Missing!

by Brad Strickland

  “That’s got it,” Salma, a dark-haired, dark-eyed Indian woman said, tugging at the last anchor to make sure it was firmly set. “Let’s get inside and inflate this thing.”

  They crawled through the flap, Salma letting Jenny go first. Jenny got inside and said, “Check the outer seal.”

  “Doing it now. Okay, seal’s shut, let me double-check. Right, it’s good.” Salma wormed her way into the interior of the tent and sealed the inner flap, doing it slowly and taking time to test it. Salma did things by the book, which, she had told Jenny, was the reason she was alive after nearly six years on Mars.

  Salma turned to Jenny. Both of them were kneeling because the tent didn’t offer much head space for a standing person. “Okay, let’s have some light and heat. And a little air would be nice too.”

  A compact external oxygen generator was already at work, producing a steady, low hiss of incoming air, but the initial tent pressurization came from a small tank of compressed oxygen. Jenny opened it, watched the digital readout on its valve, and when it showed full inflation, she said, “Oxygen’s normal.” They both removed their helmets.

  Jenny had to gasp for air. Normal for a survival tent meant oxygen at a lower partial pressure than in the suits. It was always a bit of an adjustment. Her nose tingled from the cold, and Salma got the small heater going right away. It doubled as a CO2 scrubber, removing carbon dioxide from the air inside the tent. Without it, the carbon dioxide both of them produced while breathing would build up to dangerous levels. They switched on the tent lantern and unpacked their sleeping bags. “Home sweet home,” Salma said with a grunt. “I hope it warms up soon! Check with the others, will you?”

  Jenny took the helmet transponder from her own pressure suit. It doubled as a short-range radio. “Tent Three reporting in,” she said. “We’re set up.”

  For a few seconds the radio crackled with static, and then Alex Benford’s cheerful voice came through the small speaker: “Tent One here. Dr. Henried and I are set up and starting to warm up. Haven’t heard from Tent Two yet—but Dales is always slow.”

  “I heard that!” It was Frank Dales, the electronics expert. “For your information, Joe and I have been comfortably set up for some time. We’re just trying to decide what to have for dinner—roast turkey with all the trimmings, or maybe some compressed rations.”

  “Good idea,” Salma said, opening the leg pouch on her pressure suit. “Let’s see … we have protein bars and carb bars. I’d suggest one of each. Got the water?”

  “Right here,” said Jenny, hitching the backpack from her suit.

  No one could have called it a great meal, or even an adequate one, but the ration bars were packed with enough calories to keep them going and enough vitamins and minerals to keep them healthy. They had just finished when Karl Henried, the team leader, came on the radio to set up the sleep rotation. “Someone needs to be awake at all times to monitor the radio for emergencies,” he said. “There are six of us, so ninety-minute shifts will be more than adequate. I suggest that Alex and I take the first two, then Tent Two the next two, and Tent Three the last. Each tent decide who’ll take the first watch, and that person will sleep with the radio next to his or her ear.”

  They turned in at once. Jenny dropped immediately into a deep sleep, without any dreams that she would be able to remember. It seemed she had barely closed her eyes when Salma shook her awake. “Wha?” she muttered.

  “It’s almost daylight,” Salma said. “Your watch. Tonight we’ll be waking up in the middle of the night, so get used to it!”

  It was cold in the tent. Jenny huddled close to the heater, yawning and stretching her arms. The radio remained obstinately silent. She began to think this excursion was going to be about as dull as the last few days at the extraction station had been.

  Breakfast was the same dreary affair as dinner. Jenny munched something that was supposed to remind her of oatmeal with peaches, but it tasted more like someone’s old sneaker soaked in peach juice. Everyone took a bathroom break—the tents had chemical toilets, and Jenny had long since gotten over her initial shyness. Modesty was not something you could easily practice in Marsport.

