Alexis Latner: The Life-Blood of the Land

Gravity overtook the airborne pipe. A loop of it hit the ground in front of Mark. Thundering, it broke up, thirty-foot lengths bouncing wildly. Mark cowered. But he had to reach the powerhouse. He jumped over a steaming length of pipe to get there.

Tinaja reached the powerhouse just ahead of him. He nearly collided with her. She grabbed the derrick main breaker and threw her whole weight to turn it off. Then she looked past Mark and gasped. “Too late!”

Mark turned, his stomach knotted with dread.

Fire flared above the derrick. Heat from it struck Mark’s face.

The hole under the derrick threw up another gout of mud. Choked, the fire shrank dramatically.

“Now what?” Mark asked hoarsely. Tinaja just shook her head.

They stood closer to the derrick than anybody else. Spectators and drilling crew had fled to the nearest hill with the last of the pipe crashing to the ground at their heels. His eyes transfixed on the damaged derrick, Marie moved in front of Tinaja, for the little protection that he might give her.

The derrick coughed. Then it threw up thick globs of fire. Mark groaned in dismay. His dream had come true, the right image in terrible wrong colors, like a demonic photographic negative. What should have been pale and cool burned instead: a geyser, not of water but of fire. Black smoke coiled into the sky. The derrick howled and shook. Ropes of orange fire coiled up into the air and fell back to the ground, splashing flame. Tinaja let out a shrill cry of dismay. “It’s oil! Oil burning!”

Around the derrick, clumps of dry grass caught fire. The wind blew up a swirl of thin brown smoke, and the smoke pointed toward Chang’s Creek Canyon.

Mark shook off the mesmerization of the flames. He took Tinaja by the shoulders. “Run to the dome, raise the alarm and radio the Ship for help!” Without a word she sprinted away.

Mark charged uphill, toward the greeners and drillers, waving his hands. “Wildfire! Equipment to the Creek!” He panted. “Sand plan!”

Shovels and buckets were cached near the dry creek. Greeners and drillers broke out the tools and frantically shoveled sand over the cacti to protect the plants’ roots. Disturbed grasshoppers jumped and flew short distances.

The firebreak executed so carefully, just yesterday, to guard the canyon, utterly failed. Mark knew that it would. Spurred by the hellfire of burning oil spewing out of the ground, the grass fire rapidly sidled around the firebreak in the gulch.

The front edge of the fire penetrated Chang’s Creek Canyon. Burning bits of vegetation flew through the air.

“Fall back—across the creek bed!” Mark waved everyone across the stony bed of the dry creek that might halt the fire and help them save this, the shadier and greener side of the canyon.

Mark flung the lid off the nearest flood cistern. He plunged a bucket into the warm water. Drillers and greeners threw water on the vegetated ground and splashed the mesquite trees in desperate haste.

An isolated fire flared up in the bushes under the canyon wall. Side by side, Mark and Chang beat it out. Chang had no words of recrimination to spare for Mark. Not yet.

A sudden and startling mechanical noise reverberated in the canyon. Mark looked up, stricken by hope.

An airplane thundered overhead. It banked. On the second pass, the plane dumped a dense streamer of orange powder onto the fire in the gulch.

Coughing, Mark recognized the harsh chemical. Deus ex machina, the firefighting squadron had descended from the Starship in a shuttleplane loaded with fire-suppressing chemical. The plane circled back to release another load. Then it banked toward the column of black smoke in the sky beyond the gulch.

Mark told Chang, “Check around for hot spots and put ’em out.”

Chang nodded, expressionless.

Mark recrossed the stony creek bed. The mesquite trees on the bank, leaves singed off, bore orange powder like a dusting of weird snow.

The chemical had taken the fight out of grass fire. Only a few patches sullenly smoldered. Mark emerged from the bitter smoke in the gulch just in time to see the fire squad’s plane making a brave pass at the fiery fountain spewing out of the drilling rig. The plane tossed an orange plume of chemical at the rig.

The oil inferno barely flickered.

Mark felt detached, like a spectator at a grand and tragic show. He watched the derrick collapse, its metal girders melted, inside the flames.

Something new flew down out of the sky. Not another lumbering shuttleplane: this was a screaming splinter of a jet. The jet charged toward the towering fire. Then the jet pulled up, releasing a dull gray object to tumble down and explode in the midst of the fire.

The bomb’s shock wave flattened and extinguished the flames.

Mark cheered wildly.

Wreckage and dirt fell over the drill hole. But black oil still came out of the ground. Not ablaze anymore, the oil spurted like blood from a cut artery.

The jet arched and returned. This time it hurtled low over the singed landscape. It dropped a second bomb directly onto the hole in the ground. The cratering blast shattered the rock, stopped up the hole. Only a little more oil oozed out. The jet screamed away.

Mark’s ears rang from the two explosions. He did not know how long he had been standing here watching the attack on the fire. It seemed to be nearly noon now.

Mark gave the black, oily bomb crater a wide berth. Yet he found a blob of oil in his way, flung far by the bombing, sticky and smelly, the ancient dark blood of the planet.

The wildfire had run through the field of solar energy collectors next to the derrick. The structures drooped over the charred grass. In the distance, the green grass sketch on the hills had turned ugly, charcoal splotched with lurid orange.

The home dome seemed deserted. It was not flammable, so no one had stayed there to worry about it. Mark fed the spider her overdue breakfast. She was important. A symbol of the web of life. Of which the most vital strand, for the life of continents, was grass. Mark sat down at the kitchen table. Hard hot daylight beat down on him through the skylight, since no one had closed the shutters. Shaking, he folded his arms, buried his head in them, and cried.

Someone shook him by the shoulders. “Mark! Are you hurt?”

Mark flexed his hands. Under a crust of sooty dirt, his raw skin oozed blood and blister water. He shuddered. He looked up at Evrett Reynolds. “How come you’re here?”

“I was watching from orbit,” said Ev. Behind him stood Tinaja, disheveled, her face pale under streaks of soot.

Ev went on, “I watched the terminator sweep toward your part of the planet. Then I saw the flare. It was incredible—there shouldn’t have been that much fuel on the entire continent. My people analyzed the flare immediately. Then they did a data base search for how to fix an oil well blowout, which is what that kind of thing is called. I came down with the fire squadron.”

Tinaja pulled Mark over to the counter sink. She started cleaning his blistery burns with soap and water from the kitchen reservoir. Mark’s fingers and palms hurt fiercely. The pain seemed irrelevant. Through a scratchy, aching throat, he said, “I opened up the gates of hell. It burned up the grass.” Mark felt a quiver in his insides. Maybe he was going to be sick. Or sickeningly sad.

“Mark. Where does soil polymer come from?” Ev asked.

“Garbage. Our conversion rate is up to thirty-seven point six percent,” Mark said defensively. “It’s the best I could—”

“You’ve done fine recycling around here,” Ev soothed. “Polymer comes from garbage after you process it, more or less turning garbage into petroleum. We’ve been making all of our petrochemicals that way.”