Marooned! (8 page)

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Authors: Brad Strickland,THOMAS E. FULLER

BOOK: Marooned!
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“Then the meteors miss Mars, I guess,” Sean said.

“Yeah, or they come smashing right into the middle of Marsport. So twice a year we do a Bradbury run to the South Pole. We take readings on the trajectories of incoming meteorites. If we have to
adjust the mass driver, the signal has to be sent right now—it takes years for those meteorites to get to us, and if they start to creep north of where they’re supposed to land, we have to correct that right away. Otherwise, the meteorites miss us altogether, which is bad, or they hit us, which could be a little bit worse.”

“It’s a lot of fun, flying to the pole. So what do you say, Sean? You coming with us?” Alex asked.

“What do I have to do?”

Mickey gave a triumphant squawk of laughter, leaned back in his chair, and clapped his hands. “Not much, Doe. Just pull out a 3.75 or better!”

Sean groaned. That was an A average on schoolwork. Exams were coming up. At the moment, Sean had a 3.9 in English and history, but only a 3.5 in life sciences. Even worse, Mickey was right about Sean’s two borderline subjects. His math grade was only a 2.4 and his physical science score a barely passing 2.0. “I’ll never make it!”

“You don’t have to have an
overall
average of
3.75,” Alex said, shooting a look at Mickey. “You just have to average that high on the exams. With a little intensive cramming, you can do it. Look, Sean, you probably have like a 3.2 right now. You’ll just have to study extra hard for the math and the science, and you’ve got it.”

“Give it up, Benford,” Mickey said. “A slow-brain like Doe? He’ll never do it.”

And right then and there, Sean determined that he
would
do it, if only to prove Mickey wrong.

That started several days of exhaustive studying, drilling, and memorization. Jenny helped a lot, going over and over his life sciences assignments with him until he had the basics down cold. And Nickie, who was very good in math, was glad to step up her tutoring. Sean began to feel as if he was just a learning machine, packing facts, equations, theories, definitions, and more into his brain. But it wasn’t easy, not at all, and Sean never felt truly confident. Despite the extra work he put in, he still struggled with math, and he doubted that he’d ever
really understand chemistry and physics. But now and then a little light glimmered.

6.2

Exam week arrived. A tired but
triumphant Sean breezed through English with a perfect 4.0, and came close in history, missing only one item on a long and exhausting test for a 3.99. Jenny had drummed more biology into his head than he thought it could hold, and he didn’t do badly on his life sciences exam, winding up with a respectable 3.74. Through the three-hour math test, Sean sweated almost as much as he had climbing the windmill towers, and learned at last that Nickie’s tutoring had paid off: He scored a 3.66. That left only natural sciences, Ellman’s exam.

Jenny whispered, “You’ve just got to get a 3.36. You can doit!”

Dr. Ellman had made out twenty different exams,
one for each of his students. He sat at the central desk and gave them all the signal to begin.

Sean turned on his computer and felt his heart sink. The exam was heavily weighted toward chemistry—his worst subject. But he waded in, trying desperately to remember the chart of the elements, ionic potentials, and what a mole was. Some of it came floating back to his consciousness as he worked through the test. He had to skip some of the more difficult problems, rushing ahead to answer the easier questions, then going back to concentrate on the puzzlers.

An hour left. Then thirty minutes. Sean feverishly worked to solve chemical equations, tried to come up with definitions for terms that he was shaky on, took a few guesses when he just didn’t know the answer for certain. Fifteen minutes left, then ten.

Finally the screen froze in the middle of Sean’s entering an answer. “Time’s up,” Ellman announced. “I’ll score your examinations now.”

Sean took a deep breath. He hadn’t even begun on
three of the postponed problems, and he wasn’t sure how well he’d performed on the ones he did answer. At least he didn’t have to suffer a prolonged period of waiting.

The exam had taken three hours. It took only one second for Sean’s hopes to be dashed. His score showed up in bright, glowing yellow figures: 3.34. It was a decent B. It would even pull his shaky average in physical sciences up to a fairly steady C.

But it wasn’t quite enough.

Sean slapped the desk in annoyance.

“I can dock a few points for misbehavior,” Ellman said sharply. He glanced at his own monitor, which gave him a readout of all the grades in the class. “Well, look at that. Mr. Doe, I don’t understand your impatience. You did very well. Congratulations.”

