Olympus Mons (30 page)

Gimpy, Red, and Jesperson were debating the issue between themselves when you-know-what hit the fan and splattered all over Jesperson's scheme to assault Big Oly. Aguilar charged into the maintenance shed with word that Scheiermann had issued a formal council green light, okaying Franklin's proposed ice expedition. All six crawlers were to be dispatched in a search for underground ice pockets, three to head south on divergent routes, the other three to go west into the far reaches of Amazonis Planitia.

Jesperson didn't get hot digesting the news, he turned to ice. “All six
at once?”
he asked in a monotone.
“
Now the damfools have
really
lost it! If there's another breakdown, one or more crawlers and crews could be written off, and we'll sit here helpless. Our distinguished council has its collective head jammed up its . . .”

He trailed off, eyes narrowed, and took to smacking a fist into his open palm, too incredulous over the council's crazy decision to finish the diatribe. You might call my main man even-tempered; he's forever being angrified by someone or something. I tried to talk to him, calm him down. No dice! I finally dragged him over to Gloria's cubbyhole of an office at the medicenter to let him cry on her shoulder. When we got there, she was mightily displeased to be bothered in the midst of examining a young patient, but once she got a look at the storm clouds gathered around her man's now short-clipped salt-and-pepper locks, she spent a few minutes trying to soothe his outrage.

With zero success.

“It's come down to him or us,” he told Gloria, and meant it. “If he has to go tits up instead of the rest of us,” he promised, “I'll strangle him myself.”

Gloria did her best to stay cool and professional, but was worried enough to fast-talk her man. It had no effect. She asked me to stay with him in the waiting room, saying she had to finish with the young patient. I found out later that whilst doing so she'd called Yokie, with whom she'd formed a congenial professional relationship, and asked if she and Jesperson could come over that evening and speak with him in private.

Brimming with customary politeness and sympathy that evening, Deputy Director Yokomizo had listened patiently to the lovebirds' united plea, and refused to budge. In Yokie's ultraconservative universe, Scheiermann was the enclave's duly anointed director, and as such our father figure whose leadership was not to be questioned for any reason. In Yokomizo's somewhat narrow opinion, the director spoke with the authority vested in him by the United Nations Organization, a credential that in his opinion rendered the council's decision inviolate.

As a practicing M.D. however, he did bend slightly, confessing that he himself had voted against the decision to simultaneously send all six crawlers out on an ice hunt. Even so, it was his firm belief that actively opposing a formal directive adopted by a three-to-two council vote amounted at best to open rebellion, and at worst an off-brand version of mutiny. Gloria told me while she and Jess were talking their fool heads off, Mrs. Yokomizo, who speaks only Japanese, served the Oolong tea Yokie pays through the nose to have shipped all the way from India. Gloria also reported that during the visit their host's sunny smile had radiated naught but distress. Trouble was, the longer they'd talked, the higher Yokie had built his thick stone wall.

Afterward the lovebirds looked forlorn trooping into our place to tell their woeful tale of what had taken place. While Gloria and Lorna huddled in the kitchen for girl talk, I asked Jess what he had in mind as our next move.

Head hanging low, his spirits down around his sweat socks, in a glum, hard-to-hear monotone he said, “Next we rage against the dying of the light.”

“Come again, Bwana?”

“Unless we can talk the council into changing its alleged mind,” he muttered, “our next move will be to go peacefully into the everlasting night.”

I let him know what he could do with that gloomy, doomy notion.

His drooping eyelids, the grim set of his mouth told me Jesperson himself was wondering if we'd be given a chance to
make
a next move.

***

Word of the most recent council directive finished the job of splitting the enclave's denizens right down the middle. The debate between yeasayers in one camp, and naysayers in the other built up a full head of high-pressure steam, neatly axing public opinion into equal halves. Half the Marsrats were all for sending our six precious crawlers out to scrounge for Franklin's “phantom ice pockets,” while the other half were eager to pour every effort into mounting a repair assault on Olympus Mons. The director took a halfhearted stab at quashing the ballooning controversy, and quickly making things worse was easy to predict. Us orphans in the sky aren't shy about taking sides, voicing their opinions. Arguments divided our denizens, tensions and tempers heated up as the bo's and their ladies flocked to one crusade or the other. The situation started to look like it was about to get downright dicey.

