Marsquake! (6 page)

“I don’t think we’d be on his team in that case. Too American.”

“I am. You were born in Britain.”

“Born there, raised in America.”

“He doesn’t like South Americans, either,” Jenny muttered. “What started the fight was his nasty comments to Lisa Lopez, and she’s as nice as they get.”

“Well, at least nobody’s fighting now,” Sean said. It was true. Since the nine prisoners had been freed, they had at least managed to get along with everyone.

“Right,” Jenny said. She snorted. “Wonder whose crazy idea it was to let those troublemakers out of jail early.”

Sean felt his face turning hot. “Uh … well, as long as they don’t fight.”

Jenny shot him a quick glance. “I’m sorry. It was Amanda, wasn’t it? I keep forgetting you’re her adopted son.”

Sean shrugged, wishing he could think of a way to change the subject.

But Jenny did that on her own. She said moodily, “You know, if everyone in Marsport had been brought up the way the Asimov Project kids were, as orphans, I think we’d all get along better. Stick to
your own kind, Rormer says. Huh. Wait until you don’t
have
anyone to stick to, then see how you like it!” She sighed. “Any word yet on who the team leaders will be?”

Sean shook his head. “Haven’t heard. I hope we get Mpondo, though. I’d hate to be stuck with Ellman.”

“That wouldn’t be fair,” Jenny agreed. “Not after we’ve had to put up with him all through exam week.” She still had not forgiven Ellman for the little lecture he had given them about not letting extraneous matters distract them from study. Although, as Sean had pointed out, everyone’s grades had come down some, Jenny felt he was talking directly to her. Not even Nickie Mikhailova’s cheerful remark that her own grades had come down almost exactly one point, from a 3.99 to a 3.0, had helped. Nothing bothered Nickie, whose outlook was an odd mixture of fatalism and optimism. “Did terrible this term, so next term has to be better,” Nickie had said.

But it was no use pointing out to Jenny that her drop in grades was far less than some other students’. She took everything personally.

“I wish we could do more than just take pictures,” Sean muttered.

Jenny sighed. “Not much for an adaptive-biology specialist to do,” she said. “And you don’t even
have
a specialty.”

“Don’t start on that,” Sean said. Mickey still occasionally scolded Sean for not having settled on one course of study. Sean couldn’t help it—he was interested in everything.

People all around them were standing up and moving, and Sean said, “Looks like we’d better get back to the briefing room. Wonder what we’re going to learn about this afternoon? The superiority of the Rormer family and how we should all be like them?”

“Probably,” Jenny said with a grimace.

They went downstairs and back to the briefing room. The other twenty-eight team members came in singly or in groups, and they all found seats. Rormer was in the audience now, waiting with the rest of them.

Then Amanda came in, and Sean’s heart lifted. He hadn’t guessed she would be a team leader, but if she were, he couldn’t ask for a better one.
“Hey,” Jenny said beside him, but he shushed her.

Amanda went to the lectern and then looked around the room. “Team Nine,” she said. “Very good. Well, I have you to address, and then one other, and we’ll be all set. Your group represents thirty out of three hundred explorers. I want you to do your jobs well, but take absolutely no chances. In the three weeks since the major quake, we’ve had only minor tremblors. Dr. Wu is concerned that the fumarole field continues to outgas carbon dioxide—hot carbon dioxide, at that—but we have no indication that anything like an eruption is likely. Still, caution is called for, and I’m sure you will bear that in mind. Each team has been assigned a leader, and it’s my job to introduce yours. I’m sure you all know him already.” She nodded toward the door.

Sean turned and looked back, and then groaned. Beside him Jenny did the same, and then she touched his arm in sympathy and commiseration.

Standing in the doorway, his arms crossed, his scowl as deep as ever, was Dr. Harold Ellman.

“I Kate this, hate
this,
hate
this.” That had become Mickey’s mantra, his endlessly repeated chant.

Alex patted his shoulder. “It’s ice, man. Everybody’s got something that bugs him.”

Mickey sat slumped at one of the tables in the dorm common area. He was staring down at his arms. “Marsport doesn’t bother me. The hangars don’t bother me. When we hid out in the storage areas, I was fine. Why can’t I stand to go in a stupid tunnel?”

Sean said, “Tough break, Mickey, but Alex is right. Hey, nobody blames you. Claustrophobia is hard to fight.”

