Donald of Mars Episodes 1-5

A story about living on a Mars Colony.

These chapters were originally published on Kindle Vella and are still available elsewhere. The story is an ongoing serial.

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Chapter 1: End of a labor contract

“I Just heard back from personnel on earth. They are willing to up your pay and bonus twenty-five percent if you sign on for another tour and doubled their offer if you take the foreman’s job.”

“Still no, Eddy,” he told the fat man sitting behind his desk. “I have no intention of being a grunt for the next two and half years and there is no way I will take on that crew of newbies the home office is sending us.” and I sure as hell am not going to work under you for another tour.

“I need you. Ninety percent of the people didn’t re-up their contracts. Most of those are heading back to earth. You’re staying. You heard their offer. What can I add to it that will get you to run one of these crews?”

Your heart, roasted over a fire, would be a good start. “I have my own place to build. Once I have that up, I will take on work on a job-by-job terms. But not under contract.”

“Your completion bonus isn’t going to cover that cost. The sign-on bonus as foreman would put you much closer to being able to cover it.”

“My life saving plus completion bonus will cover the shell. The bank has already signed a contract to loan me enough to finish once I have an inspected shell.”

“You have that much put back?”

“Yes,” he lied. This fat fuck didn’t need to know about his deal getting the bricks.

“Strange, you don’t act like someone with that big a nest-egg.”

And those judgmental statements are another reason no one wants to work for you. “Speaking of completion bonus, you haven’t released mine yet. I need you to do it.”

“I was only waiting to make you this last offer to know if I needed to cut a bigger check or not.”

Lying bastard. They have been in your account for two weeks. Every day you hold on to them, you are collecting interest.

“I’ll enter that satisfactory termination now. That will give you three days to clear your lockers and such before being locked out.”

As soon as Eddy finished typing, his own phone beeped. A glance at it showed the full amount now deposited.

“Thanks,” he said, standing up.

“I can keep that offer open a few more weeks,” Eddy said, offering his hand.

Despite his distaste, Donald shook hands with the massive man, then turned and left his office.

Fat Eddy was an example of why you didn’t skip the three hours a day in the gym that living on mars required. With his tremendous weight and soft bones from skipping the gym, he couldn’t go home now.

Was that why the company wasn’t replacing the fat fool? They would be paying as much or more in disability support for him to live here on Mars as they are giving him now. Donald thought that over as he made his way down the narrow, inflated tunnel to the wider brick one. Cason Construction still maintains their office in the prefab habitat instead of one of the newer buildings they had built.

Once he reached the tunnel intersection, he sighed. The two-meter-high inflated tunnels in this section of town with all the prefab habits gave him the creeps. He didn’t need to hunch over to walk them, but several of the taller residents did.

As most did who used this section of the three-meter tall three-meter-wide brick tunnel, he paused and inhaled the scent of the two-year-old yellow roses that lined the north side. He had opposed putting in roses and not something more useful.

Time had taught him better. The more useful the plant in the public areas, the more busy-bodies that will ‘look after it’. Except for raspberries, all the fruit bushes in public spaces had horrific die off rates.

Looking down the tunnel, he frowned. Once more, some paranoid busybody had closed the tunnel pressure doors again. He was all for keeping side tunnel doors and intersection doors closed as a safety measure, but those main ones were another matter. Tunnel environmental health depended on the bees and other insects moving freely down their entire length, not just the one hundred meter sections separated by each pressure door. It wasn’t that critical now; this ecology was only two years old. He opened up the one in the direction he was headed.

Sure enough, several bees were waiting to get back to their hive. He had to open three more doors before Yellow Rose tunnel joined the brand new and bigger, Cedar tunnel. That junction door he closed back when he changed tunnels.

At four-point-one meters tall and five wide, it was the largest finished tunnel on Mars, but the Pine tunnel under construction was going to be four-point-five meters tall. Currently, the center planters had hundreds of sprouting seedlings in each. In a few weeks, they would remove half of them and anyone who wanted one could have one. Donald would wait and get one on a later sorting. In a year they would be down to only five per planter, expecting to be down to two in five years with them having to be kept trimmed at that size.

Donald hoped that the gold finches survived this trip from earth. Two trips in a row they hadn’t.

He took the third side tunnel on the right and was at Brock’s Gym two doors down that small with it’s failed grape vines.

