Marooned! by Brad Strickland, THOMAS E. FULLER Read Free Book Online

I’ll bet you miss not having your face on broadcasts every day. Must be pretty dull for you uphere 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 thecaptain 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 gatheringSandy 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 onesin 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