Olympus Mons (21 page)

He shrugged. “If the need arose, I suppose I could
—
”

“That's pure crap, Jesperson!”

“Back off!” he said extra-sharply. “The extensive literature in our handy-dandy computer database spells out the specs and performance data on the DGB chute designed for long ago's Viking Project. Here in Mars it will
—
”

“Whoa! What's this . . . D-G-B routine?”

“Stands for Disc-Gap-Band, a special parachute once used to reduce the rate of descent on unmanned Viking landers plummeting into the thin Martian atmosphere. Later Mars exploratory packages like Curiosity used a fancy two-stage solution based on an aneroid switch that triggered a squib to deploy the chute at a specific altitude. Then after the payload came down farther, slowing as it entered relatively denser air, a retro-thrust terminal descent system took over, and . . . Forget all that, Barney. According to what I read in the database, the solid canopy DGB was no more than a so-so success. I've considered adapting the Ringsail design to our
—
”

“Good gracious God in Heaven! Now we're into ringsails, whatever the hell they may or may not be.” By then, I have to admit feeling like I was being swept away by a major avalanche, and it made me extra-peevish.

“The Ringsail design,” he said in that thousand-percent certain, totally self-assured way that would angrify anyone, “apparently worked very well. Single, double and triple Ringsail chutes carried the early Mercury, Gemini and Apollo command modules to safe splashdowns at sea. The chute's design makes it virtually oscillation-proof.”

“What the hell might
that
mean?”

He didn't brush off my question like I thought he would. Instead, he said it again: “Oscillation-proof, get it? It means the payload
—
a chutist
—
won't pendulum back and forth even in a fairly stiff crosswind. Ringsail chute stability's a function of the secondary annular opening plus the usual center vent. Calculating a Ringsail's gore coordinates will be a bitch kitty, not to mention the terrors of cutting and sewing together its complicated annulate geometry, but I think . . . No, strike think. I'm
certain
we'll need a drag coefficient requiring a huge diameter canopy in order to —”

“Whoa, hoss! Now you're doubling down on your own damn doubletalk. Cut out the crap! Quit blowing smoke at me about being a dyed-in-the-wool parachute designer.”

His customary super self-assurance intact, he said, “I can handle it.”

“Oh, sure! No doubt about it,” I told him hotly. “Can you walk on water, too?”

He flashed his patented know-it-all grin. “Find me some, Barney. I'll give it a try.”

“Crap!”

***

During succeeding weeks, the water level in Burroughs' twin reservoirs sank steadily. Aguilar stayed up nights doing electrical jiggery-pokery to produce beefed-up circuits and new antennas. He ended up claiming all four reworked pressure-suit wireless units were now extended range transceivers.

Jesperson went back to leading the workouts he prescribed for getting us would-be mountaineers in shape. An expanded team of a round dozen Marsrats now foot-foot-slog-slogged up ‘n down Burroughs's never-to-be-sufficiently-damned maintenance trail. Strung out behind me and my partner was the ornery glassblower, Gimpy's straw boss, Red, and two other bo's from his work gang “volunteered” by Gimpy to join the team, plus a couple of other footsore recruits who already regretted opening their yaps and wanting to become foot-sloggers.

About then the whirligig ship inbound from the Earth-Luna System stopped whirling, reeled in its interconnecting tethers, re-mated the power and habitation modules and retrofired, braking to a slow approach. Ten hours later the ship injected itself into a parking orbit circum-Mars.

My partner and I temporarily abandoned foot-sloggin' and turned to along with the crews of two other crawlers prepping to welcome the sixteen lost souls who had volunteered or consented to living burial in this frozen dustball. The new arrivals didn't know it yet, but they were about to experience the delights and pleasures of living and working in an enclave which in not many more E-months might lose the Burroughs identity and acquire the totally undesirable nickname Croatoan.

 

Victor Aguilar puts out his
Blue Planet
news sheet like clockwork every E-month, but distribution lags a day or so behind input from the homeworld. The current issue showed up in everyone's computer on the same morning a shipload of sixteen newcomers was slated to ground out on the fringe of Amazonis Planitia.

