Olympus Mons (26 page)

A slob who's never done a lick of honest work in his life, Art kept complaining loud and long and sideways about the awful beer blight. We tuned him out and he stomped off in a huff, with Karl glumly trailing him.

Tuckered out after the heart-stopping Olympus Rupes expedition, I finished stowing my vacuum gear in the airlock service compartment whilst feeling sorry for Stier. He's super-meticulous about the quality of barley and hops he tends in oxygenated tanks, pampers and harvests the crops himself, and brews a tasty lager he refers to as
ersatz bier.

That fount of all human knowledge, my partner, is a world-class beer swiller in his own right. Once when he was downing a stein of Karl's best in Art's sleazy lean-to tavern, he straightened me out on the subject of “lager,” explaining it as a German term for “storage.” According to him, the “stored” green, yeasty brew ferment at the bottom of the tank for months on end at a temperature close to freezing before it clears slowly, mellows and get charged with carbon dioxide.

A run on the available beer supply followed hard on the heels of the council's stern “ration till it hurts” proclamation. Thirsty Marsrats, overcome by a sudden, desperate urge to stock up on beer before the hoarders got it all, eagerly grabbed every liter they could lay their patty paws on. Fistfights broke out over beer, with full-scale riots in the offing. I knew it was only a matter of time until the thirst-maddened bo's began trading water, their pressure-suits, wives, children, anything of value for beer. What's more, most would willingly take the short end of every barter.

After a full week of strict water rationing, bathing, clothes washing and every other task connected with saving water was outlawed for the duration. In short order, our enclave turned kind of smelly.

Had any been available, deodorant would've become almost as much a super-popular commodity as Karl's
ersatz bier.

 

An ancient adage has it that figures never lie, but liars sure can figure, and the old saw may still have merit. Victor Aguilar, however, is no liar. He's the most upstanding character in Burroughs, a true blue Marsrat with more built-in smarts than most of us ever suspected. Since joining our foot-sloggin' crew he'd been growing more and more leery of swallowing every morsel of Jesperson's master blueprint for the maybe, if-and-when potential Olympus Mons Aqueduct repair expedition.

The logistics tote for our prospective climb bothered Vic more than any other aspect of my partner's wild ‘n woolly scheme. He stewed about it in private, kicking the bits and pieces around in his head until the suspected discrepancies sort of jelled, and he sat down to do some homework on his own. After wrestling with the preliminary data he ended up twice as tweaked as when he'd started out, and kept on fretting about and questioning certain of Jesperson's estimates. Finally he reset the whole enchilada to square one, did the calculations over again, and again a third time.

Dissatisfied with the results, he went through the numbers item by item, piece by piece, climber by climber a
fourth
time. Reluctant to show his think work to Jesperson, and possibly bang his head against my partner's spiny disposition and storehouse of expertise, he ran the numbers one final time to be absolutely dead certain, nerved himself up and told Jesperson the bad news.

Whereupon the master and commander of our foot-sloggin' cadre scoffed and got all indignant and eager to straighten Vic out. He jumped behind the computer terminal in the domicile he now shared with Glorious Gloria, talked to it steadily for six or seven minutes, and ended up with egg on his face. Based on the “wolf chase” scenario he'd laid before the council in that memorable special session, my partner went back and bounced his totals for the proposed twenty-six-man climbing team against Vic's numbers. A head-scratching half-hour later, thin-lipped and muttering bad words that sounded like self-inflicted wounds, he squared himself angrily and did a complete and total breakdown, toting the logistics requirements item by item, piece by piece, day by day, and man by man.

He wound up frustrated, his mouth working like he'd just eaten crow and didn't cotton to the taste, which was exactly the case. Vic had listed agreed-on food and water volumes per man, per day, and likewise pressure-suit and pack-battery requirements, air flask quantities and spares, incidental life support items and ancillary equipments, including the “huge, gossamer-thin” parachutes Jess had burned the midnight oil doing his designing, and were now being sewn together by Mrs. Chang and her stitch-minded ladies. Vic had also summed the required quantities of water, liquified food and waste bladders, as well as the special patch kits so mandatory if we were to repair the aqueduct when and where the damage was eventually found.

