The life-support equipment. Pumps that sucked in the dry cold air of Mars. Separators that culled the scanty nitrogen and even scantier oxygen out of the native atmosphere. More pumps to make the nitrogen/oxygen mix thick enough for humans to breathe. Cylinders of spare oxygen, in case of emergency.
He had to reach the oxygen. Vosnesensky went down the row of green, man-tall oxygen tanks, twisting their valves to the full open position, overpressurizing the dome as quickly as he could with pure oxygen. Force oxygen into the dome; replace the air being lost. It was a race, and he had no intention of losing. Higher pressure might even push the repair seals firmly against the hole. At the very least it would buy them a few more minutes.
Yet even over the hissing rush of the escaping oxygen he could hear pock, pock.
He clawed his way back toward the tear in the wall in a blizzard of papers swirling through the dome. By the time he got back to the place where the meteoroid had broken through, Abell was there in his white hard suit, spraying epoxy over the repair patches as calmly as a painter doing a living-room wall.
“I have turned on the emergency oxygen,” Vosnesensky said, almost breathless, his chest aflame.
“Right,” said Abell. It was standard emergency procedure.
The wind had died down. The shriek of escaping air had quieted. Vosnesensky was panting, but from fear and exertion, not lack of oxygen.
“Are the others in their suits?”
Abell turned toward him, a faceless robot in rust-stained white. “Uh-huh. You should be too, Mike.”
“Yes, yes.” Vosnesensky saw that the patches were no longer fluttering. They were glued flat to the curving wall. “What about the people outside?”
“They’re coming through the airlock. Nobody’s been hurt, far as I know.”
“Good. Now, if we are not struck again…”
“You should get into your suit,” Abell reminded him.
“Yes. Of course.”
By the time Vosnesensky was fully suited up, though, he heard no more sounds of meteoroids striking the dome. He clumped awkwardly to the communications console and saw on the screen that Tolbukhin was still on duty up in orbit, and still in his coveralls. His armpits were dark with sweat.
Dr. Li stretched his long legs as far as he could, considering the pain, and wriggled his bare toes until the cramp in his left calf began to subside. Two hours in a space suit that had never fit his lanky frame properly was more than his body could endure.
He sighed as he tried to relax in the reclining chair. He sipped tea from the one delicate porcelain cup he had brought with him and gazed at the silk paintings on the walls of his quarters, waiting for them to work their calming magic.
No one was hurt, he repeated to himself for the hundredth time. All the emergency procedures had worked just as they were designed to; all the emergency equipment had functioned properly. We survived the meteor shower without even any damage to our equipment, except for one minor puncture in the dome that was quickly sealed and one strike on the Mars 1 ship’s main communications antenna, which the astronauts will go EVA to repair.
The odds against meteoroid danger had been carefully calculated on Earth; they were something on the order of a trillion to one. And this particular meteor shower had been a renegade, unknown and uncharted until it suddenly struck at them. At least we should not be bothered again for another hundred million years or so, Li told himself.
He almost smiled, realizing that he could claim discovery of a new meteor swarm, so small and insignificant that it had never even been noticed on Earth. But not so small and insignificant here. No, not at all. We are very vulnerable here, Dr. Li realized. Extremely vulnerable.
He had ordered that regular radar sweeps be made as they orbited around Mars. We cannot avoid meteors, but we may be able to give ourselves some warning time if another shower develops. And we can produce data on the density of meteoroids in the vicinity of Mars; that should please the astronomers back home.