Olympus Mons (35 page)

Setting the pace a klick or more ahead and above us, the close-clustered dots of lead sledgemen Black-like-me and Gimpy's straw boss, Red, were trailed by the second pair of sledge-haulers. Watching them even at a distance made me appreciate being spared draft-horse duty. I marched along swinging my arms in a rhythm, twisting now and then to resettle the parachute pack on my back, all the while carefully conscious about where I planted my overboots, and it gave me an inkling of what it would be like, and what there was to dread in days to come. The thought of a twelve- to twenty-kilometer rise in altitude was bad enough; the genuine mind-boggler was realizing it also meant ninety to a hundred or more klicks of lateral traverse over the sort of terrain I could see up ahead, or maybe worse. All of it uphill.

The morning slipped away one labored step and lightly, panting breath at a time, a period of foot-slogging monotony that steadily dulled my senses. I sipped now and then from the water and liquified food tubes, got my second wind shortly after a brief rest stop around midday, and began striding along more loosely, falling into the steady, economical hiking rhythm I'd learned and improved traipsing up and down Burroughs' everlovin' ringwall trail. Truth be told, except for the nightmarish volcanic scenery, the hike up to then wasn't much different from climbing the maintenance trail.

Hours later the procession of Marsrats hit the first abrupt rise, and things changed. My partner had lectured us on how secondary lava vents, not just the caldera, had most likely distributed random, isolated bulges of gluey lava here and there on the slopes. This bulge had cooled and hardened into a tumbled mass that choked the canyon wall to wall. Above and ahead of the lead sledge team reared what looked like a thousand-meter-high massif; not far ahead of us the pipeline pitched upward more steeply.

The procession of climbers ground to a halt as the lead sledge team started up the first, not terribly steep rise, and it became slower going for the draft animals when the bulge steepened, forcing them to wind back and forth alongside, now and again underneath the suspended pipeline. I felt extra-sorry for Red and the glassblower, as well as the other pair of sledgemen. Even unburdened, the bo's trailing them were laboring; the panting from two dozen-plus Marsrats didn't quite drown out my own heavy breathing.

Jesperson halted, looked back at me and switched off his suit transceiver, motioning for me to do likewise. Gingerly touching his faceplate lens to mine, in a weak, tinny conducted voice he told me privately the surface was in better shape than he had anticipated. For literally eons, the lowermost, windward slopes where we were hiking had been sandblasted to a pitted, grainy texture, abrading most of what once had been sharp, broken edges to relative smoothness. Raw lava would have chopped our overboots to ribbons in the first twenty kilometers. Jess tabbed the sandblasted surface a major blessing; it reminded me that not long before the ready-get-set, go signal Black-like-me had growled a comment that stayed stuck in my mind: “Talking about climbin' the volcano's one thing, doing it'll be something else again.” His remark had been right on the money, except that up till then foot-foot-slog-sloggin' up Big Oly had been only an exercise in persistence, not endurance. I had a hunch the endurance part would come later.

***

The sledge teams surprised us by failing to halt at dusk. Seeing the way ahead clear of major obstructions, Black-like-me and Red, egged on by the competing sledge team coming up behind them and thinking to push them some, were struggling to match or better the efforts of their fellow workhorses pressing them. The two sledge teams tugged their burdens uphill another two or more kilometers in starlight, at which point all four Marsrats dropped the reins, secured the runners of their sledges with rocks, pulled off their horse collars and collapsed, totally beat to a frazzle. The other bo's in the procession who'd been hiking unburdened marched on and caught up with the sledgemen.

Jesperson allowed only one electric lantern to drain juice from a sledge-borne fuel-cell long enough for the climbers to open and close valves, decouple and remove body waste bladders, slip in fresh ones, and do likewise with water and liquified food bladders. It was an all-around hasty operation. Most of the Marsrats were too pooped for much in the way of radio conversation. Red and Black-like-me, the day's lead sledgemen, were too numbed and used up from the effort they had expended to do more than grunt.

Jesperson made the rounds. Going from man to man, he warned each bo individually to make certain fresh suit- and pack-batteries were plugged-in for the coming nine-plus hours of darkness and extreme cold. Stopping beside me, he motioned for radio silence and touched his faceplate lens to mine. “How goes it, Barney?”