Chapter 2 Brock’s Gym

“Hi Miray,” Donald smiled at the olive-skinned girl behind the counter at Brock’s Gym, or rather, one of the eight independently owned Brock’s gyms franchises here on Mars. His ex-employer, like most other earth-based employers here, preferred doing business with franchises, so gym owners belonged to one franchise or another. There were a lot of gyms on mars, far more than any population that size usually has by a huge margin. “Your brother Mohammad around?”

“Hello Donald. No. But I just got a notification that your company canceled your membership.”

“Yes, I am independent now. How long before I need to find a new gym?”

Her voice was sharper than usual. “You can set up a membership with me, pay daily, or look elsewhere.”

“I don’t even get today?”

“Fraid not. Your company paid by the hour, after the fact. Since far too many of their employees skip too many sessions, it is really cheaper that way for the company.”

“Alright Miray, I’ll cover this time, but I am going to be stuck moving to a cheaper gym. Might even need to buy weights and become a tunnel runner.”

“If you can stay up with it, it is not a bad route to go to save money, but you need to get a good weight suit, not just buy a few weights.” She paused, then went on, “You can get one use right now at just shipping cost. There are dozens of them listed for sale right now with so many people shipping out in six weeks, but the new arrivals still two weeks out. You need one to get a good workout. But I am going to warn you. Most everyone that goes that route starts skipping workouts. Skipped workouts are the number one reason that ninety percent of people planning to become permanent colonist return to Earth; and for those planning to return to earth, each skipped workout means two extra days recovering.”

Chickens in the corner of the outer room began kicking up a fuss.

“Oops, feeding time,” Miray said and came out from behind the counter.

The tight pink body suit she always wore emphasized her graceful movements across the floor in this Mars’ gravity, riveting his attention on her. Like himself, she was lean. Most people who ran gyms were lean, though few others here more than two years were. More than any country on Earth, people on Mars were fat. Too bad she had no intention of dating someone not Islamic.

Watching her feed them, he said, “I hear the market is saturated and many don’t even break even on chickens now.”

“I break even on eggs alone. So can anyone else that doesn’t try to cut corners with the feed. You don’t use cheap feeds you make up at home if you want high egg production. Those might be fine for most aquaponics systems, Guinea pigs, or pets. Egg production requires better if you don’t want fewer, and smallish eggs.”

“I was considering not having them in the place I am building. Only the fish in the aquaponic system for meat.”

She gave him a hard look and her voice softened from the colder one she had been using. “Going independent and building your own place, I’m impressed. Don’t skip out on the chickens, and hold on to the feathers until demand is high. You have nine major buyers for them, but how much they are willing to pay for them fluctuates wildly, so hold them until prices are high. Selling eggs will pay for your feed. There are four major companies that always buy them for one and a half their weight in feed. You can add rabbits if you like rabbit. You won’t sell those for more than breakeven though, even using cheap feeds you make yourself, so only raise those if you plan on eating them yourself.”

Had she thought his quitting his job was because he was going home?

“I don’t mind eating rabbit or Guinea, but I don’t think I could raise them to eat. They are too cute.” Until he got to Mars, he would not even eat them.

“Then don’t. There are always people raising rabbit willing to trade. One and a half kilos of chicken or two kilos of most fish will get you one kilo of rabbit. Don’t put yourself out about it. I don’t raise them or Guinea pigs either, but always have some in my freezer.”

Could he kill chickens he raised? But she had a point about the eggs and feathers. The T-shirt and jockey-shorts he had on were a combination of hemp and feather fiber locally made, and were as good as any he had owned back on Earth.

“Let me finish getting this fed, and I will help you into your weight suit and get you started.”

“Why are your chickens here instead of your main environmental room in the basement?”

She laughed, “So they can remind me to feed them on time and I have enough eggs to pay for their feed. Unlike many, I don’t have automatic feeders for them.”

He grinned back. That made a lot of sense.

He gave the weight suit a far greater inspection than usual, this time with an eye of someone that would need to buy their own. A standard gymnasium weight suit had enough led weights to weigh more than twice what the person putting it on did. The ones at Brocks had thick plastic-coated led bands that gave it a look of some mid-evil armor.

He smiled, remembering a runner he hadn’t seen in the halls in a year whose weight suit looked just like a knight in full armor, complete with sword and shield. I wonder what happened to the runner and his suit.

A glance at the mirror and he knew he needed a bodysuit, too. Jockey shorts and t-shirt under it might be fine for the gym, but not hall running.

