Marooned! Page 4

  CHAPTER 4

  4.1

  “What about the crop failures?” Jenny asked, her brow furrowed.

  “Lots of them,” Sean replied, huffing. He, Jenny, and eight other kids were taking their turn in the gym. In the low gravity of Mars, it was essential for the colonists to work to maintain their muscle tone, and that meant five hours of hard exercise a week. Sean and Jenny were side by side on treadmills, running with the strange low stride necessary on Mars. She was faster than he was, and she wasn’t even gasping. “Central Asia lost half its rice harvest two years ago—plant viruses left over from the China-Russia war. And some of the rainforest in south Asia is infected.”

  Jenny leaned forward, grasping the safety handles of her treadmill and making it whir even louder. Sean realized she was angry.

  “What about countermeasures? Bioengineering?”

  “Expensive,” Sean gasped. He was used to being grilled about conditions on Earth. Some of the colonists, the old hands, had been on Mars for five years now. Dr. Ellman had been the science and communications officer for the first ten-person crew to erect a habitat on Mars, and others had been on the planet nearly as long. Though they received news reports from home every day, they still burned with curiosity.

  “Stupid, stupid,” Jenny was growling. “How can it be too expensive? If the ecology crashes, there’ll be worldwide disease, starvation—too expensive!” Her treadmill chimed, telling her that she had finished her three-mile run. She began to slow her pace, the treadmill automatically adapting as Jenny cooled down.

  Sean couldn’t answer. His lungs were burning, and sweat poured into his eyes. He’d heard of the runner’s second wind, but he couldn’t seem to find his. He told himself he wouldn’t look at the readout, then gave in and glanced down. The display read 4.7 kilometers—just a little left to do. He clenched his teeth and tried to increase speed. No good. He was running full-tilt already.

  A moment later, thankfully, he heard the chime of his own readout. He’d done his 4.8 kilometers—three miles. Like Jenny, he began to slow until he was shuffling along in a sliding walk. He slowed to a stop, stepped off the treadmill, and reached for a towel.

  Jenny had looped her towel around her neck. She held both ends of it as Sean wiped his face. “I heard that some large animal species have gone extinct,” she said.

  Sean groaned. “Let me get my breath, or I’ll go extinct,” he panted. A few moments later he said, “Elephants are extinct in the wild now. And gorillas. They survive in artificial habitats, though.”

  “What about—”

  “Jenny, please. I’ll tell you everything I know, really. But I’ve got to take a shower!”

  It was, as always, a brief one. Marsport recycled everything, including its water, but even so, 3,212 colonists used a lot of water. Inevitably, some of it escaped. Sean had learned that the easily mined permafrost deposits were just about exhausted. The colony was planning construction on a pipeline to bring water in from the south polar region, but that project was still in the future. At present, colonists had a ration of four showers per week, with a two-and-a-half-minute maximum. That meant you soaped and rinsed fast. It also meant that most colonists kept their hair cut short—shampoos took even more water, and the colony just couldn’t afford it. Lake Ares, the emergency reservoir, might be tapped, true, but Jenny reacted to that suggestion with horror. There were fish in there! It was a biological habitat!

  And it was a last-ditch reservoir, if everything else failed. Sean knew that and understood it, even if he resented the beep that told him he had twenty seconds to rinse off any remaining soap.

  He dried, dressed, and met Jenny in the gym again.

  “Want to get a snack or something?” she asked.

  “Sure,” he agreed. School had ended for the day, and they had nothing in particular to do for a couple of hours. They went to a general mess dome with fifteen small tables and eight or nine other diners. Now that the Argosy had unloaded, they enjoyed a wider selection of meals, including some actual freeze-dried meats. Jenny, who was trying hard to be a vegetarian, had a kind of vegetable stew. Sean chose a hamburger, though it was made with soy protein.

  “How much of the food is from the greenhouses?” he asked as they settled in at one of the tables.

  “More than half,” Jenny said. “In fact, the colony could probably survive just with the greenhouse food. It’d be kind of dull, though. Lots of algae-based protein!”

