Twenty kilometers is a long way, compared to the drives we had taken in the rover so far (which were never more than a few hundred meters).  So, we decided to try out the minirovers, to scout out the path first.  The minirovers aren't sealed (so you have to wear your suit), and they can only carry a couple people, but they use a lot less power because they are so much smaller.  Since Olivia, Liam, and Noah were all recovering from one injury or another, we figured it should be some of the older kids, but not any of those three.  Ava had some practice driving the rover, but Elijah thought she would wreck it.  Ava got angry about this, and said Elijah should try driving if he thought it was so easy, and Elijah said he also didn't want to go himself, and the whole idea was dangerous and we should just make do with the water and power we had, and just not waste any.  It looked like it was going to be a big argument, but then Olivia interrupted to say that Emma and I should go, since we were the two next oldest who weren't injured.  I think Elijah still didn't like the idea, but Liam and Olivia both thought we should at least investigate it, so Emma and I suited up and walked over to Building 14 to get one of the minirovers out of storage.

Emma seemed to think it was fun to drive the minirovers, once she got used to it, whereas I found it nerve-wracking.  On the other hand, I think I was the more careful driver, and I was a little concerned about having my life in Emma's hands.  Emma at first was experimenting with things like how fast could it go, and what happened if you went in a tight circle fast.  I kept reminding myself that Olivia was Emma's best friend, so Olivia must know her well, and if Olivia thought Emma was a good choice for this she was probably not going to get me killed.  I might have tried to insist on driving, but I was the one who had the map to the crater on my tablet, so it made sense for me to navigate instead.

I do recall that we ended up packing enough food and water and other supplies for a long journey, and then it took us about two hours to get to the crater, and I realized we were probably going to be back before we even got hungry, and setting up the portable sealed tents that would allow us to take off our helmets in order to eat and drink would probably be more trouble than just driving back to Building 3.  At least we were prepared if something broke down, I guess.  But Emma also remarked at one point that I had packed as if we were headed to Earth instead of this crater that we could visit and get back from before lunch.  So, she started referring to the crater as "Earth" instead of "MC-278", which is what it was marked as on the map Gerard had sent me.

There were a few spots where we had to hunt around a while for a smoother path, but basically we found a decent route to the crater without too much trouble and only a few times where we had to turn around and backtrack for a while to find a safer way to go.  Once we got there, though, a problem became immediately apparent.  I was picturing something much shallower, which in retrospect was silly because if it were that shallow the water ice at the bottom would have been hit by the sun long enough every day to evaporate long ago.  This crater was much deeper, and steeper, than I was picturing; it must not have been very old, as craters go.

The point is that there was no way the rover could safely drive down to near the frozen lake at the bottom.  It wasn't even terribly clear how we could safely drive over the edge of the crater at all.  Emma and I got out and walked over it, and it wasn't that hard to climb if you were careful and held on to one end of cables that were attached to the front of the rover on the other end.  The rover, though, (or even the mini-rovers) weren't made for climbing over rock walls, or even the ridge around the edge of a crater.  We spent a few minutes wandering around, and took a few images of the area to show to the others, but we both got pretty quiet, and I think neither one of us wanted to say, "this isn't going to work" out loud until the other one did.

So, we talked about other things on the way back.  I think we talked about how good or bad other people were at singing, mostly.  Like during singing recipes.  I asked Emma how well I sang, and she got a funny look on her face like she didn't know what to say, and then said she mostly couldn't hear me because we were all singing together and I never took the lead.  If I am understanding that correctly, I think maybe I will continue to sing only softly and as part of the chorus.  But she was trying very hard to be nice about it.  I'm not sure you can go to Emma if you want an honest opinion about your shortcomings; she's no Lucas.  But she is very good about trying to make other people feel good about themselves.

When we got back to the Colony, I started to get depressed.  It was pretty clear that it would be hard to convince people to risk driving our one and only full sized rover down into the crater, close enough to the ice to either melt it or chip it away, get it to the rover, and then bring it back to the Colony and melt it.  Much less doing this many times, so that we could eventually get enough water to turn the geothermal back on, while still replacing enough of the water that we had melted out of the regolith so that we didn't cause quakes to bring down every other building like it did Building 10.  So, what were we going to do?

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that what we were most likely going to do, was turn either turn off the geothermal power and pretend that the batteries weren't going to slowly go bad, or else keep on the geothermal and pretend it wasn't going to cause more quakes.  Or perhaps, we would keep switching back and forth, and in the meantime argue about it a lot, until one disaster or the other actually happened.  In other words, we were going to do more or less what the adults had done, which is to slowly let the Monster grind us down.

I talked it over with Noah, and he was not quite as pessimistic as I was.

"So, if we can't drive the rover down into it, we are going to have to suck the water up to the edge of the crater," he said.

"What?"

"We need a long tube, like a giant straw."

"Noah, I'm serious, this is a big problem," I said, annoyed because I thought he was being silly.

"So am I," he said, and I realized that he was acting more energetic than he had since before he got trapped in the collapse of Building 10, and the frostbite was still visible but was starting to look a little less raw.

"Wait, what?  A giant straw?"

"Not literally, I mean something more like a firehose, but in reverse.  We have a pump at the rover, and a hose that goes down to the lake.  We use it to pump water up to the tank that we pull behind the rover."

"But there's no lake, or not a liquid one, anyway.  We were going to use the rover's batteries to melt some of the water."

"So, it's a firehose and a long cable.  Or we find something else to make heat down there.  There's a lot of ways to make heat, I bet we can find one that we can get to the bottom of that crater."

