Free Missing! by Brad Strickland, THOMAS E. FULLER Page A

blue with a high, thin overcast of ice clouds, and the distant sun looked feeble and dim.
    They all broke down their tents, repacked them in the side carriers of the Marscat, and climbed aboard for another jouncing, teeth-clacking ride. Henried explained that they wouldn’t be able to reach the next unit by nightfall, so they would make camp a few hours away from it. “If it had been a little warmer, I would have said we should make a dash and get to the next unit at about 2100, but there’s no sense freezing our feet. There’s a small impact crater not too far ahead. I think we should camp in the lee of that. The wind’s been kicking up a bit.”
    Jenny had noticed that the day had turned breezy. Snakes of dust whipped across their path, squirmingand slithering as if they were in a hurry to get somewhere. She looked off to her right, shading her eyes. To the north, the sky was smudged with high-blown dust, but it didn’t look particularly threatening. Anyway, she thought, Marsport or the advance base would give them a call if a storm were developing. Nothing to worry about.
    Alex sat beside her. “So, how do you like this?” he asked.
    â€œBetter than hanging around in the hootch waiting for the engineers to finish rebuilding the extraction unit,” Jenny said with a smile. “I don’t mind working—it’s not having anything to do that drives me zappy.”
    â€œI’m trying to talk Glen into letting me take the copilot’s seat when we fly back to Marsport,” Alex said. He gripped an imaginary control stick. “Technically, I’m a year too young, but I’ve got more time in simulators than any other pilot in Marsport.”
    Jenny chuckled. Alex’s ambition was to become the best pilot on Mars, and he devoted hours to training. Well, that was understandable. Jenny hadalways loved animals, and she had decided to become an adaptive agriculturist, finding ways to allow Earth farm animals to function and reproduce in the strange, low-gravity environment of Mars. She put in long hours herself—and she reflected that if anyone had told her three or four years ago that she would almost weep with joy at witnessing the triumphant flight of a chicken, she would have laughed out loud.
    Dr. Henried wasn’t a very chatty driver, but now and then he pointed out the sights along the way. There weren’t many. One part of the plain was pretty much like any other part. At one point they could glimpse the pale bulk of one of the volcanoes far off to the north, almost hidden in the atmospheric haze of distance. They briefly halted near another feature, a tiny impact crater barely five meters across that had been blasted out only ten years before. “Imagine a little space pebble this big,” Dr. Henried said, indicating a body a few inches across. “She comes whistling in from somewhere out toward Jupiter, almost vertically. Boom! She hits and vaporizes in an explosion thatblasts out a hole like this. Lucky for us one hasn’t smashed into Marsport, eh?”
    Alex and Jenny exchanged a glance, and Alex gave her a wry smile. It was just one more way that Mars could kill you. There were so many, Alex’s smile seemed to say, that one more didn’t make much difference. Still, Jenny resisted an urge to look upward, as if something big and deadly might be hurtling their way at that very instant.
    They arrived at a much larger impact crater not long before sundown. This one was far older, and it had been made by a far larger meteorite. The crater was more than ten kilometers in diameter, and they were heading for its southern side. The blast had thrust up a crater rim that looked like a curving range of hills forty meters high. Once they might have been jagged, but centuries of wind had ground them down into rolling, rounded shapes.
    The wind was steady from the north, so they planned to camp on the sheltered south side of the crater.