Missing! (8 page)

Breakfast was the same dreary
affair as dinner. Jenny munched something that was supposed to remind her of oatmeal with peaches, but it tasted more like someone's old sneaker soaked in peach juice. Everyone took a bathroom break—the tents had chemical toilets, and Jenny had long since gotten over her initial shyness. Modesty was not something you could easily practice in Marsport.

They all suited up and left the tents one at a time. Each time they did, the airlock gave a little puff and a small explosion of vapor shot out—this early in the
morning, it froze immediately into glittering crystals. Joe Weston, a pipeline technologist, was last out of Tent Two—a tight squeeze for him. He wasn't fat, but he was the most hammered-down man in the colony—barely five feet four and built like a solid linebacker. Weston was a quiet man, and Jenny had never really gotten to know him. He was always concentrating on some engineering problem.

The sun wasn't high enough yet to provide much warmth. The rusty-red landscape of Mars stretched away into the distance, a rocky surface dusted with fine sand, studded with small rocks and, here and there, a few boulders. Most of these had been blasted out of the crust eons ago by incoming meteorites. A few were ejecta, magma that had been hurled high into the atmosphere from the three Tharsis volcanoes to the north, solidifying and crashing back to Mars again as solid stone. Some of the magma, scientists now knew, had been blasted into outer space during the fiercest eruptions, and a very few meteorites on Earth were actually Mars rocks.

In the early morning the rocks all sent long shadows
streaming across the surface. In the shelter of some of the largest rocks, Jenny could see a fine spiky white frost thrusting out of the dust. It wouldn't have been there a hundred years earlier. Humans were changing the face of Mars, and one of the most vital ways was by making the air denser and, eventually, breathable. Water could exist at the surface now only as ice or vapor, but in time, there would be liquid water on Mars—and eventually, even rain.

“Let's get to work,” Dr. Henried said. “Not much scenery to admire here anyway.” Jenny blushed and went to help unpack the tool kit.

The heating/impeller station was compact, not quite as large as one of the tents. Months earlier, an advance construction team had dug down into the surface and had set it up, back when the pipeline was supposed to head for the South Pole instead of the rift valley. The prep team tested the unit, switched on its power systems, and made sure the connections were reasonably free of dust and grit. They had to align the microwave dish. This particular unit received most of its power from a direct satellite
feed. Its batteries were just meant to provide a buffer against power failure.

By the time the team had finished, the sun had risen almost to the zenith, and the temperature had shot all the way up to a few degrees below freezing. The frost behind the rocks had long since faded away, subliming directly to water vapor without melting first. The sky was milky blue with a high, thin overcast of ice clouds, and the distant sun looked feeble and dim.

They all broke down their tents, repacked them in the side carriers of the Marscat, and climbed aboard for another jouncing, teeth-clacking ride. Henried explained that they wouldn't be able to reach the next unit by nightfall, so they would make camp a few hours away from it. “If it had been a little warmer, I would have said we should make a dash and get to the next unit at about 2100, but there's no sense freezing our feet. There's a small impact crater not too far ahead. I think we should camp in the lee of that. The wind's been kicking up a bit.”

Jenny had noticed that the day had turned breezy. Snakes of dust whipped across their path, squirming
and slithering as if they were in a hurry to get somewhere. She looked off to her right, shading her eyes. To the north, the sky was smudged with high-blown dust, but it didn't look particularly threatening. Anyway, she thought, Marsport or the advance base would give them a call if a storm were developing. Nothing to worry about.

Alex sat beside her. “So, how do you like this?” he asked.

“Better than hanging around in the hootch waiting for the engineers to finish rebuilding the extraction unit,” Jenny said with a smile. “I don't mind working—it's not having anything to do that drives me zappy.”

“I'm trying to talk Glen into letting me take the copilot's seat when we fly back to Marsport,” Alex said. He gripped an imaginary control stick. “Technically, I'm a year too young, but I've got more time in simulators than any other pilot in Marsport.”