As Miray was buckling it on, he said. “Putting one on alone at home is going to be a bitch.”

“The cheaper ones are easier to put on by yourself. If you buy a high quality one that can be vacuum freeze cleaned and my customers can use it when you are not, you can keep it here and I will help you into and out of it.”

“That is something well worth considering. Are you willing to let me run through my Tai Chi before I start my run here?”

“On one condition. You turn your Tai Chi session into a regular class that any of my members can join free of charge. I have been watching you for a year. You know what you are doing. For that, you get a locker, three minutes of shower every day, but the paying members get priority.”

A look at her face and he thought better of making a counteroffer, of asking for a full membership and access to the other equipment here.

“Okay, we will try that as soon as I find a good weight suit.”

Moving to the center of the room, he started his Tai Chi routine and Miray began helping a new arrival into their weight suit. Only after he finished that would he get on the resistance machines for a full workout.

Chapter 3 Fong’s Fish and Fowl

Workout finished, starved, Donald went two doors down. Unlike most immigrants, within the first two months of being on Mars, he cashed out his company meal plan. But like almost everyone on Mars, he had changed his eating habits to eating two meals a day instead of three meals plus snacks, as he had on Earth. But not the company guaranteed meals. Those high calorie meals made a terrible situation worse and contributed to why so few were healthy enough to stay more than the two and a half years between launch windows. It didn’t matter which company either. Western companies were bread, pasta, and beans, with a bit of meat and vegetables. Eastern companies were rice, noodles and beans, with a bit of meat and vegetables. Both were equally bad here.

By the United Nations Treaty protecting people going into space, earth-based companies must provide meals. These did so by offering monthly meal plans in company run commissaries. The small companies that didn’t have their own commissaries contracted it to the larger companies. Over seventy percent of what they offered was pasta or dehydrated instant rice or shipped from earth. Also, by law, they must offer an option to cash it out if people wanted to eat elsewhere. Few took that cash out. The monthly cash out value didn’t cover a week of eating in the eateries, eating the same amount of food you could get in the commissaries.

But Mars colonists didn’t need that much food. The commissary calories plan was based on what a general laborer needed on earth, with the assumption that you would have three hours of an intense physical work out in a gym every day that put you on that level. But as he found out, if you cleaned your plate in the commissary, you would not burn it off in the workout. It had taken him six months to find Fong’s, but once he had, he rarely ate anywhere else. Still, even with eating smaller meals, eating at Fong’s cost him twice what he had cashed out for.

The aroma from the kitchen downstairs reminded him of just how worth it those wonderful meals were. Like Brock’s and nearly every resident owned business, Fong’s was on the top floor of the dome they lived in and owned, not some place they rented. Unlike Brock’s, which was a brother and sister operation, Fong’s was husband, wife, and seventeen-year-old son. Their son Fang was the third youngest person to be approved for mars, when he got here at fourteen, almost fifteen. Since including teenagers in this last arrival, Earth revised the minimum age upwards to twenty-five, but it was being disputed. Only a few teens would remain after this load left, as nearly all had major health problems that required a trip to earth. None staying here were younger than Fang. He was proud that they were not shipping him home and about to become the youngest man on Mars. With his dad’s full support, he had a contract with an earth media company for a daily podcast to start the day of liftoff titled that. Donald liked the always ever-chipper, talkative young man.

It had been Fang who introduced him to their neighbors, Miray and Mohammad, and their gym, and got him to move his company gym membership there. To put off those health issues, his dad made him eat healthy and put in three hours in the gym twice a day from the first day here.

“What is good today, Fang?”

“The catfish on steamed spiced cabbage. If that isn’t to your taste, then the crayfish mixed vegetable is good.”

Donald learned long ago; in this place, take what they recommend. They never recommend things to get rid of them, but tell you what is freshest. “Catfish it is.” Because of Fang and his extra low-carb diet, you would never find rice, beans, bread or pasta offered with any meal in Fong’s. His dad didn’t put things on the menu that Fang wasn’t eating. You would also not find people grossly overweight eating here as you did in most every commissary on Mars.

“Peppermint tea?”

“Yes, please.”

Peppermint was on the first manned ship to land on mars and was part of the environmental system here. Any place that served food would give you peppermint tea for the same price as water, which, unlike earth, was never free.

When Fang brought out the tea, Donald said, “I am planning out the aquaponics garden for the place I am building. Can you ask your dad what things I might include that he would be willing to buy, I doubt there will be excess fish for sale, but I will likely have plenty of produce.”

