“But to whom?” the little man asked wearily. “And for whom? And how?”
“To anyone, from everybody, and by radio, of course!” The woman glared at Nadia, who shrugged.
Then her wristpad beeped, and Sasha Yefremov babbled in a tinny wristphone voice. The water station north of town had gone up in an explosion, and the well it had capped was now fountaining in an artesian eruption of water and ice.
“I’ll be right there,” Nadia said, shocked. The town’s water station tapped the lower end of the Lasswitz aquifer, which was a big one. If any significant part of the aquifer broached the surface, the water station and the town and the entire canyon they lay in would disappear in a catastrophic flood— and worse, Burroughs was located only 200 kilometers down the slope of Syrtis and Isidis, and the flood could very conceivably run that far. Burroughs! Its population was far too large to evacuate, especially now that it had become a refuge for people escaping the war; there was simply no other place to go.
“Surrender!” the Arab woman insisted from the hall. “All surrender!”
“I don’t think that will work anymore,” Nadia said, and ran for the building’s lock.
• • •
A part of her was immensely relieved to be able to do something, to stop huddling in a building watching disasters on TV, and do something. And Nadia had platted and overseen the construction of Lasswitz, only six years before, so now she had an idea what to do. The town was a Nicosia-class tent, with the farm and physical plant in separate structures, and the water station well off to the north. All the structures were down on the floor of a big east-west rift called Arena Canyon, the walls of which were nearly vertical and half a kilometer high. The water station was located only a couple hundred meters from the canyon’s north wall, which in that area had an impressive overhang at the top. As Nadia drove with Sasha and Yeli to the water station, she quickly outlined her plan: “I think we can bring down the cliff onto the station, and if we can, the landslide ought to be enough to cap the leak.”
“Won’t the flood just carry the landslide’s rock away?” Sasha asked.
“It will if it’s a full aquifer outbreak, sure. But if we cover it when it’s still just an uncapped well, then the escaping water will freeze in the landslide, and hopefully form a dam heavy enough to hold it. Hydrostatic pressure in this aquifer is only a bit greater than the lithostatic pressure of the rock over it, so the artesian flow isn’t all that high. If it were we’d be dead already.”
She braked the rover. Out the windshield they could see the remains of the water station, under a cloud of thin frost steam. A rover came bouncing full speed toward them, and Nadia flashed their headlights and turned the radio to the common band. It was the water-station crew, a couple named Angela and Sam, rabid with the adventures of the last hour. When they had driven alongside and finished their story, Nadia explained to them what she had in mind. “It could work,” Angela said. “Certainly nothing else will stop it now, it’s really pumping.”
“We’ll have to hurry,” Sam said. “It’s eating the rock at an unbelievable rate.”
“If we don’t cap it,” Angela said with a certain morbid enthusiasm, “it’ll look like when the Atlantic first broke through the Straits of Gibraltar and flooded the Mediterranean basin. That was a waterfall that lasted ten thousand years.”
“I never heard of that one,” Nadia said. “Come on with us to the cliff and help us get the robots going.”
During the ride over she had directed all the town’s construction robots from their hangar to the foot of the north wall, next to the water station; when the two rovers got there, they found a few of the faster robots had already arrived, and the rest were grinding over the canyon floor toward them. There was a small talus slope at the foot of the cliff, which towered over them like an enormous frozen wave, gleaming in the noon light. Nadia linked into the earthmovers and bulldozers and gave them instructions to clear paths through the talus; when that was done, tunnelers would bore straight into the cliff. “See,” Nadia said, pointing at an areological map of the canyon that she had called onto the rover’s screen, “there’s a big fault there behind that whole overhanging piece. It’s causing the lip of the wall to slump a bit— see that slightly lower shelf at the top? If we set off all the explosives we’ve got at the bottom of that fault, it’s sure to bring down the overhang, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know,” Yeli said. “It’s worth a try.”