Missing!

by Brad Strickland

  Outside the cockpit, Mars fell away. The lights of Marsport slipped behind them, and then the planet was a dark shape in the dark night. Sean had never seen anything look more deserted.

  “We’ve done it,” Mickey growled. “We got away. Now you guys can cheer.”

  “Hooray,” Roger said mildly. “This is exciting, I must say. I almost hope we live.”

  CHAPTER 8

  The wind finally began to blow itself out before dawn. The sun rose, sending red-tinged shafts of light through the portholes of the tent. Jenny stood stiffly and peered through one. She might as well have tried to stare through an aluminum plate. The sand had scored and scratched even the resistant plastic until it was opaque.

  “Sounds better, anyway,” Alex said. He took his transponder out and keyed it. “Tent Two, this is Tent Three. Do you hear me?”

  Dr. Henried replied almost at once: “Tent Two here. We’re okay. How are you doing?”

  Alex said, “Well, we’re cold and hungry, but we’ve got air. At least for now. I don’t think our generator’s working.”

  Jenny realized then that she wasn’t hearing the reassuring hiss of incoming oxygen. She felt a rising panic, like a tide of cold water washing over her stomach and chest.

  “Probably buried and fouled,” Henried said. “We’ve a spare one in the cat, and we can always use the one from Tent one. Let’s have a council of war. Your tent or ours?”

  They agreed to met in Tent Two. Salma led the way out. The morning was still, but incredibly hazy—fine particles of dust would be suspended for days or weeks after a blow like that one. Jenny groaned when she saw the wreckage of Tent One. The side facing the blow had developed a rip, and fingers of wind had widened it, shredding the tough pressure-resistant fabric. The tent was partially buried in a drift, and partially unraveled in a long, jagged ribbon that snaked over a fresh fall of dust. They had to scoop sand away from the airlock of Tent Two before they could unseal it an make their way in, one at a time.

  Jenny followed Salma in, and Alex came behind her. Dr. Henried was looking tired and worried. “Right,” he said. “Well, we have the two tents, anyway. We should be alright if we run straight back to Advance Base. I expect they’ll have a team out looking for us as soon as they can, so we’ll probably run into them. Now, we’re about sixty kilometers south of where we should be, so the first thing to do is set up the microwave relay and get word to them. Let’s eat, and then we’ll go home.”

  They had a fairly cheerful meal, considering. When they had finished, they took small sips of water. “Might as well conserve it,” Henried said. “We can’t pick up any more out here.”

  They dug out Tent Three and found the oxygen generator ruined. Something, maybe dust getting into the circuitry, maybe a surge from a lightning strike, had fused its electronics. The generator from Tent One seemed to be all right, though.

  The Marscat had taken a pounding. The flying sand had scoured all the paint from its metal surfaces, and they gleamed as if they had been polished on purpose. Henried got the portable microwave dish out and set it up, but after a few minutes of trying, he said, “No good. Circuits are fried. Help me dig out the cat, and we’ll make a run for it.”

  The front of the cat had vanished into a crescent dune of dust and sand. They scooped it away, repacked the tents, and climbed aboard.

  It was too quiet. After a minute, Jenny asked, “What’s wrong?”

  “Can’t get any power from the cells,” Dr. Henried said. “Lightning, I suppose. And I’m not going to be able to repair this with what we’ve got on hand. Ladies and gentlemen, I’m afraid we’re going to have to walk out of here.”

  Walk? Jenny closed her eyes. They had been thirty kilometers south of the trail when they first went south of the crater. And they wouldn’t be able to walk straight across the crater—they’d have to follow its rim. Thirty kilometers was more than eighteen miles. Add to that the distance they had traveled to get to the shelter of the crater—what? Maybe twenty miles total?

  The pressure suits were good for four hours before their oxygen had to be recharged. Could they make five miles an hour? Probably not, even in the low gravity of Mars. They’d have to take oxygen with them.

  And the tents—could they haul the tents with them? That would slow them up, but without the tents, they’d face a Martian night exposed to the cold and the winds.

