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

stop, then another, and the first rover turned to make its way back to the first windmill to wait for that team. More stops, until the six people in Sean’s transport began to climb out two at a time.
    And at last only he and Alex were left. The transport rumbled to a halt. The windmill towered up and up, its vanes twisted and bent. They had drawn one of the really bad ones.
    “Okay,” Alex said, getting up. “All we have to dois take off the vanes, lower them down, and then climb down ourselves. Piece of cake, right?”
    “Sure,” Sean said, trying to sound more confident than he felt.
    But as he looked at the ladder that led up into the Martian sky for more than the length of a football field, he felt a pang of doubt.
    What if Jenny was right?

CHAPTER 5
5.1
    You climbed until your arms ached, and then you hung there in the open, resting, unable to wipe away the sweat that stung your eyes. Ahead of you, a long way off, were the fantastic cliffs at the foot of Olympus Mons, so high that you couldn’t see over them to the vast bulk of the mountain. On either side of you the foothills rolled away to an abrupt horizon. The blue sky was etched with high, thin clouds, like frost on a windowpane back on Earth. But you weren’t here to admire the landscape, so you forced your aching arms and legs to drag you higher, step by step, up the endless ladder.
    Sean clenched his teeth, trying not to think about how far he’d come, how much of a drop laybeneath him already. He didn’t look down, but up.
    And yet the windmill nacelle didn’t seem to come any closer. Sean told himself that the climb wasn’t as hard as it looked. After all, he didn’t weigh half as much on Mars as he had on Earth. Still, his senses told him that he was already unreasonably high on a rickety structure, and he had the panicky feeling that one wrong step would plunge him to his death.
    Of course, there was the safety line, a tether that snicked into a track in the ladder handrail. A sudden downward pull would make it act like a brake, slowing and stopping any fall. But the line seemed absurdly thin to hold him.
    Sean forced himself to stop thinking and start climbing again—he had paused momentarily—and he looked up. “You keeping up okay?” he asked his partner, his voice strained.
    “Fine,” said Alex with a grunt. Alex was below him on the ladder, doggedly making his way up with a long line coiled at his belt.
    Up and up, and finally the top of the structure didbegin to grow near as the tower became narrower. The last ten feet were the hardest, because by that time the tower seemed so thin and insubstantial. It did nothing to hide the view, or the fact that Sean was now hundreds of feet above the surface. At the top Sean stepped out onto a narrow circular catwalk, held the rail tight with one hand, and used the other hand to unclip his safety line from the rail. He reclipped it into a track just below the nacelle.
    Alex joined him, looked around. “What a view!”
    Sean could feel his heart beating hard. “Let’s get this done.”
    But he could see the view too: The dull morning sun gleamed off Marsport, a spread-out network of metal and glass domes and connecting corridors. The roadway beneath them showed the ruts left by the transports. Swirling across the plain and through Marsport were other tracks: the skittery paths of dust devils, some only a few feet across, a few monstrous ones a kilometer or more.
    Alex was on the other side of the nacelle now.
    “Clipped in?” Sean asked. “Double check.”
    Alex tugged his safety line, and Sean retested his. “Okay, let’s hook up.”
    Alex fastened a small pulley to the support rail just below the nacelle. He threaded line through it, letting the coil fall and leaving a few meters free. The nose cone of the windmill blades unscrewed in a clockwise direction, opposite to most fasteners. The rotor axle had been frozen in place by dust, so Sean had no trouble removing the cone. He dropped