Voyage. Stephen Baxter
light, and a little comms station, and a fan. There were little drawers for personal things, like underwear; when she opened them the drawers had blue plastic nets stretched over them, to stop everything from floating away.
A lot of light and noise leaked around the foldaround screen. She could hear the hum and whir of the Mission Module’s equipment, and the occasional automatic burn of the attitude clusters as they kept Ares pointing sunwards. With the bright, antiseptic light of the wardroom beyond her screen, and the new smell of metal and plastic, it was like trying to sleep inside an immense refrigerator.
Apparently there had been plans to provide solid doors on the sleep lockers. She even remembered seeing a memo which talked about the need to provide privacy for astronauts ‘significantly relating,’ in the typically obscure, euphemistic doubletalk NASA employed when talking about the functions of the warm bodies they were shipping into space at such expense. But the doors had been skipped, for reasons of saving weight. So much for significantly relating.
And now – on top of everything else – she needed a pee.
She tried to ignore it, but the pressure on her bladder built up steadily. Christ. Well, it was her own fault; the relief tube – the Mission Module’s toilet, the Waste Management Station – was so uncomfortable she’d put off using it. Besides, she seemed to be peeing more than usual, since coming up into microgravity.
She succumbed to the inevitable. She squirmed her way out of the bag, turned on her overhead light, and folded back the screen. When she moved, her back hurt like hell.
After the TOI burn, the Ares modules had undergone the first of the cumbersome waltzes the crew would have to endure before the mission was done. Under the command of Stone, Apollo, containing the crew, had separated from the nose of the stack, turned around and docked nose-to-nose with the Mission Module.
When she’d first been talked through the mission profile, waiting until after the TOI burn to do this separation and docking had seemed bizarre to York. Why wait until you were already on your way to Mars to cut loose of your main ship? But it made a kind of sense, in the convoluted, abort-options-conscious way the mission planners figured these things. If the MS-II had blown up during the TOI burn, the crew, in Apollo, could have got out and done an abort burn to get home. And if the injection burn was successful but the docking hadn’t been, the crew could use the Service Module’s big engine to blast back toward Earth.
Anyway, after the successful docking, the crew had been able to crawl through a docking tunnel and started moving into the Mission Module, their interplanetary home-from-home.
As long as she didn’t think about the wisdom of taking apart the spacecraft in deep interplanetary space, it didn’t trouble York.
York let herself drift across the wardroom. She was light as a feather, and invulnerable; it was like moving through a dream. The Mission Module was a lot roomier than the Apollo Command Module had been, of course. But she was learning to move around, to operate in this environment. She’d found she couldn’t move too quickly. If she did she’d collide with the equipment, dislodging switches and maybe damaging gear. It just wasn’t a professional way to behave. She was learning to move slowly, with a kind of underwater grace.
It wasn’t a big deal. Microgravity was just a different environment; she’d learn to work within its constraints.
The wardroom, with its little plastic table and three belted chairs, was clean and empty, bright in the light of strip floods. The walls and floors weren’t solid; they were a gray mosaic of labeled storage drawers and feet restraints – loops of blue plastic – and there were handy little blue rectangles of Velcro everywhere. There were up-down visual cues, signs and lighting and color codes. Everything was obviously designed for zero G.
The whole thing had the feel of an airliner’s crew station, she thought; it was all kind of pleasing, compact, well-designed, everything tucked away. Like a mobile home in space. Of course right now everything was still bright and new, every surface unmarked; it would be different after a few months’ occupancy. Much of the Mission Module’s equipment was still in stowage; the crew would spend the next few days hauling ass around the Module, configuring it for its long flight.
The Waste Management Station was a little cubicle containing a commode, a military thing of steel and bolts and terse metal labels. She pulled across the screen, swiveled in the air, dropped her shorts and pants, and pulled herself down. Thigh bars, cushioned and heavy, swung across her legs to clamp her ass to the seat.
She pulled a hose out of the front of the commode; the hose would take her pee to a tank, for dumping in space later. The hose justified the Apollo-era nickname, ‘relief tube,’ that the crews still used for the waste station. In a cupboard beside her there was a set of funnels, all color-coded to ensure they weren’t mixed up by the crew; hers, anyway, were of the distinctive female variety. The cupboard was already starting to stink a little, and the clear plastic of the funnels was turning yellow. Eighteen months of this.
She fitted the funnel to the hose, clamped it over her private parts, and opened the valve to the urine store.
There was a certain strategy to this, which involved aiming for the minimum of pain when using the device. If she opened the valve too soon, the suction would grab at her. And when it resealed itself it was liable to trap a little piece of her inside it. The way round that was to start pissing a split-second before opening the valve. But there was a danger that the funnel would just slip off, and off would float her piss in little golden globules.
It took her a few seconds to be able to let go.
Now she’d got set up here, she considered whether to try taking a dump. That was actually easier, mechanically, than peeing. She’d have to start up the slinger, a spinning drum under the commode. The shit would stick to the walls of the drum, and later she would turn a switch to expose the drum to vacuum, and the shit would be frozen and dried out.
But, though she felt a pressure in her lower gut, there was nothing doing for now; she suspected it was going to take her a few days to relax enough to unclench. And besides, there was no gravity here to help her, as the guys had informed her with glee; she wasn’t looking forward to the experience.
She took a couple of wet wipes and cleaned out the inside of the funnel. The wipes might have come out of any drug store back home, except for the strong stink of disinfectant about them.
She unlocked herself from the john seat. She pushed her hands into the wash-basin, a plastic globe which sprayed water across her skin and out into a waste tank. One or two droplets escaped the basin and went oscillating around the john, but she swatted them out of the air easily. There was a row of towel holders on the wall, little color-coded rubber diaphragms: towels, their corners shoved into the holders, hung out in the air like flags. She dried her hands.
She heard a noise; she turned.
Ralph Gershon was in the wardroom, wearing a T-shirt and shorts. He was just floating, with a plastic can of Coke in one hand and a silver-gray lithium hydroxide canister in the other. The lith canisters were used to scrub carbon dioxide out of the recycled air, and they had to be checked and changed regularly. The familiar red and white Coke can was pretty much the normal size and shape, expect for a baby-style microgravity dispenser at the top.
Gershon held a finger up to his lips – evidently Stone was still asleep – and he held the can out toward her.
She shook her head. ‘Too gassy.’
‘Yeah,’ he whispered back. ‘Coke paid a million bucks to get these cans on the Mission Module, but they just can’t get the damn mix right.’ He started to juggle with the lith and Coke cans, sending them spinning and oscillating from hand to hand. York had already observed that microgravity was like a three-dimensional playground for the guys; as soon as they’d got into the Mission Module’s big workshop area Stone and Gershon had started doing cartwheels and loops and spins, throwing bits of gear to each other like frisbees.
Gershon’s eyes kept straying to her chest.
She