Marooned!

by Brad Strickland

  Sean said, “Look, you’re the smartest kid I know. Maybe not in subjects, but in knowing what it’s all about. You don’t have to be afraid. They’ll never send you home, not in a million years.”

  “That’s what you think, just because you don’t have anything to worry about,” Jenny said. “Amanda Simak is your adopted mother. You’re safe. You don’t know what it’s like for the rest of us.”

  “You’re wrong about that,” Sean protested. “Look, I’ve felt the same way as you do ever since I got here. I mean, I thought I was the dumbest person on the face of the planet. And you’re wrong about Amanda. If the committee decided to get rid of me—well, they could send me home any time they wanted to. Right now Ellman’s itching to put me aboard the Argosy, and I don’t know how Mpondo feels about me. That’s why I’m always so scared of messing up. I just … I never thought that anyone else would be as afraid of being kicked out as I am.”

  “Well, you were wrong.” Jenny smiled weakly.

  Sean reached across the table and patted her hand. She turned her hand over and clasped his. From that moment on Sean knew that, whatever happened, he had at least one friend on Mars he could talk to about anything.

  CHAPTER 7

  7.1

  Sean’s pilot was Jimmy Carlson, a short, swaggering man with a welcoming grin and a sense of fun and adventure. To his relief—as well as to Mickey’s, he was sure—Sean learned that his partner would be Roger Smith, the youngest of the Asimov Project kids. As they waited for a preflight briefing, Roger congratulated Sean on qualifying for the trip.

  “I heard you got a 4.0,” Sean replied. “That’s impressive.”

  “Well, it was a 3.996, actually, but they rounded up,” Roger said simply. He wasn’t bragging, Sean realized. Roger just loved to be exact about figures. “Is it true that you were a survivor of the Aberlin massacre?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Sean grunted. “But I don’t remember anything about it. I don’t even remember my parents.”

  “My parents were both doctors who were killed while helping in the Pan-African war,” Roger said. “I was nine at the time.”

  For a few moments they sat in silence, waiting for their pilot in the hangar dome where three airplanes were docked. They looked almost nothing like Earth jets to Sean. The bodies of the planes were sleek and silvery, the engines relatively tiny, and the wings were enormous, as they had to be in the thin atmosphere of Mars.

  “Did you bring your tele helmet?” Roger asked.

  “My what?”

  “Tele helmet,” Roger said, with a surprised glance. But then Roger always looked surprised, his eyebrows permanently arched high on his forehead. “You know, the little fold-up hood that transmits whatever you see back to the ship? We’re required to have one.”

  “I don’t have one,” Sean said. “Nobody told me.”

  “Expect they thought you’d find it in the manual,” Roger told him with a shrug.

  “Manual?” Sean asked, suddenly feeling nervous.

  “Yes, the flight manual. Didn’t you pick yours up?”

  Sean shook his head. “Where was I supposed to—”

  “In the Prep Dome, when you took your preflight med tests.”

  “Preflight med tests?”

  “Yes, the ones that we were told about in the transmission last week.”

  “What transmission?” Sean asked, panicked.

  “The one that came over your tele helmet, of course,” Roger said reasonably.

  Sean wailed, “But I don’t have a—” He broke off and glared at Roger.

  “Gotcha,” Roger said, giggling.

  Sean rolled his eyes. That was another thing he had learned about Roger. If Roger was the least bit bored, he could think up intricate little jokes. And people almost invariably fell for them.

  “Sorry I’m late, guys!” Jimmy Carlson hurried in, his orange uniform crisp and neat. He wasn’t much taller than Sean, but his compact frame seemed to hold enough energy for five or six people. “Okay, listen up. The ship we’ll be taking is the MAR/S-7. That stands for—”

  “Martian Aerial Reconnaissance/Survey craft,” Roger said promptly.

  “Right! Ordinarily, these ships can carry a pilot, copilot, and six passengers. Because we’re hauling some equipment as well, it’ll just be me, our copilot and navigator Sara Havasian, and the two of you. We’ll have ten different survey spots where we’ll set down, take instrumental readings, and then wait for a visual observation of meteor trajectories. We’ll be out six days in all, with basic rations and water, along with a reasonable amount of emergency survival gear. I hope you guys can sleep in a reclined seat and don’t mind sharing a chemical John with three other people, because that’s the situation.”

