“Okay, Arabella,” Stone murmured, “so you’re an astronaut now, eh? Let’s see how smart you really are.” He moved the front of the box, and the web’s longerons were ripped; the web rapidly imploded, leaving the spider drifting. He felt obscurely cruel in wrecking the web. But the point of the experiment was to record fresh web-building. There were acoustic transducers which set up a high-frequency sound field in the cage; any movement of the spider would disturb the sound and trigger lights and a still camera.

The three crew clustered around the little box, making wisecracks about the spider and poking at the cage and its equipment.

Stone moved over to a small experimental garden. It was more like a window box, a tray of soil the size of a suitcase. There were peas, wheat, cucumbers, parsley, onions, dill, fennel, and garlic. Some of the plants were growing in pure microgravity and some in a small botanic centrifuge, simulating lunar and Martian conditions.

Stone tended the rows of little plants. The peas had grown well for the first four or five weeks, but now they looked as if they were dying, and he fed them water and nutrient carefully. The plants wouldn’t consistently go to seed, but tests had shown that the food value of the plants was high; microgravity didn’t impair protein synthesis. Their roots straggled, though, unable to orient themselves without gravity.

Stone was struck by the contrast of the warm, green, fertile little plants and the cold blackness a few inches away, beyond the wall of the Mission Module. He breathed on the little pea plants, hoping to provide a richer mix of carbon dioxide for them. [Hr:Min:Sec] 09:57:57

Stone hauled at the isokinetic exerciser. The machine was bolted to a bracket in the middle of the Mission Module, and it had a two-handled lever, with shoulder pads and handgrips, linked by a sprocket chain to an air turbine. The exerciser was a newfangled gadget, to replace the treadmills and rowers that had been carried on earlier flights. By bracing himself on a foot platform, Stone could do squats, toe raises, shoulder presses, high pulls, bench presses, tricep presses.

Every so often he would glance at the machine’s timer and get newly depressed at how much more time he had to spend exercising. He was uncomfortable, his vest soaked, pools of sweat clinging to his chest and between his shoulder blades. His only distraction was a small round observation port, set in the pressure hull near him, and he stared into its darkness.