The garden bay door slid open, and George stiffened like a cornered animal. One of the newcomers. Barely more than a girl. Since when did they allow kids to emigrate? “Don’t touch anything,” he said. The soil was in delicate balance, and who knows what Earth microbes she’d brought with her.

The sound of laughter and voices upstairs cut off abruptly as the door closed. George watched warily as the girl made a show of sanitizing her hands all the way up to the elbows. “You don’t like parties?” she asked.

“Had some pH tests to run.” When George left, they’d been passing around a bottle of whiskey to celebrate the landing. Like a damn frat house. Ever since the blowout four years ago, they’d been keeping the hab at three-quarters of an atmosphere. At that pressure, drink made you stupid fast. And on Mars, stupidity could kill.

The girl knelt down and buried her hands in the dirt, sifting it between her fingers. Despite the intrusion, George felt a stab of pride at the way the earth broke into clods in her grasp. Ten years ago, that soil had been dust. “You know what that is, right?” he asked.

“Composted human excrement. And you’ll be pleased to hear we’ve got half a metric ton of freeze-dried shit on the lander to add to it. I’ve got a PhD in microbiology. I earned my slot on the Express. I’m not some trust fund tourist like those idiots upstairs.”

The thought of that much fresh biomass did cheer him up, but only slightly. “Also, composted human remains,” George said.

She dusted off her hands and came over to sit on the stool next to him. “I know.”

“Sasha, Jamal, Ling, Ed, Ari,” said George, nodding down at the dirt lodged under her fingernails. They’d come to Mars knowing they would die here sooner or later. Before the Express, there had been no ticket home.

She didn’t try to touch him, thankfully, but she laid a hand down on the lab bench next to his. “I’m sorry.”

He compared their hands. His skin was brown from the grow lights. Leathery. Nine months in a Hohmann transfer orbit, baked by radiation, had aged all of them prematurely. Her skin was pale from spending the past two months cooped up in a nuclear-powered tin can. Straight to Mars and back, and damn the fuel efficiency.

“I’m supposed to help in the garden,” she said. “Didn’t you read the manifest?”

“Never got around to it. Been busy.”

“We sent it six months ago.” She sighed. “Well, I’m Kate.”

“George.”

“I know. Everyone on Earth knows your name.”

He waited for her to say any of the things that would break him. How heroic he had been to volunteer, ten years before the Express made his sacrifice obsolete. What a good job he had done with such limited supplies and expertise. He waited for her to say that now she was here, he could go back to Earth if he wanted.

Instead, she said, “Can you show me around the lab?”

“It’s not much compared to what you’ve got back home. Hardly worth coming a hundred million miles just to see it.”

“But I did.”

“Yeah. You did.” He got to his feet and took a deep breath. The garden bay had a smell like nowhere else in the habitat— fresh, musky, raw. “Well, here are the tomatoes. Everyone walks in and comments on how tall they are.” At one-third gravity, height came easy. “It took two months for them to grow this big. But it took…”

“Ten years to grow the soil. I know.”

George stooped down to untangle a tomato vine; he didn’t want to cry in front of a newcomer. “Yeah. Ten years.” 

She understood.