Olympus Mons (3 page)

A thesaurus of medical terminology, together with biochemical formulae of interest only to professionals is appended in this volume. A second appendix describes in the symbology of organic chemistry and extensive verbal detail the complex chain of anabolic and catabolic processes, along with specific electro-surgical procedures, which permit Bevvinase to act as a catalyst in the conversion of carbon dioxide to oxygen en vivo.

 

MODUS VIVENDI

 

Warren L. Beresford, M.D., Ph.D.

Hyperspace Press, Pty. 2123

Auckland, Sydney & Toronto

***

I skipped everything except the gist of the piece, not worrying a whole lot about how hard it was to understand. It made me silently curse the late, great Dr. “Clancy” Bevvins for reminding me how they roll you out of the isolated processing ward in the Christchurch Medicenter, load your sealed carbon dioxide capsule aboard a jet airfreighter bound for the Pacific Launch Complex offshore Lahaina, Hawaii, and ease your dread of what's to come by telling you you're about to spend your last night on Earth. Sure has a comforting ring, doesn't it? Then the “Mars-rationalized” label is overlaid on every page of your electronic file, but it should be written in blood, or engraved on platinum foil and glued to your forehead. A one-way street runs to Mars. They tell you straight, with no softsoap, that you can never come home again.

Ever!

***

Jesperson lifted his eyes from the way station's aged holovision tank and looked at me, his expression sour as week-old cream. “Seen enough, Barney?”

“More than plenty. Go on, kill it, Bwana.”

He picked up the remote controller. “Better think it over,” he advised, tongue in both cheeks
—
a tough maneuver even for him. “It's the only pomp and ceremony you're liable to see for the rest of your unnatural life.”

I told him what the Gypsy told the policeman.

He clicked his tongue, pretended hurt feelings. “You're uncouth, Barnes! Stay tuned, and you'll witness an historic event. Vonex Chairman Korasek is going to formally hand over Burroughs to United Nations stewardship, then the U.N. Secretary-general will swear in Scheiermann by proxy. Sure you want to miss all the hoopla?”

I hadn't exactly liked Scheiermann's version of Hearts and Flowers. “Deeds'll get done without my help. Let's suit-up ‘n truck for home.”

It looked like he'd taken me at my word by tapping the off switch, but didn't budge. He just sat there stroking his stubbled chin, stewing about something, which I've learned can be a bad sign. Then without a word, he reenergized the holotank, switched inputs and diddled with the view selector until the lowermost section of the Olympus Rupes escarpment swelled to fill the display. The way station is way too close to the volcano for the roof camera to pick up more than a tiny slice of a piece of a smidgen of the monster's soaring curtain wall. We had inspected the downfall stretch of pipeline earlier that morning, using what my partner calls “the Schmidt-Cassegrain reflector” that gets swapped around between the enclave's half-dozen crawlers. Magnified in the telescope, the visible pipe string way high up is a faint thread that dives down at you after it comes over the scarp's beetling brow. The aqueduct, our lifeline, carries a steady dribble down from the volcano's middle heights, the enclave's one and only source of water.

“Someday,” vowed Jesperson, “I'll climb that mother. I swear I will!”

“Be a cinch,” I encouraged, “once you sprout wings.”

He took no offense; we'd had the same meaningless conversation a dozen times in the past. My zinger rolled off his back like a Ping-Pong ball.

“I mean it!” he insisted, studying the holotank intently as if willpower alone would make Big Oly's gawdawful escarpment do some kind of change. He did mean it, but it was the ex-mountain climber in him doing the brave talking, not what any bo with a smidgen of common sense would say. Most experts peg the humongous volcano as dormant; others subscribe to the notion that it's been stone cold dead one full day longer than forever. Either way, except for minor burps and a now-and-then shiver shake, Big Oly hasn't done any kind of major turn for thousands or maybe millions or billions of E-years.

