Perpetual Winter: The Deep Inn (17 page)

              Lucas began to read what he could about nutrition and anatomy, particularly muscular and skeletal anatomy, but then reading became an addiction. The ship was a modern digital library of Alexandria, with information about everything you could imagine. Words, however, surprised him even more than the information they contained. Besides of its very nature, reading protected him from interacting with the others, from whom he fled because they were so different. He had to prepare himself for a life in which technology was omnipresent and in which they were going to invent a society with rules never seen. Plus, Lucas had more free time than the others.

              He read voraciously, surprising his companions who thought of him as a simple security officer. He read for hours and, sometimes, noticed that the night brought with it bizarre behavior in two members of the team. Larissa always went to bed after the others and was the first to wake up. She kept watch and would go to sleep only after everyone else had. She must be afraid or something similar, but since she was always refreshed, and had no circles under her eyes, it wasn’t bad for her. He’d never actually seen her sleep, to be precise. Pierre seemed to be a somnambulist. He walked about the ship at night without turning any lights on. He was a sleepwalker who did not open his eyes. One night, Lucas stuck his leg out in front of Pierre. He stopped before touching it, cleared his throat a little and then went around it, without opening his eyes.

              On Ganymede, the true day was longer than on Earth, but they agreed to keep the number of hours the same and, from the first day, Lucas continued waking up at seven o’clock, just as on Earth. He always knew what time it was without looking at a clock.

              After twelve weeks, they had practically mastered the capsule, having realized that the spaceship was extremely sophisticated, decades ahead of anything they were aware of, but still better fitted for Mars than the deeply frozen Ganymede. They began yearning to meet the mission’s volunteers. They felt ready to help them activate the logistics ships as soon as it heated up a little, but, unfortunately, it was not heating up.

              That was when Andrew informed them there was a problem.

Chapter 15

Perpetual Winter, Insanity and Fall

It wasn’t food. It was energy.

              Ganymede’s polar winter was much harsher than Mars’s and the vessel had surely been designed to go to Mars. It would be two months before the external nuclear reactor made the temperature rise. The plan to conserve food was working and there would be enough if they were a little more careful. But there wasn’t going to be enough energy. The outside temperature had stayed very low, with almost no variation and energy consumption was even higher than anticipated. By Andrew’s calculations, they had enough energy for four weeks at the most. Heat would not come for at least eight weeks. They could not possibly withstand four weeks without energy; oxygen and water recycling, as well as maintaining the temperature, would fail.

              Steven, who was a pilot, agreed. They had no chance of surviving four weeks without energy.

              They needed hydrogen to feed the battery cells and there wasn’t enough. Restarting the ships engines or reactivating the mini-reactor that had fed the electric thrusters in order to use them to recharge the batteries was extremely dangerous as they were designed for liftoff the vessel. They had to look for hydrogen in the cargo ships and, if they didn’t find any, they would have to bring fully charged batteries from the logistical ship, unless the surviving volunteers could help them in some way. They tried unsuccessfully to contact them many times. How many had survived?

              Earth never responded to their messages, except for a laconic statement that said, “Ganymedian communications are only answered in emergency situations when life is at stake. Please consult the manuals available in the system.” They were entering solar alignment and, with the sun between them and Houston control center, there was no communication.

              Those at the equator also did not respond. Without satellites in Ganymede’s orbit, polar communications would have to be relayed via Earth, which would be the state of things until the dome heated up. That was when the first communications satellites from the United States and the European Space Agency would arrive.

              They would have to take the Rover out to test it in low temperatures. After hearing whoever wanted to speak, Vice President Andrew had decided that who carried out the first test would be chosen by a drawing. They held a computer drawing, and Caroline Furst was chosen. Lucas opposed that choice. Not enough muscle mass. She wasn’t in shape. During equipment tests, she had difficulty getting up off the floor with a suit on after putting oxygen tanks on it, despite the suit being very flexible. Caroline paid no heed to that argument, which was somewhat understandable since she wasn’t going to be using those tanks but would be connected to the supply on the Rover. Lucas insisted that it did not make sense. Was he going to train someone only to see someone else sent, when the moment of truth arrived?             

              “This isn’t a drill. It’s a test of the equipment,” Andrew explained.             

