I’m leaving here on Sol 449. That gives me fifty-nine sols to test everything and fix whatever isn’t working right. Then decide what’s coming with me and what’s staying behind. And plot a route to Schiaparelli using a grainy satellite map. And rack my brains trying to think of anything important I forgot.

Since Sol 6 all I’ve wanted to do was get the hell out of here. Now the prospect of leaving the Hab behind scares the shit out of me. I need some encouragement. I need to ask myself, “What would an Apollo astronaut do?”

He’d drink three whiskey sours, drive his Corvette to the launchpad, then fly to the moon in a command module smaller than my Rover. Man those guys were cool.

CHAPTER 21

LOG ENTRY: SOL 431

I’m working out how to pack. It’s harder than it sounds.

I have two pressure vessels: the rover and the trailer. They’re connected by hoses, but they’re also not stupid. If one loses pressure, the other will instantly seal off the shared lines.

There’s a grim logic to this: If the rover breaches, I’m dead. No point in planning around that. But if the trailer breaches, I’ll be fine. That means I should put everything important in the rover.

Everything that goes in the trailer has to be comfortable in near-vacuum and freezing temperatures. Not that I anticipate that, but you know. Plan for the worst.

The saddlebags I made for the Pathfinder trip will come in handy for food storage. I can’t just store potatoes in the rover or trailer. They’d rot in the warm, pressurized environment. I’ll keep some in the rover for easy access, but the rest will be outside in the giant freezer that is this planet. The trailer will be packed pretty tight. It’ll have two bulky Hab batteries, the atmospheric regulator, the oxygenator, and my homemade heat reservoir. It would be more convenient to have the reservoir in the rover, but it has to be near the regulator’s return air feed.

The rover will be pretty packed, too. When I’m driving, I’ll keep the bedroom folded up near the airlock, ready for emergency egress. Also, I’ll have the two functional EVA suits in there with me and anything that might be needed for emergency repairs: tool kits, spare parts, my nearly depleted supply of sealant, the other rover’s main computer (just in case!), and all 620 glorious liters of water.

And a plastic box to serve as a toilet. One with a good lid.

• • •

“HOW’S WATNEY doing?” Venkat asked.

Mindy looked up from her computer with a start. “Dr. Kapoor?”

“I hear you caught a pic of him during an EVA?”

“Uh, yeah,” Mindy said, typing on her keyboard. “I noticed things would always change around 9 a. m. local time. People usually keep the same patterns, so I figured he likes to start work around then. I did some minor realignment to get seventeen pics between 9 and 9:10. He showed up in one of them.”