Olympus Mons (7 page)

“Wait,” he practically shouted, hurting my ear, “I want to ask if you
—
”

That was as far as his want got him. I caged the handset, stumbled back down the hall to our bedroom, and I'll be damned if the miserable telephone didn't ding-a-ling again. In no mood to talk to Franklin, God, anyone else, I banged the door shut and crashed face down in bed.

I must've slept all of twenty or thirty seconds before Lorna pushed open the door.  “Your favorite doc,” she said extra-loud, “wants to talk to you. Says it's urgent.”

Half-awake, I muttered, “Tell Franklin I died in an aftershock.”

“Wrong doc. Yokomizo's on the line. He asked me to drag you to the phone, no two ways about it.”

“Let's apply for one of those fancy wireless things?” I groused, trying not to fall out of bed. Issuing vile words under my breath, I careened into the hall, groped for the handset where Lorna'd parked it. “Yeah, Doc?”

“Mr. Barnes,” said Yokie, who'd be polite even if he was being strangled, “the director and I would like to debrief you at your earliest possible convenience.”

“Okay, sure. My earliest possible convenience comes
late
tomorrow morning.”

“I sympathize with how tired you must be, but the director and I are engaged in compiling —”

“Get hold of Jesperson,” I said quickly, improvising on my previous lame excuse. “He's lots better than me at debriefings and compilings.”

“We tried. He's apparently made himself unavailable.”

“He's better than me at that, too.”

Silence at the other end of the line. Then Yokie cleared his throat, his perpetual smile no doubt intact. “The director,” he said solemnly, “will be extremely disappointed.”

I quoted one of my partner's least popular adages. “Disappointment's a natural consequence of human frailty, Doc.”

“Pardon me. I'm not sure if I heard you correctly, Mr. Barnes.”

“Nitey-nite, Doc. Wish me pleasant dreams.” I hung up, yanked the plug on the hall extension phone, then dodged into the parlor and did the same on the other built-in phone that came with our assigned quarters. On the way back I told Lorna to leave the damn phones disconnected. I was squirming and twisting in bed, just getting comfortable when she came in, undressed and joined me.

“Poor baby!” she whispered, and began touching and kissing me in all the right wrong places. “I know what'll relax you so you can get a good night's rest.”

She wasn't kidding, either. Even with the drawback of having a set of pack-batteries strapped around your middle, we did what married folks do with some regularity. It relaxed me so completely I almost turned inside out. Sometime when you have a free hour, sweet-talk your missus into doing the nasty when you're both hindered by pack batteries strapped around you middle. It'll be the very best time there is to ask yourself if you really and truly want to come to exotic, adventurous Mars.

Before drifting off, a picture formed in my overtired brain: Jesperson hanging by his fingernails from a teentsy crack in the rugged basalt wall three miles up the Olympus Rupes escarpment. I giggled, fell into a deep sleep and dreamed about the magnitude seven-point-whatever rattler that slam-dunked the good and bad parts of Greater L.A. in early fall, 2096. I had the heeby-jeebies for weeks after that horrendous shaker; it came within an ace of doing me in.

Don't know how . . . you feel about . . . quakes.

I'm . . . against ‘em.

 

Nagged by subconscious guilt over sleeping my life away when there was work to be done, my aimed-for nine hours of sacktime shrank to six. I woke fuzzy-headed, but for some reason bursting with nervous energy. A thousand things needed doing and fixing around our place. I knew the woman of the house wouldn't cut me any slack before burning my ears with “Honey, do” suggestions.

In the john, I washed up, and was shaving with the usual cupful of warm water when Lorna yelled something garbled by razor-scrape. She rapped on the bathroom door, repeating it plenty loud:
“Phone,
Barney!”

“Thought I told you,” I yelled back, “to leave the damn things unplugged.”

“I had to call Marge earlier,” she explained. “Your maniac buddy's on the line.”

“Jesperson . . ?”

“Who else? Say the word. I'll tell him to get lost.”

“Tell him to hang on.” I dried my hands and face, carefully poured the cupful of soapy shaving water into the reclamation drain, not spilling a drop, and went to the hall phone. “What did I tell you, Bwana? Things are never bad as they seem. No permanent damage that I can —”

“Worse!” he contradicted. “Things are always worse than they seem, Barney. It's a corollary of Murphy's Law. The aqueduct isn't running.”

