Olympus Mons (31 page)

Gloria's chartreuse-green eyes clouded. “No, that I will not allow.”

“Really? How wonderfully humane and considerate of you. Why the hell
not?”
he demanded. “Scheiermann and his council have fallen in love with Franklin's insane folly, which labels them prospective mass murderers, not officials. Circumstances force us to be extremely selective in choosing a further course of action, and it's my firm conclusion that either Director Scheiermann will have to go tits-up, or for all the rest of us it will be hippety-hop to the graveyard, and die, die, die!”

“No!” Gloria was adamant.

“Yes, dear Darling Doctor of Mine!” said Jesperson, and repeated his credo. “Wise up yourself! Dirt simple alternatives have dire consequences unless handled in dirt simple fashion. It's either him, or all the rest of us. Choose!”

“There are . . . There
has
to be some other way.”

“I'm all ears.”

Gloria blinked, ran her tongue over carmined lips, and frowned. “There could be a . . . There may be an iatrogenic solution.”

I didn't come within light-years of getting it at the time
—
what it was she'd said. Gloria had also scored a first during her first time at bat. She'd hit a four-bagger that struck Jesperson a foul blow below the belt by dredging up a term that had not yet found its way into his billion-word vocabulary.

“A
what
solution . . ?” Jesperson was squinting at her.

“Look it up,” Dr. Glorious Gloria Steinkritz said snappishly. Without further adieu, she kicked us out of her office.

 

Shortly before daybreak, loaded with spare fuel-cells, a flock of suit- and pack-batteries, food, and barely enough water to keep their already dehydrated crews alive, the enclave's six crawlers departed Burroughs through North and South Tunnels. Not one Marsrat from our foot-sloggin' cadre had complied with officialdom's urgings and eventual pleadings to “volunteer” as crewmen, a mass refusal to serve the cause that sent Scheiermann into a lasting, world-class indignant snit. Why did our team turn down the director's anguished pleas when the members were the ablest, most experienced Marsrats in Burroughs? The easy answer is that our bo's judged Jesperson to be dead right, and the all-or-nothing decision by Scheiermann and the council dead wrong.

Our foot-sloggers, equally steadfast and true in calm and crisis, were firmly committed to saving the hides of not only they themselves and their families, but everyone else in Burroughs, no matter the cost. To a man, they hooted and booed the council's decision to risk all six crawlers by sanctioning a simultaneous search for “suspected” subsurface water ice “somewhere” beneath the sands. The most polite term I heard to describe the would-be ice pirates was “coney chasing crotch cannibals.” I overheard Gimpy's redheaded straw boss respond to a recruitment invitation by one of the Marsrats due to accompany Franklin on his ice hunt. Red was his usual blunt self. To the crewman he said, “Go tap some other sucker.”

“Can't duck the truth,” the bo said. “We're going out t'do what has to be done.”

“Don't get lost,” advised Red.

“What the hell troubles you?” asked the ice pirate, choosing the wrong psychology when dealing with a redhead. “Scared we'll find an ice mountain, poop your volcano party?”

Knowing Red, I doubt whether he'd be afraid of anything up to and including the crack of doom, the sole exception being hoisted up Olympus Rupes, a fright for which I'd be dead last to cast blame. He looked the bo up and down slow-like and drawled, “No ice for you chumps to chase out there, just plenty of wild geese.”

Four fingernail-biting-days later, by ones and twos, five of the six crawlers began to straggle back into Burroughs. What happened to Cee Three may never be known. During a finger-pointing debriefing session of the five crews, Aguilar patiently explained how radio contact with Cee Three had been lost while he'd been switching around amongst the separate frequencies assigned to each crawler. He had tried over and over to reestablish contact, but no luck. Somewhere out in the Amazonis wasteland Cee Three may have turned turtle while negotiating a treacherous crater ringwall, a deep rille or
—
unlikely yet possible
—
had been a victim of fuel-cell failure. We never learned what happened to it and three luckless crewmen.

When told one of the vehicles had gone missing, my partner's acid comment may've been in rotten bad taste, but it was typically and bitterly Jespersonian: “Cee Three probably fell into Lake Franklin, and the ice pirates drowned.”

