Missing!

by Brad Strickland

  There was Mars, and there, in glowing yellow, was the pipeline on which the colony depended. It was like a vital artery in the human body. If it failed to function, the colony would die.

  Sean had a bad feeling about the pipeline. He couldn’t say he was convinced it would never work, but he was afraid that the pressure of time was too great, that the colonists desperate for water would make vital mistakes.

  Sitting alone in the dark, thinking of his friend Jenny and her despair and anger, Sean made a decision. Whatever happened with the pipeline project, he had to be part of it. He had spent far too much of his life on his own.

  Now, more than anything else, Sean wanted to belong.

  CHAPTER 2

  “Have you got time?”

  Amanda Simak turned at the sound of Sean’s voice. Her tired, lined face creased into a smile. “Time for what?”

  “For a talk.” Sean caught up with her. He had waited in the passageway near her room, hoping to catch her on her way to the Administration offices. “Jenny’s worried about the water in Lake Ares.”

  “We all are.” Amanda crinkled her nose and picked at Sean’s messy hair. Most of the colonists wore their hair short, but he had let his grow. “Sean, I wish you’d try to be a little neater. I know it’s hard to stay clean, but—”

  Sean shrugged. “I’m on today’s shower schedule. Not much sense before I get in from the greenhouse, though. It’s always hot in there. Seriously, is there any alternative to drawing water from the lake?”

  They walked side by side, taking up two-thirds of the narrow passageway. Sean opened all the doors for her—the doors were color-coded to direct colonists to safe areas in the event of a blowout. But all the ones they had to pass were green-coded, meaning the areas had no access to the surface and were safe if an outer part of the colony blew. The doors were heavy, and Sean grunted as he opened each one.

  Amanda shook her head. “I’ve been over it and over it with the hydrologists and the pipeline crew. We can realistically expect some water from the pipeline in a month, if everything goes smoothly. But nothing ever does, does it?”

  “Mars has a million ways to kill you,” Sean said with a crooked grin, recalling the lesson that had been drummed into his head over and over during his first days on the planet. “Yeah, I know. But how about this? The Asimov Project kids might be able to help with the pipeline construction. We have a two-month school vacation coming up a week from Friday. If we—”

  “School breaks are supposed to be for individual study in your field of specialization, not for work-crew duty. And besides, you haven’t been trained,” Amanda pointed out.

  “No, but we don’t have to do the skilled work. We can be manual labor. I mean, they need people to check for leaks, to haul equipment, to place blasting charges. Not,” he added hastily, “to set them off or anything.”

  They had reached the Administration dome. It was set up identically to Sean’s dorm area or to any of the apartment areas: a cluster of smaller, prefab rooms built around a larger central area. When they stepped into the outer area, Amanda paused, her arms crossed. “Twenty unskilled kids can’t do much in two months.”

  “We can bring the water closer by a day or two,” Sean pointed out. “Right now that’s pretty important.”

  Amanda was silent for a long time. Looking at her, Sean thought about how Mars had changed her.

  She had always been a fastidious woman, but now she looked as grimy as any of the colonists. Her hair had been cropped close, and her standard uniform of the colony—gray tunic, black slacks—was as rumpled as Sean’s. Her face was more deeply lined now, worries and cares dragging the flesh under her eyes into pouches, making her neck muscles sag, even in the low gravity of Mars.

  “Maybe,” she said at last. “I’ll talk to Lt. Mpondo and Dr. Ellman about the idea.”

  Sean groaned. “Ellman hates me.”

  Amanda smiled. “No, he doesn’t. He’s just not sure about the wisdom of having young people here in the colony. He’s actually been very impressed with your progress in science and math. He told me so.”

  Sean didn’t respond. Dr. Harold Ellman was a dark-haired, scowling, heavyset man whose expression was a permanent mask of disapproval. He and Tim Mpondo oversaw the education of the twenty Asimov Project students. Sean liked Tim Mpondo, who had a quick wit and a relaxed, easygoing way of encouraging the kids to learn, but Ellman and Sean had rubbed each other the wrong way since day one.

  “Don’t be so upset,” Amanda said, laughing. “Look at it this way: Harold might actually be glad to have his students away from the colony over the break. I’ll talk to them about the idea, and I’ll ask Elana Moore if she thinks you can make a contribution.”

  “Who’s that?” Sean asked.

  Amanda opened her office door. She stood framed in it, a look of surprise on her face. “Elana is the chief design officer on the pipeline project. Young woman, twenty-five, I believe, but a brilliant engineer. Brown hair, brown eyes, about your height. Don’t you know her?”

  “There are three thousand people here,” Sean complained. “I don’t know every single one of them!”

  “I’ll introduce you. Now you’d better run, or you’ll be late for school. If you’re tardy, Dr. Ellman won’t be likely to approve of your plan, you know.”

  “Thanks.” As Sean hurried away to school, something occurred to him that brought a smile to his face. Amanda probably knew every single one of the colonists personally. That was part of her job. And besides, she liked people and trusted them. Sean was working on both of those traits, but sometimes he wondered if he would ever be as gifted and open as Amanda at dealing with people. He felt so awkward and tongue-tied around strangers, and even with his friends he sometimes had difficulty just talking. Well, mainly with girls. Well, mainly with one girl these days: Jenny.

  Sean was cutting it close, and he indulged in a little rule-breaking. He ran in the corridors, as much as you could run on Mars. It was a funny kind of run, almost like skiing without skis, but it was faster than walking.

  He got to the school dome and entered just as the chimes went off to signal that class was about to begin. Dr. Ellman was at the central console, his head down, and he didn’t notice Sean come in and slip into his desk. Sean, grateful for small favors, looked at his computer screen. Today he had a practice math test, and it looked hard. Jenny, two desks over, was already working at something. Sean began to do the math problems, thinking to himself that today, at least, he’d have something interesting to talk to Jenny about.

  They didn’t have time to talk until the lunch break. Finals were looming in several units, and since the last school term the students had all lost a little momentum in their studies. Like Sean, they all had jobs. Jenny, who was specializing in adaptive agriculture, worked in the barns—almost a separate colony from Marsport. The colonists were not yet raising animals for meat, but the barn domes held a tiny herd of small cattle, a louder and more troublesome herd of goats, some sheep, some chickens—which had discovered early on that in the low gravity of Mars they could actually fly—and some other farm animals. At this stage in the colony’s development, the whole goal was more to make sure that the animals could adapt to a new world than to raise them for slaughter. Jenny helped care for them and was a veterinary assistant during her work shifts.

  She was fiercely protective of her animals, even the fish in Lake Ares. Though Sean didn’t quite share that urge, he respected Jenny’s determined effort to be a vegetarian—well, mostly a vegetarian. She would eat eggs, cheese, and other dairy products.

  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.

  CHAPTER 3

  “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.”