In the hydroponic racks, plant stems protruded through little holes in plastic sheeting, straining up at the artificial lights. Water flowed through the solution and air bubbled up from below, while carbon dioxide was pumped in over the plants and oxygen sucked away by a miniature air conditioning system.
Libet’s main job today was to pull out the plastic irrigation nozzles from a couple of the racks, which had become clogged. She had to disassemble the base of the rack to get to the nozzles. She opened up her toolbag. Pliers, small hammers, screwdrivers and spanners came floating out at her face, chiming gently against each other. She retrieved the tools, picking out the screwdriver she wanted, and went to work on the rack. Soon she had a handful of screws, nuts, washers and other small parts from the rack. She put all this in a pocket, carefully buttoning it up. When she’d started to work in microgravity she had tried leaving such items suspended in mid-air. But that didn’t work in the farm; if you looked away for more than ten seconds or so your nut or washer would go sailing off in the powerful breezes in here.
Anyhow, she retrieved the nozzles; she wiped them out and replaced them. She made a mental note that in a couple of weeks, after the next wheat crop, she would have to clean out the culture media.
If only they were using soil, she mused, then she could take off her gloves and dig in with her fingers; she would need tiny spades and forks, not spanners and screwdrivers. But at least she got to handle the little plants, the green growing things. She breathed on them, enriching their atmosphere with her carbon dioxide.
It had taken a lot of care to select the plants. In typical NASA fashion, plants had been studied in a way traditional farmers would never have recognized, in terms of parameters like edible biomass produced per unit volume, growth period from planting to harvesting, and biologically recoverable calories.
So there was wheat and rice, for calories, starch and protein; white potatoes for carbohydrates, vitamin C and potassium; soybeans for protein and amino acids; peanuts for protein and oil — although the peanuts were difficult to grow and harvest — lettuce for vitamin A and vitamin C.
Wheat was the staple. They got a crop every sixty days. They even had ovens on board (fan-forced — no convection, without gravity) so they could make their own bread. And they were trying out an experimental dwarf spring wheat crop developed in Utah called Apogee, which gave a higher yield.
The warm scent of bread filling the hab module was one of the most pacifying elements of their whole environment.
She turned to her next chore.
Working in microgravity presented its own challenges, as usual. She had to get some kind of foothold, so she jammed her body into the space between the racks using her muscle tension and her legs to hold herself in place. She had a lot of reach — her work envelope, as the mission planners called it, was wider than on Earth, because she could just sway from side to side as she needed to, like seaweed in a current. But her legs, holding her in place, were in tension instead of compression, as they would be on Earth, and she had to take frequent rests to relieve her muscles.
She liked to shut out the noise of the pumps and fans of the nutrient systems and air blowers; she wore earplugs, like today, or sometimes the headset of a walkman. She found that in here she preferred thin, cold, almost abstract music: complex Bach fugues, perhaps, or late Beethoven string quartets. There was something about the voiceless, precise compositions which seemed to complement the lush warmth and visual brightness of the farm.
She was bending the rules by wearing the plugs, though. There was a danger she wouldn’t be able to hear the master alarm, if it sounded; there were visual alarms built in here — flashing red lights fixed to the walls — but, from amongst the racks, they were difficult to see.
But Libet figured the danger was minimal. The worst that could happen was probably a micrometeorite puncture — and then she would feel any loss of pressure as rapidly as it happened — or a radiation pulse, a solar particle event. But even so she was safe; the farm was just about as heavily shielded from radiation as the hab module. Plants had higher radiation dose limits than humans, but exceeding the limits would have just as lethal effects. She would just have to wait out a storm in here, for as long as it took.
As she worked, she thought a lot about Nicola.
Niki’s depression seemed to be deepening. She went through the work assigned her with no enthusiasm, and not much concentration. And she was having trouble sleeping at night, and was reluctant to wake in the morning. She seemed to have no appetite — hell, none of them did — but she was a lot less determined about keeping up her diet and her fluid intake than the rest.
Libet thought she understood. The isolation, the cramped quarters, the growing unreliability and shoddiness of their equipment — and the utter, utter impossibility of being able to get away from the others — all of that was working on them all in some way, and, it seemed to Libet, they were all changing, adapting to the situation.
Bill Angel, for instance, seemed to be shedding a lot of the bluff humor that Libet had recognized in him on Earth. He had grown an undisciplined black beard — he didn’t even look like himself any more — and he spent a lot of time bawling out the mission planners and controllers who, he said, were grinding them all flat with their instructions and demands and routines — or Paula Benacerraf over some chore he’d been assigned that he wasn’t happy with, like the work on the balky SCWO waste-reduction reactor which still wasn’t functioning as it should…
All this bull just washed over Libet. Angel was a pilot with nothing to do, just spinning his wheels. He was just finding ways to cope with his situation. Likewise Rosenberg, with his endless, obscure chains of experiments. Ways to cope.
But with Nicola it was different. Nicola didn’t seem to be finding the inner resources to handle this. She didn’t find anything a comfort any more: the work they did, the entertainment materials they’d brought along.
But at least they had each other.
It had taken the two of them a month to work up the courage — and to get over their space adaptation syndrome — but now Libet and Mott were regularly spending their sleep times in each other’s quarters.
It was a small ship, and the rest weren’t stupid. She’d intercepted one or two quizzical smiles from Benacerraf, exasperated glares from Bill Angel. Only Rosenberg seemed too sunk in his own world to figure it out.
Sharing quarters designed for one person was pretty cramped, but that was okay for Libet; she seemed to find the closeness of another human body — the warm smoothness of Niki’s skin against hers — a great comfort.
Like the farm, maybe: elemental human contact, as a barrier against the huge searing dark outside.
A farm this size needed around sixteen hours work a day: planting, harvesting, wheat grinding, preventative maintenance, adjusting the nutrient solution. So that was work for two people, every day.
Libet did more than her fair share. But then, this was her favorite place in the spacecraft cluster.
She hadn’t expected to react like this, to hanker after growing things. She was a city girl. And after all she’d spent months in low Earth orbit, on Station.
But there, right outside every window of Station, had been Earth itself. Here on Discovery, between planets, Earth had been taken away. The only object that showed as more than a point of light — anywhere in three-dimensional space all around the orbiter — was the sun, huge and bright.
Oh, Venus was approaching; in a month or so they would make their first pass past the planet, for the first of the two fuel-saving gravity assists. It would be spectacular. But Venus was just a big white featureless billiard ball, hot and hostile and hidden. Venus didn’t count.