Marooned! Page 3

  But he had slept in worse places. He could remember nights in burned-out cars, shivering nights in the scant shelter of a couple of loose boards, nights on pavement, on mounds of garbage, in downpours.

  Well, now at least he had his own room, even if it was gray and exactly like every other bedroom on the entire planet. And he had friends.

  If he could trust them.

  Sean drifted to sleep, and for some reason he dreamed of his first foster family. They had invited media reporters to interview Sean. He had learned later that they charged for the interviews. The two of them hadn’t been a very happy couple, though when the cameras were on them, they were smiling and looked cheerful.

  But every night Sean had gone to bed listening to them screaming at each other. And every morning he had dreaded getting up to their complaints and sometimes their blows. Both of them were quick to hit if he put a toe out of line.

  Now, in his dreams, he heard them screaming:

  “We could have held up United News for twice what you got!”

  “You moron! Who’d pay that much to broadcast the brat saying he doesn’t remember the attack? It’s old news now!”

  With a gasp, Sean sat up in the dark, nearly tumbling out of bed. At first he felt confused, his head reeling. Then it came back to him: Gravity was different here. It was a different world, a new start. It was Mars.

  Marsport was a grand experiment. Earth was overcrowded, bickering, on the verge of breakdown. If a new world could be opened, then the people of Earth would have hope for the future. It had taken years of work to build and equip the colony. Now the goal was for it to exist without any kind of resupply from Earth. It had to do that for at least one full Martian year before it would be considered a success. Then, once the colonists had proved that it could be done, others would come from Earth to make Mars a planet where humans could live permanently. But that all hinged on the population of Marsport surviving for one full Martian year with absolutely no food or equipment coming from Earth in that time. If everything went right, the experiment in survival would begin in just a few months.

  Sean settled down again, pulling the blanket back over himself.

  Survival.

  He was pretty good at that.

  CHAPTER 3

  3.1

  Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays were English, mathematics, history, and physical education. Tuesdays and Thursdays were science, computers, and social studies. The twenty young colonists of the Asimov Project had classes from eight o’clock to two, and then they were expected to participate in the work of the colony.

  Sean settled into the routine easily enough. Although all twenty students met in the same education dome, their lessons were all different, all delivered by computer. Sean got to know the others, and he liked some of them a lot. Alex had somehow become his best friend, but Jenny Laslo was a close second. Nickie Mikhailova, who was sixteen, was Jenny’s best friend. She reminded Sean a little of Ellman—like him, she was stocky and square of build. “That’s what comes from having a long line of Russian peasants as ancestors,” she joked. But her face, framed by short strawberry-blond hair, was always impish and pleasant, and her knowledge of computers was second to none.

  And then there was Elizabeth Ling. She was the same age as Alex—fourteen and a half—and had the longest hair of anyone Sean had met in the colony. It was jet black and hung down to her shoulders. She was very quiet, very pale, and very solemn. She never laughed, and Sean secretly sympathized with her. He didn’t laugh much himself.

  In the classes, Sean felt as if he were the stupidest person on the planet. The others had specialties already. He didn’t. The others raced through problems that he had to sit and stare at. Sean began to wonder if he were just a charity case—if Amanda had arranged for him to come to Mars out of pity. He tried not to show how inferior he felt around Jenny and Elizabeth, though. Sometimes that was hard to do, especially when Jenny went into lecture mode and began to point out things he had no way of knowing. At times like those, Sean put on an expression of bored impatience, as if he didn’t need the information, and that only made him feel worse—a phony in more ways than one.

  3.2

  At the end of his first week in the colony, Jenny dropped by after breakfast. “Want to go outside?”

  Sean, who had nothing to look forward to other than trying to catch up on math homework, asked, “Can we do that?”

  “Just got permission from Ellman,” replied Jenny with a grin. “He’s okay if you know how to talk to him. You’ve trained in a pressure suit, right?”

  “On Luna,” Sean said. “I passed my level one tests.”

