Marsquake! (2 page)

“I’ll try,” Sean promised.

School was still hard.
Ellman was a demanding teacher, and his temper wasn’t improved when one of his students fell behind or made the smallest error in calculation or in memory. Sean dreaded Tuesdays and Thursdays, when the classes were computers, science, and social studies. He was good at history and psychology, but he really struggled with the math in computer science and physics. Fortunately Jenny Laslo was good in math but bad in history, so they had formed a study team for mutual support.

On Tuesday, after an all but incomprehensible lesson in subatomic physics, Sean took a break with Jenny
and Elizabeth Ling, a dark-haired, dark-eyed Asian girl who was almost exactly Sean’s age. They had turned sixteen within four days of each other.

Elizabeth was pale and serious. Serious? No, she was
solemn
. Sean had almost never seen her laugh, and her smiles were rare enough. Sean had learned that part of her mood sprang from her memories of her father and mother, who had been murdered by a Leveler gang when she was twelve. In Sean’s opinion, the Levelers were terrorists. They were an international movement dedicated to taking away all the advantages held by the industrial nations of the world. Their goal was an Earth with a medieval level of technology and no government at all—chaos, in other words.

The three friends went up to the observation dome atop the education module. A scattering of chairs let little groups of students work together or just sit and chat. Sean, Jenny, and Elizabeth sat near the windows looking north, toward the vast, pale bulk of Olympus Mons, a volcano so enormous that it looked as if the horizon in that direction were unnaturally warped.
On most days the top of the mountain was invisible, lost in the haze of distance. Today it could just be glimpsed, a pale purple dome. The craters at the top could not be seen from the surface, but Sean had seen them from the air and knew that the largest of them could swallow the entire state of New Jersey with room to spare.

He thought idly that he was getting used to Mars. At one time he could not help staring at Olympus in fascination. Now it had become just part of the landscape.

“I needed a break,” Elizabeth said with a long sigh.

“What are you studying today?” he asked her. “Quarks?”

“Antiparticles,” Elizabeth replied.

Sean made a face. “You’re nine chapters ahead of me!” he groaned in mock anguish. “That’s not fair!”

“I work hard,” Elizabeth said firmly. “You could too, if you wanted.”

Jenny, whose blond hair was a strong contrast to Elizabeth’s jet-black mane, looked at her in surprise. “Hey, Liz, Sean
does
work hard.”

“Then why does he always pick on me?” Elizabeth demanded.

Sean blinked. “I’m sorry. I was just joking. I—” He broke off for a moment, then said, “I didn’t think. Your friends were involved in the fight, weren’t they?”

“You Euros always assume Asians are second class,” Elizabeth said bitterly. “Four of my friends are confined to quarters for a month just for defending themselves!”

“But the ones they were fighting with are being punished too,” Jenny pointed out. “Liz, we don’t think you’re second class at all. That’s not true.”

“Ax that,” Sean said with a smile. “You’re the best physics student. I’m a dummy compared to you. And I’ve always tried to be your friend.”

Elizabeth looked down. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I know you don’t hate me. And I know there are no Levelers on Mars, but it’s hard. We work ourselves half to death, we hear these terrible reports from Earth—biological wars, seven nuclear wars, eruptions, superstorms. We can’t go back. Not ever. And how are we going to live on Mars?”

“We’ve done all right so far,” Jenny said.

Elizabeth grimaced. “So far. But no baby has ever been born on Mars. Until we have a stable colony, we can’t let people have children. And if people start having children, we’ll have to grow. How will we do that? We can barely support ourselves as it is! This isn’t a real colony. It’s death row. We have no future here.”

“Maybe we do,” Sean said. “Hey, when I first came here, no one on Earth thought we could get by for more than six months without resupply from Earth. We’ve been on our own now for more than a whole Earth year, and we’re doing better than we expected. Give us time, and we’ll do better yet.”

“I don’t believe that,” Elizabeth said, and she stood up. “I’m going to get an early start on my history lesson.” She went downstairs.

Jenny stirred uncomfortably. “I’ve never seen her that upset.”

“Amanda was right,” Sean told her. “We’ve worn ourselves out over the summer working to hold the colony together physically. That’s not the real danger,
though. We’ve got to hold together as a group, too.”

