The Orthogonal Galaxy (18 page)

“
There’s no light on the
panel, Dmitri.”

Nodding, he replied, “I
expect that to be. We will chance this door, for two reasons. One,
it is a small pressurization chamber. Very little oxygen will be
lost. Two, we must trust that the containment door dropped on this
passageway as well. It is a chance we must take.”

The pair placed and sealed
their helmets, and Garrison deferred the job of opening the door to
Dmitri this time, fearing that he should make another critical
mistake. As the door opened, there was no rush of air. The
environment on the other side was identical. O’Ryan peeked in to
see another door just a couple of feet away. Boronov stepped inside
and motioned for O’Ryan to do the same. Upon closing the door,
Dmitri reached for a lever which opened a vent. The sound of
rushing air reminded Garrison of the tour that he made with Ayman
and Dmitri just the day before, when the garage of the workshop was
depressurized in preparation for departure in the Mars Terrain
Vehicle.

Dmitri grabbed the handle
on the outer door of the pressurization room. “Nobody has stepped
into this next tunnel,” stated Dmitri with an air of concern and
suspense as he looked at his companion.

“
But we must go on,”
reassured Garrison. “What could you do so wrong, Dmitri, after
seeing what I did to us last night?”

Encouraged, Dmitri pulled
the lever release and opened the door without incident. Both
astronauts leaned forward, gazing into the darkness. Dmitri lit his
torch first and shined it into the tunnel. The beam of light shown
through a haze of red dust particles. Garrison flicked on the beam
of light from his torch and followed Dmitri into the narrow tunnel,
barely tall enough to fit their statures comfortably. They walked
for 50 yards until arriving at a stair well.

“
Going up?” asked Dmitri
playfully in an effort to release the tension.

“
After you,” teased
Garrison.

They climbed into a
stairwell which seemed to go on for many stories of back-and-forth
climbing. Neither astronaut counted the number of steps, but both
were glad that they were doing this climb in the gravity of Mars
and not Earth. At last, they arrived on a low landing where the
concrete stairs ended abruptly. There was about four feet of
distance from the floor to the ceiling, so both astronauts were
kneeling here. Shining their torches upward revealed a yellow
painted square which marked the boundary of the trap door. Reaching
up, Dmitri felt for a release mechanism and found a handle with a
trigger. With a click and a grunt which was audible through their
helmet comm system, he tried to force the door open.

“
Won’t budge?” asked
Garrison.

“
No,” grunted the Russian
as he pushed upward with his arms and back, attempting to gain
leverage on the door.

Garrison came to Dmitri’s
side and assumed a similar position. As the two pushed together,
they could feel the door give about an inch or two, and after
several moments gave up the effort.

“
It feels like there’s
something blocking it,” pointed out Garrison.

“
I can’t imagine that
would be true. We do not have junk just lying around the
crater.”

“
Either way,” shrugged
Garrison. “What are we going to do now, Dmitri. This door, as you
have said, is our only hope to assessing the power failure at the
array. But why can’t we go back through the main entrance. With the
pressure door deployed, we can use it as a pressurization
chamber.”

“
We lose too much oxygen
in main tunnel. We would risk not surviving a rescue effort, if
this situation gets that far.”

“
Well, we’ve got to get
through there, Dmitri, somehow.”

“
Do you have a crowbar in
that tool box? Perhaps we could pry the hatch open?” Garrison
brainstormed out loud.

“
I didn’t bring crowbar.
It didn’t make much sense for a power repair. But, it is good idea.
I should return to get one. You wait here.” Dmitri began his
descent into the bunker.

“
Dmitri, wait.”

Dmitri turned, flashed his
torch upward to look at Garrison.

“
Is it a good idea for us
to separate?”

“
Perhaps not,” admitted
Boronov. “But you are not at 100 percent health. I prefer you not
to have to climb stairs again so soon. Our headsets will remain in
range should we need to communicate.”

Garrison deferred his
judgment to that of the senior astronaut and sat down on the
landing with his back against the slab of concrete forming the wall
of the tunnel. He turned off his torch to save battery, and watched
as the dim light of Dmitri’s light descended deeper and deeper into
the ground until it had disappeared completely from
view.

Garrison was not sure how
long Dmitri had been gone, as he nodded off in the quiet darkness
of the tunnel, until his partner had arrived with the crowbar. The
two worked with the crowbar for some minutes before having to admit
defeat again.

“
It’s budging farther with
the crowbar,” admitted Garrison, “but we still can’t get it to open
enough to exit. I don’t get it, Dmitri.”

“
The hinges must be frozen
from inactivity.”

“
We really need to get out
there and assess the situation.” Garrison lowered and shook his
head, frustrated at the chain of events that was starting his
mission so ominously.

“
I have two ideas. First,
we try light explosive.”

“
Explosive?” asked
O’Ryan.

“
We have small charge
which can blast the hinge without damaging tunnel.”

“
I don’t know, Dmitri. If
the explosive causes a cave in, then we cut ourselves off from our
only exit. Let me hear your second idea.”

“
Cutting torch. We cut
through steel, but the torch will be difficult to bring way up
here. It is big and heavy.”

“
Then, we’ll take turns
carrying it up,” offered Garrison. “The idea of an explosive… it
sounds too risky.”

“
You are not at full
health,” pointed out Dmitri. “It would not be advised for you to
carry the torch.”

“
Dmitri, I’m well enough.
We simply must get through that door. Besides, you have been
exhausted walking up the stairs twice. You’ll need to do yet a
third trip. That’s nearly 500 feet of stair climbing in one
day.”

“
Yes, but at a third of
gravity, it’s more like 150 feet, or 15 flights of stairs. It is no
problem, really.”

