Missing! (5 page)

When all was said and done, Mickey and Sean set out on a climb that would last for about six hours. They took a small rover as far as they could. This was a squat four-wheeled vehicle, no race car, but one that could move faster than a man on foot. The ground underneath tilted, and when the grade became too steep, Sean and Mickey climbed out and started up the trail on foot. Mickey carried the beacon, a small unit on an anchor rod, and three rod extensions. Sean carried a rock drill that would let them set the beacon in secure, solid stone.

“Not much of a trail,” Mickey huffed.

Sean had to agree. The trail existed mostly in someone's imagination. A Pathfinder crew had wound its way up, leaving small piles of loose stones as markers. They would find one, look at its base for a line of stones giving them a direction, and set off climbing that way until the next marker came into view. Sometimes they had to drop and scramble on all fours, and sometimes they could make good time standing and walking.

After what seemed like hours, they took a rest break and looked back. They were hundreds of meters above the extraction unit and the construction camp, but not even on the foothills of the volcano. The toehills, Sean thought, was more like it. Though Ascareus was not as huge as Olympus, it was an imposing mountain nonetheless. Sean couldn't imagine climbing all the way to the summit, where rings of ancient craters showed that the volcano had once sent clouds of dust, vapor, and gas blasting into the upper atmosphere of Mars.

Sean and Mickey strained to see if they could glimpse the pipeline, but they couldn't be sure. Hazy clouds made the sunlight dim and milky, and what Mickey insisted was the pipeline could have been just the top of a ridge in the distance. They rose at last and climbed higher.

Gradually they came within view of a scarp, a cliff face. The shield volcanoes of Mars looked deceptively smooth in photos taken from space. Closer in, they offered lots of broken landscape. Here a subterranean collapse had left a sheer cliff that rose perhaps a thousand meters. They were to place the beacon
near the foot of the cliff, but not right against it.

They searched for some relatively level ground without much success. “Closer to the cliff base,” Mickey suggested.

Sean didn't much like the idea. The foot of the cliff lost itself in a long pile of broken stone—
scree
as David Czernos, the lead aereologist of Marsport, had taught them to call it. The scree was hundreds of meters deep, hills in itself, and was eloquent testimony that the cliff could break apart and thunder down stones on their heads. But Sean had to admit that the slope leveled out considerably closer to the cliff, so reluctantly he followed Mickey.

They compromised on what seemed to be a safe place, not quite level but rising at a fairly constant angle of fifteen degrees or so. The base of the scree was perhaps a hundred meters away from the spot they chose. Sean assembled the drill and started to make the hole while Mickey assembled the anchor shaft.

It was slow work. The drill screeched and spat out a cloud of dust and a constant shower of grainy pebbles. When Sean reached a depth of a meter, he had to pull
the drill out and extend the bit, then start again. Regulations called for a two-meter anchor hole, and the beacon rod would slip into that. The beacon itself would be on the part extending above the surface—a minimum of ten meters above, according to their orders.

Mickey finished his assembly job and relieved Sean at the drill. The wind was getting up. Sean, resting, saw that the plume of dust was whipping away to the south. He looked across the plain to the east of the volcano and saw a reddening of the air on the horizon. “Dust storm,” he said. “Let's finish up.”

Mickey pulled the drill out. “This should be close enough. Help me sink the shaft.”

As if they were raising a flagpole, Sean and Mickey pushed the long shaft of the beacon up, fitted the bottom into the hole they had drilled, and dropped it in. Sean checked a portable transceiver to make sure the beacon was operating correctly. Then they heard Wilbanks's urgent voice on their helmet radios: “Beacon team! Do you read?”

“Goldberg here,” Mickey said. “We've finished, boss.”

“Get back to camp. The pipeline crew's battened down on the trail. There's one big sandstorm approaching. Hurry!”

It took them a few minutes to break down the drill, and then they started down the trail with Mickey carrying the drill body and Sean the long bits. Sean stopped suddenly and said, “What's that?”

Mickey looked back at him. “What do you mean?”

