Olympus Mons (5 page)

My optimism nosedived when I got a peek outside through the forward transpex bubble. The crawler was sitting astraddle of a spooky looking crack in the desert that widened a notch before disappearing in the near distance. You couldn't see far; the stiff afternoon wind was picking up loose, powdery dust agitated by the quake and whipping it hither and yon.

Jesperson slowly pushed the drive joystick forward a few decimeters, eased it back, and then shoved it forward again, rocking the crawler fore and aft. The portside cleated track labored uselessly in midair; the starboard cleats scooped out sandy trenches, but the beast didn't budge one centimeter. We were stranded, bottomed on the lip of fissure that made one section of the Tharsis flatland look like it'd lifted a half-meter higher than the other.

If nothing else, Jesperson's persistent. He kept playing with the drive joystick, rocking the crawler back and forth. “No dice,” he said at last, but nevertheless kept on rocking us.

“We're stuck,” I told him.

“Oh, really?” My partner's short fuse had burnt down close to the nub. He powered-down Cee Two and sat there chewing his tongue like he was thinking seriously of biting it off. “Come, on, let's suit-up. We have to dig the old girl out.”

“Think we can?”

“Only one way to find out.”

I sat down, took off my boots and jammed my sweat socks into the pressure-suit. We both began going through the gyrations it takes to get into the cumbersome rigs. A small aftershock rattled what few items of unbroken glassware were still in the open cupboard. In minutes, both our suits were pressure-tight, all set to go outside.

Another aftershock hit about then, a fairly strong jolt that sent a rash of shivers up my spine even if it didn't last anywhere near as long, or with half the force, of that first smasheroo. The crawler slewed to the left a tad, came to rest a degree or two closer to level, catching Jesperson off balance. He stumbled, fell backward on his rump, doing little to improve his disposition.

Instead of bitching about it, he surprised me by hustling forward. He kept on trying the controls, and at first there were small, off and on movements that stopped almost before they began. Worst of all, the damned crack underneath us looked as if it'd opened wider. I had visions of Mars swallowing Jess, me, the whole crawler teeth and toenails.

Swearing impatiently, Jesperson gave up rocking the crawler. I broke out a pair of fold-handled spades from the equipment locker, went forward and handed him one. Although in a rush to dig ourselves out of trouble, we still took time to follow the rules and scan each other's suit checklists of vital signs. Not making sure your suit's hot and tight before exposing your bod to the near-vacuum outdoors makes you an active suicide candidate. Exiting a crawler is a one-at-a-time proposition; the tiny, coffin-sized airlock chamber hasn't enough elbow room to let a pair of Marsrats in vacuum gear dance at the same time. Jess went first and, antsy or not, I had to wait for the pumps to scavenge air in the lock chamber before my turn came. When the pressure-match light winked green, I looked through the round eye of the inner hatch's peek-a-boo and watched what I could see of Jess as he cycled open the outer hatch. Then for some reason he hesitated, and cycled the hatch shut again.

His voice rang in my headpiece. “Hatchway's smack over the fissure. Too far to jump. We'll have to rig some kind of bridge.”

“Okay, I hear you. Come back inside.”

My partner had to wait for pressure to rise again in the lock chamber before he could step back into the crawler. He opened his faceplate lens and we got busy dismantling the collapsible deal table to use as a bridge over the fissure. We'd barely begun using spanner wrenches to unbolt the table from the crawler's deck plates when another aftershock triggered a ragged sequence of minor jolts and sways.

I swallowed hard, certain it would soon all be over. Tightlipped, Jesperson seized the handrail angrily, hanging on while we sweated out the roller. When things quieted down he went forward and powered-up again.

After rocking the crawler back and forth six or seven times with negative results, he decided to keep at it. In mid-sway, the tracks caught briefly, then bit in more soldidly, and it encouraged to keep trying again and again, then yet again. The beast chewed sand off and on a while longer until finally his persistence paid off. After another minor jolt, the tracks took hold firmly, Cee Two pitched down a bit, jarred to a sudden stop, then straightened crookedly and clawed its way up into the open desert.

***

The aft cabin was a mess, and smelled like a winery. Jess held us to an easterly heading for a dozen meters, then slewed the beast around, parked and expelled breath in a long, heartfelt “Whew!” Wiping imaginary perspiration from his forehead, he said, “We'll stay clear of the fissure. Could be more subsidence later.”

