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Chapter 49

In the event, exploring the Bemmie base had to be postponed for some time. Captain Hathaway was adamant that means of securing the unstable roof areas had to be put in place first.

"We came that close to losing two thirds of our people down there," he stated forcefully. "No way will I permit that risk to be taken again, until I'm satisfied that we've dealt with the problem. That's final, Helen, so don't even bother arguing about it."

In truth, Helen wasn't really inclined to argue anyway. Much as part of her desperately wanted to get into that base, that part was easily disciplined by the very experienced boss of many field digs.

A.J. took a bit of stifling, of course. But, by now, Helen was the acknowledged world expert—champion of the entire Solar System, in fact—at the Art and Science of Stifling A.J. Baker. Admittedly, she had the advantage of being able to use a means of coercion not available to anyone else.

The problem then became . . .

How?

"It's ridiculous!" A.J. snarled. "We've managed to cross interplanetary space using umpteen forms of cutting-edge technology. And now we're stumped because we don't have any—"

He spat out the last two words as if they were the foulest profanity: "—stupid wood."

Joe was almost as frustrated, but he couldn't help grinning. "Well, the phrase was always 'with jacks and timbers,—"

"I don't want to hear it!"

"—and without timbers the rest means jack."

A.J. glared at him, refusing to crack a smile over the feeble pun. Joe spread his hands. "What do you want me to say? It's just a fact. Old-fashioned and 'stupid' as it may be, wood is still the best material for a jillion purposes. Shoring up shaky tunnels being one of them."

"Fine." A.J. shifted the glare to Bruce Irwin. "Get on the radio and tell Hathaway to send us down some pine tree seeds. Or bulbs— whatever the stupid things grow from. We'll set up a greenhouse somehow and plant them and sit back and wait one or two hundred years until we've got some timber."

"Pine grows quite a bit faster than that, actually," Helen said, sweetly. "You're confusing it with some of the hardwoods. In ten years—fifteen, tops—I think we'd have a harvestable crop."

"Great." A.J. was practically grinding his teeth.

"Well . . ." Joe mused, "we could use iron too, in a pinch. Hold on, let me do the figures . . ."

"Cut it out, Joe!" A.J.'s glare looked to be fixed on his face permanently. "It'd take just as long to build an iron industry from scratch. That Ferris-descended reactor we've got wasn't designed to crank out I-beams—and you know it."

Jackie came to the rescue.

"Don't start denuding all the Martian forests yet," she said breezily, in their next radio exchange. "We think we've figured out a solution, and we'll be sending it down to you as part of Operation Care Package."

"What is it?" A.J. asked eagerly.

"Not telling. It's a surprise present for Helen. Don't forget what day it is that Care Package'll be bouncing down to you." There was a slight pause. "Uh, A.J., you didn't forget, did you?"

They were all in the rover, listening. A.J. suddenly realized that Helen's eyes were on him.

Very, very beady eyes.

Fortunately, A.J. pulled back from the brink of disaster. "Of course not!" He turned and gave Helen his most winning smile. "Happy birthday, darling."

Her return smile was a very cool sort of thing. "I think he was saved by the bell, Jackie."

They heard a feminine-sounding snort coming over the radio. Then: "Anyway, I'm not telling since you don't need to know yet. You'll find out in three days."

"Just try to aim it well, please," Helen said. "We don't want it to bounce so far that Thoat can't reach it."

"We'll do our best," Hathaway answered. "But you'd rather have to hike a bit than have this thing bounce on top of you, I can guarantee it. It sure 'nuff ain't going to be light."

"Point. Well, let's all keep our fingers crossed, Captain."

"I'm crossing everything I got two of," Hathaway assured her.

The ion drive was not meant for speed, of course, so despite the low orbit of Phobos it was not the next day, nor the next, but the day after that when all six of the crash survivors assembled to look for the first sign of what might be their relief, and quite possibly salvation. Food was every bit as short on Mars as trees were.

Helen stared into the bright pinkish sky, trying to calculate where Care Package would first appear. Since she was facing west, and Care Package was due to make its crash-landing somewhat to the south, that would be to her left and . . .

She realized suddenly that she was being silly and instructed her HUD to display the location in the sky where she ought to be looking.

"Cheating, eh?" A.J.'s voice came.

"Are you saying you're actually not using a gadget to do your work for you, Mr. Baker?" Madeline asked.

"Only some of my work. I'm trying to figure out the angles based on the images from above. I like testing my gut instincts sometimes."

"We'll see how well you do, then."

"This is Nike, Mars Base One. Care Package is steady on reentry now, and should become visible to you very soon. So far all shows green."

"Understood, Nike. We're all hoping."

"There!" Helen felt a touch of pride that she'd spotted it first. A tiny black dot, barely visible in the pinkish haze, moving toward them, far to the west and slightly south. It grew bigger as they watched.

Much bigger.

"That sucker's getting kinda close . . . " Joe muttered.

"You said you didn't want it too far away," Jackie said in their ears.

"Well, yeah, but too close and she may bounce right into Thoat Canyon. We'll have a hell of a time getting it then!"

"Have faith, Dr. Buckley, have faith," came Gupta's sonorous voice. "We have checked our calculations most carefully."

Care Package screamed down to Mars—literally screamed, from the sound produced by the aeroshell—only a few kilometers to the west and south of Thoat. Barely a hundred meters up, Care Package blew the remaining portion of her aeroshell and released the parachute, revealing the balloonlike airbags surrounding the precious cargo. Her first impact blasted black and red sands high into the thin air with a smacking sound incongruously soft and distant and then kicked her, spinning, back into the air, rising fifty, sixty meters before arcing back down, to hit again, and bounce, and hit and bounce again.