Aguilar, Black-like-me, Gimpy, and yours truly
—
my partner's staunchest backers
—
plus a dozen other foot-sloggin' true believers went around preaching the gospel to anyone who'd listen, and bitterly poor-mouthed the council decision to risk all six precious crawlers in a widespread, win-or-lose ice hunt. We argued that while such foolhardy nonsense had won official sanction, in the same breath our leaders had dared to put the kibosh on preparations for the big climb, the enclave's one and only “fallback” position. Time wasn't being rationed at the same rate as the drastically sinking water level in our reservoirs, but both were sure as hell on a collision course, and running out at roughly the same rate.

Us foot-sloggers did what we could to make our friends and neighbors acutely aware that the sandstorm season was upon us, and might conclusively bollix our one and only chance for survival, a chance that grew dimmer and slimmer with each passing day, each hour. Think of your women and children, we told the Marsrats.

A sickly whiff of broken heads was in the offing
—
not riots yet, just scattered run-ins, confrontations and scuffles, a few requiring stitches, splints or bandages. No Marsrat worth his salt will ever knuckle under, roll over and stage a quiet, orderly protest. Normally peace-lovers, not even semi-important issues hardly ever raise anyone's blood pressure, but once their dander's up our friends and neighbors forget about talking and protest in rough ‘n tumble style.

The life-or-death, yin or yang water issue was as basic as basic can get, real close to the bone for every living soul. We true believers put it to the Marsrats in the simplest, most straightforward terms in the book: live or die, choose one.

Vic Aguilar did the most to fire enthusiasm for our foot-sloggin' cause. He stirred the pot strictly on his own, turned his cap around and did what he'd never done before. Without consulting Jesperson or anyone else, he editorializing in the
Blue Planet,
inserting a propaganda squib he penned to offset the bland blarney still coming our way from the homeworld. The front page double-column was captioned with what almost all Marsrats considered a real mysterious headline:

C R O A T O A N

Vic had dug into the computer's encyclopedic database and done his homework. In a few paragraphs, he expanded a parroted version of Jesperson's history lesson, describing how the first Queen Elizabeth had commissioned a New World colony as a British foothold from which to raid Spain's rich overseas empire. He embellished the tale with an account of how group of settlers were sailed across the briny to what then was the Virginia Wilderness, and left to fend for themselves on an offshore island. For a time war with Spain kept anyone from voyaging back to Roanoke Island off the coast of today's South Carolina. When someone finally did, the only trace of the settlers was a single word, CROATOAN, carved on a tree trunk and a gate post.

Vic wrote about how Roanoke became famous as the “Lost Colony,” and asked if anyone had noticed what he'd called, “this same apocalyptic word” scrawled on a photomural in the “Smokers Lounge” of North Tunnel's utility airlock, and let it go at that, without so much as a hint that all of us might also turn up our toes, and hoped that whoever'd screwed up the photomural would step forward and ‘fess up. Far as I know, no one ever did.

The blowoff came within a thin red hair of blowing off when Doc Franklin paid a surprise visit to the maintenance shed and had the gall to ask Jesperson for his help in organizing, rounding up crews and whatever else needed doing for the six crawlers slated to comb the wilderness in search of vast buried ice fields. This time the gleam in Jesperson's baby-blues made me sure genuine, about-to-detonate mayhem was in the offing. It was touch and go for a few heartbeats, then a low-pitched growl came from deep in my partner's throat
—
the sound of a caged animal desperate to get out. Gimpy's strawboss, Red, and I jumped on Jesperson at the same time. It took our combined muscle power to keep him from savaging Franklin. I don't believe the areographer appreciated what a close swipe the Old Man with the Scythe took at him that afternoon. We knew. We held Jesperson down, sitting on him and waiting for the crazed heat to cool and get out of his eyes.

