Mars Year One Marooned! by BRAD STRICKLAND & THOMAS E. FULLER

Author:BRAD STRICKLAND & THOMAS E. FULLER
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ALADDIN PAPERBACKS
Published: 2004-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

6.1

To Sean’s relief, in the days that followed Alex never so much as mentioned the accident. It took them another two days to finish the repairs, and then some of it had to be done over again when another dust devil took out six more of the windmills. On the third morning of the repair mission, Sean had doubted that he would be able to make the long, frightening climb again, but once he had gotten started he had found the ascents were actually a little easier. At least his achy muscles were in better shape. And Alex had been right about one thing: Sean did not forget his safety line again.

With full power restored at last, lessons began again. Dr. Ellman leaned hard on them all to make up for lost time in their physical science sessions, and he was quick to threaten Sean with a forced return to Earth if he fell behind.

Fortunately Nickie Mikhailova seemed to take pity on Sean and tutored him in math and chemistry. It wasn’t really her fiel; she was a computer specialist, and she had even built her own personal computer—a tiny voice-activated thing the size of a paperback book—from scratch. Still, she knew a lot about science, and with her drilling him and Jenny Laslo prodding him, Sean began to make some sense of the equations and the strange symbols. He even began to pull off experiments with no virtual explosions, something that he welcomed even if the development seemed to disappoint Mickey Goldberg, who complained more than once that the fireworks display had been postponed again.

Sean fell more and more into the rhythm of life in Marsport. After more than a full month on Mars, he began to sleep better. All the Martian clocks automatically compensated for the difference between an Earth day and a Martian one. Each Martian hour was a little more than a minute and a half longer than an Earth hour, and there were twenty-four hours in a Martian day, just as in an Earth day. Still, for someone newly arrived from Earth, the extra minute and a half added up. It was as if each day went on a little too long. For the first few weeks, newcomers to Mars felt constantly jet-lagged, as if they were out of synch and out of step with everyone else. And they were, because their biological clocks were slow to adjust.

But gradually the human body was able to get used to the new “day,” and finally Sean began to feel like his old self. He was no longer waking up tired, anyway. The sessions in the gym gradually became easier to bear as he built up muscle and endurance. The dreary sameness of the food became more tolerable, and the occasions when fresh, greenhouse-grown vegetables hit the tables were times for celebration. Sean even began to feel at home in the low gravity, no longer reeling and tripping at unexpected moments, but adopting the same kind of loose-limbed walk as the long-time colonists.

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