Olympus Mons (6 page)

When the lock pressure gauge readout changed blinked from 1/0.99 to 1/1, we opened both the crawler's inner and outer hatches. I trailed my partner through the small airlock chamber, stepped across to the dock, raised my arms and stretched way up on tippy toes. Hour after hour spent plowing across Tharsis had tied what was left of my muscles in square knots. I did some bending and stretching to rid myself of the kinks, jogged in place to loosen up, and did a little shadow boxing. Beginning to feel more like myself, whatever you care to make of that, I joined my partner in the alcove next to the stuck inner lock doors, and switched to isometrics.

Some wiseass with a twisty sense of humor had hand-lettered a sign and posted it over the alcove's arched entrance:

SMOKERS LOUNGE

It's a tired gag. Marsrats all take the pledge upon being rationalized for life in this rust-colored dustball. It's a woefully easy pledge to make, and dirt simple to keep. Our carbon dioxide environment will not support combustion.

Jesperson had plopped down on a chipped glass bench. Putting his head in his hands, he leaned forward in a world-weary posture and slipped into the patented dark brown study he favors. Anxious to learn how Lorna and little Jay had fared during the quake, I couldn't sit still. Prowling about the alcove, I looked over the photomurals I'd seen a hundred times before. Rendered in living Technicolor, the larger-than-life pix had been sent to us by a herd of homeworld do-gooders who touted them as major morale boosters. Truth be told, showing us a set of earthside delights we can never hope to see again amounts to rubbing it in, then pouring salt on the open wounds. The murals always make me feel sort of weepy-eyed and sad.

There's an awesome panorama of snowy peaks sticking up behind the deep cleft of an Alpine Valley, where cattle graze in one of those hanging Swiss pastures. In the foreground, a dude wearing a Tyrolean get-up was doing his thing with an Alpenhorn, a fact Jesperson had once let me in on. Next in line was a wide-angle panorama of some African game preserve dotted far as the camera could see with wildebeest, pronghorn East African oryx, zebra and what have you
—
more Jespersonian teachments. Next to it was a genuine stunner: the high north rim of the Grand Canyon lightly dusted with snow. Of the bunch, my favorite depressing photomural is a touristy pic of London, streets and bridge all slick and shiny in the rain. Just the thought of all that pure, clean water falling out of the sky gratis makes the scene look phony as a crab with a toothache. I haven't felt or smelt rain for nine E-years. It seems like nine hundred.

I frowned, hesitating in front of the last mural in the row. “Got a minute, Bwana?”

Jesperson's head lifted. “What is it?”

“Step over here,” I invited, “and see what sense you can make of the screwy graffiti.”

“Graffiti, or graffito?”

“Don't pick nits. It's a word, one lone, goofy word.”

“What word?”

“Not sure I'd pronounce it right.”

He got up reluctantly, his expression surly, and ambled over. The photomural pictured columns of massive trunks in a grove of giant California redwoods. Sunlight slanted down in shafts, filtering through the high foliage, painting everything like it was viewed in a stained-glass window, dappling in every shade of green the thickly grown sorrel covering the ground between trees. Across the rough, vertical-grooved bark of a foreground Sequoia someone had used a black marker to scrawl what to me was a nonsense word:

CROATOAN

The longer Jesperson stared at the photomural, the more his expression soured into plain jaundice. “Graffito, singular,” he muttered. After further reflection he added, “A prophet of doom is in our midst, Barney.”

“Say what?”

“Croatoan!” Way he pronounced it made it sound like a cuss word.

“Hey, I can read.” I tried not to overdo my exasperation. “What, pray tell, does the dumb word mean?”

Jesperson sighed the special, long-suffering sigh he reserves for retards and general nincompoops. “Long ago, centuries, Gloriana, the renowned Faerie Queene of song and story, sent one of her knights to the New World with orders to
—
”

“Whoa! The fairy
who?”

My question earned me a first-class dirty look. “England's Queen Elizabeth the First,” he said, begrudging an explanation. “She commissioned knight protector of the realm Sir Walter Raleigh to sail a flock of settlers across the briny and found a colony in the New World. Raleigh did her bidding, landing the settlers on Roanoke Island, offshore what was then the Virginia wilderness.”

“Bully for Walt! What's that have to do with
—
?”

