chapter 1, episode 4

Re-entry and some introductory composting theory

"No, nothing else," said Rocco.

"Good, I'd like to finish this book in peace. I'm at the stage where the momentum is really picked up. You get a lot of reading done in that stage."

"Just plowing through," said Rocco.

"Yep." We went back to our books.

At some point, Rocco made a coffee, boiling the water on the woodstove and mixing it with the coffee grounds into a bodum. I put so much milk in mine that it was only lukewarm. I don't drink much coffee, it makes me too jittery and I usually have to take a shit right away. I don't mind that, having to take a shit, but I like to let my system do it in it's own time. It's always worked well for me, so why pressure it?

I was actually in the john, book in hand, when we started re-entry. Well, 'in' isn't really the right word because the toilet was out in the open with everything else in the module. It was basically a wooden box, efficiently constructed by Rocco, with a nice oak toilet seat on it. Inside the box was a plastic bucket. The contents of the bucket eventually went to a compost pile back down in earth. This was how all the toilets worked on the compound. We'd been building up our humanure compost piles for almost a decade now and had some darn good shit-eating carrots.

Reluctantly, I got up. I threw a couple handfuls of fine sawdust to cover my addition to the bucket. The carbon in the sawdust helped to soak up the nitrogen in my waste, absorbing the odor and beginning the composting process.

"Bucket's about half-full," I said.

Rocco grunted. Systems like these needed constant monitoring.

I sat down on the console and strapped myself in. Rocco stayed on the couch, reading. I set the module for re-entry, arming the fire retarders and re-aligning the nose to minimize friction. There was a lot of cloud coverage over the Rockies. I checked the weather. It called for snow. I IM'd Master Thomas about it.

>Is it gonna snow?

I didn't hear anything immediately. He was probably playing Virtual UT with Horst. We didn't have enough processing power on the module's computer, but if it was snowing and those guys were still playing I might be able to make it back to the Excelsior Club and log on.

The module started to shake. I put on the seatbelt. It just made me feel more snug. Rocco hooked his feet into the space between the seat and the back of the couch. External temperature went up.

>>got a foot of powder last night

"Rocco, Master says we got a dump last night."

"How much."

"A foot."

"Sweet."

>Rocco says sweet. U playing UT?

>>Was. Horst has to go to work.

>Too bad. See you later.

>>Next time. Later.

We came through the atmosphere and now you could feel the gravity. My brain started to fill up with pressure and I was very glad that I had just taken a dump.

"I'm glad I just... took a dump..." I gasped to Rocco, who though squished down, was still reading. The book was getting closer and closer to his face.

We could hear the module groaning and creaking against the pressure. I worried about the seals, the gaskets. We were pretty careful with those things. Well, not careful, we were actually kind of sloppy but we always overdid everything to make sure it wouldn't break. It wasn't the most efficient method, but we were so frugal with all of our other resources that we felt we could splurge a bit on our building materials. It was kind of an unspoken philosophy of construction for us. However, during re-entry and other load-bearing situations I sometimes wished I'd been an engineer and really done these things properly. I mean, Jeebus, this was a spaceship after all!

But she settled in nicely once we got down through the cloud layer. Rocco suddenly jumped up. He came over to me and looked at the monitor. I opened up the weather window.

"Yeah, it looks like it's snowing good. You going to jump?" I asked.

He was already putting on his skiing gear. He was stuffing his book into the front of his bib.

"Here, give that to me," I said. "I'll bring it in for you."

"Thanks," He replied and handed it to me. He put a baby blue shell on top, his inca toque with the earflaps on his head and his styley yellow sunglasses. He went for the airlock.

"No chute?" I asked. The reading said we were at 40,000 feet.

"Nah, I don't want to repack it."

"Fair enough. They're your knees!"

"Later, dude" He had his telemark skis in his hand. He would strap them on in the airlock. If you put them on inside the module you'd never get out. We had to learn that one. It was a pretty funny scene at the time.

"Hang on a couple secs, I'll get us over the top of Mt. 7. I'll beep you in the airlock when we're there."

He closed the airlock door. I checked the scanner. We were still a bit north of Golden. I thought for a moment about buzzing him early, as a joke, let him out over Jasper. But we had a lot of work to do and he probably knew where he was anyways. He was that good...