  They all suited up and left the tents one at a time. Each time they did, the airlock gave a little puff and a small explosion of vapor shot out—this early in the morning, it froze immediately into glittering crystals. Joe Weston, a pipeline technologist, was last out of Tent Two—a tight squeeze for him. He wasn’t fat, but he was the most hammered-down man in the colony—barely five feet four and built like a solid linebacker. Weston was a quiet man, and Jenny had never really gotten to know him. He was always concentrating on some engineering problem.

  The sun wasn’t high enough yet to provide much warmth. The rusty-red landscape of Mars stretched away into the distance, a rocky surface dusted with fine sand, studded with small rocks and, here and there, a few boulders. Most of these had been blasted out of the crust eons ago by incoming meteorites. A few were ejecta, magma that had been hurled high into the atmosphere from the three Tharsis volcanoes to the north, solidifying and crashing back to Mars again as solid stone. Some of the magma, scientists now knew, had been blasted into outer space during the fiercest eruptions, and a very few meteorites on Earth were actually Mars rocks.

  In the early morning the rocks all sent long shadows streaming across the surface. In the shelter of some of the largest rocks, Jenny could see a fine spiky white frost thrusting out of the dust. It wouldn’t have been there a hundred years earlier. Humans were changing the face of Mars, and one of the most vital ways was by making the air denser and, eventually, breathable. Water could exist at the surface now only as ice or vapor, but in time, there would be liquid water on Mars—and eventually, even rain.

  “Let’s get to work,” Dr. Henried said. “Not much scenery to admire here anyway.” Jenny blushed and went to help unpack the tool kit.

  The heating/impeller station was compact, not quite as large as one of the tents. Months earlier, an advance construction team had dug down into the surface and had set it up, back when the pipeline was supposed to head for the South Pole instead of the rift valley. The prep team tested the unit, switched on its power systems, and made sure the connections were reasonably free of dust and grit. They had to align the microwave dish. This particular unit received most of its power from a direct satellite feed. Its batteries were just meant to provide a buffer against power failure.

  By the time the team had finished, the sun had risen almost to the zenith, and the temperature had shot all the way up to a few degrees below freezing. The frost behind the rocks had long since faded away, subliming directly to water vapor without melting first. The sky was milky blue with a high, thin overcast of ice clouds, and the distant sun looked feeble and dim.

  They all broke down their tents, repacked them in the side carriers of the Marscat, and climbed aboard for another jouncing, teeth-clacking ride. Henried explained that they wouldn’t be able to reach the next unit by nightfall, so they would make camp a few hours away from it. “If it had been a little warmer, I would have said we should make a dash and get to the next unit at about 2100, but there’s no sense freezing our feet. There’s a small impact crater not too far ahead. I think we should camp in the lee of that. The wind’s been kicking up a bit.”

  Jenny had noticed that the day had turned breezy. Snakes of dust whipped across their path, squirming and slithering as if they were in a hurry to get somewhere. She looked off to her right, shading her eyes. To the north, the sky was smudged with high-blown dust, but it didn’t look particularly threatening. Anyway, she thought, Marsport or the advance base would give them a call if a storm were developing. Nothing to worry about.

  Alex sat beside her. “So, how do you like this?” he asked.

  “Better than hanging around in the hootch waiting for the engineers to finish rebuilding the extraction unit,” Jenny said with a smile. “I don’t mind working—it’s not having anything to do that drives me zapp
y.”

  “I’m trying to talk Glen into letting me take the copilot’s seat when we fly back to Marsport,” Alex said. He gripped an imaginary control stick. “Technically, I’m a year too young, but I’ve got more time in simulators than any other pilot in Marsport.”

  Jenny chuckled. Alex’s ambition was to become the best pilot on Mars, and he devoted hours to training. Well, that was understandable. Jenny had always loved animals, and she had decided to become an adaptive agriculturist, finding ways to allow Earth farm animals to function and reproduce in the strange, low-gravity environment of Mars. She put in long hours herself—and she reflected that if anyone had told her three or four years ago that she would almost weep with joy at witnessing the triumphant flight of a chicken, she would have laughed out loud.

