Mark waited in airlock one as it slowly depressurized to 0.006 atmospheres. He'd done this literally hundreds of times by now in each of the three airlocks. Any apprehension he may have had on Sol 1 had gone away somewhere in the first hundred sols. Ever since, it had just been a boring chore before exiting to the surface. Occasionally, he wondered if he was going to have problems just opening a door and stepping outside when he got back to Earth. Would the habit be so ingrained that he would feel it necessary? Would he find himself stuck standing inside the door, waiting for a signal that it was safe to open? Would he just stand there waiting for the right amount of time to pass? Would it become like some obsessive compulsion? Shields would have something for him to do to work through it if she was concerned. Maybe he should mention it to her just in case, though.
As he was thinking this again for the dozenth time at least, the Hab breached. It started as only a one-millimeter tear on the Hab side, but as the entire atmosphere of the Hab rushed through the tear, it went from a millimeter to a meter in a tenth of a second. The tear kept going all the way around the airlock until it reached the starting point, completely separating the airlock from the Hab.
With nothing left to keep it in place, the remaining rushing air-launched the airlock like a cannonball, leaving the Hab with a gaping hole. Mark, with no time to react, found himself slammed against the airlock's back door with the force of the expulsion.
The airlock flew forty meters before hitting the ground. Watney, barely recovered from the earlier shock, now endured another as he hit the front door, face-first.
His faceplate took the brunt of the blow, the safety glass shattering into hundreds of little cubes, held in place only by the lamination on either side. His head slammed against the inside of the helmet, knocking him senseless.
The airlock tumbled across the surface for another fifteen meters. The heavy padding of Watney's suit saved him from multiple broken bones. He tried to make sense of the situation, but he was barely conscious.
Finally done tumbling, the airlock came to a rest on its side amid a cloud of dust. The airlocks, like the Hab, were domes. The floor was flat, but the sides and top formed an arch.
Watney, on his back, stared blankly upward through the hole in his shattered faceplate. A gash on his forehead trickled blood down his face.
Regaining some of his wits, he got his bearings. Turning his head to the side, he looked through the back door's window. The collapsed Hab rippled in the distance, a junkyard of debris strewn across the landscape in front of it. Pathfinder appeared to be okay, but it was hard to tell from this distance.
Then a hissing sound reached his ears. Listening carefully, he realized it was not coming from his suit. Somewhere in the airlock, a minor breach was letting air escape.
He listened intently to the hiss, then he touched his broken faceplate. Then he looked out the window again.
"You've got to be kidding me!"
"What am I seeing here?" Melody Astor asked, looking at the photographs in her hand.
"It appears that airlock one has detached from the Hab," Mindy answered. She had been on duty when the images came in. After viewing them, she'd immediately emailed copies to the pertinent personnel. Then printed copies and rushed to the director's office. Fortunately, the woman was in Houston and not DC. Like her predecessor, Melody had dispatched the assistant director to the capital and spent most of her own time on the Johnson Space Center campus, though she did still take occasional trips to update the president or his advisors herself. It meant that she was around more often when situations occurred that she needed to be notified of as soon as possible.
Melody huffed out a laugh with a raised eyebrow. "Detached, huh? You've been spending too much time talking to Annie. You're picking up the diplomatic public relations speech. It looks like it took off like a shot."
"Yeah, pretty much."
"Where is Mark?"
Mindy bit her lip. "I'm pretty sure he's inside the airlock, I mean. He hadn't been outside before this happened. The satellite imaging window is such that unless he was out for just a few minutes, we'd have caught him. The solar farm is still dusty, so he hasn't cleaned it yet. All of those signs point to him moving from the Hab outside, meaning he was in the airlock when it blew across the compound."
"All right, then we need to find out if there's any way to determine if he's alive."
"The satellites continue to take images. I'll go back down there and keep you apprised," Mindy replied, just as Melody's phone rang.
The director picked it up. "Venkat, hello. Yes, I know. Mindy is standing in my office. I can call the Watneys as soon as we hang up."
She listened for a moment and gestured for Mindy to go ahead and return to SatCon.
"Yes, Annie will be my next call. Venkat, aren't you here in Houston?"
The door to her office opened.
"Yeah, I'm here," the man said as he stepped into the office.
Both people closed out the call and put their phones away.
"You couldn't wait until you got to my office to talk to me?" Melody asked.
He shrugged. "I thought it would be better to be sure you knew."
"Dr. Kapoor, I am not Teddy Sanders, first of all."
"I wasn't assuming anything like that. I just thought this was the kind of thing we all needed to know and begin to handle as soon as possible."
"I don't think there's anything we can handle. It's up to Mark. Mindy is going to keep up with the images as they come in and keep us updated."
He nodded. "Then I think I'll go down to SatCon for a bit."