The lowermost stretch of the escarpment's three-D image reared in the holotank like a colorized clip from some grainy old black-and-white King Kong movie
—
vertical, rugged bulwarks and furled ropes of lava drip that had serpentined down from the heights in ages past. In literally any number of places, the Olympus Rupes escarpment soars
six
kilometers above a layered crust the monster's tremendous weight has actually depressed some. High as it is, the scarp itself is only the first baby step in a truly awesome rise. All told, from its base on the Tharsis highlands to the caldera up on the edge of space Jesperson insists on calling the mesosphere, Olympus Mons is roughly three times the height of Mt. Everest.

After a long, thoughtful silence, my partner said, “I won't need wings, Barney.”

My astute observation was, “Uh-huh.”

During my first weeks as his assigned work-partner, I thought I'd gotten to know the man backward, forward and upside down, at least to the point of developing a genuine urge to kill the ornery sonuvabitch. Then I started to catch on, to begin figuring out what Jesperson was all about. In a dozen different ways, he's one helluva puzzling puzzle to try to unravel until you learn he always speaks his mind, and always minds what he's about to say before he speaks. At heart, my partner's a moody, bad-tempered, overeducated, Marsrat as lean and UV-irradiated and parchment dry as every other bo stuck in this frozen, rust-colored dustball. His conversation, what little there is of it, tends to be laced with acid.

I gradually found out that like me he'd had been given a living death sentence as a Marsrat after what must've been a really unpleasant earthside experience. He'd righteously deny ever confiding the tale to another living soul, but he would be wrong. One evening maybe three E-years ago we were sitting in Art the Barkeep's sleazy watering hole when he'd babbled the highlights to me. Seems he'd once been on the payroll of a government spook show that's shy of being talked about, and had somehow come to do less than what was expected of him. A mysterious Asian fem was involved
—
aren't they always?
—
and a fly speck-sized data microdot he'd somehow let stray into the wrong hands. The half-told tale came spun out all fuzzy and cloak ‘n daggery, leaving me mainly in the dark about whatever details he'd decided to keep under his hat. He never came right out and said so, but catching the general drift was fairly easy. His big boss had offered simple options: termination with prejudice, or Mars. I know exactly how Jess must've felt, but I still believe we both made the worst of two choices.

Once upon a time, a stonefaced, white bread judge looked down his long nose at me and offered what Jesperson once called “Hobson's Choice,” whatever that means. The rambunctious gent I'd tangled with in a San Berdoo gin palace had already taken on an overload of white lightning. He'd gone out of his way to provoke the scuffle, and his foulmouthed lack of manners had pushed me in the same direction. What lit his fuse, I later learned, was that his kid, a defensive tackle with two left feet, had screwed-up during a losing game. I'd yanked the baby bull off the field, sat him down on the bench to think about his sins.

The bo swung and I ducked, in that order. We went at it hot and heavy for a half-dozen heartbeats, except once the chips were down the tackle's proud papa was handier with his mouth than his mitts. My right fist hit the left side of his mouth, and the back of his head hit the edge of the bar, also in that order.

The assistant DA knew a Murder Two indictment wouldn't hold water. Even so, she argued, waffled, beat her gums, and ended up grudging a manslaughter plea-bargain deal that gratified the young public defender assigned to stand up for me. Unlike Jesperson, I'd had no “termination” worries, yet thoughts of five-to-ten in the slam when you're young are, well . . . I was a lot younger then, and black, and ten times more arrogant than I am now. Hizzoner didn't care for arrogance. He cared even less for Afro-American football coaches. It's a dull story.

Anyhow, once the fallout fell out, unbeknownst to either of us at the time we'd each opted for a one-way ticket to Mars. I found Lorna here, fell for her big time, and managed to earn my keep, and a sore back, by virtue of the dexterity and industry I demonstrated picking up, carting hither and thither, and setting down objects of various sizes, shapes and weights.