He looked thoughtful before answering. “Not any of the common one he uses daily. He has good reliable suppliers for those plus contracts with them. But if it’s too exotic, his customers are not going to eat it. But if you have income that will hold you over, certain of the nuts may be good choices for the future. Real tea might be a good one, as he is always short on it, but I can’t guarantee it. A number of people have immature plants and will start harvesting them next year. But the market is always changing. He might suddenly need something that he is currently getting plenty of, especially with this new group going up. It is four more passenger ships than last time. All four are each larger and carrying more than the older ships returning. The population is going to grow by ten percent despite all the people leaving. Dad expects the number that will stay past their two-and-a-half-year contract to grow from ten percent to close to twenty.”

Donald smiled. Like most teenage boys, Fang liked to talk and show what he knew. Today, Donald had time to kill and was in a mood to indulge him. “Why is that?”

“Dad says demographics. The number of middle-aged married couples has doubled in this group. Whether independents, or on company contract, that group has the lowest return rates,”

“Might be something to that.” Don heard this trip contained more Middle-Eastern and Indian people with three of the launches coming out of the United Arab Emirates, but not that it included a larger percentage of middle-aged married couples. He wondered what else he had missed.

“Dad knew a year ago that this year was tour was going to be as bad as the one before it. Almost no one that isn’t dedicated to hitting the gym every day at the four-month point is going to stay past the end of their term. By six months, half the people are hitting the gym that were hitting them right after the ships landed.”

Donald, Fang and Fang’s mother, had been in the last group. Time to change the subject.

“Pardon me for being nosey, but it doesn’t look like you can make much of a profit on your customer level.”

“The restaurant doesn’t. Dad says it won’t start making a profit for five more years. I am hoping my podcast cuts down that time. But it isn’t losing money either. Like most every other homeowner, if not for selling soy, hemp and bamboo, we would be hurting.”

“You pressing the soy for oil and fermenting the meal?” Donald didn’t want to ferment but had heard he would get more selling the oil and using the fermented bean meal himself.

“Used to. Used to make the feed for our fish that way. Then prices change and it was better to sell raw bean and buy the feed than wasting that much time and space on the project.”

Chai-Hao Fong, Fang’s dad, thought things out. If he figured it wasn’t cost effective to ferment his own fish food from soya meal, he was most likely right. He had been an engineer on the original construction crew that set up the prefabs. Only nine members of them were still alive on Mars and none of them in great health, though none so gone as Fat Eddy, who arrived one trip later, one trip before Donald. Chai-Hao was probably in the best of shape of the surviving originals and still did his morning workout with his son.

Mei Fong brought out his catfish and set it down. That was the only hint that Fang needed to stop talking and return to work.

Besides being a well-qualified engineer, Chai- Hao Fong was an expert in the kitchen. He seasoned the catfish and cabbage to perfection.

The conversation confirmed much of what Donald’s research told him. Even a large three-story dome was too small to produce food profitability. His aquaponic system needed to be geared to produce no more of that than he needed. Four-fifths of it needed to be dedicated to the production of soy and fiber for outside sales. Like many private resident domes. He was building it with the opinion of having some kind of public business in the top floor.

Two more people came in together but took separate tables, making half the tables in Fong’s taken. He’d seen both a time or two in Fong’s but didn’t know them. He might try to get to know them after the ship out date. Chances were good that they would be here, as neither were fat, though both had more weight on them than he or Fang carried.

Waiting to see if someone was still here after the return trip left was a common reaction from all the homeowners he was finding out. He checked his phone. It had gone up two tens of a percentage point since he last checked. Eighty-two point seven percent of the total population of Mars was returning this trip. With so few staying, it was going to take a long time before the target of population of one million was reached. Once the builder finished the Dole dome and production started, they could start offering a healthier diet, but he doubted they would change it enough to matter. The big one was, as Chai-Hao said, people stopped taking their need to do three hours of exercise every day seriously. People really needed to develop healthy exercise and eating habits long before they ever boarded a rocket bound here.

Chapter 4: Stein and Schmidt Construction

Donald entered the less than one-year-old Stein and Schmidt dome. A life-size portrait of both men standing in one of the early modules greeted him. It was how this company honored the two company founders. By the time construction finished on this dome, both Stein and Schmidt had returned to Germany with major health problems. The Stein and Schmidt dome, being five stories, differed from most of the three domes people on Mars built. Further, the tunnel access was on the bottom floor, not the top because of its outside airlock. Three out of Donald’s five trips outside had been since this building opened and through that airlock on its top floor.