It was news that gave me serious pause. “No water?”

“Nary a nanoliter.”

Wise to my partner's wicked ways, I knew he started spouting big words whenever he got upset
—
not just having his hair-trigger temper ruffled, mind you, but genuinely
upset.
I tried the standard soothing technique that never works. “Could be the quake broke the pipe string somewhere out in Tharsis, or maybe the windmills feeding juice to the holding tanks shut up shop, and the overnight freeze plugged it solid.”

“Wishful thinking on all counts,” he said in that one thousand-percent, dead certain way guaranteed to get under anyone's skin. “Use your head! The pipeline runs parallel to what we could see of that fissure. More to the issue, its slung from shock-dampening struts on each support pylon. Besides, the windmills were spinning merrily on our return leg.”

His comeback stung, as well as giving me serious pause. “Hate to say you're right, but you might be.”

“To cap my analysis,” he added, “and further your education, it's summer, near perihelion, and way too warm for running water to freeze and block a triple-insulated glass pipe. Nor would the wind-powered heaters allow the formation of a single ice crystal in the holding tanks, assuming there's any water left in them to freeze.”

“I hear you, Bwana. Still that doesn't mean the pipeline is
—
”

“What it means,” he said, cutting me off, “is the steady dribble that once emptied into our reservoirs has stopped cold, leaving us without a clue as to
why
it stopped, and no more than a faint chance of finding out.”

His double-barrel bad news flash was hard to swallow. I couldn't come up with an off-the-cuff reason to second-guess what he'd said. All that came out of my mouth was an explosive, “Sonuvabitch!”

“Amen! The volcanic eruption was minor, but the quake has handed us one pistol of a problem. The break, plug, whatever it is has to be up on the Big Oly's middle slopes.”

“Could be,” I admitted, calming down some, or trying to. “How much splash is in the reservoirs?”

“I checked the pumping station gauges. All things being equal, a few thousand measly gallons
—
call it a four and a half to five E-month supply, except all things won't stay anywhere near equal unless we ration to the bone, and recycle every deciliter of liquid waste.”

A nonsense word scrawled across the rough vertical bark of a giant Sequoia flashed in my mind's eye. I mentioned it, expecting commiseration.

“I die hard,” he said, zero sympathy in his tone of voice. “Barney, get your well-rested bod over to the meeting hall chop-chop. Scheiermann's called an extraordinary council session.”

“Whoa, hang on,” I objected. “A thousand things need doing around here, and . . .”

Wasted breath. He'd already rung off.

***

Slipping into the partitioned-off area designated the meeting “hall,” I found sixty or seventy Marsrats already there, and guessed that word of the special council session had not fully circulated through the grapevine. It was the noise that stopped me in my tracks. The slimmed-down bunch of Marsrats and their ladies were raising a thousand peoples' worth of hullabaloo. Washed in the rosy glow of his recent investiture, our newly minted director was trying to call the meeting to order, but the denizens of Burroughs range from rugged, positive-minded bo's at one pole, to cut-from-whole-cloth naysayers at the other. Just then both varieties were too caught up in talking, arguing, shouting amongst themselves to pay any nevermind to our transplanted professor. He took turns trying to wear out his director's gavel whilst straining his aged lungs yelling for the audience to simmer down, and couldn't hear himself over the ruckus. Looking happily aggrieved, his perpetual smile firmly in place, Doc Yokomizo sat next to Scheiermann on the shallow dais, serenely watching new arrivals straggle into the meeting area.

Slouched in the third row of folding chairs, Jesperson pretended not to notice me sag down beside him. He sniffed once, looking straight ahead, and said loudly, “We don't need this free-for-all. Catch Scheiermann's eye, move that a sergeant-at-arms be appointed and nominate that freaky-deaky black buddy of yours.”

“The glassblower? You've got to be kidding.”

“Do it!”

“Not a notion. To put it mildly, he's not real social-minded.”

“That makes him a perfect candidate.”

