In the next few weeks, we entered into a new phase, that was somewhat stable. We had a lot of food, and the crops seemed to all be growing well enough. Liam was trying out some more types of seeds that we had in storage, and now that he was able to bring his "forbidden" plants out into the open, we had started to get more variety. This is good, because it gave the bees more kinds of flower to get nectar from, and we didn't expect to be able to keep feeding them sugarwater for much longer. Some of the berry plants were starting to produce, and the bees were starting to give us just a little bit of honey. He let us each have a slice of tomato, which seemed like it would be a nice addition once we had more. There was even a table in one part of Building 3 with a few dozen wheat plants, which caused Alexander and Harper and some of the other little kids to think that we would have bread soon. Liam had to explain that this first generation would just be used to make more seeds, but said that by this time next year we could probably have a small amount of bread. Olivia was at work on figuring out how to use the chemistry lab to make more salt, so that when Charlotte ran out of what we had in storage we could get more. Lots of things were going reasonably well. We had decided on a compromise plan where we only used the geothermal at night, when the solar wasn't providing any power. The batteries had only so much life left, and already they did not charge up as fully as they were supposed to. Really, there wasn't much choice, and we tried to remind ourselves of that whenever there was a slight tremor. We hadn't had any big quakes yet, not since the one that had brought down Building 10, and we were hoping that if we used the geothermal only part of the time, the ground would settle slowly, a little bit at a time, and not result in another big quake. "That would be pretty simple if it worked," said Lucas. "I wonder why the adults didn't think of that?" Obviously, the adults had probably thought of that. I was beginning to realize why the adults had gotten into the habit of not talking out loud about problems that they didn't know a good solution to. It felt awful (to everyone except Lucas, apparently). The problem is, if you don't talk about it, you'll never come up with a solution. The flip side of that was, if you do talk about problems that you don't know a good solution to, you may still not come up with a solution, and then you not only have that problem, you've also now got a lot of depressed and angry people, which is its own kind of extra problem. So, Noah and I talked about it while we played video games, when there weren't many other people nearby to overhear us, so that it didn't get everyone upset but we could keep our minds engaged on it, just in case that helped us come up with something. Also, I'm not sure why, but I set up one of the remote cameras so that it would photograph the crater that we called "Earth". I had found the instructions for the camera controls on my dad's tablet, and it took Noah and I a while to figure out how to use it. You had to set up a little solar panel to recharge its battery every day, and the comlink back to the Colony, and then the actual controls of the camera itself. Lucas and Mia helped out, mostly by asking questions, but that is a kind of help it turns out. You have to organize your thoughts somewhat in order to explain things out loud to answer someone else's question, and once you've organized your thoughts enough to do that, you sometimes find out that the answer to one of your own questions is more clear. We had set up one at a few different places around the colony, and then eventually I got the idea that we could set it up so that it looked down into the crater with the frozen lake at the bottom. I'm not sure why we were spending time doing that, we had no particular plan for how to use any information it might give us. There wasn't much on Mars that moved around that we needed to know about, except for the weather patterns that we already had other systems to tell us about. I think the excuse we used was that we could see if it got bigger or smaller over time. It wasn't much of an excuse. The real reason is probably that it became kind of a game, like a puzzle, and we were finally at a point where things were stable enough that we could spend a little time and energy on a project just for the heck of it. Isabella talked Charlotte into helping her to put on a little play, the first one since the Electrocution. Charlotte asked me to help her find a script in the culture files, and we found one based on a story about three pigs and a wolf, which seemed to be about making your house stable and strong and that seemed like a good lesson. It was also probably the story that Sophie and Amelia and William had seen years ago, that caused William to look up how wolves mark their territory. Isabella got Alexander and Henry and Evelyn to be the pigs, and little Harper was dressed up as a wolf. It was sort of cute overload, but Isabella more or less directed them, and we all had to sit there and watch and applaud. I'm led to believe that Isabella was going to sing the song at the end, but Charlotte talked her into having us all sing it together, which was kind of excruciating but also kind of hilarious. Without the sound of chopping vegetables to keep us in beat, we sort of wandered all over the place. Olivia and Emma and Benjamin all seemed to like it a lot, and clapped really loud; the rest of us thought it was funny, anyway, so we clapped as well. Isabella looked really proud and happy, and that made the rest of us feel good. Olivia's legs were not healed yet, but they seemed to be getting there, and Liam's hand healed pretty fast, and Noah's frostbite still looked wonky but basically it wasn't really hurting him any more. That also gave us the illusion of progress. It had been more than 18 weeks since the Electrocution, and while that still had a dark grey place in our hearts and a knot in our guts, it was fading some. We were now eating mostly food we had grown ourselves, that had grown from seed to seedling to full plant to harvest to soup, salad, or whatever else Charlotte could come up with (and the rest of us could help her sing it into becoming). That felt like progress. It did make us feel, for a while, like we were settling into a good life, full of promise and hope. Instead of keeping ourselves busy so that we wouldn't think about the fact that we were doomed, and going to die an excruciating cold and painful death, or else maybe a frightening and fast one, which is what was actually happening. Because, we were ignoring the fact that we didn't have any plan to provide power that didn't involve melting all the ice in the regolith, the ground under our homes, and not replacing it with anything, such that eventually our buildings would all crack open and collapse like Building 10 did. The only other alternative we had was to pretend that the batteries that got charged up by the solar power would just keep working, instead of slowly wearing out, until