              Lucas insisted on a vote. The vice president said that he had not put anything up to a vote and that if there were objections, they should have been expressed before agreeing on the rules, not after the drawing. Lucas repeated that this was a special case. The loss of the Rover, for example, would be fatal. Andrew said the matter was closed. Lucas insisted and insisted again. The vice president got fed up and ordered the security officer, Lucas Zuriaga, to take measures to insure that the party responsible for the group’s physical training obeyed his presidential authority. The atmosphere was overcome by total silence: Andrew had ordered Lucas to use force to shut himself up. Fifteen seconds of interminable silence passed and the air quickly became unbreathable. The order had been risky, even exotic, but there was no way to back down. Lucas’ physical superiority at that point was so asymmetrical that things seemed unpredictable. Finally, Lucas answered in an unhesitant voice, “Order carried out, Mr. Vice President.” The tension abated.

              They descended to level one and prepared the Rover. Procedures were reviewed several times. Caroline would drive two hundred meters from the vessel and then follow a three hundred sixty-degree trajectory around it, after which she would approach to within fifty meters of the vessel and wait for two hours to reach thermal equilibrium with the exterior. She would repeat that distance in a new full circle, confirming that the soil had not been damaged by the landing.

              Caroline left. The Rover handled itself beautifully during the first circle and her seven companions rejoiced. She waited two hours, but after reaching thermal equilibrium, the Rover did not move. It was stuck to the ground, frozen; it would not budge. A review of the system showed the satellite navigation that did not exist had been activated and could not be turned off from a distance. It was decided that Caroline would exit the Rover and make the adjustment via hardware, following Andrew’s instructions. The task was not as easy as they had foreseen. Caroline was exhausted after nearly an hour of attempts because she had not taken extensions for the oxygen, which is why she was using a heavy tank. She was thirsty. Andrew ordered her to bring the jeep’s traction cable as far as she could and, when she got too tired, to drop it. The resource team, Lucas and Larissa, would retrieve the cable, anchoring it to the ship and pull the Rover in. Caroline was able to release the cable, but after five meters, she said she was dead tired and received instructions to return to the ship. She proceeded painfully but, at ten meters, she tripped on an irregular surface and slipped into a small ditch. She had fallen head down in a hole and could not get up. She asked to rest for two minutes before trying to get up again. Her voice was more monotone than normal. Caroline then said she was fed up with the oxygen tanks and took them off in order to stand up. She’d gone mad. Andrew shouted at her to stop immediately and ordered Larissa and Lucas to go out after her. But Caroline continued and, without the weight of the oxygen tanks, was able to stand up and move toward the space craft at a slow pace. Larissa suited up as quickly as possible. Andrew adjusted the software to better monitor the spacesuit at a distance. What they saw froze everyone: the suit’s internal temperature was ten degrees below zero and the oxygen had been used up over an hour ago.

              Lucas stayed in the air lock and Larissa had entered the depressurization chamber when Caroline arrived. She was shivering from the cold but her expression was one of happy relief because she was among comrades.

              Andrew called a meeting to review the accident within the hour. At the beginning of the meeting, Caroline Furst, now rejuvenated after a hot bath, was urged to report on what had happened.

              When she left the platform, the power supply cable that connected Caroline’s spacesuit to the Rover had become disconnected. She was preparing to turn off the satellite navigation when, still in the Rover, the liquid oxygen deposit had ruptured spontaneously and the tank’s valve had malfunctioned, which is why the gas disappeared, escaping from the tanks to the deposit and then into the atmosphere.  Because she had great tolerance of oxygen deprivation, she didn’t think much of the incident. She was standing up to pull the jeep’s traction cable to the ship when she saw the lack of energy alert. She decided to lower the spacesuit’s internal temperature to ten degrees but the suit gave out and it began to drop. With the cold, she had difficulty getting up out of the hole, but insisted on not appearing weak after Lucas’s comments and decided to remove the oxygen tanks to be lighter.

              The seven astronauts were stunned, looking at her without understanding what they had actually understood very well.

              “Would you mind repeating that part about having a high tolerance for oxygen deprivation?” Sofia Suren finally asked. “Don’t you have to breath?”

              “I have a higher concentration of oxygen storing proteins than other people. More myoglobin, more neuroglobin and more cytoglobin. I tolerate high levels of lactic acid better. Several things. If I do a good pre-oxygenation, not breathing for two hours is as easy as pie. Longer than that gets complicated,” she concluded.

              Caroline stored oxygen like a camel’s blood stores water.

              “You’re different,” Mariah commented.

              “And you’re not, Mariah? Aren’t we all?” Caroline asked.

              They were all speechless. “Not my hair,” the scientist from Columbia finally said, smiling, “I’m a true blonde, no oxygenated bleach for me.” The two laughed as only women do. The others did not. It was the first time they accepted in their hearts why they were there: they were all mutants.