“Vibration,” Sean said.

Mickey looked up at the cliff, off to their right. “Landslide! Let's get out of here!”

Sean never knew whether their drilling had been enough to upset some fragile balance or if the rising wind had played some part. What was clear was that a fifty-meter stretch of cliff high over their heads had broken loose and was cascading down. Boulders the size of cars tumbled end over end, and a shower of dust and smaller debris rode down the cliff like an avalanche of stone.

A falling boulder the size of Sean's head smashed onto the trail ahead of them, bounced impossibly high in the weak gravity, and bounded on down the
slope. Mickey stumbled and fell, dropping the drill and landing on his face and stomach. Sean heard him curse. “I've cracked my faceplate!”

Sean fumbled at his belt. Every colonist carried an emergency repair kit, and he pulled his out. “Turn over so I can get to it!”

Mickey was gasping frantically. “I'm losing air! I'm gonna die!”

“Ax that!” Sean yelled. “Turn over! I'm getting a patch!”

Mickey rolled to his side in a spasmodic jerk. He tried to clamp his hands against his faceplate, but Sean tugged them away. Sean could see Mickey's terrified eyes, wide behind their round spectacles.

The crack jagged diagonally from about the height of Mickey's left eye down to the center of the face-plate. The warm, humid air from the suit was squealing out, jetting into visible white steam in the low pressure. “I can fix it,” Sean said. He found a sheet of pliotape, clumsily peeled off the backing, and smoothed it over the break. “That get it?”

Mickey's voice was taut. “I can still hear a hissing.
Slowed it, though,” He took three deep breaths, then groaned as he got to his feet, his legs shaking. “Let's go before I run out of air.”

The worst of the landslide had been behind them. Sean glanced back and saw that at least the beacon had not taken a direct hit, though loose fallen stones lay all around its base. They had not reached the rover before Mickey had to switch to his reserve oxygen tank, and they got back to camp just before that ran out. By then the whole eastern horizon had vanished in a roiling cloud of dust and sand. Mickey and Sean had expected to be bawled out, but Wilbanks just ushered them into the hootch with a hasty word of advice: “Settle in. Looks like a big one.”

It was a three-day blow.
Sean thought he would go crazy. All day and all night the hootch screeched as a billion fingers of sand dragged across it with a sound like dentist's drills. No one could go outside into the blinding storm. The flying dust would abrade a
pressure suit's faceplate, would get into joints and crevices and foul the servos that made it possible to breathe and live. Sean had been through some dust storms back in Marsport, days when it seemed the sun had not even risen and everything was a midnight rage of chaos. But it was one thing to hunker down with three thousand other people and another to be trapped in a tiny metal dome with only three others.

The wind let up on the third day, and by the late afternoon they were able to go out and survey the damage. The eastern side of the hootch, fortunately the one opposite the airlock, was buried in a dune of dust that curved around each side of the dome in a broad crescent. They had to dig out the extraction-unit hatch—it was buried under six feet of dust that had collected against the face of the rise. But everything was still working, and before nightfall Wilbanks picked up the pipeline crew on the radio. They were eighteen kilometers away, ready to resume work.

Four days later, Roger let out a whoop as he stood staring off to the east. “There they are!”

Sean hurried over to join him. In the distance he saw the glitter of sun on a moving object, one of the haulers. “Great,” he said. “I'll be glad when they get here.”

“You worry too much,” Roger said. “I think they told you about one time too often that Mars can kill you.”

Sean said, “It's not that. It's just that I'll be glad to see the pipeline connected at last.” But in fact he had been worried. Overland travel on Mars was always dangerous. He joined the others in welcoming the incoming team members.

Wink Crandall was the leader of the pipeline team. She was in her twenties and had been a pilot when she had first arrived at Marsport four years earlier, but in the intervening time she had developed a skill with machinery. “Ran out of pipe sections two weeks ago, and Marsport had some trouble ferrying more to us,” she said. Otherwise we would've been here sooner. Well, another day of hard work should do it. I hope you guys are ready to head home, because I'm sick of roughing it!”

