Marooned! (2 page)

He nearly bounced as he made his way over to look out of one of the screens—getting back the habit of walking properly was difficult. He steadied himself and stared out at the Martian plain. He had expected a pink sky, but it was blue; a deep, clear blue. Some distance away, a rugged cliff rose up and up, and beyond that were the slopes of Olympus Mons itself. Sean felt a little drop of disappointment. The mountain was so far away and so vast that it faded into a purple, hazy blur. He wasn’t even sure that he could see the summit—

“Sean.”

He turned at once and felt his throat tighten.

Dr. Simak stood a few feet away. She was wearing a light gray tunic with pockets everywhere, darker gray slacks, and black boots. Her lined face was smiling, and her blue eyes gleamed with tears. “I’ve waited a long time to see you again.”

Sean lurched toward her, nearly falling. He hugged her tightly. “I’m glad to be here,” he said, his voice a rough whisper.

Sean shifted in his seat.
He had been on Mars for less than an hour, and now he was waiting with the other newcomers in a classroom for an orientation session.

A blond girl wandered in, spotted him as the only teen in the whole group, and came to sit beside him, making herself right at home. “Jenny Laslo,” the girl said, offering her hand. As Sean shook it, she
frowned and asked, “What kind of outfit is that?”

“It’s mine,” Sean said, surprised. He was wearing a dark blue V-neck shirt, baggy trousers, sneakers, and over it all his favorite leather jacket, black and very long so that it hung to his knees. Jenny, he noticed, was wearing the standard gray tunic, black slacks, and boots. He frowned. “What’s wrong with my clothes?”

“Well, nothing. They’re just a little unusual. Not that we have a uniform or anything. So who are you?”

“Sean Doe.”

Jenny’s eyes, which were a light blue, widened. “
The
Sean Doe? The one Dr. Simak adopted?”

“Yes,” Sean said shortly. He dreaded the questions that would come next, about his real parents and how he had lost them.

“Ice,” Jenny said.

“What?”

“Ice,” she repeated. “You know—the coolest. She’s a great person. So what’s your specialty?”

Sean shook his head. “I don’t have a specialty,” Sean said.

“You’ll get one. Me, I’m in adaptive agriculture. You know, studying how plants and animals adapt to nonterrestrial conditions. I’ll introduce you to the rest of the brat squad later. First you have to do the ‘Mars will kill you’ bit.”

“Done it already,” Sean told her. “Lieutenant Mpondo on the
Argosy
. Twenty lectures, all of them winding up by reminding us that Mars wants us dead.”

Jenny tilted her head. “No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t care, that’s all. Remember that, and you’ve got the most important thing spiked from the beginning. Mars doesn’t hate you. It just never forgives a mistake. Simple, right?”

Some of the adults who had made the flight with Sean came in and found places near the front of the classroom. Jenny jerked her head toward the door. “Ax the class. You don’t need it if you’re not specializing yet.”

Sean had been wondering how he was going to cope with another round of information about all the dangers of Mars. He grinned. “Okay.”

The two of them walked out with considerably more grace than the adults who were shuffling down the corridor holding on to wall rails as they tried to readjust to gravity. Sean followed Jenny down a maze of passageways. She seemed to know everyone they passed, and they all spoke to her. She finally led Sean into the biggest dome he had seen, this one a clear greenhouse more than two hundred meters across. Jenny was grinning at him. “This is ice. Well, it’s water, not ice, but it’s the coolest. Lake Ares.”

For a few seconds Sean wasn’t quite sure what he was seeing, and then everything clicked. “Its a crater,” he said.

They stood on the edge of a body of water so calm that it looked like a sheet of glass. It was almost perfectly round. The afternoon sunlight slanting in glistened on its surface, making it a blue shimmer. “It’s the only body of water on Mars,” Jenny said.
“Maybe one day they’ll let us swim in it. Meanwhile, it’s got a few fish and a great way of splashing.” She sat at the edge of the water, swept a hand down and slapped the surface.

In the low gravity, a spray of water rose into the air, then fell as if in slow motion. Undulating waves broke out on the surface of the lake, rolling across the water in lazy expanding circles. “Where does this come from?” Sean asked.

