“Two hundred meters!”

“Right. And this was nothing compared to the ones that cut theChryse channels! The anastomosing up there covers areas-”

“Two hundred meters of bedrock?”

“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.”

“ Directa flood like that?” John exclaimed.

“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 AM 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 pummelled by these missiles, and the ice balls were already knee deep.

Given the discussion of the previous night 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 theygot 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 time-slip 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 PM. 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 and the lightening of construction materials, which created a situation where gravity could be balanced with pressure, making the pressurized dome effectively weightless. The frame was to be made of reinforced areogel beams, the latest from the alchemists; areogel was so light and strong that Nadia went into little raptures as she described the potential uses for it. Crater domes themselves were a thing of the past, in her opinion; it would be just as easy to erect areogel pillars around the circumference of a town, bypassing the rock enclosures and putting the whole population inside what would be in effect a big clear tent.

She told John all about it as they walked around Rabe’s interior, now nothing but a big construction site. The whole crater rim was going to be honeycombed with skylighted rooms, and the domed interior would hold a farm that would feed thirty thousand. Earthmoving robots the size of buildings hummed out of the murk of the dust, invisible even fifty meters away. These behemoths were working on their own, or by teleoperation, and the teleoperators probably had too little view of their surroundings to make nearby foot traffic entirely safe. John followed Nadia nervously as she strolled about, remembering how skittish the miners at Bradbury Point had been-and there they had been able to see what was happening! He had to laugh at Nadia’s obliviousness. When the ground trembled underfoot, they just stopped and looked around, ready to leap away from any oncoming building-sized vehicles. It was quite a tour. Nadia railed against the dust, which was wrecking a lot of machinery. The great storm was now four months old, the longest in years; and it still showed no sign of ending. Temperatures had plummeted, people were eating canned and dried food, and an occasional salad or vegetable grown under artificial light. And dust was in everything. Even as they discussed it John could feel it caking his mouth, and his eyes were dry in their sockets. Headaches had become extremely common, as well as sinus trouble, sore throats, bronchitis, asthma, lung distress generally. Plus frequent cases of frostnip. And computers were becoming dangerously unreliable, a lot of hardware breakdown, a lot of AI neurosis or retardation. Middays inside Rabe were like living inside a brick, Nadia said, and sunsets looked like coal mine fires. She hated it.

John changed the subject. “What do you think of this space elevator?”

“Big.”

“But the effect, Nadia. The effect.”

“Who knows? You can never tell with a thing like that, can you.”

“It’ll make a strategic bottleneck, like the one Phyllis used to talk about when we were discussing who would build Phobos station. She’ll have made her own bottleneck. That’s a lot of power.”

“That’s what Arkady says, but I don’t see why it can’t be treated as a common resource, like a natural feature.”

“You’re an optimist.”

“That’s what Arkady says.” She shrugged. “I’m just trying to be sensible.”

“Me too.”

“I know. Sometimes I think we’re the only two.”