The Delicate Crunch of Marshmallows

Reaching up to climb another deck, Erica caught a whiff of something, glanced around to see if anyone was looking, and checked her underarms.

“Nope, it’s not me.”

She sniffed the air around her.

“Geez, this place smells like a damned locker room!”

She climbed through the hatch to the next deck and spotted a technologist.

“Hey, how come it smells so bad in here?”

“Oh, hi Dr. Thompson,” the fellow replied, a little startled. “Uh, sorry, but the reprocessor in this spoke is busted.”

“Well, I hope they fix it soon. This is terrible.”

The man shrugged. “We’ve kind of gotten used to it. I guess it does smell a little worse than the rest of the station, but frankly, the whole place is a little ripe.”

Erica grimaced. “Gotten used to it? How long has it been down?”

“A couple of months, I guess. It still makes good air, you understand. Just doesn’t get rid of the odor of dirty laundry and good, honest sweat.”

“It may be honest, but it stinks.”

The fellow gave Erica a long, tired look. “I’ll drop what I’m doing and see if I can fix it if you want,” he offered.

Erica glanced back at his lab. “What are you working on?” she asked.

“Nothing but the flow regulators for the main engines. Before that it was the APUs for the personnel decks. I dropped work on a new fastener fabricator so I could do that. Doesn’t matter to me, though. I’ll work on whatever you say.”

Erica shook her head. “Stick with what you’re doing. I’ll see if I can find somebody else.”

The fellow maintained the same tired stare for a few seconds. “Sure,” he said, as if he were not, and went on his way.

Erica climbed through the remaining decks, feeling the centrifugal artificial gravity gradually decrease. It felt great, and she could hardly wait for the weightlessness of the hangar deck. The thought of almost effortless flight energized her, and the weight of her administrative duties seemed to disappear with the gravity.

Not everyone around her seemed to feel the same, though. Most of the techs labored in stony silence, broken only by an occasional outburst of profanity. Erica thought she understood how they felt, but would have swapped her duties for fighting with a stubborn bolt in the blink of an eye, if she could.

She reached the spoke airlock and labored through the two hatches to the hub. The hub was a large cylindrical compartment with one wall which appeared to turn, although, in fact, that wall was stationary while the spokes turned around it. She was about to close the second spoke airlock hatch when she rubbed against a black, gummy mass on the wall, staining a cuff of her jumpsuit. Erica clambered back through the airlock to the shop below, hung by one arm from the top rung of the ladder, and looked around until she spotted a familiar face.

“Kara, could you come over here for a minute?”

“Sure, Dr. Thompson,” the woman answered. She bounded across the deck with two graceful leaps. “What’s the problem?”

“What’s this black crud all over the inside of the hub?”

“Oh, be careful!” Kara answered. “The only way that stuff comes out is with scissors.”

Erica glared at the stain. “Now you tell me. So what is it? Two-day-old coffee?”

“Comet grease. The rotating seals were starting to break down, and we didn’t have time to replace them. We couldn’t spare the synthesizer capacity to make extra silicone grease to seal them with, so we distilled that stuff from comet tar. Plenty of it available from that little comet we snagged a couple of years ago. Seems to be working, so far.”

Kara handed Erica a shop rag. “Here, this won’t get it out, but at least it will get enough off that you don’t leave little tar puppies all over the station.”

Erica pulled herself up through the hatch, then sat on the lip while she dabbed at the gunk on her sleeve. “Oh, well, at least it looks like I work for a living.”

Erica tossed the rag back to Kara, then made her way back through the airlock to the hub. She glanced at the gummy mess on the slowly rotating seal. It was an innovative enough field expedient, she supposed, but it surely wasn’t a satisfying long-term solution to the problem. She wondered how much air they were losing, and how soon they would have to spare a team to go find another comet to replace the losses. Small comets were not all that hard to find, but they were fairly fragile, and it took a lot of time to rig a cradle to them; then gently apply enough delta-V to switch them from a headlong plummet into the inner Solar System to a gentle orbit matching the station. If they were lucky and could find one in a favorable orbit, the whole process would only take a few months. More likely it would take a year, possibly even two.