Parked in Cee Four, Jesperson and yours truly were waiting inside the South Tunnel utility airlock for the doors to rumble apart so we could exit and join the caravan heading out to meet and greet the foreshortened crop of new arrivals. I was scanning the latest
Blue Planet
edition in Cee Four's small video monitor. In the driver's seat, Jesperson had brought along his hardcopy mylar printout.

After searching every column for a report of our water-worries and finding zilch, he growled something unfit to record. “Not a word,” he said bitterly. “Not one syllable to let the consumers in Petersburg, Poughkeepsie or Pomona in on our grisly secret. Those backstabbing U.N. gabmeisters are handing us bottom-of-the-barrel treatment. It's like wroth in death and envy after, except backwards”

I looked up from reading a tidbit extolling the virtues of the sixteen self-sacrificing, incredibly brave latter-day pioneers who'd forsaken all earthly delights in favor of spending the rest of their unnatural lives in exotic Mars. “Say again, Bwana? What was that frothy deathly routine?”

“Forget it,” he said snappishly.

“Sounded kind of weird,” I told him.

The news, or lack of it, had further curdled Jesperson's permanently sour outlook on the world, the flesh and the devil. He'd fallen into one of his surly foul moods.

“Says here,” I told him, thinking to make conversation, and maybe help soothe his vinegar disposition,“one adventurous newbie is a medic who wants to specialize in whatever afflicts newborn about to become Marsrats. Guess that makes sense. Lorna's sure every kid born in Burroughs has problems straight off, including our boy. Says right here, ‘Dr. Steinkritz, a noted pediatrician, plans to devote every waking moment to reducing the higher than normal incidence of infant mortality among babies needing immediate Mars-rationalization.' How d'you like those apples?”

“Be delighted to meet him,” said Jesperson. “Unless I die of thirst beforehand, I promise to strangle the sumbitch if he doesn't invent a way to reverse the Bevvinase Process and let me go back where I belong.”

“Sorry to have to set you straight, Bwana. This doc's a her, not a him. Dr. Gloria L. Steinkritz, M.D., Ph.D., with more alphabet soup tacked on at the end.”

“Fine!” declared the unhappy man. “Be easier to strangle a ‘her' than a ‘him'.”

“My, won't
you
be charming company on this expedition!”

“If I offend your tender sensibilities,” he invited, “don't come along.”

I shut up and sulked. He was right
—
not right to be pissed-off and take it out on me, just to feel bitter about the U.N.'s two-faced, blindside policy of keeping the news of our soon down-the-drain status from the homeworld at large, particularly from the arriving newbies. Then a thought occurred to me. “Listen,” I told him, “a thought just occurred to me.”

“Don't scare it,” he advised. “It belongs to an endangered species.”

“What if the U.N. saw no reason to pour our very own private water worries back over our very own heads? Old news, they say, is no news. Maybe the bad tidings got spread around at home, but the U.N. brass got shy about throwing more dirt into the deep hole your pet volcano's dug for us, and skipped the bad news on purpose, or maybe on general principles Vic axed it out of the lasercomm digits spritzed our way.”

As a reward for my words of wisdom, I was stung by a look of bloodcurdling disdain. “Shaky theory. Tremulous! Vic wouldn't do that.” He assured me, saying Aguilar seldom does more than compile and organize the slanted copy he receives each month, and often spends his spare time monitoring what little earthside scam he can pick up on his supersensitive microwave band receiver. He assured me Vic hadn't heard a tweet about the eruption and shaker, nor one word about our dried up aqueduct.

“Could be because of some good reason we don't know about,” I said. “Those Korasek's Cossacks you're so proud of were maybe told not to spread the word in order keep the ground-pounders from finding out about our wet problem.”

“A possibility,” he admitted, “yet unlikely.” He glanced ahead through the crawler's transpex bubble. “Here we go. Parade's underway.”

South Tunnel's outer airlock portal finished grinding open. Jess powered-up Cee Four, ooched us out through the tunnel and into the open desert. Nudging us into the three crawler procession' as tail-end Charlie, we trailed Cee One and Cee Five.