A few minutes after Franklin left, he quit struggling and went limp, the homicidal fire in his eyes banked
—
not extinguished, just dimmed. “Get off me,” he said, sounding calm, cool ‘n collected as you please.

It's a cinch to admire Glorious Gloria for maybe a dozen reasons. For one, she's even more super-smart than she is super-pretty. Kilos of high-quality think meat are lodged under that pageboy hairdo, and every bit as importantly she stays cool as one of Doc Franklin's ice cubes in a crisis, even the one then dumped smack in front of us. I think when told of Franklin's near-miss at the hands of her man, it brought home to Gloria the putrid stench of a slow, thirsty finale that hour by hour was beginning to look like more of a sure thing. She wasn't alone, either. The foul stench of a disaster on the horizon had seeped through Burroughs like what leaks from a busted sewer pipe.

Most startling to me was Gloria's stern reaction to her man's near-homicidal blowup over Franklin's invitation to join in and help organize his ice hunt, except in her case it was a cool, collected form of outrage. She didn't say anything, but no one who knew her could have missed the fact that she was every bit as furious as Jesperson, furious I should say not as a dedicated physician, but privately as a woman in love. Glorious Gloria detested the end-of-the-world atmosphere she had unknowingly fallen into upon arriving in Burroughs, not to mention her scorn for our “leaders” over their obstinate refusal to listen to reason, or give logic a hearing instead of swallowing the counsel of a stuffed-shirt know-it-all like Doc Franklin.

I had never before seen my partner in the state he was in during that crucial period. In a word, he shut up shop, pulled in his horns and refused to say anything. His emotions stretched tight as one of the hoist system cables under heavy load, he sort of folded himself into himself, and for someone like me who thought he knew his partner better than well it was a genuine hair-raiser. I remember feeling happy about the fact that there were no firearms in Burroughs. If a weapon had been handy, I know damn well Jesperson would've loaded it and gone looking for Scheiermann and Franklin, not necessarily in that order. His emotions had peaked, soaring high above ordinary, every day rage, and gone off the scale. What made it worse was that he seethed in silence, staying in the same deaf ‘n dumb killing mood. On the outside he looked cold and unfeeling as the “phantom” ice pockets Franklin was bent on chasing after, and in that frame of mind was ten times as deadly.

Gloria tried to talk to him, and plead with him. She got nowhere. Jesperson wasn't buying anything she or anyone else had to say. He wouldn't talk, wouldn't let her touch him with words or in any other way. He wouldn't listen, wouldn't even
look
at her. Gloria wore herself out, and finally she got so hyper-worked-up and frantic what with coaxing and cajoling Jesperson that she ended up as full of blind, staggering red rage as he was.

Then, in the middle of a tirade Gloria shut up suddenlike and did something I wouldn't have done if my life depended on it. She grimaced, sucked in a deep breath, hauled off and slapped Jesperson a roundhouse crack on the cheek. Not a love pat, believe me; her backswing almost clobbered me. Then she cranked her other arm way back and belted Jess again, snapping his head around in the opposite direction.

He backed off, rubbing his reddened chops, his lips curled in a slow, rueful grin. “Doctor,” he said, “you have golden hands.”

“Grow up, you stubborn ass!” Gloria didn't raise her voice; she didn't need to. “Give up feeling sorry for yourself,” she told him, “and
think.
We don't
have
the luxury to sit around and mope and give in to rage while everything around us is crumbling.”

“I hear you, Mother Mayhem.” Sounding more than a degree sheepish, he massaged his cheeks; both had turned a delicate rose shade.

“Damn you!” cried Gloria. “Turn off your gonads and turn on your brain. While we're arguing desperate issues with the fellow inmates who pretend to run this asylum, the water in the reservoirs is running out like a patient's lifeblood. Wake up! Anger won't cut it, hear me? Anger is a dead issue; it's taking us to a dead end! We have to
think
our way out of this mess, and we have to do it now, now,
now!”

“I have been thinking, Dear Darling Doctor of mine,” Jesperson said slowly, deliberately. “The end product of my heavy-duty thought brings me to a dirt simple conclusion. Either Scheiermann has to go, or we will all go together when we go.”