  Dr. Henried was talking again. “We can break down the sides of the cat and fashion a travois. We’ll put one of the tents on it, and all the supplies. We ought to be able to make fifteen kilometers by sunset, and we’ll get an early start tomorrow. Let’s get to work.”

  It took them hours. By the time they had lashed together the crude sledge, the sun was halfway up the sky, though it was visible only as an orange smudge in a rose-colored murk. They recharged their suits and began the long walk, taking turns hauling the travois behind them. They had rigged a couple of crude skids, but even so towing the sledge was a constant irritation. It snagged on rocks, it tilted and wobbled constantly as they went up or down hill, and it dragged at them, slowing them to a crawl. On the treadmill, Jenny could manage a steady 6.4 kilometers per hour. She doubted that they were doing half that.

  The sand under their boots was yielding, flowing, slippery, making them stumble and lurch. Dust collected on their faceplates, and they had to wipe it off time and time again just to have some vague idea of where they were going. Noon came and went. The sun sank, fading as it lost itself in thicker layers of drifting dust. They struggled along in a murky half light, resting for ten minutes out of every hour.

  Hended called a halt at last. “I estimate we’ve done at least fifteen kilometers,” he said. “Let’s pitch camp and get what sleep we can. We’ll need to start early tomorrow.”

  They were all staggering with exhaustion. Setting up the tent was excruciating, and once they had all crowded in, finding enough space to sleep seemed an impossibility. Jenny hunkered near the inner flap, and Alex slumped beside her, his face drained.

  “Cheer up,” she told him. “We ought to reach the trail tomorrow, if nothing else goes wrong.”

  With a weak smile, Alex said, “It could be worse, I guess. I can’t think how, but there must be some way.”

  Jenny laughed, though she didn’t feel like it. It was either that or cry.

  The shuttle angled down just as the sun cleared the eastern horizon. “Find us a smooth place,” Mickey said. “That’s all I want, a nice, firm, smooth place to set her down.”

  “Scanning with the radar,” Roger said, sounding absorbed in the task.

  Sean sat in the copilot’s seat itching to do something—anything—but not able to help. He didn’t have the piloting skills of Mickey or the computer knowledge of Roger. It was frustrating to admit, but all he could do at the moment was trust the others. “Storm’s moving to the southeast,” Roger said. “Okay, we’re due north of the second station. Let me see … there’s a little hill with a big trail of dust behind it, but if we set down here, we should be okay. Will we be able to take off again?”

  “In VSTOL mode, sure,” Mickey said. “But after that, we can set down only once and take off only once and still have enough fuel to get back to Marsport. If we have to do any more landings, we’re out of luck. We’ll never make it back.”

  “But we can call for help,” Sean said. “If we find them, we can call for help.”

  “If I crack this crate up, we can call for help,” Mickey added. “If we’re still alive to do it. Okay, I’m turning nav over to you. Sean, sit back and don’t touch anything. If we’re lucky we’ll come down in one piece.”

  The landscape of Mars rose alarmingly fast. Sean gripped the arms of the copilot’s seat and had to remind himself to breathe. Vague blotches rounded into craters, their eastern depths in shadow, their western sides lit by the rising sun. What looked like pepper sprinkled on red sandpaper suddenly became boulders strewn over a broadly flat plain with a few dunes and rolling hills. Then the ship
’s engines swiveled, the thrust kicked at Sean, and they settled toward the surface. Clouds of dust rose as the ship came down, and it crunched in with a very solid sound.

  “Are we okay?” Roger asked in a shaky voice.

  “Checking,” Mickey said. “Engines shut down.

  Fuel’s okay, attitude’s okay. We’re down, the ship is level, and I think we can take off again. Now what?”

  “Now we break out the cat and visit the station,” Sean said.

  Six kilometers to the south they found it, marked by a beacon that had been twisted into a corkscrew by the wind. Sean opened the hatch and checked inside. “Not activated,” he said. “They didn’t get this far.”

