Missing! (3 page)

She preferred to eat alone, usually in the observation dome above the schoolroom. She would sit in a chair, only half her attention on her food, the other half fixed on her portable computer screen. She struggled with history, and she used every opportunity to cram for exams.

She had a salad for lunch, with greens grown on Mars, a sprinkling of cheese made from milk taken from Martian cows, and a chopped hard-boiled egg from a Martian chicken. “You're really going native,” Sean said, watching her eat. “You make me feel guilty.”

“Why?” Jenny asked, raising one eyebrow. She had very direct, pale blue eyes, eyes that Sean thought could look right through him.

He held up his sandwich. “Earth rations,” he said. “Reconstituted chicken, reconstituted tomato, reconstituted lettuce.”

Jenny made a face. “And I bet it tastes like reconstituted garbage.”

“Pretty close,” Sean admitted. “Look, I know how upset you've been over the decision to take water from Lake Ares, and I had an idea that I talked over with Amanda.” He briefly filled Jenny in.

She looked hopeful at first, but then she groaned. “Ellman will never let us go. Especially me. My grades fell this term, and he's really been after me to study more.”

“Right,” Sean said, grinning. “I happen to know that your GPA fell a whole one-one hundredth of a point. Like that's anything. Nickie lost more ground than that, and she's not worried.”

“Some people worry more than others,” Jenny said with a sniff. “I didn't know that you and Nickie were such good friends.”

“Grade-point averages aren't a big secret. Everybody talks about them.”

“People who don't have to struggle to get a passing mark in history, maybe.”

Sean furrowed his forehead. What was Jenny's problem? Nickie Mikhailova was an outgoing, cheerful girl, and she was a genius at computer design, but
she wasn't as friendly with Sean as she was with Jenny. “Have you and Nickie had a fight or something?”

Jenny gave him a dirty look. “Do you think we'd fight about y—about anything?”

“I don't know,” Sean said reasonably. “That's why I'm asking. Okay, ax the question. Look, I'll help you study for history. I don't think grades are going to be that much of a problem, anyway. I mean, this is a vital project, and if we don't pitch in, it's going to take even longer. I know they can spare me in the greenhouses for two months, and I think your critters can get along without you for that long, so I really don't think there's a problem. You'd go if you could, wouldn't you?”

Jenny nodded. “I missed the Bradbury Run,” she said in a wistful voice. Sean, who had flown down to the edge of the southern polar cap to help set up observation posts that made sure the incoming ice meteors were not straying from their course, didn't say anything. He loved to get out onto the surface of Mars, even if he had to do it wearing a pressure suit, and Jenny did too.

“It'll be fun,” he said. He felt a sudden twinge of doubt.

“I'm in, if the teachers give permission,” Jenny told him. “Anyway, it was nice of you to ask Amanda about that. Thanks.”

Sean nodded. He had oddly mixed feelings. On the one hand, it was good to have Jenny on his side. He had two good friends in Marsport, Alex Benford and Jenny, but of the two, he seemed to have a harder time keeping on Jenny's good side. He enjoyed seeing her smile. On the other hand—well, he wasn't at all sure that volunteering for pipeline duty was the smartest thing to do. Or, for that matter, the safest.

But the class bell chimed, forcing them to hurry down to be on time, and he put his unformed worry completely out of his mind.

Roger Smith, the youngest person
on Mars, had recently celebrated his fourteenth birthday. He kept insisting that that fact made him only
one
of the youngest people on Mars, since Melia Davis was also
fourteen, but she pointed out that she would be fifteen in a few weeks, whereas Roger wouldn't turn fifteen for another ten and a half months.

It wasn't the most interesting argument in the world, and Sean was glad when Jenny came to the table to join them, distracting Roger and Amelia. “What a day,” Jenny said, collapsing into a chair in the town hall, the largest open area inside the colony. Town hall was a combination recreation room, dining hall, and meeting place, and as usual it buzzed with activity.

“How'd you do?” Sean asked. He didn't have to tell Jenny he was asking how she'd done on her history test.

“Aced it,” she said with a broad smile. “A 3.9!”

