Marooned! (3 page)

Amanda looked satisfied. “I appreciate that attitude. Confinement to your dormitory wing for the remainder of the day and night. And tomorrow you will attend the orientation sessions. Is that clear?”

“Yes.”

“You’re dismissed.”

It wasn’t quite so simple.
Marsport seemed vast and confusing, and finally Amanda walked with Sean to the same intersection where Jenny had turned away. “Your dormitory section is to the right,” Amanda said. “Your room is A4-5. That’s Asimov section, fourth group, fifth room. Clear?”

Sean glanced at her. “A green-coded door,” he said.

Amanda gave him an odd look. “Yes, it is. All the dormitories are green-coded. Anyway, your luggage should be there already. Better hurry, or you’ll miss your dinner.”

Sean made his way down another corridor. He could hear voices from ahead. He opened the heavy green-banded door and stepped into an open area ten feet across and thirty feet long. Four teenagers sat at a table, eating and talking. They fell silent when he stepped in. One of them rose and gave him a brilliant smile. “Sean Doe, I’ll bet! Your travel case showed up half an hour ago. We’ve already gone through it.” He grinned. “Just kidding. But we’re supposed to expect a Sean Doe, and you must be him.”

Sean nodded, uneasy to be meeting these new people.

The boy who had spoken was African, perhaps one year younger than Sean. He was slim, a little shorter than Sean, and quick in his movements. “Grab some chow and sit down! I’ll introduce your
cellmates! I’ll start with me, since I’m the leader.”

The others jeered him good-naturedly. “Okay, okay,” he said, still smiling as he sat down again. “I am only a legend in my own mind. I’m Alex Benford, and one day I’m going to be the hottest pilot on Mars.”

“Uh, glad to meet you,” Sean said. “But where’s the food?”

“New man! New man!” said an Asian youth. He jumped up. “Come this way, Sean, and I’ll show you. And don’t let Alex fool you. I’m the oldest, so I’m the leader of this crew. My name’s Patrick Nakoma, I’m eighteen—the old man of the Asimov Project, thank you very much—and I’m in zoology. That means I help take care of the animals we’re trying to adapt to Mars. Here we go, this is the mess module.”

Sean realized that this area was almost exactly like the Administration dome—a large central space with rooms opening off it—and followed Patrick into a hexagonal room. “Here you go,” Patrick said,
opening a panel in the wall and pulling out a tray. “This is the food. Pop it in here.” He slid the tray into another panel and in ten seconds it popped back out again. “Now it’s cooked. Utensils are here.” He opened still another panel and produced a knife, fork, and spoon. “Glasses are here, and this dispenses your drink. Today it’s synthetic chocolate milk, water, or lemonade.”

Sean chose the chocolate milk and took his tray back to the table. Patrick showed him how the lid lifted off and folded under. The meal was chicken, vegetables, and a roll. Sean’s mouth began to water at the aroma, and he dug in as Alex continued. “Before I was rudely interrupted by Mr. Nakoma there—aren’t you retiring next year, old man?—I was about to introduce your other two dorm mates. On your left is the youngest human being on the entire planet, Master Roger Smith.”

“I’m thirteen,” objected Roger, his accent revealing him to be British. He had untidy brown hair—long
for a colonist—a snub nose, and a pale complexion. “That means I’m only a year younger than Alex, so pay no attention to him. I’m pre-engineering.”

“Watch out for Roger,” Alex warned as Sean wolfed down his food. “He’s got a warped sense of humor. And last and certainly least, on your right is Mr. Michael Goldberg, another old codger. What are you, Mickey, seventy-one?”

“Seventeen,” Mickey corrected. He had a plump face, curly dark hair, and—most unusually—round rimless glasses. “Hydraulics specialist. And before you ask, I can’t have corrective surgery and I hate contact lenses, so I wear specs. What’s your specialty, Sean?”

Sean gulped some synthetic chocolate milk, which tasted almost completely unlike real chocolate milk. “Don’t have one yet,” he said.

