Fifty-five sols hath September,
April, June, and November;
Fifty-six have all the rest,
Including February, subject to test:
Fifty-six sols comprise the norm,
But each fifth rev, three more's the form.

I wrote a Discrepancy Report on the Comm Controllers in Pasadena -- NOT on the downlink noise. Competency is the issue; they don't seem to understand that superior conjunction is less than twenty degrees away. As the Earth approaches a point exactly opposite the sun from us, the radio link wades through more and more solar plasma. The sun pumps it out and churns it up, and the turbulence -- mainly the free electrons -- phase modulates the signal with noise and plays hell with communications.

They should have known this. Who's on duty down there? Or maybe we shouldn't expect too much from this project anymore. At least we still have Thorny.

The downlink wasn't the only thing that was screwy this morning. I wrote an Anomaly Report on the food packet --

There was a noise in the middle of the night. I know every sound on the station and when to expect it, but this wasn't one of them. Usually the biggest noise maker is the greenhouse, next door to our bedroom. The water scavengers in the rotating growers come on every hour. They're not particularly loud, but at first they drove me nuts. Then I got used to them. The air plenums beneath the stationary growers gurgle like somebody sucking the last drops of milk shake through a straw. I complained to Charles, but he shrugged it off, said, "Nothing I can do, Cap'n. Design deficiency." I pointed out that he was one of the station designers, that maybe we should swap bedrooms so that the designer and his wife could live closer to the problem, but before it became an issue we got used to that too, so it didn't matter. There are noises all over the place -- the station squeaks and groans continually from uneven heating as we do our once-a-day rotation -- but we got used to all of them eventually.

THIS sound I'd never heard. It wasn't loud -- a faint "whupp" -- but I was awake instantly, scrambling out of the bag in pitch darkness. I accidentally caught Andra in the side with an elbow, and she grabbed my arm and mumbled "Wot? What's going on?" without fully waking up. She's never been particularly tense about things like this. She should be. Any unaccounted noise in deep space on the other side of the sun from home is potentially fatal.

Collided with Charles in the bedroom hallway and we split up. He went north through the greenhouse and galley, and I took the other direction, through OPS-1 into the East Wing.

He found it. A food packet had exploded in the pantry. Pea soup. A partially hydrated package of concentrated split-pea soup had blown out and made a mess. There were still gobs floating around inside the storage cabinet, but most of it coated the inside surface. At first we thought it had spoiled or fermented, but it smelled okay, and Laura tested a sample and it was all right.

So, I wrote a Discrepancy Report on the Comm Controllers and an Anomaly Report on the mysterious exploding food packet, and put them both on the Daily Downlink Summary file, but they'll probably go into the same bureaucratic black hole as all the rest of the requests we make to the project.

Lee Thornton's news uplink comes rolling in at the usual 1000 sharp, Tharsis time. He's never admitted he has to work at keeping that schedule so precisely, considering the continually changing light-time and the fact that our day ("Sol", Andra's voice echoes) is forty minutes longer than his. It means his schedule has to slip around the clock by twenty-four hours about every five weeks. For six months now -- six Earth months since we arrived on orbit, his uplink has started every morning at the stroke of our local ten o'clock.

"Barely made it this morning, folks," he says, grinning slyly. Thorny always looks like a kid with a secret he can't wait to unload.

"Suzanne and I were going east on the third level of the Foothill Freeway and we got caught in a godawful jam. Snipers had taken out a bus ahead of us. The bus slammed a center-post, folded up like an accordion with a big hole in the side, rolled about a hundred meters and came to rest across three lanes. It was a real mess, bodies and blood all over the place -- I ain't exaggerating much -- and the whole third level westbound, all five lanes, got totally blocked by the wrecking crews and ambulances and fire trucks and police, and, oh yeah, the vultures. There must have been a couple of thousand vultures -- the human kind -- looting and picking over the victims. The police shot a few of them before they'd stay away. After that came the gawkers -- walking around, supervising the rescue and funeral services you know.

"I'll bet a hundred thousand people got hung up, no kidding. Anyhow, we weren't worried about the looters -- we had our guns handy. What did worry us, though -- what Suzanne and I were thinking most of the time was, Jesus, people! What if that's only the first shoe and the bastards are ready to drop the other one with a bomb or a chem or something, as soon as enough sheep herd together in one place. Wasn't pretty thinking. Anyhow, obviously they didn't." He spreads his arms in a flourish.

"After we got off the freeway it took nearly an hour to get into the La Crescenta enclave, security was so nervous. They had a line of cars two kilometers long backed up at the gate.

"Nobody knows who the snipers were. They'll probably advertise later today. Suzanne thinks it's the Righteous Tide, but I'm betting on the Brokers. We got into the pool at work. Some of the other prime choices are the Feudalists and the Neo-Know-Nothings, but it could have been any of them: the Mother Mary's or the Swanzies, or Sepulveda Corner, or Amigas, or South Side. Don't know how we'll decide the pool 'cause they'll all take credit, and they'll all be lying."

Thorny grins wickedly, but freckles and sparkling blue eyes spoil the effect. He puts on a conspiratorial air, but we all know there's not a Machiavellian bone in his body. Maybe a cartilage or two, but no bones. He looks like an eager schoolboy instead of the jaded thirty-four year old man of the world he tries to project.

"Aren't you sorry you're missing this, folks, tucked away in the lap of security and under population out there amongst the planets and the stars? Oh thank God we didn't launch last December, or I wouldn't be here to catch all this action."

If they had launched, Thorny and Suzanne and Tom and Linda would be our relief crew here on the station, and we'd be down at Cradle.

Cradle! We're in Mars synchronous orbit, performing a slow, once-a-day oscillation seventeen thousand kilometers above Tharsis Ridge, almost exactly over Pavonis Mons. Down there, neatly tucked into a small meteorite crater named Jacobson near the foothills of Pavonis, is our new home: Tharsis Cradle. That's where our children will be born, and their children, and their children's children; for as far as we can see into the future.

Twelve Harwood modules nestle inside Jacobson. They all plunked down on chutes within a few kilometers of each other. Mariah and George hauled them in, one at a time, and for the last six months -- since we arrived on orbit last April -- we've supervised them while they plugged everything together and did system checks. The twelfth module went into place two months ago.

When the four of us get down there, we'll have power cans, machine shops, mining equipment, green houses, manufacturing facilities, livestock modules -- enough to support us indefinitely.

When we get there? Make that if we get there.