Olympus Mons (34 page)

He went on to emphasize one last directive, repeating it twice to drill it into everyone's head. The file of climbers was to stay alongside, or underneath the elevated sections of pipe string at all times
—
all
times. He explained how volcanologists and civil engineers working under the auspices of the original multinational sponsors had obtained exhaustive orbital surveys and detailed radar mappings of Big Oly's southeastern slopes, after which they had tossed the pix and cartographic records back and forth amongst themselves, evaluating tentative routes. Only then had they made a final, cast-in-concrete determination of the pipeline's right-of-way.

Jesperson bore down. He stressed the point, telling us that if the going up ahead looked purely awful — maybe next to impossible
—
we were not to despair because the pipeline was known to take the best, safest, most direct and economical route up to the manifold system outfall. Then he gave us a second, no less important reason for staying close to the pipeline: more than one comprehensive analysis of the visual and remote sensing data obtained by the inbound whirligig ship had inferred that finding a small break in the slick, triple-insulated glass pipe was considered most probable, with internal blockage least probable, hence every man not busting a  gut dragging a sledge uphill, or too busy panting and putting one overboot in front of the other, would be duty-bound to keep his eyeballs peeled for a break in the pipe string, or any type of external damage.

“I won't try and soft-soap you,” he concluded. “Inspirational messages waste breath. We, every one of us, are about to engage in the toughest, most demanding and dangerous activity any humans have ever tackled, or imagined tackling. For the benefit of those of you who might have done some rock climbing or mountaineering, all I can say is that Big Oly is no ordinary hill, not in any sense of the term. We're facing a long, grueling, exhausting uphill grind, and to get the job done we'll have to stay glued together as a team, our objective to make no stupid moves, nor gamble with a single gram of provisions, nor fritter away one minute of time, nor take even one unnecessary risk. Think twice before you do anything that might endanger you or your mates. If you spot someone in trouble, sing out ‘Mayday!' Call attention to the problem, then hang in there until help arrives. Never, ever, try to be a hero; it could get you trashed along with the bo you're thinking to rescue. Yell for help! Shout your fool head off, but for any other reason stay off the wireless link as much as possible.

“During the trek,” he added earnestly, “we'll need to concentrate on two items, and only two. First, keep putting one overboot ahead of the other; that above all else is and will be first and foremost in importance. Secondly, make double-sure to conserve every calorie of energy for what's in store up ahead. An ancient Chinese adage has it that a thousand-mile journey begins with a single step. If . . .” he added, and then hesitated as if to emphasize the point he was about to stress before saying, “Scratch ‘if.' I should have said
when
you can't force yourself to lift that overboot and take the next step, remember the ladies and kiddies, friends and neighbors back in Burroughs who are counting on you and me to get the job done. It will goose you into lifting the overboot and taking the next thousand-mile step, and the next.”

He clapped his hands. “That's it, sum total. Early reveille, so find yourselves a cozy corner here in our luxurious sleeping quarters, and get plenty of shuteye. We have warm, breathable air and a reasonably clean and level concrete floor to doss down on. Tomorrow night you'll be trying to fall sleep tucked away on hard basalt canted at an angle, with bigger lumps sticking up through the smaller, sharper lumps. Be smart, and take advantage of our accommodations. Nitey-nite, and pleasant dreams.”

Here and there, Jesperson's beddy-bye message earned a few comments, grunts and wisecracks that fell flat. Yokie and Glorious Gloria went around doling out sleepy pills. I folded up alongside Black-like-me, whose snores already imitated a defective chainsaw. Gloria huddled with Jesperson not far away in one of the “cozy corners” he'd mentioned. They were saying their farewells. I closed my eyes so as not to pry.

Soon the sleepy pill started taking hold. The last thing I remember was opening my eyes again, raising my head a little and glancing at the litter of flaked-out Marsrats around me in all directions.

Then everything got kind of fuzzy and indistinct around the edges . . .

***

The dream I was having clotted together, firmed up slowlike and turned into Gimpy's grizzled puss. He was shaking me hard enough to dislocate my shoulder. “Rise ‘n shine, Barnes.” He showed no mercy, shook me harder. “C'mon, up ‘n at ‘em. All set to barge out there and do good deeds, are you?”

“Not . . . hardly.” I yawned, sat up and stretched.

