Marooned! Read online

  Two kilometers was a little more than one mile, but to Sean it seemed to take forever to walk it. Once he and Jimmy were off the landing strip, the ground underfoot was strewn with rocks, rolling in a series of low hills, and cut with ancient dry water courses. It was hard going with two oxygen tanks under his arms. Ahead of him, Jimmy carried two tanks plus a bulky medical kit. Sean hoped they would make it to the others in time.

  They climbed a fairly high hill and Sean saw the wreckage of the MAR/S-8 ahead. The plane had come down hard and the starboard wing had sheared off. The port wing lay crumpled and half torn from the fuselage. A trail of debris—metal, glass, and plastic—glittered between the ripped-off starboard wing and the rest of the plane. The domed emergency tent was close by the wrecked plane, with a plume of vapor coming from its top vent.

  “Looks like they got the oxygen generator going, anyway,” Jimmy said. “Come on.”

  He called for Mickey over his helmet radio, and after a moment, Mickey responded. “Where are you guys?”

  “We’re with you,” Jimmy said, panting a little. “Is everyone in pressure suits?”

  “Negative,” Mickey said. “The captain’s unconscious, and the copilot has a broken arm.”

  “Okay, we’ll use the airlock. It won’t be perfect, but we’ve brought extra oxygen to make up for a leak. We’ll have to come in one at a time. Seal up the inside door if you haven’t already done it.”

  They reached the tent. Jimmy opened the outer door flap and then sealed it behind him. “I’m in,” Sean heard him say. “Seal shows green. Open the inner door.”

  Sean saw the outer door flap billow, and a few icy plumes of vapor shot out. As Jimmy had said, the seal wasn’t perfect, and the tent had lost a little air. With his feet feeling frozen, Sean waited.

  His helmet transponder came to life: “Sean, this is Jim. Jappa has serious injuries. We have to get her back to Marsport a.s.a.p. Goldberg says the cockpit MW is still operational. Get into the ship and patch your helmet radio into the MW system. Give Sara a call and tell her to taxi the MAR/S-7 off the end of the runway and toward us, slowly. Then I want you to check in the med locker and bring me a body baggie, okay?”

  Sean left the two oxygen containers and hurried toward the ship. He ran—which, given the low gravity, meant that he bounded over the surface like an earthly kangaroo. He reached the crashed aircraft and saw that the airlock door was open. That meant the inside of the ship would have no more air than the surface of Mars.

  He climbed into the cabin and found the floor tilted crazily to the left. He struggled to the pilot’s seat and turned on the MW set.

  Sean made his call, and Sara, in a worried tone, acknowledged. Then Sean crept back down the tilted aisle to the medical locker and opened it. A jumble of equipment fell out. What he wanted was a partly silver and partly clear thick plastic bag with a couple of small tanks attached. The colonists called them body baggies, but actually they were sealed stretchers. Their small auxiliary heaters and oxygen tanks would keep a patient alive on Mars.

  At least for a short time.

  8.2

  The tent huffed out a cloud of fog as Jimmy unsealed the door. Sean was freezing, but there was nothing he could do about that right now. Rial Whitepath, the copilot of the MAR/S-8, crawled out. His face was strained inside the helmet. Jimmy had strapped Rials broken right arm to his chest, and the right arm of his pressure suit bulged and flapped weirdly. Leslie followed, lugging the foot end of the body baggie, and then came Jimmy, holding the head part. Through the transparent plastic, Sean could see Jappa Nannup’s head, bandaged and bruised. She was a small woman, an Aborigine from Australia, and Sean remembered her as always laughing.

  Now she looked dead.

  “Okay,” Jimmy said. “Here’s the drill. The MAR/S-7 can transport Jappa, Rial, and Leslie, but Mickey and Sean will have to stay behind here in the tent. The MAR/S-6 will land in another hour, and they’ll jettison enough stuff to load the two of you. You have enough oxygen to last for a day, even without the generator, so you should be all right. Rial, can you make it?”

  “Yeah,” the copilot said in a weak voice.

