Marooned! (7 page)

He had often tried to force his memory back to the time when he had a mother and father, but he never could. The earliest thing he could recall was a man holding him up, and another one taking him onto a helicopter. U.S. Army counter-terrorist specialists, taking the few survivors of the Aberlin massacre to safety.

Nothing earlier than that. No home, no mom, no dad.

The transport rattled to a stop, a fine drift of dust catching up with it and settling as they climbed aboard. The driver switched radio frequencies and
his voice crackled into their helmets: “One more today. Meteorology’s saying there’s a high chance of dust storms. We’re heading back early.”

“Suits me,” Alex said.

They sat opposite each other. Sean wanted to ask Alex about his parents, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. It was hard to be the only person on Mars who had no real history. And besides, he didn’t want Alex upset, not when they had to climb to the top of yet another tower.

They reached the windmill, and Alex clucked his tongue. “Man, this is another blade job. Mind if I go first this time?”

“Be my guest.”

Sean paused to look up. This one would be tough. The blades of the windmill were mangled; one of them had caught in the framework of the tower, one was snapped off short. He waited while Alex hooked his safety line on and started up, and then he followed, ten feet behind.

Above him, Alex’s legs pumped steadily as
he climbed the ladder. Sean tried to keep up, but he had to rest more often than Alex did. He felt embarrassment again. Had he been holding things up? Probably, he decided. Alex had been too polite to call him on it.

“Wait up,” he said at last, when Alex was far above him.

“Ice. I’m ready for a rest anyway.”

Sean toiled up the ladder. When he reached Alex, he heard the other boy whistle. “Sean, we’re going to have to unhook to get past this. Be careful, okay?”

Looking up, Sean could see that the badly bent lower blade of the windmill had thrust itself through the framework on the far side and stuck out a couple of feet on their side—right through the ladder. The wind had all but wrapped the tip of the blade around the rail, and it was so tightly jammed that the safety lines would have to be unhooked, then refastened once they were past the obstacle.

“Take it easy, Alex,” Sean warned.

“Got it. Here we go. If I fall, catch me.”

It took Sean a second to realize that was just a humorless little joke. There would be no catching if the worst should happen.

He saw Alex cautiously unclip his safety line, climb two more rungs, and then hook on again. “Watch the end of the blade. It’s sharp enough to cut your pressure suit.”

Sean swallowed and followed Alex up. He reached the point where the blade thrust through and saw that the dust, or something, had broken the tip off and had honed the metal sharp as a knife. He felt some misgiving. What would happen when they took the blade assembly off at the top? He didn’t know if they could work the blade out from where it was lodged. Maybe they should wait—

No, this was their job. And he wanted to do it well. Sean unhooked his safety line, telling himself that he had never needed it so far. Climbing up five or six feet without it was no big deal.

Sean forced himself not to look down; he couldn’t afford to be dizzy. He edged over, avoiding the sharp
end of the blade. Thinking that he was already past the blade, he stepped back over—but his boot came to rest not on the rung, but on the point of the windmill blade. He felt himself slip, and he desperately clung to the ladder, hoisting himself by his arms.

He got his foot onto the next rung and let out a deeply held breath. From above: “You okay, Sean?”

“Fine. Let’s go.”

They made the rest of the climb. Because of the bent and jammed blade, Alex had to edge around the catwalk to the right instead of the left. Sean got to the top, reached to his belt, and took out the pulley. “I don’t think we’re going to be able to lower this one,” he said.

“You may be right,” Alex replied. “The shaft looks bent too, and I think the nacelle may be damaged. This is going to be a major overhaul. We’ll let them know, but let’s see if we can get the blades down. That’ll be a start.”

The nose cone was pointing down at a fifteen-degree angle, a sure sign that the axle was bent. Alex
leaned far out and tried to turn the cone. It was stuck. “A little help here, Sean.”

Sean hooked his leg around a strut and leaned out. The nose cone wouldn’t give at all. “Let me get a lever through it,” he said. He reached to his belt and pulled out a steel rod. It slipped through two holes drilled near the tip of the nose cone, ordinarily closed by two hinged plastic flaps. In an emergency, though, the rod could be pressed through, serving as a handle.