“Loads of fun, Bwana!”

“Get used to it,” he said. “Tomorrow we'll have even more fun, and the day after that, and the next and the next. We're slated for the main event, so pace yourself, save as much as you can for the stretch drive. Our chutes're stowed aboard each of the sledges, so on the morrow we'll be hiking hands-free, no chutes on our backs. It should help conserve energy.”

“Gotcha, Bwana! How much ground did we cover?”

“Hate to say not as much as I'd hoped. Best guess is we're only a few thou above the lip of the scarp
— l
ess than I'd expected, and we were fresh today. In the morning we'll all be stiff and sore. Get some shuteye, and mind your batteries.”

“Right! Bless you for your guidance and counsel.”

I could barely see Jesperson's tired grin in the dim light of the lone electric lantern. He moved away, reached down to his suit's utility belt and flipped on the transceiver. He bent over the next man, gave him the battery replacement word, then stopped beside Red and did likewise, and then Black-like-me, then on to the next bo, and the next. Soon the lantern sitting on top of the lashed-down sledge cargo went black.

I flaked out on lumpy basalt, a whole lot closer to the bottom than the top of the most humongous volcanic pile in the Solar System, with only the wind, a sky full of flinty, unwinking stars and my thoughts for company. Whether you have companions in misery, or feel sorry for yourself all by yourself, it's lonesome as hell up there with your UV cloak wrapped under you to protect your p-suit from accidental puncture. Our vacuum gear was fully ballooned, but then when wasn't it. Down on the floor of Tharsis there's roughly six-tenths of one percent of the air pressure homeworld denizens take for granted. Up where we were, it was so thin there might just as well not have been any.

I unslung my carbon dioxide flasks, gently laid the glass bottles beside me and cranked the feed down a notch. The sole advantage of being a carbon dioxide-breather is that in an acute emergency
—
sans pack-batteries, or stuck somewhere with depleted canisters
—
you can live for a while on your own exhalation, though it isn't the same. Byproducts and toxins build up fast and get cleaned out of you system only as long as the Bevvinase Process stays active. When the pack-batteries are depleted, rebreathing exhaled air soon begins to do you in.

I watched Phobos sail by overhead. The cratered, potato-shaped little moonlet circles Mars every seven-hours, making three orbit circuits each day. I decided to follow the hurtling moon . . . all the way across the sky to the . . . unseen . . . horizon . . .

 

Whenever one of my teenage football players had the “wind knocked out of him” in practice or a game
—
not an uncommon happenstance
—
I would trot out on the field, turn the kid flat on his back, grab his belt and then gently lift and drop his midsection to break the partial vacuum in his diaphragm, get him breathing again. I must've dreamt I'd gotten flattened in a pileup because it seemed to be happening to me.

Coming awake gradually, feeling disoriented, I blinked to force my sticky eyelids apart. The Marsrat rudely tugging on my pressure-suit's utility belt motioned for me to come alive and join the party. I struggled to sit up.

An electric lantern glowed on the nearest sledge. In the dimness, I made out through the clear lens of his faceplate the grim-featured bo who'd nudged and levitated me into wakefulness. A stripe of upward-arching whitewash along the horizon
—
a forerunner of the sunrise halo
—
silhouetted the monster canyon's jagged rim and dimly illuminated the figures of fellow Marsrats clustered around what looked from a distance like a prone pressure-suit.

I reached down to my utility belt, switched on the transceiver. The comm circuit was a jumble of subdued talk punctuated by muttered cuss words. Laboring to get my overboots underneath me, every bit as stiff and sore as Jesperson had predicted, I stretched to the limit vacuum gear will allow, fully extended my arms and legs, rotated my trunk and stamped my overboots, checking to make sue all the parts were still working, and stepped over to see what the huddle was all about.

The heart went right out of me. It was the saddest awakening I can recall. The glassblower had died scowling. Despite Jesperson's commandments and urgent warnings, he'd either been too spent from straining to pull his share of the sledge load through the previous foot-slogging day to change his pressure-suit batteries, or else one or more had failed. He'd frozen to death during the sub-subzero night, diminishing Burroughs' skimpy Afro-Martian population by a count of one.

