Hab Log

Well, I guess I've really gone and done it, now. Whatever slim-to-none chance that may have existed, to get myself out of this situation in one piece, is officially gone. I'm done.

When I last updated this log, you might remember that I spent the better part of two Sols planning and digging out the Hab's communications dish. It was buried during the sand storm of Sol 6, of course, with me underneath it, and the dish itself is in relatively good shape.

The structure to which it was originally attached also seems to be in good shape. And then, of course, there was the coupling that held the two of them together. The sustained forces from the wind storm snapped it clean in half.

My plan was to repair the coupling, and then remount the dish, and reestablish contact with Hermes. I would have needed to patch together the severed cables, of course, but I have plenty of spares. That's not my problem.

Notice I use the word "was". As of now, my plan is for nothing, because I totally destroyed it. I attempted to solder it back together, and now the coupling no longer exists, except as a melted piece of slag.

I've done my share of soldering over the years. Usually on small items, circuitry, maybe a power supply here and there. I figured I knew what I was doing. Of course, if the rest of the crew were here, I would probably have been, quite literally, the last crew member that would have been in charge of repairing a broken coupling. I'm just the reactor tech, and Sysop of Hermes.

After some careful consideration, it seemed unnecessarily risky to do the soldering inside the Hab, so I decided that outside was safest.

But you see, heat doesn't dissipate properly in Martian atmosphere, and I didn't account for that. While I had no trouble getting the solder iron hot enough, the heat just melted the coupling into a puddle.

It was so stupid.

Any of the other crew members would have known right away to do the soldering inside the Hab, but not me.

I always seem to have to learn things the hard way.

Well, there's nothing to be done about it now.

But it was stupid. It's the final nail in my coffin here, and I should have thought things through.

So that's that. There will be no fixing the dish. No contact with the crew. No contact with NASA. No opportunity to beg them for a resupply probe or a rescue mission. They all think that I'm dead, and will continue to think that. Nobody is ever going to get the chance to read this log. Because about a year from now, everyone who already thinks that I'm dead will be correct. I'll run out of rations and die.

Hermes

"And here's something that you may not have ever thought about, guys," Mark continued for the benefit of his classroom, back on Earth.

As the crew's public relations man, it was usually Mark that wound up hosting the weekly live chat. This week's talk had, strictly speaking, not been on the schedule at all. But with the surface mission scrubbed, Montrose had decided to be proactive, and get the crew back into their routine.

"But it's actually pretty hard to get good coffee in space," he continued, gesturing to the coffeemaker, mounted to the galley wall.

"Well, you guys are in middle school. So maybe this is not something you kids have worried about a whole lot. But can any of you guess why it's hard to make coffee in space?"

He paused for a minute, as though the students watching the telecast were able to suggest reasons, even though there was a significant amount of time drag, and their answers wouldn't be reaching Hermes for eleven minutes or so.

"It's gravity, yeah," he nodded, as though one of the students had hit upon the correct answer. "Coffeemakers work completely differently in space." He demonstrated, by removing an empty coffee packet from one of the galley drawers, and attaching it to the output valve.

"Now, back on Earth, gravity would pull the water through the ground-up coffee beans, and it would flow," he gestured to the coffeemaker, "from top to bottom. Boiling water goes in, up here, hot coffee comes out, down here."

"Yeah," he said, shaking his head sadly, with a grin at the camera. "That's not going to work here on Hermes. Our centripetal gravitational pull is less than half of Earth's. And that's not all the time, either. Sometimes, we have none, or very little, gravity; microgravity, in other words. In microgravity, water acts differently. Steam acts differently. It doesn't flow down through the coffee. It wants to sit on top of the coffee."

He pulled a face for the camera.

"That's not going to make any kind of coffee that I would want to drink. That's going to make what we refer to, scientifically, as coffee sludge. Yuck."

Opening the front panel of the coffeemaker, he gestured to the steel piping.

"So we have to help it out a little bit. We use suction here, with this pump, to pull the water through the ground-up coffee." He closed the panel, flipped the switch, and a few moments later, coffee began to trickle into the empty packet below. As it filled, Mark continued, "And.. bonus! This even works in microgravity!"

"Now, do you know where this wouldn't work?"

He paused for the kids to have a moment to wonder, and to give the machine a chance to finish filling the packet.

"Oh man, this is awkward," he smiled, looking from side to side, as though NASA were watching. "NASA sent us to Mars, with a coffeemaker that doesn't even work on Mars," he stage-whispered.

"But actually, that's not really too big a deal, because Mr. Coffee here doesn't get to go to Mars. He's gonna hang out right here in the galley, the whole surface mission."

The pallet from flight supply had included a flat box of Nescafe packets for the surface mission. Little flattened plastic bags with freeze-dried coffee crystals; one per crew member per day. He'd filled one with hot water for Beth the morning of Sol 6, and watched her shake it to distribute the coffee evenly, as he had begun to suit up for the day's work-

Watney removed the filled coffee packet from the output valve, and held it up for the camera. Vogel did his best to zoom in on it, so that the students could see the bubbles floating through it, the foam swirling around strangely through it. The steam vented through the bottom of the drinking valve, dissipating in an odd cloud. Instead of dispersing as one might expect, the steam hung in the air, fogging the camera lens.