“Ready?” Sean asked. “On three. One, two, three!”

They both shoved, and finally the cap began to rotate. They got it off and let it fall, then hooked on the pulley and the line. “Brake on?” Alex asked.

“Check.”

Sean took the bolts nearest him, and Alex worked on the three on his side. They removed the last two at the same time. Sean was leaning far out, his arm hooked around the broken-off stub of the top blade.

Then it happened. The assembly swung free—and
dragged Sean with it. Too late, he remembered that he had not refastened his safety line.

He desperately clutched the hub and upper blade. The pulley brake was not meant to hold his weight along with the blades. He felt it giving, the line screeching through the pulley. Now he was dangling three hundred meters above the surface, clutching the blade, feeling himself beginning to slip. His head reeled, and pure terror made him hold on with a death grip.

“Hang on!” Alex shouted. He had ducked past the nacelle and was grabbing for the line.

The blade swung to the side, threatening to dump Sean off. Below him, the lower blade, weakened where it had bent through the framework, was crumpling.

Alex was grunting, hauling on the line, dragging the blades and Sean back toward the tower. Sean realized that he was just close enough to the framework to grab it—if he could overcome his panic and force his hands to let go of the blade.

“Now!”

For a sickening second, Sean felt himself falling, but his flailing hand grabbed a cross strut. He thudded against the tower, hooked a leg through the maze of struts, and hung there gasping. Alex let go of the line. It fed through the pulley, the brake weakened, and the windmill blades fell outward. There was a shuddering snap. Somewhere below them the lower blade had broken off short. The rest of the assembly plunged down to the surface.

“Give me your safety line,” Alex commanded.

It took every bit of nerve that Sean could summon, but he pulled the line out of its reel and passed it up. Alex fastened it into the track with a click. “Now give me your hand.”

In a few seconds, Sean was back atop the tower, his head spinning. “I owe you big, man.”

“Ice,” Alex said with a sickly grin. “Man, look back there.” He pointed.

In the far distance Sean could see the writhing form of a dust devil, far south of Marsport. “They’re starting early today.”

“Better get down.”

The descent was hard. Sean’s knees kept wanting to give way. By the time they reached the bottom of the ladder they could see the transport speeding up the rutted road toward them.

“Jenny was right,” Sean said. “I could’ve killed myself up there.”

“Could’ve but didn’t,” Alex said. “Could’ve been me just as well. But stay sharp. Be better tomorrow.”

“You want to partner me again?” Sean asked, surprised.

“Yeah, sure. You just forgot for a second, that’s all. You won’t do it again. I know from now on you’re going to remember.”

“What, to latch my safety line?”

“No,” Alex said. “That Mars has a million ways to kill you. That’s all.”

To Sean’s relief, in the days that
followed Alex never so much as mentioned the accident. It took them another two days to finish the repairs, and then some of it had to be done over again when another dust devil took out six more of the windmills. On the third morning of the repair mission, Sean had doubted that he would be able to make the long, frightening climb again, but once he had gotten started he had found the ascents were actually a little easier. At least his achy muscles were in better shape. And Alex had been right about one thing: Sean did not forget his safety line again.

With full power restored at last, lessons began again. Dr. Ellman leaned hard on them all to make up for lost time in their physical science sessions, and
he was quick to threaten Sean with a forced return to Earth if he fell behind.

Fortunately Nickie Mikhailova seemed to take pity on Sean and tutored him in math and chemistry. It wasn’t really her fiel; she was a computer specialist, and she had even built her own personal computer—a tiny voice-activated thing the size of a paperback book—from scratch. Still, she knew a lot about science, and with her drilling him and Jenny Laslo prodding him, Sean began to make some sense of the equations and the strange symbols. He even began to pull off experiments with no virtual explosions, something that he welcomed even if the development seemed to disappoint Mickey Goldberg, who complained more than once that the fireworks display had been postponed again.