***

Any ol' place will do duty as a site fit to ground the spotty incoming traffic we get, as long as it's a distance from the enclave. Touchdowns and liftoffs are kept a ways off for safety reasons, to make certain a misguided orbit-to-surface shuttle's hot exhaust splash on descent or liftoff doesn't endanger Burroughs. Ground zero as designated by the inbound lander's captain was a flat stretch of nothing special off to the southeast between the gradually downsloping Tharsis highlands and the flats of Amazonis Planitia. Our three crawlers stood off two kilometers or so, watching and waiting for the shuttle to come down. We monitored the two-way transmissions between lander and Cee One with half an ear, and otherwise passed the time reading Vic's
Blue Planet,
or thumb-twiddling.

The Mars-landers carried aboard whirligig ships are a lot like what're called “boxcars” in military jargon, the wingless, slab-sided space-to-space birds that ply vacuum between low Earth orbit and airless Luna. The piggybacked landers, smaller than actual boxcars, sport a similar quad of thrusters cantilevered outboard to aid in balancing the wingless vehicle on its thrust during descent and liftoff. Throughout the mother ship's curving, months-long trajectory from the Earth-Moon System, a lander rides attached to the whirling power module to equalize the masses of it and the life support module.

Forty minutes went by before the lander appeared. Coming down on four gouts of fire, it slowed its descent, slowed still more to a downward crawl. The fiery exhaust streaks drifted sideways a bit until the bird corrected, then it slowed its descent further and disappeared in billowing dust stirred up by the thrusters that obscured the landing site till the morning wind brushed it away.

I clicked the crawler's transceiver over to the appropriate daytime frequency, and we listened in on the exchanges between Captain Kinsolving and Scheiermann as they discussed the arrangements for transferring passengers. Aboard Cee One, the director buttered up the captain some, but seemed to dither less than usual. No sensible Marsrat would expect a green newcomer to know the safety drill for checking-out and wearing vacuum gear, nor would letting a greenhorn blunder around in a pressure-suit without instruction and indoctrination be other than an open invitation to accidental suicide.

Once the sands beneath the lander cooled, Crawler One moved up and took station a few meters from the shuttle. A pair of crewmen in zebra-striped pressure-suits exited the lander's access hatch, expanded and rigged the umbilical tube, sealing the open end around Cee One's airlock hatch. We heard a tick of radio static, and then, “Tight, here; pressure's up!”

The masters of whirligig ships, conservative oxygen-breathers one and all, rarely if ever have direct contact with us whilst delivering Mars-rationalized passengers and supplies, nor for that matter do their passengers have much to do with the crew during transit, segregated as they are in carbon dioxide life support compartments. We couldn't see him, but his muffled voice made it obvious that Captain Kinsolving was wearing an oxy mask and carrying an air flask while talking as he passed through the umbilical tube. He emerged from the crawler's open airlock chamber and we heard Scheiermann greet him warmly.

The transmission ceased abruptly, cutting us out of the loop. A Marsrat within earshot aboard Cee One told us later how, during their “private” conversation, the captain commiserated with Scheiermann about the enclave's plight, telling him our desperate situation had not been made known until receipt of the U.N. action-directive ordering him to scan the volcano using the whirligig ship's remote sensing gear.

In the course of three orbital swings prior to unshipping the lander, and prepping for descent, the remated, stabilized ship had obtained digital high-resolution pix, ground-penetrating radar scans, and infrared images of the volcano's southeastern flanks. The same eavesdropping Marsrat also reported later that when Captain Kinsolving had handed over the recording disks along with an offer of assistance, he'd not only voiced a hope that the data would be of value, but had promised to get on the ultraband horn soon's his ship entered return trajectory and spread the word of the enclave's dire straits to the homeworld.

The captain's noble intentions did not sit well with that overeducated jackass,
Herr Doktor
Walther Scheiermann, Ph.D. Our noble leader's head was buried in the sand up to his ankles, and he intended to keep it there. According to our informant, the damfool diplomatically blunted the captain's offer, cautioning him to do nothing along the suggested lines for fear of raising red flags and maybe inspiring a controversy. In his own self-righteous, schoolmasterish way, the director decided it would be vital to keep faith with the faithless U.N leadership, and then demonstrated the size of his honor-at-all-cost crusade by informing Kinsolving that spreading the adverse propaganda might inhibit, or prohibit, any last ditch rescue efforts the U.N. might at that very moment be preparing to initiate.