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bowl over her head and chopped away herself.
    “Possum has told you the news?” she asked gloomily.
    Jamie nodded. Across the open area, at the row of lockers next to their airlock, he saw Rodriguez worming his arms through the torso of his hard suit.
    “Tomas is going outside?”
    “The chemical toilets are in the lander. He’s going to bring them in here for tonight.”
    “It’s already dark out.” That meant the temperature was plunging.
    “We must have toilets,” Dezhurova said firmly. She was almost always somber and serious, an impressive and very capable woman whose formidable exterior masked a keen, dry sense of humor. But now she was in her no-nonsense mode. “Toilets are primary.”
    “Who’s going with Tomas?” Jamie asked. Safety regulations forbade anyone from going out alone, even a NASA-trained astronaut.
    “I’ll go,” Craig said, without much enthusiasm.
    Dezhurova shook her head. “No, I will do it.”
    “Not you, Stacy,” Jamie countered. “We can’t have both our astronauts outside at the same time if we can avoid it.”
    Craig walked off toward the lockers. After a moment, Stacy said, “I will help them check out their suits.”
    “Fine,” said Jamie.
    Left alone in front of his cubicle, Jamie saw that the two other women, Hall and Shektar, were talking quietly together at the galley table. Trumball and Fuchida were not in sight, probably in one of the labs. He went back into his compartment, slid the door shut, and booted up his laptop computer. Time to make my report back to Tarawa, he told himself, debating mentally whether the toilet problem was important enough to mention.
    Let the news media find out our toilets aren’t working and that’s all they’ll talk about for the next two weeks, he told himself.

    Jamie had insisted, from the very beginning of the expedition’s planning, that the whole team should have dinner together whenever possible. Everyone in the dome must come together for the evening meal; only those out on field excursions were excused. There had to be one time during each day when they could all get together, discuss the day’s work casually, informally, and relax and socialize.
    Once the chemical toilets were carried into the dome and installed in the two lavatories, everyone washed up from the water supply they had brought with them and congregated at the galley tables. Jamie started pushing the tables together to make one large table; Fuchida immediately came over to help.
    Then they lined up at the microwave ovens, heating the precooked meals that each person had taken from his or her personal store of supplies.
    “It’s been an eventful day,” Jamie said, once they were all seated.
    “Tomorrow will be better,” said Trudy Hall. It was a line she had used almost every day of their journey from Earth. She said it with an enforced, almost desperate kind of cheerfulness that made Jamie wonder about her.
    “Tomorrow will be better only if the toilets are working,” Stacy Dezhurova added. She was sitting next to Hall, thickset big-boned Russian next to the slight little English sparrow.
    “They will be,” said Trumball confidently. Then he turned to Craig. “Won’t they, Wiley?”
    “Sure, sure,” Craig said, pronouncing it, Shore, shore.
    Rodriguez looked up from his tamales and retried beans. “They better be,” he said.
    Jamie wanted to get off the subject. “Dex,” he called out, “what about the backup water generator? Will we have to move it?”
    Trumball sat exactly opposite Jamie. Deliberately, Jamie had chosen a seat in the middle of the table. He did not want to appear to be placing himself at its head. Trumball hail taken the chair on the other side.
    The backup water generator had been launched two years earlier, on the same booster as the methane fuel generator. The uncrewed landing vehicle, without direct human guidance, had set itself down more than two kilometers away from the dome.
    Before Trumball could reply, Craig