Missing! (2 page)

“But it isn't working yet!” Jenny yelled. “And what if we get along so well by using water from Lake Ares that the council decides we have plenty of time? Things go wrong! You know that things always go wrong!”

Sean felt goose bumps on his arms. He had begun life as one of the few survivors of a terrible biological terrorist act. He had later spent years as a wild kid roaming the streets and underground tunnels of old New York. Somewhere along the line he had picked up a talent. Sean could almost instinctively estimate the chances of something going wrong. A sense of doom had led him to beg Dr. Simak to make room for him in the Mars colony, and that sense had been proved right when Earth suddenly fell out of touch with the colonists. Sean had looked at the pipeline proposals too—and he had to side with Jenny.

Every instinct in him told him that, yes, something was bound to go wrong.

Still, the argument was not
something Sean could settle then and there. He was bone-weary, and when Jenny continued to rage about boys and their stupidity, he just went into his room, closed the door, and collapsed onto his bed.

Another thing that was rationed on Mars was space. The materials that made up most of the colony had been prefabricated on Luna and sent to Mars years ago. That meant that all the bedrooms were built exactly alike, small but packed with hidden essentials. The bed folded down from one wall. An electronic center in the opposite wall could show movies or television—though the colonists now had only their own homegrown programs, since Earth was off-line—or could play music, become a computer console, or serve a dozen other functions. The room was so small that, lying in bed, Sean was able to reach out with his foot and touch the screen.

Still, it was his, a room of his own. It had been bare and sterile when he'd first moved in, but little by little
Sean had been putting his stamp on it. One wall now had photos of himself and Amanda when they lived back on Earth, along with an interactive map of Mars, pictures of Alex at the controls of a Martian airplane, and a picture of Jenny laughing. And the room had fallen into the normal disorder that Sean lived in. His clothes weren't stored neatly in a closet, but spread out across the floor so he could dress efficiently.

Sean sniffed. The room even smelled like him.

Showers were rationed too. You got two showers a week, and if you couldn't soap up and rinse off in two minutes, you had to scrape suds from your hide with a towel and spend the next few days feeling itchy. All Marsport was beginning to smell of human sweat.

Sean drifted into a deep sleep. He usually dreamed, often bad dreams of the old days on Earth when he'd stalked, killed, and eaten rats, or elusive dreams of his parents, who had died before he'd really known them. In recent weeks, though, he had always fallen into bed so tired that he couldn't remember any dreams at all.

His stomach woke him after some hours. He hadn't
bothered to eat, and in the dead of night he woke up hungry. He looked at the screen at the foot of his bed, his eyes bleary. Three hours until he had to get up and get ready for school.

He rolled out of bed and went barefoot out into the common room. No one was there at this time of night. He went to the mess unit—a room identical to his dorm room, except that it was taken up with food storage and a heating unit. He pulled a tray from a dwindling reserve of Earth food. It was flat and loosely sealed in a special foil. Sean didn't even read the label, just popped it into the heating unit.

While the food was cooking, he got a glass and slid it into the drink dispenser. He hesitated, then selected plain water. Two hundred and fifty milliliters poured into the glass. That was the full allotment for one meal.

The tray popped out looking puffier. The food had been rehydrated and heated, and when Sean peeled the foil off, he discovered he was eating pizza, with a dessert of hot apples. The aromas of cinnamon and tomato sauce drifted up. They smelled better than he did, anyway.

As Sean munched the pizza, he reflected that it was probably about the last Earth food he would eat. The last supply ship from Earth had given the colony six months of supplies, but some of those had been placed into long-term storage in case of emergencies, and the growing self-sufficiency of the colony meant that for six days out of the week, the colonists could eat homegrown foods. Soon they would be doing that seven days a week.

Just as well,
Sean thought. The pizza was too chewy, and it tasted less like pizza than like a pizza box—cardboard-y, bland, without any real zest. Still, he ate every bite. You didn't waste food in Marsport.