“Not hard for everyone else,” Mickey said stubbornly. The teams had been training for a month now, and Mickey had washed out the previous day. They had entered one of the storage area’s lava tubes and had gone all the way through the modified part,
through a recently installed airlock, and into the lava tube itself, a tunnel that, in cross-section, was a squashed oval about four meters in diameter from floor to ceiling, six meters side to side. It was big, nearly as big as a subway tunnel. The walls, hardened lava with a high iron component, glistened in the lights, black shading through the reds of oxidized iron, the greens of copper, and a hundred other colors. The way they had cooled made the tunnel walls and floor unexpectedly smooth, like the surface of a marble block.

Mickey had toughed it out for a few hundred paces and then had panicked.

Alex said, “Really, man, nobody blames you.”

Sitting at the table, Mickey flattened his palms and shook his head. “I blame me. Screaming like a coward.” He looked up, his face twisted. “It was like I couldn’t breathe. I mean, my lungs were working, but the air I was getting wasn’t doing me any good. It was too dark, too creepy.”

“It’s ice, Mick,” Sean said, echoing Alex. “Hey, you can fly a ship, you can drive an exploration buggy—and
you’re going to graduate after next term as a hydraulics specialist. That ought to count for something.”

Mickey nodded, took off his glasses, and rubbed his eyes. “My claustrophobia never bothered me that much before,” he muttered. “Not until I was underground and in the dark.” He put his glasses back on, rubbed his nose, and said, “Hey, you guys, I’m gonna be okay. I’m sorry that I can’t go with you, but really, I’ll be fine. Mpondo’s going to let me work communications with the teams, so I’ll be in touch, huh?” He gave them a weak smile.

“Sure,” Sean said. “Hey, let’s go to Town Hall. I’m supposed to meet Jenny and Nickie for lunch.”

“I’m just going to grab something here,” Mickey said. “You go on. Really, I’m fine.”

“Sure?”

“Go, already!” Mickey said. He gave them a lopsided grin. “Just as well. Someone needs to stay back here, just in case you clowns get in trouble.”

“Well depend on you to get us out again,” Alex said. “Later, Mick.”

Mickey waved them off. As they made their way through the corridors, Alex said, “He scared me, man. You should have seen him.”

“What did he do?” Sean asked, lowering his voice.

Alex paused to open one of the heavy doors, a green-coded one—safe—because it was an interior door that had no close access to the surface. “First he kind of stumbled, and then I noticed he was falling back. I dropped back to see if he was having trouble. We were on full oxygen then because the deeper sections of the tubes aren’t pressurized at all—”

“Sure,” Sean said. “Remember, I did the course Monday.”

“Right. Anyway, I dropped back and switched my transmitter to his helmet frequency and asked if he was okay. He just looked at me.” Alex frowned. “His glasses looked all fogged up. I mean, you always get a little condensation on the inside of a helmet faceplate, but Mickey was dripping. And he was, like, gasping for breath. I thought his oxygen mixture was wrong. I said, ‘Let me check your tank.’”

A couple of adults passed them, and Alex fell silent
until they were out of earshot. “Then he stopped and I stopped, and the others went on ahead a little way. Well, his pressure and mix were fine, so I tapped him on the shoulder and said, ‘You’re ice, Mick. Let’s go.’ And then he started to yell.” Alex took a deep breath. “Mickey was screaming, man. ‘I’m dying! I can’t breathe!’ He was struggling and everything. I thought he was really sick, you know. Everyone heard him and turned around to see what was going on. Mick had fallen onto his knees, and he was flailing his arms and all, but it was like he couldn’t move his legs, right? Paralyzed. So we carried him back. The med expert said he’d hyperventilated. Panic reaction.”

Sean shivered. He had sometimes felt weird when practicing in the tunnels too, as if he had been buried alive and forgotten, but had never reacted like that. “It’s cracked for Mick to freak like that. He’s been in rough spots before, and he’s never done it.”

“Never been underground though,” Alex said. “I know he couldn’t help it, but man, it got to me. Even when we had him back inside, had his helmet off, he looked like he was dying, all pale, with his
eyes rolling. You never know what punches a button, I guess.”

“Guess not.”