The womenfolk had fixed a more than hearty breakfast
—
our last warm meal for some time to come. The climbers reveled in the luxury of choking down food in comfortable, pressurized quarters. When the last of them finished breakfast, we shook hands all around, jabbering to encourage each other. The chitchat petered off fast and died when the bo's started suiting-up.

It stayed quiet as church during the short crawler ride in pitch darkness from the way station to the base of the scarp. Black-like-me and Gimpy's straw boss, Red, had elected themselves first-day sledge haulers; they went up in the third netload right after re-sorting and reloading the stockpiled supplies had been completed. The roll call continued, ticked off like clockwork, with four pressure-suited bo's plus assorted gear and supplies slated for each netful.

Jesperson had long since penciled in he and me as the lucky pair destined for the climb's final “suicide” leg, and that meant we had the longest wait before going up. Stuck at the tag end of the queue, we stayed flaked out in shirtsleeves aboard Cee Two to conserve pressure-suit utilities. The upside hoisting began to drag a tad and soon fell behind schedule, then for a while slipped to the pace of a sickly snail. We waited for what seemed like forever, listening in to the other climbers as they and the equipment left the ground.

At last Gimpy's radio voice alerted us. “On deck, you two loafers. Only the alternates're ahead of you, plus a few stray items of gear.”

Jess and I paid hurried visits to the crawler's small chemical john, got into our vacuum gear, checked each other's life support readouts, latched down and sealed our headpiece lenses; I remember saying a silent prayer that mine would stay sealed during the days to come. Jess left the crawler first, and I was right behind him.

We sweated out a short wait next to the system control igloo, and squadrons of butterflies started chasing each other around my insides. Through the open door I watched Gimpy working inside the lighted shed. Dedicated work-dodger he may be, but a ten-digit wonder at playing the world's fastest two-handed game. Over the open comm circuit, I heard him field transceiver cues from on high, watched the gauntlets of his pressure-suit dance over the control panels and joysticks, heard him send an “up” command to the hoist on level three, retract the boom on level four, bring down the remate cable on level five, and so forth. He juggled the moves and maneuvers in his head and still gave voice responses to each squawked request. Near as I could tell, Gimp never broke stride, never missed a beat.

Finally it was our turn. Jess and I stepped into an empty net, sat down across from each other and braced ourselves, overboots to overboots. We rode upward, just the two of us along with the getaway parachute packs Jesperson wouldn't hear of letting out of his sight until the first overnight bivouac, when he meant to split them up, lash one aboard each sledge to chop in half the odds of both getting trashed in a single accident.

We went up in the dark, with the ambient air temp wobbling near minus sixty degrees C. Getting hoisted up Olympus Rupes shortly before the first light of a moderately windy summer morn affected me exactly the way it had during that first gut-wrenching trial hoist, with one exception: darkness made the first two stages nowhere as gawdawful as that test ride in broad daylight. Standing beside Jesperson on level three's narrow upper shelf, waiting for Gimpy to send an upside carabiner-paired cable down to us, I recall watching Phobos roll past overhead, a sweeping klieg light brighter than any of the unwinking stars. I sent up a silent prayer to Saint Duracell, the patron of Stored Energy, offering to light ten thousand candles and force ‘em to burn by willpower alone in our carbon dioxide environment if he'd watch over my pressure-suit and pack-batteries to make sure they hung in there.

The topside cable came down. I spread our net flat, closed the carabiner's ears over the net's topside ring, pulled the slack lower cable from the drag spindle and attached the carabiner to the lower net ring, then climbed into the net and sat down.

 On the way up I began to appreciate what a blessing the predawn darkness had been. As Red and I had learned the hard way, being lifted more than a thousand meters at a crack in an open-weave cargo net is bad enough without having to look down and see what isn't underneath you.

Jesperson cued Gimpy. “It's an upside go, level three.”

Between voices from above and below, my suit's external pickup tuned in the soft wind song playing soft, diminishing chords in the cable rigging. Across the net, in the light of the pressure-suit lantern no longer needed to cut through the predawn gloaming, Jesperson looked to be half-asleep. Neither of us had anything much to say, nor would it have been easy with all the radio chatter flying up and down the escarpment. Like the test ride, the scariest part of using the hoist system is when you end up dangling on a cable the size of an undernourished pencil meters from the “safety” of a platform you can barely make out in the glow of the predawn halo that was doing its best to ready our section of Mars for sunrise. The net slowed its rise and stopped. I waited, heart in my throat, for the boom to swing around, contact the cable and warp us in over the platform. Day, night, or at any time in between, that part of going up Olympus Rupes is plain spooky.