  “Goldberg, Doe, into the tent and repressurize. Listen for the MAR/S-6 crew, but don’t expect them for another two hours or so. They’ll have to land and then send someone to escort you.”

  Sean ducked into the tent, and after a moment a strangely reluctant Mickey followed. Jimmy said, “Outer door sealed.”

  Sean sealed the inner tent door and said, “Secure here. We’ll repressurize.”

  Jimmy acknowledged, and then he was gone. Sean checked the oxygen generator. Its shaft had been thrust through a valve in the tent floor, then drilled into the soil surface beneath the tent. It was putting out just enough oxygen to allow him and Mickey to breathe, but it would be nearly an hour before the pressure built up enough to let them remove their helmets.

  “Lets crack one of the tanks,” Sean suggested. “Speed things up a little.”

  He opened the valve on one of the oxygen tanks he had lugged to the crash site. Within seconds the tent was pressurized with a breathable atmosphere, and Sean took off his helmet with a sense of relief. “What happened?” he asked, his voice sounding strange and thin.

  Mickey looked miserable. “We missed a small crater in the runway when we did our preflight check. It must have been filled in with loose dust. The plane hit it, tilted, and we lost part of the starboard wingtip just as we were taking off. Jappa fought for control, but we couldn’t gain altitude, and we had to set down. The ground’s uneven, and we cracked up.”

  “How could you miss a crater?” Sean asked, surprised. That was part of the routine for taking off: You swept the runway with penetrating radar to make sure there were no obstacles in the way.

  “I just missed it, okay?” Mickey snapped.

  Sean realized what Mickey was trying not to say. The older boy had been careless. He’d been the one entrusted with the runway sweep, and he’d fouled up. For a nasty moment, Sean felt delighted. Mickey was always quick to criticize him. Sean could show him what it felt like to be on the receiving end.

  But Sean didn’t say anything. Mickey looked miserable enough on his own. “Is the heater working?” Sean asked. His suit heater was on full and still he felt as if he were about to freeze.

  “Notched up as high as it’ll go,” Mickey said. “At this latitude, we can maintain an air temperature of about twelve for a day or two. Then the batteries give out and we freeze in the dark.”

  On the Aonian Plain they were outside the Antarctic Circle of Mars, and they wouldn’t completely lose the sun. But the day was very short, and the shrunken sun gave off little heat. Sean tried to remember what the outside temperature was. Probably seventy-something below zero. Twelve degrees didn’t sound so bad, after all.

  Mickey didn’t want to talk. Half an hour after Jimmy had left, his voice came through on Sean’s helmet radio. Sean put the helmet back on to talk to the pilot. “We’re okay,” he said. “What’s up?”

  “We’re taxiing back to the runway now,” Jimmy said. “Jappa is stable, as far as we can tell, but still unconscious. We’re going to be heavy, but I think we’ve got enough lift to get into the air before we hit the far end of the runway. MAR/S-6 is on track to land in, let’s see, thirty-four minutes, and they’ll pull you and Mickey out. Hang in there, Sean.”

  “We Will.”

  And then there was nothing to do but wait. Mickey sat huddled and miserable near the center of the tent. Sean couldn’t stay still. With nervous, worried energy, he paced around and around the edge of the tent, which meant that he had to bend forward. From time to time he paused and looked out the small round windows. The one facing south showed him a range of terraced hills, glistening white with carbon dioxide and water frost. They rose one above the other until they faded into the polar darkness.

  What seemed like hours passed, and then they picked up a call from MAR/S-6. “We’ve landed, guys,” the pilot sai
d. “Two of us will come to lead you back. The other two are going to dump everything we don’t need so there’ll be room. Sorry to hear about Jappa.”

  “Well, we’re safe,” Sean said to Mickey.

  “You are,” the older boy said bitterly.

  8.3

  The flight back to Marsport took hours, and it was doubly uncomfortable for Sean and Mickey. The MAR/S-6 had jettisoned a lot of equipment, but it still had only four seats installed, and no one wanted to take time to move two more from the wrecked plane. Mickey and Sean sat on the deck, hanging on to the seats in front of them for takeoff and landing.