I nodded sort of a herky-jerky agreement. The aftershocks had tailed off, leaving me with a bad case of my own shakes. “Now what?”

“Get on the horn,” he advised. “Try to raise Burroughs, find out how much damage the enclave's taken.”

“Check.” I switched the transceiver to daytime frequency, cranked the topside horn around facing east and called, “Burroughs, Cee Two here
—
Charlie Deuce, Jesperson and Barnes. Come in, Burroughs. Do you read, Burroughs . . ?”

Zilch! I tried twice more, waited a minute or two, then tried one last time. “No dice, Bwana. I expect they're off the air.”

“Proves nothing,” he assured me. “Don't let it make you more despondent than you already are. They're probably running around like trampled ants right now. Leave the channel open and give it another whirl in a few . . .”

He shut up, stiffened and hunched way down in the driver's seat, bending as far sideways as he could get, and peered upward through the crawler's transpex bubble. “Oh, Jesus-my-beads!” he said with more feeling than I would've thought possible.

“Now what?”

“Look, just
look
at that spectacle! The old devil's come alive.”

I hunkered down in the aisle between seats and followed his gaze. There wasn't very much to see through the blowing dust outside, but looking up through it I caught off and on glimpses of a thin wash of dirty gray-black smoke drifting away from what had to be the volcano's invisible summit toward Amazonis Planitia.

“Gawdalmighty! I don't believe it!”

“Start believing,” he advised. “Lesser experts always tell the major experts Big Oly's been extinct for a gaggle of E-years. Looks like every wisdom-dispensing volcanologist in the homeworld needs a refresher course. For ‘extinct,' read ‘dormant.' There's a huge difference. It's definitely an eruption, maybe Big Oly's final belch, maybe not.”

I'm not ashamed to confess the eruption and quake had scared the liver out of me. All it did was galvanize Jesperson. He slewed the crawler around and poured on the watts, hauling us away from that fissure under boot, whip and spur. Careening and jouncing along belted in our seats, we must've covered fifty klicks in not much more than fifty minutes, our hell-for-leather transit punctuated by minor aftershocks that forced Jess to slow down.

The crest of Burroughs' curved, shiny roof-shield finally poked up over the too-close horizon. Flush-mounted cabin speakers crackled faintly as a carrier wave banged the topside horn and a gravelly baritone laced with a slight hint of an accent blared, “Cee Two, Burroughs here. Come in, Cee Two, Cee Two. Do you read, Cee Two?”

“Copy five-by-five, Vic,” I replied. “Us badly used and abused travelers are almost as good as new. What came down in Burroughs?”

“¡Hóla, muchachos!”
Hearing from us straight off made Aguilar sound like the happiest of happy campers. “Plenty came down, emphasis on plenty. It's also plenty good to hear both of you are okay. We guessed you must've been somewhere ‘tween here and the volcano when the shaker hit.”

“Too true for words, Vic. We're fine ‘n dandy.” I spent a minute giving him the lowdown on the eruption and its consequences. “How much of home sweet home is still standing?”

“Just about everything,” he assured me. “A few windmills either went down up on the ringwall, or damaged enough to  make their power outputs go off the air. The lasercomm horn could've taken some damage, too. Far as I know, thanks be to all the Saints, we didn't lose anyone. There were minor injuries over in West Slope
—
sprains, bruises, scrapes, and like that. The roof-shield's intact; overpressure's holding steady with no twitches.”

“Best news I've heard today. You can expect us at South Tunnel in seventeen or eighteen min . . .”

“North,” prompted Jesperson, pushing the joystick forward, goosing Cee Two into rolling faster than I thought was one hundred percent safe. “Tell him North Tunnel, Barney. We won't go anywhere near that fracture zone.”

I nodded. “As you were, Vic. Make it North Tunnel. Our destination is North Tunnel. Do you copy?”

“Loud and clear,
compadre.
You may have a fairly long wait in the airlock at North. The quake jammed the inner doors. Gimpy and his maintenance crew are headed that way with hydraulic jacks. What's wrong with South? The tunnel and airlock are intact, undamaged. No wait there.”

Jesperson's negative head shake preceded his emphatic. “Tell him we'll hang out in North till the fix is in.”

I relayed the message.

“Suit yourselves,
compañeros. Hasta la vista!
Burroughs, out.”

