For the next thirty days or so, I spent every day wondering if today would be the day.  I had the pump, the big hose with all of the fittings, and everything else that I knew of, ready in the rover, with the tank parked right near the Building 14 exit.  The idea was that if the satellite photo from that day showed what looked like ice on the side of that crater again, everything would be ready for me and as many of the others as I could convince to go, to drive there in the middle of the night and wait for dawn.  Once the light hit it, it would start to melt.  Actually, a lot of it would probably turn directly to water vapor, but my hope was that enough of it would melt that it would be possible to use the pump and hoses to vacuum up enough of it to be worthwhile.

Noah and I even took a minirover out to the crater again, just to make sure we knew the path well.  We told Olivia and Liam we were going, and they didn't say anything positive, but they also didn't try to talk us out of it.  I realized that we would need to know the route well enough to drive it in the dark, so that we could get there before sunrise.

Elijah and Charlotte thought it sounded dangerous.  Noah and Ava were into it, ready to go.  Olivia and Liam and Emma were in between, and the younger kids were all looking at them to decide.  I would bring up the topic whenever it seemed like people were in a good positive mood, and if the conversation would seem to be running into a lot of opposition I would drop it and not push the issue.  I think the hardest part was to get Noah and Ava to let it go, for that day, and not push it so much that the others got angry and turned hard against it.  So, it was still kind of an open question, as to whether or not we would do this, and after a while it started to seem like it wasn't going to happen soon anyway, maybe ever, so perhaps it was a moot point.  Maybe this thing where water erupted happened once every ten years or more.

So naturally we started getting serious about figuring out how to get to the supply pod that was coming in less than thirty days.  It wasn't absolutely certain where it would land, but we knew the general area.  It was in roughly the opposite direction of the crater we called "Earth" (you know, Gerard, I really wish now we had given it a different name, so I would not have to specify "the crater we called..." every time when I'm writing this, but I think otherwise it might be confusing to read if I just wrote 'the opposite direction of Earth'; naming things is hard).  It was the first time any of us had been involved in retrieving a supply pod; this was always done by people like Olivia's dad, when he was on Mars, or other adults.

We tried to prepare by doing a couple mini-rover trips to the general area where it would land, just to see what the possible obstacles were.  It gave us all more practice at driving, and at navigating.  There was a radio telescope on top of Building 5, that allowed us to track the supply pod and see how far away it was.  By the way, Gerard, thanks for helping us to learn how to use that to calculate the arrival time; it was still anxious waiting, but it would have been worse if we had not known how long we needed to wait.

Once we had the list of what was supposed to be in it, we started planning what to do with it all.  By 'planning', I mostly mean arguing, but we did eventually end up with a plan at the end of it.  More table salt and other spices to use for food, more batteries (not as many as we would have wanted, but even a few more was good), and some replacement parts for the servers.  Also, things like more adult-sized clothing and replacement parts for equipment in Building 10, that wasn't all that useful, at least not for a long time.

Olivia got kind of excited when she found out about the chicken eggs.  I think several of us wondered if we should just cook them, but they were fertilized and that seemed like it might be kind of grotesque, and anyway she seemed to be convinced that we could restart Building 17.  We'll see.  She's not usually the type to get excited about something and then drop it soon after, so I suppose if she's so determined that it could be done, she may do it.

We talked about how it was all stowed in the supply pod (thanks for the details, Gerard), and how we would unload it, and then how it should be put into the rover and which building to take each part of it to.  Some of it was just that we were excited about it, but some of it was also a bit of paranoia.  We knew this wasn't something we would get a second chance at, not for many years if ever, and we didn't want to leave anything to chance.

Then, two days before it was supposed to arrive, in the middle of the night, the camera at the crater called "Earth" signalled that it had detected movement.  It's got a pretty decent ability to ignore dust swirling, but when it's in nighttime mode sometimes it gets fooled, so I almost didn't get up and check.  But, for some reason, I did, maybe because I wasn't sleeping very well anyway.  I stumbled over to the terminal at one end of Building 3 to look at the feed from that camera, and I saw it: water, liquid water, spewing out of the side of the crater, freezing solid as it ran down the side.  There was already a long white ripple, like a frozen waterfall (I guess it wasn't 'like' a frozen waterfall, I guess it was a frozen waterfall).  I think I must have shouted or something, because a lot of people showed up to look over my shoulder at the screen.

"Dude, it's actually flowing right now," said Noah.  "Oh, wait, only for a little bit, then it freezes.  Still, that's pretty cool."

"We could get it!" I said.

"What?" asked a bunch of people at once.

"If we're there by the time the sun comes up, we could get it as it melts in the sun!"

