Distant Atmospheres Daily 1000

Dorothy Felt the Door Slam through the Walls of... (1077#)

Dorothy felt the door slam through the walls of the ship’s pressurized living chamber. Her jaw tightened, but she waited for Roger to get through the inner door before she started complaining—the airlock didn’t have any air in it, so there’s be no point of screaming just yet. As he heard the cycle complete, she inhaled, and just as the inner door opened, she opened her mouth. “Roger! How many times have I told you, don’t slam that door!”

“I didn’t slam the door,” Roger said through the speaker mounted in the front of his suit. He dropped the two bags he was carrying, which fell with a thud on the steel deck.

“And don’t drop stuff on the damn floor!”

Roger was unfastening the seals on his helmet and in another moment, he had it off. He dropped it too, and it loudly bounced on the deck a couple of times. “Why is it so cold in here?” he said.

“Okay, now, when you go outside next time and your pressure starts falling because your helmet is leaking, don’t complain to me.”

He stepped past her, past the small table where they ate, past the small galley, past the food storage lockers, past the downladder that led to the unpressurized parts of the ship and arrived at the environmental control panels. “This thing’s set to 20 degrees,” he said. One hand pulled the glove off of the other, and then he brought the ungloved hand up to the controls. He turned a knob. “Twenty-four is as cold as the worms can stand.”

“They can stand a lot colder than 24,” Dorothy replied.

“Yeah, yeah, I know. But they don’t make as much oxygen when they’re cold.” He turned away from the panel and pulled his other glove off. “Leave this at 24.”

Dorothy rolled her eyes. “Aye-aye, Captain Bligh,” she said sarcastically.

Roger ignored her comment and moved back to the table, where he sat down. He started unfastening the seals on his boots. “I took a look behind that boulder to the east. There’s a dry riverbed down there, I followed it for about three clicks. It’s a dry as a bone as far as I can see.”

“What did the radar show?”

Roger had his boots off. He stood up and started working on the seals on his suitpants. “Nothing.”
“Nothing?” Dorothy repeated. “You had the range turned all the way up?”

“Yeah. No water as far as the radar could see.” He had the seals open and he lifted first one leg and then the other out of the suitpants. “How much do we have in the tanks?”

“About 400 liters.”

“Hmm.” Roger wriggled out of the top and placed it on the deck next to the other parts of his suit. “When were the worms last watered?”

Dorothy spun the captain’s chair around and stood up. “I watered this this morning, so they won’t need it again for a couple of days.”

Roger stepped over to the captain’s chair and sat down. He activated screens down on the panel and studied them for a moment. “Okay, so we can stay here for a couple of days and let the worms build our O2 up, then we probably should launch and just orbit here for a while, don’t you think?”

Dorothy shrugged. “We could charge up the batteries first.”

Roger continued to work the panel. “Yeah, let’s do that first. That’ll take about three days. Then we can start cracking the atmosphere and get our water tanks filled up, that’s another two days.” He turned off the panel, stood up, and moved to retrieve his helmet and the bags that were still lying on the floor where he had dropped them. “I found something odd out there, some sort of material,” he said. “I got a sample to take a look.”

“What kind of material?” Dorothy asked.

“I don’t know what it is,” Roger said. “It’s some sort of greenish material.”

“It’s probably alien poop,” Dorothy said. “And you brought it into the ship.”

“There’s no life on this ridiculous little moon,” Roger said, stepping past her again. He carried the helmet in one hand and one of the bags in the other, and again, he stepped past the table, past the galley, past the lockers, past the downladder, but this time he continued past the environmental panel to the small countertop that served as the ship’s science station. There was a microscope, a spectrometer, weight scales and measures, and a variety of laboratory equipment and chemicals for analyzing materials. Most critically, there was an isolation box capable of holding a sample and permitting work to be done on it without exposing it to the environment of the interior of the ship. The box had clear panels on the top and on the sides, and there were holes with protective gloves installed so that materials inside the box could be manipulated without exposing the crew to whatever chemical or organic hazards might be present. Roger opened the isolation box, placed the entire bag inside, and closed it. Then he stuck his hands through the gloves and through them, started opening the bag. Inside was a plastic container with some sort of greenish material inside, just as Roger had reported. He moved the bag to the side and placed the plastic container front and center. Then he opened the top of the container and peered at the contents.
Dorothy had moved into a position alongside him and she peered too; as a professional xenobiologist, she was familiar with most known alien life forms and the various sorts of metabolic products—poop—they might leave behind. “Look familiar?” Roger asked.

“Nope,” Dorothy responded. As she moved away, she said “See if it reacts to potassium permanganate. That’ll tell you if there’s any carbon in there.”

“Who’s the chemist here, you or me?” Roger asked dryly.

“Yeah, yeah,” Dorothy responded. She heard him open the storage cabinets above the counter and then she heard the sound of bottles being placed on it. “Do a Wineberg stain, but don’t do it until I can come and take a look.”

Roger grunted distractedly. And then: “Hmm. That’s strange….” His voice trailed off, and then it returned. “Oh, wow,” he said. Dorothy noticed something in his tone and was already rising from the small table and moving back toward him. “Oh, wow. Come take a look at—"