Olympus Mons (27 page)

“That
much?” said Jesperson.

“Yeah, ‘fraid so . . . Hey, wait! I'm thinking of the big commercial rig in the maintenance shed. The portables weigh one helluva lot less.”

“How much less?”

“Let me call ‘n find out.” Gimpy got up and limped over to the phone. Punching the maintenance shed number, he spoke to Red, his straw boss and alter ego. He had the answer in a minute.

Elated-plus, Jesperson spun back around and jabbered a blue streak, spewing words and numbers like they had to be used quick before going out of style.

“If the compressor gimmick happens to fill the bill,” warned Gimpy, “you'd best figure on hauling along a spare. A single compressor fails, and every Marsrat upside of the scarp will right quick head toward being DOA.”

“Good, that's good,” muttered Jesperson, mostly to spur himself to extra effort.

“Bwana, you'd best plug in a potful of empty flasks, too,” I said. “There's bound to be breakage. Remember what happened when we got dumped hard on level four of the hoist system?”

“Right, right, Barney! Fabulous head work! This's beginning to look good.
Better
than good!” Fast and furious computing was taking place. At last my main man clapped his hands and jumped to his feet. “Nailed it! Even if we lug
two
portable compressors, a spare fuel cell and a ten percent batch of spare flasks, we'll
still
be a skosh under the arbitrary mass limit.”

Amid the general rejoicing, a nearly invisible frown was wrinkling Aguilar's high forehead. “There's another basic issue I haven't heard settled,” he said slowly. “Where do your magic sledges come from, Jesperson? I used your arbitrary, total-packed-aboard-weight for each sledge, but couldn't help wondering how the delta figure for a bare sledge could be so low. The soil's fairly rich in iron oxide, but rigging a smelter to make steel means
—
”

“No, no!” rattled Jesperson. “Steel's too heavy, Vic, and way too hard to come by for our purposes even if we had the time and facility to make it, which we don't. I plan to strip the hard-anodized aluminum alloy handrails from one or two crawlers, then get Gimpy's ace welder, Red, to fusion-weld the runners into a lightweight tubular framework. Presto! We have a pair of sledges.”

“Man alive!” I objected. “Scheiermann'll love you to death for tearing the guts out of our precious crawlers.”

“He already does,” said Jesperson, his features twisted in an evil grin.

“Uh-uh,” denied Gimpy. “Scratch fusion welding. We'd need aluminum welding rod for that, except there's none hereabouts. Your sledges'll have to be arc-welded, and if so you'd better start praying those crawler handrails were fabbed from a weldable alloy.”

Our half-dozen tracked vehicles had been built and qualification tested at an automated Vonex factory in Pennsylvania, then disassembled, shipped piecemeal and reassembled here inside pressure at Burroughs.

“Quibble, quibble, quibble!” Beaming like a kid who just woke up on Christmas morning, Jesperson clapped his hands. “We again have a viable program, people.” He kissed Gloria soundly, then came over and chucked me on the shoulder. “Helluva great day's work by you, partner! The rest of us couldn't see the forest for all the trees, but
you
did. There's worthy think meat inside that woolly skull after all.”

“Gee, thanks,” I said. “Don't spoil me, Bwana.”

“You can say that, but you'll never have to fret about hearing it from me again.” His ear-to-ear grin blossomed like a sunrise, then Jesperson turned to the maintenance boss and sobered. “One other small glitch has reared its plug-ugly head, Gimpy. The hoist system needs a fix. Remember the stuck boom on level four? Can you take Red and another bo out to Olympus Rupes? The seals and gearing on the boom's pivot post need attention.”

“Oh, yeah. Sure, I remember.” Gimpy scratched behind his ear. “Remind me what it'll take to do the job?”

Jess had inspected the faulty seals his ownself. He advised using the level four upside cable to hoist the post out of its socket and clean out the sand and debris. “If that turns the trick,” he added, “Red may have to jury-rig a replacement for the pivot seals. The spec says the boom's drive motor also features permanent hermetic seals, but I wouldn't count on them staying tight after all these E-years. He'll be up there anyhow, so have Red give the motor a thorough inspect, too, then run a check while he's up there to make sure the boom's hot and tight?”