“Patience, Barnes! Years later, a sailing vessel carrying another shipload of settlers and supplies dropped anchor off Roanoke Island and found no one home. The only trace of the vanished settlers was that word carved on a tree trunk, and a gatepost.”

“This same dumb word?”

“The very same, yet not necessarily dumb,” he said. “Croatoan could have been a corruption of the name of some inland Algonquin tribe, or a different tribe on one of the nearby islands.”

“Never heard tell of it before or since.”

“It could also be a conundrum.”

I thought over what he'd told me, and cracked wise. “Don't need ‘em, Bwana. I had the operation.”

My off-the-wall remark made Jesperson crack a smile — a first. “It could also be an anagram of Roanoke,” he said, “albeit a lousy one.”

“Uh-huh. So lay it on me, Mr. Know-it-all. What happened to the settlers?”

“No one has a clue. Roanoke gained lasting fame as The Lost Colony.”

“You don't say.”

“I do say.”

I revolved the gloomy, doomy notion while staring at the funny word, picking it to pieces letter-by letter, syllable by-syllable. I didn't care for the “Lost Colony” label even a tiny bit. The message it sent was too close to the bone for comfort, and left a bad taste in my mouth. “Like to meet the cheery bastard,” I told my partner, “who messed up our mural.”

“So would I,” said Jesperson.

I was still stewing about the “lost colony” tag when the utility airlock's inner doors creaked and groaned, creaked some more and slowly began rumbling apart. We left the Smokers Lounge and walked into a shambles.

Walls were down here and there, mostly roofless privacy partitions a team of riggers could re-erect without breaking a sweat. We passed a few words with Gimpy, the maintenance gang boss, and complimented his crew for having jacked free the stuck inner doors.

I parted company with Jesperson, fast-stepping toward our quarters, eyes lifted to search for any sign of roof-shield damage. If you think hanging a translucent, pressure-tight roof over a crater almost three klicks across was a major feat, you'd be correct. Thin glass panels are bonded to the underside of interlocking ribbed supports, and internal overpressure helps hold up what my partner calls “a shallow geodesic dome.” He once illustrated the term by surfing the computer and bringing up the hologram of a neat structural brainstorm by some old-timer named Fuller. Our smart ‘n sassy master computer commands any or all roof-shield glass panels to turn translucent or opaque by degrees
—
some polarizing monkey shine I don't pretend to understand — that leaves ‘em clear to let in weak heat and sunlight while screening out most harmful ultraviolet, and then turns ‘em dark at night to help hold in every possible smidgen of internal warmth.

I came across quake damage in the complex, none of it a few hours of work wouldn't set right. Four or five Marsrats and their ladies were standing around yakking in the little plaza at the foot of the walkway leading uphill to our quarters. My neighbors were pretending to clean up broken glass and other debris, but really just hanging out, gabbing about the awful awfulness of the quake and the raft of aftershocks it left behind. A pair of Marsrats brightened like they were glad to see me upright and operating a warm body, but neither bothered to call out, or beckon me over to chat them up.

***

Lorna and I live with five-year-old Jay
—
five E-years, that is
—
in our assigned three-room and bath domicile second to last in the row running up the crater's North Slope. Its a decent site all things considered, even if getting there means walking up a gentle grade. The crater floor beyond our place steepens, bumps into the inner ringwall, and rises more sharply to meet the circlet of pilasters anchoring the roof-shield. Stand outside our front door, and you can look clear across Burroughs, still partly raw crater floor, to the far quadrant. Off to the left are vineyards and farm plots. The enclave's nothing to brag about, but it gets to be home.

I let myself in quiet-like. Her back turned, Lorna was muttering to herself while she swept up broken glassware. The place looked . . . oh, not too terrible. Burroughs hadn't been hit by the brunt of the tremender Jesperson and I'd suffered through out in Tharsis.

“Hi, Babe.”

“Barney!” She dropped the fiberglass broom and rushed to hug me so hard it almost knocked me over. “Thank the Lord you're all right! I've been so worried. Where were you when the quake hit?”

“Way to hell ‘n gone out in the flats of
—
”

“Neither of you got stove-up?”

“Not a scratch. We did have a real sticky time when the
—
”

“Oh, why'd we ever let ‘em send us to this godforsaken hellhole?”