They didn’t talk about Mickey’s problem after that, and by the end of the week, Mickey himself seemed almost back to normal, making jokes and kidding around. Still, his eyes had a haunted quality behind their spectacles. Nobody in the dorm wing talked much about the expedition.

Sean suspected that they were all a little worried. Mickey was one of the courageous ones, one of the guys who’d charge confidently into any danger, any trouble. Sean couldn’t really imagine Mickey behaving the way Alex said he had, thrashing his arms and screaming that he couldn’t breathe. He was the type who took charge and faced down his worries and fears.

Sean reflected that he had never been deep underground himself. And he couldn’t help wondering,
If it could happen to Mickey, then could it possibly happen to me?

Another Monday morning, early,
and three teams were heading out for the lava-tube complex. They rode in Martian trucks that functioned as surface rovers. There were eight rovers in all, and fifteen team members could just barely squeeze into their trailers. A road, if you could call it that, snaked along through the low hills, bulldozed out by the advance team that had blasted out an opening down into the lava tubes.

The roadway was flat, meaning it didn’t have any boulders in it much larger than a soccer ball. And like everywhere else on the planet, it was dusty. The rover that Sean rode in happened to be third in line. That meant that his view was … dust. Dust hanging in red clouds in the air, dust swirled into miniature tornadoes and whirlpools by the wind of their passing. The people in the lead truck would get to see the early morning landscape, long shadows, white wisps of surface frost, a blue sky streaked with ice clouds, the orange surface, the rocks ranging from black to
bloodred. They could see the distant hump of Olympus, and they could see where they were going on the so-called road. The next rover crew could barely make out the taillights of the first rover. The next one could barely see the lights of that one, and so forth.

It was a problem on a low-gravity world. Dust hung in curtains in the air for ages unless there was a good wind to sweep it away. And this was an unusually calm morning. Very occasionally the dust clouds to the side would thin just enough for Sean to glimpse a hint of the rock-strewn Martian surface, but otherwise, he was as good as blind. Other team members were trying hard to play cards or even chess, with a small magnetic chessboard and miniature chessmen, but on a day like this, Sean had no patience for games.

So he sat in the jouncing trailer, his teeth clacking now and again when they hit an unexpected bump, and fought to keep his balance. Jenny was next to him, and across from them, leaning back, his arms crossed, his flat brown eyes looking at them in what
seemed to be quiet scorn, was Pavel Rormer. His gaze, Sean thought, was even more intimidating than the dark scowl of Dr. Ellman, and that was saying a lot.

The trip seemed to take forever. Fifteen clicks—or fifteen kilometers—wasn’t much of a distance. On Earth, a man in good physical condition could walk that far in about three hours. On the other hand, the rovers didn’t move very fast, and the road was not only rough, but twisty as an addled snake.

At last the rovers slowed, then screeched and lurched to a stop, and the crews spilled out onto the surface. They walked though the cloud of red dust, the Martian surface crunching under their boots, and emerged in the weak sunlight of a winter day. Sean’s helmet receiver crackled: “Team eight, to the left of the shaft, please. Team eight assemble to the left. Team nine, to the right of eight, ten meters from them, please. Nine, assemble ten meters to the right of team eight. Team ten—”

Team nine shuffled into a loose formation, thirty colonists in blue pressure suits. Ellman, the thirty-first among them, wore the standard suit, but his
arms were marked by bright yellow bands, and the back of his helmet was yellow as well, identifying him as the leader. His stocky figure stood impatiently, his finger stabbing as he counted heads. “Thirty,” he said when he had finished. “Okay, everyone in my team, switch receivers to nine, please.”

Sean adjusted his helmet radio receiver. Now the team members could talk to one another or to Ellman, and their transmissions would not spill over to the other teams. That would avoid confusion.

Ellman was explaining procedures, but Sean had heard them all before. He was staring at the entrance to the lava-tube complex. A miniature dome concealed it, but he knew what was inside: The pathfinders had blasted down through regolith to a depth of more than three hundred meters. They had rigged a simple lift that would carry the teams down and back up again. It would comfortably accommodate only six at a time, so the teams were going to go down in five different trips. It would be time consuming.

The first group from team eight had already shuffled into the dome, and a few minutes later, a second group
went in. For the seventh or eighth time, Ellman was droning on about safety procedures. He suddenly shot Sean a question. “If your air supply goes wrong, what’s the signal for help?”