“Ice mines,” Jenny responded. “Well, not really, but that’s what we call them. Mars has a pretty good store of permafrost—water that’s under the surface and permanently frozen. When Olympus was erupting, it shot out a lot of water vapor. That condensed and fell as rain—the atmosphere used to be thick enough for that—and the water seeped down underground. When the first engineers were making the tunnels, they hit pockets of permafrost. Later, when the Marsport project started, some of them domed in this crater and began melting the permafrost and pumping the water in to create this
reservoir. It’s more than thirty meters deep at the center. We haven’t had to draw on it for drinking water yet. We probably will soon, because the permafrost that’s within reach is about played out.”

Sean watched as the slow-motion waves reached the far shore, then rebounded, coming back their way. “What about the ice at the South Pole?”

“The meteorites, you mean?” Jenny shrugged. “That’s mostly for the sake of the atmosphere. As the meteorites evaporate, they add water vapor, nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide to the air. You know the air pressure today is thirty times what it was in 2050? In some of the rifts, the pressure’s up to three hundred millibars, but that’s still not much. Maybe you know that on Earth, standard sea-level pressure is one thousand thirteen millibars. Still, we get clouds all the time now. Maybe in fifty more years we’ll get rain. Or snow.”

Sean stared out at the surface. Long shadows were creeping across the rusty red plain. The afternoon sun shone on a complex of domes, towers, and
antennae. A half-dozen people in pressure suits were working out there, clearing boulders from a stretch of ground between the dome Sean and Jenny stood in and the next one. “When do we get out?” Sean asked.

“Oh, you won’t be able to go outside for a couple of weeks,” Jenny said. “Not until you learn all about the dangers of the surface. But you can sum them up pretty easily.”

“I know,” Sean replied solemnly. “Mars has a million ways to kill you.”

They looked solemnly at each other for ten seconds. Then Jenny began to laugh, and to his own astonishment, Sean joined in. Like gravity, laughing felt very strange. Good, but very strange indeed.

“What are you doing hero?”

The voice startled Sean, and he turned quickly—too quickly in the low gravity of Mars. He couldn’t stop and went sprawling onto the sandy edge of the lake. He scrambled up, teetering for balance, and fell forward again—into the arms of an angry-looking man, who set him on his feet.

Jenny was speaking fast in an anxious tone. “We weren’t doing anything, Dr. Ellman. Sean’s new, and I was just showing him—”

Ellman was a heavyset man in his thirties, with black hair cut close to his head. Everything about him was square: his broad shoulders, his thick body, his heavy chin. He scowled at both of them from dark eyes set deeply under heavy brows. “If he’s new, he should be
at the Asimov Project orientation. What’s the name?”

“Sean Doe,” Sean said, meeting the man’s unpleasant gaze.

A smile that looked more like a sneer crinkled its way across Ellman’s lips. “Yes,” he said. “I’ve heard of Sean Doe. The ward of Dr. Simak, I believe. She will not be pleased to hear how you’re beginning your stay on Mars, Doe. Or how Laslo here is contributing to your rule-breaking.”

“It isn’t her fault,” Sean said. “It’s just that I’ve heard these lectures before, and I asked her—”

“Heard them before?” Ellman cut in. “Oh, so you can read minds, can you? You’re sure that you know everything that can possibly be presented to you? Tell me, if you’re so certain, how much of our power is provided by areothermal wells and how much by wind generation?”

Sean stared stupidly at him. “I—uh, I don’t know.”

“No. How many kilometers of lava tubes have we adapted for storage, power generation, and factory space?”

Heat crept upward from Sean’s throat into his face. He tried to control his anger at these unfair questions and merely shook his head.

“Is that an answer, Doe?” snapped Ellman.

“No, sir,” Sean said. “I don’t know.”

“We have 3,212 colonists at the present time. At a standard rate of consumption, disregarding recycling, how many months’ water supply do we have?”

Jenny whispered, “Six.”

But Ellman whipped his head toward her. “I heard that, Laslo! You’re confined to quarters for the rest of the day. Doe, come with me.”

Sean gave Jenny a helpless look, and she shrugged an apology. The three of them traveled down a corridor to an intersection, where Jenny split off to the left. Ellman said, “I suppose you know about the color-coded doors, Mr. Doe?”

