Red Mars. Kim Stanley Robinson
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day.
Then the materials scientists needed help getting their factories operational, and the crew assembling the nuclear reactor wanted her supervision for every breath that they took: they were petrified with fright that they would do something wrong, and were not reassured by Arkady sending radio messages down from Phobos insisting they did not need such a dangerous technology, that they could get all the power they needed from wind generation: he and Phyllis had bitter arguments about this. It was Hiroko who cut Arkady off, with what she said was a Japanese commonplace: “Shikata ga nai,” meaning there is no other choice. Windmills might have generated enough power, as Arkady contended, but they didn’t have windmills, while they had been supplied with a Rickover nuclear reactor, built by the US Navy and a beautiful piece of work; and no one wanted to try bootstrapping themselves into a wind-powered system: they were in too much of a hurry. Shikata ga nai. This too became one of their oft-repeated phrases.
And so every morning the construction crew for Chernobyl (Arkady’s name, of course) begged Nadia to come out with them and supervise. They had been exiled far to the east of the settlement, so that it made sense to go out for a full day with them. But then the medical team wanted her help building a clinic and some labs inside, from some discarded freight crates that they were converting into shelters. So instead of staying out at Chernobyl she would go back midday to eat and then help the med team. Every night she passed out exhausted.
Some evenings before she did, she had long talks with Arkady, up on Phobos. His crew was having trouble with the moon’s micro-gravity, and he wanted her advice as well. “If only we could get into some g just to live, to sleep!” Arkady said.
“Build train tracks in a ring around the surface,” Nadia suggested out of a doze. “Make one of the tanks from the Ares into a train, and run it around the track. Get on board and run the train around fast enough to give you some g against the ceiling of the train.”
Static, then Arkady’s wild cackle. “Nadezhda Francine, I love you, I love you!”
“You love gravity.”
With all this advisory work, the construction of their permanent habitat went slowly indeed. It was only once a week or so that Nadia could climb into the open cab of a Mercedes and rumble over the torn ground to the end of the trench she had started. At this point it was ten meters wide, fifty long, and four deep, which was as deep as she wanted to go. The bottom of the trench was the same as the surface: clay, fines, rocks of all size. Regolith. While she worked with the bulldozer the geologists hopped in and out of the hole, taking samples and looking around, even Ann who did not like the way they were ripping up the area; but no geologist ever born could keep away from a land cut. Nadia listened to their conversation band as she worked. They figured the regolith was probably much the same all the way down to bedrock, which was too bad; regolith was not Nadia’s idea of good ground. At least its water content was low, less than a tenth of a percent, which meant they wouldn’t get much slumping under a foundation, one of the constant nightmares of Siberian construction.
When she got the regolith cut right, she was going to lay a foundation of Portland cement, the best concrete they could make with the materials at hand. It would crack unless they poured it two meters thick, but shikata ga nai; and the thickness would provide some insulation. But she would have to box the mud and heat it to get it to cure; it wouldn’t below 13° Centigrade, so that meant heating elements … Slow, slow, everything was slow.
She drove the dozer forward to lengthen the trench, and it bit the ground and bucked. Then the weight of the thing told, and the scoop cut through the regolith and plowed forward. “What a pig,” Nadia said to the vehicle fondly.
“Nadia’s in love with a bulldozer,” Maya said over their band.
At least I know who I’m in love with, Nadia mouthed. She had spent too many of the evenings of the last week out in the tool shed with Maya, listening to her rattle away about her problems with John, about how she really got along in most ways better with Frank, about how she couldn’t decide what she felt, and was sure Frank hated her now, etc. etc. etc. Cleaning tools Nadia had said Da, da, da, trying to hide her lack of interest. The truth was she was tired of Maya’s problems and would rather have discussed building materials, or almost anything else.
A call from the Chernobyl crew interrupted her bulldozing. “Nadia, how can we get cement this thick to set in the cold?”
“Heat it.”
“We are!”
“Heat it more.”
“Oh!” They were almost done out there, Nadia judged: the Rickover had been mostly preassembled, it was a matter of putting the forms together, fitting in the steel containment tank, filling the pipes with water (which dropped their supply to nearly nothing), wiring it all up, piling sandbags around it all, and pulling the control rods. After that they would have three hundred kilowatts on hand, which would put an end to the nightly argument over who got the lion’s share of generator power the next day.
There was a call from Sax: one of the Sabatier processors had clogged, and they couldn’t get the housing off it. So Nadia left the bulldozing to John and Maya, and took a rover to the factory complex to have a look. “I’m off to see the alchemists,” she said.
“Have you ever noticed how much the machinery here reflects the character of the industry that built it?” Sax remarked to Nadia as she arrived and went to work on the Sabatier. “If it’s built by car companies, it’s low-powered but reliable. If it’s built by the aerospace industry, it’s outrageously high-powered but breaks down twice a day.”
“And partnership products are horribly designed,” Nadia said.
“Right.”
“And chemical equipment is finicky,” Spencer Jackson added.
“I’ll say. Especially in this dust.”
The Boeing air miners had been only the start of the factory complex; their gases were fed into big boxy trailers to be compressed and expanded and rendered and recombined using chemical engineering operations such as dehumidification, liquefaction, fractional distillation, electrolysis, electro-synthesis, the Sabatier process, the Raschig process, the Oswald process … Slowly they worked up more and more complex chemicals, which flowed from one factory to the next, through a warren of structures that looked like mobile homes caught in a web of color-coded tanks and pipes and tubes and cables.
Spencer’s current favorite product was magnesium, which was plentiful; they were getting twenty-five kilos of it from every cubic meter of regolith, he said, and it was so light in Martian g that a big bar of it felt like a piece of plastic. “It’s too brittle when pure,” Spencer said, “but if we alloy it just a bit we’ll have an extremely light and strong metal.”
“Martian steel,” Nadia said.
“Better than that.”
So, alchemy; but with finicky machines. Nadia found the Sabatier’s problem and went to work fixing a broken vacuum pump. It was amazing how much of the factory complex came down to pumps, sometimes it seemed nothing but a mad assemblage of them; and by their nature they kept clogging with fines and breaking down.
Two hours later the Sabatier was fixed. On the way back to the trailer park, Nadia glanced into the first greenhouse. Plants were already blooming, the new crops breaking out of their beds of new black soil. Green glowed intensely in the reds of this world, it was a pleasure to see it. The bamboo was growing several centimeters a day, she had been told, and the crop was already nearly five meters tall. It was easy to see they were going to need more soil. Back at the alchemists’ they were using nitrogen from the Boeings to synthesize ammonia fertilizers: Hiroko craved these because the regolith was an agricultural nightmare, intensely salty, explosive with peroxides, extremely arid, and completely without biomass. They were going to have to construct soil just like they had the magnesium bars.
Nadia went into her habitat in the trailer park for a standing lunch. Then she was out again, to the site of the permanent habitat. The floor of the trench had been