Missing!

by Brad Strickland

  “And I thought you knew nothing about any science that didn’t have to do with computers,” Ellman said in a dry, sarcastic voice. “Broadly correct, Mikailova. The other two volcanoes presumably have similar permafrost deposits. Of course, none of the three is close to the size of Olympus Mons, so the supplies are not likely to be great. But here”—he flicked a key on his remote, and the crooked, curving yellow pipeline off to the south and east glowed brighter on the globe—“yes, here is a fascinating possibility What is this feature, let me see, ah—Doe?”

  Sean leaned forward. The highlight was pulsing red over a long, slanting scar just to the west of the great plateau called Solis Planum, the Plain of the Sun. The whole southern rim of the plateau was fringed with intricate networks of braided channels, evidence that surface water had once flowed on Mars. “That’s a valley,” he said.

  “Rift valley,” murmured Jenny, sitting beside him, too softly for Ellman to hear. That was an art that she had picked up early in her education.

  “I mean it’s, uh, a rift valley,” Sean corrected himself.

  “You surprise me, Doe,” Ellman said. “Quite right. The limited tectonic activity on Mars did open up a number of these valleys. The largest of them is—Goldberg?”

  “The Valles Marineris,” the older boy replied, his tone bored, but not quite bored enough to call down the teacher’s wrath.

  “Yes, correct. However, let’s leave that out for now. It’s steep-sided and very deep, so we won’t be exploring that area for water for some years. The valley we’re interested in is not quite so deep, more accessible, and possibly very rewarding. Now, you may be aware that if everything had gone according to plan, the second and larger Martian colony would have been founded on Solis Planum. Why, Smith?”

  “Water,” Roger Smith said promptly. “Water, water everywhere. Or at least, water, water a hundred meters beneath the surface.”

  “Accessible water,” Ellman droned on. “And, as you say, only about three hundred feet beneath the surface. But this rift valley on the southeastern side of the plateau offers an even more exciting possibility. The atmosphere of Mars is much thicker now than it was a hundred years ago, thanks to our terraforming efforts. At the bottom of the valley, the air pressure is just great enough to allow ice to remain stable, instead of subliming. And what is subliming, Davis?”

  Melia always sounded frightened when Ellman called on her. In a squeaky voice, she said, “When ice goes straight to vapor form without melting into water first. It happens at low pressures.”

  “Very good,” Ellman said. His smile came and went fast, like a mousetrap snapping. “The exciting possibility is that at the bottom of the valley, the permafrost may literally be within arm’s reach beneath the surface. Some water vapor constantly percolates up from beneath as the deep permafrost sublimes. It’s very likely that, with the increasing air pressure, much of the escaping water vapor has refrozen into ice and has remained that way. The problem, of course, is that the extraction unit is far away, down toward the South Pole. But the engineers have been working on that—”

  Sean yawned. Ellman was not a very inspiring lecturer, and he went on and on. Sean gathered that the water-extraction installation already built in Schmidt Crater was too massive to break down and move. However, the factory units in the colony were cobbling together a smaller automated water-extraction unit from spare parts and machinery they could adapt to other uses.

  Since the pipeline could reach the rift valley in a month and couldn’t reach Schmidt Crater for well over a year, it was being diverted. Some of the pipeline crews would be dropped into the bottom of the valley, where they would finish preparing the extraction factory. When the pipeline reached the valley, it would be connected to the factory. The unit would then melt, or partially melt, ice beneath the surface, and then strain out soil and rock particles. The slushy ice then would be sent through the pipeline on a long journey northward to Marsport.

  At noon the class broke, and Sean walked back toward the town hall with Alex and Jenny. “Well, that was boring,” he said.

  “Are you kidding? If we pull this off,” Alex replied, “we’ll have plenty of water for years. That’s about the most exciting news I’ve heard in ages.”

  “Alex is right. Think of it! One day Mars will have lakes. Seas,” Jenny said, her eyes dancing. She linked her arm through Sean’s as they walked. “And you got us a chance to be in on the beginning of it. Thanks, Sean!”

  Sean nodded, feeling pleased. In a way, he felt almost as if he had wrapped up hope for the future and had given it to Jenny as a present.

  Now if they could it off …

  Elana Moore, Sean decided a few days later, was just as hard a taskmaster as Dr. Ellman. Oh, she was nicer about it, and her jokes didn’t have the sarcastic cutting edge that Ellman’s did, but she wouldn’t let you get away with anything less than your best.

  She was about twenty-five, trim and slightly built, with close-cut brown hair and a skier’s body. Even in the bright blue pressure suit and helmet, Sean could pick Elana out from the others by the quickness of her movements and by the intensity of her focus. She was the one bustling everywhere, quick to point out a mistake, quick to praise a good job.

  They were training just south of Marsport. It was a clear day, with a deep blue cloudless sky overhead. To the north the jumble of domes, corridors, and green-houses of the colony glittered in the noon sun. Past that, the huge red bulk of Olympus Mons rose into the sky, looking as if the horizon had somehow warped itself up to an unimaginable height. The twelve-person crew was laying a small pipeline from Marsport to a brand-new oxygen rendering station ten kilometers south of the colony. It was a simple job, but Sean was quickly learning that simple jobs became devilishly complicated when he had to wear gloves and view the world through a helmet.

