A Colony on Mars by Cliff Roehr Page A

nozzle of the hose before it can be resharpened. I had an idea, we removed the drill bit and ran the fire hose through the shaft and gave it full power. The soft clay began to liquefy and bubble to the top. I noticed smal rocks ranging is size from the size of walnuts to the size of apples being forced up to the surface. I figured we must be drilling through an ancient lava flow. I picked up the rocks that were being forced to the surface and threw them into a wheelbarrow. We were down almost 50 feet and the thermometer indicated that the temperature was up to two hundred fifty degrees. We needed around one thousand degrees to obtain sufficient conversion steam to turn a generator the size of the one we intended to mount and make electricity. That afternoon when the crew went off duty my curiosity was getting the best of me so I went over to the lake and rinsed off the rocks I had col ected. They looked kind of pretty so I put them in a canvas bag and took them to my quarters. I didn't know at the time what I would eventually use them for but on Mars you can find a use for everything. Maybe I could mount them in concrete and use them to decorate around our front door someday.”
    The talk radio announcer who called himself Harry Martian broke in to the music stations to announce that dril ing had started for the hole that would enable the new geothermal generator. Tim had his ear piece radio on the talk station and was amused at the different spins that the listeners put on the project. A couple callers feared that what they were doing could cause a volcano to erupt in The Company cavern. Actually, thought Tim, that would be a possibility. Tim found himself thinking about that possibility the rest of the day. After work Tim looked up the scientist he had met named George Schultz, and asked him what he thought. George said, “you don't need to worry at all about your dril ing effort causing a volcano,” “How can you be so sure?” “I am not at all sure that it won't, Tim but if it does you won't have long to worry about it.”
    Somehow Tim did not feel at all reassured.
    October 2, 2107: ( from Tims notes) We reached a depth of 60 feet and were getting a temperature of over six hundred degrees. We continued on slowly until at just under one hundred feet we were getting the one thousand degrees that we needed. We withdrew the hose and sank a blade that I had found in the supply yard that enlarged the hole to a three foot circumference. We then started inserting a double 6” pipe joined at the bottom by a U shaped fitting.
    When the U at the bottom connecting our two pipes reached five hundred degrees we began to pump the cold water from the lake into one of the pipes. Hot water began to spew from the other so we connected a hose to the end where the hot watter was bubbling out and fed that into the lake. We were taking our cold water from the headwater of the stream just below the fal s. By this time another crew had mounted the generator on cement blocks so we connected the out hose to the generator and ran the exhaust water hose from the generator into the lake. We then powered up the generator and it began to pump water into the lake. We then eased the dual pipes deeper into the hole. Shortly we had raw steam flowing into the generator and the fan began to turn. While we were busy with these tasks the electrical crew had wired the generator into the electrical system and the power began to flow. Once the pipes were at the bottom of the hole we aliened the pipe from the generator to line up with the output pipe and cut the motor forcing the cold water into the pipe. We didn't have long to make the connection before the U at the bottom of the pipe would melt. When the live steam diminished enough that we could handle it in a Mars suit one of the men connected the live steam pipe directly to the generator and we restarted the pump sending the cold river water into the ground. On most steam generation systems the water is