Missing! (10 page)

It seemed to take them forever to go through the string of greenhouses. The last few were cold, not yet planted. “Better suit up here,” Sean said as they approached the hatch that led out of the last one. “The garage isn't pressurized, and it'll be awkward trying to get into these helmets and packs in the corridor.”

They were wearing their blue pressure suits, but now they donned the helmets and helped one another with the backpacks. “Good to go,” Mickey said. “Look, I'll lead the way, all right? If we get caught, they'll think this is my idea anyway.”

“No, they'll probably think it's me playing a practical joke,” Roger said. “Wish I could think of a funny one right now.”

They went through a long passageway, partly constructed, partly dug through bedrock. The door at the end bore a red marker: It had direct access to the surface of Mars. Mickey operated the airlock, and the three of them crowded into a space about the size of a small closet. The hatch closed behind them, air circulated out, and then Mickey opened the outer door.

Strange, Sean thought, that not so far away a storm was raging. Here the night sky was achingly clear. One of Mars's two tiny moons was high in the sky, hardly more than a bright smudge of light too big to be a star. Sean thought it was probably the potato-shaped, deeply cratered Phobos, whose slow orbit gave viewers the illusion that it moved from west to east.

“Hope everyone went to the loo,” Roger said as they stepped out onto the hard, bare rock of the landing field. “We're not stopping along the way.”

Sean didn't reply. A few work lights gave them some illumination, and their shadows stretched out weirdly. They hustled to the hangar with the ski-like motions of Martian running. Mickey was breathing hard when they got to the access hatch. “Okay,” he said. “I've got the code to get us in. The shuttle should be in position near the hangar doors. Roger, you'll code in the override to get the hatch open. They'll know something's going on then. You'll have about ten seconds to get aboard, and then we'll have to go. Everyone clear?”

“Clear,” Sean and Roger said in unison.

They opened the hatch and stepped out onto the surface. Near an enormous hangar, the shuttle, a conical craft with stubby wings, pointed up to the night sky. A plastic bubble covered it, mildly pressurized and attached to the marscrete revetment by a pressure ring. Roger knelt by the ring and said, “These things are forever malfunctioning. If we're lucky, the tower will read this as just another minor blowout. Here we go.”

Roger opened a small hatch and tapped a control panel. The ring released, and the flexible plastic shot off the base with an inaudible
whoosh.

“Get aboard,” Sean said, leaping up onto the revetment and using his transponder to activate the boarding ladder.

A hatch slipped smoothly open in the side of the craft, and the ladder slid to the ground. Both boys scrambled up it.

Mickey hurried forward. He got into the pilot's seat, powered up, and leaned past Sean to wave at Roger. “Here goes,” he said through clenched teeth. “I'm
activating the emergency liftoff program on the autopilot. They'll know something's up as soon as I do. Hang on tight.”

Sean fastened his seat restraints as Roger clambered into the navigator's station directly behind him. “Let's go, let's go,” Roger said tersely.

Mickey was working at the control panel. “Power's at full. Lay in our course, Roger. I'm shutting off the radio. There's nothing they can say that we want to hear.”

Roger fumbled at his station. “Hang on, I haven't got it connected yet.”

“Just feed it the memory stick,” Mickey said. “Sean, brace yourself. This is going to be rough. Here we go!”

The craft began to shudder as the engines engaged. The lights on the landing field flared. Someone knew that a ship was about to take off, and in a minute they would be coming out to ask questions.

“Trajectory is in,” Roger yelled. “Go, go, go!”

Sean gripped the arms of his seat. Mickey threw a final switch. “Power to the engines,” he said, and the craft began to move. “Anything, Sean?”

“Don't see anyone yet. Wait, there's a Marscat coming out of the garage, two people in it.”

“Too late,” Mickey said. “We're off.”

The shuttle leaped into the air, gaining speed, and then Mickey yelled for Sean to grab the stick. They both pulled back as the shuttle hit airspeed, and Sean felt the g-forces building.

Outside the cockpit, Mars fell away. The lights of Marsport slipped behind them, and then the planet was a dark shape in the dark night. Sean had never seen anything look more deserted.

