There was a sudden crunching, tinkling noise, and the inner air-lock door ground inward an inch and a half. On the next blow, it moved six inches, and the next caused the door to swing almost fully open, amid a sound like a cement mixer filled with champagne glasses. With nothing left in its way, Jack the Ripper shut down.
White dust drifted smokily in their lights. As it settled, they could see that the corridor beyond was coated with ice.
"They were hooked to a water source, all right," A.J. said, quite unnecessarily. "Well, let's take a look-see."
After he and Skibow moved the ripper to the side, all four of them started cautiously down the icy tunnel. Helen and A.J. were in the lead, with Rich coming next and Madeline bringing up the rear.
"The ice starts off incredibly thick on the ceiling," Helen reported. "Two meters thick, at a guess. Fortunately the roof is much higher than I'd expect with Bemmie construction. I think that's because, from the looks of it once the ice starts thinning out, this was originally a natural formation that they just took advantage of. The ice starts tapering two thirds of the way through, and is gone completely about fifteen meters from the end. The roof here is just rock. The walls are sort of gray colored, with the floors almost black."
"I see another door," Rich said. "It looks like it has a plaque with the same airlock markings."
Madeline came last, walking down the ice-coated corridor carefully, to keep from slipping. She was quite a ways behind them because she'd stopped to study the wall at one point.
The ceiling collapsed.
To Madeline, time seemed to freeze. The fact that the great slabs of ice fell more slowly than they would have on Earth just made the coming doom a bit more protracted. Even three eighths of a ton, multiplied by untold tons, is a crushing weight.
If time seemed frozen, her brain wasn't.
She saw A.J., Rich, and Helen ahead of her—facing the wrong way, and too far in any case to be able to reverse direction and escape. They were now almost at the far end of the tunnel.
They weren't in immediate danger, because Madeline could now see that only the central area of the tunnel was caving in. That was the part right above her.
She glanced back and saw that she had no time to make it out herself, even if the supports beyond the tunnel held and the entire cave system didn't come down. And even if she could, the other three would be trapped.
She might—barely—be able to race to shelter with them at the far end, assuming she didn't slip on the treacherous footing. But that would just leave all four of them trapped.
With not much oxygen left, only the water in their small sip tanks, and no food. And only Bruce and Joe—and him with a broken leg—to try and get them out. With, even leaving aside the fact they'd have asphyxiated by then, not more than forty hours they could count on the suits remaining powered. Once the batteries were dead, they'd freeze within minutes.
In the very short time it took her to finish that assessment, the slabs had come more than halfway down. There was only one possible chance left, slim as it might be. She took a step forward, stopped, planted her legs, extended her arms at what she guessed was the best angle, and braced herself.
The ice arrived.
A moaning, grumbling noise echoed through the tunnel. A.J. spun to see the roof coming down, seeming to break in two directly above Madeline's head.
A ghostly blast of white-red dust filled the corridor. A.J. felt himself dragged backward by Helen, away from the collapse. The two of them tripped over something. They fell to the floor and lay there, expecting to see the roof come down on top of them also.
"Madeline! A.J.! Helen!" Joe's voice came faintly over the radio. "Are you all right? What's happening down there?"
Dust fogged the air so thickly that A.J. felt an impulse to cough or hold his breath, despite the fact that none of it could possibly get to him. His voice was strained when he answered.
"Cave-in, Joe. Me and Helen seem to be okay." The rumbling had faded away. The ceiling in this far area of the tunnel seemed solid enough. He looked at Helen, who blinked wide-eyed back at him. For a moment the two just held each other. He saw Rich picking himself up. He was apparently what they'd tripped over. "Rich is okay too."
"What about Madeline?"
It was starting to sink in. "Jesus . . . She was smack in the middle of the tunnel when it came down."
He heard a choking sound from Joe, a sound filled with so much pain that it caused his own eyes to sting. "I'm going to take a look, Joe. We really don't know anything yet."
Despite that attempt at reassurance, A.J. had no real hope that Madeline was still alive, as he groped his way toward where she'd been. Ice dust still drifted thick as smoke in a burning building in the corridor. He couldn't see anything, although he could sense Helen and Rich following him.
"I can't see anything at all yet. Place is filled with ice dust. Some rock dust too, looks like. Hold on . . ."
He could now make out vague dark shapes in the beam of his light. "Clearing up slowly. Probably all blocked, but I'll get as close as—"
He broke off sharply. Just stared, wide-eyed.
Helen and Rich came up beside him. "Holy . . ." Rich started to say, but trailed off, unable to finish.
Helen said nothing at all. Just shook her head, back and forth, like a metronome.
Finally, A.J. cleared his throat, very loudly. "I swear, I swear, I swear. I will never again made a wisecrack about Supergirl."
Madeline stood in the center of the corridor, her arms stretched up and out to either side at perhaps a sixty-degree angle. Her hands held up two huge slabs of ice which, in turn, prevented most of the ice above from erasing the entire corridor like a bubble from a wad of dough.
They heard a gasp from her. Now that the ice dust was clearing away, A.J. could see that Madeline's eyes looked as wide as his felt.
"W-what do you know . . ." she said shakily. "It worked. For now, anyway."
"What?
What
worked? How the hell are you holding up all that? Dammit, you're
not that strong
. Three-eighths gravity be damned. No human being who ever lived is that strong!"