The apple dessert was better, though the rehydrated apples had the consistency of mush. Sean saved about half his water for the end of the meal, and he sat sipping it thoughtfully. There were so many things he had always taken for granted back on Earth. Water, of course, but also basic things like, well, like air. The Martian atmosphere was too thin to support life, except perhaps at the very bottom of the deepest part of the Mariner Valley. Even there, you'd gasp like
someone at the top of one of Earth's highest mountains. And of course you'd freeze—Mars was cold, and only very gradually getting warmer.

The Bradbury Project was part of the effort to terraform Mars, to make it more like Earth. Far away on Ganymede, one of the larger moons of Jupiter, a giant robotic machine tirelessly scooped up water ice, shaped it into projectiles, and fired it with a mass-driver into space. The ice bullets whipped around Jupiter and spiraled inward toward the sun on a long orbit that took years. At the end, they were captured by the gravity of Mars and entered into orbit around the planet—orbits designed to break down so that after a few passes, the masses of ice came whipping through the air, the heat of entering the atmosphere stripping them into vapor and ice crystals.

The ice meteors did two things. First, they made the air of Mars thicker and richer, allowing it to trap more heat from the sun and to warm the surface. One day, if the plan went as it should, the air of Mars would be thick enough to breathe.

The other thing, of course, was to supply more water to a very dry planet.

Sean finished his drink. He used the table's built-in computer to recall the hologram Alex had displayed.

There was Mars, and there, in glowing yellow, was the pipeline on which the colony depended. It was like a vital artery in the human body. If it failed to function, the colony would die.

Sean had a bad feeling about the pipeline. He couldn't say he was convinced it would never work, but he was afraid that the pressure of time was too great, that the colonists desperate for water would make vital mistakes.

Sitting alone in the dark, thinking of his friend Jenny and her despair and anger, Sean made a decision. Whatever happened with the pipeline project, he had to be part of it. He had spent far too much of his life on his own.

Now, more than anything else, Sean wanted to belong.

“Have you got time?”

Amanda Simak turned at the sound of Sean's voice. Her tired, lined face creased into a smile. “Time for what?”

“For a talk.” Sean caught up with her. He had waited in the passageway near her room, hoping to catch her on her way to the Administration offices. “Jenny's worried about the water in Lake Ares.”

“We all are.” Amanda crinkled her nose and picked at Sean's messy hair. Most of the colonists wore their hair short, but he had let his grow. “Sean, I wish you'd try to be a little neater. I know it's hard to stay clean, but—”

Sean shrugged. “I'm on today's shower schedule. Not much sense before I get in from the greenhouse, though. It's always hot in there. Seriously, is there any alternative to drawing water from the lake?”

They walked side by side, taking up two-thirds of
the narrow passageway. Sean opened all the doors for her—the doors were color-coded to direct colonists to safe areas in the event of a blowout. But all the ones they had to pass were green-coded, meaning the areas had no access to the surface and were safe if an outer part of the colony blew. The doors were heavy, and Sean grunted as he opened each one.

Amanda shook her head. “I've been over it and over it with the hydrologists and the pipeline crew. We can realistically expect some water from the pipeline in a month, if everything goes smoothly. But nothing ever does, does it?”

“Mars has a million ways to kill you,” Sean said with a crooked grin, recalling the lesson that had been drummed into his head over and over during his first days on the planet. “Yeah, I know. But how about this? The Asimov Project kids might be able to help with the pipeline construction. We have a two-month school vacation coming up a week from Friday. If we—”

“School breaks are supposed to be for individual study in your field of specialization, not for work-crew
duty. And besides, you haven't been trained,” Amanda pointed out.

“No, but we don't have to do the skilled work. We can be manual labor. I mean, they need people to check for leaks, to haul equipment, to place blasting charges. Not,” he added hastily, “to set them off or anything.”

They had reached the Administration dome. It was set up identically to Sean's dorm area or to any of the apartment areas: a cluster of smaller, prefab rooms built around a larger central area. When they stepped into the outer area, Amanda paused, her arms crossed. “Twenty unskilled kids can't do much in two months.”

