Also, during the… whatever the fuck happened… I got bounced around like a pinball and smashed my faceplate. Air is notoriously uncooperative when it comes to giant, gaping holes in your EVA suit.
Looks like the Hab is completely deflated and collapsed. So even if I had a functional EVA suit to leave the airlock with, I wouldn’t have anywhere to go. So that sucks.
I gotta think for a minute. And I have to get out of this EVA suit. It’s bulky, and the airlock is cramped. Besides, it’s not like it’s doing me any good.
Things aren’t as bad as they seem.
I’m still fucked, mind you. Just not as deeply.
Not sure what happened to the Hab, but the rover’s probably fine. It’s not ideal, but at least it’s not a leaky phone booth.
I have a patch kit on my EVA suit, of course. The same kind that saved my life back on Sol 6. But don’t get excited. It won’t do the suit any good. The patch kit is a cone-shaped valve with super-sticky resin on the wide end. It’s just too small to deal with a hole larger than eight centimeters. And really, if you have a nine-centimeter hole, you’re going to be dead way before you could whip out the kit.
Still, it’s an asset, and maybe I can use it to stop the airlock leak. And that’s my top priority right now.
It’s a small leak. With the faceplate gone, the EVA suit is effectively managing the whole airlock. It’s been adding air to make up for the missing pressure. But it’ll run out eventually.
I need to find the leak. I think it’s near my feet, judging by the sound. Now that I’m out of the suit, I can turn around and get a look….
I don’t see anything…. I can hear it, but… it’s down here somewhere, but I don’t know where.
I can only think of one way to find it: Start a fire!
Yeah, I know. A lot of my ideas involve setting something on fire. And yes, deliberately starting a fire in a tiny, enclosed space is usually a terrible idea. But I need the smoke. Just a little wisp of it.
As usual, I’m working with stuff that was deliberately designed not to burn. But no amount of careful design by NASA can get around a determined arsonist with a tank of pure oxygen.
Unfortunately, the EVA suit is made entirely of nonflammable materials. So is the airlock. My clothes are fireproof as well, even the thread.
I was originally planning to check the solar array, doing repairs as needed after last night’s storm. So I have my toolbox with me. But looking through it, I see it’s all metal or nonflammable plastic.
I just realized I do have something flammable: my own hair. It’ll have to do. There’s a sharp knife in the tool kit. I’ll shave some arm hairs off into a little pile.
Next step: oxygen. I don’t have anything so refined as pure oxygen flow. All I can do is muck with the EVA suit controls to increase oxygen percentage in the whole airlock. I figure bumping it to 40 percent will do.
All I need now is a spark.
The EVA suit has electronics, but it runs on very low voltage. I don’t think I could get an arc with it. Besides, I don’t want to mess with the suit. I need it working to get from the airlock to the rover.
The airlock itself has electronics, but it ran on Hab power. I guess NASA never considered what would happen if it was launched fifty meters. Lazy bums.
Plastic might not burn, but anyone who’s played with a balloon knows it’s great at building up static charge. Once I do that, I should be able to make a spark just by touching a metal tool.
Fun fact: This is exactly how the Apollo 1 crew died. Wish me luck!
I’m in a box full of burning-hair smell. It’s not a good smell.
On my first try, the fire lit, but the smoke just drifted randomly around. My own breathing was screwing it up. So I held my breath and tried again.
My second try, the EVA suit threw everything off. There’s a gentle flow of air coming out of the faceplate as the suit constantly replaces the missing air. So I shut the suit down, held my breath, and tried again. I had to be quick; the pressure was dropping.
My third try, the quick arm movements I used to set the fire messed everything up. Just moving around makes enough turbulence to send the smoke everywhere.
The fourth time I kept the suit turned off, held my breath, and when the time came to light the fire, I did it very slowly. Then I watched as the little wisp of smoke drifted toward the floor of the airlock, disappearing through a hairline fracture.
I have you now, little leak!
I gasped for air and turned the EVA suit back on. The pressure had dropped to 0.9 atmospheres during my little experiment. But there was plenty of oxygen in the air for me and my hair-fire to breathe. The suit quickly got things back to normal.
Looking at the fracture, I see that it’s pretty tiny. It would be a cinch to seal it with the suit’s patch kit, but now that I think about it, that’s a bad idea.
I’ll need to do some kind of repair to the faceplate. I don’t know how just yet, but the patch kit and its pressure-resistant resin are probably really important. And I can’t do it bit by bit, either. Once I break the seal on the patch kit, the binary components of the resin mix and I have sixty seconds before it hardens. I can’t just take a little to fix the airlock.
Given time, I might be able to come up with a plan for the faceplate. Then, I could take a few seconds during that plan to scrape resin over the airlock fracture. But I don’t have time.
I’m down to 40 percent of my N2 tank. I need to seal that fracture now, and I need to do it without using the patch kit.
First idea: Little Dutch Boy. I’m licking my palm and placing it over the crack.
Okay… I can’t quite make a perfect seal, so there’s airflow… getting colder now… getting pretty uncomfortable… Okay, fuck this.
On to idea number two. Tape!
I have duct tape in my toolbox. Let’s slap some on and see if it slows the flow. I wonder how long it will last before the pressure rips it. Putting it on now.
There we go… still holding…
Lemme check the suit…. Readouts say the pressure is stable. Looks like the duct tape made a good seal.
Let’s see if it holds….
It’s been fifteen minutes, and the tape is still holding. Looks like that problem is solved.
Sort of anticlimactic, really. I was already working out how to cover the breach with ice. I have two liters of water in the EVA suit’s “hamster-feeder.” I could have shut off the suit’s heating systems and let the airlock cool to freezing. Then I’d… Well, whatever.
Coulda done it with ice. I’m just sayin’.
All right. On to my next problem: How do I fix the EVA suit? Duct tape might seal a hairline crack, but it can’t hold an atmosphere of pressure against the size of my broken faceplate.
The patch kit is too small, but still useful. I can spread the resin around the edge of where the faceplate was, then stick something on to cover the hole. Problem is, what do I use to cover the hole? Something that can stand up to a lot of pressure.
Looking around, the only thing I see that can hold an atmosphere is the EVA suit itself. There’s plenty of material to work with, and I can even cut it. Remember when I was cutting Hab canvas into strips? Those same shears are right here in my tool kit.
Cutting a chunk out of my EVA suit leaves it with another hole. But a hole I can control the shape and location of.
Yeah… I think I see a solution here. I’m going to cut off my arm!
Well, no. Not my arm. The EVA suit’s arm. I’ll cut right below the left elbow. Then I can cut along its length, turning it into a rectangle. It’ll be big enough to seal the faceplate, and it’ll be held in place by the resin.