Whatever residual animosity he still had regarding Madeline's role in the expedition finally vanished. She was what she was—but she was all of it. You couldn't pick and choose what you liked.
"The good and the bad and the ugly," he murmured.
It was a package deal. And—on Mars, all things considered—one hell of a good package. It had kept them all alive, when they'd otherwise surely have been dead.
He must have murmured louder than he thought.
"Thank you, I guess. Joe doesn't think I'm ugly, though, so poop on you."
Impossibly, her smile brightened. "Now, A.J.—if you don't mind—I'd like to be able to unlock the suit and put my arms down someday. This is going to get very uncomfortable, after a while."
"We're on it." The hollering over the radio finally registered. "Hey, Joe, calm down, will you? She's alive and smarter than we are."
"Thank God. Thank God. Madeline—"
"It's okay, Joe. I'm fine, really I am. It was scary for a minute, but if the cave back of us is okay, we're going to be just fine."
"I want you back here right away."
"Don't be silly, Joe. If I unlock the suit, we'll be trapped—and it's going to take Helen and A.J. and Rich quite some time to substitute some other sort of bracing. So just hold your horses."
While the rest of them were preoccupied with Madeline's situation, Rich had passed gingerly through the "Madeline Arch" and gone to check conditions at the opening of the tunnel.
"I think we're okay," he said, coming back. "The bracing held. In fact, as near as I can tell, the roof out there is just fine. I thought at first that the roof had caved in because of a Marsquake, but I think it was just the localized effects of the strain the ripper put on this area near the door we forced. Why it worked that way, I have no idea."
Chad Baird spoke over the radio. "Underground structures can be very quirky. In fact, that's exactly what I was worried about." His voice sounded a little shaky, too. "What kills most people in mining operations is not the big dramatic explosions and cave-ins and floodings that make the national news. Those are awfully rare, at least when proper safety precautions are taken. But coal miners and hard-rock miners still get killed, year after year, in ones and twos—because a piece of the roof came loose and fell on them."
He paused a moment, as if checking something. "I can tell you for sure and certain there's been no Marsquake in that area. Our sensors would have picked it up. So I'm almost positive Rich is right. I hate to say it, but it was your own activities that weakened the roof."
"Gotcha," said A.J. "On the bright side, we've got some good titles for new movies. Indiana Jones Had It Coming."
Joe chimed in, almost giggling with relief. "Lara Crusht, Tomb Raider No More."
"Hey, that's good. The sequel to follow: The Mummy—"
"SHUT UP!" Helen and Madeline shouted simultaneously.
"Please," added Rich.
A.J. choked off the rest. Then: "Ah, right. Let's get Madeline out of her new job as a roof column. Joe, switch from movie fan mode to engineer mode, will you? This is going to be tricky, since we don't have much in the way of material to make supports from."
With three of them working together, it took about four hours to get sufficient bracing jacked into place to let Madeline relax her suit. Most of the "bracing," unfortunately, was nothing fancier than moving pieces of ice and a few loose rocks into what they hoped was a supportive structure.
None of them were very happy with the results, when it was done. The "support structure" looked more like a pile of rubble than anything else. But at least, at Joe's suggestion, they'd been able to carefully position the ripper in such a way as to serve as a more substantial brace for what seemed to be the shakiest area.
That done, at Madeline's insistence, the others cleared the corridor. Then she unlocked the suit and, slowly and gingerly, lowered her arms.
But there was no sign of movement from the roof, except a very slight slippage that Jack the Ripper's tines kept from moving more than a few inches. Almost tiptoeing her way, Madeline came out of the corridor. Once safely outside, she started wiggling her arms to get them working again. Four hours holding her hands over her head, even in low gravity and with the suit doing the actual load-bearing, had not done pleasant things to her blood circulation.
"Not so bad, really," she assured them. "I've done worse in other places."
Helen suddenly hugged her. A moment later, A.J. and Rich joined in. For about a minute, the four people were clutched in a spacesuited huddle far beneath the surface of Mars, all of them shaking a little as the reaction finally set in.