That was a question Sean could answer. It had been part of the training on Luna. “A red-coded door means the room has an opening onto the
Martian surface,” he said. “If the room loses pressure, there’s no way anyone could survive inside. A yellow-coded door doesn’t have a wall that adjoins the surface, but no resupply of air. If there’s a breach to the surface, the room will hold air and anyone in it would be safe for as long as the air held out. A green door means the room has a constant supply of—”

“At least you know something.”

Sean plowed on., “The doors don’t open automatically because they have to be heavy in case of a pressure loss, and the power needed to open and close them—”

“When I want to know that, I’ll ask you,” snapped Ellman. He marched Sean for what seemed like miles until they came to a dome with a sign reading ADMINISTRATION above the entrance. Around the perimeter six doors were arranged. Ellman made for the one farthest from the entrance to the dome and pressed his hand against a plate beside the door.

It opened, and they stepped into a small office.
Amanda Simak sat at a desk studying a holographic projection that hovered above her computer console. “Yes?” she asked without looking away.

“This young man has committed a serious breach of the rules,” Ellman said stiffly.

Amanda looked up, her expression stern. It changed to one of surprise when she saw who the culprit was. “Sean? What’s he done?”

Ellman explained, making it seem as if cutting a lecture was the equivalent of armed robbery. When he finished, he added, “I’d suggest confinement for at least a week.”

Amanda nodded grimly. “I will consider your suggestion, Dr. Ellman. Thank you. You may leave us alone now.”

With a final scowl at Sean, Ellman turned and strode from the office. As soon as the door had closed behind him, Sean said, “I didn’t mean to cause any trouble—”

Amanda shook her head. “Of course not. But you’ve had lectures enough to last a lifetime on the
trip from Earth. I know.” She touched a pad near her computer and the holographic display—a maze of red and green corridors connecting red and green domes—faded. Another touch of the pad, and a section of the wall behind her cleared, becoming a window looking out onto the afternoon landscape of Mars. Long shadows stretched away, twinkling with frost.

“That’s what interests you. A new world.”

Sean nodded. “I met a girl, and she was going to show me around.”

“What girl?”

“Her name is Jenny. Jenny Laslo.”

Amanda smiled. “Yes, she’s one for bending the rules herself. Sit down, Sean.”

Sean sat in the only other chair in the office, on the other side of the desk from Amanda. She sighed. “Well, we won’t be too harsh on this first day. However, you will have to cooperate, Sean. I don’t know if you’re aware of how controversial the Asimov Project is.”

Sean shrugged. “It’s just a few teenagers.”

“More than that,” Amanda told him. “Twenty young people, between the ages of thirteen and eighteen. You got the very last spot in the project, Sean. You should know that there are many on Earth who say that the dangers we face are too great to allow us to risk the lives of young people. Others say the whole effort is a waste and that Mars can never be a home to humans, so sending anyone here, let alone youngsters, is futile. We intend to prove the doubters wrong. The purpose of Marsport is to test whether Mars can ever be fully colonized by humans. Our task is to prove that we can survive for one Martian year—do you know how long that is?”

“Six hundred and eighty-seven Earth days,” Sean said. It was a figure he had heard over and over during the long voyage from Earth.

Amanda nodded. “Very close. Actually, 686.98 Earth days. The Martian day is a little longer than an Earth one—24 hours and 37 minutes, approximately—so in Martian terms, the Martian year is 651.17 days long.
That’s a long time, Sean. A very long time for a colony to be independent from Earth.”

She put her hands together, making a steeple of her fingertips. “We believe that the Martian colony has to reflect a real community, just as the lunar colony now does. A real community includes teenagers and even children. The Asimov Project is very expensive, Sean. That’s why the selection process was so difficult. And that’s another reason people on Earth object. For what it cost to send you to Mars, the Levelers say, a thousand poor children on Earth could be fed, clothed, and housed for a year.”

Sean shook his head. “There’d be no point. Things are falling apart on Earth.”

“I know they are,” Amanda said. “The trouble is that the governments of Earth are too stubborn to admit it.” She rose from behind her desk. “All right. You have to learn to live with rules, Sean. Dr. Ellman isn’t very diplomatic, but he’s right about some things. Do you understand?”

“I guess so,” Sean said. “It’s just that—well, I’ve
been on my own for so long. But I’ll try. And I’ll take my punishment.”