"Stop by the Mark office first, please," she requested. "I'll call the Watneys as I said, then get Annie in here, though we'll hold off on announcing until we know more. Hopefully, we'll know enough that we don't have to put it off for the whole twenty-four hours we're allowed."
"I'm going to call JPL and see if they can get any pictures with Pathfinder. I'm not sure how the power will work with the Hab deflated, but we can try."
"Do that right now, please. I'd like to know the answer to that."
Venkat nodded and took out his phone. After speaking with Bruce, he ended the call and said, "They won't know until they try, and it will be at least twenty minutes until we can tell. If they get images, he'll send them to both of us."
"Thank you."
After he had left the room, Melody took a deep breath and picked up her phone to make a call she didn't want to make, but also didn't want to wait to make.
"Mrs. Watney, Melody Astor."
Melissa Lewis was walking out of the office as Venkat reached the door.
"Melissa, could I talk to you for a second?" he asked.
"Sure, as long as you walk with me."
"Where are you headed?"
"SatCon."
"Ah, so Mindy emailed you, too. Then we can go together. I assume you've let the rest of your crew know."
"Yes, as well as Tod, Marty, and Alannah," she replied.
"Then everyone will know in the next ten minutes if they don't already."
"Yes."
It became clear just how many people had received the message when the pair reached SatCon and opened the door to find the small room seemingly packed wall-to-wall with astronauts and a very frustrated Mindy sitting at her computer with several astronauts looking over her shoulder.
Venkat went straight to her station. "How about you send any images you get to me and Lewis like you did this set and I'll see about getting this crowd back to the Mark office?"
"Please," she replied. "It's not that I don't understand, but I can't make images return any faster and I don't need a dozen people asking me when they're going to come in every other minute."
"Ok, I'll handle it," Venkat told her, then turned to the crowd. "If I could have your attention, please."
He waited until most of them were looking at him quietly.
"I know you all want to know what's happening with Mark. That's why I'm here as well, but this space isn't big enough for all of us and the staff here needs to be able to move freely. Let's all go to your office. Yes, I'm coming too. Mindy will let us know as soon as we know anything, just like she did when she received the image of the airlock and Hab."
His request was met with grumbling, but the men and women who'd come to find out what was going on began filtering out of the room.
"Thank you," Mindy said. "I don't know when I'll have any news, though. It could be in the next images or it could be hours from now."
"It all depends on how he is, I know. Just send them when you can, and maybe call every once in a while to let us know that you are getting images."
"Will do."
"I don't want the public to think we're hiding anything from them," the director said to Annie.
"Good plan, but we can wait a bit and see if there is a sign he's alive. We don't have to wait a full day. Keller said he thinks it's likely Mark survived?"
"He wasn't willing to give any odds, but he did say the suits are designed to help the astronauts survive an impact in case something goes wrong with the MDV on the descent, so long as it's not terminal velocity. Hopefully, Bruce or Mindy will have news for us soon."
Venkat felt his phone buzz and stepped into the hallway to answer it. The group of combined astronauts was just too loud for him to be able to hear and there were too many of them to try to get quiet without being sure he had something to tell them. It was better to just step away for a moment.
"Bruce, tell me you have good news," he said, turning back to the door and seeing Lewis standing there waiting. He held up a finger while he listened to the man on the other end.
"Thanks, Bruce."
"Well?" Melissa asked.
"Let's go in," he suggested.
"Everyone," she called after they had reentered the room. "Venkat has news from JPL."
"Bruce says Pathfinder is still responding, and they should have images soon. He's not sure how long the power will last, but they'll keep taking images until it runs out of stored power. They expect the first image in the next ten minutes."
"Mindy says the latest images show no change," Annie added as she stepped into the office. "She also said you'd all be here, so I thought I'd join you and we can get information at once."
"Sure," Tod said, "the more the merrier, or something like that."
"Then you don't mind if I join you as well?" Melody asked.
"No ma'am, come on in," Lewis insisted.
"Please," the director held up a hand, "not ma'am. Call me Melody. I couldn't just sit in my office any longer. I feel useless there right now. I needed to at least be with other people."
"Welcome to the club," Alannah responded. "I think we all feel that way right now."
"Does someone want to explain why there are boxer shorts on the walls?" Melody asked, biting back a smile.
"Oh well, um, it was this idea we had," Rick started.
"Martinez, don't," Beck cut him off. "You'll just end up eating your tongue when you say something you shouldn't, or Alex will have to bop you on the head again." He then explained the contest they had held amongst themselves.
"And we decided why not keep the others we'd bought, we can always send them later," Molly said.
"So naturally you stuck them to the wall," Annie groaned and shook her head. "I swear astronauts are just oversized pre-teens. It's like working in a middle school."