“Check! Got it.”

Jesperson seldom bothers with salutations or farewells. Without so much as a glance at the rest of us, he slumped behind the desk, revived Mr. Sibelius' sonic tempest, grabbed a pencil and without further ado went back to work on his ding-a-ling sledge design sketches.

Glorious Gloria knowingly elevated one neatly plucked eyebrow, and pursed her glossed lips in a silent request for sympathetic understanding of her man's foibles and foolishnesses. She escorted us outside, smiled and waved bye-bye and ankled away in the direction of the enclave medicenter over on West Slope.

***

Two or three evenings after that fruitful get together, I stopped by Art the Barkeep's all but deserted joint for a pick-me-up. The beer drought had put the kibosh on Art's business but good, so I asked for a belt of the so-called “Chianti” he keeps on hand for déclassé customers like me.

Gimpy's straw boss, Red, stumbled in a few minutes later looking shaky and drawn like maybe he hadn't slept well for a couple of months. He dipped his chin in my direction, looked away and said hoarsely, “Brandy, Art. A double, and make it your good stuff, not the swill you usually pour.”

I asked Red what was troubling him. He stared at me, round-eyed, his expression bilious. “Hoist,” was all he said. The word erupted as more of a croak.

“Ah, hah! Fix the level four stuck boom?”

He shuddered. “Fixed . . ? Uh-huh, all shipshape now. It was going up there and coming down again that damn near fixed me. Barnes, at one time or another in my short, unhappy life I've been plenty goddamn scared, but never like I was getting hauled up those neverending cliffs. You been up there, so you know what I'm saying. Were you scared as me riding that net?”

“On a one-to-ten scared scale,” I told him, “I rang up at least a twelve.”

“No way!” Red denied my bold declaration with a jerky head shake. He tilted back and chug-a-lugged brandy. “Your scared scale doesn't go high enough to close in on
my
count. Couldn't have been as bad for you as it was for me.”

There was no point arguing with the redhead. Scared is scared, and I make that a universal truth. For me, riding that open-weave net all the way to the top of the scarp whilst dangling from a real skinny cable had been plain, gut-wrenching terror that never did let up a whisker for one single instant.

Red downed another double, shook his head again as if to scrub away the picture of Olympus Rupes in his head, and ooched out of Art's place wearing kind of a dazed expression.

***

Later that evening, with our boy in bed, Lorna and I were sitting around, gabbing about nothing in particular when our domicile's built-in telephone ding-a-linged. It was Jesperson. He wanted to know what I weighed.

“Here in Mars?”

“Where else, f'Chrissake?”

“Remember our sky-ride, Bwana? Right around seventy-eight pounds,” I said, “give or take a few ounces.”

“Pounds yet! That comes to . . . Let's see, just over thirty-five kaygee. You're fat,” he accused, and rang off before I could pry an explanation out of him. Fat he calls me! I'm a bag of bones and gristle covered with scrawny lumps of dehydrated meat. As a college football linebacker, I once tipped the scale at a sassy two-thirty-six.

In the morning Jesperson called off our regular foot-sloggin' stint, saying he wanted to wait for the wind to maybe raise a little dust later on. He rounded up three of us
—
a pair of maintenance grunts and yours truly. Just after noontime we followed him back and forth up the trail's twisty switchbacks. Gimpy's bo's were wrestling with an empty glass box of middling size, while I lugged a bulky, flattened bundle.

I topped out breathing easy. Jesperson had complimented us for getting in shape so fast, and constantly encouraged us to keep at it, saying all our hard work would pay off big time. To me, that line of propaganda sounded like pure blarney. All we seemed to be getting in shape for was more foot-foot-slog-sloggin' up ‘n down the miserable ringwall trail.”

Making our the way along the crater's curving lip in a procession, we dodged around the roof-shield's anchoring pilasters, picked our way around the larger chunks of debris underfoot that'd splattered all around eons ago. In the lead, Jesperson found a spot he liked
—
a long, flattish block of ejecta that never quite got fully ejected, with a sheer dozen-meter drop-off on its desert side. I'd twigged long before that, naturally. He was bent on testing a model of his homemade parachute.