Vikrant Negi, a robotics engineer from India, turned company manager for Schmidt, Stein, and a bunch of German investors, stepped off the treadmill that was behind his desk and just past the entrance. “Donald, good to see you. How are you doing? Since you’re not scheduled as an operator, what brings you here?”

“Doing great. Just got my contractor license and here to schedule and pay for my first project. How are you?”

The usually cheerful man piped up, “Great, Great. Just talked to both my cousin and his wife on the ship. Both are having a much easier time with the crossing than I had and will arrive in better shape. I can’t wait to see them. Full project uploaded? You have your operators?”

Donald smiled at the middle-aged Indian man. Part of Vikrant’s agreement with Stein and Schmidt for taking over when both had to return to earth had been that they send two members of his family here on each of the next three trips and give them jobs. Donald envied him and others having family here. He didn’t know of a single person in his own family physically fit enough to come to Mars, much less having the right attitude, though one young second cousin he swapped videos with might when they were old enough if they kept on the way they were going.

“Yes, DONALD 108. All six operators and their contractor numbers are listed there.”

Getting five operators besides himself had been a major hurdle. Ninety-five percent of all current operators were returning to Earth, and he didn’t know any of the ones that were coming in. Nor could he meet the mandated company policy hiring those, as none would have a contractor’s license. Dealing with EU companies like Schmidt and Stein that had to obey EU regulation was a pain. It had come close to killing his dream of building his own home here. The regulation there to prevent the big companies from screwing people over prevented the small guy from getting anything done. There was no way for him to pay those salaries and benefits. His mentor, Quentin, showed him the work around. He would use five contractors, each taking care of their own salaries and benefits from the fees they charge. Donald’s payment to each was to provide an operator for their own projects, either himself or someone that he hired for the amount of time they gave him at a later date.

He would miss Quentin when he returned to Earth. The man had been a fount of good advice. But too much overtime and not enough gym time had done him in. Putting in the contracted eleven-hour workdays is bad enough. You still have time to hit the gym, but not if you routinely accept the overtime. Quentin may have earned three times what Donald had in his tour, but had sacrificed his health. It was too bad really. The main reason Quentin put in so much overtime early on had been to afford a home here.

Now he was looking forward to retiring back on Earth.

Donald had only worked with one of those five before.

With Quentin’s help and contacts, he found the other four. One reason those men agreed to this was that his project served several functions. It showed them that he could get a project done. In a fashion, it was a job interview, and not just of him. Only two of the five were established independent contractors. This would be the first job as contractor for the other three, though all had years of experience as remote operators. All of them would consider which ones they would call on with job offers in the future. If he messed up or got on their bad side, he was finished as an independent contractor.

Building his shell required two contractors in the operation chairs at all times for ninety-six hours straight, and if something went wrong, a man needed to go topside and set it right. On average, one operator needed to go topside every five hundred hours a team operated. Stein and Schmidt had twelve rooms with pairs of operator chairs from which they could control every remote and robot that would be on his site.

Vikrant pulled his tablet off its holder on his treadmill and entered the project name in it. Donald envied those who possessed the ability to do their workouts and get work done at the same time like Vikrant did. He scanned though it, then handed him his tablet with its card reader and on it was the summary of his project and the price to rent the construction robots and remote, and lot license, with its tunnel connection fee.

There was still a fight taking place in the courts on earth about that license fee. The tunnel development company insists they own those lots and can evict anyone that doesn’t follow their rules as long as they pay that party fair market value for the improvements they made to those lots. The Mars homeowner association says the people who paid to build those domes own them. Donald saw both points. The tunnels needed some means of keeping those tunnels maintained and problem people out. There was a tunnel under planning under a homeowner association. As yet, it only had two percent of the funding needed. The tunnel he was buying a lot connected to, or leasing, depending on how one looked at it, was a small tunnel off the unfinished Bamboo Tunnel, and being built by a large American construction conglomerate. They were building eighty percent of all Mars tunnels. For that reason, it would be American law and courts that would settle that dispute.

Worried, Donald unchecked the twenty-five percent insurance surcharge on the tablet that covered things like unplanned trips out to fix equipment mishaps. He didn’t have funds to cover that cost. If there was a problem, he could lose everything, but if he didn’t, he could not complete the project. Pulse coursing, he checked the start date once more and hit pay.