  Sean made a face. He’d tried algae-based protein. It was faintly green, clumpy, and bland, with a flavor reminiscent of, well, algae. “Yuck.”

  “You can develop a taste for it.” Jenny ate some of her stew. “But I have to admit, it’s great to get freeze-dried veggies from home now and then. We just don’t have the variety yet.”

  Sean munched his burger. It wasn’t great, but he’d eaten worse, like roasted rat and pigeon.

  “I guess the Argosy is about ready to go back to Earth,” he said.

  “Another two months, I think,” Jenny told him. “There are some mineral samples and some seismic readouts the scientists on Earth want to get their hands on. The series won’t be complete until then. They’ll be cutting it close. There aren’t that many times a year when a ship can launch from Martian orbit on a good return trajectory to Earth. They’ll have to take off in about twelve weeks, or else wait another six months.”

  When they had finished eating, they went to an observation dome to look out at the Martian surface. Sean had arrived at the very beginning of spring in this hemisphere. The changes the season brought were extreme. Sandstorms whipped across the surface now, fierce gales filled with fine, gritty dust that sandblasted everything exposed on the surface. The heating—if you could call it that—also raised dust devils. Now that the surface reached a balmy ten degrees Celsius—about fifty Fahrenheit—at noon, the storms regularly rose up.

  They were spectacular, tornadoes of whirling dust towering more than a mile high, leaning, racing across the Martian surface. As Jenny and Sean looked out to the south where there were few buildings, they saw three of the dust devils snaking their way toward the colony. “They’re more dangerous than the sandstorms,” Jenny said. “Lucky they’re small. The winds get to tremendous speeds.”

  The storms dangled and twirled like ropes, vanishing into a clear sky. Unlike Earth tornadoes, they rose from the surface. The three gigantic whirlwinds did an intricate dance, weaving in and out of each other’s paths. Sean winced as one of them swept over a distant dome. “Could they break open an installation?”

  “They haven’t so far,” Jenny said. “I think the domes are safe—they’re engineered to resist high wind velocities. Some of the red-coded connecting tubes are iffy. We’re not supposed to go into them if there are storms in the area. But if a tube cracked, the doors at both ends would seal automatically.”

  “What if someone was inside?”

  “Too bad,” Jenny said.

  Sean shivered.

  4.2

  Two days later Sean learned about the kind of damage a dust devil could do. It happened during his chemistry session, which was overseen by a glowering Dr. Ellman. Sean, Mickey Goldberg, Alex Benford, Patrick Nakoma, and Nickie Mikhailova were all at separate virtual stations, each working on an individual problem, when everything went haywire.

  The three-dimensional display in front of Sean flickered, flared, and faded out. The other students yelped in dismay as they lost their work too. Nickie, who was a computer-science specialist, said, “We lost core power! What happened?”

  Ellman, who had been watching Alex’s virtual titration experiment, snarled, “I don’t know, unless Doe somehow managed to destroy the circuitry. I suppose you’re innocent, Doe?”

  “I didn’t do anything!” Sean protested.

  Ellman looked at him with a sour sneer. “You never do, and that’s one of your problems!” The lights in the lab dimmed suddenly, leaving them in semidarkness. “Go to your quarters. We’ll take up here next s
ession. I trust we will have power again then.”

  But when they headed back to their dormitory wing, Alex, in the lead, found that the yellow-coded door to the connecting tube was sealed and wouldn’t open. “Man, I wonder what’s up. Let’s go up to the observation dome and see.”

  They wound their way up the stairs to the top of the lab dome, where windows looked out over the colony. A noise that Sean had barely been aware of, a sort of grinding, grew as they climbed, and when they got to the top he saw that the whole south side of the dome was being assaulted by dust whipping against the windows, driven by a roaring wind. It lasted for just a few seconds, and then the dust screeched overhead and the storm swept on. “Look at that!” Alex exclaimed.

  Sean pressed his face against a clear window. Dozens of dust devils were writhing through the colony, and in the distance, up in the foothills, more were snaking through the forests of windmills.

  “That’s it,” Mickey said. “The wind generators have shut down.”