Sean fell more and more into the rhythm of life in Marsport. After more than a full month on Mars, he began to sleep better. All the Martian clocks automatically compensated for the difference between an Earth day and a Martian one. Each
Martian hour was a little more than a minute and a half longer than an Earth hour, and there were twenty-four hours in a Martian day, just as in an Earth day. Still, for someone newly arrived from Earth, the extra minute and a half added up. It was as if each day went on a little too long. For the first few weeks, newcomers to Mars felt constantly jet-lagged, as if they were out of synch and out of step with everyone else. And they were, because their biological clocks were slow to adjust.

But gradually the human body was able to get used to the new “day,” and finally Sean began to feel like his old self. He was no longer waking up tired, anyway. The sessions in the gym gradually became easier to bear as he built up muscle and endurance. The dreary sameness of the food became more tolerable, and the occasions when fresh, greenhouse-grown vegetables hit the tables were times for celebration. Sean even began to feel at home in the low gravity, no longer reeling and tripping at unexpected moments, but adopting the same kind
of loose-limbed walk as the long-time colonists.

But though he still felt like an outsider—Mickey Goldberg in particular was still hounding him about settling on an area of specialization—Sean found that he was indeed fitting in, after a fashion. Like the rest of the colonists, he found himself pausing every evening at 19:35 hours to watch the news transmission from Earth, the narrow-beam cast that gave the colonists a one-hour glimpse of home.

It was seldom good news. More wars, more terrorist attacks, more disease and destruction. Politicians complaining and posturing, but little evidence of anything being done. “I don’t believe it’s that bad,” Alex said one evening after a particularly depressing news program. “I think this must be Earth’s way of making us happy to be away from it all. Keeps us from getting homesick and wanting to go back.”

Sean started to tell him that he doubted the governments of Earth would hold together for even one more year, but he stopped himself. He didn’t
know how to explain his inner certainty, and he didn’t want to try. He just said, “I’ll never go back.”

“You wish,” Mickey Goldberg said from across the common room. “You’ll be out of here before you know it, Doe. You’ve got to pass every course to stay eligible as a colonist, and you’re right on the borderline with a couple. Last week I heard Ellman saying he can’t wait to ship you out when the
Argosy
leaves orbit in a month and a half.”

Sean glowered at him. “I don’t care what Ellman says. Amanda—I mean, Dr. Simak—won’t send me back.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” Mickey said with a grin. “She doesn’t have the final word, you know. It’s a committee decision, and Dr. Ellman is on that committee. But I really can see her point about bringing you to Mars. I guess maybe it helps to have a celebrity here. You know something, though? I haven’t seen your name on the newscasts, so you’re not worth much in that department, either.”

“Shut it down, Goldberg,” Alex said. “You’re just
flapping your mouth to make a breeze. Hey, you going to take the Bradbury run in two weeks?”

Mickey rolled his eyes. “Is Jupiter a planet?”

Sean looked at Alex. “What’s the Bradbury run?”

“Chance to fly, man,” Alex said with a broad smile. “A pilot trainee like me wouldn’t miss it. Hey, why don’t you sign up to come along? There’ll be room. Maybe we can take the same plane.”

“Where do we fly?” Sean asked.

Mickey laughed and leaned forward in his chair, spreading his hands theatrically. “Now, see, that’s what I’m talking about. Didn’t they tell you about the ice meteorites on the trip out?”

Sean responded from memory. “Sure, the ones that hit around the south pole. They come in from Ganymede.”

“The Bradbury Project,” Mickey said. “Know what that is?”

Sean did. “The plan to enrich the atmosphere of Mars with the liquids and gases from the meteors. After ten or twelve more years, the air will be thick
enough to create a strong greenhouse effect. The climate all over Mars will warm up. Then all the ice at the south polar region will melt during the southern summer and create liquid water—it won’t just sublime directly to vapor. Eventually well even get rain, maybe rivers and lakes.”

“The boy can be taught,” Mickey said. “Okay, right so far. Now, here’s the news flash that you didn’t get, Doe. The mass driver on Ganymede is like a big gun. It uses magnetic acceleration instead of gunpowder, but it basically shoots huge bullets of ice into space. The bullets loop around Jupiter, then spiral inward toward the sun and toward Mars. After a long time, they crash near the Martian south pole. But what happens if the gun isn’t aimed right?”