"Jesus, is she going to stop?" A.J. asked nervously. "She's heading right for the edge!"

"That would suck," Joe said bluntly.

The bounces were getting shallower and quicker, even in Mars' feeble gravity. Suddenly, Care Package wasn't so much bouncing as rolling, throwing dust aside as it slowed itself through friction with the previously untouched sands. Helen held her breath as Care Package continued its journey, slowing, slowing, until it rolled to a stop a kilometer and a half to the south and slightly east of Mars Base One, no more than two hundred meters from the edge of Thoat Canyon.

"Yeah!" she heard herself shout involuntarily. "Package delivered safely!"

"Now that," Jackie said with satisfaction, "is a landing."

"Bah," A.J. said. "I betcha we bounced farther. And we didn't have balloons, either."

Helen's birthday present was there, too, just as Jackie had promised.

"Oh, swell," Helen complained. "'Some assembly required.'"

"Look on the bright side," Jackie countered. "At least you don't need any batteries that weren't included."

A.J.'s attitude was mixed. On the one hand, he was delighted to have the means to create a safe entry into the Bemmie base. On the other, he found the means themselves contemptible.

"I can't believe this. I was expecting some sort of high-tech wizardry from you people."

"Do not be childish, Mr. Baker," said Gupta. "In many respects, the ways of our grandfathers are still best."

"Still. We're going to stuff our way there. How undignified."

Undignified it might have been, but it worked. The half-shredded portions of the airbags that had enabled Care Package to survive the landing, when properly positioned and braced by the package's structural pieces, did a fine job of filling the tunnels so tightly that there was no chance of any further roof collapses. They left a passage just big enough to allow them to get through along with whatever drones they needed.

That still left the problem of the ice cavern, of course. The interior of the cavern was so immense that not even a hundred Care Package shells could possibly have filled it up.

But, to everyone's relief, Chad Baird pronounced that the cavern's size provided enough of a safety margin in itself.

"Look, even though it's probably a recent formation in geological terms, the emphasis is on the word 'geological.' On the scale of human lifetimes, that cavern is very old. It's been there for millennia, certainly. So, barring one of the very rare major Marsquakes, I can't see any likelihood that the cavern itself will collapse. The real danger is much more prosaic—those chunks of ice that it periodically drops on the floor below, as the stalactites shed some of their weight."

"And how do you propose they protect themselves against that?" Hathaway demanded. "I don't care if—theoretically—assuming the right position with the suits locked in rigid impact mode would shield someone well enough. Just because it worked for Madeline once doesn't mean it'll work every time."

"Don't need to," replied Baird calmly. "Ken, stop fretting for a moment and just think. Like a soldier, if you will. The ceiling of that cavern averages forty-five meters above the floor, and in no place they'd be passing through is it lower than thirty-five meters. In Martian gravity . . ."

"Oh." Hathaway cleared his throat. "Spotters, you're saying."

"Right. Unless a whole section of stalactites sheds at once—and that's not the way it normally works—all they have to do is pass through the cavern one at a time, with the rest keeping an eye on the ceiling to warn the person below if anything's coming loose. As slowly as any dangerous piece of ice will fall on Mars, with that much distance to travel, they can easily be out of harm's way by the time it lands."

There was silence on the radio, for a moment. Everyone listening in Thoat had their fingers figuratively crossed.

"Okay," the captain finally said. "It's a sloppier solution than I'd like, but . . . At least we won't be risking more than one person at a time."

"Just because we've used one low-tech solution for making the corridors safer doesn't mean we should suddenly go backwards in time, people." A.J. spoke up. "Spotting things is not a job for people. It's a job for machines. Smart sensors. I can tweak the sensors in the suits to watch for such events and display the alert, and even show you which way to go to escape. And unlike people, the sensors won't get distracted, sleepy, or fail to look the right direction at the wrong time."

Hathaway grunted assent. "Okay, that's a better solution. Go to it, people."

Three hours later, they were finally back to the second door. This time, all six members of the party were there. None of them wanted to miss this moment.

Impatiently, they waited while A.J. and Joe brought up and positioned Jack the Ripper, in case they needed the drone's services.

They didn't. The door opened almost as smoothly as if it had just been closed an hour earlier.

They passed through into the interior of the alien base on Mars.

Ten minutes of silence later, Madeline spoke the first "Oh my God" of the day. The three words would be echoed by all six beings who saw the installation for the first time in sixty-five million years, again and again, as the day passed.

Finally, their oxygen running as close to the margin as Helen dared, they returned to Thoat.

"Well?" Ken asked.

"Jackpot," was A.J.'s reply.

Helen's was more dignified. For a while.

"Captain Hathaway, we have uncovered an alien installation which, though most of it is in the state of ruin you'd expect from planetary as opposed to vacuum conditions, is still in good enough condition to be studied and investigated for . . . oh . . .

"The place is HUGE, Ken! Way way way way way bigger than the base on Phobos! We'll be digging for years! I'll be working here till I croak of old age! Ha!"

"You'll need funding," he pointed out, mildly.

"No sweat. Tell Jackie—no, ask Satya, he's the best horse-trader I know beneath that solemn exterior—to start jacking up those bids. The only condition—ha!—is that they have to send a photographer to Mars. No way I'm letting those paparazzi get near me. And whoever cosmetics companies use. Professional sniffers, whatever. Hound dogs, for all I care. I love this place!"

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Framed