"Come on, Annie, you know you love this," Venkat teased her when he saw the grin she was holding back.
Annie, Venkat, and Melody jolted when each of their phones buzzed.
"Bruce is sending us images," Venkat informed the room. "He says they think they can see Mark in the window of the airlock door. He wants us to look at them."
"Use this computer," Lewis said, and slid it closer to him. "It's the one attached to the projector."
He did as she suggested, logging in and pulling up the pictures. "Here you go folks, this is the image from Pathfinder. Tell me what you see."
The group closed in closer to the screen and stood tilting their heads side to side, some squinting, others leaning in to get as close as they could.
"That's a helmet in the window. It has to be Mark," Melissa said finally.
"Well, yeah," Tod said, "but, and don't hurt me, anyone, it doesn't mean he's alive. It just proves he was in the airlock when it detached."
"Which we already knew," Beck commented. "He could have a concussion. While our helmets are cushioned, the forces he experienced from the detachment were probably really high. I don't even know how we go about calculating them. Do we have a sim that could do it?"
Venkat considered, "I'd imagine we do, but I'm not sure who has it or where. Then again, we never thought this could happen. Maybe someone in the flight surgeon's office has stats from testing on the helmets and the forces that can be sustained before major injury, but what might happen if an airlock detached? I don't know if anyone would."
"That's because we never expected any of the Habs to be running for this long," Melody said.
"True," Venkat acknowledged.
A ding rang out from the computer. "That's my email alert," Melissa told the group. "Hang on a second."
She turned off the projector, accessed her email, then turned the projector back on.
"From Mindy, she says it's good news."
"I'm not seeing it," Rick commented. "What am I missing?"
"It's moved," Venkat said with a relieved sigh. "The airlock was lying on the other side. It's rolled over, and it's closer to the Hab. Mark's alive!"
Cheers filled the room as Melody stepped out to make a second call to the Watneys, with Annie on her heels to brief the press.
"Can nothing go right for him up there?" Grace complained at dinner that evening.
Karen shook her head. "Space is deadly. I know you're scared, but we know he's alive from the pictures of the airlock moving back to the Hab. He'll contact us as soon as he can."
"I know, but I hate this. It's bad enough that we have to keep watching him suffer, and not be able to help in any way, but no one else can understand. No one else has been through anything like this. No one can truly feel what we're feeling."
"While that's true, if you would like, I believe at least two of Jim Lovell's children live here in Chicago now," Karen told the Watneys. "They might be willing to talk to you about their experience during Apollo 13. I know the two incidents don't compare-"
"But they did live through the one space crisis that comes closest to ours. They'd be the ones closest to understanding the feelings of uselessness and fear we have now," Tim finished. "We'll think about it. Thank you for the offer."
Audio Log entry Sol 458
NASA is probably in a massive panic, but they're going to have to wait for an update. After the damned airlock blew, I thought it was all over again. It's not because here I am, but it's also been nearly a whole sol since it blew. I knew that damned airlock was gonna kill me someday. Airlock one, that stupid thing. I should have never used it again! Yes, that's dumb but look where I am after going back to using it, and yeah it's been hundreds of sols since I started to use it again, but I knew that thing was bad luck. I knew it! The only good thing is I don't have to worry about using it anymore. I'd like to tear it apart bit by bit right now. I can probably find a use for the parts. Yeah, destruction is the key. Gotta break it down into tiny little pieces. Maybe bury it. Too bad I can't burn it. Have a giant bonfire. Damn lack of atmosphere and oxygen and flammable materials.
Ok, done with the temper tantrum. That would be two I've had since the damn thing blew me halfway across Mars. Yes, I'm being dramatic, but so would anyone in this situation, and I'd say I'm allowed a temper tantrum or twenty. I'm done now, well, for a while. I'm not promising I won't have more tantrums yet. I'm bound to have at least one more with this mess and who knows how many more while I'm still stuck here on this damn red hellhole of a planet.
Fortunately, I was able to find and seal the small hole in the airlock. It took a ridiculous amount of time and involved making a fire. Yes, more fire in space, and I used my arm hairs because it was the only thing I had easy access to that I could burn. I'm getting to be good at starting fires when I shouldn't be able to do it at all.
Then I used my patch kit to fix my suit and helmet. Yep, it was just that simple. Everyone who believes that stand on your head. Hell no, it wasn't easy. When the hell has anything on this damned planet ever been easy? I hate this place! I honestly was ready to just give up and let it win. I yelled and screamed and pounded my fists on the ground just like a toddler, yeah it was a pretty good tantrum, better than my little second one in this log entry, but I finally settled down and got to work. That doesn't mean I'm not still pissed, and I will be for a long time. I'm just so over all of this bullshit!