  “Ice!” Jenny said. “There’s a catch, though. We have to go out in groups of three or more, so we’ll need someone else. Where’s Alex?”

  They found him in one of the greenhouses, where he was reading a disk on piloting. He scrambled up from where he had been sitting in the shade of some tall cornstalks, looking embarrassed. “Nobody ever comes here on Saturday,” he said. “That’s why I like to study here. Nice and quiet.”

  Sean understood that, but he also understood that the greenhouse, with its lush aroma of growing things, its supplemental lights that imitated the sun as it shone on Earth, and its warm, moist air was one place that felt like home.

  “Want to go out?” Jenny asked. “Not for long, but just to show Sean the sights?”

  “Such as they are,” Alex said with a chuckle. “Okay, I’m in.”

  The three of them made their way to an entry dome, where they donned the clumsy pressure suits, then waited in an airlock as pumps sucked the air out. Sean’s heart was beating fast with excitement, and every time he took a breath the air rattled in his helmet, sounding like pebbles falling down a chute. Finally the outer door opened, and Alex led the way out.

  It was cold. At this latitude the maximum outside temperature at noon in summer could get up to fifteen degrees Celsius—not quite sixty degrees on the old Fahrenheit scale. It was barely spring, though, and on this particular Saturday noon, the thermometer would have read minus six Celsius, well below freezing. Alex’s voice rasped over the radio receiver in Sean’s helmet: “We can’t stay out very long in unheated suits.”

  “Why didn’t we use heated ones?” Sean asked.

  “Because we’re not part of a work party, and they’re reserved. Hey, Jenn, let’s go look at the construction site where they’re sinking the new thermal well.”

  Walking was difficult. The ground underfoot was loose sand scattered with boulders of all sizes. The sun hung overhead, pale and shrunken in the dark blue sky. The three of them rounded the edge of the dome, and Sean caught his breath.

  The day was clear, and the towering, rugged cliffs at the base of Olympus Mons looked close enough to touch. They were almost sheer, and they reared up four miles above the foothills. Beyond them was the bulk of Olympus itself, so large that it looked as if the horizon was warped upward, vanishing in a dim purple distance. On the foothills past the settlement a forest of windmills rose, hundreds of them, their great blades sweeping in a gentle breeze.

  Jenny pointed, and her voice crackled on the radio, “In the spring we’ll have real storms, and the generators will have to be cleaned about every other day. They’re sealed against dust, but it gets in everywhere during the seasonal storms. The wind-mills are shut down during the peak winds, but we’ll be out a lot then. That’s one of our jobs, keeping the generators working.”

  Sean felt a vibration through the soles of his feet, and a second later he heard a dull boom that did not come over the radio. “What was that?”

  “Blasting,” Alex said. “The air’s so thin that it doesn’t make half the noise it would on Earth. There, see? No, look over to the left. They’re drilling a shaft right down into the crust. There’s still volcanic heat deep down, and that powers turbine generators.”

  Sean was shivering from the cold. They could see a work crew in the distance, six figures in bright blue pressure suits under
a billowing plume of dust from the explosion.

  “This is close enough,” Jenny said. “Let’s get back inside. I’m freezing!” She turned, the sun gleaming on her helmet.

  They retraced their steps and went back inside. Sean felt himself gasping. “Seems hard to breathe,” he complained.

  Alex hung up his pressure suit. “That’s because you were on a richer oxygen mix outside. In here it’s lower than Earth’s normal, a mix of oxygen, argon, helium, and nitrogen. But the tanks give you full oxygen, because usually when you’re outside you’re doing manual labor.”

  “All the oxygen comes from Mars?” Sean asked. He knew that on Earth’s moon oxygen came from factories that broke down oxygen-containing minerals.

  “Pretty much,” Jenny said. “The greenhouse plants generate a tiny fraction of what we’re breathing, but most of it comes from the regolith, the basic rock of Mars. A lot of the minerals that make up the rock are oxides, and one thing the colonists have to do is to build a chain of solar-powered oxygen factories all around the planet. Now that the air’s thicker, we have to make sure that eventually we can breathe it.”