  “Some of them are damaged,” Nickie said, shading her eyes with both hands. “They’ll have to be repaired.”

  “I’m volunteering,” Patrick said at once.

  “Not me,” Mickey said flatly. “I don’t want to be caught out in the open when a storm hits.”

  “I’ll go,” Sean said.

  Mickey glanced at him and grinned. “Oh, so you’ve discovered your specialty at last. Going to become a planetary hero, are you?”

  “Stop it, Goldberg,” Nickie said. “Somebody has to go out and clean the contacts, and it might as well be us. We can’t get back to school until the colony has full power. You know our computers are the first things to go when there’s a power shortage.”

  “I could use a week or two off,” Mickey said. “Might be a good idea to let old Sean go out on the repair mission. Think you can foul things up just enough to keep us out of school, Doe?”

  “Shut up,” Sean said irritably. “I don’t care if you don’t want to go outside, but I’m tired of being cooped up. If I can be useful, I’m going, that’s all.”

  Mickey laughed. “That’s the pioneering spirit. Just like you, too. You were in the news a lot back on Earth, right? I’ll bet you miss not having your face on broadcasts every day. Must be pretty dull for you up here on Mars. Hey, I’ve got it. Your specialty can be ‘Celebrity First-Class.’”

  “Mickey,” said Patrick in a warning tone. “Enough.”

  “Okay, okay,” Mickey said. “Just kidding, Sean. You go out there and do your best.”

  When they went downstairs again, they found a repair crew at work. Two men had taken up a section of the flooring in front of the closed tube door, revealing a meter-wide, meter-deep trench lined with pipes and conduits. “Air leak in the tube?” Mickey asked.

  One of the men glanced up as the other slid down into the trench on his back. “No, but the power loss caused the emergency locks to engage. We’ll go in and clear it. Meanwhile, you guys can get back to your quarters by going through town hall and the west greenhouse wing.”

  Sean and the others found their way back to the dorms by the alternate route, a long and winding one that left Sean half lost. Patrick talked with the captain of the repair crew, a woman named Sandy Colmer, and reported that she was delighted to take volunteers. “Come on,” he said. “We’ve got to go to a training session, or she won’t take us.”

  That led them to one of the outlying domes—one crowded with surface transport rovers, spare parts, and what looked like stacks of junk. Patrick called the rovers “Martian limos,” but to Sean they looked like stripped-down Army tanks. Sandy Colmer, a tall, black-haired woman of thirty, assembled her team there.

  Sean counted eighteen people in all, quite a crowd for the area. Alex was easily the youngest, with Sean and Patrick next. The only other student volunteer was Leslie Kristopolis, a botany specialist Sean did not know well. He thought she was about seventeen, a slender girl with short, curly red hair. She saw the others and came over to stand with them. “I haven’t been outside for months,” she said by way of greeting. “I’m about to get cabin fever.”

  Patrick shushed her. At the front of the gathering Sandy was holding up a generator nacelle, the unit at the top of the windmills. “This is the problem,” she was saying. “The dust gets into the bearings around this axle. What we have to do is take each one apart, replace the bearing assembly, and then reattach the vanes. The hard part will be the climbing. The weight isn’t a problem. Now, to detach the bearing assembly, you have to remove these restraining rings and then loosen these six bolts—”

  They watched, and then each of them had to disassemble and reassemble the unit. It took hours, with Sandy criticizing their technique and offering suggestions. “When do we go?” Patrick asked.

  “Not tonight,” Sandy told him. “Too cold and too dark. We’ll start just after sunrise tomorrow. We have about fifty units out of commission. That’s too many for one day, so we’ll work on about ten at a time. Plan for four mornings.”

  “Why not—,” began Sean, but then he stopped short.

  “Why not work all day?” Sandy asked with a grin.

  Sean nodded. “But I already know the answer. We might get caught outside when the dust storms come in the afternoon.”

  “Right,” Sandy said. “And believe me, you don’t want that to happen. It’s dangerous enough out there as it is.”

  4.3

  “You what?!” yelped Jenny.