“Ice!” Melia exclaimed. “I was scared half to death that my history exam would impact, but I pulled out a 3.74. How'd you do it?”

Roger, who had a drawling British accent, said, “Special tutoring, of course. Our Sean is a wizard at history and languages, you know.”

“Cut it out,” Sean said. “I just helped Jenny memorize a few dates, that's all.”

Melia tilted her head. She was short for a fourteen-year-old,
and her face had a funny elfin quality with its sharply pointed chin and oddly slanting green eyes. “So Sean, what's the word? Do we go pipelining, or are we anchored here?”

“Search me,” Sean said. “Amanda never tells me anything. I know the council has been talking about it, though, and that's why we're all off work rotation this week.”

“Really?” Roger asked, raising his eyebrows. “Fancy! I thought it all had to do with them giving us study time. Oh, well, never look a gift holiday in the mouth. Old Earth saying.”

“It is not,” Melia said, playfully popping him one on his shoulder.

“Ow!” Roger said, wincing. “That's assault, that is!”

A curly-haired, bespectacled boy of seventeen, Mickey Goldberg, spotted them and came over. He was sipping a cup of something or other, probably a milk-shake. Mickey had a sweet tooth, and it didn't seem to bother him that the milk-shakes didn't contain any real milk or ice cream. Sean found them a pale imitation, but Mickey slurped one down at least once a day. “Hi,”
Mickey said, pulling up a chair. “Mind if I join you?”

Nobody objected. Sean and Mickey hadn't hit it off at first, and sometimes they were still tense around each other, but Sean thought the older boy was really making an effort to be friendlier. “Its on,” Mickey said, dropping his voice to a whisper.

“The trip?” Roger asked. “Wicked!”

“How do you know?” Sean asked suspiciously.

Mickey glanced around with exaggerated caution. “Because after I finished my calculus exam, I noticed something had been uploaded into the student computers, some new program suite. It was password protected, but Nickie got it open after only two tries. Guess what it is.”

“Hmm—menus for the next term,” Roger said. “Bread that tastes almost but not completely unlike real bread, synthetic milk that is to real milk what a boulder is to a cow, and a few good veggies just to keep us drooling.”

“No,” Mickey said sharply. “Pipeline schematics and a program on how the pumping stations work.”

“Ice!” both Jenny and Sean exclaimed together.

“Don't let anyone know I told you,” Mickey warned them. “Nickie and I are keeping it a secret, but since Sean dreamed up the idea, I thought you ought to know. But nobody else, okay?”

“Word on that,” Melia said solemnly.

And just then Alex Benford weaved his way over to the table, his dark eyes dancing. “Guess what?” he said, making no effort to keep his voice low. “We're going! The school computers have been loaded up with—”

Melia pelted him with a wadded-up napkin, and Roger sprang to his feet and clapped a hand over Alex's mouth. “You know,” he said mournfully, “if Marsport didn't have such terrible leaks, we wouldn't have to worry about water!”

It was a bad joke, but everyone at the table laughed at it, anyway—even Alex, who still had Roger's hand clamped on his mouth and sounded as if his head were buried beneath a pillow.

“I'm personally opposed to this,
you understand,” Dr. Harold Ellman said, his dark scowl sweeping the twenty Asimov Project kids. “You'd be far better advised to remain here in the colony and free up some more seasoned colonists who might actually be of more use on the pipeline project. However, the rest of the council believes that you will benefit from working on the surface. Let me show you the four sites you will be visiting.”

Ellman dimmed the lights in the classroom dome and summoned up the same holographic globe of Mars that Sean had seen so many times before. The yellow line still zigzagged across the face of the planet, splitting into four branches. But—Sean squinted to be sure—one of them, the southernmost branch, looked different. He realized that it now made a
sharp angle eastward, no longer heading south toward Schmidt Crater and the south pole.

Ellman tapped a remote control, and as he mentioned places on the map, they lit up one by one. Sean could see that now parts of the pipeline, the parts that had been completed, glowed a brighter yellow than the sections that had not yet been joined up.