"It won't melt, though, won't it turn straight to vapor?" asked Olivia.

"It's got some kind of salt in it that makes it possible for it to be liquid," said Noah.

"Are we sure?" asked Liam.

"It's liquid right now, isn't it?" asked Lucas.  "At least for a little bit."

"But it'll be at a different temperature when the sun rises," said Olivia.  "How do we know that it will still turn liquid before it evaporates?"

There was a long pause, where nobody said anything.

"We don't," said Ava, "but if we wait here to find out, it will be too late.  Let's just go and try.  If it turns straight to vapor, then it's just a few hours wasted trip.  It's worth the risk."

"I don't think a few hours wasted is the worst that could happen," said Elijah.

There was another long pause, as everybody pictured what the worst was that could happen.  On a long rover trip, there were a lot of possibilities.  We could wreck the rover.  It could die on the way, and we would have to walk back for hours, which gave a lot more chances for other things to go wrong.  We could drive the wrong direction in the dark and go over a cliff or have the soil erode beneath us in a way we didn't expect, and end up flipping the thing.

"Elijah, do you really think we should just sit here and not try?" asked Emma.  For some reason, we all turned to look at Elijah.  I guess it was because part of us knew that driving over unpaved terrain for hours in the night, with no possibility of rescue if something went wrong, might not be the right idea.  But, staying in the Colony and never leaving did not seem like the right idea, either.  If we could talk Elijah into it, probably it was a risk worth taking.

Elijah scowled, as he saw all of the faces turned towards him, including Liam and Olivia.  He wasn't used to being asked for his opinion.  He looked down at the ground, and frowned for a bit, then he looked up.

"Oh godammit, ok, let's do it.  Otherwise, you people will all blame me that it didn't happen."

It was the most Elijah-sounding way of saying 'yes let's do it' I could imagine, but we all got up and started preparing.  Charlotte agreed to stay with the youngers, and it was pretty easy to convince her because she didn't like the whole idea anyway.  Convincing Lucas to stay was harder, but Mia pointed out that he was the one who knew the most about how to use the terminal to receive the camera feed, and everyone who stayed at the Colony was going to want to watch.  Olivia decided she was driving.  We briefly considered using the mechsuits, but they were just going to make us bigger and more dangerous to each other, and there wasn't going to be any heavy lifting anyway.  It did kind of feel like going into battle without armor.

Because, there was no doubt in my mind (or anyone else's, I suspect) that the Monster would be waiting for us.  We were going far outside our comfort zone, basically all of the older kids, so if It could get to us, the ones who were left would probably be doomed.  I'm pretty sure the thought had occurred to Charlotte that she might end up in the same situation her parents had been in, with all of her peers dead and a bunch of younger ones looking to her to figure out what to do next.

Driving at night was creepy and disturbing, but we had done this route a few times already, so we knew where we were going and how to get there (and what spots to avoid).  The rover was a lot bigger and heavier, and there was always the chance that there would be a patch of terrain which the minirovers went over without a problem, that would crumble or give way under the weight of the rover and the water tank it was pulling.  But at least we knew we had done everything we knew how to do, to scout it out beforehand.

There was a moment when we were heading up the largest rise between us and the crater, and the night sky was bright and clear.  We can see a lot of stars when we're lying in our bedrolls in Building 3, but the reflections from the glass and polymer layers in the roof, and all the triangular beams of the geodesic domes, do block it a bit; this was a completely unobstructed view.  None of us had ever been this far away from the Colony at night, and it was almost stunning how many stars there were.  We were all very quiet, mostly because we were all half-asleep but also because it was beautiful and (literally) awesome.

Emma was sitting in the navigator's seat next to Olivia, because Emma had driven this route in the mini-rover and knew it better than Liam.  Noah and I did a bit of perfunctory checking of the pump that was going to suck up the water (we hoped), the hose that we would use to get to it as it melted (we hoped), and the fittings that connected the one to the other (this part we had been able to check beforehand).  If it all worked, we would get some of the water into the tank that the rover was pulling behind us; hopefully more than 3% of the tank's capacity, and hopefully actual water rather than a slurry of mostly red dust particles.

I found out later that Charlotte had sat down in front of the screen back in Building 3 showing the feed from the front of the rover, and some of the little ones were watching it with her.  Others were asleep again, piled on and around her like puppies.  She could hear what we were saying over the comlink, but we weren't saying much.  It was probably not just me that was suddenly back in that moment just after we got into the rover to look for Charlotte's parents.  This time, though, we weren't waiting for the Monster to pick us off one after another.  If we couldn't use the geothermal power safely without more water to push down, then we weren't going to pretend that we could, and we weren't just going to rely on the solar to recharge batteries that we knew were slowly dying and we couldn't replace.  If the Monster was going to get us, at least we would die facing the enemy.  But I think Charlotte went through a lot, sitting there and watching us.  She told me later that if there hadn't been all the little ones around her, she would have been even more frightened, but since she knew she had to keep together for them she couldn't fall apart.