  “I volunteered to help repair the windmills,” Sean said irritably. “That’s all. I didn’t set fire to Dr. Ellman or anything.”

  “That’s crazy!” Jenny said. “You don’t know anything about electronics.”

  They were sitting in the dimmed-out common area. Patrick Nakoma said, “Relax, Jenny. There’s not that much to know. The dust gets in the bearings, you switch out the bearings. Bring the fouled ones in for cleaning, leave fresh ones in their place. It’s not that hard.”

  “But you have to climb up the towers!” Jenny made an impatient gesture. “They’re a hundred meters high! The vanes are fifty meters long! Anything could happen out there!”

  “We’ll have safety harnesses,” Patrick said. “Really, it’s no big deal. And we’ll watch out for each other. Nothing’s going to go wrong.”

  “What if a storm sweeps up while you’re at the top of one of those towers?” Jenny demanded. “If dust tears your suit, you could die of oxygen starvation or freeze to death! This is crazy.”

  “I want to do it,” Sean said. “Look, I can’t just spend my time here going to lessons and running on treadmills. I’m not contributing anything. Mickey’s right—I’ve got no specialty, I’m dead weight. This isn’t much, but it’s something I can do for the colony. And anyway, I’d rather do this than have Ellman leaning over my shoulder telling me how stupid I am!”

  “But going out when—”

  “You went out and got yourself lost once,” Sean pointed out. “Mickey Goldberg said—”

  Jenny stiffened. “Mickey was wrong. I didn’t get lost. I just lost track of the time, that’s all. And anyway, that was completely different!”

  “I’m going tomorrow,” Sean said. “That’s settled.”

  Jenny got to her feet. “Boys can be so stupid!” She hurried out, her back stiff.

  “And girls are always so reasonable,” Patrick said with a chuckle after she had gone. “Don’t worry, Sean. I won’t say a repair crew isn’t dangerous, but we’ll be looking out for each other. Better get some sleep. We’ll have a hard day tomorrow.”

  4.4

  The blue pressure suit was more confining than it looked. Sean had struggled into it—a three-layered suit, heated, with supplemental oxygen and a full helmet. He flexed his hands inside protective gloves. He had worn them to practice the repairs, but he still wondered how well he would be able to handle the tools when he was perched up on one of the towers. Sandy gave the word and all eighteen of the repair crew clambered into three surface rovers, six to
a vehicle. Sean, Alex, Patrick, and Leslie were all in the last one to rumble out of the dome.

  The shrunken sun was up, low on the horizon, and pale shadows stretched out across the rusty red Martian landscape. The rovers traveled abreast because each one kicked up a cloud of dust from its treads. If they had gone single file, the last two in line would be traveling blind.

  Sean knew they weren’t really going all that fast, but to him it seemed they were racing across the surface, swerving around large boulders and outcrops, then following a rough road that twisted up into the foothills. The towers of the windmills seemed to grow as they approached, larger and larger, tall open-meshed structures of steel and alloy polished to a gleaming finish by the punishing dust. It looked as if every third or fourth windmill was frozen, its vanes not moving at all. A half-dozen or so were already damaged, the vanes bent and twisted by the cruel dust devils.

  Patrick pointed at one of the twisted windmills and said, “We’ll just remove the vanes from those and leave them for the pros to fix.” His voice came crackling into Sean’s helmet, sounding distant and scratchy.

  Sean fiddled with the controls on his suit belt. The heat had been welcome at first, but he had overdone it. Now he was starting to smell his own sweat. He knew he would be in for an uncomfortable six hours if he couldn’t get the suit’s heater adjusted.

  The first rover stopped at the base of one of the windmills, and a two-person team leaped out. Looking back, Sean saw them scrambling up the access ladder looking like spiders swarming up a web. The windmill was nearly a thousand feet tall—over three hundred meters. His stomach lurched. How would he handle a height like that?

  “Patrick,” Leslie said, “will you partner me?”

  “You’ve got it,” Patrick replied. “Alex, you and Sean will be okay with each other, won’t you?”

  “Sure,” Alex said, his voice tense.

  Sean realized he wasn’t the only one on edge