Vogel tried to fan the cloud of steam away from the camera, as Mark tried to gather his thoughts.

Swirling clouds, black winds.

He swallowed hard and cleared his throat.

"So why wouldn't this coffee maker work on the surface mission? Anyone know?"

As soon as he'd said it, he already knew that he had no idea what the next line from the script was, even though he had been the one that had written it.

Mark took a small sip from the coffee packet, but the rich, bitter flavor brought a certain uneasiness. He had to refocus himself, looking back to the camera.

Sol 6.

Johanssen… disappearing…. into the storm, in the blink of an eye.

Vogel was looking at him, eyebrows raised, but Mark still stood there, dazed.

The script, he ordered himself to focus. What was next?

And now Vogel was circling his free hand towards Mark; his expression was shifting towards worried.

"Why wouldn't this work on the surface mission?" he repeated, trying to remember the answer.

He cleared his throat again, and took another sip, trying to give himself another moment to get back on track.

Mark had always preferred his coffee with creamer and sugar, but his traitorous brain took this moment to loudly remind him who did like her coffee just this way.

Black and boiling hot.

Shit.

Vogel was waiting for him. Again. His expression had changed to one of understanding. He waved down Martinez, from the nearby flight deck and mouthed something to him, as Mark's eyes searched the program notes, trying to find his place once more.

Where the hell was I?

Alex was pointing to the Boiling Point heading on the whiteboard behind them.

Boiling point.

Steam hung heavy in the air around him.

Boiling point?

"Right. On Mars... umm… water has a lower... boiling point."

So did astronauts. Humans had a low boiling point, too, if they'd been hit by a satellite dish that destroyed their EVA suit.

"The atmosphere…" he trailed off again, unfocused.

Atmosphere on that hellhole had sucked the air out of her lungs instantly, suffocating her to death...and then... the blood had boiled away in her veins... she might have been conscious, even, might have known what was happening to her, as the crew was looking for her frantically, as she-

"Thanks, Watney," Beck was saying, as he took the coffee and took a few steps away from Mark. Vogel swung the camera away, to get Mark out of frame.

"Hi," he addressed the camera, with a tentative smile. "I'm Dr. Beck."

Mark sat down at the flight console, shoulders slumped. He turned towards the workstation, scrubbing a hand down his face.

We left her there. We left without her.

It was embarrassing, to need Beck to rescue him, mid-lecture. And Beck was, frankly, not a natural public speaker. He had stepped out of his comfort zone on Mark's behalf. He seemed to be doing alright, and Mark started to relax, a little bit.

"Wow. That's hot," Chris was saying, consulting the lesson's outline points on the board behind Vogel. "Here on Hermes, we can have our coffee as hot as we want, just like on Earth. But it's a different story down on Mars."

Mark glanced at the screen. There was a crazy amount of packet loss, catching his attention. He pulled up the SysOp module, trying to pinpoint the problem, grateful for the distraction.

"Now, of course, it depends on where the surface mission is, the elevation makes all the difference. What if I decided that I needed some coffee when I was visiting the Hellas Basin, for example? That's one of the lowest places on Mars, kind of like Death Valley, on Earth."

He was grateful for the distraction, sure. Right up until the moment that he realized that the entire communication system seemed to be either dying or dead.

What in the hell?

"Things get pretty hot, down there in Death Valley, right? So does that mean my coffee will be hotter, down in Hellas Basin? What do you think?"

Vogel nodded the camera, bobbing it up and down.

Beck shook his head, sternly.

"Nope!"

Vogel mimicked his motion, shaking the camera back and forth.

"The boiling point for water is way lower on Mars. All the water down in Hellas Basin, if there should happen to be any, would boil at only 10 degrees Celsius! So, the hottest I could possibly have my coffee, without it boiling away, would be about 9 degrees Celsius. That's about 49 degrees, Fahrenheit. So yeah, it would be like drinking coffee straight out of a refrigerator. It's not even room temperature, let alone hot!"

Beck glanced at Vogel, waiting for the signal to continue with the script, but he was focused on the console behind him, where Watney was looking more and more upset.

Inbound and outbound communications had gone dark now, and it wasn't a matter of calibration; there was simply no signal, and the Hermes firmware didn't offer any clues as to what was going on.

Hoping to get this disastrous live chat finished as quickly as possible, Beck skipped the normal waiting interval and went straight to the closing statements.

"And that, my sixth-grade friends, does not make good coffee," he concluded. "When you get to college, and it's time to cram for finals, you'll know what I'm talking about-"

But Beck was talking to the empty air, as Vogel lowered the camera, looking at it, perplexed.

"There's no connection."

"Why did we lose the downlink?" he asked Mark, who sat shaking his head at the flight console. "Is it coming back online?"

Mark was shaking his head. "I don't know," he replied, worried. "It's acting really weird."

Martinez tapped his headset. "Commander, we've got a problem." He looked at Mark, who was furiously typing commands into the console. "Something's wrong with the comm system."

Lewis arrived a few moments later, still gloved and gowned from the geo lab, safety goggles pushed to the top of her head. "Can you raise CAPCOM?" This was exactly the sort of situation that she had hoped wouldn't arise; the one crew member who would have known exactly what to do wasn't going to be able to help them.

"Negative," Mark replied. "There's no outbound signal at all."