Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [160]
“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 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.”
“Direct a 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 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