“We can bring the water closer by a day or two,” Sean pointed out. “Right now that's pretty important.”

Amanda was silent for a long time. Looking at her, Sean thought about how Mars had changed her.

She had always been a fastidious woman, but now she looked as grimy as any of the colonists. Her hair had been cropped close, and her standard uniform of
the colony—gray tunic, black slacks—was as rumpled as Sean's. Her face was more deeply lined now, worries and cares dragging the flesh under her eyes into pouches, making her neck muscles sag, even in the low gravity of Mars.

“Maybe,” she said at last. “I'll talk to Lt. Mpondo and Dr. Ellman about the idea.”

Sean groaned. “Ellman hates me.”

Amanda smiled. “No, he doesn't. He's just not sure about the wisdom of having young people here in the colony. He's actually been very impressed with your progress in science and math. He told me so.”

Sean didn't respond. Dr. Harold Ellman was a dark-haired, scowling, heavyset man whose expression was a permanent mask of disapproval. He and Tim Mpondo oversaw the education of the twenty Asimov Project students. Sean liked Tim Mpondo, who had a quick wit and a relaxed, easygoing way of encouraging the kids to learn, but Ellman and Sean had rubbed each other the wrong way since day one.

“Don't be so upset,” Amanda said, laughing. “Look at it this way: Harold might actually be glad to have his
students away from the colony over the break. I'll talk to them about the idea, and I'll ask Elana Moore if she thinks you can make a contribution.”

“Who's that?” Sean asked.

Amanda opened her office door. She stood framed in it, a look of surprise on her face. “Elana is the chief design officer on the pipeline project. Young woman, twenty-five, I believe, but a brilliant engineer. Brown hair, brown eyes, about your height. Don't you know her?”

“There are three thousand people here,” Sean complained. “I don't know every single one of them!”

“I'll introduce you. Now you'd better run, or you'll be late for school. If you're tardy, Dr. Ellman won't be likely to approve of your plan, you know.”

“Thanks.” As Sean hurried away to school, something occurred to him that brought a smile to his face. Amanda probably knew every single one of the colonists personally. That was part of her job. And besides, she liked people and trusted them. Sean was working on both of those traits, but sometimes he wondered if he would ever be as gifted and open as
Amanda at dealing with people. He felt so awkward and tongue-tied around strangers, and even with his friends he sometimes had difficulty just talking. Well, mainly with girls. Well, mainly with one girl these days: Jenny.

Sean was cutting it close, and he indulged in a little rule-breaking. He ran in the corridors, as much as you could run on Mars. It was a funny kind of run, almost like skiing without skis, but it was faster than walking.

He got to the school dome and entered just as the chimes went off to signal that class was about to begin. Dr. Ellman was at the central console, his head down, and he didn't notice Sean come in and slip into his desk. Sean, grateful for small favors, looked at his computer screen. Today he had a practice math test, and it looked hard. Jenny, two desks over, was already working at something. Sean began to do the math problems, thinking to himself that today, at least, he'd have something interesting to talk to Jenny about.

They didn't have time to talk
until the lunch break. Finals were looming in several units, and since the last school term the students had all lost a little momentum in their studies. Like Sean, they all had jobs. Jenny, who was specializing in adaptive agriculture, worked in the barns—almost a separate colony from Marsport. The colonists were not yet raising animals for meat, but the barn domes held a tiny herd of small cattle, a louder and more troublesome herd of goats, some sheep, some chickens—which had discovered early on that in the low gravity of Mars they could actually fly—and some other farm animals. At this stage in the colony's development, the whole goal was more to make sure that the animals could adapt to a new world than to raise them for slaughter. Jenny helped care for them and was a veterinary assistant during her work shifts.

She was fiercely protective of her animals, even the fish in Lake Ares. Though Sean didn't quite share that
urge, he respected Jenny's determined effort to be a vegetarian—well, mostly a vegetarian. She would eat eggs, cheese, and other dairy products.