  They shuffled back through billowy ankle-deep sand to the cat. Visibility was less than a kilometer—the fine red dust still hung in curtains. Roger turned on the directional finder, though, and it showed another beacon somewhere ahead. “About five clicks,” Roger said. “The trail marker.”

  “They’ll be on the trail,” Sean said. “I think we should take the cat a few markers down. We’ll probably see them. They can’t be far off.”

  “Call the Advance Base,” Mickey said. “See if they’ve heard from them.”

  “They’ll yell at us.”

  Roger switched on the microwave relay. “I’ve been yelled at lots of times.”

  They got nothing, no signal at all. “What’s happened at Advance Base?” Roger asked, sounding both concerned and fearful. “You don’t think they’re all—”

  “The lightning,” Mickey said quickly. “It’s fouled up their transmitter, that’s all. You saw the weather readouts. They had the worst of the storm. May take them days to get back online.”

  Sean hoped he was right.

  They made slow time. Driving the cat in that strange red mist was almost like driving blind. Roger called out the directions, but every other minute they had to divert around boulders, and once or twice rolling crescent dunes defeated them, sand and dust piled high but too loosely packed and unstable for them to drive across. They had to go around, and guessing which side of the dune offered the best path led them into some labyrinths. From time to time Roger sent out a hailing call on the prep team’s emergency frequency, but without any response.

  The second beacon was nearly buried in a drift. They saw no sign that anyone had been there, and they headed toward the next beacon, another five clicks down the trail. “What’s around here?” Mickey asked. “What geographical features?”

  Areological, Sean corrected mentally, but he said nothing out loud and studied the map. “Not much. There’s an impact crater ahead and to the south.”

  “Big one?”

  “Ten or twelve kilometers across. It has an eroded rim that’s elevated well above the plain.” Sean strained to see ahead. “We’re not going to fall into it.”

  “I think you’re drifting too far north,” Roger said, bent over the navigation console. “Bear to the right a little more. That’s good. What’s our speed?”

  Mickey sniffed. “About three clicks an hour.”

  “These things can do thirty.”

  Mickey’s face was red with frustration. “You try doing thirty in this mess!”

  “All right, all right,” Roger said. “I know you’re doing your pathetic best.”

  Mickey didn’t answer, but he did speed up. They reached the next marker, stopped, and repeated their call.

  “Nothing,” Mickey said. “If it was clear, we could do a flyover and look for—”

  “Hold on!” Roger’s voice was sharp with concern. “I heard something. Boost the gain.”

  Sean adjusted the radio, straining his ears. Crackling static, a constant hiss. And then—words? He couldn’t be sure. Maybe. Maybe.

  Roger said, “I don’t think that’s anyone calling us. More like pressure-suit radios. They’re talking to one another, and we’re barely able to pick up a signal, but it’s too weak for us to make it out.”

  “Where are they?” Sean asked, pounding his fist on his knee.

  “Hang on, I’m trying to get a fix.” Roger muttered under his breath, not to Mickey or Sean, but just begging whoever it was to keep talking. Sean felt as if he wanted to leap out of the cat and go running across the surface of Mars, but he fought the feeling down. He couldn’t hope to find anyone on his own.

  From the electronic mush, Alex’s voice came suddenly sharp for a couple of words—“don’t let”—and then it was gone again. Roger said, “This can’t be right. They wouldn’t be twenty kilometers southeast of us, would they?”

  Sean fumbled frantically with the map. He found the location of the nearby beacon, giving him their spot on the map, and then he measured twenty kilometers. “That would put them way south of the trail. Twenty clicks, let’s see, that’s a spot just inside the crater wall. No way would they go in there!”

  “Or maybe they’re just outside the crater if the fix isn’t just right,” Mickey said. “How could they get so far off the trail?”

  “Don’t know,” Sean said. “Look, we have to go on and check this out. We can make it in four hours.”

  “Maybe,” Mickey said. “But we can’t make it back to the shuttle before nightfall.”

  “We’ve got a survival tent aboard,” Roger said. “If we find them, we can crowd together with some in the tent and some in the cab of the cat. Shouldn’t be too hard to get through one night.”