  He looked at his watch. “Okay, you’ll need to be familiar with five different types of instruments. I want you to spend the next couple of days studying them on your computers, and then we’ll do a couple of days of training. Assuming you get through that okay, we’ll plan for takeoff at 6:00 hours Monday. Heck of a way to spend your school vacation, isn’t it?”

  They toured the aircraft—it was going to be very tight, Sean saw—and learned about the emergency gear: a heated tent with a small oxygen generator, compressed food rations, a global positioning monitor and location beacon, and a radio. “You’ll have to wear these,” Jimmy said, handing Sean and Roger each a small device like an old-fashioned wristwatch. “Key in your ID numbers now. Do it twice to confirm them.”

  They did, and Sean saw the face of his device register his name, age, and dorm room assignment. “Are these GPS locators, too?” he asked.

  “Right,” Jimmy told him. “Mars doesn’t have as complete a satellite grid as Earth, but as long as you’re wearing this device, the satellites we do have can track you to within fifty meters or so. If we get stranded, a rescue craft can find us and bring us back.”

  “For burial,” Roger said cheerfully.

  Jimmy winked. “Never happens,” he said. “Well, almost never.”

  7.2

  The instruments that Sean had to learn about proved to be pretty simple. They were almost all robotic—that is, they were computerized with high levels of artificial intelligence, and they “knew” their jobs. The crew’s main task would be to ferry the instruments to the correct locations, set them up, and let them perform their functions. Sean thought that the actual work of the expedition wouldn’t be nearly as hard as studying for his exams had been.

  There were five ships in all, each with a four-person crew. Other than Roger and Sean, nine students were going along on the expedition. Alex was partnered with Nickie, Mickey Goldberg with Leslie. The remaining two aircraft would be on the far side of the south polar icecap.

  All nine students did their practice instrument setups under the supervision of David Czernos, the lead areologist of Marsport. His specialty was the structure and chemical composition of the Martian regolith, the rock that made up the planet, but he was keenly interested in the meteorology and planetography of Mars as well. “Have to call it planetography,” he explained to the students as they stood on the surface just past the landing strip. “The geo- in geography means ‘Earth,’ and Mars is not Earth, right?”

  It was a warm day for Mars. The temperature at their location, south of Olympus Mons, was 14 degrees Celsius, or 57 degrees Fahrenheit. “All right. First let’s do the check for subsurface water. Mr. Goldberg, what instrument do we use?”

  Mickey correctly produced the device, a seismic scanner no larger than a small aquarium. He demonstrated how to set it up and activate it. The machine operated perfectly, and Czernos showed them a holographic readout. “Very little water under us here, see? That’s because Marsport is built on more or less solid rock. Permafrost exists in more porous areas. All right, Ms. Mikhailova, I want to track an incoming meteor. How do I do it?”

  Nickie set up a computerized theodolite, an instrument that measured horizontal and vertical angles.

  The traini
ng period continued. They went through each instrument package one by one, and then each student demonstrated that he or she knew how to set up all of the measuring devices.

  “Good, good,” Czernos said when they had all finished. “All right. Get a good night’s sleep tonight, and be sure to take a shower. You won’t have another chance for nearly a week—unless we find a heated lake at the south pole, and so far they’ve eluded us.”

  That evening Sean found Jenny and told her about preparing for the expedition. They sat in the library dome, where Jenny, as usual, was poring over texts taken from the main library computer. The library wasn’t crowded. With a three-week school holiday, the students who weren’t going on the Bradbury run were kicking back and relaxing, not hitting the books.

  “Good thing you got to go,” she said with a rueful smile. “Sounds like you’re really going to like it.”

  “I wish you could come too,” Sean told her.

  She shrugged. “Maybe next time, if I can pull up my history grade.”

  “I can tutor you, if you want,” Sean told her.

  “I’d like that,” Jenny said. “Thanks.”

  When he left her, Sean couldn’t stop grinning. All those years on Earth of hiding, of fighting with other kids for scraps of food, hadn’t prepared him for this. Jenny liked him, and he liked her. He was beginning to think there wasn’t anything he couldn’t do, provided he had a few friends along.

