Jury-Rigging for Dummies

Long months of training are behind me; I have felt the crushing Gs of launch, I've floated for a while at the window to watch the delicate ballet of the shuttlecraft docking up... and now I have finally arrived at the new space station. From the windows, Earth sweeps majestically below me, the lights of her cities glittering on the night side and the light on her oceans gleaming on the sun side.

I shake my head and turn from the window, back into the station. I am floating in a narrow corridor; my guide, a rangy tanned American astronaut who arrived before my shuttle, hovers behind me. His hair waves gently in the breeze from a nearby fan as he smiles at me, gripping one of the containers lashed securely to the wall behind him. “So,” he asks in perfect French, “are you ready to go?”

I nod; he kicks off the wall, launching himself effortlessly down—excuse me, now that way is up—the corridor. After a moment spent re-orienting myself, I follow him. He moves with astonishing fluid grace, dodging containers of fuel and assorted chemicals, his effortless ease in freefall implying that he’s been here much longer than I have. As we glide along, he points things out: in another life he is Dr. Andrew Carden, a celebrated physicist, but at the moment he’s my volunteer tour guide. Hey, someone has to show the new botanist around.

“We’re traveling along the docking axis of the station, which is currently acting as chemical storage,” he’s telling me. “We’ll join the main axis in a few moments.” Looking over his shoulder, he catches my eye. “I’m sure you’ve seen plans of the station, but I’ll explain the layout anyway. The feel of the place is different when you’re actually in it.”

I agree with a wholehearted grin.

We turn a corner—he ricochets off the wall with the grace of a leaping gazelle, I collide with the ceiling and awkwardly reorient myself—and find ourselves in a wider cylindrical corridor that arches away into obscurity. Either this station is just as big as it looks from outside or my freefall-drunk eyes are deceiving me. Dr. Carden rubs his hand along the wall to decelerate and wait for me; I use the first-time skier’s stop and crash into a ceiling brace. As I rub a sore shoulder, he points to a hatch that opens to our left.

“There’s the hydroponics module,” he informs me. “I understand you’ll be working there.”

I drift towards the hatch, looking for the controls. “How do I get in?”

He clears his throat, averting his face nervously. “Er, well… um… you really don’t want to do that just yet. Shouldn’t I show you the rest of the station first?”

I frown. “Why? Can’t you tell me?”

His breath whooshes out. “It hasn’t been sprouted yet.”

I stare at him in frank astonishment. “What?”

“That’s why you were brought up so early.”

“I thought I was tending the plants!”

“Well, you are, after a fashion. You’ll have the opportunity to see them grown from seed.”

“But—” I splutter, hunting for words. “How are you recycling your air, if no one seeded the plants?”

“CO2 scrubbers. It worked for the space shuttles seventy years ago, and now it’s working for us.” His embarrassed, nervous grin only adds to my frustration. “A temporary measure, but it’s working for now.”

I rein in my anger, realizing that this particular blunder isn’t his fault, and push the hatch open. “I’ll have to get started immediately, then. How—” I grind to a halt as the open hatchway reveals a module dark and empty save a few biomass canisters along a far wall. Forgetting freefall in my consternation, I jerk sideways; Carden winces visibly. “Where,” I grate, “are the lights?”

“They’re here, just… er… well, there’s no power to them yet.”

“I can’t grow plants without light.” I kick off the wall and narrowly avoid bashing my head against a long full-spectrum lamp attached to the wall/floor/ceiling. “They’ll sprout without it, but as soon as the leaves start unfolding they’ll die. Is there a way to run power to the room?”

He hems and haws for a moment. “Well, no—not off the main power grid.” Before I can whip around and hurt myself, he adds hurriedly, “On the other hand, we do have a black box or two.”

“Black boxes?” My mind kicks into high gear. The chemical black box is among the most recent of inventions, so new that even I have barely worked with it, a fantastic device capable of harnessing all chemical energy released within it and converting the energy into any form necessary. With one of those and some appropriate fuel, I could probably run the grow-lamps until the next shuttle brings up something more permanent. “Show me.”

He beckons me out of the module and we fishtail back up (down?) the axis to the window where I had been watching Earth wheel along below me. Among the canisters affixed to the wall I spot a smallish jet-black cube festooned with attachments for tubes, wires, and the occasional 120-VAC plug socket. Detaching it from the wall, Carden hands it to me. “Voilà.”