. If nothing went wrong, he would finish his own dome shell four weeks before they finished and pressurized both tunnels. Donald added three more weeks to that as the safety margin. That was how long he needed to keep renting his room. 

His own phone beeped, notifying him of the transfer.

The tablet then brought up the next screen.

Vikrant raised his eyes as Donald hit skip and the next screen came up.

“Can’t do that one via the net. William said he had to enter the data personally and use his override code to give me the discount on bricks and not to go through the net or his override code would not work.”

“Then my all means, talk to William. But get it done soon. The job scheduler will cancel your project and you get a rescheduling fee if you don’t verify materials purchase within seven days. When you buy those bricks, it should automatically update, but you better double check it with me. If it doesn’t, bring me your invoice number, and I will update it.”

“I’m on my way there next. I’ll check back with you after.”

The next screen was the tunnel rules and regulation. His side tunnel was a clover tunnel. Nearly ten percent of public access side tunnels were clover tunnels, and all had rules against the malicious harming of the insect population that build up in them. Donald hadn’t planned on a clover tunnel, but that had been all that was left on Bamboo Tunnel. There could be little doubt that clover tunnels were top as far as air quality, but were havens for cockroaches, cricket and other insect people didn’t care to have around. On an intellectual level, Donald understood the need for the ecological balance that mandated their presence on Mars. He wished they had come up with better alternatives. 

He thumb-printed the rules agreeing to them, then handed the tablet back to him.

Vikrant beamed, “Congratulations. You are now technically a Mars resident and not a transient, though that isn’t official until you move into your own place. You are now entitled to attend Residents’ Committee meeting and join one of the three Resident Association. I recommend you do so ASAP. If you decide on the BLDT association, let me know and I will sponsor you.”

Donald had mixed feelings about the resident associations. While they did offset the company power, they seemed to be getting into other peoples’ business far too much, and BLDT was the worst of them for that.

“Thanks Vikrant, I will think over which one I want. As you said, it isn’t official until I move into a place I own.”

“They’re not that picky. Your email probably has spam now from different members of all three offering to sponsor you that went out the moment you thumb printed that tunnel agreement.”

Donald laughed, “Probably.”

Chapter 5 Mars Bricks Incorporated

The overweight, middle-aged bald man with striking blue eyes behind the desk really wanted to stay on Mars. But at one hundred ten kilos, up fifty kilos since arriving on Mars two years ago, and softening bones, the company medics told him no.

Donald pitied him. William loved being here. But it just wasn’t to be. Not able to stay himself, he went out of his way helping people like Donald, who wanted to stay, get every discount on bricks they could. Quentin had told him about the ‘new contractor’s’ discount. When Donald inquired about it in person rather than just using the net, William found two more discounts for him: first-time buyers, and personal residence discount. Technically, it was supposed to be either; a new contractors discount, or first-time buyers discount, but William could authorize both, provided certain conditions were met. Getting that third discount made it possible for Donald to do this on his level of funds, barely.

William had been key in getting all that cleared away.

He saw Donald and set down his e-reader. “Hi Donald.”

“Watching porn again on company time?”

He laughed, “Not this time. Maybe later. Just going over the Earth job offers.”

“What happened? I thought it was all set. You were going to work in the home office trying to get more idiots to come here while you worked on getting healthy enough to come back.”

“I won’t be back. According to the last checkup, I passed the point of no return possible.”

“Damn.”

“It isn’t all bad. Since I no longer need a guaranteed job here, I can take one of these part-time offers that will be paying me twice what Building Supplies Consolidated would have on earth. What do you think? Professor Casting, part-time lecturer at Texas A&M?”

“Part-time lecher, you mean.

William smiled, then said in mock soberness, “Only after class, and never with my students.”

Not wanting to explore that any further, Donald changed the subject. “If the price you told me is still good, I have the money.”

“Good thing you came in now, then. It looks like since I’m not staying with the company, they will revoke my ability to authorize those discounts soon. The replacement they are shipping up is some brown noser that doesn’t understand; long-timers get special treatment.”

Strange. Donald hadn’t completed his first tour yet, but others already called him a long-timer.

Picking up the tablet next to his e-reader, William asked, “Got a job number?”

Pulling out his phone, Donald looked it up. “SS107831B73”

William entered it. “Perfect.” Then he looked it over and made one more change before handing the tablet to Donald.