Sean clamped his jaws shut. All the other students filed out, except for him and Alex. Sean sat slumped in his chair and stared sullenly at the stupid numbers, two one-hundredths of a
point too low. Alex came up behind him, bent over his shoulder, and said, “My man!”

“I needed a 3.36,” Sean growled.

“Oh, really? Move over.”

Alex called up a calculator program and fed in Scan’s scores. The result was 3.746.

“I’m still short,” Sean pointed out.

“Well, you’re lucky that the grading program goes two decimal places and rounds up, aren’t you?” Alex asked. The display flickered to round the figures up, and there it was, a big, beautiful 3.75.

6.3

“I’m going, Goldberg!” Sean crowed
that afternoon at dinner. “3.75! Read it and weep!”

Mickey shrugged. “Lucked out, did you? Well, I got a 3.88, for your information, so don’t get too full of yourself. But I guess I’d be scrambling too if I was afraid of being shipped out.” He paused.
“Good going, Doe.” His tone was grudging.

“Thanks,” Sean said.

And then Mickey added, “If you’re taking the Bradbury run, see if you can fly with Alex. I don’t want you getting airsick in any cabin with me.”

Jenny came in, and Sean jumped up from his table, momentarily forgetting the low gravity. He recovered his balance and carried his tray over to her table, beaming from ear to ear as he sat down next to her. “Thanks for everything. I did it!” he said. “Skin of my teeth, but I squeaked it out! I’m going with you.”

“Going with me?” Jenny asked with a frown. “Where do you think I’m going?”

“The Bradbury run,” Sean said. “You know—” He broke off in confusion as Jenny’s face turned bright red. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m not going on the Bradbury run,” Jenny said. “I don’t qualify. I thought you knew. I’m lousy at history. I’ve only got a 3.70 on the exams.”

“What? But if it’s just history—I thought—you’re so smart!” Sean spluttered.

She gave him an angry look, and he saw tears in her eyes. “In biology! But I’m scrambling to keep up in everything else. If you weren’t so wrapped up in yourself, you might—oh, never mind.”

“What’s wrong?” Sean asked. “I didn’t mean to—”

Jenny was looking down. Tears fell into her lap. “I’m so scared,” she whispered. “Everyone else here is so smart, and I’m so dumb. I feel like a fake. Every time we take an exam, I’m sure I’m going to wash out and be sent back to Earth.”

“That’s just how—” Sean broke off. “Hey, you don’t have to worry. You’re brilliant at biology. They’d never—anyway, all the teachers like you.”

Jenny still wouldn’t meet his gaze. “I don’t care what happens. I’m not going back to the orphanage.”

“What?” Sean asked. “You didn’t have a—”

“A family? I’m a Skinner kid,” she said bitterly. “They never let us be adopted.”

“I don’t understand,” Sean said. “What’s that mean?”

She wiped her eyes, looked around guiltily, and then said, “You really don’t know? Okay, put it this way: My mother was a criminal. She died in prison when I was five years old. The government takes kids like me and puts them in Skinner orphanages. They experiment on us.”

Sean felt cold. “Do you mean—”

Jenny waved a hand. “Not Frankenstein stuff. No medical experiments. Social ones, education, that kind of thing. We can’t transfer out of the orphanage system until we’re eighteen. We’re like … like lab rats or something.”

“But you got out. You were selected to come to Marsport,” Sean said.

“Charity case,” she said bitterly. “I qualified so well in science that they put my name in the lottery for the first round of Asimov Project selections, and I won. Now I have to scramble all the time, but I’m not going back to that. I’m not!”

Sean said, “Look, you’re the smartest kid I know. Maybe not in subjects, but in knowing what it’s all
about. You don’t have to be afraid. They’ll never send you home, not in a million years.”

“That’s what you think, just because you don’t have anything to worry about,” Jenny said. “Amanda Simak is your adopted mother. You’re safe. You don’t know what it’s like for the rest of us.”

“You’re wrong about that,” Sean protested. “Look, I’ve felt the same way as you do ever since I got here. I mean, I thought I was the dumbest person on the face of the planet. And you’re wrong about Amanda. If the committee decided to get rid of me—well, they could send me home any time they wanted to. Right now Ellman’s itching to put me aboard the
Argosy,
and I don’t know how Mpondo feels about me. That’s why I’m always so scared of messing up. I just … I never thought that anyone else would be as afraid of being kicked out as I am.”

“Well, you were wrong.” Jenny smiled weakly.