“Excellent.” I admire his reflection in the obsidian surface. “And the fuel?”

He gestures to the other canisters arrayed along the hallway. “Take your pick.”

I scan the canisters, reading labels, trying to grasp knowledge long forgotten: my high school chemistry lessons. Thermochemistry… Hess’ Law. Which fuels should I use, and which would be best?

After long minutes of deliberation, I point to several of the canisters. “These. Hydrochloric acid, magnesium, silane, and oxygen. There are two possible reactions here… I can either synthesize magnesium chloride or combust silane.”

His nervous, high-pitched laugh echoes eerily down the axis. “I wouldn’t work with silane if I were you. The consequences could be dire if the black box explodes.”

I fix him with an irritated glare. “My dear sir, I’ve done this in a black box before. It handled the reaction beautifully—I didn’t even hear the blast.”

He subsides, muttering something inaudible.

“Anyway… the question remains of which of these to use. Which will run a 20-watt full-spectrum lamp for longer?”

He stares at the canisters for a moment, his eyes narrowing in mental calculation. “Well… Let’s see. If I have all the constants right—-mind you, I don’t exactly have every molar mass out there memorized—-the silane will run your lamps for quite a bit longer. Using it, you’ll get 1,236 hours—-that’s 51½ days… the acid and em-gee will only give you 180 hours. The former will be quite enough to hold until the next shuttle brings you something more permanent.”

“Yeah,” I mutter under my breath, “like a competent assistant.” It is with incredible relief that I’ve remembered my colleague, the other station botanist, who will be arriving with the next shuttle trip. Louder, I add: “Incidentally, when does the next shuttle arrive?”

“Er, six days.”

I wince. “It’ll have to be the silane, then. The other won’t last long enough.”

“A hundred eighty hours is about seven and a half days…”

“And what if the shuttle’s late? The weather over Cape Canaveral this year can be fickle. Two days’ delay could kill the plants.”

“I still don’t think you should use something so explosive.”

I glance at him askance. “Remind me… what are the products of each reaction?”

“Combusting silane produces water and silicon dioxide—-”

“Sand?”

He raises an eyebrow. “If you want to use the vernacular… yes, it’s the same stuff most sand forms from. Very pure quartz.”

“Just clearing that up.”

“The other reaction,” he continues, “produces magnesium chloride and hydrogen gas.”

“Hydrogen gas? The same type of flammable, explosive, difficult-to-store gas that you’ve been advising me against in the first place?”

His jaw flops on a loose pivot for a moment. “Yes, I suppose so,” he mumbles.

“So one reaction produces sand and water--materials I can use to grow the next plant generation. The other—-running half on concentrated acid, mind you—-produces a diatomic salt and an explosive gas.”

“You know more of chemistry than you let on,” he accuses me.

“I was only clearing things up.” Pushing off the wall, I glide to where the silane canister attaches to my ceiling. “Let’s get this stuff down to the hydroponics module.”

We detach the black box and the two canisters and shepherd them down the axis and into the little module. As Carden plunges into a maze of tubing, switches, and pumps he has jury-rigged to fill the black box’s tanks, I pull the hydroponic trays out to check on the seeds. They are as I expected them, nestled in their spongy growth medium; I open a few valves and nutrient-laden solution flows into the trays, saturating and warming the anthracite lobster-eyes. That done, I turn around to wait for Carden.

He surfaces after a good fifteen minutes of hissing gases and clanking valves, wiping sweat from his forehead. A stray bead of clear liquid floats towards me; I catch it on a fingertip and draw it back to his lapel. “I hope emptying it won’t be such an ordeal.”

“One of the products is water gas, which we can ignore, but the other is solid. In freefall it’ll be a mess—-but at least we’ll be able to see what we’re trying to catch.”

I acknowledge this with a grin. “Let’s get this show on the road.”

He pores over the black box for a moment, checking connections, and then flourishes a finger to flip a single switch. With a soft hum of rising fluorescent lights, the long grow-lamp comes on, bathing the black-powder seeds in golden light. Under the kiss of the synthetic sun, my active imagination envisions the embryonic plants within stirring, primevally awakening in their delicate shells.

He turns to me with a grin. “See? That wasn’t so bad after all.”