"Maybe we could find something in the chemistry lab that would create heat, like combine two chemicals on the spot and have them react.  That would be easy to transport," I admitted.

"Good idea," said Noah.

From that point on, he started talking and planning as if it was a given that we were going to do this.  It did occur to me at one point that I had never actually agreed that this plan was practical, but since I didn't quite disagree, that was it, and Noah kind of pulled me along with his confidence.  But, I notice whenever Liam or Olivia were in earshot, it was always just an idea that we were investigating, not a thing we had actually decided to do.  I think, given the whole way that geothermal power had gotten started, that neither Liam nor Olivia were particularly fooled, but they didn't try to stop us.  If we spent an hour or two every day rummaging through other buildings trying to find the best long hose to use to pump water up the side of a crater, as long as we hadn't actually started to actually do it yet, I think they thought they would just let us prepare.

At one point, though, Olivia did swing by on her crutches and say, "So, uh, you guys are not going to actually try driving the main rover to this crater without talking to everyone about it first, right?"

"Sure, of course," I said immediately.  Olivia nodded, politely, but with a look on her face like she wasn't actually worried about me doing that.  She stood there, for a while, looking at Noah.  He tried to look preoccupied with what he was doing, trying to find which in a box of fittings was the one we needed to fit hose to pump, and didn't look up or make eye contact.  Olivia wasn't fooled, and she stayed there looking at him.  Several very long moments passed.

"Noah?" she finally said.

"Yeah, sure, no problem," he said.

Then Olivia gave me a long look, which I think meant, 'you keep an eye on him and don't let me down', and went off to let us do our thing.  

Whenever Elijah or Charlotte were around, Noah and I pretended to be doing something else entirely.

Eventually, we had found half a dozen hoses that would work, assuming that Liam would let us remove them from Building 3 for a little while (they were intended for use in moving water between reserve tanks, I think, because they were too big to be used for watering plants).  We also found a pump that would fit in the rover and run off its power, and fittings to connect the hoses to the pump.  We thought at first that we were going to have to just fill the rover with barrels and buckets, and started measuring and planning how to fit as many as possible in there, to make sure we got the most volume possible.

"Wouldn't it just be easier to use the tank?" asked Lucas.

"What tank?" asked Noah, or maybe it was me, or actually I think we both said it at the same time.

"The one your dad ordered," said Lucas.  "He talked about it in some of the files on his tablet.  He had to make designs, and get approval from Earth to use that much steel, and then get them to cast the pieces and weld it all together.  I think it's in Building 14.  It has wheels and you can attach it to the back of the rover, and it would hold a lot of water.  More than all of those barrels would, I think."

Keep in mind that Noah and I had been working on finding as many barrels and so forth as we could, for like a day and a half at this point, and Lucas had been tagging along for nearly all of it.  Mia kind of held her head in her hands as if it was going to explode, because she had been tagging along with us for most of it as well.  I expect I kind of looked the same.  Noah, on the other hand, looked somewhat amused, although also exasperated.

"It seems like it would be a lot easier than doing it this way," Lucas added, still apparently oblivious to the fact that three different people were wondering why he hadn't mentioned this before.

"Well, Lucas," said Noah, "what an interesting point you are making.  Why don't we go check out this tank you speak of?"

I should mention that Building 14 was pretty much just the place where big stuff went, if it wasn't used very often.  Smaller stuff went in Building 20, things that were small enough they could be moved easily for New Year's parties or all-Colony meetings or that sort of thing.  Building 14 was where the stuff was put that was too big to move easily.  So it made sense that was where the tank got stored, if it wasn't going to be used immediately.  I'm guessing it was finished not long before the Evacuation, so there wasn't time to use it.  Or, who knows, maybe Dad wanted to, but he couldn't get the other adults to agree to do it.  I never heard it discussed, so I guess I'll never know.

It also occurred to me, of course, that for some reason they had decided not to do it because the whole idea was daft, and I just hadn't realized that yet.

When we finally got Liam and Olivia to agree to let us try it, they had both recovered enough to help out.  Olivia's legs were still in braces, but she could sit in the rover and even drive.  Liam's hand wasn't 100%, but it was good enough that he decided he could come along, and just favor the other hand.  Noah was on board, of course, and so were Emma and Ava.  That left Elijah and Charlotte to watch the younger kids, which was fine because neither of them were very keen on the idea anyway.

It was kind of a disaster.  But, not the sort of disaster that Elijah (and probably also Charlotte) were worried about.

We had discussed a few ways of trying to create heat down at the surface of the frozen lake: some sort of chemical reaction that didn't require oxygen, bringing a tank of oxygen and using it to make something burn on the surface of the ice, running wires from a battery to make sparks on the surface of the ice.  In the end, we realized that all of these seemed likely to not work all that well, or else to work entirely too well all of a sudden and give us a different problem.  So, we decided it would be a better idea to just chop blocks of ice out of the frozen lake, haul them up to the rover, dump them in, and let them melt there.

It turns out, ice is hard.  I mean, I knew it was hard compared to liquid water, obviously, but I didn't know how much work it would be to chisel out a block of ice.  We sweated and grunted and flailed about for about an hour, until we were pretty exhausted.  Then, we tried to carry the disturbingly small blocks of ice which we had liberated, up the side of the crater to dump into the tank.  At the end of it all, after driving back to the Colony (by which time the tank's heater should have melted all the ice) the tank's gauge said it was 3% full.

What was more depressing, is that when we drained the tank into buckets to use for watering plants in Building 3 (since it sure wasn't enough to make any significant difference when using the geothermal plant), we saw that a lot of what actually got into the tank was rust-colored dust, not ice.

"This is not going to work," said Lucas.