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

continued Dr. Simak, “the twenty Asimov Project colonists will prepare for evacuation. We expect to begin ferrying the returning colonists to the ship in two days. With luck and hard work, we can load all six-hundred-odd passengers by the end of the week, and the
Argosy
will then leave orbit.
    “My fellow colonists, please think very clearly and very seriously about what I have said. Some of us will remain behind, regardless. We will do our best to survive and to become independent of Earth. I think we have at least a fifty-fifty chance of succeeding. It will be hard—I won’t hide that from you. The effort will present you with the greatest challenges you have ever faced. Still, I believe that together we can succeed. I know you all very well. I couldn’t ask for a better group of people to make a stand with. Thank you.”
    The holoscreen faded to nothing. For a moment everyone was silent.
    Then a new voice broke in: “I’m with you. If you’ll have me.”
    Mickey Goldberg stood in the doorway.
    Alex whooped. “Welcome to the Doe crew!” he said. “Now we have to make plans.”
9.2
    “There’s nowhere to hide,” Jenny insisted in despair. “They can sweep the whole compound in less than a day! Where are we supposed to go?”
    “Somewhere they can’t find us,” Sean insisted. “There has to be a place!”
    “The hangars,” Mickey suggested. “Maybe we could climb aboard the planes and they wouldn’t think to check there.”
    “We could steal survival tents and go out onto the surface,” Nickie volunteered. “We can hang out there until the
Argosy
’s launch window is over.”
    “No good,” Alex said morosely. “If we were in thehangars, they could use heat sensors to find us. And survival tents are
designed
to be seen from a distance.”
    “There’s Lake Ares,” Jenny said slowly. “I think if we all were in pressure suits we could survive under the surface for a few hours. Of course, we’d tend to float, so we’d have to be anchored to something.”
    “One thing we can do to begin with,” Sean said, “is to round up all our wrist locators. The first thing they’ll check will be the GPS system. I’ve got an idea about that.”
    Alex and Leslie took all twenty of the wrist devices to the point farthest from the dorm wings, the factory domes where the colonists refined steel from the iron in the Martian rocks. They activated all the locators and left them in the observation room on the top of the most distant factory dome, along with a note that they all had signed:
    To the Marsport Council:
    We have decided to stay on Mars. There isnothing on Earth for any of us. We believe that since the Asimov Project began four years ago, we have proved our value to the colony and our ability to do our part. If any colonists are going to take a stand here, we want to be part of that stand. We don’t want to cause trouble, and we are not rebelling for the sake of rebellion. We ask your acceptance, but with it or without it, we are part of Marsport and will remain here with any colonists who decide to stay.
    Mickey Goldberg had shaken his head as he read the note before signing it. “Not exactly the Declaration of Independence, is it?”
    “It says what we want to say,” Jenny told him. “And what’s more important, we’ve all signed it.”
    Mickey had added his name, and then the note went into hiding with the wrist locators.
    As soon as everyone was together, Sean said, “The room locators are the big problem. We can’t play hide-and-seek when each room has sensorsthat can tell them if people are inside.”
    “Not necessarily,” Jenny said thoughtfully. “There are a couple of corridors that don’t have that kind of detector, because they’re cut back into the surface of the planet. They were the first storage areas when Marsport was started. Now they’re used for emergency supplies—rations, medical stuff, things like that. But we can’t get to them without going through the