“We've done it,” Mickey growled. “We got away. Now you guys can cheer.”

“Hooray,” Roger said mildly. “This is exciting, I must say. I almost hope we live.”

The wind finally began to blow
itself out before dawn. The sun rose, sending red-tinged shafts of light through the portholes of the tent. Jenny stood stiffly and peered through one. She might as well have tried to stare through an aluminum plate. The sand had scored and scratched even the resistant plastic until it was opaque.

“Sounds better, anyway,” Alex said. He took his transponder out and keyed it. “Tent Two, this is Tent Three. Do you hear me?”

Dr. Henried replied almost at once: “Tent Two here. We're okay. How are you doing?”

Alex said, “Well, we're cold and hungry, but we've got air. At least for now. I don't think our generator's working.”

Jenny realized then that she wasn't hearing the reassuring hiss of incoming oxygen. She felt a rising panic,
like a tide of cold water washing over her stomach and chest.

“Probably buried and fouled,” Henried said. “We've a spare one in the cat, and we can always use the one from Tent one. Let's have a council of war. Your tent or ours?”

They agreed to met in Tent Two. Salma led the way out. The morning was still, but incredibly hazy—fine particles of dust would be suspended for days or weeks after a blow like that one. Jenny groaned when she saw the wreckage of Tent One. The side facing the blow had developed a rip, and fingers of wind had widened it, shredding the tough pressure-resistant fabric. The tent was partially buried in a drift, and partially unraveled in a long, jagged ribbon that snaked over a fresh fall of dust. They had to scoop sand away from the airlock of Tent Two before they could unseal it an make their way in, one at a time.

Jenny followed Salma in, and Alex came behind her. Dr. Henried was looking tired and worried. “Right,” he said. “Well, we have the two tents, anyway. We should be alright if we run straight back to Advance
Base. I expect they'll have a team out looking for us as soon as they can, so we'll probably run into them. Now, we're about sixty kilometers south of where we should be, so the first thing to do is set up the microwave relay and get word to them. Let's eat, and then we'll go home.”

They had a fairly cheerful meal, considering. When they had finished, they took small sips of water. “Might as well conserve it,” Henried said. “We can't pick up any more out here.”

They dug out Tent Three and found the oxygen generator ruined. Something, maybe dust getting into the circuitry, maybe a surge from a lightning strike, had fused its electronics. The generator from Tent One seemed to be all right, though.

The Marscat had taken a pounding. The flying sand had scoured all the paint from its metal surfaces, and they gleamed as if they had been polished on purpose. Henried got the portable microwave dish out and set it up, but after a few minutes of trying, he said, “No good. Circuits are fried. Help me dig out the cat, and we'll make a run for it.”

The front of the cat had vanished into a crescent dune of dust and sand. They scooped it away, repacked the tents, and climbed aboard.

It was too quiet. After a minute, Jenny asked, “What's wrong?”

“Can't get any power from the cells,” Dr. Henried said. “Lightning, I suppose. And I'm not going to be able to repair this with what we've got on hand. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm afraid we're going to have to walk out of here.”

Walk? Jenny closed her eyes. They had been thirty kilometers south of the trail when they first went south of the crater. And they wouldn't be able to walk straight across the crater—they'd have to follow its rim. Thirty kilometers was more than eighteen miles. Add to that the distance they had traveled to get to the shelter of the crater—what? Maybe twenty miles total?

The pressure suits were good for four hours before their oxygen had to be recharged. Could they make five miles an hour? Probably not, even in the low gravity of Mars. They'd have to take oxygen with them.

And the tents—could they haul the tents with them? That would slow them up, but without the tents, they'd face a Martian night exposed to the cold and the winds.

Dr. Henried was talking again. “We can break down the sides of the cat and fashion a travois. We'll put one of the tents on it, and all the supplies. We ought to be able to make fifteen kilometers by sunset, and we'll get an early start tomorrow. Let's get to work.”