By the end, he was almost screeching. A.J. realized he sounded half-hysterical; relief, terror, incomprehension all mingled in his high-pitched demand. Somewhere in the background, but not really grasping the words, he could hear Joe hollering words that combined relief and demands for a coherent report.
"No, I'm not." Madeline took a slow breath, settling her own nerves. "But I thought the suit might be."
The dazzling Fathom smile came. Even shining through her faceplate, it seemed to light up the whole tunnel. "I remembered what you did with Joe, after he broke his leg."
Enlightenment burst over A.J. "Mother of God. You made your whole suit go to rigid impact mode and lock that way. With mostly carbonan components . . . yeah, it could work. Genius. Pure effing genius."
He finally understood, now, why Hathaway had been so insistent that Madeline accompany them.
False modesty aside, A.J. knew he was extraordinarily intelligent. Something of a genius, in many ways. But his mind groped to imagine the combination of foresight, quick thinking, and instantaneous reaction that had enabled Madeline to do what she'd done.
A.J. knew he'd never have been able to do it himself, if he'd been in her position. He'd have been nothing more than a smear in the ice.
In the end, brains were only a part of it—and a small part at that. The universe that had shaped Madeline Fathom was just a completely different one than had shaped A.J. Baker.
Whatever residual animosity he still had regarding Madeline's role in the expedition finally vanished. She was what she was—but she was all of it. You couldn't pick and choose what you liked.
"The good and the bad and the ugly," he murmured.
It was a package deal. And—on Mars, all things considered—one hell of a good package. It had kept them all alive, when they'd otherwise surely have been dead.
He must have murmured louder than he thought.
"Thank you, I guess. Joe doesn't think I'm ugly, though, so poop on you."
Impossibly, her smile brightened. "Now, A.J.—if you don't mind—I'd like to be able to unlock the suit and put my arms down someday. This is going to get very uncomfortable, after a while."
"We're on it." The hollering over the radio finally registered. "Hey, Joe, calm down, will you? She's alive and smarter than we are."
"
Thank God
. Thank God. Madeline—"
"It's okay, Joe. I'm fine, really I am. It was scary for a minute, but if the cave back of us is okay, we're going to be just fine."
"I want you back here right away."
"Don't be silly, Joe. If I unlock the suit, we'll be trapped—and it's going to take Helen and A.J. and Rich quite some time to substitute some other sort of bracing. So just hold your horses."
While the rest of them were preoccupied with Madeline's situation, Rich had passed gingerly through the "Madeline Arch" and gone to check conditions at the opening of the tunnel.
"I think we're okay," he said, coming back. "The bracing held. In fact, as near as I can tell, the roof out there is just fine. I thought at first that the roof had caved in because of a Marsquake, but I think it was just the localized effects of the strain the ripper put on this area near the door we forced. Why it worked that way, I have no idea."
Chad Baird spoke over the radio. "Underground structures can be very quirky. In fact, that's exactly what I was worried about." His voice sounded a little shaky, too. "What kills most people in mining operations is not the big dramatic explosions and cave-ins and floodings that make the national news. Those are awfully rare, at least when proper safety precautions are taken. But coal miners and hard-rock miners still get killed, year after year, in ones and twos—because a piece of the roof came loose and fell on them."
He paused a moment, as if checking something. "I can tell you for sure and certain there's been no Marsquake in that area. Our sensors would have picked it up. So I'm almost positive Rich is right. I hate to say it, but it was your own activities that weakened the roof."
"Gotcha," said A.J. "On the bright side, we've got some good titles for new movies.
Indiana Jones Had It Coming.
"
Joe chimed in, almost giggling with relief. "
Lara Crusht, Tomb Raider No More.
"
"Hey, that's good. The sequel to follow:
The Mummy
—"
"SHUT UP!" Helen and Madeline shouted simultaneously.
"Please," added Rich.
A.J. choked off the rest. Then: "Ah, right. Let's get Madeline out of her new job as a roof column. Joe, switch from movie fan mode to engineer mode, will you? This is going to be tricky, since we don't have much in the way of material to make supports from."
With three of them working together, it took about four hours to get sufficient bracing jacked into place to let Madeline relax her suit. Most of the "bracing," unfortunately, was nothing fancier than moving pieces of ice and a few loose rocks into what they hoped was a supportive structure.
None of them were very happy with the results, when it was done. The "support structure" looked more like a pile of rubble than anything else. But at least, at Joe's suggestion, they'd been able to carefully position the ripper in such a way as to serve as a more substantial brace for what seemed to be the shakiest area.
That done, at Madeline's insistence, the others cleared the corridor. Then she unlocked the suit and, slowly and gingerly, lowered her arms.
But there was no sign of movement from the roof, except a very slight slippage that Jack the Ripper's tines kept from moving more than a few inches. Almost tiptoeing her way, Madeline came out of the corridor. Once safely outside, she started wiggling her arms to get them working again. Four hours holding her hands over her head, even in low gravity and with the suit doing the actual load-bearing, had not done pleasant things to her blood circulation.
"Not so bad, really," she assured them. "I've done worse in other places."
Helen suddenly hugged her. A moment later, A.J. and Rich joined in. For about a minute, the four people were clutched in a spacesuited huddle far beneath the surface of Mars, all of them shaking a little as the reaction finally set in.
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."
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.