  “Some of the oxygen comes from water, too,” Alex added. “There are underground, automated factories near the south pole that will mine subsurface ice and then break it into hydrogen and oxygen. When the factories are fully operational, the gases will be piped back here.”

  Sean was beginning to feel warm again. They headed back to what was generally called the town hall, a community structure where meetings could be held, games could be played, and meals could be eaten. It had been one of the first habitats for humans on Mars, and years ago it had suffered a blowout when the shell burst and the air had exploded outward. Colonists had repaired and reinforced it with a cage of tubular steel, made right on Mars. The hall itself was proof that the colonists wouldn’t give up easily and would bounce back from disaster, or so Sean had been told in his orientation sessions.

  Weekends were a time of relaxation, though work never completely stopped in the colony. They found the hall about half full of colonists, some of the younger ones tossing a ball around, others deep in discussion at tables along the walls, and still others eating. Sean, Alex, and Jenny joined this last group.

  Alex made a face as he checked the menu. “Great. Tuna salad or vegetarian today. Yuck.”

  “One day we’ll be eating only food we produce ourselves,” Jenny said. “Right now about half is reconstituted stuff from Earth. Think of it as survival rations.”

  “I’d give a lot for a pizza,” complained Alex.

  “Hi, guys.” Mickey Goldberg breezed over and pulled up a seat at their table. “What are you three up to?”

  Sean told him about their brief stroll out in the open. Mickey chuckled. “You know why we have those unheated suits? It’s to keep us from roaming around too far from safety. Hey, Jenny, tell them about the time you nearly froze!”

  Jenny’s face turned red. “I didn’t nearly freeze. I just stayed out too long.”

  “Uh-huh,” Mickey said in a teasing voice. “Just long enough for the emergency sensor to sound. Simak had to send out a rescue party to bring you back in.”

  “I walked back in on my own, didn’t I?” demanded Jenny. “I didn’t even have frostbite.”

  Mickey laughed. “Well, Sean, just wait until they want you to do some work. Then you’ll get one of the fancy blue suits. They’re heated, and have auxiliary boosters built in, so you can lift half a ton. You feel like some kind of cartoon hero in one of those things. Hey, have you been assigned a specialty yet?”

  Sean looked down at his plate of half-eaten tuna salad. “Not yet.”

  “Give him time,” Jenny said. “He just got here.”

  Mickey shrugged. “Okay, okay. I just thought he might have decided to be a survival specialist or something. I mean, he’s famous for having survived back on Earth, right?”

  “Let him alone, Mickey,” Alex said. “Sean will be fine.”

  “Everyone’s touchy today,” Mickey said, getting up. “Okay, I’m going. See you guys around.” Mickey bounced away, looking like a kangaroo.

  A moment later, Ellman’s voice lashed out: “Goldberg! Walk properly when you’re not in a gymnasium.”

  “Good,” Sean said. “He had it coming.”

  “Don’t let him get to you,” Jenny said. “He’s too energetic for his own good, and sometimes his mouth is a few steps ahead of his brain, you know?”

  After a few moments of silence, Alex asked, “So what was it like, back on Earth, when you were running with the gang?”

  Sean shrugged. “I did what I had to do to live, that’s all. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Alex leaned back in his chair. “I was just curious—”

  Sean jumped up. “I don’t want to talk about it, okay?” He snatched up his tray, but he had momentarily forgotten the low gravity. The tray catapulted the remains of his tuna salad, and it flew over his head. A second later, a hand clamped on his shoulder, and he turned to face a scarlet-faced Dr. Ellman. A blotch of tuna salad spattered the front of his tunic. “We do not have food fights in Marsport, Doe,” he growled. “No matter how barbaric your upbringing was, you will have some manners here. Confined to quarters until Monday!”

  Sean didn’t even try to apologize. He slunk off to his room, feeling more out of place than ever.

