Missing! (6 page)

“I'm taking a shower,” Roger said. “And I'm going to insist on four full minutes of water. I've earned that!”

“I'm going to get new lenses for my glasses. These
somehow got all scratched.” Mickey took the glasses off and squinted through them. He was one of only half a dozen people on Mars who wore glasses. Most of the colonists had perfect vision, either naturally or through surgery, but Mickey's problem with his vision was one of the rare type that could not be surgically corrected. The same machine that created new lenses for instruments made his specs, and though he often complained about them, he needed them to see well. He put the glasses back on and squinted through them. “Ugh. These are so scratched it's like looking through fog. Anyway, as soon as these are fixed, I'm going to get in some apprentice time.”

“You've
had
apprentice time, Goldberg,” Roger said, yawning. “You're hydraulics, and this has been one long experiment in the movement of water.”

“It's a little too practical for my taste,” Mickey said. “I want a few weeks of nice quiet theory. And I'd give my right arm for a milkshake.”

“Me, I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous,” said Roger, and he ducked as Mickey threw a pillow at him.

They took the last flight to Marsport the next day. Sean had a window seat, and he watched the harsh, oddly beautiful landscape of Mars drift past. At some points they could see sections of the pipeline. Most of the distance it ran underground, but occasionally short, insulated sections of it had to pass over a gully or run along the crest of a ridge. It gleamed in the sun, and Sean couldn't help feeling proud of having played a part in constructing it, at least in a small way.

They landed, got back to their dorm wing, and took their showers. Despite Roger's determination, they were still limited to just two minutes, but they were a glorious two minutes for Sean, who felt as if he were sluicing off an inch-thick layer of grime. They rattled around then, the only three in a dorm wing equipped for five.

They ate some real food, and when they had finished, Sean said, “I'm going to Comm to try to call Jenny. I want to see how she's doing way down there in the valley.”

“Tell her hello for me,” Roger said.

Sean saw the corridors of Marsport with new eyes. What had once seemed cramped now was positively spacious, at least in comparison to the advance base. To enter a room where twenty or more people could mill about freely seemed like finding wide open spaces. And Marsport no longer seemed to stink of sweat. After spending several hard-working weeks in one pressure suit, Sean thought the air in Marsport was almost fragrant.

No one he knew was on duty in the communications center, a dome crammed with radio and microwave equipment, but a youngish communications tech put him through to the Plain of the Sun center. There was a slight hitch to the transmissions, because Mars had no ionosphere to bounce radio waves off, and all transmissions had to go from the surface to one satellite to the next, then back down. It gave voices a tinny, distant quality.

Jenny sounded thrilled when she finally came online. “Sean! How's it going?”

“It's
gone,”
he said cheerfully. “Advance Base One is pumping slush. We beat it here, but in the next day
or so, Marsport will get its first sip of water from the pipeline How's it there?”

“Hard work,” Jenny said. “You should see the way down into the valley. Switchback road. You have to travel about twenty clicks to get ahead two clicks, the road winds so much. And the bottom of the valley is, like, mush. Soil that clumps like snow. But it's great. There's ice all over the place! when we get connected, Marsport will be okay for water for the next fifty years.”

Sean took a deep breath. Fifty years. Fifty. Marsport was less than ten years old. All along the goal had been discover whether a human settlement could endure for one Martian year—six hundred and eighty-seven Earth days—without outside assistance from Earth. No one had seriously expected that the colonists would spend the rest of their lives on Mars.

“Sean?”

“Yeah, great!” Sean said. “Look, I'm stealing time on the comm net. I'd better let you go. Say hi to Alex for me. Hope to see you soon!”

Jenny said something that he didn't quite catch, and
then the conversation was over. Sean left the center feeling strangely depressed. Something, he thought, was wrong somewhere. He didn't know just what.

But that gift, or curse, of his was kicking in. He had the feeling that something bad was going to happen, and soon.

He wished he had some idea of what it might be.