Donald read it. William had added yet another discount, free delivery. It didn’t save him money per se, as he would have used the remotes to get them, but did save about four hours and simplified things. He pressed pay.

It was such a shame William was being forced Earth-side, but recent policy changes did that. The Insurance companies revoked insurances on people told to go home that didn’t. It didn’t affect people like fat eddy who would face serious trouble on the trip and reentry but did anyone deemed fit enough to return. Once revoked in that fashion, it became impossible to get insurance on mars. If you couldn’t have insurance, you couldn’t work for most earth base companies.

Handing back the tablet, Donald saw the e-reader.

“Damn it, William, you can’t be seriously considering that job.”

“It keeps me on Mars.”

“Buries you on Mars, you mean. Spending that much time in a suit outside is suicide.”

“It isn’t all outside in a suit, or even most of it. Most of the time, I would be in a shielded runabout.”

Donald made a raspberry. “Same difference.”

“Seriously, it isn’t that bad now. They are far better shielded and spend most of their time parked under more shielding.”

“Hog wash. You’re grasping at straws.”

“Are you willing to take on a junior partner?”

That stopped Donald. He’d looked for a partner, but changed his mind and stopped. The wrong partner was worse than none.

He liked William. But he would be the wrong partner. William had known for over a year they would send him home if he didn’t change his eating and exercise habits.

He hadn’t changed.

“Don’t worry about it, Donald. You don’t want me as a partner. No one does. But don’t criticize me if I take a high-risk job with Gofers of Mars to stay.”

“If you work at Gofers, you will regret it. I haven’t met one person that has been there long that didn’t.” Donald felt guilty the moment he said it. He only knew two gophers, and neither well.

“Of course I’ll regret it. But will I regret it as much as I would regret living on earth? They are fucking nuts there!”

Donald didn’t know what to say to that. He was right. They were nuts there. But then again, so was everyone on Mars. It was just a flavor unique to Mars.

William changed the subject. “There are five more three-D construction printers on the shipment.”

Donald snorted. “When will they learn?” Twelve percent of construction projects had been three-D printing when Donald arrived. Only nine percent of the building finished since then were three-D printed and only one printer still in operation.

“Don’t be that way. Even if they break down fast and require a lot of maintenance, they work fast enough that they are still cost effective to send.”

“The only reason they are cost effective is because of how much the can be scrapped for here. Hell, nearly a third of your own maintenance is done using parts from printers you bought and scrapped after they break down.”

“True, but these are supposed to last longer and be easier to fix. They expect to get twice the number of buildings out of them. And they are building things you can’t build with brick.”

“Those buildings also have a far higher problem rate, and are much more expensive to repair. Repairing the Power Dome with brick cost them more than if they had just torn it down and rebuilt it. And it still leaks sixteen kilograms of air a week.”

“That is a design problem, not a printing problem.”

“Yes, it’s a design problem. One inherent to three-D printing and will keep cropping until there are centuries of experience understanding what does and doesn’t work. People have enough problems here without that.”

Maybe that was going too far. The recently finished Eco one dome, the biggest dome yet built, was a masterpiece of both design and construction made with three-D printing. It had been worth burning out all four printers working on it to get it done. They had their uses, but it was limited. But people with William’s attitude to the glory of three-D printing irritated him.

“I still need to see Vikrant over at Stein and Schmidt with this receipt. Go to Earth, chase Coeds. Don’t kill yourself becoming a gopher. Who knows, they could be wrong, the right diet and exercise routine might just get you healthy enough to come back.”

“I’ll think it over. I still have a month.”

With a sour taste in his mouth, Donald walked out, knowing he hadn’t convinced him. But Vikrant needed the brick order receipt to finalize the project.

The company Donald had worked for didn’t approve of, or use, Mars Gofers. They sent their own people topside on the rare instances they needed something done there. Donald had gone himself, more than once. Part of their logic is that only an expert in the equipment can fix the problem. That was true less than ten percent of the time. The truth was, the earth owners considered it bad policy to pay people to do that dangerous a job day in and day out, where each day you go outside shortened your life.

It would cost him a quarter as much to contact a gopher already outside to fix things than go himself if something went wrong, but people willing to do just that is what kept all those gophers outside accumulating more and more radiation.

Before today, he would not have called Gofers. Now he had to rethink that.

Walking into Stein and Schmidt, he said, “Vikrant, what do you think about Gofers?”

Episode 6-10