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“Elephants are extinct in the wild now. And gorillas. They survive in artificial habitats, though.”
    “What about—”
    “Jenny, please. I’ll tell you everything I know, really. But I’ve got to take a shower!”
    It was, as always, a brief one. Marsport recycled everything, including its water, but even so, 3,212 colonists used a lot of water. Inevitably, some of it escaped. Sean had learned that the easily mined permafrost deposits were just about exhausted. The colony was planning construction on a pipeline to bring water in from the south polar region, but that project was still in the future. At present, colonists had a ration of four showers per week, with a two-and-a-half-minute maximum. That meant you soaped and rinsed fast. It also meant that most colonists kept their hair cut short—shampoos took even more water, and the colony just couldn’t afford it. Lake Ares, the emergency reservoir, might be tapped, true, but Jenny reacted to that suggestion with horror. There were
fish
in there! It was a biological
habitat!
    And it was a last-ditch reservoir, if everything else failed. Sean knew that and understood it, even if he resented the beep that told him he had twenty seconds to rinse off any remaining soap.
    He dried, dressed, and met Jenny in the gym again.
    “Want to get a snack or something?” she asked.
    “Sure,” he agreed. School had ended for the day, and they had nothing in particular to do for a couple of hours. They went to a general mess dome with fifteen small tables and eight or nine other diners. Now that the
Argosy
had unloaded, they enjoyed a wider selection of meals, including some actual freeze-dried meats. Jenny, who was trying hard to be a vegetarian, had a kind of vegetable stew. Sean chose a hamburger, though it was made with soy protein.
    “How much of the food is from the greenhouses?” he asked as they settled in at one of the tables.
    “More than half,” Jenny said. “In fact, the colony could probably survive just with the greenhouse food. It’d be kind of dull, though. Lots of algae-based protein!”
    Sean made a face. He’d tried algae-based protein. It was faintly green, clumpy, and bland, with a flavor reminiscent of, well, algae. “Yuck.”
    “You can develop a taste for it.” Jenny ate some of her stew. “But I have to admit, it’s great to get freeze-dried veggies from home now and then. We just don’t have the variety yet.”
    Sean munched his burger. It wasn’t great, but he’d eaten worse, like roasted rat and pigeon.
    “I guess the
Argosy
is about ready to go back to Earth,” he said.
    “Another two months, I think,” Jenny told him. “There are some mineral samples and some seismic readouts the scientists on Earth want to get their hands on. The series won’t be complete until then. They’ll be cutting it close. There aren’t that many times a year when a ship can launch from Martian orbit on a good return trajectory to Earth. They’ll
have
to take off in about twelve weeks, or else wait another six months.”
    When they had finished eating, they went to an observation dome to look out at the Martian surface. Sean had arrived at the very beginning of spring in this hemisphere. The changes the season broughtwere extreme. Sandstorms whipped across the surface now, fierce gales filled with fine, gritty dust that sandblasted everything exposed on the surface. The heating—if you could call it that—also raised dust devils. Now that the surface reached a balmy ten degrees Celsius—about fifty Fahrenheit—at noon, the storms regularly rose up.
    They were spectacular, tornadoes of whirling dust towering more than a mile high, leaning, racing across the Martian surface. As Jenny and Sean looked out to the south where there were few buildings, they saw three of the dust devils snaking their way toward the colony. “They’re more dangerous than the sandstorms,” Jenny said. “Lucky they’re small. The winds get to tremendous speeds.”
    The