Space Stations

The potato vines and the carrots and the lettuce had not yet begun to die, though the leaves on the fruit trees were already starting to droop. Some had been killed by the explosion, torn to bits or ripped up and hurled violently against once another. One of the big pear trees had been blown to splinters. Smashed pears lay scattered across the floor like escapees from a Vermeer still life. Amy knew that the others would start dying soon, now that the hydroponic fluid that nourished their growth had stopped circulating and the special lights used to simulate the sun had gone out. The heaters were off, too, though some residual heat still emanated from their internal ceramic elements. The temperature was falling steadily, soaked up by the thirsty atmosphere of the rapidly cooling station module.

What really frightened her, though, wasn't the darkness or the gathering cold. It was the persistent, angry hiss that came from the base of the wall at the far end of the module.

She couldn't see the leak, but she could hear it. She tried putting some empty sacks over the hiss and then piling furniture on them. It muted the noise, but didn't stop it. So she backed as far away from it as she could, all the way back across the module, as if retreating from a dangerous snake. There were four safety doors in the big module, designed to divide it into airtight quarters in the event of a leak. Not one of them had closed. She didn't know why, but she guessed that the explosion had broken something inside them, too.

She wondered if she would know it when the air finally ran out. She would have asked Mr. Reuschel about it, but he was already dead. He didn't look at all like Gramma Marie had. His mouth hung open and instead of lying neat and straight on his back he was all bent and twisted on the floor where the explosion had thrown him. She didn't know for certain he was dead, but she was pretty sure. He didn't reply to any of her questions and he didn't move at all, not even when she touched his eye. When she put her palm up to his mouth the way she'd been taught to in school, she couldn't feel anything moving against her skin.

He'd been the gardener on duty when everything had exploded. Daddy called him a hydroponics engineer, but Amy just thought of him as the gardener. Ms. Anwalt was the other gardener. Like everyone else on the station, she probably knew about the explosion by now and would want to check on the garden, but she couldn't. No one could because the access door didn't work anymore. The explosion had broken it just like it had broken Mr. Reuschel.

The door led to the lock, which led to the service corridor, which connected the hydroponics module to the rest of the station. Amy knew it was still connected because her feet weren't floating off the floor. If the module had broken away from the rest of the station, then it wouldn't be swinging around the central core, and if it wasn't rotating around the central core, then she would be floating in zero-gee right now.

She wondered if Jimmy Sanchez was worried about her. She hoped so. Jimmy was twelve, the only other kid on the station. His parents were photovoltechs who spent their days drifting like butterflies around the huge solar panels which powered and heated the facility. Jimmy was pretty nice, for a boy. She liked him more than he liked her, but maybe, just maybe, he was thinking about her.

She knew Mum and Dad must be worrying about her, but she tried not to think about that because it made her sad. She thought of all the bad things she'd done as a little girl and wished now she hadn't done them.

It was getting cold and she knew she should keep moving. She walked over to the rectangular port behind the tomato vines. Since all the overheads had gone out, the only light in the module came from the ports. Pressing her nose to the transparency enabled her to see the big blue sphere of the Earth outside, rotating slowly around the port.

Doing geography helped keep her mind off the chill. She located Britain, and Spain, and the boot of Italy. There was no cloud cover over the Alps and she saw the snow on the mountain-tops clearly. But the oceans were easiest to identify. They made her think of beaches, and the stinky-sweet smell of salt water, and the warm summer sun.

She was able to see her breath by the light of the Earth. Mr. Reuschel still hadn't moved.

He didn't protest as she struggled to get his jacket off. He was a grown-up and heavy and hard to move and it made her stomach feel queasy to try, but she kept pushing and shoving. His jacket was bulky-warm and covered her down to her knees.

Water dripped from a broken pipe, a comforting tinkling in the darkness. She drank and then did her best to wash the dirt off her face, the dirt from where she'd landed. She understood enough to be thankful for it. If the compost pile hadn't been there to catch her and break her fall, she might be as twisted up as Mr. Reuschel.