To my personal regret, as Lady Luck would have it
—
and She usually does
—
the ice expedition leader, Dr. Wesley M. Franklin, Ph.D., had been aboard Cee Six, not the missing crawler. Returning all but empty-handed from his personally guided grand ice hunt, the areographer expressed “the deepest imaginable sorrow” over the loss of an irreplaceable vehicle and its crew. Cee One alone had made it back from the far reaches of the southern flats with maybe a half-dozen liters of dirty, rust-colored water sloshing around in glass buckets. The remaining four crews had turned up nothing other than sand, rocks and aching backs from trying to dig into the desert's underlying hardpan using useless, fold-handled utility spades.

The upshot of Franklin's disastrous venture into the hinterlands was a shock wave that rippled through Burroughs like an afterthought the eruption and quake had neglected to deliver in timely fashion. With acid-tongued ferocity, Jesperson labeled the misadventure “Franklin's Folly,” reminding everyone it had not only cost three never-to-be-seen-again Marsrats good and true as well as Cee Three, but never-to-be-seen-again time, energy, and a gross quantity of what little water had been in the reservoirs. Franklin's Folly would have discouraged any leadership owning a smidgen of good sense, but it pains me to record in what short supply that commodity was during those dark, thirsty days. All us foot-sloggers were sure the ice hunt had put the quietus on all thought of an encore, but the areographer refused to give up. Scheiermann and his water wizard put their heads together again immediately after yet another special emergency council session none of Jesperson's followers bothered to attend.

I was busy helping Vic apportion equipment and supplies for the respective sledges, and saw no reason to accompany my partner to the session. He wagged his head and told us afterward how the director had looked down his nose at the measly buckets of dirty water, turned to the areographer and had the brass balls to say, “Dr. Franklin, is this all . . ?”

Never stuck for a comeback, Franklin had persisted in looking at the real-world situation through blinders, and argued that the dinky crater that had given up a smidgen of water ice had been only one of several in the far-off southern wilds, and had nerved himself up to request permission to give it another try that almost sent Jesperson over the edge.

My partner had hooted “Mission Implausible!” loud enough to bust a lung, adding an unprintable comment about Franklin's notion that instantly got him booted out of the meeting area. Nevertheless, the areographer's motion was seconded and voted on, losing by a bare three-to-two vote. Anyone else would have thrown in the towel there and then. Not Franklin, who requested yet
another
private audience with the council members which, for reasons none of us could fathom, Jesperson and Gimpy were invited to attend. I tagged along, and no one seemed to care enough to object.

Franklin's latest brainstorm made his first fateful ice expedition, or the motion to do yet another off to the west, seem downright conservative. He proposed sending a pair of crawlers on a long-range expedition to skirt the volcano's northern flanks, press on to just this side of the point of no return, scouring the badlands along the volcano's far side for water ice. In a more detailed explanation of his latest urge to commit this latest folly, he told the council a “comprehensive inspection” of the cartographic, high-resolution orbital pix led him to believe quantities of ice simply
had
to be beneath what “looked like” dry washes in the Lycus Sulci area
—
runnels and canyons which in his opinion
had
to have been carved as a result of watershed from extensive prior flows.

Hearing this latest harebrained proposal, Jesperson went ballistic, and in a frothing-at-the-mouth frenzy bellowed at the council, informing the members that the extensive Lycus Sulci aureole made ordinary, run-of-the-mill badlands look like a manicured golf course. He agreed that the thousands of square kilometers ravaged by striated rilles, and deep, rugged ravines might
be
washes created by flowing water millions or billions of E-years ago, but insisted that the jagged ravines and gullies were part and parcel of an underlying basalt schist that would tax the capability of professional drilling equipment to penetrate, let alone puny hand tools. In short, he derided the proposal so violently that it accomplished nothing except to have Franklin take the floor and insist in his own long-winded, so-sincere way that critical analysis of the orbital remote sensing data had assured him that at least some of the rilles and ravines in question had been carved by water running off the volcano's flanks, or perhaps bubbling from fumeroles and natural volcanic springs. He told the council he had high hopes of discovering water somewhere amid the distant, tumbled desolation.

