Alexis Latner: The Life-Blood of the Land

“Look.” She held out a curved, rough cone about an inch long. “Found this in the core sample. It was sheer accident that the whole thing was inside the core.”

“Worm shell?” Mark guessed.

Her face was intense. “I don’t think so. Granted, this is an alien world. Who knows how evolution goes here? But Mark, I think it’s a tooth. Look—see how it’s worn flat, here? Predators’ teeth get wear patterns like that. Worm shells don’t.”

Sheer shock made Mark feel cold and numb.

“Mark, what would have happened if this world had an extensive ecosystem?” she whispered. “What if it had been like Earth?”

Appalled, Mark forced himself to marshal his education in life sciences and answer her. “The atmosphere must have been partly stripped away and the oceans boiled off to shallow seas. Enough marine microorganisms survived to recolonize the seas. But on land, judging from what we found when we got here, there was nothing left. The continents must have been sterilized. It was as though the evolutionary clock were set back.” He swallowed with difficulty, his throat constricted. “Almost to zero.”

Three hours before dawn, the foreman flipped the main breaker at the powerhouse. The drilling rig’s lights came on. The crew checked their equipment. There was little of the usual banter and horseplay this morning. Two miles down, hole heating up and pipe supply dwindling, today looked like the last day, one way or another.

The foreman replaced the corer, a hollow sharp-rimmed cylinder, with the diamond drill bit. Then the crew lowered the bit into the ground. Joints of pipe followed it, each attached swiftly but securely. Time passed, metered by the clank of pipe being joined to pipe.

Mark felt nearly sick. He’d had too many broken nights and too much work, and now there was a fossil tooth—evidence of sudden death on a planetary scale. Visible through the thickness of the atmosphere near the western horizon, the shredded supernova ring shimmered like the winking of an eye, a vast lidless eye with a tiny, implacable pupil.

The plunging pipe changed its tune, decelerating. Tinaja called out in a clear voice, “We’re here.”

A small crowd of greeners had come out of the home dome to watch. Somebody slapped Mark on the back and blurted something about luck. Whether they believed in Mark’s dream or not—opinion was distinctly divided—the greeners wanted water.

Mark joined Tinaja on the platform. The drill bit met solid limestone far below their boots. The foreman sent the helper, a boy named Dusty, up the derrick to mind the moving parts at the top.

Two miles long in a hot, narrow hole, the pipe behaved like a wet noodle. It took several turns at the top to get any rotation at the bottom to cut the rock. The mud pumps ran at full throttle, forcing cool mud down the throat of the pipe. The mud came back up the hole outside of the pipe, carrying rock chips and heat with it. A fat hose took the mud back to the tank, dumped it in through the mechanized sieve called a shaker. The shaker rattled mindlessly. Thick and grayish-brown, the mud cooled in the open tank. An automatic stirrer made swishing sounds.

Tinaja paced between the rotary table and the shaker. She scraped chips of rock out of the shaker and examined them. She patted the pipe. “Down some more, baby, down some more.”

Machinery rattled and clanged, and the pipe turned tirelessly. Mark saw the knife edge of dawn, a thin rim of light on the eastern horizon. Directly overhead, a bright point of light traversed the dark sky. It was the Starship in polar orbit.

“Pay attention, skygazer!” Tinaja said sharply. “The mud’s changed!” She crouched beside her shaker, watching the mud stream through it, heedless of the spatters. “Frothy.”

“Watery?” Mark asked instantly.

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

Mark stared at the twisting snake of pipe. A scar on the metal revolved with it and slowly moved down.

Some mud bubbled up over the rotary table. The foreman watched it inundate his boots. Over his head the returning mud hose suddenly twitched. “Is the planet fartin’ at us?” asked the foreman.

“I don’t think that’s possible,” Tinaja replied in an uneven voice.

With a loud burp, mud spurted high out of the hole in the middle of the table. On his perch up in the derrick, Dusty ducked. “It’s throwing mud at us!” he sang out.

“You’re not safe up there,” the foreman decided. “Come down.”

A minute later, a brief gout of mud came out of the hole. Mud, with rocks in it, rained down on the platform. “I’ve drilled up a lot of water, but never seen the likes of this.” The foreman sounded uneasy.

Dusty scurried over to peer into the mud tank. “It’s making bubbles and the mud’s higher in the tank than it was!” he reported breathlessly from the edge of the platform by the tank.

“Mixed with water?” Mark demanded.

“No sir, it’s just really foamy.”

Another gout of mud, a hard one, shook the pipe.

In a sharp voice, Tinaja told the foreman, “We can’t have any sparks. If this is some kind of natural gas, then it could be flammable.”

The foreman nodded, then grimly started checking around for moving parts that might strike sparks, or loose electrical connections that could arc.

To Mark, Tinaja muttered, “Natural gas is not supposed to exist on this world—but neither are teeth. Maybe there is a kind of natural gas down there. It might or might not be associated with water.” She cursed briefly and vehemently. “I never studied this in ship school!”

The scar on the pipe turned around and around without going down. Mark approached it, leaning as close to the pipe as he could, heedless of the mud piling out onto on the table. He asked, “Why have you halted the downward motion of pipe?”

“I haven’t,” said the foreman.

“But it’s—”

The pipe slithered upward in front of Mark’s face.

Swearing in surprise, the foreman tried to clamp the pipe. The upward thrust of it tore the clamp apart. Accelerating, the pipe broke something high on the derrick. A piece of metal fell clanging down. Tinaja yelled, “Can’t you stop it?”

The foreman bellowed back, “No! There’s godawful pressure under it!”

The platform shook spasmodically. Dusty lost his balance. Letting out a terrified yell, he slipped into the mud tank with a thick splash.

Closer to the tank than the others, Mark shouted, “I’ll get him!” Holding a jittering railing, Mark reached for Dusty. The boy’s muddy hand slipped out of Mark’s.

The pipe thrusting itself up out of the ground muttered and moaned, noises that vibrated through the platform. Mark heard a shriek from strained metal at the top of the derrick. Tinaja screamed, “It’s breaking the rig apart! Run!”

With shouts and curses the drillers and Tinaja leaped off the platform and scattered. On his third frantic try Mark got a handful of Dusty’s shirt. Dusty scrabbled to get some leverage for himself on the slippery side of the tank.

The hole roared. The platform rocked. Mark almost fell into the mud tank himself. Then he hauled Dusty out while mud and rocks and metal parts rained on them. Dusty shrilled, “It’s shooting into the sky!!”

Dusty meant the pipe. Drill pipe arched high in the air over the derrick. It was being thrown up out of the hole—lofted by gas escaping from underground. The platform quaked. Glowing light bulbs swung wildly on their cords. Any moment now, one of them would smash into shards and sparks.

Mark threw Dusty off the platform and the boy hit the ground running like a jackrabbit. Mark jumped down and angled away from the platform as he raced toward the powerhouse. In the comer of his eye he saw hundreds of feet of noodle-soft pipe still shooting up into the air.