“Talk American, you Beaner!” I told Vic, and signed off. For E-years, Aguilar and I have played and replayed the same dumb game. I badmouth the Spanish lingo he insists on using for one reason and only one
—
to tweak me
—
and then laughs it up over my comebacks.

 

In the distance, the shadowed entrance to South Tunnel gaped darkly at the base of Burroughs' ringwall. Having declined to use the easier entrance, Jesperson steered the beast north, and slewed Cee Two around to face west within sight of North Tunnel, where he parked and powered-down.

“Why pull up out here?” I wanted to know.

He hustled aft without a word, opened the starboard equipment locker and broke out the Schmidt-Cassegrain reflector we'd used that morning to optically inspect the downfall section of pipeline. Hauling the instrument case forward, he yanked out the telescope, nested it in the dashboard mount and inserted what he termed “an image-erecting porro prism eyepiece.” Turning the vernier focus slowly, he studied what could be seen of Olympus Mons the short horizon had not chopped off.

I breathed in. I breathed out. I blinked. “Forget your damn pet volcano,” I told him, more than a tad exasperated by the pointless wait. “Let's boogie inside. I want to check on Lorna and our boy.”

Jesperson's ponytailed head didn't budge from the eyepiece. “Unless we were misinformed,” he said, dripping sarcasm, “we have to wait for Gimp and his grunts to clear the jammed airlock doors. While waiting, I didn't think you would mind if I took a long, hard look at my damn pet volcano.”

I did mind, and was about to tell him so for all the good it would do. I thought better of it and instead of snapping back at him settled for cracking my knuckles. It's tough to act patient when you don't feel patient. Minutes later, a minor aftershock caused Jess to rear back from the eyepiece.

“Well . . ?” I inquired.

“See for yourself.”

We swapped seats. I bent over the ‘scope's eyepiece, fiddled with the vernier focus. At a distance of eighty-odd klicks, we were far enough away to see a ways above the escarpment's humongous rise. The orographic cloud layer — another vocabulary tidbit Jesperson taught me — builds up nearly every afternoon. This late in the day, with sunset coming on in a rush, a thin layer of cloud already girdled what could be seen of the scarp. Big Oly's lowermost heights, far below the distant, much higher summit caldera, stood out clear and sharp at fifty diameters magnification. The ‘scope we carry aboard the crawlers is achromatic, no color. Nightfall was coming on, something that happens quickly in Mars; what with our skimpy atmosphere, it's almost like switching off a table lamp. In the gathering dusk, a few thin threads glowed in jagged, snaky patterns way high up on Big Oly's shallow, distant flank. “Bad news,” I said, straightening in the seat.

“Possibly,” he admitted, “but maybe not. We'll have to wait and see. Could be just drips and dribbles from secondary lava vents. The visible region is one helluva long way below the edge of the caldera.”

Dullard that I am, I should've let his observation slide by without comment. “You say so, Bwana, but I don't think you mean it. You're worried.”

“When I want words put in my mouth,” he told me, “I'll put them there myself. Doesn't pay to abandon ship on impulse. Never! Hope springs eternal, and so forth. We'll keep a close watch, see what takes place up there tomorrow, the next day, and the next.”

“Uh-huh! Eternal gets my vote.”

“That makes it unanimous.” Tiring of his second overlong look, Jess raised his head again and asked none to politely if I'd mind stowing the telescope.

While I was busy at my assigned chore, he energized the crawler and we trundled on around the base of the Burroughs ringwall and into North Tunnel, where Jesperson switched on the beast's headlamps. He pulled up facing the outer airlock doors and punched the remote controller. The big utility lock chamber obviously had been left at outside pressure, so there was no delay on that score. The big doors immediately unlocked from their seals and started sliding apart. Jesperson brought us inside at slow-march, and the doors took their own sweet time closing behind us.

Pressure in the big utility airlock chamber began rising toward the nine pascals that keeps Marsrats breathing inside the enclave. Just to see if they would, my partner didn't wait for the pressure readouts to completely equalize before commanding the inner doors to open. The Burroughs master computer was even smarter than Jess; not only was it aware of the jammed inner doors, but fail-safe wise enough to ignore a command to open up when unequal pressures tied up the interlock circuits. Jess slewed the beast around, backed up and parked at the loading dock alongside Cee Five.