We finished the final leg early in the first daylight hour, with sunlight spilling over the horizon and making the volcano's slate-gray basalt looked brighter, almost cheerful. The orographic mist, ordinarily kilometers overhead, was now a good ways below us, and had mostly dissipated. The roof-shield of Burroughs, a tiny, bright dimple marring the ocher Tharsis highlands, looked like it was no more than a long stone's throw beyond Big Oly's brow. Way off to the southeast toward the canyonlands, a plume of water ice blowing off the summit of one of the lesser volcanoes striding in a neat line along the Tharsis bulge barely showed above the short, sharply curved horizon.

The orographic cloud's departure made me especially unhappy. Now I could look down into the horrendous, six-kilometer-deep gulf, and the view made me turn away quicklike. Vacuum gear or no vacuum gear, looking down makes you want to upchuck. It seemed as if we'd already reached the summit of Mars, although in real-world terms topping the scarp was only the first baby step in a truly awesome journey.

That, I must say, was some discouraging notion.

***

The uppermost platform is wider and deeper than any lower down. You in your net get dumped there maybe a half-kilometer in elevation below the up-sloping broad, curling basalt brow of Olympus Rupes. We spent a few minutes helping each other strap on the parachute packs before starting up a set of narrow, stepped ramps crudely carved in the rock that gradually flattened out before disappearing altogether when the bulge flattened to semi-level.

Trailing Jesperson along the final, shallow-pitched ramp into a narrow defile
—
a minor cleft in the ancient, haphazard lava flow
—
where the going was fairly easy. The black glass pipeline climbed beside us slung on shock-dampening struts atop short, evenly spaced pylons. The small ravine rose more steeply as it neared the crest; in places, we were both using gauntlets as well as boots, making it more like rock climbing than hiking. We finally crested on an all-but-flat stretch not far from the mouth of the huge canyon.

Ahead and above us in the shadows of early morning, a row of figures formed a weird procession wending into the gaping defile that swallowed them and the pipe string. With the monk's cowls of their ultraviolet cloaks shrouding the headpieces of their pressure-suits, and the skirts fluttering in the morning breeze, the column looked like a procession of teddy bears on their way to morning prayers.

The low sun gradually slipped above the horizon, edge-lighting the volcano's gentle, rugged slopes. On either side of the canyon, the view uphill was about what a gnat might see if it lacked the sense to climb a humongous, slate-colored iceberg. In raw sunlight, we had to raise the polarization in our faceplate lenses, and it made the going tougher what with inky shadows underfoot. Leaving the volcano's rolling shoulder behind, we crossed an uptilted field several kilometers long strewn with rubble, picking our way around various sized boulders, some the size of a two-room bungalow, and entered the canyon. Sharply rising, vee-shaped walls of basalt immediately chopped off the sunlight. We had to turn down faceplate lens polarization.

Jesperson upped the pace, stepping out smartly ahead of me, all but double-timing in his eagerness to catch up with the end bo in the file. I tagged his heels, breathing harder at that pace as we gained ground on the procession, and eventually closed in behind the tail-end Charlie, one of the alternates who'd ridden up the scarp just ahead of us. The Marsrat turned, looked back and made the mistake of halting. Obeying his own order, Jesperson stayed off the transceiver circuit and impatiently swung the arm of his suit, motioning for the Marsrat move on.

Trekking uphill at a steady pace, the three of us brought up the rear as the column forged deeper into the that huge canyon's maw. Gigantic bulges of once-viscous, slow-moving lava had congealed and formed the furrow's shoulder, and had then been split apart during ancient eruptions and what must've been fearsome quakes. The pipeline climbed on our right, its row of angled support pylons sticking out ladder-fashion from the canted wall a few meters above the canyon floor. The huge cleft we were passing through didn't pitch upward very sharply, but a grab-bag assortment of debris and natural obstacles conspired to slow progress. Over the eons, jagged boulders of all sizes and shapes had broken off and tumbled down from the heights to where we hiked. Drifted dust and sand lofted up from the highlands by fierce storms had built endless rows of talus slopes against either wall of the canyon. The Marsrats trekking ahead of us had to skirt the foot of each talus incline, or if adequate room was lacking, had to plowed through the base, where the footing became iffy.