  Sean was never as glad to arrive anywhere as he was to step through the airlock and into the hangar back at Marsport. Jenny was there waiting, and she ran forward, relief flooding her face. “You’re all right!” she said to Sean and Mickey. “Thank God!”

  “I’m frozen into a Doe-sicle, but other than that I’m fine,” Sean said. His joints ached with cold, and he felt as if he’d never be warm again. “I hope we got enough data before the crash.”

  “You did fine,” Jenny told him. “The ships have enough readings to show that the mass driver on Ganymede doesn’t need adjusting. Next month some follow-up crews will go out and pick up the equipment you left behind, and they’ll finish any observations that you had to leave incomplete. Come on, let’s get back to the dorms.”

  “How’s Jappa?” Mickey asked, his voice fretful.

  Jenny looked at him, then at Sean. “You haven’t heard? She—she didn’t make it.”

  Mickey froze. He glared at her. “You’re lying!”

  “There was nothing they could do,” Jenny said. “I’m sorry.”

  With a bitter curse, Mickey shoved past them and vanished down a corridor. Sean looked after him. “He thinks it’s his fault.”

  “Was it?” Jenny asked.

  “I don’t know,” Sean told her. “But he thinks it is, and that’s bad enough.”

  “There’s worse,” Jenny said. “We’ve lost contact with Earth. Nothing since yesterday morning,” she said. “Something terrible’s happening there. The Lunatics say they can’t raise Earth, either. Luna Base has been monitoring conditions on Earth, and they know there’s an economic meltdown. You know history?”

  Sean gave her a look.

  Jenny’s smile was miserable. “Course you do, with your grades. Remember the depression in the middle of the Twentieth Century?”

  “Earlier than that,” Sean said. “It started in 1929.”

  “This is a hundred times worse, they say. And there are five or six epidemics going on, and some terrorist activity hitting the power grid, and … it looks bad.”

  They had reached the dorms. No one was in the common area, and Sean and Jenny sat at a table. Sean was frowning. “I felt something like this was coming,” he said. “I didn’t know exactly what—war, plague, collapse—but I could tell something really bad was brewing. What does that mean for us?”

  “The council is talking about evacuating Marsport,” Jenny said. “And the Asimov Project kids will be the first to go.” “No,” Sean said at once. “Not me.”

  “And not me,” Jenny added. “If things on Earth are as bad as you say they are, there’s no point. I’d rather take my chances here. But I know the council has told the Argosy to prepare to take on passengers, and the Magellan is due to launch from Earth orbit any day now. Between the two of them, if they carry no cargo but passengers, they’d be able to ferry a thousand colonists back to Earth. It’ll take three trips, about nine more years, but they could take everyone back eventually.”

  “I’ll leave when Amanda does,” Sean said. “Not before.”

  “Count me in,” Jenny said. “I’ll be part of your crew.”

  “The dumb crew?” Sean asked with a bitter smile.

  She touched his hand. “The Doe crew,” she corrected.

  CHAPTER 9

  9.1

  For one day, Marsport grieved its loss. A brief memorial service for Captain Jappa Nannup was held at noon, and shortly afterward a funeral detail took her body to Marsport Cemetery, where it joined the bodies of a dozen other Mars explorers who had died over the years.

  When Sean told Alex that he and Jenny planned to stay on Mars, Alex immediately joined the Doe Crew, and right after that, Roger came over to add his support. Leslie was next, and then Nickie. Sean tried to see Amanda, but found that she was too busy with official meetings. He could understand that, but he wished he could at least speak with her. All the rest of the day, word spread among the teens, and one by one they came to find him. Before lights out that evening, nineteen of the twenty Asimov Project kids had pledged to remain in Marsport, whatever happened.

  The following day, the council called an assembly at eleven in the morning. It was an odd kind of assembly, since Marsport had no area big enough for all three thousand colonists to congregate. They gathered in all the common areas instead. Sean’s dorm wing common area could barely hold the twenty Asimov Project kids, and nineteen of them gathered there to watch the holoscreen and hear what the council had decided.