The maintenance grunts plopped down their burden. At Jesperson's bidding, we scrounged armfuls of scoria and started loading it in the glass box. Jesperson watching the action as it filled, and when the ballast reached a line scratched on the glass, he called a halt, closed and fastened the lid. The bo's and I got behind it, shoved it to the brink of the drop-off.

Jesperson took his time attaching the chute pack to eyelets bolted high on the box's sides, near the top, and stood back. “There, that's you, Barney.”

“I look kind of puny.”

“We must learn to walk before we can even think about running.”

“Uh-huh. Can we also say this widget's a model of the real me?”

“To scale, perfect scale.”

“How'd I get elected to take the fall?”

“By unanimous acclamation.”

“Do tell. That makes me feel good all over, Bwana. How you figure to recover me?”

“Transponder.” He tapped a bulge in the chute pack. “It's sewn into the canopy. Vic jiggered it up for me. He's waiting out there now.” Jess pointed.

Sure enough, the black speck of a crawler was visible near the horizon five or six klicks to the southwest, in the direction of the Amazonis lowlands.

“Here goes nothing.” Jess waved us back. “Stand clear, guys. It might swing sideways when the chute pops.”

I judged the wind to be not too strong, no more than sixty-five, seventy knots. Looping a length of fiberglass cord through the chute's simulated “D”-ring Jesperson glanced left, glanced right to make sure we were on safe ground. He counted down from five, yanked hard on the lanyard.

The pack came open lazy-like until a small compressed air bottle forced the chute open, a low
wh-h-h-houp!
came through my suit's external audio pickup, and the glass box vanished.

A scale model of Jesperson's full sized brainchild, the shallow-dished, translucent half-bubble floated down and away, looking like an undernourished Portuguese man-of-war jellyfish, except much wider and shallower. The chute's rate of descent wasn't too steep, the glass box standing-in for me swung back and forth hardly at all. After due deliberation, my partner had elected the complicated canopy he called a “Ringsail” adaptation, patterned after the recovery chutes used on NASA's first manned space flights that featured an all-around opening out near the canopy's perimeter as well as the center vent. Jess told me sewing together the chute's “annulate geometry” had taxed the ingenuity of Mrs. Chang and her stitching crew.

We watched the model chute drift away carrying simulated “me” toward Amazonis like a windborne thistle. Chute and box traveled a klick or more farther downwind than Jesperson had calculated. The glass box touched, bounced going like blazes laterally, bounced once more and got dragged by the chute, scudding along the rock-strewn desert until it shattered on a boulder. The distant dot of the crawler slewed around and chased after the collapsed, billowing canopy.

“I see why the wind's got you worried,” I told Jesperson. “No way I could have made a decent landing sailing along at fifty, sixty kph.”

His mind elsewhere, Jess muttered, “You should've been more careful.

On the trail down, I asked him why a pressurized air flask had been needed to pop open the chute. His answer made me feel like he was being evasive. He said the wind hadn't been strong enough, nor the drop-off steep and deep enough, to guarantee the payload getting swept off the crest cleanly, without damaging or busting the glass box.

“No air bottles when thee and me step off the volcano?”

“Certainly not,” he said.

“Certainly not!” sez he.
“Why
not?” I demanded. “What'll keep the wind from carrying us halfway around the planet from high up on Big Oly.

“Not to worry,” he advised in that offhand, super-confident manner that worries me no end. “Remind me to teach you how to spill air with your risers and sharpen the rate of descent. There are plenty of other things to fret about.”

“Such as? I'll get busy fretting.”

“On balance,” he said, “freezing is far and away the most worrisome hazard. Staying out in the open night after night will put a ferocious strain on our suit batteries. Trouble is, there's no choice.”

“Oh, be still my pitter-pattering heart! What else, Bwana?”

“Sandstorm,” he said without hesitation. “A major blow could trash the climb. Winds raging at almost three hundred kph wrecked more than one ringwall anemometer during the last really big blow, and to our potential misfortune we'll be climbing the windward slopes. Yet the other side of the coin is that really huge blows leave Big Oly open to the sky.”

“How come?”

“Because the scarp's too high and wide to allow much more than an aerosol made up of tiny particulates to build up in the air above six klicks.”