Missing! (7 page)

Mars, as Sean had been told over and over, had a million ways of killing a person.

He sat alone and studied the most recent weather images. Nothing alarming. Heavy clouds over the south pole, but that was normal, with the ice meteorites spiraling in and the sun warming the polar cap as summer advanced. The north pole was just the opposite, the carbon dioxide and water ice cap growing rapidly as the northern hemisphere had its winter.

No huge dust storms showed up. There were spatters of lightning storms in the southern hemisphere, another normal feature of Martian weather. Dust clouds generated considerable electricity as the partides
spun in the wind, building static charges. Martian lightning storms never produced rain, but there could be fearsome bolts of electricity.

But nothing looked to be an imminent threat. Sean sighed and switched off the computer screen. “Feel better?” asked someone behind him.

Sean jumped and turned, feeling guilty. It was Amanda, sitting at a student work station just behind him. “I didn't hear you come in,” he said.

Amanda smiled. “I wondered why you'd been so jumpy for the last few days, and so I decided to ask you. Tracked you down with your wrist locater. Hope you don't mind.”

Sean shook his head. The colonists all wore the wristwatchlike devices, tiny transponders that let searchers locate them to within a few meters. It was a surrender of independence, but it was also a safety measure. “I don't know,” Sean confessed. “I'm worried about Jenny and her work party. They don't have any heavy trucks, and they're relying on survival tents.”

“That shouldn't be a problem,” Amanda pointed
out. “It's warm—well, warm for Mars—and they can generate enough air and water to take care of their needs.”

“I know,” Sean said. He threw his hands up. “I don't know why I'm so worried. It should be okay, but I have a feeling it isn't. Like Roger says, everything goes wrong.”

“Sometimes it does,” Amanda said. “Sean, Jenny isn't alone. Her team leader is Karl Henried, and he's a level-headed man. She and Alex will have the others to look out for them. Alex is a level-headed young man, and Jenny's no slouch herself. She knows what the dangers are and how to guard against them.”

“The people on Earth knew what the dangers were,” Sean returned. “They didn't do such a great job of guarding.”

“Well, we learn from their mistakes,” Amanda said. “I know you have a gift for spotting the weak places in plans, Sean. Is that what's happening now, or is it just that you're lonely and worried?”

Sean had been wondering about that himself. “I just don't know. I'm not even sure how I can recognize
trends. It's a feeling more than anything else—the way you can bend a stick just so far and you have the feeling that if you try to bend it just a little more, it will snap. But it doesn't work all the time, and sometimes it's wrong. I hope it's wrong now—or that it's not working at all.”

“I hope so too,” Amanda said.

The next morning settled the
question. Sean woke up with a sharp feeling of foreboding. He slipped to the foot of his bed and activated his computer, asking it for a weather satellite readout.

The picture flicked to life immediately, live images showing Marsport and the area immediately around it: the southern slopes of Olympus Mons to the north, and the smooth, crater-pocked plain to the south. Sean expanded the view and moved it to the east and to the south.

There. A blurry mass rose over part of the Daedalia
Planum. Sean homed in on it. Not an atmospheric cloud, but a billow of dust. A storm was building—had built overnight—and now was gaining strength rapidly. Sean threw his clothes on and called Amanda. Her face appeared in his viewscreen. “What is it?”

“Dust storm,” Sean said. “Big one. Close to the pipeline route on Daedalia. Here, I'll send you the picture.” Sean sent it, and on his own viewscreen he saw Amanda's eyes widen in shock as she grasped the extent of the storm.

“The meteorology department said there was a chance of a storm, but they haven't done their daily report yet. That
does
look bad. I'll call the prep party in,” Amanda said. “It looks like it's coming in from the north, across the lava flows. Maybe they can outrun it.”

It was an electrical storm as well as a sandstorm. Bolts of intense lightning that dwarfed any on Earth shot from the growing, roiling dark cloud, slammed into the Martian surface, shattered and melted rock. Like a gigantic spider, the dark bloated body of the storm rose and stalked across the land on legs of lightning. The discharges interfered with radio communication, and
for over an hour Amanda tried without success to raise the advance base.