“
But you pointed out that
this next trip will be a bigger deal, dragging up a heavy cutting
torch up—Dmitri, let’s not argue. I will come down and help you
bring the torch up.”

The senior astronaut
yielded to the persistence of his younger companion, and the two
shared the job of hauling the torch up 500 feet of stairs, a task
which proved less tiring since they were able to have periods of
rest while the other grunted up the stairs.

Boronov did the cutting,
which proved tedious because of the thickness of the door, and the
fact that the work was entirely overhead. Since there was little
room to work on the top landing of the stairwell, O’Ryan remained
on the landing below to watch his companion work. Boronov began
cutting by making four perforated straight cuts along each side,
just next to the yellow lines marking the edge of the square door.
Then he connected one perforated edge to another to form corners of
cuts. He worked on connecting the corners closest to him, so that
when the door finally gave on any remaining connected steel, it
would drop down from the ceiling in such a manner as to swing away
from him.

“
Just two more cuts to
go,” Dmitri called to his companion.

A hazy brown light from
outside began to filter through the cracks where the cuts had been
made. He set the torch to work on the second to last cut, and
jumped back when he noticed a sudden increase in light indicating
that the door was finally collapsing into the stairwell. The door
swung away from Boronov as anticipated, but what he wasn’t
expecting was the vast quantity of debris which came flowing into
the tunnel as well. Broken chunks of concrete and asphalt mingled
with Martian dirt rushed into the tunnel, forcefully knocking
Dmitri to the concrete ground.

“
Dmitri!” screamed Garrison shielding himself from a shower of
rocks which were now bouncing down the stairs. He jumped away from
the falling debris until the commotion ceased. Working past rubble
on the landing and stairs, he was finally able to make his way to
the upper landing. Obscured by dust, Garrison at first was having
difficulty assessing the situation. “Dmitri! Are you
okay? Can you hear me?”

There was no immediate
response from Boronov, and O’Ryan feared that he might have been
knocked unconscious from the blow. As the dust settled, he saw
nothing but a pile of rubbish filling much of the upper landing.
Boronov had been completely buried. Garrison furiously pulled
chunks of concrete and asphalt off of the landing using nothing but
his hands for tools. With each effort, the sound of rock and
concrete bouncing down the stairs kept rhythm with O’Ryan’s effort
to extricate his companion. After fifteen minutes of work, he felt
a soft lump, which he quickly recognized as the spacesuit of
Dmitri. Working harder, he continued to sweep the debris away,
until he had removed his companion, who was able to sit up against
the wall of the stairwell, still shaken from the incident. He
looked up to see streams of light through the pile of
debris.

“
Dmitri! Can you hear me?
Are you in pain?”

“
What—happened?” Dmitri
asked in a daze.

“
When the trap door
opened, a flood of debris came down on top of you. Are you in
pain?”

“
A little, but I do not
think injuries are too bad,” Boronov stated. “I simply do not
understand. There should be nothing blocking this emergency hatch.
Camp is kept free of stuff like this, and yet it is clearly garbage
from camp. Blocks of concrete, road asphalt? There is a landfill,
but it is on east side of crater near SAR pad, where junk is
recycled as material for SAR operation. This hatch should not lead
us there.”

“
Well, we will know where
this came from once we can get above ground and see what it is and
where we are at,” pointed out Garrison looking at the streams of
ruddy light. “But that will have to wait. We must see to your
injuries first. Do you think you can stand?”

Boronov nodded, and
slowly, Garrison helped him to his feet with a few grunts and
Russian words which O’Ryan assumed to be cursing.

“
This is very frustrating,
Garrison. All day long we have been just feet away from ground
level and we just cannot seem to get there.” Dmitri looked at his
watch. “17 hours 13 minutes. Even if we can clear this pile today,
it will be dark again, and we will not be able to work on power
array.”

“
We must not work on it
today,” insisted Garrison. “Your injuries must be tended to, and
then we must rest and hopefully return to complete this stubborn
job tomorrow.”

Defeated, the pair of
damaged astronauts walked slowly and quietly back down the stairs,
Garrison sulking in the misfortunes of the last 24 hours, and
Dmitri hobbling on a swollen foot.

…

Through the slits in his
eyes, Garrison saw the same green glow that had greeted him the
morning before. He sat up, yawned, and saw his companion tightly
wrapping his right ankle with a bandage.

“
How is it, Dmitri?” asked
Garrison. “The foot?”

“
It is some swollen, but
not so much as I feared. I can walk, and this bandage will help us
with our day of work.”

“
Well, let’s get packed.”
Garrison stood on his feet and clapped his hands together. He felt
optimistic about the day ahead of them. Besides, it couldn’t get
any worse than the last couple of days, could it?

“
I have packed some hand
tools to help with debris,” Dmitri mentioned. “Hand shovel and
small pick axe should get us through tunnel and onto Martian soil.
But, do eat some breakfast first.”

Garrison was beginning to
wonder if Dmitri ever slept. By the time he awoke in the mornings,
his partner had already finished breakfast and began preparations
for the day. He completed his meal while Dmitri was gone. By the
time he was finished suiting up, Dmitri had returned and the two
proceeded into the depressurization chamber and ensuing tunnel
again. They climbed the stairs slowly, feeling the muscle fatigue
of yesterday’s climbs as well as the pain from their respective
injuries.

When they reached the top
landing, they discovered that there was not enough room on the
stairs for both to safely work, so Boronov began by removing debris
from under the trap door and O’Ryan cleared a path off of the
stairs, while trying to dodge rocks and dirt flying from his
companion’s shovel. Every now and then, the pair would trade roles
in order to catch a breather from the digging and shoveling, but
later in the morning, they were able to extricate enough of the
material to give an opening large enough for an astronaut to fit
through.