  Still—Sean felt a quiet surge of pride—he was wearing the blue Pathfinder pressure suit at last, not the green Excursion one. The upgrade made him feel more a part of the Martian colony than ever. True, all the Asimov kids now wore the blue suits, not just Sean, but that somehow made the achievement seem even better. They had made it as a team.

  Roger Smith didn’t seem particularly proud of his blue suit at the moment, though, as he knelt beside the half meter-diameter pipe, securing an impeller unit with a bolt driver. Roger didn’t weigh much on Mars, and it was almost comical to watch him. The driver was shaped like a streamlined power drill, and when the bolts began to tighten, the torque made Roger lurch and brace himself. If Roger wasn’t careful, Sean thought, he’d be spinning like a top himself, and the bolt would stay frozen in place.

  “Blast whoever invented this blasted piece of blasted junk,” Roger growled, his voice crackling over Sean’s helmet communicator. “These are supposed to be tightened to a torque of a hundred and ten Newton Meter units, and it’s still at a hundred and four.”

  “Let me help,” Sean said.

  Roger lifted a gloved hand to wave him off. “I want to try one more time. Might as well go into this with some useful skills. Here we go.” He bent back to his task, leaned hard, and the thin whine of the torque gun started again, with Roger visibly straining to hold the tool steady against its strong turn. “I think I’ve got it!”

  “Well done, Mr. Smith!” It was Elana. She had come up from behind Sean, and her crisp voice surprised him and made him jump a little. “Is that the last one?”

  “Yes, the last of six bla—blessed little bolts,” Roger said, rising carefully from his kneeling position. “And, I hope, the last of the impellers.”

  “It is. All right, get in the truck. We’re going to take a look at the vent dome.”

  Sean and Roger clambered into the hauler. Jenny was there already, her face looking strained and sweaty through her helmet. “Hard work,” she said to Sean.

  Sean nodded. It was almost Martian summer now, and the temperature outside the pressure suits was comparatively torrid for this latitude—nine degrees Celsius, or on the old Fa
hrenheit scale, about forty-eight degrees. Sean’s early impression of Mars had been that the planet was a deep-freeze of a world, but warmer weather had made it far more comfortable to stay outside for hours. If the air had been thick enough, he reflected, it would even be possible to roam around in his clothes and a light jacket and still feel relatively warm. As it was, work made him hot—the pressure suits were much more flexible than the ones the first astronauts had worn on their moon landings, but they still had one problem. It was harder to disperse heat in warmer weather than it was to generate it in colder weather. He got very stuffy and sweaty inside a pressure suit.

  The truck, one of the long, articulated haulers normally used to carry equipment, joggled, jounced, and jolted over the surface, sending up a fine cloud of red dust behind them. They seemed to roar along, but they were really creeping—maybe thirty kilometers per hour, barely five times faster than a running man. The tired crew chatted a little as they rode out to the dome of the oxygen cracking plant.

  Mars was a world whose surface was mostly composed of rust—oxides of minerals and metals. It was possible to extract the oxygen from these compounds, but as Sean had learned, there was no such thing as a free lunch. Separating oxygen from the minerals required lots of energy.

  The effort was worthwhile, because in addition to the oxygen, the process produced carbon and iron, and the two were then processed into steel, but the energy demands were high. Part of the power came from wind-generated electricity, part from microwave energy beamed down from satellites, and part from thermal generators. The oxygen replenished the air in the colony—something they hoped the greenhouses would eventually do. The carbon was essential in producing steel, and the metal the units produced provided a basic building material for the colony. Not a bad bargain, Sean thought, even though it did cost tons of energy.

  They reached the dome, a steel half-sphere a few meters across rising from the surface like the back of a tortoise. Most of the machinery was underground. This was just the access to the automated factory, together with the power inputs and the valves that let the gas flow. The crew climbed down from the hauler and Elana opened a control panel on the side of the dome. “All right, here goes. Let’s see if this critter will breathe.”

  She switched the power on. Sean felt a deep vibration rising from his boots, strong enough to make his teeth feel as if they were buzzing. Elana checked the dome’s readouts, then hit more switches. “Here goes,” she said at last. “Half pressure as a test.”

  They stared across the Martian plain at the silvery pipeline winding its way toward the distant colony. Suddenly Jenny yelled, “There’s a leak!” She pointed a blue-gloved finger into the distance.

  Squinting, Sean saw a plume of white vapor. He sighed. The welding in a joint had failed, or an impeller had blown. Elana got a position reading, then shut down the machinery and said, “Board the truck. Let’s see what the damage is.”

  In fact, the damage turned out to be minor. A seam had given way, and a little spot welding took care of it. But Elana sounded far from happy. “This little line is barely ten kilometers long. Multiply that by a factor of a thousand, and you’ll have some idea of the job ahead of you. And if we have one blowout in ten kilometers, then on the real thing we could expect a thousand.”