I must make a wonderful stooge. Sticking two fingers in my mouth to curl my tongue, I loosed an ear-bending whistle, took advantage of the hubbub when it died down maybe a half-dozen decibels, and bellowed, “I move that a sergeant-at-arms be appointed.”

Bouncing out of his chair like Jack-in-the-box, Jesperson seconded the motion, and my inspired motion carried. Eternally grateful, Scheiermann beamed and banged his gavel like a frustrated drummer. I nominated Black-like-me, my nickname for a sullen, oversized Marsrat who has to be the finest glassblower in the known universe. His real name's Cleve, Clive, Clyde, something like that, a convicted felon who'd aped my mistake and rolled the dice in favor of deportation to this lush garden spot instead of doing plain vanilla hard time in a homeworld slam. Also like me, he's probably been sorry ever since that he decided wrong. Black-like-me is unique. He owns a face like a tarred, malignant frog, a neck like a creosote-soaked telephone pole, the temperament of a stepped-on rattlesnake, and what Jesperson, unkind man that he is, describes as, “The intellectual capacity of a gnat.” In short, if those traits and features aren't the basis for an enduring friendship I don't know what else they could be.

***

Elsewhere on the evening the scuffle took place, I had to settle for second- and third-hand bystander accounts. There were other versions, too, but none that made much sense. Art the Barkeep was there at the epicenter, and eyeballed the action firsthand, which should've made him a reliable witness. Trouble is, calling Art reliable would be stretching the word past its elastic limits. Anyhow, he filled me in first, using choice elastic descriptions.

It seems Black-like-me and Jesperson were bending their elbows one elbow-rub apart in Art's watering hole, a set of slapped-together partitions tacked on behind a West Slope storehouse area where the ahem! Patron serves rationed brew, wine, and on special occasions brandy, charging an arm, a leg, a foot and a hand for each and every gargle; as a bonus, you get to listen to his salty repartee. No one, including Art, recalls how the tiff started. The consensus opinion is that Art plunked down a stein of brew, which Jesperson and Black-like-me reached for at exactly the same time. Since both gladiators were already half-smashed, accusations and bad-mouthings flew back and forth until they tangled in what might've ended in a one-sided mismatch.

Maybe.

Black-like-me stands a head and a half taller than Jesperson, and owns muscles he hasn't gotten around to using yet. That being the case, anyone who wasn't clued in would've predicted a David and Goliath skirmish, and the smart money usually rides on Goliath. However, being a personal acquaintance of the wild ‘n woolly, well-hidden talents of the David in question, I honestly wouldn't dare predict how the tussle would've ended if not for Art, who's almost the glassblower's size, except he's a hefty mound of suet, not muscle. Art told me he heard the trash-talk preliminaries and paid no nevermind until the bad words got a sight badder and the fracas erupted like Jesperson's pet volcano.

Art took his life in his hands hopping around the bar and inserting his lard between the combatants, doing so mostly I think to preserve the scabby, chipped glass tables and chairs he calls “furniture.” Make no mistake, brawls are rare in Burroughs; even the rottenest tempered Marsrat is usually too tired to bother. After Art interrupted the festivities, Black-like-me, who admits wisdom being a lesser virtue, invited Jesperson to partake of fisticuffs the following day on neutral ground. Art reported hearing the glassblower promise to, quote, tear the mouthy li'l white devil's pinhead off his shoulders by the roots, unquote.

I got wind of the challenge match to come, and took my own life in my hands by paying a visit to the glassworks, ambitious to play peacemaker. Anyone who's ever watched a pro at work knows what a painstaking pastime glassblowing is. I stood off to one side and watched Black-like-me turn his outsized gorilla fingers whilst gracefully, huffing and puffing and spinning out a delicate little wine decanter. Sitting in rows above his workbench were curved vases, drinking goblets, stemware and suchlike. That plug-ugly doesn't fit the title of glassblower, he's an artiste. He endorsed my presence by lowering his blowpipe, glaring at me in friendly fashion.

Drawing a shaky breath, I launched into my sermon. “Listen, Blood. You're black like me, but trash my partner and we'll tie up on the spot.”

His friendly glare turned a sight less friendly
.
“Fight the li'l white devil's battles for him, eh, Barnes?”