  “I don’t like leaving the shuttle,” Mickey said.

  “No one’s likely to steal it,” Roger pointed out.

  “No,” Mickey replied, controlled anger in his voice. “But what if another storm comes up? What if the shuttle got hit with lightning or buried in a drift?”

  “Then we’d take the cat to Advance Base,” Sean said.

  Mickey shook his head. “What if we find them and take them to Advance Base and—and things aren’t right there? What’s the plan then?”

  “Don’t ask so many what-if questions,” Sean said. “None of that has happened yet, and we can’t be sure it will happen. But we know Alex is out there somewhere, and we know he’s talking to at least one other person. If we head back to the shuttle, we’ll lose the trace. I say we go on.”

  “We have to, Mickey,” Roger said. “Seriously. What if it was you out there?”

  Mickey let out a long breath. “I suppose I’d want some loonies to come looking for me. Okay. Sean, look sharp and keep me from driving this thing into a gulley. We have to make tracks.”

  They wound their way forward slowly, taking a twisting path around obstacles in their way. Sean kept checking the weather photos, but as far as he could tell, the storm was heading southeast now, away from them—though he could tell from the high-resolution images that the area around Advance Base had been hard hit. The radio chatter came and went, never clear enough to understand. They tried broadcasting on the same frequency, but they couldn’t be sure if they were getting through. Each time they heard something like voices, though, Roger worked to refine his radio fix.

  “Helmet radios are generally good over line-of-sight distances of four kilometers or less,” he said once. “If we can get around this bloody big pile of rubble”—he glared at the rim of the crater, passing by on their right, looking like a dim wall in the poor afternoon light—“we should be able to talk to them.”

  “Why aren’t they using their cat’s radio?” Mickey asked, but it was a question none of them could answer.

  They drove on in uneasy silence, all of them staring ahead. Sean, at least, was a little fearful of what they might see, but Roger was right: They really had no choice but to follow the ghostly voices and hope for the best.

  The oxygen generator failed fifteen minutes after they made camp. Dales went out and brought it into the tent, but they couldn’t find the reason for the breakdown. Apparently some circuits had been fried by the lightning, but they had no way of testing the unit and no way of repairing the circuits.

  “That’s pretty grim,” Salma said. “How m
uch tanked oxygen do we have left for the tent?”

  “Tonight,” Dr. Henried said. “That’s it. But I suggest we wear our suits and save the last of the tent cylinder. It can give us another three hours of oxygen apiece.”

  Jenny did some quick mental calculation. With the oxygen tanks they had dragged behind them on the travois, the suits had a forty-hour supply. Advance Base was more than two hundred kilometers away to the east. At the most, they could probably make three kilometers an hour, two hundred and forty kilometers … eighty hours.

  Alex seemed to read her thoughts. “Don’t worry about running out of air. We’ll find the trail. Advance will send a team out to find us, and they’ll be equipped with everything we need. We’re not dead yet.”

  “Of course not,” Salma said, putting a hand on Jenny’s shoulder. “Not by a long shot.”

  They had an hour or so of oxygen left in the tent before they had to put the helmets on. As far as it was possible in the cramped space, Dr. Henried, Dr. Dales, and Dr. Weston got together and carried on a quiet consultation apart from the other three.

  At last, Dr. Henried cleared his throat. “We’ve come to a decision,” he said. “We’ll make for the trail and try to get as close to Advance Base as we can. If it seems possible that a party will not be able to save us all, the three of us will give whatever remains of our oxygen to you three.”

  Salma objected at once. “No. That’s not fair. None of the women-and-children-first nonsense. We’re in this together.”

  “True,” Dr. Henried said. “However, if some of us must die so that some of us can live, well, that’s the only logical course to follow. Far better for three of us to survive than none.”

  “Then we draw straws,” Salma said. “I won’t play by your rules.”

  Jenny looked at Alex. He seemed to be struggling, but he finally said, “I agree.”

  Jenny was truly afraid now. But from somewhere she found just enough courage to say, “So do I.”