The next day, as they were thinking about getting themselves an evening meal, the doorbell rang.
"More reporters," grumbled Andrew. "I'll get rid of them."
"Perhaps you should ask for money," suggested David with a grin. "Tell them that, if they want your story, they've got to make it worth your while."
"There isn't that much money," Andrew replied as he rose from his armchair. "Besides, those types are always happier making up their own stories."
"We could get a Palace in Mayfair!" the boy protested. "Live among the councillors and the scientists! Have a maid and a butler like the top nobs!"
Andrew was already leaving the room, though, going for the door, choosing the words he would use it get rid of their visitors. It wasn't reporters, though. Instead, the door opened to reveal Bill Tembo, his superior, the Head of Surface Operations, along with two other men who looked vaguely familiar and definitely important. Passers-by in the street were watching curiously so he invited them in and ushered them through to the living room.
"Sorry to intrude," Bill Tembo apologised as Susan ushered the children off the good chairs to give their guests places to sit. "This is Councilman Anthony Bear and Councilman Chen Zhuzi."
"Of course!" said Andrew as the whole family stared in fascination. "I've seen you on the telly. I'm sorry, but seeing you out of context like this..."
"No need to apologise," said Zhuzi, smiling pleasantly.
"Can I get you some tea?" said Susan uncertainly. "Or coffee? Or we have hot chocolate?" She was babbling nervously, she knew. Were these men going to reprimand her husband for his failure in recovering the dysprosium? She knew that it was a ridiculous idea. They wouldn't have come in person to punish him, but their presence here had to mean that something big was in the offing and she was trembling nervously as she tried to imagine what it could be. "Come on, Children," she said, beckoning. "Let's go into the back room so they can talk."
"No, please stay," said Bear, however. "What we have to say concerns all of you."
"It concerns the children?" said Andrew, suddenly concerned.
"I assume that, when your rover is repaired, you'll be going out onto the surface again," said Bill Tembo.
"That's right," Andrew replied. "They say it shouldn't be more than a couple of weeks."
He'd gone back to the car park that morning, to talk to the fitters. Their rover had already been moved to a garage space where it had been surrounded by radiant heaters to bring its outer hull up to room temperature, a process that would take another few hours. Only then could the chamber be filled with air, allowing the fitters to get a proper look at the vehicle's exterior. Some men had gone inside, though, and had entered the service level where they were tutting to themselves as they examined the floor, and what they'd seen had been enough for them to make a preliminary repair estimate.
"When you go back out there, I expect you'll be joining another dig site," said Bear. "Looking for more rare and valuable minerals you can sell to the city."
"I expect so," Andrew replied. "The engineers are always looking for rare earth elements, and they used up their original stockpiles long ago."
"There's one element in particular we're very keen to get hold of, as you know."
"Dysprosium," Andrew replied with a glance at his wife.
"That's right. All the dysprosium from the Sellafield site is now deep inside Etna Mons, where we won't be seeing it again until the next time it erupts."
"You could drop a bomb down there!" said David excitedly. "Trigger a premature eruption."
"Believe it or not, we actually considered that," said Zhusi. "It turned out to be impractical for a number of technical reasons. Fortunately, we believe that there is another stockpile of dysprosium not too far away that you might be able to dig up for us."
"Where?" asked Susan, leaning forward in her chair with a frown of concern.
"LaSalle, in what used to be the USA," said Bear. "Alongside the nuclear power plant itself there was a facility that manufactured the control rods used to moderate the nuclear reactor. The particular type of control rod they made there used dysprosium, and we believe they kept a stockpile on site. More than enough for our needs. All you have to do is go over there and dig it up."
"There are no life hutches that side of Atlantica Planitia," Andrew pointed out. "If fact, there are none on Atlantica Planitia at all. We'd be thousands of kilometres away from the nearest safe refuge if anything went wrong."