The team at the extraction unit became pipe layers too. They dug and blasted a trench, fitted together sections of pipeline, and bolted sensor and impeller units at the proper intervals. When the pipe team came in from the east, they found that the last section required very minor adjustment. The two parts of the pipe joined together, and someone weakly cheered.

“Ought to have a golden spike,” Roger Smith said.

Mickey Goldberg gave him a long look. “What are you talking about?”

“Your American history. When a railroad was built from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the last part of it was driving in a golden spike. That happened in 1969. Or maybe 1869. Primitive times, anyway.”

Bob Wilbanks said, “Forget the golden spike. I'll be satisfied if this thing produces water. I might drive an icicle in if it does.”

It took another few hours to finish all the preparation, and then everyone, the pipeline crew and the extraction-unit crew, crowded into the tunnel that housed the main machinery. The air seemed thin—it was a slightly richer oxygen mix than in the hootches,
but at a slightly lower pressure—and there was hardly room to turn around. Sean stood at the rear of the crowd, his spine pressed against the rough stone of the tunnel wall.

Bob Wilbanks stood at the control unit up front. “Well, I won't make a speech. And I don't have a golden spike, Roger. But if this thing works, I'll be happy.”

He switched the extraction unit into pump mode. Machinery whined into action, and after a few minutes Sean heard a definite sound of gurgling. Everyone stood tensely, waiting for some word from Wilbanks.

At last the skinny man smiled. “The slurry has hit the first sensor unit five clicks out. We're in business. Ladies and gentlemen, let's go home.”

There was something sad about
leaving the advance base. Sean had no love for the dark, smelly hootch,
and the work had been as hard as anything he had done in his life, but the weeks of close contact with Roger and Mickey had given him a better understanding of both of them. All the kids in the Asimov Project were orphans—that way, as someone had explained to Sean, if they were lost, at least there wouldn't be any grieving parents back on Earth. Some, like Sean, couldn't even remember their parents. Others, like Roger, had lost their parents when they were seven or eight years old.

Sean now thought that Roger's offhand joking style, his tendency to see everything as a punch line, hid an underlying sadness. Occasionally the British boy would have what he called “a case of the silence,” when he just didn't want to talk or be around anyone. Sean suspected that Roger was thinking of his parents at such moments and missing them terribly.

Mickey Goldberg was another story. He was fiercely competitive and tended to insist that things be done his way. Sean had always thought of Mickey as a genius, good at everything. Now he began to understand that Mickey was afraid of failure. Marsport was
the closest thing to home that Mickey had ever known, and he fiercely wanted not only to belong, but to be an indispensable part of it.

As for Sean, well, he was coming to understand himself a little better too. His first few years had been spent in a research institute run by the United States government. He had survived a deadly biological attack, and the scientists and doctors had wanted to know what allowed his system to resist the terrorists' germ attack. The people who had raised him hadn't been cruel, but they hadn't been particularly loving, either. Sean had been treated somewhat like an unusually intelligent lab animal, a hamster that could talk well but that had no real feelings, none that the experimenters needed bother with, at any rate. Then, after a horribly failed time with an unsuitable foster family, Sean had spent years living a feral life on his own, like a hunted animal.

Now he was starting to learn what friendship was, and family. And he was deeply fearful of losing what he had gained. He found it hard to open up to others, but he was trying.

Sean caught himself and stopped his brooding—that was what Jenny called it when he fell silent and started thinking about his own past. The present was enough to think about. By contrast to the days of hard work at the base, the days following completion of the work were, well, boring. The colony could spare only one plane to bring all the work crews back to Marsport. By common consent, they all agreed that the ones who had been away the longest should be the first ones to return. That left Sean, Roger, and Mickey in the last dozen, and so they had to wait for several days while the plane ferried everyone else back home. The last couple of days were a strain. The hootch wasn't crowded any longer, not after Wilbanks' departure. They had no more work to do, so they luxuriated in doing nothing, lying in their bunks and reading, eating the tasteless rations, and talking about what they wanted to do next.