  “At least,” Roger muttered, “my bolts held.”

  Sean had hoped that he and Jenny would be assigned to the same team, but no such luck. Jenny wasn’t as good as he was at the brute-strength requirements of the pipeline job, but she had a touch with measurements and record keeping that snared her the position of first assistant to Elana Moore, and Elana was going to the rift valley southwest of Solis Planum. An advance team was already working there to assemble the water-extraction unit, and Elana was going along to supervise.

  Sean, Roger, and Mickey Goldberg were to provide manual labor for the northernmost branch of the pipeline. Early one morning they and a half-dozen older men and women boarded one of the Martian airplanes, a craft with huge wings, and settled in for the flight to the south and east. Training had taught Sean not to expect much in the way of accommodations, and so he was not terribly disappointed to see where he would be living for the next several weeks.

  The colonists called them bootches. They were essentially metal-and-plastic tents, shallow domes about ten feet in diameter, radiation-shielded with a built-in air generator and heating unit. Each one could house four people (uncomfortably), and Sean resigned himself to having three roommates for the next month and a half.

  The work site consisted of six hootches arranged in a semicircle around an airlock leading into a tunnel blasted into the Martian bedrock. The tunnel housed the collection station. Pipes large enough for a man to crawl through led from the tunnel mouth down into the crust. Long trenches had already been scooped out, and robot drills had reached a rich pocket of permafrost beneath these. The machinery was mostly in place now. What remained was largely a matter of hauling and shoving, making sure that the ice-bearing soil would come smoothly into the processing units in the tunnels and that the extractors would work.

  During daytime in the summer, freezing would not be much of a problem, but the temperature dropped sharply at night. All along the pipeline were heating units using fresnel lenses, electric power, and other techniques to keep the water in the pipeline in a slushy, moveable state—a slurry state, as Elana had called it.

  Bob Wilbanks, the foreman for Sean’s work detail, was a lanky, skinny, humorless man in his late thirties, quiet and apparently laid-back until he suspected one of his team was slacking off. Then he had an astonishing vocabulary.

  The days seemed long to Sean. Hours in the pressure suit carrying supplies, testing pipe fittings, and running machinery left him exhausted. The hootch was smelly and cramped. You could stand completely upright only toward the center, and Sean got used to crouching as he headed toward his bed or toward his locker.

  The workers had two meals a day, breakfast and dinner, because it was more trouble than it was worth to take off the pressure suits. Water was no problem—they could produce plenty of that, so they had enough to drink. None of the hootches had showers, though, so they tried to make do with sponge baths, though these did little to make Sean feel really clean.

  Breakfast was a cold meal: compressed rations of fruit and carbohydrate-rich “Mars bread” that had the consistency of a bowling ball. At night they ate heated rations that soon began to taste alike, if you could say they had much taste at all. After dinner they played chess or cards, read on their portable computers, or just tried to grab as much sleep as possible. They tested machinery, moved machinery, and serviced machinery. Mickey Goldberg once grunted, “You know, the word robot comes from an old Czech word meaning slavery. Robots are supposed to work for us, but I’m starting to think the machines are in charge and we’re their servants!”

  “Things are in the saddle, and they ride mankind,” Roger said. “One of your American writers said that. Henry David Thoreau, I think.”

  “I feel like something’s been riding me,” Sean said with a groan, trying to stretch the kinks out of his aching back. “How much closer are they?”

  He didn’t have to explain what he meant. The pipeline was creeping toward the collection unit. When the pipeline construction crew reached them, they would see how much water they could send to Marsport. But they couldn’t begin until the connections were made and the line was tested.

  “I heard they’re seven clicks closer,” Mickey said, lying on his inflatable bunk with his forearm thrown across his eyes.

  “Seven kilometers a day,” Roger said. “Let me see. That means they should be here in ten days’ time. Which means two weeks, probably, or longer. There’ll be a sandstorm, or a hauler will break down, or they’ll damage some sections of pipe. There’s one thing you can count on in this blasted place. Something always goes wrong.”

  Mickey didn’t reply. Sean heard him snoring. “He could go to sleep on a meat hook,” he said.


  “Lucky fellow,” Roger replied sourly.

  CHAPTER 4

  In their third week of work, Mickey and Sean got chosen to set up a directional beacon on the slopes of Ascraeus Mons. Like almost every volcano on Mars, Ascraeus was a vast dome of hardened lava, rising more than six miles above the surrounding plain. In the hootch, Wilbanks pointed out the spot where the beacon should go, using a large-scale paper map. “When you set the beacon up, be sure you activate the global positioning relay,” he said. “That will give the pipeline crew the best bearing. Don’t screw up.”

  “We won’t,” Mickey said.

  “Do it, don’t say you’ll do it,” Wilbanks snapped. His temper was short after months at this advance station, and Sean had learned early that the man had a short fuse. “Take the north trail to the scarp line. You want to position the beacon as high as possible, but don’t get too close to the cliffs. There’s some unstable rock face that could be a problem.”

  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.