  3.3

  Sean wasn’t really bothered that his room was tiny, but he was aware of how impersonal it looked. The others had been here longer and their rooms seemed more lived-in. Alex had models of airplanes and spacecraft hanging from his ceiling, and posters of pilots and zooming ships on his walls. Roger had papered his walls with photos of his parents and holographic posters of ancient sites on Earth—the Pyramids of Egypt, the great stone heads of Easter Island, and a dozen others.

  Sean spent the weekend in his bare room or the common area, glumly reviewing his academic assignments and watching an old movie or two on his console. Once he caught part of a news broadcast from Earth, a tightly beamed narrowcast sent directly to Mars. There was nothing very encouraging: Leveler riots in Australia and South America, a serious crop failure in Central Asia, border wars in half a dozen places. It should have made Sean glad to be on Mars, but in his current mood, nothing could have done that.

  Monday brought release from his captivity, but not from his sour mood. One thing he had noticed from the beginning: People were eager to talk to him. Marsport got very little news directly from Earth, and new arrivals could expect to be pumped for the latest information. Sean told them what he could. Earth was suffering from ecological disasters, war, and riots. Levelers were waging a kind of guerrilla campaign against the richest nations, using sabotage, kidnapping, and even murder to present their list of demands.

  Dr. Ellman stopped Sean in a corridor one afternoon and said, “A word to the wise, Doe. You have your own opinions about conditions on Earth. Those are colored by your, ah, peculiar history.” The heavyset man made a face, as if Sean’s history were Sean’s own fault. “Thats no reason to go around upsetting everyone with your tales of how civilization is about to collapse.”

  Sean’s anger boiled up in him. “They asked me!” he said. “And things are getting worse. Unless—”

  “I don’t want to hear it,” Ellman said. “If you’re a disruptive element in the colony, Doe, you can be sent back to Earth when the transport leaves. It’s your choice.” Ellman turned and stalked away.

  That week other distractions arrived. The Argosy was still in orbit, and the landers began to ferry supplies from Earth down to the surface. That meant a slightly varied choice of foods, and the colonists perked up at the prospect of changing what had become a monotonous diet.

  But classes were hard as ever. Sean struggled, strained, and became quieter and quieter. And he felt more inadequate than he ever had before in his life.

  Not even Jenny’s friendship could lift his mood. She was smart—no, she was brilliant. Sean was in aw
e of how fast she picked up everything. The toughest equation was as simple as the alphabet to her, and she seemed to have a photographic memory for names, dates, and places. Once or twice she complained that the educational programs were wrong or misleading, and when Tim Mpondo, who was supervising the education of the Asimov Project kids, challenged her, she was able to produce research that proved her point. Ellman, Sean thought, would have exploded over something like that, but Mpondo just said, “Interesting. Well, I’ll reprogram the questions, then. Good work, Laslo.”

  His own studies were a steady grind. Sean liked reading, and he did well enough in writing and literature, but the math was extremely difficult and the science all but impossible. Time after time he caused explosions in his chemistry lab. Fortunately, it was a virtual lab, computer-generated, so he didn’t actually cause any damage, but it was discouraging to hear Mickey Goldberg sing out, “Heads down, everybody—Doe’s got his hands on a test tube again!”

  And Mickey seemed to have made it his mission in life to pester Sean about his specialty. He asked the same question about four or five times a week: “What are you going to settle in and actually do, Sean? Haven’t they placed you yet?” Sometimes he had suggestions: “You could go in for demolition. You have a real talent at blowing things up!” Or: “You know, if you went outside at night and stuck your arms straight out, you’d freeze solid. You might make a good coat rack.”

  Sean, who had fought off boys older and tougher than Mickey back on Earth, held back his temper and merely simmered. He still could not explain it, and he supposed it might have just been stress, but increasingly Sean had the feeling that matters back on Earth were becoming more serious. Whatever happened, he did not want to be bundled back aboard the Argosy when it departed for Earth in three months.

  He had the sick feeling it might be flying back for Doomsday.