And when I sacrifice my angel soul
Ishall become what no mind ever conceived.
“Sleep well,” she said into his drowsing mind. “This is all our path.”
The next morning he climbed stiffly in his rover, wincing with soreness and determined to eat some omeg as soon as he got on his way. The same woman was there to see him off, and he bumped his faceplate against hers affectionately.
“Whether it be of this world or of that,” she said, “your love will lead us yonder in the end.”
The transponder road led him through the brown wind-torn days, crossing the broken land south of Margaritifer Sinus. John would have to drive it again some other time to see any of it, for in the storm it was nothing but flying chocolate, pierced by momentary golden shafts of light. Near Bakhuysen Crater he stopped at a new settlement called Turner Wells; here they had tapped into an aquifer that was under such hydrostatic pressure at its lower end that they were going to generate power by running the artesian flow through a series of turbines. The water released would be poured into molds, frozen, and then hauled by robot to dry settlements all over the southern hemisphere. Mary Dunkel was working there, and she showed John around the wells, the power plant, and the ice reservoirs. “The exploratory drilling was actually scary as hell. When the drill hit the liquid part of the aquifer it was blasted back out of the well, and it was touch and go whether we were going to be able to control the gusher or not.”
“What would have happened if you hadn’t?”
“Well, I don’t know. There’s a lot of water down there. If it broke the rock around the well, it might have gone like the big outflow channels in Chryse.”
“That big?”
“Who knows? It’s possible.”
“Wow.”
“That’s what I said! Now Ann has started an investigation into methods for determining aquifer pressures by the echoes they give back in the seismic tests. But there are people who would like to release an aquifer or two, see? They leave messages on the bulletin boards in the net. I wouldn’t be surprised if Sax is among them. Big floods of water and ice, lots of sublimation into the air, why shouldn’t he cheer?”
“But floods like those old ones would be as destructive to the landscape as dropping asteroids on it.”
“Oh, more destructive! Those channels downslope from the chaoses were incredible outbreaks. The best Terran analogy is the scab-lands in eastern Washington, have you heard of them? About eighteen thousand years ago there was a lake covering most of Montana, Lake Missoula they call it, composed of Ice Age meltwater and held in place by an ice dam. At some point this ice dam broke and the lake emptied catastrophically, about two trillion cubic meters of water, draining down the Columbia plateau and out to the Pacific in a matter of days.”
“Wow.”
“While it lasted it ran about a hundred times the discharge of the Amazon, and carved channels in the basalt bedrock that are as much as two hundred meters deep.”
“Two hundred meters!”
“Right. And this was nothing compared to the ones that cut the Chryse channels! The anastomosing up there covers areas—”
“Two hundred meters of
“Yeah, well, it isn’t just normal erosion. In floods that big the pressures fluctuate so much that you get exsolution of dissolved gases, you know, and when those bubbles collapse they produce incredible pressures. Hammering like that can break anything.”
“So it would be worse than an asteroid strike.”
“Sure. Unless you dropped a really big asteroid. But there are people who think we should be doing that too, right?”
“Are there?”
“You know there are. But the floods are better yet, if you want to do that kind of thing. If you could direct one of them into Hellas, for instance, you’d have a sea. And you might be able to refill it faster than the surface ice sublimed.”
“
“Well, yeah, that would be impossible. But if you found one in the right spot, you wouldn’t have to direct it. You should check where Sax has sent the dowsing team lately, see what it looks like to you.”
“But it would be forbidden by UNOMA for sure.”
“Since when has that mattered to Sax?”
John laughed. “Oh, it matters now. They’ve given him too much for him to ignore them. They’ve tied him down with money and power.”
“Maybe.”
That night at 3:30 A.M. there was a small explosion in one of the well heads, and alarm bells ripped them from sleep and sent them stumbling through the tunnels half-naked, to be faced with a gusher that was shooting up into the night’s flying dust, in a column of white water torn to shreds in the unsteady glare of hastily directed spotlights. The water was falling out of the dust clouds as chunks of ice, hail the size of bowling balls. Wells downwind were being pummeled by these missiles, and the ice balls were already knee deep.
Given the discussion of the previous evening John found himself quite alarmed by the sight, and he ran around until he found Mary. Through the noise of the eruption and the ever-present storm, Mary shouted in John’s ear: “Clear the area, I’m going to set off a charge beside the well and try to snuff it!” She ran off in her white nightshirt, and John rounded up the spectators and got them back down the tunnels to the station habitat. Mary joined them in the lock, huffing and puffing, and fiddled with her wristpad, and there was a low boom in the direction of the well. “Come on let’s go see,” she said, and they got through the lock and ran back down the tunnels toward the window overlooking the well. There in a tumble of white ice balls lay the wreckage of the drill, on its side, and still. “Yeah! Capped!” Mary cried.
They cheered weakly. Some of them went down to the well area, to see if there was anything they could do to secure the situation. “Good work!” John said to Mary.
“I’ve read a lot about well capping since that first incident,” Mary said, still short of breath. “And we had it all set up to go. But we never actually had the chance. To try it. Of course. So you never know.”
John said, “Do your locks have recorders?”
“They do.”
“Great.”
John went to check them. He plugged Pauline into the station system, and asked questions, and scanned the answers as they appeared on his pad. No one had used the locks after the timeslip that night. He called the weather satellite overhead, and clicked into the radar and IR systems that Sax had given him the codes for, and scanned the area around Bakhuysen. No sign of any machines nearby, except some of the old windmill heaters. And the transponders showed that no one had been on the roads in the area since his arrival the previous day.
John sat heavily before Pauline, feeling sluggish and slow-witted. He couldn’t think of any other checks to make, and it seemed from those he had, that no one had been out that night to do the damage. The explosion could have been arranged days before, perhaps, although it would be hard to hide the device, the wells being worked on daily. He got up slowly and went to find Mary, and with her help talked to the people who had last worked on that well, the day before. No sign of tampering then, all the way until eight p.m. And after that everyone in the station had been at the John Boone party, the locks unused. So there really had been no chance.
He went back to his bed and thought about it. “Oh, by the way, Pauline— please check Sax’s records, and give me a list of all the dowsing expeditions in the last year.”
Continuing on his blind road to Hellas he ran into Nadia, who was overseeing the construction of a new kind of dome over Rabe Crater. It was the largest dome yet built, taking advantage of the thickening of the atmosphere