The water from Ascraeus station
began to arrive in Marsport. It came in as slush, which had to be processed to make it liquid and drinkable, but it did come flowing in. The hydrologists estimated that the amount being pumped in from the first remote station barely balanced the average loss of water from the colony. As Roger put it, the first pipeline wouldn't let the colonists go for a swim, but it would keep them from dying of thirst.

Days passed, and Sean began to feel at home again, though a strange kind of apprehensiveness walked everywhere with him. Part of his uneasiness was in not having more friends his age. He, Roger, and Mickey were temporarily the only teens in Marsport, and they had seen plenty of each other on the work detail. All the other Asimov Project kids were out on pipeline duty—and when Sean complained about
that to Amanda, she tartly reminded him that the whole thing had been
his
idea, after all.

Then, one week to the day following Sean's return, a plane brought an injured Nickie Mikhailova in from the Arsai Mons base. She had caught her leg in a crevice and had a bad fracture above her left ankle.

Sean went to see her in the hospital dome the day she arrived. She was the only patient—the Marsport colonists had been carefully screened for communicable diseases, vaccinated for every possible infection, and given overall health screening before leaving Earth. Marsport had no problem with infectious diseases, only with accidents like Nickie's or with disorders that colonists might develop after arriving on Mars, like heart disease or cancer, against which there were no vaccines. Fortunately, so far no one had developed any serious problems.

Nickie was sitting up in bed, looking grumpy. Her leg lay immobilized in a lightweight cast, and she rolled her eyes when Sean came into her room. “Call me clumsy,” she said. “It was all my own stupid fault.
Shouldn't have tried to carry something I couldn't see over, but I thought I could make it.”

“It's okay,” Sean said with a smile. “I'm not blaming you. What happened?”

Nickie shrugged. “I was carrying a short section of pipe, about two meters long. We needed just enough to connect the end of the pipeline to a heating junction. Well, you know me: Russian peasant type, right? I figured that I could easily lift a piece of pipe that on Earth would weigh a hundred kilos, because here it's only about a third of that. I did lift it, too, but I couldn't see where I was going and stuck my foot in a crack. I fell forward, and I heard a snap, and then I hurt like blazes.”

“Sorry. That kind of thing could happen to anyone, though, so don't beat yourself up over it. How long are you going to have to wear that thing?”

“The cast?” Nickie wrinkled her pug nose. “Six whole weeks. Everybody's going to want to know what happened, and there's no way to lie to them, so everyone in school will think I'm some kind of idiot. And imagine me hopping around on crutches. Bull in
a china shop, right? Oh, well, at least I'll have an excuse to be late when school starts again. So catch me up. How did your tour go?”

They were both hungry for company, and they talked for a long time. Then Sean played a couple of games of chess with her. They weren't much fun for him, because Nickie was a real chess shark. She'd memorized all sorts of classic games, and she seemed to have the irritating ability to see forward in time, guessing exactly what Sean was going to do with his bishops, knights, and rooks. Both games ended pretty quickly with Sean getting caught in a checkmate he didn't see coming.

“Want any movies or anything?” Sean asked.

“Got a direct feed to the vid library through the hospital net, thanks,” Nickie said with a smile. “Thanks for not making fun of me fouling up this way. Boy, I hope I'm not the only one who fouls up.” She looked appalled the second she said that and then rushed on: “I didn't mean that the way it came out. I don't really want anything bad to happen to any of the others. It's just that I hate being the one who—you know.”

“I know,” Sean said. “Hey, Mickey and I almost brought a mountain down on our own heads.” He told her about the adventure, making it seem a lot less dangerous and a lot more amusing than it had felt at the time. One of the medical staff brought in Nickie's lunch, and Sean left her alone to eat it. He wandered restlessly, reflecting that it was nice to talk to Nickie, but somehow it wasn't the same as talking with Jenny.

He spoke to Jenny again later that afternoon by radio. She said the extraction unit was working after a fashion, but only at forty percent efficiency. The engineers were trying to figure out what was wrong, and until they could do that, nothing much was going on. Meanwhile, Jenny said, the work had been hard, everyone was stinky, and she was getting really homesick for some actual organic food, not the processed stuff in the silvery ration packs.

