Together we carried or dragged everything to the wall.
The arc of the dome, broken into two-meter triangles, was vertical at ground level. I selected a reasonably clean triangle and dusted it off with a wire brush. There’s no weather on the moon, but there is static electricity. Fine lunar dust gets everywhere and sticks to everything with the slightest charge.
“Okay, this one,” I said. “Help me move the shelter into position.”
“Copy.”
Together, we hoisted the air shelter and shuffled it over to the dome. We pressed the aluminum skirt against the shiny wall then set the shelter down.
“Goddamn, Dad’s good,” I said.
“Jesus,” Dale said.
He’d done an absolutely perfect job on the skirt. I mean, okay, he just had to make the point of contact with the wall flat, but holy hell. There was less than a millimeter of gap between the skirt and the wall.
I brought up my arm readout, which was basically just a fancy external screen for my Gizmo. The Gizmo itself was safely inside the suit with me (they’re not made to handle the rigors of the outdoors). I tapped a few buttons and made the call.
“Yo, Jazz,” said Svoboda. “How’s tricks?”
“So far, so good. How’s the camera feed?”
“Working perfectly. I’ve got your suit cams on the screens.”
“Be careful out there,” came Dad’s voice.
“I will, Dad. Don’t worry. Dale, you getting the phone audio?”
“Affirm,” said Dale.
I walked back to the skirt and faced it so the helmet cam would point at it. “Good skirt alignment. Like…really good.”
“Hmm,” said Dad. “I see some gaps. But smaller than the bead you’ll be making. Should be fine.”
“Dad, this is some of the best precision I’ve ever—”
“Let’s get to work,” he interrupted.
I dragged the oxygen and acetylene tanks to the site and fixed the torch head.
“All right,” Dad said. “Do you know how to start a flame in a vacuum?”
“Of course,” I said. No way in hell I would admit I learned it the hard way just a few days ago. I set the oxygen mix very high, sparked the flame, and got it stabilized.
When I’d worked over the harvesters earlier I’d done very rudimentary joins. I just needed it to hold the pressure in long enough to blow up. These joins would be a lot more complicated. The job would’ve been trivial for Dad, but he didn’t know anything about EVAs. Hence our teamwork.
“Looks like a good flame,” Dad said. “Start at the crown and let the bead puddle downward. Surface tension will keep it aligned with the gap.”
“What about the airflow pressure?” I said. “Won’t it blow droplets into the skirt?”
“Some, but not much. There are no eddy forces around the flame in a vacuum. There’s just the pressure of the flame itself.”
I held a rod of aluminum stock to the top of the skirt and set the flame on it. It was awkward in my EVA suit, but not too bad. A bead of molten metal formed at the tip and dribbled down. Just as Dad predicted, it wicked along the gap and filled the crack.
By habit, I brought the flame down to the fill site to keep the bead molten.
“No need for that,” Dad said. “The metal will stay liquid longer than you expect. There’s no air to convey the heat away. Some gets lost through the metal, but the state-change soaks up most of the energy. It can’t radiate too far.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” I said. I returned the flame to the aluminum stock.
Dale stood a few meters away, ready to save my life.
And there I was again. Melting metal while in a vacuum. If a blob melted my EVA suit, my life would be in Dale’s hands. If I sprung a leak, he’d have to haul me into the rover airlock. I wouldn’t be able to do it myself because I’d be too busy dying of asphyxiation.
Bit by bit, I worked my way around the perimeter of the skirt. Dad told me when I went too fast or slow. Finally, I got back to the start of the seam.
“Whew,” I said. “Time for a pressure test.”
“No it isn’t,” Dad said. “Run another line. All the way around. Make sure you completely cover the first weld.”
“Are you kidding me?!” I protested. “Dad, that weld is solid.”
“Run another line, Jasmine,” he said firmly. “You’re not in any hurry. You’re just impatient.”
“Actually I am in a hurry. I have to get this done before the Sanchez shift change.”
“Run. Another. Line.”
I groaned like a teenage girl (Dad really brought that out in me). “Dale, hand me more rods.”
“No,” Dale said.
“What?”
“As long as you have that torch in your hand, I won’t take my eyes off you, I won’t be more than three meters away, and I won’t have anything in my hands.”
I groaned louder.
It took another twenty minutes, but I ran another seam around the skirt under Dad’s watchful eye.
“Well done,” said Dad.
“Thanks, Dad,” I said. He was right. I’d done a good job. Now I had an air shelter perfectly welded to the smelter bubble’s hull. All I had to do was cut a hole in the wall from inside the shelter and I’d have a ghetto airlock.
I set the torch down on a nearby rock and spread my hands at Dale. Now that I met his stringent requirements for safety, he ambled toward the inflatable.
The inflatable was the same kind I’d helped set up during the Queensland Glass fire—an accordion tube with a rigid airlock connector at each end. He and I each grabbed a hoop and backed away from each other. I headed toward the newly welded air shelter while Dale went to the rover.
I loaded all my welding equipment and tanks into the tunnel, then connected my end of it to the air shelter. Then I joined Dale and we both climbed into the rover airlock. Together we pulled the tunnel’s other connector into place.
I stared down the tube toward the still-sealed air-shelter hatch.
“Time to test it, I guess,” I said.
He reached for the valve. “Keep on your toes. Just ’cause we’re in EVA suits doesn’t make us safe. If we misconnected the tunnel, we could be in for an explosive decompression.”
“Thanks for the tip,” I said. “I’ll be ready to jump out of the way if a pressure wave moving the speed of sound comes at me.”
“You could be less of an ass.”
“I could,” I said. “But it’s not likely.”
He turned the valve and a foggy plume of air rushed in from the pressurized rover compartment. I checked my suit readouts and saw we were up to 2 kPa—about 10 percent of normal Artemis pressure.
An alarm blared from inside the rover.
“The fuck is that?” I said.
“Leak warning,” Dale said. “The rover knows how much air it should take to fill the airlock, and we’ve gone way past that. We’re filling this whole tunnel.”
“Problem?”
“No,” he said. “We’ve got plenty in the tanks. Way more than we need. Bob saw to that.”
“Nice.”
Slowly, the tunnel inflated. It held pressure perfectly, of course. This was exactly what it was designed to do—connecting one hatch to another.
“Looks good,” Dale said. He turned the hatch crank and opened the rover’s inner airlock door. He climbed into the main compartment and settled into the driver’s seat. The rover was designed to accommodate a driver with or without an EVA suit.
He checked the control panel. “Twenty point four kPa, one hundred percent oxygen. Good to go.”
“Here goes nothing,” I said. I popped the vents of my EVA suit. I took a few breaths. “Air’s good.”
Dale joined me in the connector and helped me de-suit.
“J-J-Jesus.” I shivered. When you release pressurized gas it gets cold. By filling the tunnel from the rover’s high-pressure tanks, we’d made a goddamned meat locker.
“Here.” Dale handed me my jumpsuit. I put it on faster than I’d ever put on clothes before. Well…second fastest (my high school boyfriend’s parents came home earlier than expected one day).
Then he handed me his own jumpsuit. He was a big enough guy that his clothes fit over mine easily. I didn’t even argue. I leapt right in. After a minute, I warmed up to something bearable.
“You all right?” he asked. “Your lips are blue.”