24
Five hundred and eighty-eight Earth days after leaving the quicksand, Coppélia arrived back at the landing shuttle. Everything was as she had left it, which was no surprise since she was the only inhabitant of the planet. She looked around the landing shuttle, evaluating each component’s usefulness for the project that she had planned. What she was looking for was an open-ended tube. Nobody had known what kind of problems to expect on the planet so an emergency kit – including two shovels, for which Coppélia was very grateful – had been assembled and formed part of the ship’s inventory. The problem was that tube. It needed to be two metres in diameter and perhaps two metres long. It also had to be very strong.
She looked inside the deGrasse Tyson but there was nothing inside the space