              Andrew was furious, but he hid it. Badly, but he hid it.
His tone of voice has that quality of not transmitting the tension you could see in his face
, thought Pierre. There are people who maintain a serene posture but are betrayed by their voice. Others, like Andrew, are the opposite and that is an advantage since it is always more difficult to interpret the face than the voice. The face comes from the heart, which is changeable, but the voice comes from the soul, which is more enduring. In appearance, that is, since in truth neither one nor the other guarantees anything. The right pill, a beta blocker, an anxiolytic, a serotonin reuptake inhibitor and there go the majority of the clues those who interpret the exterior signs of character look for.
That’s why actions define people so much better than their posture, tone, their very words,
Pierre reflected .

              Andrew, turning to Caroline, said she had changed the temperature of her spacesuit to ten below zero and not ten degrees. Perhaps because of fatigue. The suit performed well and the internal temperature dropped perfectly. There had been several errors in the chain of events. The mistake of going out with light batteries with short life spans (due to Lucas’ initiative without the rest of the team knowing it). Caroline’s mistake of not detecting that the battery cable had been disconnected for three hours. The mistake of not monitoring the spacesuit’s internal conditions from a distance because they were all focused on the Rover. The mistake of not informing the command center that the battery was discharged. The mistake of deciding to approach the spaceship instead of reconnecting to the vehicle to reestablish the battery charge. The mistake of inputting ten below instead of ten degrees. The mistake of interpreting the spacesuit’s dropping temperature as equipment failure rather than a programming failure. The mistake of not communicating the cooling to the command post. Eight mistakes in a row, even considering her tolerance of oxygen deprivation.

              “Eight sequential mistakes,” the vice president repeated. “The two most serious were not monitoring from a distance as soon as she left the ship and Caroline’s ego in not wanting to ask for help. I thought you were free of that infantile attitude. My mistake. Meeting adjourned,” Andrew finalized.

              The meeting had ended but Andrew had ordered Steven to figure out another detail: the oxygen deposit rupture and the valve malfunction that had let the oxygen flow from the tanks to the Rover. Steven would conclude that it resulted from an intentional failure, preprogrammed from the Earth. A conspiracy to keep them from leaving the spacecraft. Andrew thought Boyd’s conversation was childishly persecutorial. It was illogical. He had been alerted to Boyd’s character. The last thing he needed was for someone to go crazy for real.

              Lucas was also angry, not with Caroline but with the American.
Too many rules and too little flexibility,
he thought to himself.
Rules are very good but reality’s infinite nuances can’t always be simplified. Caroline was the wrong person to go out alone.

              After supper, Lucas came across the four women speaking in hushed tones. He approached them and said, “You were courageous, Caroline, but next time, ask for help. That’s what we’re here for.” Mariah looked at him and told him she was very happy that Caroline had gotten back but that Andrew was right. There had been many mistakes in a row.

              “Lucas, if just one of those errors had not happened, that would have reduced the risk,” Sofia confirmed. “We have to learn from our mistakes and improve our procedures,” she confirmed.

              “You’re right, to an extent, Sofia,” Lucas responded. “See you later.”
Damned Americans, coming from everywhere but all preaching the same sermon. They change
d
the mold but not the recipe. Procedures. Sequential mistakes. Wouldn’t it be better if they opened their eyes, looked at the people and chose the right ones? Even if they’d sent Sofia, if they had to send a woman. Now the fragile blonde. For the disaster to have been complete, they only needed to have sent Mariah.
Lucas felt alone and nearing burnout. The other astronauts were somehow more alike, with the possible exception of Steven Boyd and, to a lesser extent, Pierre Tollmache. He’d been eating that food for the last dozen weeks. The food, like the clothes, the silverware, everything, fell more slowly than on Earth. Although people adapted to that lightness in other things, it always left an impression in our food because the lack of weight in our mouths accentuated its spongy character. Lisbon for him was now Clams in White Wine or Portuguese Pork with Clams, followed by Sericaia and hand dripped coffee. He’d never see them again. On the ship, the menu was little more than gasified pap to eat with plastic spoons. At least for him. The Australian was like the Americans and the Frenchman still had his way with some flavors hidden in the pantry.
He and I
, Lucas thought, at least we can still eat French food. But, for Portuguese flavors, they’d sent dehydrated bread from Mafra and canned sardines without the can and they had been stored for New Year’s Eve, he imagined. The list of foods in the storeroom didn’t bode well, but that was the idea they had of Portuguese cuisine.
They have the technology to send a person to another galaxy and, when he gets there, canned sardines,
Lucas thought.