Free Missing! by Brad Strickland, THOMAS E. FULLER

the first two, then Tent Two the next two, and Tent Three the last. Each tent decide who’ll take the first watch, and that person will sleep with the radio next to his or her ear.”
    They turned in at once. Jenny dropped immediately into a deep sleep, without any dreams that she would be able to remember. It seemed she had barely closed her eyes when Salma shook her awake. “Wha?” she muttered.
    â€œIt’s almost daylight,” Salma said. “Your watch. Tonight we’ll be waking up in the middle of the night, so get used to it!”
    It was cold in the tent. Jenny huddled close to the heater, yawning and stretching her arms. The radio remained obstinately silent. She began to think this excursion was going to be about as dull as the last few days at the extraction station had been.
    Breakfast was the same dreary affair as dinner. Jenny munched something that was supposed to remind her of oatmeal with peaches, but it tasted more like someone’s old sneaker soaked in peach juice. Everyone took a bathroom break—the tents had chemical toilets, and Jenny had long since gotten over her initial shyness. Modesty was not something you could easily practice in Marsport.
    They all suited up and left the tents one at a time. Each time they did, the airlock gave a little puff and a small explosion of vapor shot out—this early in themorning, it froze immediately into glittering crystals. Joe Weston, a pipeline technologist, was last out of Tent Two—a tight squeeze for him. He wasn’t fat, but he was the most hammered-down man in the colony—barely five feet four and built like a solid linebacker. Weston was a quiet man, and Jenny had never really gotten to know him. He was always concentrating on some engineering problem.
    The sun wasn’t high enough yet to provide much warmth. The rusty-red landscape of Mars stretched away into the distance, a rocky surface dusted with fine sand, studded with small rocks and, here and there, a few boulders. Most of these had been blasted out of the crust eons ago by incoming meteorites. A few were ejecta, magma that had been hurled high into the atmosphere from the three Tharsis volcanoes to the north, solidifying and crashing back to Mars again as solid stone. Some of the magma, scientists now knew, had been blasted into outer space during the fiercest eruptions, and a very few meteorites on Earth were actually Mars rocks.
    In the early morning the rocks all sent long shadowsstreaming across the surface. In the shelter of some of the largest rocks, Jenny could see a fine spiky white frost thrusting out of the dust. It wouldn’t have been there a hundred years earlier. Humans were changing the face of Mars, and one of the most vital ways was by making the air denser and, eventually, breathable. Water could exist at the surface now only as ice or vapor, but in time, there would be liquid water on Mars—and eventually, even rain.
    â€œLet’s get to work,” Dr. Henried said. “Not much scenery to admire here anyway.” Jenny blushed and went to help unpack the tool kit.
    The heating/impeller station was compact, not quite as large as one of the tents. Months earlier, an advance construction team had dug down into the surface and had set it up, back when the pipeline was supposed to head for the South Pole instead of the rift valley. The prep team tested the unit, switched on its power systems, and made sure the connections were reasonably free of dust and grit. They had to align the microwave dish. This particular unit received most of its power from a direct satellitefeed. Its batteries were just meant to provide a buffer against power failure.
    By the time the team had finished, the sun had risen almost to the zenith, and the temperature had shot all the way up to a few degrees below freezing. The frost behind the rocks had long since faded away, subliming directly to water vapor without melting first. The sky was milky