Try as he would, Jesperson couldn't make a significant dent in Vic's assessment, nor could he find fault with the communication maven's calculations on quantities and volumes. It maddened him to the point of distraction, in effect drove him up the wall of his once messy quarters. The total mass of essential materiel Vic had arrived at exceeded by almost one eighth of a metric tonne the optimum, arbitrarily determined maximum carrying capacity of the sledges my partner was mindful of having built. For the twenty-six hardy grunts slated to climb his “big hill,” portage had been ruled out at the very start, the rationale being that bearing the load on their backs would put an impossible physical strain on everyone, particularly on he and me, the “suicide candidates” slated to climb hands-free in order to save energy for the final, do or die assault on the volcano's lower slopes. What's more, until then he'd successfully fended off every argument to the contrary, allowing no ifs, ands, buts or compromises. Each day's pair of sledge haulers, he had insisted, would have to pull enough cargo to supply the team on the way up, plus caches of supplies offloaded at intervals along the line of march to sustain the spent Marsrats trekking back downhill. He remained convinced that the human draft animals would never be able to pull overburdened sledges up the volcano's rugged inclines, or for that matter through the ravines, clefts, canyons, furrows and levees of basalt depicted with disheartening clarity in the digital, high-res orbital photos.

Jesperson had therefore set arbitrary mass and bulk limits for each sledge, except that Vic's arithmetic lesson had proven the need to list an excess of vital cargo destined for the sledges, axing the calculated climb scenario right in the heart. The longer Jess chewed and re-chewed the numbers, the more irritable Glorious Gloria became. She accused him of foundering in circular reasoning, terming it,“The path to elliptical insanity,” and dared to infer that somewhere in the tote might be buried a set of dumb, redundant mistakes both her man and Aguilar had been making and repeating Or maybe, she told me privately, there was a “significant hidden datum” they'd overlooked, and kept on overlooking.

In due course Dr. Steinkritz temporarily put aside her medical research, made copies of the data on the sly, and stole the time to go over the numbers and juggle them herself. She didn't just add, subtract and multiply, either. A gorgeous head crowned by a set of perfect pageboy bangs rests on top of Glorious Gloria's shoulders, and she uses what's inside for a lot more than practicing medicine and doing her research. Bringing to bear the insight and experience of an experienced professional medic, she recalculated every human requirement, wrapped it up, checked her numbers, rechecked them again, and apologized for doubting both Vic and her roommate. Try as she might, she couldn't find an error worth mentioning in either Vic's summation, or Jesperson's reiteration of bare-bones, rock bottom essentials.

Being who and what she was, Gloria then did something sensible. She convened a council of war, hoping for a discussion that might lead to some input
—
any
input
—
that would help make the problem go away, or at least shrink to a point where it could be offset by a shift in strategy, tactics, witchcraft or whatever else, and somehow be overcome.

***

Foregathered in the lovebirds' cramped domicile, five of us devoted ourselves to the objective of kicking around the logistics problem, and maybe coming up with a stray notion that hinted at a tentative solution. Vic and I walked in together, and were nearly blown back out the door by the sound wall Jesperson's supersonic boom boxes had erected at ear-bending volume, threatening to expand the walls. Gloria had straightened up the place in anticipation of having company. She closed the door behind us, scooped up the remote controller and killed the sound storm dead.

“Hey!” Behind his littered desk, Jesperson looked up and complained, “That's a Sibelius gem,
En Saga.”

“Let's put Sibelius on hold,” suggested Glorious Gloria tactfully. “We have our own saga to contend with.”

“I think better with music,” he grumped.

“Don't think,” she told him, “talk. Our friends have come here to listen and learn from you, not Sibelius.”

