LITMIR.BIZ

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hab. If there’s a safe place, I can’t find it. I left an evacuation ball in the main entry. Let’s go.”

      * * * *

      Sekou didn’t like the evacuation ball. “Mama, please, it hurts.”

      “How can the evacuation ball hurt?” She tried not to grit her teeth as she wadded the limp, slick surface around him and tried to force his legs to bend so she could seal it.

      “It hurts my stomach when I have to put my knees up like that.”

      “It will just have to hurt, then!” She tried to pry his left shoe off, then decided he might need shoes—wherever they ended up.

      Marcus intervened. “Take a big breath, my man. Big breath. Hold it. Let it out slow. Now, pull your legs into the ball. See?”

      Sekou, half enveloped by the flaccid translucent thing so like an egg, nodded through tears. His puckered little face, trying so hard to be brave, stabbed Zora’s heart. It occurred to her for the hundredth time that Marcus was just better with children than she was. Marcus winked at Sekou as he pressed the airtight closure shut.

      The transparent ball, designed for animal use, had two handles so Zora and Marcus carried it between them. If only one person were there to carry, it would have been rolled, not a pleasant process for the person inside.

      “Go ahead,” Marcus murmured. “I’ll do the minimum shutdown.”

      “Marcus, I can do it. Sekou wants you.”

      “Sekou wants both of us. Go, girl. I can do it faster and we’ll all be safer.”

      * * * *

      The rover was ready to go, its own nuke always putting out power. She bundled Sekou inside it and fumbled to embrace him through the pliable walls of the ball, finally settling on a clumsy pat on the top of his head.

      “Where to go?” Marcus asked.

      “I don’t know, I don’t know. The Centime’s pharm is within range, but are they at their winter place?” Zora was shaking from the shock of being jerked out of her comfortable hab and, worst of all, seeing her little boy in fear and pain and danger. She fingertipped their code and got back cold silence, then the Gone Fishing message.

      “Strike out for Borealopolis.”

      “We need somebody to sponsor us there. Even if we have enough credit to buy consumables, we need somebody to vouch for us.”

      “Call Hesperson.” Hesperson sold them small electronics and solar cell tech.

      They did so, and explained the radioactivity problem. The image on the screen was wary. Hesperson sighed. “I wish I could tell you what to do. There’s a big decontamination mission near Equatorial City—”

      “Our rover would take twenty days to get there! And we would run out of consumables first.”

      “Let me get back to you on this.” And Hesperson was gone.

      “The Centimes,” Zora said. This couldn’t be happening. Couldn’t. It was a crazy nightmare, and soon she’d wake up. “We’ll contact the Centimes at their summer habitat and ask them to let us use their Pharm. They can send us codes to unlock it.”

      Krona Centime’s face, on the monitor, looked distracted and her hair was sticking up as if she hadn’t combed it in several days. Maybe something had happened during the Centime’s trip to the southern hemisphere to derange her mind. “Yes! Yes, of course. No, wait, I ought to ask Escudo.” Without waiting for an answer, she logged off.

      Marcus was staring at a life-support monitor. Some of the rover’s functions ran much better when the sun was in the sky, and it wasn’t up very much in Winter-March. Zora pressed his hand, a gesture he could barely appreciate through the thickness of their gloves.

      Sekou’s voice cut through the silence like a tiny flute. “Those people have a little girl. Could I play with her?”

      Zora had forgotten that Sekou had a com with him when she’d scooped him up to evacuate the hab. Now she was glad—it might come in very handy. Especially if they were to become homeless, landless people in a Martian city where they would be forced to scrape or beg for the very oxygen they breathed.

      “She won’t be there,” said Marcus, and patted his head through the thick membrane. “But I’ll ask if you can play with some of her toys.” The Centimes were known as spendthrifts and were rumored a vast store of luxury items and gadgets. Zora hoped they were also generous.

      Escudo Centime’s dark, strong-jawed face appeared in Zora’s monitor. “Help yourself. I sent a command to the entry airlock to let you in. It should recognize your biometrics.”

      And so, in the cramped rover, confined to their environment suits with Sekou in his rescue bubble, they set off.

      * * * *

      Centime Pharm was almost invisible, most of it underground, its sharp angles softened by sand settled out of the tenuous atmosphere.

      “That’s it, thank heaven,” said Zora.

      Marcus said nothing, just drove the rover toward the hab entrance. Zora could read nothing of his expression through his helmet.

      Sekou’s voice broke the silence. “When can we go home? I want my Croodelly.”

      The Croodelly was a piece of worn-out shirt Zora had fashioned into a stuffed animal of indeterminate species. She wished once more that they had had time to pack.

      More time? They had none at all. She was totting up in her head the costs of decontaminating the hab and discarding everything damaged within. Their experiments would have to go; the radiation would start mutations and blight even the most vigorous plants and bacteria.

      Marcus, reading her mind, said, “Rehabilitation may be possible.”

      “If it isn’t done properly, we’d be in danger. In the end, we’d shorten our lives and our science would be suspect.”

      “Or it may be impossible. We can’t know now. Here’s the airlock. Get ready.”

      Zora waited for Marcus to approach Centime Pharm’s outer airlock. It was silly to be afraid of an empty hab, but she thought, irrationally, of creatures, runaways, ghosts, inside.

      Marcus opened the rover hatch and slid out. He plodded a few paces from the rover, then turned and looked back, his suit dusty under the low autumn sun. He couldn’t have seen her face through her faceplate, but he stood stock still and looked at the two of them, his wife and his son, standing out in the Martian dessert. His voice came through the com. “What are you afraid of, Zora?”

      “You feel it, too, don’t you? I keep thinking there are things on Mars—no, people on Mars—who don’t like us. It’s so cold out there, and that hab—it seems haunted.”

      Marcus turned back to the hab and plodded on.

      Zora said, “I know it’s irrational, but the darkness—we’re so far from New Jersey, aren’t we?”

      Marcus spoke softly, still marching toward the dark hab entrance. “This was a decision we made. Can’t unmake it. But for your sake, if I could, I’d change.”

      “No, love. We’re here. We wanted this, both of us. However it turns out, we’ll play it as it lays.”

      But Sekou, she thought. Sekou is the innocent passenger.

      “Mama,” he said. His voice sounded near, even though a thick plastic membrane separated him from her.

      “Hush,” she said. “Papa’s trying to get us a place to stay.” Sekou couldn’t see the readouts. They had enough consumables in the rover to get back to their own hab, but what good did that do? If they went back, they’d fry.

      Because she was watching the rover readouts, she didn’t notice at first that Marcus had turned and sprinted back toward the rover.

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