“How do we do that?”

“I don’t know,” Sean had to confess. “But if we don’t, we’re done for. You and I and the others will have to think of a way.”

“At least we won’t have to work as hard during the fall,” Jenny said. “That’s something.”

That much was true. Sean, for example, had put in long, long hours in the agricultural greenhouses, helping to raise and harvest food. The greenhouses would not close down over the winter. Artificial heat and light would enable the colonists to continue growing some crops, enough to supplement their diets. Still, the effort would not be as intense as during the long spring and summer growing seasons, when the domes had to produce a surplus to get the colony through the months of reduced sunlight and heat.

But wasn’t that the problem? “We’ve built up a lot of tension and energy,” Sean said slowly. “As things slack off, that has to be released. That’s one reason for the quarrels.”

“Maybe,” Jenny agreed. “But what do we do about it?”

“Ask me an easy question,” Sean said.

But Jenny had none to ask.

On Wednesday morning when
Sean woke up and opened his door, he found a package waiting outside. He hauled it in, dropped it onto his bed, and opened it. It was his blue pressure suit and helmet, and he had never in his life been so happy to see anything.

He took it out of the box, noticing that it had been cleaned. He even sniffed it—everyone joked that the suits had such a strong aroma of sweat that they could stand up on their own. But his smelled pristine, as new as the day he had first received it. Sean wished he could don the suit and take a short excursion outside, but it was a school day. He carefully hung the suit in his closet and placed the helmet in its special rack, stepping back to admire it briefly before he
closed the closet door and got ready for the day.

He told his friends the news at breakfast. “Brilliant!” exclaimed Roger Smith, one of the colony’s two youngest inhabitants. “But shouldn’t there have been a ceremony? I mean, they had a court-martial to strip you of your right to wear it!”

The bespectacled Mickey Goldberg elbowed Roger. “It’s ice, Rog. I don’t think Sean wants a fuss made over this, if you scan my meaning.”

Sean grinned. Roger and Mickey had both been in on the rescue effort, and they both had served out terms of confinement to quarters as a result, but he had been the ringleader. That was why his suit had been confiscated. Now he said, “Right, no fuss. Next time we have outside assignments, I’m just going to slip into the suit and go out with everyone else. I’m not going to make a big production out of it.”

After school Sean had to put in a two-hour stint in the greendomes. With the autumn light fading, the artificial lights stayed on longer, but even so, the crop yield would be lower over the coming months. Sean was part of a team assigned to plant, care for, and
harvest soybeans, and he spent his time making sure the slatted water cylinders that supported the plants were operating correctly and that the water evaporating into the air was being recovered by the recycling units. The hydroponic method had been strange at first to Sean, who was not used to seeing plants growing without soil, their dangling roots constantly bathed in a mist of nutrient-bearing water, but now the seedlings looked quite normal to him. He checked the oxygen and carbon dioxide levels as well. The growing plants in the domes absorbed carbon dioxide and gave off oxygen. So far, their output wasn’t enough to keep the colony’s air supply fully oxygenated, but they helped. And one day, if nothing happened to prevent it, the colonists would breathe air produced by growing things, just as people on Earth did.

Late that afternoon Sean finally couldn’t stand it any longer. Roger, Mickey, and Alex were all busy, but he hunted down Jenny and said, “How about going out with me?”

She looked at him without understanding for a
moment, then grinned. “You got your suit back!”

“Yeah,” Sean said. “I’ve got a couple of hours. I want to get outside for a few minutes, anyway. Want to go?”

“Sure,” Jenny said. “Meet you at the northeast airlock in half an hour.”

Sean hurried back to his quarters, donned the suit, and then threaded his way through the corridors to the airlock. He felt a little disappointed that no one seemed to notice that he was wearing the pressure suit for the first time in six months. But he had said he didn’t want a fuss, so he couldn’t complain.

He was in a hurry, and after so many months on Mars, Sean no longer lurched and stumbled because of the low gravity. He had become an accustomed Mars walker, and when he ran, he did so with a strange skiing gait, speeding along without bounding up into the air.

