The constellations themselves were unchanged from the familiar patterns of her childhood. It was a sobering reminder of what a short distance they’d come: the stars were so remote that they reduced this immense interplanetary journey — achieved at the very limit of human technology, far enough to turn Earth itself into a starlike point — to a child’s first step.
The MEM had already been on the surface for three days. The crew had had to spend that precious chunk of its stay time adapting from zero G.
As she’d been warned, York had found herself a few inches taller and about fifteen pounds lighter than when she’d left Earth. At first, she’d had trouble walking around the MEM’s tight compartments; she’d kept walking into walls and forgetting which way was down. And she had the scrawniest pair of “chicken legs.” Rapid aging, huh, Adam, she thought. You were right. We’re three old people, stuck here on the surface of Mars. But anyhow, chicken legs were all she needed in Mars’s one-third gravity.
But after three days on the Martian surface, she still felt disoriented, as if the Jupiter-lit landscape beyond the window was just another plaster-of-paris sim mock-up.
When she walked out there, though, it would become real.
Stone joined her at the port. Stone, like York, was wearing thermal underwear, with his Cooling and Ventilation Garment over the top. The cooling garment was a corrugated layering of water coolant pipes. York had her catheter fitted, and Stone wore his own urine collection device, a huge, unlikely condom. The two of them looked bizarre, sexless, faintly ridiculous.
“Pretty view, huh,” Stone murmured. “You know, Ralph claims he can see the Moon with his naked eye.”
“Maybe he can. It’s possible.” The Moon ought to look like a faint silver-gray star, circling close to its master.
Stone had brought over York’s Lower Torso Assembly; this was the bottom half of her EVA suit, trousers with boots built on. “Come on, York; enough rubbernecking.”
She stared at the suit with a feeling of unreality. “That time already, huh.”
“That time already.”
She hooked the sleeves of the cooling garment over her thumbs; the hook would stop the sleeves from riding up later. She looked at her hands, her own familiar flesh, with the plastic webbing over the balls of her thumbs; it was the first step in the elaborate ceremonial of donning the suit, and the simple act had made her heart pump.
She stepped into the Lower Torso Assembly. The unit was heavy, the layered material awkward and stiff, and it seemed to wriggle away from her legs as Stone tried to pull it up for her. She found she was tiring rapidly, already.
Next she fitted a tube over her catheter attachment. It would connect with a bag large enough to store a couple of pints of urine. There was nothing to collect shit, though; she was wearing a kind of diaper — an absorbent undergarment — that would soak up “any bowel movement that cannot be deferred during EVA,” in the language of the training manuals.
York planned to defer.
Then it was time for the Hard Upper Torso. Her HUT was suspended from the wall of the airlock, like the top half of a suit of armor, with a built-in life support backpack.
She crouched down underneath the HUT and lifted her arms. She wriggled upward, squirming into the HUT. In the darkness of the shell there was a smell of plastic and metal and lint, of newness.
She got her arms into the sleeves and pushed her hands through; the cooling garment’s loops tugged at the soft flesh around her thumbs. Her shoulders bent backwards, painfully. Nothing about this process was easy. Still, these suits were a hell of a lot simpler than the old Moon suits; the Apollo crew members had had to assemble their suits on the lunar surface, connecting up the tubes which would carry water and oxygen from their backpacks.
Her head emerged through the helmet ring. Stone was grinning at her. “Welcome back.” He pulled her HUT down, jamming it so that it rubbed against her shoulders, and guided the metal waist rings of the two halves of the suit to mate and click together.
Then she helped Stone don his suit.
York and Stone had already been inside the cramped airlock for two hours. Challenger’s atmosphere was pressurized to 70 percent of Earth’s sea level, with a mix of nitrogen and oxygen, but to stay flexible their suits would contain oxygen only, at just a quarter of sea-level pressure. So York and Stone had had to prebreathe pure oxygen to purge the nitrogen from their blood.
It was a tedious ritual. And EVAs on Mars could last only three or four hours, at most. Apollo backpacks had been capable of supporting seven hours of surface working. But Mars’s gravity was twice as strong as the Moon’s, and Mars suits had to be proportionately lighter, and could therefore only sustain much briefer EVAs. There would also have to be a long tidy-up period after each EVA: the suits would have to be vacuumed clean of Mars dust, which was highly oxidizing and would play hell with their lungs if they let it into Challenger.
The brief EVAs, with the surrounding preparation and cleanups and anticontamination swabbing, were going to occupy most of each exhausting, frustrating day on Mars.
York fixed on her Snoopy flight helmet, and over the top of that Stone lifted her hard helmet, with its visor, and twisted it into place against the seal at her neck.
The last pieces were her gloves; these were close-fitting and snapped onto rings at her wrists.
Stone flicked a switch on her chest panel, and she heard the soft, familiar hum of pumps and fans in the backpack, the whoosh of oxygen across her face. He rapped sharply on the top of the helmet and held up a gloved thumb before her clear faceplate. She nodded out at him and smiled.
She held up her arm; there was a reflector plate stitched into her cuff, allowing her to see the panel on the front of her chest which gave her a readout of oxygen, carbon dioxide and pressure levels, and various malfunction warnings. She could see her oxygen pressure level stabilizing.
Stone tested out the radio link. “Hi, Natalie. Able Baker Charlie…” His voice sounded soft and tinny, echoed by muffled sound carried through the thick glass of her faceplate.
She checked the small plastic tubes protruding from her helmet’s inner surface; she sipped out little slugs of water and orange juice. The OJ was okay, but the water was too warm. It didn’t matter. She pushed her suit’s internal pressure up to maximum, briefly, to test for leaks. She fixed her little spiral-bound EVA checklist to her cuff.
When they were through with the suit checkout they studied each other. Stone’s suit was gleaming white, with bright blue Mars overboots, and the Stars and Stripes proudly emblazoned on his sleeves.
Stone asked: “Are we done?”
She was sealed off from Challenger: locked inside her own, self-contained, miniature spacecraft. She took a deep breath of cool, blue oxygen. “Yes. Let’s get on with it.”
“Roger.” He looked away from her to talk to Gershon, who was up in the ascent stage. “Ralph, we’re waiting for a Go for depress on time.”
“Rager, Phil; you have a go for depress.” Gershon would monitor this first EVA from the ascent-stage cabin.
Stone closed a switch on the wall; York heard sound leak out of the air, and the internal noise of her own breathing seemed to grow louder, more ragged, to compensate.
“Roger,” Stone said. “Everything is go here. We’re just waiting for the cabin to bleed enough pressure to open the hatch.”
The gauge, York saw, showed the pressure already down to two-tenths of a pound.
Gershon said, “I’m reading a real low static pressure on your lock. Do you think you can open the hatch yet?”
Stone said, “I’ll try.”
The exit from the airlock was a small hatch, close to the floor. The handle was a simple lever. Stone bent down, twisted the handle, tugged. York could see the thin metal of the hatch bow inward. The hatch stayed shut.