Worlds

Sleep that night was out of the question. I couldn’t even sit on my bed. I mean, how could everybody just take this sitting down? I walked around the dome a few times to try to deal with all this. “We haven’t even seen this crevice,” I said to myself. Then it hit me. I had to see this thing that was causing me so much grief—that was wrecking my career. Like heck if I was going to be defeated by something I couldn’t even see. I didn’t want to wait to ask Bruce for permission to do an EVA; I knew he would turn me down anyway. Playing by the rules had gotten me this far, but this situation was different. I just had to take things into my own hands. I walked into an office to get a disc, then over to the airlock, where I inserted it, then typed in some codes to override the monitor—that’s the computer that reports what’s going on to mission controllers here in Asimov and up in the orbiter. I got myself into my suit, powered up my life support system, activated the magnetic field and fastened my helmet. I vacated the atmosphere. I used the disc to black out info from the smallest rover we had, then powered it up. After waiting for the video camera that was scanning the area to turn away from the airlock—our night security team could monitor it—I opened the hatch and drove out, looking at screen shots I had called up of the x-rays of the crevice. I tried to drive fast enough to be out of there by the time the camera scan came back but slow enough not to kick up a lot of dust. I apparently hit just the right speed, ’cause I didn’t hear a thing on the radio from the security people. A perfect getaway. I kept slicing through the dust, keying on that screen shot of the orbital picture till I was right on the edge of the crevice. And there it was, a crack that widened into a split, slanting downward into what looked like the opening of a cave. It was a real crevice, not some image on a screen. I very slowly drove forward onto the edge of the slant, more nervous with each inch I traveled. When I heard dust start to slide down from under my front wheels, I decided that was far enough. I shined the high beams into that thing. The light seemed to go forever. Bruce wasn’t kidding about how it dwarfed the Asimov. The opening I looked into was about 10 meters wide, about the width and shape of one of our canisters of the hardening agents we were going to inject into the next dome. What a waste, I thought—all those canisters and roof rolls we were about ready to start rolling out and would never use. Then it hit me. Thousands of liters of hardening agents that firm up all those chemicals in the roof rolls. Maybe they would firm up the soil. We could put roof chemicals into the crevice’s cracks, then pump the hardening agents into them. And just maybe stop the crevice. I got ready to hit reverse to go tell Bruce this, but I realized, hell, how could we inject all those things into the soil? Those injectors don’t have enough force to spray them more than three or four meters. Then, it was another about-face; the soil samplers, those tubes we pull soil out of the ground with, they can go down as far as 15 meters! Yes! I gave myself a high five, then shifted into reverse to tell Bruce the good news. But instead of going backward, I started going down. The ground under me was sinking and the more I pushed the accelerator the faster it crumbled. I was sliding down and forward into this hole of no return. I shot my anchor toward the rear. It’s a rocket-powered cord with a series of blades that latch you into the ground. It’s narrow, but super-reinforced. It’s designed to stabilize you in windstorms, not to keep you from falling, so I just had to hope it would work now as I heard it whipping upward and toward the rear with the sound of a basketball going through a nylon net. The remaining dirt under me started collapsing faster and went rolling into the crevice and I was sliding that way, too, as the cord wasn’t yet pulled to full tension. For a second there, I didn’t know if that was it for my life, or if that cord would save me. I could see that the anchor was into the ground, but how firmly? I closed my eyes for a second, then opened them to see the dirt falling faster and faster. I could still see it careening down 50 or 60 meters below. I was heading there, too. This is it, I told myself. Either I’m going down because the cord has come loose or it hasn’t been pulled to full length yet. In a second or two, I’ll know. I saw Mom and Dad.