Jenny was waiting for him, her blond hair gleaming in the harsh glare of the corridor lights. “Took you long enough,” she teased.

They put the helmets on, made sure the seal was
tight, and tested their suit radios. Then Jenny opened the hatch of the control panel and fed in the code key to open the lock. The inner door opened, and they stepped through and waited as pumps pulled the air out of the chamber.

The outer door was marked bright red—a warning that it opened directly onto the surface of Mars. When it did open, Sean followed Jenny out, feeling the crunch of the Martian surface under the soles of his boots. The pale sun rode low in the western sky, and long shadows stretched across the reddish orange surface. Jenny pointed a gloved finger.

Looking orange in the fading light, finger-long spears of ice thrust up from shadowed corners. Sean nodded, realized that Jenny couldn’t see the gesture, and said aloud, “It’s getting pretty common.”

“More and more,” Jenny agreed.

At one time Mars had been so dry and the atmosphere so thin that surface ice never appeared in this latitude. But slowly, slowly the colonists were enriching the air and an automated system was shooting ice meteorites into the area around the South Pole. Now
the air was just dense enough so that the ice could form without immediately evaporating to nothing—and the air bore just enough water vapor for that to happen.

To the north Olympus Mons rose in dim, purple majesty, its peak lost in streaked, wispy clouds of ice. Sean took a deep breath. He had missed this. He had missed it more than he had thought.

The suit’s sensors detected the cold, and he felt a warmth creeping over his skin. But being outside, being free, being trusted again—well, the warmth was as much inside him as outside.

Less than a Week
later Sean, Jenny, and Alex were tossing a ball around in the Town Hall dome when a group of adults began to shout in anger. Alex dropped the ball and turned in surprise. “What’s up?”

“Lets see,” Sean responded, taking the lead. He shouldered through the crowd, rising up on his toes to peer ahead. It looked as if five or six people were being held back, their arms pinned behind them, and they were still yelling at one another. Then Sean saw that it was two groups—two people on one side, four on the other. “That’s a lie!” one of the people being held yelled out. It was Chris Wu, a seismologist. He struggled but could not break free of the colonists who were holding him back.

On the other side, a thick-set, gray-haired man named Foster was trying to pull away from the hold that restrained him. “Asians started it!” he shouted,
his face red. “Think you own the world! Ought to lock you—”

“That’s enough!” One of the men holding Foster said, “Get Wu and Shimata out of here. Cool down, everyone!”

“What’s going on?” Sean asked Marie Sessions, a woman he had worked with in the greendomes.

She shook her head. “Argument about the wars on Earth. Foster accused Wu and Shimata of sabotaging the construction program here because they’re loyal to the Asian bloc on Earth.”

“That’s crazy,” Jenny said from behind Sean. “We’re within a few days of being on schedule! It’s the weather and the areology that have slowed us up, not sabotage!”

“Tell Foster that,” Marie said.

Foster and his two friends were being hustled out of the dome to the north, while Wu and Shimata had been taken off to the west. Sean looked around at his friends as the crowd broke up. “This is just great. Marsport can’t afford this.”

Alex looked disgusted. “Ellman says
we’re
too
immature to make it on Mars. You ask me, it’s the so called adults who’re being childish.”

Sean nodded his agreement. He, Alex, and Jenny found a table and sat down. The dome was still packed, but the crowd had begun to talk in little more than whispers, with small groups clustering together, gesturing, pointing. “An animal would have better sense than this,” Sean said. “It takes a human to go out on a limb and then saw the limb off behind him.”

“You know what I think?” Jenny asked. “I think we’re not busy enough. Back during the summer, when we all had to scramble to build up food and water supplies, we didn’t have this stupid quarreling. Now that we’ve got time to think …” She shrugged.

Alex nodded his agreement. “Because when we stop to think, it looks like we can’t make it.”

“But that’s not true,” insisted Sean. “If we can get through one Martian year, we can get through another. And if we can make it through two years, then nothing can keep us from staying here for good.”

Jenny touched his hand. “In six more months,
the
Magellan
will be here from Luna,” she said. “They’ll be bringing things we can’t make on Mars, and some agricultural supplies that will let us diversify our crops. But they could take back more than six hundred of us. I wonder how many will go this time?”