Red Mars(22)

An emergency message from Houston confirmed him. He could have faked those as well, but he was headed for the nearest spoke, and there was nothing they could do; fake or not, they had to follow.

In fact, a big solar flare was an event they had simulated many times before. Everyone had tasks to perform, quite a few of them in a very short time, so they ran around the toruses, cursing their luck and trying not to get in each other’s way. There was a lot to do, as battening down was complicated, and not very automated. In the midst of dragging plant trays into the plant shelter Janet yelled, “Is this one of Arkady’s tests?”

“He says not!”

“Shit.”

They had left Earth during the low point in the eleven-year sunspot cycle, specifically to reduce the chance of a flare like this occurring. And here it was anyway. They had about half an hour before the first radiation arrived, and no more than an hour after that the really hard stuff would follow.

Emergencies in space can be as obvious as an explosion or as intangible as an equation, but their obviousness has nothing to do with how dangerous they are. The crew’s senses would never perceive the subatomic wind approaching them, and yet it was one of the worst things that could have happened. And everyone knew it. They ran through the toruses to get their bit of battening done— plants had to be covered or moved to protected areas, the chickens and pigs and pygmy cows and the rest of the animals and birds had to be herded into their own little shelters, seeds and frozen embryos had to be collected and carried along, sensitive electrical components had to be boxed or likewise carried along. When they were done with these high-speed tasks they yanked themselves up the spokes to the central shaft as fast as they could, and then flew down the central shaft tube to the storm shelter, which was directly behind the tube’s aft end.

Hiroko and her biosphere team were the last ones in, banging through the hatch a full twenty-seven minutes after the initial alarm. They hurtled into the weightless space flushed and out of breath. “Has it started yet?”

“Not yet.”

They plucked personal dosimeters from a velcro rack of them, and pinned them to their clothing. The rest of the crew already floated in the semicylindrical chamber, breathing hard and nursing bruises and a few sprains. Maya ordered them to count off, and was relieved to hear the whole hundred run through without gaps.

The room seemed very crowded. They hadn’t gathered the whole hundred in one spot for many weeks, and even a max room didn’t seem large enough. This one occupied a tank in the middle strand of the hub shaft. The four tanks surrounding theirs were filled with water, and their tank was divided lengthwise between their room and another semicylinder that had been filled with heavy metals. This semicylinder’s flat side was their “floor,” and it was fitted inside the tank on circular tracks, and rotated to counteract the spin of the ship, keeping the tub between the crew and the sun.

So they floated in a nonrotating space, while the curved roof of the tank rotated over them at its usual four rpm. It was a peculiar sight, which along with the weightlessness made some people begin to look thoughtful in a preseasick kind of way. These unfortunates congregated down at the end of the shelter where the lavatories were located, and to help them out visually, everyone else oriented themselves to the floor. The radiation was therefore coming up through their feet, mostly gamma rays scattering out of the heavy metals. Maya felt an impulse to keep her knees together. People floated in place, or put on velcro slippers to walk over the floor. They talked in low voices, instinctively finding their next-door neighbors, their working partners, their friends. Conversations were subdued, as if a cocktail party had been told that the hors d’oeuvres had been tainted.

John Boone rip-ripped his way to the computer terminals at the fore end of the room, where Arkady and Alex were monitoring the ship. He punched in a command, and the exterior radiation data were suddenly displayed on the room’s biggest screen. “Let’s see how much is hitting the ship,” he said brightly.

Groans. “Must we?” exclaimed Ursula.

“We might as well know,” John said. “And I want to see how well this shelter works. The one on the Rust Eagle was about as strong as the bib you wear at the dentist’s.”

Maya smiled. It was a reminder, rare from John, that he had been exposed to much more radiation than any of the rest of them— about 160 rem over the course of his life, as he explained now in response to someone’s question. On Earth one caught a fifth of a roentgen equivalent man per year, and orbiting Earth, still inside the protection of the Earth’s magnetosphere, one took around thirty-five per year. So John had taken a lot of heat, and somehow that gave him the right, now, to screen the exterior data if he wanted to.