Madeline finally broke it up. "Come on, guys. I appreciate it—I really, really do—but we've still got work ahead of us."
"Not now!" Joe's voice almost shouted. Then, more calmly: "Seriously. Helen, I'm not going to tell you what to do, but—"
"No problem, Joe. I've got no intention of continuing our investigation today. We all need a rest. Even if we didn't, our oxygen reserves are too low to do anything more than come out."
Startled a bit—he hadn't thought to check in a while—A.J. took the readings. "You're right about that."
"Are you going to be okay?" Joe asked, concern coming back into his voice.
"Relax, willya?" said A.J. "We've got plenty left to make our way out—even leaving aside the emergency tanks we left at the bottom of the cliff. But Helen's right. We don't want to fool around with anything else today. If another emergency happened, we'd be truly and royally screwed."
For all that Helen's intellect told her they were doing the right thing, all of her emotions and professional instincts pulled her in the other direction. They were on the verge—the verge, damnation!—of what might prove to be another extraordinary discovery. Now that the ice dust had completely settled, she could easily see that beckoning door at the other end of the tunnel where they'd almost died.
She shook her head, firmly, and turned to follow the others as they headed toward the surface.
A.J. made a wisecrack once they reached Melted Way. For once,
Helen thought it was appropriate. Sort of. "Hey, look at it this way. Live to loot another day."
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.