along with King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, adding to a collection that included, among other items, an Allen wrench set, some pliers, a power drill, several clamps, some hacksaws, an impact-wrench set, a brace of cold-tolerant bungie cords, assorted files and rasps and planes, a crescent-wrench set, a crimper, five hammers, some hemostats, three hydraulic jacks, a bellows, several sets of screwdrivers, drills and bits, a portable compressed gas cylinder, a box of plastic explosives and shape charges, a tape measure, a giant Swiss Army knife, tin snips, tongs, tweezers, three vises, a wire stripper, X-acto knives, a pick, a bunch of mallets, a nut driver set, hose clamps, a set of end mills, a set of jeweler’s screwdrivers, a magnifying glass, all kinds of tape, a plumber’s bob and ream, a sewing kit, scissors, sieves, a lathe, levels of all sizes, long-nosed pliers, vise-grip pliers, a tap-and-die set, three shovels, a compressor, a generator, a welding-and-cutting set, a wheelbarrow—
and so on. And this was just the mechanical equipment, her carpenter’s tools. In other parts of the warehouse they were stockpiling research and lab equipment, geological tools, and any number of computers and radios and telescopes and videocameras; and the biosphere team had warehouses of equipment to set up the farm, the waste recyclers, the gas-exchange mechanism, in essence their whole infrastructure; and the medical team had more warehouses of supplies for the clinic, and their research labs, and the genetic-engineering facility. “You know what this is,” Nadia said to Sax Russell one evening looking around her warehouse, “It is an entire town, disassembled and lying in pieces.”
“And a very prosperous town at that.”
“Yes, a university town. With first-rate departments in several sciences.”
“But still in pieces.”
“Yes. But I kind of like it that way.”
Sunset was mandatory return-to-habitat time, and in the dusk she would stumble into the lock and inside, and eat another small cold meal sitting on her bed, listening to the talk around her which mostly concerned the day’s work, and the arrangement of the tasks for the next morning. Frank and Maya were supposed to be doing this, but in fact it was happening spontaneously, in a kind of ad hoc barter system. Hiroko was particularly good at it, which was a surprise given how withdrawn she had been on the voyage out; but now that she needed help from outside her team, she spent most of every evening moving from person to person, so single-minded and persuasive that she usually had a sizable crew working on the farm every morning. Nadia couldn’t really see this; they had five years of dehydrated and canned food on hand, fare that suited Nadia fine, she had eaten worse for most of her life and she paid little attention to food anymore, she might as well have been eating hay, or refueling like one of the tractors. But they did need the farm for growing bamboo, which Nadia planned to use as a construction material in the permanent habitat that she hoped to start building soon. It all interlocked; all their tasks linked together, were necessary to each other. So when Hiroko plopped down beside her, she said, “Yeah, yeah, be there at eight. But you can’t build the permanent farm until the base habitat itself is built. So really you ought to be helping me tomorrow, right?”
“No, no,” Hiroko said, laughing. “Day after, okay?” Hiroko’s main competition for labor came from Sax Russell and his crowd, who were working to start all the factories. Vlad and Ursula and the biomed group were also hungry to get all their labs set up and running. These three teams seemed willing to live in the trailer park indefinitely, as long as their own projects were progressing, but luckily there were a lot of people who were not so obsessed by their work, people like Maya and John and the rest of the cosmonauts, who were interested in moving into larger and better-protected quarters as soon as possible. So Nadia’s project would get help from them.
When she was done eating, Nadia took her tray into the kitchen and cleaned it with a little swab, then went over to sit by Ann Clayborne and Simon Frazier and the rest of the geologists. Ann looked nearly asleep; she was spending her mornings taking long rover trips and hikes, and then working hard on the base all afternoon, trying to make up for her trips away. To Nadia she seemed strangely tense, less happy about being