one night they would fail to keep the power going and all of our life support would give out and it would get very dark and very, very cold. We were just ignoring all that, and growing food and learning how to work more and more of the equipment in the other buildings, and just trying to pretend that it was all ok. But it wasn't ok. Then, on the 130th day since the Electrocution, 84 days after Charlotte's parents left and didn't come back and we were all officially on our own, the remote camera showed us something on the side of the crater we called "Earth", that I didn't recall seeing before. "Hey Noah, look at this," I said. "What the fuck is that?" commented Noah, with very little emotion really (it doesn't take much for Noah to resort to profanity, you may have noticed). "I don't know. Is that some kind of landslide?" "Maybe. Why is it white?" "I don't know. What color are landslides supposed to be?" "They're supposed to be rock-colored, dude. Like, land-colored, except they have slid. Mia, please explain to Oliver what a landslide is." Mia looked from Noah to me with those big eyes open but not much expression, blinked once, and then added, "I think Oliver knows that already." Was she smiling? It is sometimes hard to tell if Mia is smiling. Lucas looked up the definition of landslide on his tablet and tried to show it to me, which annoyed me and delighted Noah. I think it was in part my annoyance that made me say what I said next. "I'm going to go look." "What? Dude, the sun is setting already. It'll be dark before long." "So? The minirover has lights, and I know the way already." "Why such a hurry?" asked Noah. I didn't answer (because it would have made me sound childish to say "because I'm annoyed and it's an excuse to leave this conversation"), but just got up and started putting on my suit. "Whoa, whoa, are you sure?" "Yep," I said, not stopping. "I'm coming with," said Noah, and then turning to the two youngers he added, "but you two stay here, ok?" "What do we say if someone asks where you are?" asked Mia. "Don't tell them," said Noah. "We can't just not tell them," said Mia. "Olivia or Liam will want an answer. Or Elijah or Charlotte." We got all the way to where the minirover was, parked inside Building 14, before I realized this was a bad idea. I stood there, in the driver's seat, Noah sitting next to me, waiting. I didn't have anything ready for if our minirover broke down, and we needed to repair it or (more likely, given how much I knew about repairing minirovers) walk back. If we needed to call for help, there was no one ready to come get us. If they took a long time to come get us, I had no spare oxygen tanks to keep us alive while we waited. The last time, Emma had said we were packed like we were going to Earth. This time, we were packed like we were going from one room to the other. I sat there for a bit, fiddling with the controls, checking the map on the tablet, trying to come up with some excuse to not go. I couldn't exactly think of anything that didn't make me sound like an idiot for having decided to go on this trip, after dark and with so little preparation. I had just about decided that I was just going to have to go anyway, and hope nothing went wrong along the way, when Noah interrupted my thinking. "Dude," he said, "just say it." "Say what?" "Say that we're not ready, and we should wait until tomorrow when we have more daylight, and time to get ready." "But if we wait that long, whatever it is might be gone," I said, not really protesting with much vehemence but I had to say it. "Yeah, that's true. Which would be slightly annoying. If we break down or get in an accident and it's night and nobody knew we were going, it will be worse than annoying." So, I did a few more minutes of half-hearted arguing, which Noah was smart enough to see for what it was, and he calmly countered every argument of mine, and then we went back to Building 3. "That was quick," said Lucas. "I thought Earth was farther away than that." Mia gave him a look, half eyeroll and half smile. I wonder if she does that same look behind my back ever. "I decided we needed to spend more time to get better prepared, so we can't go tonight," I said. "Oh, YOU decided that, did you?" asked Noah. We talked it over with Liam and Olivia, and they decided we could go the next morning. When we went, I ended up driving, which given that Noah had more experience was probably not ideal, but I felt like I needed to know how to do this. I think I did alright, although there was a lot of jerking forward and lurching to a stop at first, but by the time we got to Earth I was a lot smoother. We also took fewer wrong turns than the first time, when Emma and I went and we didn't know which route to take yet. We got out of the minirover, walked over to the edge of the crater, and crawled up to the rim to look down. Nothing. "It's gone," I said. "What's gone?" asked Noah. "Maybe it was just a problem with the camera. Weird lighting or something." "I think it was ice. It was ice, and now it's all evaporated." "Dude, this is Mars, it doesn't snow here. Ice doesn't just show up." "It could have erupted out of the side of the crater," I said. "Now you're just making shit up," said Noah. "No, we've seen evidence of it before. There's a lot of water beneath the surface, and sometimes it moves as it heats up, and depending on how it moves through the soil it may erupt from the side of a crater or hill." Noah didn't have an answer for me, right away. I think it might have passed through his mind that if we had come here last night, we might have been able to get some of it. "It wasn't really any easier to get at this point higher up, than at the bottom," I said. "But it would have been nice to be here as it was melting." "Melting? You mean subliming," said Noah. "Outside, water goes straight from solid to gas." "Not if it's mixed with enough of the right kind of salts," I said. "My dad was studying up on this. If the water that erupts out of the side of the crater is mixed with enough of the right kinds of salts¸ it can be liquid, if it's in the right temperature range." "Well, ok maybe, but what makes you think the water here has just the right kind of salts to run as a liquid?" "Two things," I said. "One, the photo showed it coating a good part of the side of the crater. So it was running down the side of it for a while, then solidifying, like a frozen waterfall back on Earth." "Maybe, unless we're interpreting that photo wrong," said Noah. "And two, that," I said, and pointed at the lake of frozen water at the bottom of the crater. "I think that's why the lake is here. Every once in a while, water erupts out of the side, and maybe most of it evaporates before it runs down the side, but a little bit gets to the bottom before it freezes. Like a smart-ass I know once said, 'ice doesn't just show up'." Noah didn't say anything for a while, but I could tell he was starting to be convinced. "How often do you think this happens?" he asked. "No way to know, I don't think," I said. "But if it happens again, I want to be ready."