Sean reached across the table and patted her
hand. She turned her hand over and clasped his. From that moment on Sean knew that, whatever happened, he had at least one friend on Mars he could talk to about anything.

CHAPTER 7
7.1

Sean’s pilot was Jimmy Carlson,
a short, swaggering man with a welcoming grin and a sense of fun and adventure. To his relief—as well as to Mickey’s, he was sure—Sean learned that his partner would be Roger Smith, the youngest of the Asimov Project kids. As they waited for a preflight briefing, Roger congratulated Sean on qualifying for the trip.

“I heard you got a 4.0,” Sean replied. “That’s impressive.”

“Well, it was a 3.996, actually, but they rounded up,” Roger said simply. He wasn’t bragging, Sean realized. Roger just loved to be exact about figures. “Is it true that you were a survivor of the Aberlin massacre?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Sean grunted. “But I don’t remember anything about it. I don’t even remember my parents.”

“My parents were both doctors who were killed while helping in the Pan-African war,” Roger said. “I was nine at the time.”

For a few moments they sat in silence, waiting for their pilot in the hangar dome where three airplanes were docked. They looked almost nothing like Earth jets to Sean. The bodies of the planes were sleek and silvery, the engines relatively tiny, and the wings were enormous, as they had to be in the thin atmosphere of Mars.

“Did you bring your tele helmet?” Roger asked.

“My what?”

“Tele helmet,” Roger said, with a surprised glance. But then Roger
always
looked surprised, his eyebrows permanently arched high on his forehead. “You know, the little fold-up hood that transmits whatever you see back to the ship? We’re required to have one.”

“I don’t have one,” Sean said. “Nobody told me.”

“Expect they thought you’d find it in the manual,” Roger told him with a shrug.

“Manual?” Sean asked, suddenly feeling nervous.

“Yes, the flight manual. Didn’t you pick yours up?”

Sean shook his head. “Where was I supposed to—”

“In the Prep Dome, when you took your preflight med tests.”

“Preflight med tests?”

“Yes, the ones that we were told about in the transmission last week.”

“What transmission?” Sean asked, panicked.

“The one that came over your tele helmet, of course,” Roger said reasonably.

Sean wailed, “But I don’t
have
a—” He broke off and glared at Roger.

“Gotcha,” Roger said, giggling.

Sean rolled his eyes. That was another thing he had learned about Roger. If Roger was the least bit bored, he could think up intricate little jokes. And people almost invariably fell for them.

“Sorry I’m late, guys!” Jimmy Carlson hurried in, his orange uniform crisp and neat. He wasn’t much taller than Sean, but his compact frame seemed to hold enough energy for five or six people. “Okay, listen up. The ship we’ll be taking is the MAR/S-7. That stands for—”

“Martian Aerial Reconnaissance/Survey craft,” Roger said promptly.

“Right! Ordinarily, these ships can carry a pilot, copilot, and six passengers. Because we’re hauling some equipment as well, it’ll just be me, our copilot and navigator Sara Havasian, and the two of you. We’ll have ten different survey spots where we’ll set down, take instrumental readings, and then wait for a visual observation of meteor trajectories. We’ll be out six days in all, with basic rations and water, along with a reasonable amount of emergency survival gear. I hope you guys can sleep in a reclined seat and don’t mind sharing a chemical John with three other people, because that’s the situation.”

He looked at his watch. “Okay, you’ll need to be
familiar with five different types of instruments. I want you to spend the next couple of days studying them on your computers, and then we’ll do a couple of days of training. Assuming you get through that okay, we’ll plan for takeoff at 6:00 hours Monday. Heck of a way to spend your school vacation, isn’t it?”

They toured the aircraft—it was going to be very tight, Sean saw—and learned about the emergency gear: a heated tent with a small oxygen generator, compressed food rations, a global positioning monitor and location beacon, and a radio. “You’ll have to wear these,” Jimmy said, handing Sean and Roger each a small device like an old-fashioned wristwatch. “Key in your ID numbers now. Do it twice to confirm them.”

They did, and Sean saw the face of his device register his name, age, and dorm room assignment. “Are these GPS locators, too?” he asked.

“Right,” Jimmy told him. “Mars doesn’t have as complete a satellite grid as Earth, but as long as you’re wearing this device, the satellites we do have
can track you to within fifty meters or so. If we get stranded, a rescue craft can find us and bring us back.”

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