The human capital of Endurance dwindled. They were always short on food. Arklets were designed to grow their own food supplies in their translucent outer hulls. But Endurance’s arklets were buried in ice to protect them from the Hard Rain. The ones near the outside got enough sunlight to produce some food, but not enough compared to the mouths that had to be fed. She began her journey well stocked with emergency provisions, which were rationed out on a schedule that assumed a mission length of one year. As it became clear that the journey would go on much longer, the rations were cut back. Endurance also had abundant stockpiles of vitamins, most of which had survived the Break. These were sought after by the people of the Swarm, who had flown the coop without stockpiling enough of them. Trade began to happen between Endurance and the Swarm, but it wasn’t the free market that the Swarmamentalists had once envisioned. Deals were negotiated over the radio and consummated by exchanges between MIVs and arklets, difficult to arrange because of the need to match orbits that had now become very different.
As they had done with Ymir, they mined ice from the interior volume of Endurance, leaving the outer “walnut shell” as a structural support and as a first line of defense against bolides. But as J.B.F. and other Dump and Run partisans had never tired of pointing out, such a heavy craft lacked maneuverability. When a big rock was seen far enough in advance, they could use her engines to make small course changes that would have large outcomes by the time the rock came close. Doing so was the full-time occupation of most of Endurance’s complement, which worked at it three shifts a day. But below a certain threshold they could not see rocks soon enough, or maneuver out of their way quickly enough, and then they just had to hope that the bolide would strike Amalthea. Most did, but some hit the icy lower slopes, and of those, some struck with enough power to penetrate and kill.
Suicide took about one in ten over the course of the three-year journey. Sometimes this was for traditional reasons. After a great burst of creative activity during the weeks when Endurance was being designed and crafted, Rhys fell into a black depression and took his own life a month into the voyage. In other cases a spacewalker agreed to go on what was clearly a suicide mission, or a patient suffering from cancer decided to end her life rather than create a drain on limited resources of food, air, and medical supplies. And there was quite a bit of cancer, for Dinah’s prediction on the day of the Break had been borne out. In spite of all precautions, particles of fallout made their way into the air and the food chain and lodged in lungs and guts. Even without this, the environment of space, with its ambient radiation, lack of exercise, poor diet, and exposure to various chemicals, tended to jack up the cancer rate. Endurance’s medical facilities were not up to the job of detecting and treating cancer in the way people had been used to on Earth.
Periodic crises in the supplies of food and air, caused by blights in the greenhouses or breakdowns in equipment, took away people whose strength had been sapped to begin with. The journey entailed thousands of traversals of the Van Allen radiation belts. Rather than passing through these but one or two times, as might have been the case in a more traditional space voyage, they had to do it twice on each orbit; and during the first year they were, for all practical purposes, never out of them. They sheltered as much as they could in shielded parts of the ship. But no shelter was perfect. Some of the crew were obliged by duty or by happenstance to remain in exposed locations. And the mere fact of being crammed together in a confined space for a significant fraction of the time was a drag on health.
The gender ratio began to skew even more toward females. The General Population, whose Break-surviving members had made up roughly a quarter of Endurance’s original complement, had been predominantly male. This was a simple consequence of the fact that they had been drawn from traditionally male-dominated professions such as the military, the astronaut corps, and science and engineering. The other three-quarters had been Arkies. The original Arkie population had been 75 percent female and 25 percent male. The ones who had elected to stay with Endurance at the time of the Break were more strongly skewed toward women.
The men tended to be older—in many cases two or even three times the age of the Arkies. Compared to the Arkies, who had mostly been sent up at the last minute, they tended to have been in space, and subject to its health effects, for much longer. They had been picked for brains, not for physical fitness. At least at the beginning, while the Arkies were still learning the ropes, they tended to draw the most hazardous duty, such as space walks. And men simply were not as well suited to life in space. They were more biologically vulnerable to radiation. They needed more air and more food. And, whether it was the result of cultural upbringing or genetic programming, they simply were not cut out psychologically for the idea that they were going to spend the rest of their lives in crowded indoor spaces. Many of them felt an urge to go outside and get away from people that manifested itself as a tendency to volunteer for more space walks. People who went on space walks were much more likely to die of radiation exposure, bolide strikes, equipment malfunction, misadventure, or contamination by reactor fallout.