Bowman nodded absently. He ate mechanically, without his usual delight in the other man’s cooking. “It’s pitiful, watching the little critters asphyxiate themselves like this, and then resort to feeding on one another’s corpses.” He remembered cuddling and taking the measurements of baby muffins while others looked on, curious but only mildly agitated, peeping querulously. Now that peeping had risen to a tyrannical, pestilential drone not even the outpost’s soundproofing could mute entirely.

“It’s not pitiful to me.” Eyes swollen from sleeplessness, LeCleur scratched his right leg where he had been assaulted earlier. “You didn’t get bit.”

Holding his coffee, Bowman glanced to his right, in the direction of the nearest port. Instruments told them the sun was up. They could not confirm it directly because every port was now completely blocked by an unmoving mass of accumulated muffin cadavers.

Still, both men were capable of surprise when the voice of the outpost AI announced later that evening that it was switching over to canned air. Neither man had to ask why, though Bowman did so, just to confirm.

The station was now completely buried beneath a growing mountain of dead muffins. Their accumulated tiny bodies had blocked every one of the shielded air in-takes.

The men were still more aggravated than worried. They had enough bottled air for weeks, along with ample food, and they could recycle their wastewater. In an emergency, the station was almost as self-sufficient a closed system as a starship, though quite immobile. Their only real regret was the absence of information, since the swarming bodies now also obstructed all the outpost’s external sensors.

Three days later a frustrated LeCleur suggested cracking one of the doors to see if the migration had finally run its course. Bowman was less taken with the idea.

“What if it’s not?” he argued.

“Then we hit the emergency door close. That’ll shut it by itself. How else are we going to tell if the migration’s finally moved on and passed us by?” He gestured broadly. “Until we can get up top with some of the cleaning gear and clear off the bodies, we’re sitting blind in here.”