Material designed to withstand atmospheric pressure? Check.
Resin designed to seal a breach against that pressure? Check.
And what about the gaping hole on the stumpy arm? Unlike my faceplate, the suit’s material is flexible. I’ll press it together and seal it with resin. I’ll have to press my left arm against my side while I’m in the suit, but there’ll be room.
I’ll be spreading the resin pretty thin, but it’s literally the strongest adhesive known to man. And it doesn’t have to be a perfect seal. It just has to last long enough for me to get to safety.
And where will that “safety” be? Not a damn clue.
Anyway, one problem at a time. Right now I’m fixing the EVA suit.
Cutting the arm off the suit was easy; so was cutting along its length to make a rectangle. Those shears are strong as hell.
Cleaning the glass off the faceplate took longer than I’d expected. It’s unlikely it would puncture EVA suit material, but I’m not taking any chances. Besides, I don’t want glass in my face when I’m wearing it.
Then came the tricky part. Once I broke the seal on the patch kit, I had sixty seconds before the resin set. I scooped it off the patch kit with my fingers and quickly spread it around the rim of the faceplate. Then I took what was left and sealed the arm hole.
I pressed the rectangle of suit material onto the helmet with both hands while using my knee to keep pressure on the arm’s seam.
I held on until I’d counted 120 seconds. Just to be sure.
It seemed to work well. The seal looked strong and the resin was rock-hard. I did, however, glue my hand to the helmet.
Stop laughing.
In retrospect, using my fingers to spread the resin wasn’t the best plan. Fortunately, my left hand was still free. After some grunting and a lot of profanities, I was able to reach the toolbox. Once I got a screwdriver, I chiseled myself free (feeling really stupid the whole time). It was a delicate process because I didn’t want to flay the skin off my fingers. I had to get the screwdriver between the helmet and the resin. I freed my hand and didn’t draw blood, so I call that a win. Though I’ll have hardened resin on my fingers for days, just like a kid who played with Krazy Glue.
Using the arm computer, I had the suit overpressurize to 1.2 atmospheres. The faceplate patch bowed outward but otherwise held firm. The arm filled in, threatening to tear the new seam, but stayed in one piece.
Then I watched the readouts to see how airtight things were.
Answer: Not very.
It absolutely pissed the air out. In sixty seconds it leaked so much it pressurized the whole airlock to 1.2 atmospheres.
The suit is designed for eight hours of use. That works out to 250 milliliters of liquid oxygen. Just to be safe, the suit has a full liter of O2 capacity. But that’s only half the story. The rest of the air is nitrogen. It’s just there to add pressure. When the suit leaks, that’s what it backfills with. The suit has two liters of liquid N2 storage.
Let’s call the volume of the airlock two cubic meters. The inflated EVA suit probably takes up half of it. So it took five minutes to add 0.2 atmospheres to 1 cubic meter. That’s 285 grams of air (trust me on the math). The air in the tanks is around 1 gram per cubic centimeter, meaning I just lost 285 milliliters.
The three tanks combined had 3000 milliliters to start with. A lot of that was used to maintain pressure while the airlock was leaking. Also, my breathing turned some oxygen into carbon dioxide, which was captured by the suit’s CO2 filters.
Checking the readouts, I see that I have 410 milliliters of oxygen, 738 milliliters of nitrogen. Together, they make almost 1150 milliliters to work with. That, divided by 285 milliliters lost per minute…
Once I’m out of the airlock, this EVA suit will only last four minutes.
Fuck.
Okay, I’ve been thinking some more.
What good is going to the rover? I’d just be trapped there instead. The extra room would be nice, but I’d still die eventually. No water reclaimer, no oxygenator, no food. Take your pick; all of those problems are fatal.
I need to fix the Hab. I know what to do; we practiced it in training. But it’ll take a long time. I’ll have to scrounge around in the now-collapsed canvas to get the spare material for patching. Then I have to find the breach and seal-strip a patch in place.
But it’ll take hours to repair, and my EVA suit is useless.
I’ll need another suit. Martinez’s used to be in the rover. I hauled it all the way to the Pathfinder site and back, just in case I needed a spare. But when I returned, I put it back in the Hab.
Damn it!
All right, so I’ll need to get another suit before going to the rover. Which one? Johanssen’s is too small for me (tiny little gal, our Johanssen). Lewis’s is full of water. Actually, by now it’s full of slowly sublimating ice. The mangled, glued-together suit I have with me is my original one. That leaves just Martinez, Vogel, and Beck’s.
I left Martinez’s near my bunk, in case I needed a suit in a hurry. Of course, after that sudden decompression, it could be anywhere. Still, it’s a place to start.
Next problem: I’m like 50 meters from the Hab. Running in 0.4 g while wearing a bulky EVA suit isn’t easy. At best, I can trundle 2 meters per second. That’s a precious 25 seconds; almost an eighth of my four minutes. I’ve got to bring that down.
But how?
I’ll roll the damn airlock.
It’s basically a phone booth on its side. I did some experiments.
I figured if I want it to roll, I’ll need to hit the wall as hard as possible. And I have to be in the air at the time. I can’t press against some other part of the airlock. The forces would cancel each other out and it wouldn’t move at all.
First I tried launching myself off one wall and slamming into the other. The airlock slid a little, but that’s it.
Next, I tried doing a super-push-up to get airborne (0.4 g yay!) then kicking the wall with both feet. Again, it just slid.
The third time, I got it right. The trick was to plant both my feet on the ground, near the wall, then launch myself to the top of the opposite wall and hit with my back. When I tried that just now, it gave me enough force and leverage to tip the airlock and roll it one face toward the Hab.
The airlock is a meter wide, so… sigh… I have to do it like fifty more times.
I’m gonna have a hell of a backache after this.
I have a hell of a backache.
The subtle and refined “hurl my body at the wall” technique had some flaws. It worked only one out of every ten tries, and it hurt a lot. I had to take breaks, stretch out, and generally convince myself to body-slam the wall again and again.
It took all damn night, but I made it.
I’m ten meters from the Hab now. I can’t get any closer, ’cause the debris from the decompression is all over the place. This isn’t an “all-terrain” airlock. I can’t roll over that shit.
It was morning when the Hab popped. Now it’s morning again. I’ve been in this damn box for an entire day. But I’m leaving soon.
I’m in the EVA suit now, and ready to roll.
All right… Okay… Once more through the plan: Use the manual valves to equalize the airlock. Get out and hurry to the Hab. Wander around under the collapsed canvas. Find Martinez’s suit (or Vogel’s if I run into it first). Get to the rover. Then I’m safe.