Chapter 2 –

SNAFU

Porter didn’t think crying awoke him. He was dimly aware of wailing in the background as he slowly regained consciousness, but he was sure he could have slept through it for a few hours more. She must have touched him or made noise, but he didn’t remember it. When he opened his eyes, a pudgy toddler of about two with a tangle of golden hair crouched before him, staring at him intently with blue eyes. She wore a dirty blue gingham dress with tiny bare feet peeking from below it. Her face was dusted with dirt and soot. Clean tracks marked the recent passage of tears on her rosy cheeks. She seemed pleased that he was awake.

“Hi there,” Porter croaked gently.

The girl smiled in surprise at his animation, standing erect and taking cautious steps backward.

“Who are you?” Porter asked.

She said nothing but watched him closely while keeping her distance.

The small sun was high in the sky, providing a white-reddish light through the dusty greenhouse panels. As Porter sat up, he became more aware of the din of crying children. Looking around, he saw over a dozen children scattered about the reception area. Some played in the dirt. Some wandered among the planting tables and equipment. Others were sitting or lying down and crying. Some appeared to be sleeping. Porter pushed away memories of last night—he feared some of the motionless were not sleeping.

The golden-haired girl continued watching him.

“I’m thirsty,” Porter said. “Would you like some water?”

“Wa-duh,” repeated the girl shyly.

“What is your name?” Porter asked, thinking he might now have a partner for the conversation, but the girl was otherwise silent.

“Well, let’s go find some water and then maybe you can tell me.”

Pulling himself up with the air lock door, Porter struggled to his feet. He wished he had kept the crutches. Looking around, he saw a shop broom leaning against the wall. He carefully hopped on his good leg to the broom, tucked the broom head under his arm, and used it as an improvised crutch. The little girl followed a few steps behind, watching him carefully.

Porter took his coffee cup from the workbench and moved to the sink. He rinsed the cup and filled it. He drank half in a quick gulp, and then offered the cup to his new little friend.

The girl backed away uncertainly.

Supporting his weight with one hand on the sink, he bent down and put the cup on the ground. He smiled at the girl and said, “You can have some water when you are ready.”

He hopped a step away from the cup and busied himself rinsing and filling a watering can in the deep industrial sink. From the corner of his eye, he saw the girl tentatively approach the cup, then pick it up and drink.

“Where is everyone?” Porter said aloud. “I would imagine they would have gotten to us by now.” He looked toward the air lock. The glass of the air lock doors acted like a poor-quality mirror when the sun was this bright in the greenhouse, reflecting back images of the transparent greenhouse walls behind him and the view of the barren Martian landscape beyond.

Inside the air lock, beyond the partial mirror effect of the glass, he could dimly see the fire alarm strobe still blinking silently.

Then he noticed the red-light warning that the air lock was depressurized.

This meant that there had been a failure in the pressure vessel of the main station. The airtight doors should have slowed that kind of failure to give people a chance to respond, but it was a big deal, nonetheless. On the other side of the greenhouse wall, Martian air pressure was less than 1/100th of Earth pressure at sea level. Human life expectancy at that pressure was about one minute, with a merciful loss of consciousness after twenty to thirty seconds before the worst of the symptoms took over. The colony had never had a serious loss of pressure in a thousand days on Mars—a few drills and some dry run tests, but never a real loss of pressure. He told himself that the crew was probably working the problem. He realized that no one might know he brought the children here. The greenhouse would be the last place anyone would look. The children’s parents would be frantic!

He reached for the comm band missing from his wrist, cursed, then touched the panel on the wall above the sink. “This is Porter in greenhouse Charlie. I have children from the daycare here with me. What is the status?”

Silence.

A sliver of panic pricked his brain, but he chose to ignore it for now. Comm must be down. He noticed the crying again. He turned and looked at the children around him, then proclaimed to no one in particular, “I’ll bet you are all thirsty.” He put the strap of the filled watering can over his head and shoulder, leaving it dangling in front of him.

He looked at the golden-haired girl watching him, the now-empty cup dangling from one small hand. “Will you be my helper?” he asked. She didn’t reply but paused and then took his hand when he offered it. Together, they moved slowly toward the other children, the girl carrying the cup, and Porter holding her hand with one hand and his broom-crutch in the other.

The next hour was chaotic but productive. The surviving children had been quite thirsty, all thirteen of them. The toddlers managed to drink from the cup, although several were apparently new to the concept and choked and sputtered their first sips. The babies were more challenging. At first, Porter dipped his pinkie in the water and let the young ones suck the water as it ran down his finger, but this was time consuming and didn’t go fast enough to satisfy either party. Eventually, Porter realized that a bit of blanket soaked in water was a better delivery system, and he tore strips from one of the blankets to support the four youngest.

Some of the toddlers might have been potty trained before the accident, but the trauma of the fire, the long stretch of unsupervised time while Porter had slept, and the lack of anything resembling a toilet meant that all of the children had soiled themselves. Porter removed the children’s diapers and other clothes. He used some of the remaining blanket fragments to give all the children quick sponge baths, trying to soothe the diaper rash that seemed universal after what must have been eighteen hours in soiled underclothes.

He improvised a meal from a half dozen brownies Julia had made a few days ago to tide him over when he worked through lunch. Thinking of Julia and her brownies made him smile—then nudged the sliver of doubt deeper. He told himself that Julia had to be okay. It was just a matter of time. He chose not to contemplate the magnitude of a disaster that would result in silence continuing sixteen hours after the event.

He had no trouble getting the toddlers to eat bits of the brownies, but he quickly learned to provide them in small pieces and soak them in water for the “molar-challenged.”

The babies were fussy. Porter was sure they were hungry too. He chewed bits of the brownie and brushed the resulting sludge onto the lips and roof of the mouth of the babes that he suspected had no experience with solid food. They spit out most of what he tried to put in, but they were hungry and motivated, and Porter was patient. Although repeated application probably didn’t result in the equivalent of a full meal, most did ingest some calories and more water. He was pleased to see his golden-haired helper mimicking his actions by reinserting some of the rejected food to the babies, and he praised her for assisting him. None of the other children seemed to take much interest in helping.

Once the children were fed, Porter paused to consider his situation, something he had gladly avoided while preoccupied with more pressing childcare needs. He knew that every passing hour without contact from other survivors on the station was ominous. He found it hard to imagine that everyone had—he pictured his wife Julia and almost didn’t allow himself to complete the thought—died. Standard fire response protocols would have put many in exo-suits, so even if the decompression was massive and sudden, there should have been survivors. He was disgusted with himself that he had forgotten his wrist com, which would have been an alternative to the hard-wired intercom system and furthermore would have tracked his whereabouts on the station’s computer.

He knew the accident was severe. He had seen over a dozen dead in his brief stint in sick bay. The reactor was northwest of the cafeteria. He had run into smoke billowing south from the east corridor near the daycare, suggesting the fire was in the northeast quadrant of the station.

If there were other survivors—he preferred that assumption to alternatives—where would they be? Why would they be so slow restoring pressure to the station? Perhaps they had established a contained area? Maybe they evacuated to hunker down in the hulk of the original Numa, the ship that brought them to Mars?

Spaceship Numa was the size of a large jet liner and had been constructed in Earth orbit to carry the hundred plus colonists on a one-way trip to Mars. It had been designed to deliver...