Missing!

by Brad Strickland

  Then, one week to the day following Sean’s return, a plane brought an injured Nickie Mikhailova in from the Arsai Mons base. She had caught her leg in a crevice and had a bad fracture above her left ankle.

  Sean went to see her in the hospital dome the day she arrived. She was the only patient—the Marsport colonists had been carefully screened for communicable diseases, vaccinated for every possible infection, and given overall health screening before leaving Earth. Marsport had no problem with infectious diseases, only with accidents like Nickie’s or with disorders that colonists might develop after arriving on Mars, like heart disease or cancer, against which there were no vaccines. Fortunately, so far no one had developed any serious problems.

  Nickie was sitting up in bed, looking grumpy. Her leg lay immobilized in a lightweight cast, and she rolled her eyes when Sean came into her room. “Call me clumsy,” she said. “It was all my own stupid fault. Shouldn’t have tried to carry something I couldn’t see over, but I thought I could make it.”

  “It’s okay,” Sean said with a smile. “I’m not blaming you. What happened?”

  Nickie shrugged. “I was carrying a short section of pipe, about two meters long. We needed just enough to connect the end of the pipeline to a heating junction. Well, you know me: Russian peasant type, right? I figured that I could easily lift a piece of pipe that on Earth would weigh a hundred kilos, because here it’s only about a third of that. I did lift it, too, but I couldn’t see where I was going and stuck my foot in a crack. I fell forward, and I heard a snap, and then I hurt like blazes.”

  “Sorry. That kind of thing could happen to anyone, though, so don’t beat yourself up over it. How long are you going to have to wear that thing?”

  “The cast?” Nickie wrinkled her pug nose. “Six whole weeks. Everybody’s going to want to know what happened, and there’s no way to lie to them, so everyone in school will think I’m some kind of idiot. And imagine me hopping around on crutches. Bull in a china shop, right? Oh, well, at least I’ll have an excuse to be late when school starts again. So catch me up. How did your tour go?”

  They were both hungry for company, and they talked for a long time. Then Sean played a couple of games of chess with her. They weren’t much fun for him, because Nickie was a real chess shark. She’d memorized all sorts of classic games, and she seemed to have the irritating ability to see forward in time, guessing exactly what Sean was going to do with his bishops, knights, and rooks. Both games ended pretty quickly with Sean getting caught in a checkmate he didn’t see coming.

  “Want any movies or anything?” Sean asked.

  “Got a direct feed to the vid library through the hospital net, thanks,” Nickie said with a smile. “Thanks for not making fun of me fouling up this way. Boy, I hope I’m not the only one who fouls up.” She looked appalled the second she said that and then rushed on: “I didn’t mean that the way it came out. I don’t really want anything bad to happen to any of the others. It’s just that I hate being the one who—you know.”

  “I know,” Sean said. “Hey, Mickey and I almost brought a mountain down on our own heads.” He told her about the adventure, making it seem a lot less dangerous and a lot more amusing than it had felt at the time. One of the medical staff brought in Nickie’s lunch, and Sean left her alone to eat it. He wandered restlessly, reflecting that it was nice to talk to Nickie, but somehow it wasn’t the same as talking with Jenny.

  He spoke to Jenny again later that afternoon by radio. She said the extraction unit was working after a fashion, but only at forty percent efficiency. The engineers were trying to figure out what was wrong, and until they could do that, nothing much was going on. Meanwhile, Jenny said, the work had been hard, everyone was stinky, and she was getting really homesick for some actual organic food, not the processed stuff in the silvery ration packs.

  “Some of us are going to go on the pipeline trail later,” Jenny said. “There’s not much for us to do here, and the heating and impeller junctions have to be preset. Six of those left to do on this end, so the boss is going to pick a volunteer crew to go out with tents and stuff and spend about two weeks setting up the junctions.”

  “Don’t volunteer,” Sean said without even thinking.

  “Too late,” Jennys voice crackled back. “Already did it. Look, I’m getting cabin fever here. Hootch fever. I’m sick of being stuck here with not enough to do, anyway.”

  “I don’t like the thought of your being out on the plateau with nothing but tents,” Sean said. “We had a bad storm when we were at the advance base. Something like that would pick up a tent and sail it away like a paper plate in a high wind. You wouldn’t have a chance.”

  “We’re not taking chances,” Jenny replied, sounding cantankerous. “We’ve all had the basic training. Anyway, they’ll wait until there’s a window of good weather before sending anybody out. Relax, it’s ice.”

  Sean swallowed his wariness and said, “I guess. Hey, call in and let me know if you get picked, though, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  For three days after that, there was no word from Jenny, and Sean began to feel a little better. Chances were she hadn’t been picked after all. Then on the fourth day Amanda passed him in the corridor, turned, and said, “Sean! I heard from Jenny today. She tried to reach you but couldn’t.”

  “I’ve been in the gym,” Sean said. “What did she want?”

  “She said to tell you she’d been picked and not to worry. She said you’d know what she meant.”

  Sean swallowed. “Yeah,” he said. “I do.”

  Relax, he told himself. It will be all right. She’s not alone. There are six on the team. They know what they’re doing.

  Roger had insisted that things going wrong was the normal state of affairs on Mars, the only thing you could count on.

  Sean and Mickey had thought setting up the directional beacon was a snap, a simple job with nothing dangerous about it, and then boulders had begun to rain down around them.

  Six people in tents on the plateau of the Daedalia Plain was a reasonable number. Two per tent. If two got in trouble, four were there to help them out.

  Still …

  Sean sat in the quiet school library, studying the largest scale map of Daedalia Planum. It was high country, an immense, uplifted plateau. Parts of it had been overrun with lava flows from the three volcanoes to the northeast, and in satellite photos those areas looked vaguely like reddish colored oatmeal, a jumble of ridges, hills, and blocks of stone frozen in solidified magma. Other parts were sand-covered stone, pitted with impact craters from meteorites. The pipeline was supposed to make its way across these relatively clear areas, avoiding the craters. The rift valley where the water-collection unit had been placed was between Daedalia and Solis, a broad crack in the surface of the planet between the two uplands.

  Using a computer, Sean called up a survey set of satellite views showing Daedalia. The craters on its surface seemed to trail dark streaks. Wind streaks, Sean realized. The raised walls of the crater provided wind breaks, and when the storms hit, in the shelter of the wind breaks, the dust and sand collected in teardrop shapes fifty or sixty kilometers or more long. The pictures reminded Sean of the force and power of a Martian sandstorm. For millennia fierce, global hurricanes had roared across the Martian surface, sculpting and eroding mountains, filling the air with impenetrable billows of dust.

  Now the atmosphere was thicker than it had been in millions of years, and it would have to be thicker still if humans were going to live permanently on Mars. It was a necessity, but even the weather experts could not predict with any confidence what the heavier blanket of air meant for Martian weather. Generally the storms were fiercest at the time of the equinoxes, the beginning of Martian spring and fall. But the heat of the sun could generate cyclonic updrafts that resulted in awesome blows in summer, too.

  And that was just one thing that could go wrong, Sean knew. He’d read of the history of Martian exploration. Some Earth explorers ha
d died when they plunged through the thin layer of rock and soil over a vast cavern, a gas bubble left over from a volcanic eruption. Others had suffered from rock slides, from earthquakes—Marsquakes, Sean corrected mentally—from the cold, from sudden loss of pressure in buildings and aircraft.

  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.

  CHAPTER 6

  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.