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Published:

January 31, 2025

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The man sat on the floor, waiting for the wind to stop.

 

It had been howling for hours, just beyond the space where he sat, blasting away with unimaginable force, and separated from him by an eighth of an inch of plastic wallboard. Less at the seams. He had no idea why it was the wall hadn't given way and lacked the education even to speculate.

 

The chamber where he found himself was a safety baffle: bland and uninteresting, oddly shaped, clearly not designed for occupancy. Doubtless the last person who had been here was one of the maintenance patrol, going on their regular inspection tours. That they had found no problems was evident from the unbroken surface of the insulation along the Outside walls. It hadn't been touched since construction finished, nearly eleven years ago now.


Eleven Earth years, that is. In Mars years, that worked out to... Hmm.

 

He concentrated, trying to remember all the conversion factors, but eventually gave it up as irrelevant. Nobody cared about the Mars year unless they had to work in it, Outside. Even then, it didn't make much difference. It was cold and airless out there the whole year round.

 

Except today. Today, there was air outside, where it shouldn't be. Air was precious, had cost a fortune to manufacture along with millions of man-hours of work, but the torrent continued regardless. He wondered why nothing had been done to stop it, but his mind foundered on the question, unable even to grasp the scope of the disaster in which he was trapped.

 

To be fair, it wasn't something that had been considered possible before today. All the dome's safety systems were widely touted as infinitely redundant, massive, failure-proof, with hundreds of safely partitioned small domes and tubes nesting within each of the dozens of larger ones, all huddled together beneath each of the six massive interlocked structures that made up the crater city. The smallest breach caused pressure locks to seal, bulkheads to slam shut. Repair crews trained endlessly even though incidents were vanishingly rare.

 

Yet something had caused this; it must have. What, he had no idea. He'd been riding the trolley home from work when it happened. He heard a bang, and the next thing he knew his car was off the rails, skidding toward a gaping hole in the wall. It had jammed crosswise, and of all the passengers, he alone had had the presence of mind to dash out the back door and sprint for shelter. The trolley's shrieking metal as it crumpled, drawn inexorably through the gaping hole in the dome wall, made a noise that would haunt him to the end of his days.

 

If he survived, that is, an eventuality that seemed increasingly unlikely as the wind wailed on, escaping in torrents into the near vacuum of Outside. The airtight hatch had slammed shut behind him, locking him in. He had no tools, nothing but his coveralls and ident card.

 

He was surprised to discover that, despite the terror coursing up and down his spine, he was bored. Finding nothing to do once he'd gotten stuck inside the baffle chamber, he'd promptly sat on the floor and waited. Every few minutes, he'd try again to envision some small part of what must be unfolding outside these walls -- the grand dome crumpling overhead, people suffocating or being blown Outside by the hundreds -- but his mind, confronted with the unthinkable, simply refused to accept it.

 

Had he been thinking clearly, he would have recognized the symptoms of shock. But he wasn't.

 

The thin plastic wall ahead of him vibrated in the wind. With a start he recognized it must be looser than he'd thought. He couldn't imagine why it was that the air in here with him didn't blow it out. He failed to realize the awful truth: that much had already escaped, equalizing pressure, and that his brain was slowly starving from lack of oxygen.

 

Instead, his mind returned to the banal and pointless. Let's see: a year on Earth was 365 days, and on Mars it was 669 days -- or was it 686? ...but was that Mars days or Earth days? Days on Mars were, hmm, forty minutes longer, that's... uh...

 

After a while, he fell asleep. If he dreamed, he never knew.

Copyright 2024 - SFS Publishing LLC

The Wind

He hadn't heard it in years...

J. Millard Simpson

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