When we got to the crater named Earth, we spent a while moving the rover and the tank around, trying to figure out the best spot.  It reminded me somewhat of the discussion about exactly how far away from Building 10 to park.  This time there was actually a good reason to consider it carefully, though, because it turns out that backing up the rover when it's pulling a water tank behind it, is way more complicated than just backing up.  None of us had done this, or even thought about the fact that we would need to, so we did a lot of arguing and trying things that didn't work.  At one point it seemed like we had gotten things so torked up that if we went any further back the connection between the rover and the tank (which was by that point almost at a right angle to the rover) would break, but if we went any further forward we might go too close to the edge of the crater and trigger a landslide.  I think Olivia was a little embarrassed about her driving, but honestly none of us had done that before and I don't think anyone else would have done better.  We ended up all getting out (except for Olivia, who was still not supposed to put too much weight on her legs) and manually detaching the water tank and manuevering it around to where it needed to be, nearly going too close and pitching it over the edge of the crater at one point.  But then it was in place, and Olivia backed the rover up to it just perfectly, and we had everything hooked together again, in the right position so that we could dangle the hose over the edge down into the crater where all that ice was frozen down the side of it.

We had settled on one big hose, rigid enough that it would not kink up when we started pumping, but it was bulky so we needed to have half a dozen of us holding it.  Liam, Noah, Emma, me, Ava and Elijah.  Then, after a bit more arguing about how we were going to do it, we sat there in the starry night, looking to the east and waiting for the sun to rise.

It got very quiet.

I remembered back when I was helping the youngers write up their "homework", as Noah called it, and Alexander told me that he would often be up to see the sunrise.  I realized that, when he told me it was bad dreams that caused him to wake up early, I should have said something more encouraging or sympathetic, or maybe paid more attention to the fact that he had said he was having bad dreams.  Were they still happening, I wondered?  Had he been waking up in fear of a new Evacuation, every night since then, and I hadn't done anything to try to help?  I'm not sure what I could have done, but I suddenly wished I had at least done more to show that I cared.  Sometimes I realize, days or weeks or months after a conversation, that there was something really important said, and I wasn't listening well enough to notice.

Well, I thought, if this works and we survive it (and the drive back), I'll make sure to check if Alexander is still having bad dreams.  It also occurred to me that if this all turned out to be a giant mistake, and we got buried in a landslide or explosively evaporating chunks of ice ruptured all our suits and we asphyxiated, or we wrecked the rover or drove off a cliff because we went the wrong direction on the way back, then I guess Alexander's bad dreams were going to come true.  

What would Charlotte do?  What would the little ones do?  I wondered if my mom or dad had any thoughts like that, right before they passed out from the gas leak in Building 10.

I suddenly missed my mom and dad, painfully, and my vision blurred for a little bit.  By the time I blinked the tears away and could see clearly again, I realized there was a tiny bit of red light on the horizon.  Dawn.

At first, of course, nothing happened.  We were all in a row, holding the hose, with Liam at the front (his hand was basically healed by this point).  The idea was that as the water started to melt when the sun's rays hit it, Olivia would flip the switch to start the pump, and we would move the hose around to wherever the water was flowing.  We weren't sure how heavy the hose would be once it had water in it, or how much water we would be able to get, so it was possible that there would not be any reason for more than one of us to hold the hose, but we were all there at the beginning just in case because Elijah was worried that it might be too heavy to manuever once it was full of water.  My main fear was that it would all amount to basically nothing, and everyone else would resent me having convinced them to spend half the night to get here just so we could see all the ice turn straight into vapor.

The sunlight started to hit the ice, and it began to hiss and for a moment I thought maybe it was going to go straight to vapor.  Maybe it was a different temperature when it erupted out than it was now, or the salt concentration was not the same after it had frozen, or there was some other difference such that it would not ever pass through liquid and would go straight from solid to vapor.  But then, after a few seconds, we started to see liquid running down the ice.

"Olivia, turn the pump on!" said Liam.

"It's on!" came her answer.  We felt the hose give a little shudder, and start to suck up air, until Liam directed the end of the hose to where the ice had started to melt.

What did not turn out like I planned, was that it would both melt and explosively vaporize at the same time.  Different spots were doing one or the other, and we scrambled around trying to catch the liquid with the hose before it ran down to the bottom.  There were little explosions of vaporization happening underneath us, sometimes directly under us, and it was unnerving.