"You wouldn't be going alone," Zhusi assured him. "We'd be sending four rovers, with enough equipment to create a permanent dig site, just like the one at Sellafield. Three other rovers to provide safe refuge. You'd be just as safe there as you were at Sellafield."
"I imagine the remainers will try to sabotage the effort again," said Susan.
"That's why we want you to go," said Bear. "There's no way to know who's a secret remainer, so we're manning the mission, as much as we can, with people we can trust. Your efforts while pursuing Reginald Fox proved to our satisfaction that you're not a remainer."
"That's not what Cheval thinks," said Andrew. "He was suspicious of me the whole way."
"Actually, it was Sergeant Cheval who recommended you," the Councilman replied. "It seems your final effort to stop the rover convinced him."
"The reporters think I let the rover sink on purpose," said Andrew. "I could have closed the airlock door. Stopped the rover from filling up with lava. It would have floated and we could have pulled it back out."
"Reginald Fox revealed under interrogation that he sabotaged the doors so they couldn't be closed."
"I didn't know that. I could have tried to close them."
"You were performing an extremely dangerous act, and you barely had time to get inside the rover before it reached the crater. No-one blames you for not thinking of it. Sergeant Cheval believes that you genuinely tried to stop the rover and so do I."
"Damn right!" said David brightly. Jasmine and James nodded, smiling broadly.
"David!" cried Susan sharply. "One does not use that kind of language in front of guests." She turned to the Councilmen. "I'm so sorry..."
"Perfectly all right," said Bear, smiling in turn. "And if your husband is trustworthy, I think we can trust you and the rest of your family as well."
"I'm sorry," said Andrew, though, "but I can't put my family in that kind of danger. Natural hazards are one thing, but people trying to sabotage the mission is something else. Windsor and Cheval were both shot. Kartoshka tried to blow up the cockpit."
"All four rovers will be thoroughly searched to make sure nobody's smuggled any weapons aboard," said Zhusi. "And there would be no transfer of personnel between the four rovers, except in the direst emergency. There would be no opportunity for a remainer in one of the other rovers to sabotage your rover."
"What about when we reach the new dig site?" said Andrew. "I was tied up.." He shuddered at the thought of his wife or one of the children suffering the same ordeal.
"There are measures we can take to make sure that nobody gets up to any mischief," Bear assured him. "Cameras in every room, continuously monitored by two of you. It would take three people acting in concert to carry out an act of sabotage without being seen."
"We'll do it!" said David excitedly.
"We will not," said Andrew, though. "I'm sorry, it's just too dangerous." He looked at the boy and his imagination conjured up an image of David bound and gagged, struggling desperately against his bonds. His wrists itched as they remembered the tightness of the rope Kartoshka had tied around them. "I'm sorry. I appreciate the faith you have in me, but I'm not going to put my family in that kind of danger."
"This is something we have to talk about," said Susan, frowning disapprovingly. "This has to be a family decision."
"Fox re-activated a sentry weapon," Andrew reminded her. "The North American underground cities were also surrounded by all kinds of weaponry. Some of them may still be active, even after two hundred years. Cheval didn't think the idea was totally ridiculous."
"You'll be giving the underground cities a wide berth," said Bear. "You've got no reason to go within a hundred miles of them."
"Then there's the mid Atlantic ridge," said Andrew. "We've spent the last twenty years trying to figure out safe ways to get past the cryo-volcanoes and the last I heard it's still considered extremely hazardous. Ice storms, ice quakes, crevasses dozens of metres across..."
"Mister Tembo here says that you're the best there is on the surface," said Zhusi. "If anyone can do it, you can."
"If we were on a mission to rescue someone trapped on the other side, I'd certainly think the risk worthwhile," replied Andrew. "But to take that kind of risk just so we can take a gigantic gamble with the future of the human race..."
"Mankind has no future here on Earth," said Bear sadly. "Not in the long term. I've seen the calculations. If we don't leave Earth, mankind will be extinct within a hundred million years."