  Dr. Henried wasn’t a very chatty driver, but now and then he pointed out the sights along the way. There weren’t many. One part of the plain was pretty much like any other part. At one point they could glimpse the pale bulk of one of the volcanoes far off to the north, almost hidden in the atmospheric haze of distance. They briefly halted near another feature, a tiny impact crater barely five meters across that had been blasted out only ten years before. “Imagine a little space pebble this big,” Dr. Henried said, indicating a body a few inches across. “She comes whistling in from somewhere out toward Jupiter, almost vertically. Boom! She hits and vaporizes in an explosion that blasts out a hole like this. Lucky for us one hasn’t smashed into Marsport, eh?”

  Alex and Jenny exchanged a glance, and Alex gave her a wry smile. It was just one more way that Mars could kill you. There were so many, Alex’s smile seemed to say, that one more didn’t make much difference. Still, Jenny resisted an urge to look upward, as if something big and deadly might be hurtling their way at that very instant.

  They arrived at a much larger impact crater not long before sundown. This one was far older, and it had been made by a far larger meteorite. The crater was more than ten kilometers in diameter, and they were heading for its southern side. The blast had thrust up a crater rim that looked like a curving range of hills forty meters high. Once they might have been jagged, but centuries of wind had ground them down into rolling, rounded shapes.

  The wind was steady from the north, so they planned to camp on the sheltered south side of the crater. Even with the thin air of Mars, a strong wind could damage a survival tent.

  But it meant a colder night. South of the equator, the north side of the crater got the most direct sunlight. When they scrambled off the Marscat and began to unpack the tents, the crater’s shadow was already deep, and the temperature was plummeting. There were a few advantages. The wind shadow of the crater was a collecting ground for the fine Martian dust, and the portable oxygen generators worked very efficiently with that material. On the other hand, it was hard to stake the tents down through a meter of dust, and the job took so long that by the time they finally got into the tents, stars already glittered in a rapidly darkening sky.

  Jenny slept dreamlessly again, and this time when Salma shook her, she didn’t complain.

  “All quiet?” Jenny asked.

  “Except for the wind.”

  Jenny heard it then, the scratchy hiss of sand against the outside of the tent. She shivered. If it was this bad behind the shelter of the crater rim, the wind must be howling out in the open. But they’d had no word of storms. Maybe it was just a seasonal thing.

  She kept her ninety-minute watch, then called Alex in Tent One to wake him for his turn. He sounded foggy, as if he had been snoozing deeply, and she kept him on for a minute to make sure he was fully awake. “Are you up?” she asked in a soft voice, not wanting to wake Salma.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Alex grumbled. “Anything happening?”

  “Windy.”

  Alex was silent for a moment, and then he said, “Yeah, I hear it. Sounds pretty fierce. Think I should wake Dr. Henried?”

  “Probably not. It’ll be dawn in three hours, and you’ll get him up in an hour and a half anyway. Let him sleep, unless it gets worse. It’s been steady ever since I woke up.”

  “Okay. Grab another few hours of sleep. I’m awake now, I promise.”

  Sleep didn’t come, though. Jenny lay awake listening to the sifting-sand sound of the wind, wondering if it were growing stronger or staying about the same. It was hard to tell. She was still awake when Dr. Henried gave out the general call, and she tapped Salma’s shoulder. “Still blowing,” her tent-mate said. “Hope it’s not working into a storm.”

  After breakfast, all six of them got out of the tents. Jenny knew they wouldn’t be going anywhere the moment she looked around. A few hundred meters to the west, beyond the shelter of the crater rim, the air was a blurry rush of dust and sand. Even in the protected area, they walked in a kind of reddish fog, a fog made up of microscopic dust particles whirling and blowing in eddies of wind. Jenny could make out the shapes of the others, but she couldn’t tell the tall, thin Henried from the short, heavyset Weston in the swirling gloom.

  “This isn’t good,” Dr. Henried said. “Luckily, we can hold out for a week if we have to, and this should blow over well before then. But we’d better head west for a while, to get to the center of the crater’s protection. I doubt we can raise the base by radio with all this going on, but let’s make some tracks and we’ll try.”

