Then, laboriously, the solar generators were spread out, and the subsurface rock-bound water was boiled out. As the first tiny plume of steam appeared at the lip of the pipe, they cheered. It would have been easy to miss it. The utterly dry Martian air snatched every molecule up almost as soon as it left the pipe. But by leaning close to the valve at the end one could see a faint, irregular misting that distorted shapes beyond it. It was water vapor, all right.
The next step was to spread out three great stretches of monomolecular film, the smallest first and the largest on top, and seal the topmost to the ground all around its periphery. Then they carried the pumps out on the basket-wheeled vehicle and started them going. The Martian atmosphere was extremely thin, but it was there; the pumps would ultimately fill the domes, partly with the compressed carbon dioxide and nitrogen from the atmosphere, partly with the water vapor they were boiling out of the rock. There was, to be sure, no oxygen to speak of in any of that, but they didn’t have to find oxygen; they would make it, in exactly the same way Earth made its oxygen: through the intercession of photosynthetic plants.
It would take four or five days for the outer dome to fill to its planned quarter kilogram of pressure. Then they would start filling the second one, up to almost a kilogram (which would increase the pressure in the diminishing space of the outer shell to about a half kilo). Then, finally, they would fill the inner dome to two kilograms, and so they would have an environment in which people could live without pressure suits, and even breathe as soon as the crops gave them breathing material.
Of course, Roger didn’t need any of that. He didn’t need the oxygen; he didn’t even need the plants for food, or not much and not for a long time. He could stay perhaps forever living off the unfailing light of the sun for most of his energy, plus what would be microwaved down from the MHD generator once it was in place. What was needed for the minuscule remaining part of him which was raw animal could easily be supplied by the concentrated foods from the ship for a long time; and only then, after perhaps a couple of Martian years, would he have to begin to depend on what came out of the hydroponics tanks and the seeds they were already sprouting in sealed cold-frames under the canopies.
It all took several days, since Kayman wasn’t a great deal of help. Getting in and out of a pressure suit was agony for him, so they left him in the lander most of the time. When it came time to lug the tanks of carefully hoarded sludge from their toilet facilities over to the dome, Kayman lent a hand. “Exactly one hand,” he said, trying to handle the magnesium-shafted rake by wrapping his good arm around it.
“You’re doing fine,” Brad encouraged. There was enough pressure in the innermost dome now to lift it above their heads, but not quite enough to let them take off their pressure suits. Which was just as well, Brad realized; this way they couldn’t smell what they were raking into the sterile soil.
By the time the dome was fully extended the pressure was up to a hundred millibars. This is the pressure of Earth’s atmosphere at some ten miles above sea level. It is not an environment in which naked man can survive and work for very long, but it is an environment in which he will only die if something kills him. Half that pressure would be lethal instantly; his body temperature would boil his fluids away.
But when the internal pressure hit the 100-millibar level all three of them crowded through the three successive airlocks and Brad and Don Kayman ceremoniously took off their pressure suits. Brad and Don fitted nosepieces, something like that of an aqualung, in place for breathing; there was still no oxygen to speak of inside the dome. But they got pure oxygen from the tanks on their backs, and with that they were, for the first time, almost as free as Roger, inside a transplanted bit of Earth that was a hundred meters across and as tall as a ten-story building.
And inside it, in orderly rows, the seeds they had transplanted were already beginning to sprout and grow.
Meanwhile—
The vehicle with the magnetohydrodynamic generator attained Mars orbit, and with General Hesburgh helping, matched orbit with Deimos and nestled into the crater. It was a perfect coupling. The vehicle swung out its struts to touch the rock of the moon, augered them in, and locked. A brief jet from the maneuvering system tested its stability: it was now a part of Deimos. The power system began to sequence toward full operational mode. A fusion flame woke the plasma fires. Radar reached out to find the target on the lander, then locked on to the dome. Power began to flow. The energy density of the field was low enough for Brad and Kayman to walk around in it unaware, and to Roger it was like the basking warmth of sunlight; but the foil strips in the outer dome gathered the microwave energy and channeled it to the pumps, the batteries.
The fusion fuel had a life of fifty years. For that long at least there would be energy for Roger and his backpack computer on Mars, whatever happened on Earth.
And meanwhile—
There were other couplings.
In the long spiral up from Earth, Sulie Carpenter and her pilot, Dinty Meighan, had had time heavy on their hands and had found a way to use it.
The act of copulation in free fall presents certain problems. First Sulie had to buckle one strand of webbing around her waist, then Dinty embraced her with his arms, and she him with her legs. Their motions were underwater slow. It took Sulie a long, gentle, dreamy time to come to orgasm, and Dinty was even slower. When they were finished they were hardly even breathing hard. Sulie stretched and yawned, arching her belly against the retaining strap. “Nice,” she said drowsily. “I’ll remember that.”
“We both will, honey,” he said, misunderstanding her. “I think that’s the best way we screw. Next time—”
She shook her head to interrupt him. “No next time, Dinty dear. That was it.”
He pulled his head back to look at her. “What?”
She smiled. Her right eye was still only centimeters from his left, and their view of each other curiously foreshortened. She craned forward and rubbed her cheek gently against his bristly one.
He scowled and detached himself, suddenly feeling naked where before he had been only bare. He pulled his shorts out from behind the handhold where he had cached them and slid into them.
“Sulie, what’s the matter?”
“Nothing’s the matter. We’re almost ready for orbit, that’s all.”
He pushed himself backward across the cramped compartment to get a better look at her. She was worth looking at. Her hair had gone back to muddy blond and her eyes were brown without the contact lenses; and even after almost two hundred days of never being more than ten meters from him, she still looked good to Dinty Meighan. “I didn’t think you had any surprises left,” he marveled.
“You never can tell about a woman.”
“Come on, Sulie! What’s this all about? You sound as though you’ve been planning — Hey!” A thought struck him. “You volunteered for this mission — not to go to Mars, but to go to some guy! Right? One of the guys ahead of us?”
“You’re very quick, Dinty. Not,” she said fondly, “where I don’t want you to be, though.”
“Who is it, Brad? Hesburgh? Not the priest? — oh, wait a minute!” He nodded. “Sure! The one you were mixed up with back on Earth. The cyborg!”
“Colonel Roger Torraway, the human being,” she corrected. “As human as you are, except for some improvements.”
He laughed, more resentment than humor. “A lot of improvements, and no balls at all.”
Sulie unstrapped herself. “Dinty,” she said sweetly, “I’ve enjoyed sex with you, and I respect you, and you’ve been about as comfortable to be with as any human being possibly could be on this Goddamned eternity trip. But there are some things I don’t want you to say. You’re right. Roger doesn’t happen to have any testicles, right at this exact moment. But he’s a human being I can respect and love, and he’s the only one like that I’ve found lately. Believe me, I’ve looked.”