another belt of the dust cloud. The pockets of tritium ice catch a few neutrons from uranium ore—down under. Some of the tritium goes into helium. Frees oxygen. Gases form pressure. Big blow.”
What are they going to do with the ice?”
The troffie shrugged. “The engineers might know.” Manue snorted and spat. “They know how to make money.”
“Heh! Sure, everybody’s gettin’ rich.”
The Peruvian stared at him speculatively for a moment. “Senor Donnell, I—”
“Sam’ll do.”
“I wonder if anybody knows why… well… why we’re really here.”
Donnell glanced up to grin, then waggled his head. He fell thoughtful for a moment, and leaned forward to write in the earth. When he finished, he read it aloud.
“A plough plus a horse plus land equals the necessities of life.” He glanced up at Manue. “Fifteen hundred A.D.”
The Peruvian frowned his bewilderment. Donnell rubbed out what he had written and wrote again.
“A factory plus steam turbines plus raw materials equals necessities plus luxuries. Nineteen hundred A.D.”
He rubbed it out and repeated the scribbling. “All those things plus nuclear power and computer controls equal a surplus of everything. Twenty-one hundred A.D.”
“So?”
“So, it’s either cut production or find an outlet. Mars is an outlet for surplus energies, manpower, money. Mars Project keeps money turning over, keeps everything turning over. Economist told me that. Said if the Project folded, surplus would pile up—big depression on Earth.”
The Peruvian shook his head and sighed. It didn’t sound right somehow. It sounded like an explanation somebody figured out after the whole thing started. It wasn’t the kind of goal he wanted.
Two days later, the drill hit ice, and the “big blow” was only a fizzle. There was talk around the camp that the whole operation had been a waste of time. The hole spewed a frosty breath for several hours, and the drill crews crowded around to stick their faces in it and breathe great gulps of the helium-oxygen mixture. But then the blow subsided, and the hole leaked only a wisp of steam.
Technicians came, and lowered sonar “cameras” down to the ice. They spent a week taking internal soundings and plotting the extent of the ice-dome on their charts. They brought up samples of ice and tested them. The engineers worked late into the Martian nights.
Then it was finished. The engineers came out of their huddles and called to the foremen of the labour gangs. They led the foremen around the site, pointing here, pointing there, sketching with chalk on the foundation, explaining in solemn voices. Soon the foremen were bellowing at their crews.
“Let’s get the derrick down!”
“Start that mixer going!”
Get that steel over here!”
“Unroll that dip-wire!”
“Get a move on! Shovel that fill!”
Muscles tightened and strained, machinery clamoured and rang. Voices grumbled and shouted. The operation was starting again. Without knowing why, Manue shovelled fill and stretched dip-wire and poured concrete for a big slab to be run across the entire hundred-yard square, broken only by the big pipe-casing that stuck up out of the ground in the centre and leaked a thin trail of steam.
The drill crew moved their rig half a mile across the plain to a point specified by the geologists and began sinking another hole. A groan went up from structural boys: “Not another one of these things!”
But the supervisory staff said, “No, don’t worry about it.”
There was much speculation about the purpose of the whole operation, and the men resented the quiet secrecy connected with the project. There could be no excuse for secrecy, they felt, in time of peace. There was a certain arbitrariness about it, a hint that the Commission thought of its employees as children, or enemies, or servants. But the supervisory staff shrugged off all questions with : “You know there’s tritium ice down there. You know it’s what we’ve been looking for. Why? Well—what’s the difference? There are lots of uses for it. Maybe we’ll use it for one thing, maybe for something else. Who knows?”
Such a reply might have been satisfactory for an iron mine or an oil well or a stone quarry, but tritium suggested hydrogen-fusion. And no transportation facilities were being installed to haul the stuff away—no pipelines nor railroad tracks nor glider ports.
Manue quit thinking about it. Slowly he came to adopt a grim cynicism towards the tediousness, the back- breaking labour of his daily work; he lived from day to day like an animal, dreaming only of a return to Earth when his contract was up. But the dream was painful because it was distant, as contrasted with the immediacies of Mars: the threat of atrophy, coupled with the discomforts of continued breathing, the nightmares, the barrenness of the landscape, the intense cold, the harshness of men’s tempers, the hardship of labour, and the lack of a cause.
A warm, sunny Earth was still over four years distant, and tomorrow would be another back-breaking, throat-parching, heart-tormenting, chest-hurting day. Where was there even a little pleasure in it? It was so easy, at least, to leave the oxy turned up at night, and get a pleasant restful sleep. Sleep was the only recourse from harshness, and fear robbed sleep of its quiet sensuality—unless a man just surrendered and quit worrying about his lungs.
Manue decided that it would be safe to give himself two completely restful nights a week.
Concrete was run over the great square and trowelled to a rough finish. A glider train from Mare Erythraeum brought in several huge crates of machinery, cut-stone masonry for building a wall, a shipful of new personnel, and a real rarity: lumber, cut from the first Earth-trees to be grown on Mars.
A building began going up with the concrete square for foundation and floor. Structures could be flimsier on Mars; because of the light gravity, compression-stresses were smaller. Hence, the work progressed rapidly, and as the flat-roofed structure was completed, the technicians began uncrating new machinery and moving it into the building. Manue noticed that several of the units were computers. There was also a small steam-turbine generator driven by an atomic-fired boiler.
Months passed. The building grew into an integrated mass of power and control systems. Instead of using the well for pumping, the technicians were apparently going to lower something into it. A bomb-shaped cylinder was slung vertically over the hole. The men guided it into the mouth of the pipe casing, then let it down slowly from a massive cable. The cylinder’s butt was a multi-contact socket like the female receptacle for a hundred-pin electron tube. Hours passed while the cylinder slipped slowly down beneath the hide of Mars. When it was done, the men hauled out the cable and began lowering stiff sections of pre-wired conduit, fitted with a receptacle at one end and a male plug at the other, so that as the sections fell into place, a continuous bundle of control cables was built up from “bomb” to surface.
Several weeks were spent in connecting circuits, setting up the computers, and making careful tests. The drillers had finished the second well hole, half a mile from the first, and Manue noticed that while the testing was going on, the engineers sometimes stood atop the building and stared anxiously towards the steel skeleton in the distance. Once while the tests were being conducted, the second hole began squirting a jet of steam high in the thin air, and a frantic voice bellowed from the roof top.
Cut it! Shut it off! Sound the danger whistle!”
The jet of steam began to shriek a low-pitched whine across the Martian desert. It blended with the rising and falling Ooooowwww of the danger siren. But gradually it subsided as the men in the control station shut down the machinery. All hands came up cursing from their hiding places, and the engineers stalked out to the new hole carrying Geiger counters. They came back wearing pleased grins.
The work was nearly finished. The men began crating up the excavating machinery and the drill rig and the tools. The control-building devices were entirely automatic, and the camp would be deserted when the station began operation. The men were disgruntled. They had spent a year of hard labour on what they had thought to be a tritium well, but now that it was done, there were no facilities for pumping the stuff or hauling it away. In fact, they had pumped various solutions into the ground through the second hole, and the control station shaft was fitted with pipes that led from lead-lined tanks down into the earth.
Manue had stopped trying to keep his oxy properly adjusted at night. Turned up to a comfortable level, it was
