Runaway World

The Life Hutch

     "Which one's the sun?" asked David Birch.

     Andrew Birch looked up into the sky. A million stars shone with impossible clarity, dazzling bright against the velvet blackness that separated them. His breath momentarily fogged the interior of his faceplate, but the heating elements, the invisibly fine strands of silver that lay between the layers of transparent silica, made it evaporate within less than a second, restoring his pristine view.

     "Ask your suit to highlight it for you," he said. "It'll put a pair of crossbars on your visor display."

     "Suit," said the boy. "Please show me where the sun is." There was a pause before the ten-year old spoke again. "I can see the crosshairs," he said, staring up into the sky, "but there's nothing inside them."

     "That's because the suit's keeping you from seeing it," his father replied. "It's too bright to look at directly, even at this distance. Your helmet's protecting your eyes. Two clusters of polarised elements in your faceplate, one in front of each eye, form tiny spots of black that block it from view. They move as you move your head, always keeping you from seeing it." Andrew heard him curse with disappointment and chuckled with amusement. "Six billion kilometres away," he said. "That's a long way, but it's still close enough to give us about half a watt of energy per square metre. Still close enough to hurt your eyes."

     The boy nodded thoughtfully, then lost interest in it and began picking his way across the hard nitrogen ice that covered the ground. The cleats on the soles of his boots scratched away at the surface layer, stained blue with impurities, to reveal the colourless white of the pure nitrogen beneath. The occasional tiny fragment of ice that he kicked up from the ground fell again as fast as if it were made of lead.

     "Stay in the light of the headlamps," his father warned. "And don't go too far."

     "We've all got our beacons on," David replied. "I can't get lost."

     "There might be crevasses or sharp outcrops of ice where it's shifted," his father replied, watching after him anxiously. "If you fall, you could tear the fabric or burst a heating pipe. If you lose the heating in your leg, your whole leg might be frozen solid before we can get you back inside..."

     "Dear," said the voice of Susan, his wife, over the intercom. "Don't fuss. You'll give him a complex."

     "I just want him to understand the dangers," Andrew replied. "The surface is unforgiving. It's constantly looking for ways to kill us."

     "I'll be careful, dad," David promised, picking his way carefully across the flat, featureless plain. The surface walk for which he'd been begging for weeks. A large part of Andrew wished he hadn't agreed to this, to let his son leave the safety of the hab-rover. but the truth was that the boy was long past the age where he should have had his first walk on the surface. Some kind of accident or emergency could occur at any time that would require him to leave the rover, and he needed to know what to do. How to put on a surface excursion suit for himself. Perform all the checks, go through the startup procedure and operate the airlock. This time, his father had done it all for him, but next time the boy would do it for himself while his father watched with even greater anxiety than he was feeling now.

     The boy was looking up into the sky again. Understandable, his father knew. All his life, he'd lived in the tunnels and caverns of New London. There's been the occasional trip in a hab-rover as his father's work took him here and there across the frozen world, but even then there had been a ceiling of steel and aluminium above him. Now, though, there was nothing but a couple of millimetres of fused silica between his bright, hazel eyes and the rest of the universe.