“Whoa! Easy does it. Where's Jay?”

“Out playing. Mrs. Chang shut down schooling soon's the shake, rattle ‘n roll aftershocks tapered off.”

“Always knew Mrs Chang was smart. Remind me to give her the benefit of my sterling advice from time to time.”

“Oh, you!” She hugged me even harder, then kissed me again. It felt so good I kissed back. “Let me go wash up, maybe grab a bite. I'm beat to a frazzle, Babe. I feel like sacking in for an E-month.”

“You didn't get your supper?”

“Our evening meal,” I told her, “was rudely interrupted. Jesperson ended up wearing my delicious salad.”

The woman of the house came back in my arms. She looked up into my eyes and pulled a face. “Sooner or later,” she warned, “hanging out with that crazy bo for days on end'll get you in a potful of trouble.”

To put it mildly, Lorna did not appreciate my work-partner ‘s finer qualities. Her lack of esteem for Jesperson put her at the head of a long queue.

A matter of habit, the first thing I did when she turned me loose was open my belt pouches, exchange the pack-batteries for fresh ones, and plug the half-depleted canisters into charge receptacles. I went into the john and took care of business. The washing-up part went well. I was in the process of getting into my sleepy time jammies when the hall phone ding-a-linged.

Lorna hollered something I couldn't make out. I hollered back, asking for a repeat. She yelled again, louder, saying Doc Franklin was on the line. Hearing who the caller was didn't make me any happier.

The title of areographer is loaded chock-a-block with prestige, expertise, and all kinds of other impressive stuff. Us Marsrats're stuck here forever, so I guess Wes Franklin has a right to the self-inflating label he's gone and hung around his own neck. Word is that he was once a homeworld seismologist, which made plain what it was he wanted to talk about. I went into the hall, picked up the audio-only phone that came with our humble domicile, and grunted a hello.

“Mr. Barnes,” said Franklin, trying to sound less stiff-necked than usual, and not making the grade, “I'm told the eruption caught you in transit across Tharsis.”

“Guilty as charged, Doc. We were on our way home when the shaker
—
”

“Excellent!” he said, as if overjoyed to learn of our misfortune. “Tell me what you can about the quake.”

“Sure thing. Shook the living bejesus out of us, and ended up close to stranding us on a big crack that split the ground right underneath our
—
”

“A crack?” he demanded, his voice cracking. “What crack?”

Thinking to be tactful, I said, “My partner called it a fissure. Opened up right beneath the crawler it did while we were getting bounced around. Scared me into thinking Mars might gobble us up, crawler and all. Crack stretched clean out of sight, leaving one hunk of desert higher than the other, and
—
”

“Fascinating!” He sucked in an anxious breath, and insisted that I tell all.

“Just did, Doc.”

“The details, I mean. The particulars.”

That stumped me. “Afraid there aren't many details to tell about. The crawler got stuck over the, er . . . fissure. We suited-up, and were set to go outside and try digging the beast loose. Just then an aftershock dumped us a touch flatter, so we
—
”

“Yes, yes; I understand. What are your estimates of severity, the magnitude in that locale, the duration of tremors, the
actual
details?
Specifics?”

“Hey,” I said growing sleepy-eyed and fast losing patience, “what I've told you is as specific as details get. You should maybe talk to Jesperson. When it comes to details, he's ten times more specific than I am.”

“I tried to contact Mr. Jesperson,” admitted Franklin. “He didn't answer his phone.”

Surprise, surprise!
I thought. He'd most likely turned off his phone after the first ding-a-ling woke him, or more likely smashed it. I shook my head to clear the drowsies that kept crowding in around the edges. Franklin's not all that bad, except now and then his hard-nosed expertise wears on your nerve endings. Worse, he proudly numbers among the righteous, upstanding Dudley Do Rights who
volunteered
to face the slings and arrows Mars had ready to throw at him. Hear what I'm saying? He
wanted
to make the one-way trip. He
requested
a chance to live out his life in this frozen, dried up wasteland. Deep down I think of Doc Franklin as a smart, overeducated retard. “Listen, Doc,” I pleaded, patience out the window, “I've been on my feet close to thirty hours straight. Get back to you tomorrow, okay?”