They waited for a moment, and then Alex asked, “How old are you?”

Fifteen and six months,” Sean replied..

“And how many days?” Roger asked with a grin.

“No, I’m just joking with you. Go ahead and eat. You look starved.”

Though he had shown up late, Sean was so hungry that he finished his dinner along with the others. They showed him how to return the tray to yet another compartment for washing, then explained the layout.

“Bathroom and shower are in the module to the right of the mess module,” Alex said. “Computer library and rec module is the one to the left. Then our rooms, which I’m sure you’re going to love just as much as we do. Patrick’s in number one, because he showed up first. Then Mickey in two, me in three, and Roger in four. Yours is five, right over there. And the last one, in case you’re interested, is the laundry. We do our own. Oh, what we sacrifice to be a part of the Asimov Project!”

The room wasn’t very impressive,
Sean had to admit. It was hexagonal, like all the others, and was perhaps eight feet in diameter. The desk, with its own small computer, was beside the door. The chair folded out from the wall. Storage shelves occupied three of the other five walls. One wall was actually a closet door—he unpacked his clothes and hung them there—and the last one folded down to become a bed.

The others were playing some complex computer game in the common room and invited him to join them, but he begged off, explaining that he was tired. “Anyway, I’d better go to my room,” he finished. “I’m sort of confined to quarters.”

“Why?” Roger asked, sounding surprised.

Sean explained the trouble he had landed in. The others looked at each other, shaking their heads. “Man, you got off on the wrong foot,” Alex
said sympathetically. “Ellman’s a real pain. You have to watch out for him, or you’ll be on the first shuttle back to TF.”

“TF?” Sean asked.

“Terra firma,” Mickey explained. “Otherwise known as Earth. Ellman’s a stickler for rules.”

“Most of which he makes up on the spot,” Patrick put in. “That’s just to keep us on our toes.”

“I’m terrified of him,” Roger said.

Sean stared at the younger boy. “Really?”

“Well,” Roger said with a grin, “at least I’m always sure to leave no clues when I pull something on him. Seriously, though, Ellman hates the Asimov Project. I think he’s secretly a Leveler.”

“I hate Levelers,” Sean said.

“I think they’re a bunch of nuts who just think they’re important,” Mickey added with a shrug.

“Besides,” Roger said with a grin, “what did they ever do to you?”

“They killed my parents,” Sean said evenly. “I was born in Aberlin.”

Roger gaped at him. “No way!”

“I was.”

Alex was no longer smiling. “I guess I wasn’t paying attention. What’s Aberlin?”

Roger began, “It was this town in—” He looked at Sean. “Sorry.”

“Go ahead,” Sean told him. “It’s in the past now.”

In a lower voice, Roger said, “Aberlin was a small town in Scotland. It had about the same number of people in it as Marsport, I think. Anyway, the Levelers hit it with a biobomb about ten, eleven years ago. They were calling for everyone not of British descent to leave the islands. Load of rubbish, but they said that if they didn’t get their way, they’d destroy one town a month. Almost everyone in Aberlin died of a modified form of plague. Sean was one of the few survivors. You were raised in the States, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Which explains why you don’t sound Scottish.
But they caught that ring of terrorists. They’re all in prison now.”

“Yeah,” Sean said bitterly. “And my parents are still dead.”

Patrick put a hand on Sean’s shoulder. “This is a new world,” he said. “A new beginning.”

Sean turned in a few minutes later.
With his door closed, he couldn’t even hear the others. He knew they’d be talking about him, though—the only Asimov Project kid to come in on this flight, and the last one scheduled to come to Mars. They might even be feeling sorry for him.

The bed felt strange at first. During the whole flight out from Earth, for many months, Sean had slept in a pressure web, a zero-gravity sleeping bag made up of elastic tubing that alternately inflated
and deflated, the kneading massage keeping his muscles toned and his circulation healthy.

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.

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.

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.