“Can't just leave him here,” I mumbled.

Jesperson switched off his transceiver, urged me to do likewise, and touched lenses. “Certainly not! We wouldn't
dream
of just leaving him here through eternity.” Although his conducted voice was weak, my partner's extra-strong sarcasm came through five-by-five. “No, no; we'll abandon the climb, carry him back to Burroughs and do what's proper.”

“Back off!” I told him, getting awful temperish awful damn fast.

“You
back off, Barnes! While you're about it, get real! We don't have the time or energy to waste on sob story crap. It's luck of the draw, pure and simple. Could've as easily been you, me, any one of us. Grieve while you march, but knock off the mawkish bullshit and get your head screwed back on tight.”

“Yeah, I . . . Okay, it's just that I, uh
—
”

“Do it! We don't have a second to waste on sentimental farewells.”

The sumbitch was right, but then when wasn't he? We had no choice. Zero! We had to leave the ornery glassblower right where his heart stopped. Losing him hurt, and hurt bad. No other course was possible, which I knew it as a fact, except my emotions were running far behind knowing it for a fact. The hurt stayed inside me, and wouldn't go away.

Black-like-me's first-day sledge partner, Red, went around talking things up in a way that made us realize how necessary it was to downplay our grief. He and the other pair of first-day sledgemen hung around longer than they should've, paying no nevermind at all to Jesperson's repeated urgings to hit the downside trail. The three lucky homeward-bound Marsrats decided to hustle their butts, working like crazy to build a cairn of rocks over the stone-still, extra-large Day-Glo orange pressure-suit enclosing what had once been my fierce-minded, lovable glassblower pal.

During the cairn-building session, Jesperson's blood pressure had zoomed toward the ultimatum stage, especially after a few climbers still on March joined in and lent a hand to Red and the other pair of delinquents, who finally knuckled under to Jesperson's threats, said their goodbyes, waved to us and headed back down through that mammoth canyon toward the brink of the scarp, and home. I watched ‘em disappear with a catch in my throat, envied them no end.

The second day's trek was an extended marathon more than matching the dull slog-slog, overboot by overboot misery of the first day. Eighteen of us, including the pair of alternates, hiked empty-handed in single file, toiling through the miserable canyon that seemed to go on forever, dogging the heels of the sledge-hauler twosomes sweating at the head of the column. Seeing the draft animals strain at their horse collars made me wonder how long they could hope to hold up under the pace they were setting.

The towering canyons walls started to narrow ominously, like they meant to close in and squeeze us to jelly farther on after we'd forged deeper into the trap. Smaller, less massive talus slopes of sand, gravel and small rocks mixed in with fine-grained, windblown dust had built up at the base of the rugged basalt walls. The canyon floor, now less wide than that behind us, was strewn with assorted smaller rocks and rubble long ago tumbled down from the heights. The pipeline disappeared now and again in the talus wedges, reappearing on the far side. Hunks of rip-rap the size of cargo containers or larger had also fallen here and there, turning progress into a series of zigzags that meant a torturous, winding path for the sledgemen, and extra steps for us hikers.

The neverending roadblocks grew thicker, forcing the snakelike procession to take one wide roundabout after another. There in the canyon's narrowing maw, the pipeline ran low along the canted wall on our right, and as I said now and again vanished in shallow dives into, through and out of the talus slopes. With an excess of debris scattered around the canyon floor, it seemed like a ready-made place ripe for damage to the glass pipe string, yet so far there had been no sign of it. Every foot-slogger hiking hands-free kept his head constantly turning, on the lookout for any hint of a break, or damage.

During the brief noon rest stop Jesperson told me in private, faceplate lens-to-lens, that the giant chunks of basalt had most likely crashed down a few millions or billions of E-years ago, an eternity before the aqueduct had been a foggy notion in the minds of the farsighted homeworld designers, or the hard-hats clad in clumsy, old-fashioned vacuum gear who had made it happen in that godforsaken canyon.