  7.3

  “All right, crew,” Jimmy Carlson said from the cockpit. “We’re next for takeoff, so hold on to something that won’t bend or break.”

  Sara Havasian, taller than Jimmy and a few years younger, was all business in the copilot’s seat. “Flight path locked in,” she said. “Final instrument check completed.”

  Roger leaned toward Sean and whispered, “I hope you packed your tele helmet.”

  Sean chuckled despite himself.

  Then they were moving, trundling out onto the runway and picking up speed as they headed to the south. The airplane lifted off, tilted sharply, and soared up into the Martian air. The sky rapidly became a deeper, richer blue, and the horizon showed a distinct curve. Mars was a much smaller planet than Earth, and you didn’t have to get very far above it before the air thinned and you were able to see that it was a sphere.

  “We’ll be flying at about ten thousand meters most of the way,” Jimmy said as they leveled off. “I’ll show you a few of the sights.”

  Sean looked out the window at the bleak landscape below. Except for five or six scientific outposts, the only human habitation on the face of Mars was Marsport. Everywhere else the landscape was wild, rugged, and barren. Impact craters millions of years old showed where meteorites had slammed into the planet. More volcanoes, like Olympus Mons but nowhere near as huge, loomed here and there. They flew over Valles Marineris, named for one of the first Earth probes to visit Mars. It was an enormous canyon, a split in the face of the planet.

  “People used to call that the Grand Canyon of Mars,” Jimmy said cheerfully. “Not a very good description. Valles Marineris is four thousand kilometers long; on Earth, it would stretch from California to Washington, D.C. It’s deep, too. Parts of its floor are ten kilometers below the surface plain. When we get water on Mars, that’s going to be one long, deep lake!”

  Sean could hardly imagine the canyon full of water. It was sheer-sided in places, and in others he saw slopes that looked like ancient landslides. “They say you can walk around down there without a breathing mask,” Roger told him. “You could survive for maybe five or ten minutes if you were at the bottom of the canyon.”

  “That’s not very long,” Sean said.

  “No,” Roger agreed thoughtfully. “But it would be an interesting five or ten minutes!”

  Sean closed his eyes and somehow dozed off. When he woke up again, Roger was nudging him. “We’re coming in,” he said. “Brace yourself for the landing.”

  “I resent that,” Jimmy shot back with a smile. “My landings are perfect.”

  Sean looked down. It was still day, but the shadows beneath the plane were long. They were passing over a relatively flat plain, studded with boulders and rock outcroppings. In the shadows something white gleamed. “Ice?” Sean asked.

  Sara craned to look down. “Frozen carbon dioxide,” she said. “It’s cold down there, guys. Even in the pressure suits you can’t stay outside the ship for very long.”

  “Here we go,” Jimmy said, and the plane tilted as they lost altitude.

  The surface came closer, and rocks and hills flashed past. “It’s going to be quite a chore, dodging these boulders,” Roger said.

  “We’re shooting for a prepared landing strip,” Jimmy told him. “If we’re lucky, we might even find it. There we go, navigation beam acquired. Hang on. It’s a short field and a sudden stop.”

  The MAR/S-7 touched down and rolled along at a tremendous speed, jouncing and shuddering. Dust rose outside the windows as the plane braked, and Sean felt himself thrust forward, the lap and shoulder belt pressing into him as the craft came to a stop.

  “Not bad,” Sara said dryly. “We still have nearly two meters of field left.”

  “Okay, suit up, one at a time,” Jimmy said. “Sara first, and then you guys. We’ll make sure the plane is secure, then set up the instruments for the first reading. I hope you enjoy this. It’s going to be the same routine for the next five days!”

  The next day Sean realized that Jimmy wasn’t kidding. They had moved a few hundred kilometers to another short strip, where they had gone outside, again, and had set up the instruments, again. The pale sun rode very low on the horizon. In the southern hemisphere of Mars, the season was mid-autumn. The days were short and getting shorter. In a few months the polar night would set in, and then the sun would not rise at all until spring came again.

