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

adopted.”
    “I don’t understand,” Sean said. “What’s that mean?”
    She wiped her eyes, looked around guiltily, and then said, “You really don’t know? Okay, put it this way: My mother was a criminal. She died in prison when I was five years old. The government takes kids like me and puts them in Skinner orphanages. They experiment on us.”
    Sean felt cold. “Do you mean—”
    Jenny waved a hand. “Not Frankenstein stuff. No medical experiments. Social ones, education, that kind of thing. We can’t transfer out of the orphanage system until we’re eighteen. We’re like … like lab rats or something.”
    “But you got out. You were selected to come to Marsport,” Sean said.
    “Charity case,” she said bitterly. “I qualified so well in science that they put my name in the lottery for the first round of Asimov Project selections, and I won. Now I have to scramble all the time, but I’m not going back to that. I’m not!”
    Sean said, “Look, you’re the smartest kid I know. Maybe not in subjects, but in knowing what it’s allabout. You don’t have to be afraid. They’ll never send you home, not in a million years.”
    “That’s what you think, just because you don’t have anything to worry about,” Jenny said. “Amanda Simak is your adopted mother. You’re safe. You don’t know what it’s like for the rest of us.”
    “You’re wrong about that,” Sean protested. “Look, I’ve felt the same way as you do ever since I got here. I mean, I thought I was the dumbest person on the face of the planet. And you’re wrong about Amanda. If the committee decided to get rid of me—well, they could send me home any time they wanted to. Right now Ellman’s itching to put me aboard the
Argosy,
and I don’t know how Mpondo feels about me. That’s why I’m always so scared of messing up. I just … I never thought that anyone else would be as afraid of being kicked out as I am.”
    “Well, you were wrong.” Jenny smiled weakly.
    Sean reached across the table and patted herhand. She turned her hand over and clasped his. From that moment on Sean knew that, whatever happened, he had at least one friend on Mars he could talk to about anything.

CHAPTER 7
7.1
    Sean’s pilot was Jimmy Carlson, a short, swaggering man with a welcoming grin and a sense of fun and adventure. To his relief—as well as to Mickey’s, he was sure—Sean learned that his partner would be Roger Smith, the youngest of the Asimov Project kids. As they waited for a preflight briefing, Roger congratulated Sean on qualifying for the trip.
    “I heard you got a 4.0,” Sean replied. “That’s impressive.”
    “Well, it was a 3.996, actually, but they rounded up,” Roger said simply. He wasn’t bragging, Sean realized. Roger just loved to be exact about figures. “Is it true that you were a survivor of the Aberlin massacre?” he asked.
    “Yeah,” Sean grunted. “But I don’t remember anything about it. I don’t even remember my parents.”
    “My parents were both doctors who were killed while helping in the Pan-African war,” Roger said. “I was nine at the time.”
    For a few moments they sat in silence, waiting for their pilot in the hangar dome where three airplanes were docked. They looked almost nothing like Earth jets to Sean. The bodies of the planes were sleek and silvery, the engines relatively tiny, and the wings were enormous, as they had to be in the thin atmosphere of Mars.
    “Did you bring your tele helmet?” Roger asked.
    “My what?”
    “Tele helmet,” Roger said, with a surprised glance. But then Roger
always
looked surprised, his eyebrows permanently arched high on his forehead. “You know, the little fold-up hood that transmits whatever you see back to the ship? We’re required to have one.”
    “I don’t have one,” Sean said. “Nobody told me.”
    “Expect they thought you’d find it in the manual,” Roger told him with a shrug.
    “Manual?” Sean asked, suddenly feeling