Sean paced her office, too nervous to sit down, more and more worried as time went on and the storm intensified. Martian meteorologists had a classification system for storms. A ten was a global storm, a blinding, weeks-long rage of wind and sand that blanketed the whole planet. A one was a local storm, a dust devil that could cause minor damage. A two was ten times stronger than that, and a three was a hundred times stronger than a one.

This one, the computer told Sean, had already built up to a four point five. If it had been an Earth hurricane, it would have ranked among the most powerful. A storm that size slamming into the east coast of the United States could rip apart a city the size of Washington.

And if six campers were on the beach with no protection but tents—Sean couldn't stand to think about it.

When Amanda finally got through, the comm tech on the other end said that the station had lost contact
with the prep team. “We're okay here, but it's a big one. The pipeline crew have dug in and ought to be safe. We're hoping the prep team saw the storm coming and battened everything down,” the tech said, her voice barely audible above the hiss and roar of background static. “If they can get to protection in a crater or behind a ridge, they may be okay.”

May be, Sean thought.
May
be.

He went to an auxiliary computer station and called up the current image of the storm. It sprawled over half the Daedalia Planum, a dark mass. Another view showed him lightning strikes. The whole cloud writhed with them.

“Is there anything you can do for the prep team?” Amanda was asking.

“Negative. They're on their own to weather this one.”

“Keep trying to raise them,” Amanda said. “Let them know we'll get help to them as soon as possible.” No reply. She repeated her order and asked, “Did you get that?”

But nothing came back, only the crackle and mutter
of static. The storm had swirled right over the advance base, and it was cutting off communications.

“We've got to send a rescue team,” Sean said.

“We'll get a team in as soon as we can,” Amanda replied. “IVe got the GPS system trying to locate them now. Too much interference, but when the storm lets up a little, we should be able to find them without any trouble. I'm sure they're safe.”

“They may not be,” Sean insisted. “If the storm hit them before daybreak, it might have ripped all their tents loose. They only had one half-track, and I've seen storms wreck those. We've got to get to them—”

“Sean!” Amanda's voice was sharp. “I know you're worried. But remember, I have to worry about everyone in Marsport, not just about six members of a surface team. We operate under a standing order: Never send a rescue team in until they're clear of danger themselves. We can't lose a dozen people trying to save six.”

Sean opened his mouth to argue, realized that nothing he could say made any difference, and closed his mouth again. Every instinct he had told him that
Amanda was wrong, that waiting meant losing Jenny and the others. Still, he couldn't stack instinct up against Amanda's orders, or against the good of the entire colony.

Daedalia Planum bore the name of the mythical Greek inventor Daedalus, he who had crafted wings to allow his son Icarus and himself to fly. Icarus, though, got caught up in the joy and excitement of flying and had risen too close to the sun. His wings melted and he fell. It had never really happened, of course. It was mythology. Still, Sean could not help remembering that Icarus had died.

Sean left Amanda's office determined that he was going to do something. He might not be able to send a dozen people out to search for six.

But he could send one.

Himself.

Jenny Lasio Wondered If she
would ever feel that she fit in. The Asimov Project kids had been carefully tested, screened, evaluated, and studied—so why did she sometimes feel that she was the only one of them who had slipped through by accident? Maybe that was why she always tried harder than anyone else, pushed herself to and even beyond the limit.

Sometimes at night she lay awake and wondered if she could stand the strain, and sleep was hard to find. As often as not, she had bad dreams when she did manage to drop off, dreams of her days in an orphanage on Earth, where she was treated as a subject in an ongoing series of experiments. The sense of isolation and helplessness sometimes woke her up with a frightened jerk.

Fortunately, the prep team worked so hard that sleeplessness was unlikely to be a problem. On the
first day they had ridden for hours in the little Marscat rover, sometimes having to zig and zag to avoid boulders or ridges. The sun had been too low in the west to let the team do much at the impeller/ heating unit, so they had hastily set up the tents and had just called it a day instead.