It took them hours. By the time they had lashed together the crude sledge, the sun was halfway up the sky, though it was visible only as an orange smudge in a rose-colored murk. They recharged their suits and began the long walk, taking turns hauling the travois behind them. They had rigged a couple of crude skids, but even so towing the sledge was a constant irritation. It snagged on rocks, it tilted and wobbled constantly as they went up or down hill, and it dragged at them, slowing them to a crawl. On the treadmill, Jenny could manage a steady 6.4 kilometers per hour. She doubted that they were doing half that.

The sand under their boots was yielding, flowing,
slippery, making them stumble and lurch. Dust collected on their faceplates, and they had to wipe it off time and time again just to have some vague idea of where they were going. Noon came and went. The sun sank, fading as it lost itself in thicker layers of drifting dust. They struggled along in a murky half light, resting for ten minutes out of every hour.

Hended called a halt at last. “I estimate we've done at least fifteen kilometers,” he said. “Let's pitch camp and get what sleep we can. We'll need to start early tomorrow.”

They were all staggering with exhaustion. Setting up the tent was excruciating, and once they had all crowded in, finding enough space to sleep seemed an impossibility. Jenny hunkered near the inner flap, and Alex slumped beside her, his face drained.

“Cheer up,” she told him. “We ought to reach the trail tomorrow, if nothing else goes wrong.”

With a weak smile, Alex said, “It could be worse, I guess. I can't think how, but there must be some way.”

Jenny laughed, though she didn't feel like it. It was either that or cry.

The shuttle angled down just
as the sun cleared the eastern horizon. “Find us a smooth place,” Mickey said. “That's all I want, a nice, firm, smooth place to set her down.”

“Scanning with the radar,” Roger said, sounding absorbed in the task.

Sean sat in the copilot's seat itching to do something—anything—but not able to help. He didn't have the piloting skills of Mickey or the computer knowledge of Roger. It was frustrating to admit, but all he could do at the moment was trust the others. “Storm's moving to the southeast,” Roger said. “Okay, we're due north of the second station. Let me see … there's a little hill with a big trail of dust behind it, but if we set down here, we should be okay. Will we be able to take off again?”

“In VSTOL mode, sure,” Mickey said. “But after that, we can set down only once and take off only once and still have enough fuel to get back to Marsport. If we have to do any more landings,
we're out of luck. We'll never make it back.”

“But we can call for help,” Sean said. “If we find them, we can call for help.”

“If I crack this crate up, we can call for help,” Mickey added. “If we're still alive to do it. Okay, I'm turning nav over to you. Sean, sit back and don't touch anything. If we're lucky we'll come down in one piece.”

The landscape of Mars rose alarmingly fast. Sean gripped the arms of the copilot's seat and had to remind himself to breathe. Vague blotches rounded into craters, their eastern depths in shadow, their western sides lit by the rising sun. What looked like pepper sprinkled on red sandpaper suddenly became boulders strewn over a broadly flat plain with a few dunes and rolling hills. Then the ship's engines swiveled, the thrust kicked at Sean, and they settled toward the surface. Clouds of dust rose as the ship came down, and it crunched in with a very solid sound.

“Are we okay?” Roger asked in a shaky voice.

“Checking,” Mickey said. “Engines shut down.

Fuel's okay, attitude's okay. We're down, the ship is level, and I think we can take off again. Now what?”

“Now we break out the cat and visit the station,” Sean said.

Six kilometers to the south
they found it, marked by a beacon that had been twisted into a corkscrew by the wind. Sean opened the hatch and checked inside. “Not activated,” he said. “They didn't get this far.”

They shuffled back through billowy ankle-deep sand to the cat. Visibility was less than a kilometer—the fine red dust still hung in curtains. Roger turned on the directional finder, though, and it showed another beacon somewhere ahead. “About five clicks,” Roger said. “The trail marker.”

“They'll be on the trail,” Sean said. “I think we should take the cat a few markers down. We'll probably see them. They can't be far off.”

“Call the Advance Base,” Mickey said. “See if they've heard from them.”

“They'll yell at us.”

Roger switched on the microwave relay. “I've been yelled at lots of times.”