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By Root 2007 0

In the whole afternoon they only managed to haul it a hundred meters, and they had to use the bulldozer attachment to scrape a rough road for it all the way. Just before sunset they returned through the lock into the habitat, their hands cold and aching with fatigue. They stripped down to their dust-caked underwear and went straight to the kitchen, ravenous once more; Vlad estimated they were each burning about 6,000 calories a day. They cooked and gulped down rehydrated pasta, nearly scalding their partially thawed fingers on their trays. Only when they had finished eating did they go to the women’s changing room and start trying to clean themselves up, sponging down with hot water, changing into clean jumpers. “It’s going to be hard to keep our clothes clean, that dust even gets through the wrist locks, and the waist zippers are like open holes.” “Well yeah, those fines are micron-sized! We’re going to have worse trouble from it than dirty clothes, I can tell you that. It’s going to be getting into everything, our lungs, our blood, our brains….”

“That’s life on Mars.” This was already a popular refrain, used whenever they encountered a problem, especially an intractable one.

On some days after dinner there were a couple hours of sunlight left, and Nadia, restless, would sometimes go back outside. Often she spent the time wandering around the crates that had been hauled to base that day, and over time she assembled a personal tool kit, feeling like a kid in a candy store. Years in the Siberian power industry had given her a reverence for good tools, she had suffered brutally from the lack of them. Everything in north Yakut had been built on permafrost, and the platforms sank unevenly in the summer, and were buried in ice in the winter, and parts for construction had come from all over the world, heavy machinery from Switzerland and Sweden, drills from America, reactors from the Ukraine, plus a lot of old scavenged Soviet stuff, some of it good, some indescribably shoddy, but all of it unmatched— some of it even built in inches— so that they had had to improvise constantly, building oil wells out of ice and string, knocking together nuclear reactors that made Chernobyl look like a Swiss watch. And every desperate day’s work accomplished with a collection of tools that would have made a tinker weep.

Now she could wander in the dim ruby light of sunset, her old jazz collection piped from the habitat stereo into her helmet headphones, as she rooted in supply boxes and picked out any tool she wanted. She would carry them back to a small room she had commandeered in one of the storage warehouses, whistling along with King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, adding to a collection that included, among other items, an Allen wrench set, some pliers, a power drill, several clamps, some hacksaws, an impact-wrench set, a brace of cold-tolerant bungie cords, assorted files and rasps and planes, a crescent-wrench set, a crimper, five hammers, some hemostats, three hydraulic jacks, a bellows, several sets of screwdrivers, drills and bits, a portable compressed gas cylinder, a box of plastic explosives and shape charges, a tape measure, a giant Swiss Army knife, tin snips, tongs, tweezers, three vises, a wire stripper, X-acto knives, a pick, a bunch of mallets, a nut driver set, hose clamps, a set of end mills, a set of jeweler’s screwdrivers, a magnifying glass, all kinds of tape, a plumber’s bob and ream, a sewing kit, scissors, sieves, a lathe, levels of all sizes, long-nosed pliers, vise-grip pliers, a tap-and-die set, three shovels, a compressor, a generator, a welding-and-cutting set, a wheelbarrow—

and so on. And this was just the mechanical equipment, her carpenter’s tools. In other parts of the warehouse they were stockpiling research and lab equipment, geological tools, and any number of computers and radios and telescopes and videocameras; and the biosphere team had warehouses of equipment to set up the farm, the waste recyclers, the gas-exchange mechanism, in essence their whole infrastructure; and the medical team had more warehouses