She threw the tape at his feet. “Be a fool, then. Get us all killed.”
“You’re counting that I can’t take the chance.” He stooped slowly and picked up the tape.
Zora continued, as if she had just thought of it. “You can pressurize the cabin and fix your suit. But it’ll take awhile to pressurize. A half hour at least. I’ll go get the camera with the photo while you the atmosphere builds up.”
“When you come back, we’ll lose all that good atmosphere again.”
She looked at him blandly. “It can’t be helped. You can take the opportunity to get Sekou out and cleaned up. We have no clean clothes for him, but ten minutes over the heater will at least dry his britches.”
Marcus stared back unsmiling. “You’re a jive fool, girl. You get serious radiation sick, I’ll kill you.”
“You saying don’t go?”
He stared longer. Then, “Go.”
Zora didn’t look back at the rover as she loped awkwardly in her environment suit to the front airlock of the hab. Once inside, she felt a sense of unreality, her family home having turned alien. Odd to fumble to open the door to Sekou’s tiny room, not to feel the softness of his blanket through her thick glove. Everything was changed, charmed, deadly.
Her com still connected her to her child and her husband back in the rover. “Sekou,” she asked, matter of fact. “Tell Mama where the camera is.”
Sleepy, Sekou’s voice came back, “Under the bed.”
Environment suits aren’t built for crawling on hands and knees. Under the bed Sekou had stowed all sorts of things, pitiful toys made of household scraps and discards. A whole fleet of rovers made of low quality Mars ceramics with wobbly wheels that only a child would consider round. A doll she had made of scraps of cloth, and upon which he had put a helmet made of a discarded jar.
And way back toward the wall, where her clumsy fat-fingered glove could scarcely reach, the camera.
“The picture is still in the camera, Sekou?”
“Yes, Mama.”
She felt a flash of fury for not having paid more attention to her own child’s plaything. “How do you get the pictures out?”
“You have to develop them.”
“Say what?”
Marcus broke in. “It’s a chemical process. The film emulsion is sensitive to light, you apply chemicals to fix it. You unload the film into the chemical bath in the dark.”
Sekou had done this by himself? Mars god almighty, her boy was going to be something fine as a grown man. “Why can’t we just give the camera to Hesperson? And why can’t we do the developing in the rover?”
“It needs water, if I understand correctly. And I’m not sure Hesperson has the chemicals.”
Sekou’s voice broke in, excited. “They’re already all mixed up. Look behind the sanitizer. And Mama, it has to be way dark or you’ll spoil them. Take them in the bathroom.”
Marcus added, “It’s nineteenth century technology, Zora. Just do as the boy says.”
“Nineteenth century,” she said. “What game are you two running on me?” She felt the fool. She had a Ph.D. in biochemical engineering. How could she not how to work a nineteenth century gadget? But then she couldn’t weave cloth, or knit, or make a fire with flint, either.
“Turn off your helmet light, too,” Sekou added.
Thirty minutes later, she was staring at film negatives. “Why is there no color? Insufficient band width? And how could anybody be recognizable?”
“I think any computer could deal with that. Try it on your com.”
She scanned the tiny transparent images into her com and was rewarded with a bright, colorized image of Valkiri. After the com had thought a minute, it added a third dimension to the colorized image, although both color and third dimension looked a little off from the memory she had of Valkiri.
Marcus’s voice in her com startled her. “Bail out of there, woman. You’ve absorbed enough REMs to light up Valles Marineris.”
Marcus was back in his suit, Sekou in his bubble, and the pressure in the rover falling rapidly when she got it.
“My suit doesn’t show a radiation load,” she said.
“Something wrong with it. They probably sabotaged our suits, too. Let’s book for Borealopolis.”
Sekou didn’t even ask to see the picture. “Those guys that stayed in my room,” he said, “they did something bad, didn’t they?” Through the haze of the bubble’s surface, she could see betrayal written on his pinched face.
“I’m sorry, Sekou. I think it was just the new girl, the one with the frizzy blonde hair. But we can’t trust them any more.”
She had stopped trusting her conviction that she wasn’t pregnant, too. She’d have to find a machine and test herself the minute they were safely inside the city.
Hesperson greeted them inside the city’s outer airlock. His assistant took the image “We’ll run a biometric search on this, right away.”
“And you’ll take us in,” Marcus asked. “We need consumables. Can’t live like Land Ethic Nomads, running from hab to hab, on charity.”
Hesperson smiled warily, “The city management of Boreaolopolis can offer you a nice cubicle, plus free air, water, food, and utilities for up to a year.
“Marcus,” Zora said, “We’ll have to contact Vivocrypt corp about renegotiating our contracts.”
Marcus looked grim. “They’ll want another ten mears of work, no lie.”
Hesperson took them to a cramped, body-smelling holding area where they could unsuit while he arranged for temporary quarters. Zora wanted some hot tea, but she had to find out something first. She slipped away and found a cheap medical test machine in a dark corridor. It looked battered and she wondered if the lancet that nicked her skin was even sterile. Bu in two minutes, it told her what she wanted to know—or didn’t want to know. She was pregnant.
She stood in the corridor in the dimness for endless minutes. How long had she been in the radioactive hab? Her suit com would have the information, but she didn’t want to know, really.
What difference would it make now?
She willed herself to walk back to the holding area.
Should she tell Marcus she had lied? Or should she quietly go and abort the fetus? She had lied about the rip in his suit, he had forgiven her that lie. But could she compound the lie, saying she was sure she wasn’t pregnant, a further betrayal?
Her mind was a welter of horror and confused thinking.
“—and you can run routine quality tests on our water treatment until we find you work more suited to your backgrounds,” the assistant was saying. “Any questions?”
Sekou looked up at her and whispered “Can I ask how long before we can go back, Mama?”
And all the stars help her, she had all she could do not to slap him.
Hesperson hustled back in, smiling. “Then there’s a break in the search for Valkiri. The image your little boy recorded with matches the face of a Land Ethic radical who had jumped contract from Equatorial City two years ago. Her name was Estelle Query. She was a nuclear engineer in charge of developing ways to maximize heat production in large urban nukes.”
“Figures,” said Marcus.
“What a smart little boy you have here,” said Hesperson. “Somebody will pay big franks for his contract someday.”
Zora was already feeling horrible guilt over nearly losing her temper with Sekou. This just made her want to cry.
“Would you like a nice clean pair of pants?” the assistant asked Sekou. He nodded eagerly and cast an only slightly worried look at Zora and Marcus as she led him out to get cleaned up. Zora buried her face in her hands.