  To the south the sky shaded away to a deep indigo, where a few stars glittered even during the hours of sunlight. Frost, both ice and frozen carbon dioxide, spiked up in the shelter of every rock and ridge. And Sara had been right: The heated pressure suits did little to keep out the chill. Half an hour was about as much as they could take at a time.

  The first day’s observations had been normal. On the second day, they waited to glimpse a meteorite, one of the frozen balls of water and gas coming in from Ganymede. It should, if all was well, pass well to the south of them, but Jimmy said it would be a sight to see.

  The satellite system did a good job of tracking incoming meteors, and they knew just when and where to look. Sean stood on the surface, head tilted back, staring out through the plastic bubble of his helmet. He tried to ignore the creeping cold in his toes.

  “Here it comes!” Sara said, pointing.

  Sean caught sight of it: a brilliant, glowing white streak against the cold, dark blue sky. The meteor was coming in at a shallow angle and would go halfway around the globe, mostly disintegrating before its icy core crashed to the surface, but it was low enough for Sean to see the clouds of vapor boiling off it. It left behind a spreading canopy of cloud, so white on the sunward side that it almost hurt to look at it, shading to a deep gray on the far side. The cloud billowed and grew, swelling until it filled half the sky.

  And just when Sean’s toes were beginning to ache unbearably from the cold, it began.

  Sean had to tilt his head just right to see them, but glittering crystals were swirling down from the sky.

  “There you go,” Jimmy said. “A miracle.”

  Roger laughed and held out his gloved hand. White specks appeared on the orange fabric.

  Not rain. Not yet. Not for perhaps decades.

  But right here, right now, it was snowing on Mars.

  CHAPTER 8

  8.1

  Near the end of the Bradbury run. Sean was in the MAR/S-7, taking his turn as the ship monitor, keeping an eye on the seismic, meteorological, and astronomical readings the instruments were beaming back to Marsport. It was a boring job, and he wished he could be outside with the
others.

  And then the MW receiver suddenly came to life, with Mickey Goldberg’s frightened voice calling, “We need help!”

  Sean turned on the transmitter. “Ship eight, this is seven. What’s wrong?”

  “Sean? Listen, we’ve crashed! We’ve got an air leak—they’re trying to seal it now, but we’re losing oxygen fast. We have two hurt. Get us out of here!”

  Sean looked at the locator screen and saw that it was showing nothing. “Turn on your beacon. I’ll round up our crew. Get the beacon on now!”

  He changed frequencies and quickly told Jimmy, Sara, and Roger the news. They hurriedly gathered their instruments and returned to the ship. Sean heard the airlock cycling as he went back to the MW transponder. “Mickey, get your locator beacon going. I can’t pick you up.”

  “It’s on!” Mickey’s voice was more frightened than ever. “You should be able to see us. Wait a minute, let me get our GPS coordinates.”

  Sean waited, hearing the rest of the crew open the inner door of the airlock. Before they reached the cockpit, Mickey read off a string of figures. Sean entered them into the navigation computer and commanded the machine to fix the position. An instant later a detailed holographic map shimmered into existence above the computer panel. The MAR/S-7 was at the eastern end of the Aonian Plain. Mickey and the MAR/S-8 were hundreds of kilometers away at the western end.

  Jimmy slipped into the pilot’s seat and checked the map. “We’re closest. Secure for takeoff, everyone. Good work, Sean.”

  Sean got to his seat. Roger had a hundred questions, and by the time Sean had answered half of them, they were airborne. Sara put out a call to the Bradbury run ships, telling them of the accident and requesting them to stand by in case the MAR/S-7 crew needed assistance.

  The flight was a short hop, and before long they angled in for a landing, a rougher one on this side of the plateau. Sean strained to see the MAR/S-8, but he couldn’t catch sight of it. Jimmy was on the radio again, talking to Mickey, as their craft braked to a halt. As soon as they had stopped, Jimmy turned to his crew. “Listen up. The MAR/S-8 is about two klicks to the west. They were taking off and didn’t make it, and Jappa got them down as best she could, but she and her copilot Rial are both injured, and Mickey and Leslie have set up the survival tent. Sara, you keep watch here. Sean, Roger, suit up. Sean will come with me. Roger, I want you to clear out anything we don’t need—tent, emergency supplies, instruments. Sean, grab two oxygen tanks. We may need them.”