Jesperson grumped some more, while Vic and I redistributed the few choice items of clutter still scattered about, and found ourselves a place to squat. Jesperson did as directed, so well versed in the subject that he outlined the logistics requirements from memory, hitting the high spots. “In broad strokes, at least on paper,” he concluded, slapping the mylar flimsy sheets on his desk he'd referred to, “the climb was eminently doable until Vic threw sand in the gears. As always, the devil's in the niggling details. Every phase of the scenario is in bed except for a viable means to haul the necessary quantity of freight. I've transposed this, shuffled that, eliminated the other. I even posited additional climbers
—
thirty instead of twenty-six. It just does not work.
Nothing
works!”

“With twenty-six,” said Gloria, nixing his more climbers concept, “you're already at, or slightly past, the point of diminishing returns. Trading-off consumables and throwaway items versus personnel for the added climbers further ups the mass and volume of mandatory supplies, further overburdening the sledges. It might even drive you to three sledges instead of two. Think of something else.”

“Love to, Luv.” Jesperson threw up his hands. “Sixty-four trillion new dollar question is,
what
else?”

We tried. Lord, how we did try! The parlor of the lovebirds' two-room bachelor digs stayed deathly quiet off and on whilst each of us studied a hardcopy listing the miserable, unsympathetic, maddening, indisputable goddamn numbers.

“Doc,” said Gimpy, breaking a lengthy silence, “how close to being cast in concrete are these here figures on food ‘n water?”

Gloria eyed the maintenance guru askance, her air skeptical. “Taking into account the strenuous hour after hour, day after day work the climbers will be doing, and the climb's prospective duration, I've listed worst-case minimums, none of which I could bring myself to reduce. Matter of fact, I raised one or two a trifle.”

“Could we maybe trim the objective a hair,” wondered Aguilar, “and hope to find the break or damage lower down, closer to the brink of the escarpment?”

“I even considered that,” admitted Jesperson. “It's an enticing notion, yet also self-defeating. In a sense, we'd be planning for failure, not success.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Adopt skewed logic like that, and we could get within a hundred meters of the break and never see it, never learn it was there. Unless we can somehow plan a realistic expedition that'll get a pair of climbers all the way up to the confluence, where the manifold system dumps into the main pipe string, the whole thing could become wasted effort, an exercise in futility.”

More glum silence filled the parlor, punctuated by thoughtful grimaces and more than one exchange of blank looks, each followed by an averted gaze. Along with the others, I'd been exercising my own think meat to the best of my natural ability, whatever you care to make of that. I could hardly believe it when a hot flash lit up inside my own head. I recognized it a once as either my shot at gaining hero status, or being fitted for a dunce cap. Seizing the chance by the horns, I spoke up kind of hesitantly. “One set of numbers here looks sort of, uh . . . too high.”

“Which?” he demanded wearily.

“Air flasks, Bwana. Oodles and bags and bundles of heavy, charged glass air flasks.”

Gloria answered for her man. “There again, Barney, I'm afraid even if we ignore potential breakage, continuous, unending exertion means the intake of carbon dioxide has to be adequate for those hoofing it, especially the sledgemen, to remain sufficiently strong and durable to perform, hence a need for slightly more than one mass-kilogram of breathable cee-oh-two per day, per man.”

“Hear you loud ‘n clear,” I told her, “but I still think we could be missing a bet. This schedule calls for all those glass air flasks
—
cartloads of ‘em
—
to get charged here on the ground beforehand. Why not haul a compressor on one of the sledges, and maybe an extra fuel-cell to run it? Tradeoff that combo against the humongous weight of all the charged air bottles, and see if the notion flies. We'd be able to lower the quantity of flasks, and recharge depleted ones during the overnight stops.”

Jesperson came up out of his chair like he was on fire. “Say again, Barney!”

I did as he asked, word for word.

“Mother of God!” breathed Jesperson. My inspiration lit a bonfire under him. He swung around without another word, plopped down and began yakking at the computer terminal, only stopping now and then to punch keys.

“Gimp,” he asked without losing focus and interrupting his concentration, “what's a compressor mass?”

The maintenance guru leaned back on the divan and stared up at the domicile's acoustic ceiling. He blinked and mentioned a tentative number.