Jesperson wasn't that fortunate; only thing he found here was Olympus Mons. Now no one in his right mind, underscore no one
—
taking it for granted the term applies to my partner
—
had ever given serious thought to
climbing
Burroughs' humongous next door neighbor. Yet I think mountaineering must get in your blood, and stay there. My partner had been a world-class climber long before he made the mistake that got him cashiered and made him agree to have his insides reworked so he could get boxed and shipped to Mars. According to Doc Franklin, the enclave's self-appointed areography expert, Jesperson had once ranked among the homeworld's top “alpinists,” if that's the right word. When prodded extra-hard, he'd now and then open up part way and spin a tale about climbing some “hill” in the Dolomites, Alps, California's Sierra, the Canadian Rockies or wherever. He once told me he and another pair of carefree crazies had hitched their bods up the sheer granite face of Yosemite's El Capitan, and proudly said they'd gone up the wall “clean,” anchoring their carabiners, ropes and whatnots in chocks and handset aluminum wedges instead of hammered-in pitons
—
more big words borrowed from Jesperson.

Why do a super-tough climb the super-tough way? Not, for the love of God just because it's
there!
That has to be the lamest damned excuse for risking it all I ever did hear. No, he said he and the other two clucks had done it the hard way so as not to “spoil” the rock face for any head cases dumb enough to follow them up a few thousand meters of vertical granite.

All things considered, I think that explains my wild ‘n crazy work-partner better than anything else I could tell you.

 

Suiting up for the short hike from the way station airlock to the crawler was a bother. Our next-to-nothing surface air pressure is less than one percent of what it is at sea level earthside, so we bothered. The summer afternoon was mild, the air temp wobbling around minus forty degrees C, with a light wind from the southeast
—
a homeworld gale, but here in Mars a gentle zephyr.

My education, such as it was, ended in a battle to earn a bachelor's degree in Physical Education. I staggered through college with the help of some dear friends I never had a chance to meet: a herd of do-gooder alums who eagerly picked up the tab on my grant-in-aid for playing football. All things considered, high school was twice as tough as college. As an eleventh grader, I had to make a purely adult decision: did I want to stay a student, or dropout and maybe turn up my toes and turn into a dead gang-banger? My dad's older brother, Uncle Jeremy, used a pair of attitude correction tools
—
fists like family size tomato cans
—
to help me decide. After bouncing me around some to warm-up, he reached for the never-to-to-be-sufficiently-damned leather strap he used to whet his straight razor before scraping the steel wool off his jowls. The adroit way he used the strap helped persuade me to go along with his kindly straighten-up-and-fly-right “suggestions.”

The point of this personal stuff is that hanging out with Jesperson earns you the sort of liberal education on which money won't make a deposit, let along the down payment. Unwilling student I may be, but it's tough not to swallow the sterling pearls of wisdom my partner keeps dropping. Among other incidentals, he taught me more than I wanted to know about the whys and wherefores of Martian wind.

Our atmosphere boasts six measly “millibars” of surface pressure, and has a smallish “heat capacity,” meaning it cools down faster than the homeworld's thick air blanket, and heats up quicker, too. Above the long Tharsis Montes bulge east of us, the air hangs in at a lower pressure, while higher pressure sits over the lower down plains to the west, and over Burroughs. The pressure differential's small, but enough to give us upslope winds in the daytime, and downslope blows during the cold, cold nights. Most times a paper tiger, the wind seems all sound and no fury as it whistles and moans in your pressure-suit's audio pickup, but there's hardly any “shove” behind it. Surface altitude hereabouts varies by quite a few kilometers, so air pressure can change up to thirty percent from one slice of Tharsis to another. High up or low down, too few molecules are packed into every cubic centimeter of air to have much force during an ordinary blow.

Yet during the warmest parts of late spring, summer and early fall, look out! Our seasons are twice as long as those in the homeworld, with the windiest period of all coming around “perihelion,” when Mars swings closest to the Sun and solar heating jumps up thirty or forty percent, and convection patterns kick off hurricane winds that lift millions of tonnes of powdery dust into the air. The howlingest windstorm ever clocked at Burroughs
—
two hundred and eighty klicks per hour
—
roared across Tharsis during the Great Storm three E-years ago. It sent to the scrap heap a pair of anemometers perched on the crest of Burroughs' ringwall, and lasted roughly five E-months, cloaking much of the planet in reddish-brown misery.