  A grim-looking Amanda Simak appeared on the screen, flanked by Tim Mpondo and Harold Ellman. “I won’t conceal the seriousness of the situation from you,” she said without any kind of formal beginning. “Earth is in deep trouble. All indications from the Luna Colony are that an international war has broken out, complicated by economic collapse, widespread disease, and ecological disaster. I frankly don’t know whether there is any safe area on the face of the Earth at this moment.

  “Our state of affairs is not promising. We are still dependent on twice-yearly shipments of food, medical supplies, and other necessities from Earth orbit. We are on the verge of being self-sustaining. Whether we can become so immediately is an open question.”

  She paused, letting this sink in. The young people gathered in the common area murmured among themselves, “Maybe she’s going to say we might as well stay on,” Alex said hopefully. Jenny shushed him.

  With a weary, strained expression, Dr. Simak continued: “The council has decided that it’s unfair to ask colonists to remain here on Mars, given our uncertain future. Tomorrow, beginning at 8:00 hours, the council will begin accepting applications for a return to Earth. These will be granted on a first-come, first-served basis. I have asked the crew of the Argosy to prepare to take as many people back to Earth as they can. When you arrive there, in more than a year’s time, you will be ferried down to the surface if that is practicable. If not, Luna Colony has reached self-sustaining status, and they will accept you as refugees. I am told that, at a maximum, the Argosy can transport slightly more than six hundred passengers. That gives the ship no margin for error on food and supplies. Even at that, rationing will be tight. I want you all to think about the situation for the rest of the day. Ordinary duties are suspended.”

  She glanced at Ellman, who stood beside her, his face rigid, showing no emotion. Then, looking back into the camera, Dr. Simak said, “I should have said that one group of colonists will return to Earth whether they apply to go or not. This one exception will be the twenty young people in the Asimov Project. Dr. Ellman has made a strong case that we have no right to expose these colonists to the uncertainties and risks that the rest of us will have to face for at least one full Martian year, until the Magellan can reach us and take perhaps another thousand colonists home.”

  “Home?” exclaimed Leslie. “This is home!”

  “Therefore,” continued Dr. Simak, “the twenty Asimov Project colonists will prepare for evacuation. We expect to begin ferrying the returning colonists to the ship in two days. With luck and hard work, we can load all six-hundred-odd passengers by the end of the week, and the Argosy will then leave orbit.

  “My fellow colonists, please think very clearly and very seriously about what I have said. Some of us will remain behind, regardless. We will do our best to survive and to become independent of Earth. I think we have at least a fifty-fifty chance of succeeding. I
t will be hard—I won’t hide that from you. The effort will present you with the greatest challenges you have ever faced. Still, I believe that together we can succeed. I know you all very well. I couldn’t ask for a better group of people to make a stand with. Thank you.”

  The holoscreen faded to nothing. For a moment everyone was silent.

  Then a new voice broke in: “I’m with you. If you’ll have me.”

  Mickey Goldberg stood in the doorway.

  Alex whooped. “Welcome to the Doe crew!” he said. “Now we have to make plans.”

  9.2

  “There’s nowhere to hide,” Jenny insisted in despair. “They can sweep the whole compound in less than a day! Where are we supposed to go?”

  “Somewhere they can’t find us,” Sean insisted. “There has to be a place!”

  “The hangars,” Mickey suggested. “Maybe we could climb aboard the planes and they wouldn’t think to check there.”

  “We could steal survival tents and go out onto the surface,” Nickie volunteered. “We can hang out there until the Argosy’s launch window is over.”

  “No good,” Alex said morosely. “If we were in the hangars, they could use heat sensors to find us. And survival tents are designed to be seen from a distance.”

  “There’s Lake Ares,” Jenny said slowly. “I think if we all were in pressure suits we could survive under the surface for a few hours. Of course, we’d tend to float, so we’d have to be anchored to something.”