7
Their living quarters were not much bigger than her single room apartment back home and she could never go outside without suiting up. Besides, there was nothing much to see anyway, except for a few stars and the continuous stream of tin cans making their way to the docking facilities. For the first few months she had felt sufficiently compensated for the lack of action by the regular pay cheque and accumulation of credit that would eventually earn them enough to retire back on Earth. But she had become increasingly bored with the predictable work routine of Ogdan’s five days’ on, one day off. The fact that she knew she was essentially stuck here for at least five years, which was how long it would take to earn the ticket home on Ogdan’s current earnings, had begun to cast a shadow over everything she did, like a life sentence.
She screwed the control panel back onto the FPU, and ran the diagnostics program to ensure all was working well. It was; at least she hadn’t lost her knack for fixing machines. The work that Ogdan did at the farm was beyond her; she had never had much of an interest in plant breeding and environmental management systems. Ogdan loved his work. He was full of enthusiasm, but despite his obvious fascination with what he did, he wasn’t that good at it, and he hadn’t advanced as far as he thought he deserved. He would complain to her about it, but she could see from the way he looked after their things in the module that he lacked the attention to detail and order required to reach the level of technical manager that he so coveted. If he could get away with leaving something that needed fixing until it broke, and then fixing it in a haphazard way, compounding one broken problem on top of another, he would. In his happy go lucky way, he was living in a fantasy world in which everything around him was fine, and if there were ever any problems it was someone else’s fault. She had tried to talk to him about how he should look after things at home more carefully, but it was like he had a blind spot. He would smile and cuddle up to her and make comments that as she was so good at fixing things, what did it matter? He had said that as he prepared for his shift at the farm this work period, after he had kissed her and just before he had snapped up his faceplate and lumbered into the vacuum chamber. It had made her really angry, but since his communicator was broken she was left to stew without the comfort of a suitable reply.
She was waiting for him with the news about his tour of duty when he got back from work. He took it with his usual cheerfulness.
“Honey, that’s great. You know I get extra work bonus for doing Service, and I’m sure