Andrew laughed aloud. "That seems a pretty long time to me," he said.
"Not when put in context. The universe as a whole will he habitable for a thousand times as long, at least, and we'll be able to expand outward without limit. Here, we may survive, but we'll be huddling in whatever warm little refuges we can make for ourselves. We'll never be able to undertake any of the grand ambitions we used to have, and we'll be living with that knowledge for as long as we can eke out our existence. Earth won't be our home, it'll be our prison. A prison from which we have this one chance to escape."
"And for which you're willing to risk the lives of my family."
"It's our lives," pointed out Susan. "I think we get a say on whether we take the risk."
"So you're willing to risk the lives of the children?" demanded Andrew.
"They've been on the surface their whole lives," his wife reminded them. "You and I grew up in the city, but they grew up in a hab-rover. It's not an alien environment to them. It's home."
"Right!" declared David.
"Mum's right," James added, meeting his father's gaze and nodding seriously. "We're willing to do this. It's what you trained us for."
"I didn't train you to fight villains."
"We won't be fighting villains," said Jasmine. "You heard what they said. There'll be precautions to make sure no bad guy gets an opportunity to do anything."
Andrew's eyes were drawn irresistibly to her slim, graceful wrists, crossed in her lap. An image crept into his head of someone pulling rope tight around them. He shook his head to drive it away, but even as he did another memory came. Phil Badger, one of the other surface engineers at the Sellafield dig site, telling him how Fox had tied up his son. He's fine, he'd said, seemingly not too bothered by it. Just a bruised ego. Why hadn't he been as horrified and outraged as Andrew would have been?
"Dad," said James, suddenly sounding serious. "We're being bullied at school. People are saying you're a coward and a failure. This is a chance to prove them wrong."
"I am definitely not putting your lives at risk just to save my reputation!"
"We..." James glanced around at Jasmine and David. They both nodded. "We haven't told you how bad it's been. Didn't you notice Davey's knuckles?"
Andrew looked, and saw for the first time that they were scuffed and scabbed. "You've been in a fight?" he gasped in alarm.
"There were three of them," said James. "They backed him into a corner and shouted at him that his father was a traitor and a failure. He tried to fight all three of them at once."
Andrew stared at his youngest son in horror. "I'm sorry," he said. "I had no idea. You should have... I'm going to see that they're punished. I'll go to that school, talk to the teachers..."
James waved a hand at him to interrupt. "You don't stop bullying that way," he said. "It just makes you more of a victim. You stop bullying by doing what Davey did, by fighting back."
"But he shouldn't have had to fight back," said Jasmine. "None of us should."
"They've been bullying you too?" said Andrew in dismay.
"Turns out girls my age can be real bitches," said Jasmine with a smile, "so I'm being a real bitch right back at them."
"And what about you, Jim?" said Andrew, feeling miserable.
"Don't worry about me, Dad," said James, smiling cheerfully. "I can take anything they dish out. I just worry about Davey."
"Don't worry about me," said David, grinning like a shark. "Worry about Charley Gull. He tries anything again, I'll give him another black eye to match the one he's already got."
"Well, clearly you've got things you need to talk about as a family," said Bear, rising from his seat. Zhusi and Tembo rose as well. "When you've reached a decision you can contact Bill here and tell him."
"I won't be changing my mind," Andrew promised him.
"It'll take time to get the expedition ready to depart," Bear added as if Andrew hadn't spoken. "At least two weeks, so your rover should be all fixed and ready to go."
"I look forward to hearing from you," said Tembo as they moved towards the front door.
"When you hear from me, it'll be to tell you where on this side of Atlantica Planitia we'll be going," said Andrew. "Probably to Tenburgh to dig up some more frozen wheat species. The farms are crying out for more species to be de-extincted, to grow as food. That's good, solid income right there."
"That's your decision, of course," said Tembo. "Take as much time as you need to decide."
The three men then left, and a new argument broke out in the Birch household as soon as the door was closed.