I also hadn't counted on how slippery ice was; once it was moving underneath us, it was practically impossible to stand up.  We kept falling over, and the hose started to writhe underneath us like a live thing, I suppose because of all of the surges of water and vapor and air that were alternately shooting up it to the tank at the top of the crater.  It felt like we were wrestling a giant snake, and trying to force it to drink, and we were getting bruised and battered and it wasn't even clear if we were getting any of the water or not.  I mean probably Liam at the front could tell, but the rest of us could not.

Pretty quickly we gave up on the idea of being able to stand up, we just crawled on the melting, fizzing, exploding ice, and moved the hose back and forth to try to get as much water as we could.  Some of it splashed past us, and we had liquid water on the outside of our suit helmets, which then either turned to ice or turned to vapor or did one first and then the other.  Our conversation wasn't very coherent, with a lot of shouting and some screaming, but eventually we heard Liam's voice through the cacophany.

"Down!  The ice at the top is getting hit by the light first, it's already melted away!  We need to move down the slope!"

We tried to move slowly down, but if there's one thing more difficult than to get moving on slippery ice, it's moving but just slowly.  Pretty soon, we were sliding down, and the hose whipped us around and off the ice as we hung on to it for dear life, like we were all hanging on to a whip as it cracked.  We got up and picked up the hose again and moved up the side of the crater, staying just at the edge of the ice so we could try to stand, and Liam trying to direct the end of the hose into the waterfall.  Was any of it getting sucked up even?  I couldn't tell.  There was spray everywhere, and I couldn't see much.

Then, we heard Emma scream, and through the spray and ice pebbles stuck to the outside of my bubble helmet I could see her careening down the ice, going faster and faster.  She eventually curled into a ball and rolled off the side of the ice, hitting the rocky slope hard, bouncing off it several times before she came to a stop.  We all stopped breathing for a moment, and Elijah and Noah both let go of the hose to try to run down to her, but she stood up and waved them back.

"Later!  Get me later, I'm ok!"

She didn't sound ok, but we figured if she could talk and stand it wasn't too awful, so we turned back to the task at hand.  We backed slowly down the side of the crater, as far as our hose could go (about 50 meters), trying to vacuum up as much water as we could.  The rising sun's rays would hit a new part of it, and that part would start to hiss and bubble and melt and vaporize all at once, and Liam would try to steer the end of the hose to the right spot, while the rest of us tried to support him and the hose, so it didn't get caught on the rocky protrusions down the side of the crater.  Noah also slipped at one point, and probably would have gone sliding down the crater as well, except Elijah was right behind him and grabbed him quickly.  He had to let go of the hose to do it, though, and then it was just Ava and I supporting it, and it heaved and thrashed like it knew there weren't many of us left to keep it in check.  I suddenly felt like I was actually wrestling the Monster, like it was a real creature and it was kicking and writhing and trying to throw me back and knock me off balance.  Ava and I somehow managed to stay on our feet and keep our arms wrapped around it until Noah and Elijah got back up to help us.  Liam kept moving slowly down the side of the waterfall, keeping the end of the hose right where the light was first hitting it and turning it to water.

Eventually, the light had gone too far down the side of the crater and our hose wouldn't reach any further.  We stood, sat, or lay collapsed on the side of the crater and watched it dissolve its way down.  The light did not quite reach to the center, which was presumably why the ice lake was there, and I think perhaps a small amount of the water reached that lake and added to it before it was all gone.  I wondered if there were parts of the year when the light did reach the bottom, and the entire lake disappeared, only to reappear the next year.  How often did water erupt from the side and run down to the center?  Was it like a geyser on Earth, regularly spouting out?  Someday we would know enough to say whether we had to drop everything and come here, or whether we could have just waited a few months and done it later.

Speaking of which, I thought, did we actually accomplish anything?  How much would be enough to be worthwhile?  The tank was quite large, but the 3% we got last time (even if it were not half-dust this time) would not be enough to be worth it.  Did we get to 10%?  Maybe 20%?  I didn't dare to hope for 30%.

Emma, walking with a limp, was coming slowly up the crater side to meet us.  Liam met her halfway up, and helped her as it got steeper.  We clambered slowly out of the crater, bruised and sore and exhausted and still tired from lack of sleep, and slowly wound the hose back around the giant spool that we used to store it.  I almost decided not to look at the gauge on the back of the tank until we got back to the Colony, just so I wouldn't be disappointed, but Noah was having none of it.

"Dude," he said, "come look."

I shuffled around the back, and looked up at the gauge.  100%.  The tank was completely full.