Free Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson Page B

were more than friends, now), Frank, Sax— all people who had been well known before their selection— and none so much as John. So that any diminution in Earth’s regard for one of them might have a kind of corresponding effect on their status within the Ares . This at any rate seemed to be Frank’s operating principle.

    • • •
    It felt as if they were confined to the interior of a hotel with no exits, without even any balconies. The oppression of hotel life was growing; they had been inside now for four long months, but it was still less than half their trip. And none of their carefully designed physical surroundings or daily routines could hasten its end.
    Then one morning the second flight team was dealing with another of Arkady’s problem runs, when all at once red lights burned on several screens.
    “A solar flare has been detected by the solar-monitoring equipment,” Rya said.
    Arkady stood quickly. “That’s not me!” he exclaimed, and leaned over to read the screen nearest him. He looked up, met his colleagues’ skeptical stares, grinned. “Sorry, friends. This is the real wolf.”
    An emergency message from Houston confirmed him. He could have faked those as well, but he was headed for the nearest spoke, and there was nothing they could do; fake or not, they had to follow.
    In fact, a big solar flare was an event they had simulated many times before. Everyone had tasks to perform, quite a few of them in a very short time, so they ran around the toruses, cursing their luck and trying not to get in each other’s way. There was a lot to do, as battening down was complicated, and not very automated. In the midst of dragging plant trays into the plant shelter Janet yelled, “Is this one of Arkady’s tests?”
    “He says not!”
    “Shit.”
    They had left Earth during the low point in the eleven-year sunspot cycle, specifically to reduce the chance of a flare like this occurring. And here it was anyway. They had about half an hour before the first radiation arrived, and no more than an hour after that the really hard stuff would follow.
    Emergencies in space can be as obvious as an explosion or as intangible as an equation, but their obviousness has nothing to do with how dangerous they are. The crew’s senses would never perceive the subatomic wind approaching them, and yet it was one of the worst things that could have happened. And everyone knew it. They ran through the toruses to get their bit of battening done— plants had to be covered or moved to protected areas, the chickens and pigs and pygmy cows and the rest of the animals and birds had to be herded into their own little shelters, seeds and frozen embryos had to be collected and carried along, sensitive electrical components had to be boxed or likewise carried along. When they were done with these high-speed tasks they yanked themselves up the spokes to the central shaft as fast as they could, and then flew down the central shaft tube to the storm shelter, which was directly behind the tube’s aft end.
    Hiroko and her biosphere team were the last ones in, banging through the hatch a full twenty-seven minutes after the initial alarm. They hurtled into the weightless space flushed and out of breath. “Has it started yet?”
    “Not yet.”
    They plucked personal dosimeters from a velcro rack of them, and pinned them to their clothing. The rest of the crew already floated in the semicylindrical chamber, breathing hard and nursing bruises and a few sprains. Maya ordered them to count off, and was relieved to hear the whole hundred run through without gaps.
    The room seemed very crowded. They hadn’t gathered the whole hundred in one spot for many weeks, and even a max room didn’t seem large enough. This one occupied a tank in the middle strand of the hub shaft. The four tanks surrounding theirs were filled with water, and their tank was divided lengthwise between their room and another semicylinder that had been filled with heavy