Red Mars (Mars Trilogy, #1) - Kim Stanley Robinson Page 0,151

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 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 and the lightening of construction materials, which created a situation where gravity