  They rode for a couple of hours, with visibility dwindling the entire way. Finally, Dr. Henried stopped the vehicle. “I’m going to foul the bearings if we keep rolling in this,” he said. “Let me get the blade in place, and I’ll see if we can scrape down closer to bedrock.”

  The Marscat could double as a scraper with its blade swung out from its slot under the cab and locked into position. Henried jockeyed it back and forth, digging a gradually deepening trench in the drifted sand. He excavated a strip ten meters wide and thirty or so long, finally stopping when the cat blade began to snag on rock. “That will have to do. Get the tents up.”

  With the brickdust fog growing thicker, it was hard work, but at last they all had their tents ready. “Meeting in Tent One,” Henried said.

  A survival tent was never meant to contain six people. They were elbow to elbow, sitting on the floor. Dr. Henried looked worried. “All right. Let me give you just the skin.” Jenny leaned forward. The skin meant the most important facts, the essentials. Dr. Henried continued: “We’re off the trail, folks. Normally we would have gone around the north side of the crater, but we need the protection, so I made a decision to divert. However, that means that advance base won’t know where to look for us—and until the wind dies down and I can aim a microwave dish at a satellite relay, I can’t raise them on the radio. We’ll hunker down here for at least a day to see if this is going to get any better. If it doesn’t, we’ll think of a contingency plan. Everyone get some rest and conserve your food and water. They may have to last us for a long time.”

  Jenny nodded. She felt nervous, but not especially afraid—not until she noticed how scared Alex looked. Alex was a rock. If he was frightened, there was something to be scared of.

  That was when she first began to think that they might not make it back.

  CHAPTER 7

  “Okay.” Sean Said to Roger and Mickey, his voice low and conspiratorial. “First, what I want to do is against all the rules, so we could get in trouble. I don’t have anyone’s permission for what I’m going to try. You need to know that up front.”

  Mickey’s plump face was solemn, his eyes sharp behind his spectacle lenses. He and Roger exchanged a glance, but neither of them spoke. Then Mickey tilted his head and asked, “How much trouble?”

  Sean shook his head. “I just don’t know. Dr, Simak won’t send a rescue team out to look for Jenny and the others, because she doesn’t want to risk any more lives. I want to go myself, but I can’t go alone. I don’t have Dr. Simak’s orders or even her permission, so if I’m caught, I’m in for it. I need help.”

  The three of them were in Sean’s room, Roger
sitting backward on the computer chair, Mickey lounging against the wall beside the door, Sean sitting on his bed, which was folded into its sofa position. Sean leaned forward, his arms resting on his knees, his hands clasped. He studied the other two boys, but their expressions told him nothing.

  Roger frowned and held up a hand as if asking for silence. “Now, let me see if I understand you, Sean. Correct me if I’m wrong in any of this. You want us to go with you out into a dangerous storm and try to find the prep team, right? If we succeed, we’ll be in terrible trouble with the council, and if we fail, we’ll probably all die? Is that pretty much it, then?”

  “Pretty much,” Sean confessed.

  “Oh, right, then. I’m in.” With a carefree smile, Roger leaned back with his hands clasped behind his head, as if he had made his decision and was comfortable with it.

  “Are you jumping ahead too far? I mean, wouldn’t the Advance Base have sent out a rescue party already?” Mickey asked, sounding undecided.

  “Not likely,” Sean told him. “They’re catching the brunt of the storm. It’s worse there than it is on the trail, from the satellite pics. We’re clear of the storm’s path here, so we can move before anyone from Advance Base can. We have to get to Daedalia Planum and—”

  “Hold on, hold on,” Mickey said irritably. “Ax the plans for a minute, will you, and let me catch up? First, how are we supposed to get there, with the storm and all? They’re a long way off. I suppose we could take a hauler and carry enough spare fuel to make it, but it would take weeks to get that far, and by then they’d be back, or—well, it would be too late.”