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those lava tubes to store some emergency supplies, some oxygen tanks and pressure suits, even some food rations, we ought to do it. Worst comes to worst, we’d have something to fall back on.”
    “Who wants to live in a hole?” grumbled Mickey.
    “Better than the alternative,” Alex said dryly.

    Sure enough, plans for exploring the new lava tubes went ahead on schedule. Chris Wu and the other seismologists checked out the geyser field, kept wary eyes on their instruments, and very, very gradually seemed to relax as days went by and no aftershocks occurred.
    Sean’s work schedule was suspended as construction crews repaired the dome of Greenhouse 7, a long process that involved not just mending the hull breach but also reworking the electrical and plumbing systems. Greenhouse domes used a lot of water—and dome 7 could have cost the colony a lot of waste if its water system had been fully compromised. Luckily sensors had cut off the supply when the quake first started, so they had lost only the water actually in the dome at the time. Even so, the pipes had almost all been destroyed. In the bitter cold, the water had frozen almost instantly and its expansion had ruptured pipes all through the structure.
    Then, in the low pressure, the ice exposed by the burst pipes had sublimed. It didn’t melt—Martian ice didn’t behave the same way ice did on Earth. The ice simply turned directly to water vapor, shrinking away to nothing.
    Similarly, the electrical connections all had to be checked and reworked. The quake had caused short circuits, overloads, melted junctions. All of these had to be repaired or replaced, and that would take weeks. Since Sean couldn’t work at his job until then, he had some rare time off.
    But exams didn’t stop for anything—not even a major disaster. Sean’s grades suffered some, but so did everyone’s.
    “No wonder,” Jenny said disgustedly when she learned she had slipped a whole tenth of a point in biology. “We’re all on edge and upset. I can’t even
sleep,
let alone
study
!”
    Sean, whose own biology grade had tumbled by more than twice as much as Jenny’s, wisely didn’t comment. He knew how sensitive Jenny was about her grades. For a change Dr. Ellman had nothing cutting to say to Jenny or to Sean—or to any of his other students. He was an information systems coordinator, and that task kept him so busy that he didn’t seem to have time left over to worry about the Asimov Project kids.
    “At least the fights have stopped,” Alex said to Jenny and Sean one afternoon.
    “Everyone’s too scared to fight,” Jenny said. “It’s the way it was just after the
Argosy
left for Earth. Back then we knew we didn’t have a chance unless we all cooperated. Now everyone’s worried that even if we do cooperate, the planet will kill us.”
    “The problem,” Sean said slowly, “is getting everyone to cooperate even when things are all going along fine. How do you do that? People on Earth couldn’t manage it, and look what’s happened there.”
    “So are people just no good?” Alex asked. He was smiling, but his voice was serious.
    “I don’t believe that,” Jenny said quickly. “I think people can be mistaken, or some of them can be just plain mean and bullheaded, but if you talk about most people, I think most of us are good. Or try to be.”
    “Until we see someone who’s not like us,” Sean said bitterly. “And then our reaction is to kill them.”
    “I lost my parents too, you know,” Jenny said.
    Sean nodded. Jenny had grown up in a state-sponsored orphanage, where the kids were used asguinea pigs for sociological and educational testing. He couldn’t really complain that his loss was greater than hers, or greater than any other Asimov Project kid’s, for that matter. In some ways it was worse for those like Roger, who had clear memories of their parents. Sean couldn’t even picture his mother and father.
    “Well, we’ve got some time off after this