian life ripping through industrial-strength plastics. The audio had gone out to Earthside, too.
She tried not to think about it, and of course failed.
But after a good sleep and an hour of lounging around past breakfast, she got restless. In her robe she ventured forth, to find that Raoul and Viktor were long gone for the ERV. Viktor had checked on her earlier, and she had drifted off immediately. “Oh?”
“You were asleep, prob’ly didn’t notice,” Marc said, offering her some tea. She had thanked him profusely as soon as he got her into the lock, and the wonderful sensation of filling her lungs again had passed. He got embarrassed if she brought it up any more.
She eased into her acceleration couch, the best place to snuggle.
She had a deep facial sunburn, eyeballs showing red veins, dead skin on her earlobes, and overall felt as delicate as antique porcelain. “I must still be a little rocky. Mmm, it’s warm in here.”
“Yeah, Viktor turned up the hab temperature for you.”