“Some of us are going to go on the pipeline trail later,” Jenny said. “There's not much for us to do here, and the heating and impeller junctions have to be preset. Six of those left to do on this end, so the boss is going to pick a volunteer crew to go out with
tents and stuff and spend about two weeks setting up the junctions.”

“Don't volunteer,” Sean said without even thinking.

“Too late,” Jennys voice crackled back. “Already did it. Look, I'm getting cabin fever here. Hootch fever. I'm sick of being stuck here with not enough to do, anyway.”

“I don't like the thought of your being out on the plateau with nothing but tents,” Sean said. “We had a bad storm when we were at the advance base. Something like that would pick up a tent and sail it away like a paper plate in a high wind. You wouldn't have a chance.”

“We're not taking chances,” Jenny replied, sounding cantankerous. “We've all had the basic training. Anyway, they'll wait until there's a window of good weather before sending anybody out. Relax, it's ice.”

Sean swallowed his wariness and said, “I guess. Hey, call in and let me know if you get picked, though, okay?”

“Okay.”

For three days after that, there was no word from Jenny, and Sean began to feel a little better. Chances were she hadn't been picked after all. Then on the fourth day Amanda passed him in the corridor, turned, and said, “Sean! I heard from Jenny today. She tried to reach you but couldn't.”

“I've been in the gym,” Sean said. “What did she want?”

“She said to tell you she'd been picked and not to worry. She said you'd know what she meant.”

Sean swallowed. “Yeah,” he said. “I do.”

Relax,
he told himself.
It will be all right. She's not alone. There are six on the team. They know what they're doing
.

Roger had insisted that things going wrong was the normal state of affairs on Mars, the only thing you could count on.

Sean and Mickey had thought setting up the directional beacon was a snap, a simple job with nothing
dangerous about it, and then boulders had begun to rain down around them.

Six people in tents on the plateau of the Daedalia Plain was a reasonable number. Two per tent. If two got in trouble, four were there to help them out.

Still …

Sean sat in the quiet school library, studying the largest scale map of Daedalia Planum. It was high country, an immense, uplifted plateau. Parts of it had been overrun with lava flows from the three volcanoes to the northeast, and in satellite photos those areas looked vaguely like reddish colored oatmeal, a jumble of ridges, hills, and blocks of stone frozen in solidified magma. Other parts were sand-covered stone, pitted with impact craters from meteorites. The pipeline was supposed to make its way across these relatively clear areas, avoiding the craters. The rift valley where the water-collection unit had been placed was between Daedalia and Solis, a broad crack in the surface of the planet between the two uplands.

Using a computer, Sean called up a survey set of satellite views showing Daedalia. The craters on its
surface seemed to trail dark streaks. Wind streaks, Sean realized. The raised walls of the crater provided wind breaks, and when the storms hit, in the shelter of the wind breaks, the dust and sand collected in teardrop shapes fifty or sixty kilometers or more long. The pictures reminded Sean of the force and power of a Martian sandstorm. For millennia fierce, global hurricanes had roared across the Martian surface, sculpting and eroding mountains, filling the air with impenetrable billows of dust.

Now the atmosphere was thicker than it had been in millions of years, and it would have to be thicker still if humans were going to live permanently on Mars. It was a necessity, but even the weather experts could not predict with any confidence what the heavier blanket of air meant for Martian weather. Generally the storms were fiercest at the time of the equinoxes, the beginning of Martian spring and fall. But the heat of the sun could generate cyclonic updrafts that resulted in awesome blows in summer, too.

And that was just one thing that could go wrong,
Sean knew. He'd read of the history of Martian exploration. Some Earth explorers had died when they plunged through the thin layer of rock and soil over a vast cavern, a gas bubble left over from a volcanic eruption. Others had suffered from rock slides, from earthquakes—Marsquakes, Sean corrected mentally—from the cold, from sudden loss of pressure in buildings and aircraft.