“I ran out of razor blades and had to use the wind-up. Beats the hell out of your face.”

“Looks like you’ll have to make do without blades for a few days more. Hurricane Caroline is stalled in the Atlantic, so the shuttle’s being delayed.”

“How long?”

“Three days, maybe five. Depends on when Caroline clears out.”

“Christ,” said Tighe. “I have a frazzled crew, a bunch of immature scientists, and now this.”

“Can’t do anything about Mother Nature,” said Henderson. “And you forgot the Martians.”

“I’m trying to forget about them.”

The two men ran through their daily housekeeping chores—analyzing the amount of food, water, air, and fuel remaining on board, plotting the orbital path, coordinating the photographs that would be taken by the camera array on the station’s nadir platform. Meteorologists were especially anxious to get all the photos of Caroline that they could provide. One task originally scheduled for today’s communication—fixing the rendezvous with the shuttle-would have to wait.

“One more thing,” said Henderson. “Trikon has added another scientist to the next rotation. His name is Hugh O’Donnell. American biochemist. I don’t have his file yet, but I see that he has standing orders to report to your medical officer on a daily basis.”

“Health risk?”

“Looks it.” Henderson arched his eyebrows. “I’ll shoot you his file as soon as I receive it.”

“Keep me posted on the shuttle.”

“Roger that,” said Henderson. “Out,”

Tighe removed the headset and clipped it to its receptacle on the wall. It was important to fasten down everything in microgravity. Otherwise they somehow floated away, lost until they turned up stuck to an intake ventilator grid. Tighe remembered waking up in the middle of the night on his first shuttle flight to find a green snake gliding toward him. It took him a couple of panicked heartbeats to realize that it was the garden hose that one of the mission specialists had brought aboard for a botany experiment. The jerk hadn’t tied it down properly and it was undulating like a cobra across the mid-deck section where the crew slept.