I'm also worried. I'm down to two airlocks if I can even get the Hab re-inflated. If I can't, I don't know what I'm going to do. I never did modify the other rover so it could hold enough life support to get me to another site. I don't know if I could make it to Ares I or II, and there's still no point in going to IV.
Stop gotta stop thinking about that. First things first, I need to get back into the Hab and find a complete suit. Oh, did I forget to mention that my suit has only one arm? No, the explosion didn't cause it, I did. I had to cut off an arm of my suit to cover my broken faceplate or I could never have left that damned airlock. I had to cover it with something that could hold the pressure of an atmosphere, and the only thing I could do was use the arm of my suit. So, yeah, no, I'm the one-armed man. No, it wasn't me; it was the one-armed man… Yeah; I know that was dumb, but right now I'll take any little joke I can get. It's fucking miserable trying to function with only one damn arm. Not to mention how tight the suit is with my other arm stuck down inside it next to my body. The suits are designed to fit us pretty well. I guess it's a good thing I've lost a little weight, or I'd never have been able to get my arm inside like that. Still, it fucking sucks.
I'm cussing a lot I know, but those nannies at NASA can whine about it later, and then they can shove it up their collective asses. Yeah, I said it and they can all bite me; they're not here dealing with this, I am. So, they can just take their damn pearl-clutching and shove it. What the hell do you expect when my back is screaming in pain from "rolling" the damn airlock halfway back across Mars to be able to get into my deflated tent to try to find anything useful? No meds, no tub, and no bed. I fucking hate my life right now.
Well, that makes three tantrums, if you can call that last bit a tantrum. Yes, rolling the airlock. That's about all I can call it. Launching myself from one side of the airlock to the other and making it roll as close to the Hab as I dared. It took hours and my back is never going to be the same again. As bad as it felt after the trip to retrieve Pathfinder, it's now at least ten times worse. I'm sure I've done permanent damage to it and no one can do anything to help me until and unless I can make it back to Earth. Add back surgery to my post-landing health lineup doc.
After I got done rolling the stupid airlock, I was exhausted, so I pretty much just collapsed and passed out. I'm not sure how long I slept, but when I woke up I managed to get into the Hab and grab Martinez's helmet, a new patch kit, and make a run for the rover. Now I need to sleep, then I can start tomorrow with a Morse code message to satisfy their morbid curiosity. Yeah, not fair to them. I know their curiosity isn't morbid. They're freaking out, though they should have enough pictures to know I'm alive even if they didn't get any of me outside. They'll be wondering about my exact condition, though, and that they'll still have to wait for. I'm not leaving a morse code message that long.
Log entry Sol 459
I got a good night's sleep last night, well good compared to sleeping on the wall of the airlock, that is. Yeah, that was a great night's (hours?) sleep. Good thing I did that after jumping against the wall over and over and over and over and over and… you get the point, to roll the stupid thing. If I'd tried it before, I might not have been able to jump like that. I've resealed the hole in my suit now to just get back into the Hab and see if I can get a fully functional suit. The advantage of grabbing Martinez's helmet wasn't just having a helmet that's not busted all to shit, but also having an additional patch kit.
Log entry Sol 459 (2)
I have Martinez's suit. I had to use a pole and use it as a lever to get a table off of the suit. I've dragged it back to the rover and done a diagnostic on it. Ran it twice, actually. The suit is ok so now I have a suit with two arms again. Time to change and venture back into the Hab, to see if I can get it standing again even without pressurizing it.
Log entry Sol 459 (3)
Well, that was interesting. It's bad enough having to lift up the canvas and crawl around underneath it with nothing but my helmet lights to see by, but then to try to get an idea of the condition of things is even tougher. The Hab didn't completely collapse. Tables and the toilet stalls were holding it up, but the flexible tent-like poles that normally hold it up are lying flat. I don't think any of them are broken, though I won't know for sure until I can get them together, which isn't a one-person job, so it's going to take a while. I got a few done, but the light was getting low outside, so I grabbed a few potatoes and came back to the rover. Tomorrow I'll finish the job.
I did leave a message for NASA. Someone there better be able to read Morse code or figure it out soon. Thank goodness I had the foresight to learn it. Still wish there was an easier way. I could go back to hexadecimal, but I don't know if they can read those from space. It would probably take just as many rocks to make those messages as it would Morse code. It doesn't matter anyway since I don't have that memorized and it's on Johanssen's computer in the Hab. SHIT! Will any of the computers work? Did liquid components in them boil off? Am I screwed for communication? I guess I can still connect the rover to Pathfinder, so not screwed, but damn it! No use stressing until I know for sure and I won't until tomorrow. Time to get some sleep though how well I'll be able to do that with my back screaming in pain I don't know. It was too hard to try and get to the painkillers when I was rummaging around the Hab. It'll wait until tomorrow.