Just as well,
Jenny thought as she and Salma Sauvo wrestled with the fabric-and-metal radiation shielding. The kit was supposed to snap right into shape as a tent. It did, finally, and they set about anchoring it with a hand drill and some rocks. Survival tents had just about enough space to let two people sleep in one, and just about enough heat and oxygen to keep them alive. They weren't much to look at—low, pointed silvery domes, with three tiny round portholes near the top and a bulging flap that was a primitive airlock.

“That's got it,” Salma, a dark-haired, dark-eyed Indian woman said, tugging at the last anchor to make sure it was firmly set. “Let's get inside and inflate this thing.”

They crawled through the flap, Salma letting Jenny go first. Jenny got inside and said, “Check the outer seal.”

“Doing it now. Okay, seal's shut, let me double-check. Right, it's good.” Salma wormed her way into the interior of the tent and sealed the inner flap, doing it slowly and taking time to test it. Salma did things by the book, which, she had told Jenny, was the reason she was alive after nearly six years on Mars.

Salma turned to Jenny. Both of them were kneeling because the tent didn't offer much head space for a standing person. “Okay, let's have some light and heat. And a little air would be nice too.”

A compact external oxygen generator was already at work, producing a steady, low hiss of incoming air, but the initial tent pressurization came from a small tank of compressed oxygen. Jenny opened it, watched the digital readout on its valve, and when it showed full inflation, she said, “Oxygen's normal.” They both removed their helmets.

Jenny had to gasp for air. Normal for a survival tent meant oxygen at a lower partial pressure than in the suits. It was always a bit of an adjustment. Her nose tingled from the cold, and Salma got the small heater going right away. It doubled as a CO2 scrubber,
removing carbon dioxide from the air inside the tent. Without it, the carbon dioxide both of them produced while breathing would build up to dangerous levels. They switched on the tent lantern and unpacked their sleeping bags. “Home sweet home,” Salma said with a grunt. “I hope it warms up soon! Check with the others, will you?”

Jenny took the helmet transponder from her own pressure suit. It doubled as a short-range radio. “Tent Three reporting in,” she said. “We're set up.”

For a few seconds the radio crackled with static, and then Alex Benford's cheerful voice came through the small speaker: “Tent One here. Dr. Henried and I are set up and starting to warm up. Haven't heard from Tent Two yet—but Dales is always slow.”

“I heard that!” It was Frank Dales, the electronics expert. “For your information, Joe and I have been comfortably set up for some time. We're just trying to decide what to have for dinner—roast turkey with all the trimmings, or maybe some compressed rations.”

“Good idea,” Salma said, opening the leg pouch on her pressure suit. “Let's see … we have protein bars
and carb bars. I'd suggest one of each. Got the water?”

“Right here,” said Jenny, hitching the backpack from her suit.

No one could have called it a great meal, or even an adequate one, but the ration bars were packed with enough calories to keep them going and enough vitamins and minerals to keep them healthy. They had just finished when Karl Henried, the team leader, came on the radio to set up the sleep rotation. “Someone needs to be awake at all times to monitor the radio for emergencies,” he said. “There are six of us, so ninety-minute shifts will be more than adequate. I suggest that Alex and I take the first two, then Tent Two the next two, and Tent Three the last. Each tent decide who'll take the first watch, and that person will sleep with the radio next to his or her ear.”

They turned in at once. Jenny dropped immediately into a deep sleep, without any dreams that she would be able to remember. It seemed she had barely closed her eyes when Salma shook her awake. “Wha?” she muttered.

“It's almost daylight,” Salma said. “Your watch. Tonight we'll be waking up in the middle of the night, so get used to it!”

It was cold in the tent. Jenny huddled close to the heater, yawning and stretching her arms. The radio remained obstinately silent. She began to think this excursion was going to be about as dull as the last few days at the extraction station had been.