“Running
water
?”
Red-faced, Jesperson yelled, “Freely running water on or near the surface? Franklin, where the hell are you coming from with
that
crazy idea? There may have been ancient lakes, oceans eons ago. Not
now,
f'Chrissake!”

The director's patented disapproval frown washed over Jesperson. He tapped his gavel once, deciding against a second tap when Franklin, speaking from his high seat in the saddle of a very tall horse, denied it impossible for Jesperson to know that for a fact.

“You
can't
be serious, Franklin!”

By this time, I was beginning to worry about what Jesperson might do next. His features distended, he was plainly struggling against a revival of the urge to savage Franklin right then, in front of God and the council and all bystanders. Getting hotter by the second, he all of a sudden took a deep breath and said more calmly, “Please listen to me, Dr. Franklin. Aside from volcanic emissions, what I do know for a fact is that not a single molecule of free water is on or near the surface of Mars, and so does anyone willing to open his mind and at least
try
to make sense of the information provided by his senses. The scientific and engineering teams who opted for the agony and expense of building the Olympus Mons Aqueduct System chose not to waste time and effort searching for subsurface ice. They
knew,
not guessed, but
knew,
that if any pockets of frozen water still existed, by now they had to be deeply buried beneath the surface.”

“Mr. Jesperson,” declared Franklin, “I hear vanity speaking, not scientific assessment. You may be correct, but there is absolutely no way you can
—
”

“No way? Really?” cried Jesperson, again fast approaching the flash point. He asked how many crawlers Franklin meant to lose on
this
excursion, just one, or all five.

At which point the director banged his gavel in earnest. “That will do, Mr. Jesperson,” he intoned, spurring his own high horse into a fast canter. “Uncalled for remarks of that nature are not to be tolerated. The Chair refuses to permit scurrilous innuendo, and henceforth, you do
not
have permission to take part in further discussions. Please remove yourself from the premises.”

I watched my partner swallow bile. Breathing hard, spasmodically clenching and unclenching his fists, he glared redly at the podium, then abruptly subsided. “Now hear me one last time, Mr. Director,” he said in a low, dangerous voice. “I realize that you, Dr. Yokomizo, and the other council members believe you are doing the right thing by agreeing to seriously consider sanctioning an action that might somehow allow Burroughs to survive this emergency. I also recognize Dr. Franklin's sincerity in proposing that water ice might be found somewhere in the Lycus Sulci region.

“Yet I must insist that he is sadly mistaken. You have misinterpreted my frustration if you believe it derives in any way from having Dr. Franklin's prospective enterprise endorsed instead of the course of action I have advocated and worked so very hard to set in motion. Believe me, that is
not
the case. I prayed for the success of Dr. Franklin's earlier mission, and prayed as hard or harder than anyone else. Why? Because discovering any source of water ice would have eliminated the necessity of mounting an incredibly difficult, extremely hazardous assault on Olympus Mons, where experiencing casualties will be highly probable, if not inevitable.

“What galls me so very deeply,” he continued, “and offends me as nothing else ever has, or will, is that the council has chosen to put all of Burroughs' eggs in one flimsy basket by an order directing the abandonment of our proposed expedition to resurrect the aqueduct and return it to usefulness, yet in the very same breath seems prepared to willing risk
all
our remaining mobile resources in a search for nebulous deposits of water ice in an extremely doubtful locale.”

The areographer opened his mouth to say something. Before he could utter a sound, Jesperson whipped his forefinger around, aimed it right between Franklin's eyes. Something about the abrupt gesture made Franklin choke back whatever he'd been mindful to say.

Jesperson rounded on the director. His manner intense, not to be argued with, he said very slowly, “To no avail, sir, you have repeatedly solicited aid from the parent United Nations Organization, and are now entering what, win or lose, one way or the other, must be the last days. Even with severe rationing, less than a two E-month supply of water remains in the reservoirs, and when the reservoirs are dry we will all begin to die of thirst, which I warn you is a truly terrible way to go. I plead with you: endorse Dr. Franklin's venture if you so desire, but for the love of God lift your ban on the backup effort for which I . . . that is, the committee I chair, is largely responsible.”