Ellman fiddled with the control again, and the section showing the colony and the pipeline enlarged, making the details come into sharper focus. The teacher cleared his throat as he highlighted a mountain on the holographic map. “We know for a fact that there are permafrost deposits in the soil on the southern side of Ascraeus Mons.” That was the northern-most of a chain of three vast volcanoes, far larger than volcanoes on Earth.

Sean had studied the geology of Mars, and he knew that Mars had no tectonic plate movement, so a volcano that formed on Mars remained right over the hot spot that produced its lava. Sean knew that on Earth, the tectonic plates slowly drifted over the centuries. The Hawaiian Islands were a fine example of that—
the western islands had been built up when they were over the hot spot that sent magma welling up to the surface, but as they drifted to the west, their volcanoes died and new islands were born.

“Do I have to tell you the mechanism that produced the permafrost?” Dr. Ellman asked.

Nickie Mikhailova waved her hand frantically and even before Ellman called on her, she blurted, “The volcanoes outgassed water vapor along with carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and other gases. Millions of years ago, when the volcanoes were active, the atmosphere was thick enough to let the vapor condense into rain or ice. It fell on the slopes of the volcanoes, drained down into the soil, and froze. Below the equator, the southern sides of the volcanoes are the most protected, and the permafrost deposits are closer to the surface there.”

“And I thought you knew nothing about any science that didn't have to do with computers,” Ellman said in a dry, sarcastic voice. “Broadly correct, Mikailova. The other two volcanoes presumably have similar permafrost deposits. Of course, none of the three is close to the size of Olympus Mons, so the supplies are not
likely to be great. But here”—he flicked a key on his remote, and the crooked, curving yellow pipeline off to the south and east glowed brighter on the globe—“yes, here is a fascinating possibility What is this feature, let me see, ah—Doe?”

Sean leaned forward. The highlight was pulsing red over a long, slanting scar just to the west of the great plateau called Solis Planum, the Plain of the Sun. The whole southern rim of the plateau was fringed with intricate networks of braided channels, evidence that surface water had once flowed on Mars. “That's a valley,” he said.

“Rift valley,” murmured Jenny, sitting beside him, too softly for Ellman to hear. That was an art that she had picked up early in her education.

“I mean it's, uh, a rift valley,” Sean corrected himself.

“You surprise me, Doe,” Ellman said. “Quite right. The limited tectonic activity on Mars did open up a number of these valleys. The largest of them is—Goldberg?”

“The Valles Marineris,” the older boy replied, his
tone bored, but not quite bored enough to call down the teacher's wrath.

“Yes, correct. However, let's leave that out for now. It's steep-sided and very deep, so we won't be exploring that area for water for some years. The valley we're interested in is not quite so deep, more accessible, and possibly very rewarding. Now, you may be aware that if everything had gone according to plan, the second and larger Martian colony would have been founded on Solis Planum. Why, Smith?”

“Water,” Roger Smith said promptly. “Water, water everywhere. Or at least, water, water a hundred meters beneath the surface.”

“Accessible water,” Ellman droned on. “And, as you say, only about three hundred feet beneath the surface. But this rift valley on the southeastern side of the plateau offers an even more exciting possibility. The atmosphere of Mars is much thicker now than it was a hundred years ago, thanks to our terraforming efforts. At the bottom of the valley, the air pressure is just great enough to allow ice to remain
stable, instead of subliming. And what is subliming, Davis?”

Melia always sounded frightened when Ellman called on her. In a squeaky voice, she said, “When ice goes straight to vapor form without melting into water first. It happens at low pressures.”

“Very good,” Ellman said. His smile came and went fast, like a mousetrap snapping. “The exciting possibility is that at the bottom of the valley, the permafrost may literally be within arm's reach beneath the surface. Some water vapor constantly percolates up from beneath as the deep permafrost sublimes. It's very likely that, with the increasing air pressure, much of the escaping water vapor has refrozen into ice and has remained that way. The problem, of course, is that the extraction unit is far away, down toward the South Pole. But the engineers have been working on that—”

Sean yawned. Ellman was not a very inspiring lecturer, and he went on and on. Sean gathered that the water-extraction installation already built in Schmidt Crater was too massive to break down and move. However, the factory units in the colony were cobbling
together a smaller automated water-extraction unit from spare parts and machinery they could adapt to other uses.