Jenny chuckled. Alex's ambition was to become the best pilot on Mars, and he devoted hours to training. Well, that was understandable. Jenny had
always loved animals, and she had decided to become an adaptive agriculturist, finding ways to allow Earth farm animals to function and reproduce in the strange, low-gravity environment of Mars. She put in long hours herself—and she reflected that if anyone had told her three or four years ago that she would almost weep with joy at witnessing the triumphant flight of a chicken, she would have laughed out loud.

Dr. Henried wasn't a very chatty driver, but now and then he pointed out the sights along the way. There weren't many. One part of the plain was pretty much like any other part. At one point they could glimpse the pale bulk of one of the volcanoes far off to the north, almost hidden in the atmospheric haze of distance. They briefly halted near another feature, a tiny impact crater barely five meters across that had been blasted out only ten years before. “Imagine a little space pebble this big,” Dr. Henried said, indicating a body a few inches across. “She comes whistling in from somewhere out toward Jupiter, almost vertically. Boom! She hits and vaporizes in an explosion that
blasts out a hole like this. Lucky for us one hasn't smashed into Marsport, eh?”

Alex and Jenny exchanged a glance, and Alex gave her a wry smile. It was just one more way that Mars could kill you. There were so many, Alex's smile seemed to say, that one more didn't make much difference. Still, Jenny resisted an urge to look upward, as if something big and deadly might be hurtling their way at that very instant.

They arrived at a much larger
impact crater not long before sundown. This one was far older, and it had been made by a far larger meteorite. The crater was more than ten kilometers in diameter, and they were heading for its southern side. The blast had thrust up a crater rim that looked like a curving range of hills forty meters high. Once they might have been jagged, but centuries of wind had ground them down into rolling, rounded shapes.

The wind was steady from the north, so they planned to camp on the sheltered south side of the crater. Even with the thin air of Mars, a strong wind could damage a survival tent.

But it meant a colder night. South of the equator, the north side of the crater got the most direct sunlight. When they scrambled off the Marscat and began to unpack the tents, the crater's shadow was already deep, and the temperature was plummeting. There were a few advantages. The wind shadow of the crater was a collecting ground for the fine Martian dust, and the portable oxygen generators worked very efficiently with that material. On the other hand, it was hard to stake the tents down through a meter of dust, and the job took so long that by the time they finally got into the tents, stars already glittered in a rapidly darkening sky.

Jenny slept dreamlessly again, and this time when Salma shook her, she didn't complain.

“All quiet?” Jenny asked.

“Except for the wind.”

Jenny heard it then, the scratchy hiss of sand against
the outside of the tent. She shivered. If it was this bad behind the shelter of the crater rim, the wind must be howling out in the open. But they'd had no word of storms. Maybe it was just a seasonal thing.

She kept her ninety-minute watch, then called Alex in Tent One to wake him for his turn. He sounded foggy, as if he had been snoozing deeply, and she kept him on for a minute to make sure he was fully awake. “Are you up?” she asked in a soft voice, not wanting to wake Salma.

“Yeah, yeah,” Alex grumbled. “Anything happening?”

“Windy.”

Alex was silent for a moment, and then he said, “Yeah, I hear it. Sounds pretty fierce. Think I should wake Dr. Henried?”

“Probably not. It'll be dawn in three hours, and you'll get him up in an hour and a half anyway. Let him sleep, unless it gets worse. It's been steady ever since I woke up.”

“Okay. Grab another few hours of sleep. I'm awake now, I promise.”

Sleep didn't come, though. Jenny lay awake listening to the sifting-sand sound of the wind, wondering if it were growing stronger or staying about the same. It was hard to tell. She was still awake when Dr. Henried gave out the general call, and she tapped Salma's shoulder. “Still blowing,” her tent-mate said. “Hope it's not working into a storm.”

After breakfast, all six of them got out of the tents. Jenny knew they wouldn't be going anywhere the moment she looked around. A few hundred meters to the west, beyond the shelter of the crater rim, the air was a blurry rush of dust and sand. Even in the protected area, they walked in a kind of reddish fog, a fog made up of microscopic dust particles whirling and blowing in eddies of wind. Jenny could make out the shapes of the others, but she couldn't tell the tall, thin Henried from the short, heavyset Weston in the swirling gloom.

“This isn't good,” Dr. Henried said. “Luckily, we can hold out for a week if we have to, and this should blow over well before then. But we'd better head west for a while, to get to the center of the crater's
protection. I doubt we can raise the base by radio with all this going on, but let's make some tracks and we'll try.”

They rode for a couple of hours, with visibility dwindling the entire way. Finally, Dr. Henried stopped the vehicle. “I'm going to foul the bearings if we keep rolling in this,” he said. “Let me get the blade in place, and I'll see if we can scrape down closer to bedrock.”

The Marscat could double as a scraper with its blade swung out from its slot under the cab and locked into position. Henried jockeyed it back and forth, digging a gradually deepening trench in the drifted sand. He excavated a strip ten meters wide and thirty or so long, finally stopping when the cat blade began to snag on rock. “That will have to do. Get the tents up.”

With the brickdust fog growing thicker, it was hard work, but at last they all had their tents ready. “Meeting in Tent One,” Henried said.

A survival tent was never meant to contain six people. They were elbow to elbow, sitting on the floor. Dr.
Henried looked worried. “All right. Let me give you just the skin.” Jenny leaned forward.
The skin
meant the most important facts, the essentials. Dr. Henried continued: “We're off the trail, folks. Normally we would have gone around the north side of the crater, but we need the protection, so I made a decision to divert. However, that means that advance base won't know where to look for us—and until the wind dies down and I can aim a microwave dish at a satellite relay, I can't raise them on the radio. We'll hunker down here for at least a day to see if this is going to get any better. If it doesn't, we'll think of a contingency plan. Everyone get some rest and conserve your food and water. They may have to last us for a long time.”

Jenny nodded. She felt nervous, but not especially afraid—not until she noticed how scared Alex looked. Alex was a rock. If he was frightened, there was something to be scared of.

That was when she first began to think that they might not make it back.

“Okay.” Sean Said to Roger
and Mickey, his voice low and conspiratorial. “First, what I want to do is against all the rules, so we could get in trouble. I don't have anyone's permission for what I'm going to try. You need to know that up front.”

Mickey's plump face was solemn, his eyes sharp behind his spectacle lenses. He and Roger exchanged a glance, but neither of them spoke. Then Mickey tilted his head and asked, “How much trouble?”

Sean shook his head. “I just don't know. Dr, Simak won't send a rescue team out to look for Jenny and the others, because she doesn't want to risk any more lives. I want to go myself, but I can't go alone. I don't have Dr. Simak's orders or even her permission, so if I'm caught, I'm in for it. I need help.”

The three of them were in Sean's room, Roger
sitting backward on the computer chair, Mickey lounging against the wall beside the door, Sean sitting on his bed, which was folded into its sofa position. Sean leaned forward, his arms resting on his knees, his hands clasped. He studied the other two boys, but their expressions told him nothing.

Roger frowned and held up a hand as if asking for silence. “Now, let me see if I understand you, Sean. Correct me if I'm wrong in any of this. You want us to go with you out into a dangerous storm and try to find the prep team, right? If we succeed, we'll be in terrible trouble with the council, and if we fail, we'll probably all die? Is that pretty much it, then?”

“Pretty much,” Sean confessed.

“Oh, right, then. I'm in.” With a carefree smile, Roger leaned back with his hands clasped behind his head, as if he had made his decision and was comfortable with it.

“Are you jumping ahead too far? I mean, wouldn't the Advance Base have sent out a rescue party already?” Mickey asked, sounding undecided.

“Not likely,” Sean told him. “They're catching the
brunt of the storm. It's worse there than it is on the trail, from the satellite pics. We're clear of the storm's path here, so we can move before anyone from Advance Base can. We have to get to Daedalia Planum and—”

“Hold on, hold on,” Mickey said irritably. “Ax the plans for a minute, will you, and let me catch up? First, how are we supposed to get there, with the storm and all? They're a long way off. I suppose we could take a hauler and carry enough spare fuel to make it, but it would take weeks to get that far, and by then they'd be back, or—well, it would be too late.”