Olympus Mons (9 page)

Jesperson did his duty and snickered to be polite, and that finished the flippant nonsense. I knew it was time to get cracking. “Shall we hike?” he invited.

“Far as I know, it's why we're standing out here in the cold.”

Whether you traipse out of Burroughs during the drawn-out Martian spring, endless summer, or overlong fall and winter seasons, it's always colder than a witch's teat in early morning. Even in deep winter, the overnight temp nosedives and bottoms out in this latitude at minus a hundred and twenty-five degrees, C. I never knew why this was so until Jesperson rendered one of his college thesis explanations. Minus one-two-five, Celsius, happens to be the dew point of carbon dioxide, the temp where our next-to-nothing atmosphere cools and condenses and deposits dry ice snow,” which then “sublimates” in sunlight according to Jesperson, and goes back to its role as gassy cee-oh-two.

Needless to say, on this frigid morning our purpose in being outside had to do with aitch-two-oh, not cee-oh-two. The eruption and quake had radically changed my view of the drips and dribbles of liquid treasure once spurting gratis into the Burroughs reservoirs. A lot more water, you see, comes out of Big Oly's numerous blowholes, vents and fumeroles than we recover. Most of the outflow evaporates each sunny day, getting sucked up into the thin, dry air where my know-it-all partner says it turns into “orographic clouds.” On this particular predawn morning only the middle stretch of the Olympus Rupes escarpment poked above the horizon made short by the indistinct, misty cloud layer that forms most afternoons upside of three or four klicks above the highlands, and dissipates when the nightly downslope winds whisk it away. Now and then, if the moisture release is heftier than normal, the cloud layer hangs in there overnight.

Wearing a summer parka and hooded ultraviolet cloak over my vacuum gear, not to mention the staunchest pair of overboots in my, ahem! wardrobe, I trailed Jesperson's ballooned pressure-suit uphill, tackling the well-trodden trail, pathway, route, or whatever that climbs the northern section of the crater ringwall. It gets tromped over every E-month, or sometimes oftener, by Gimpy and his maintenance grunts. They inspect the roof-shield's anchoring pilasters and wind-driven power whirlies installed on the ringwall's zig-zaggy, uneven crest.

Starting out slowly, we picked up the pace bit by bit. From down below, the trail runs straight uphill over gradually rising terrain, then at about the one-third point steepens turns into umpteen deadly dull switchbacks that make you pick your way back and forth, forth and back. It's gets downright monotonous stepping around, among and between jagged boulders, debris from what Jess calls the “ejecta blanket” that splashed over the surroundings when a sizable meteor burned in at some ungodly number of klicks-per-second and created the dished-out hole in the ground where we make our home away from home. Sharp-edged rocks litter the area; except for getting sandblasted during now-and-then storms, and minor flaking from the heating, cooling cycles in wan sunlight, or the deep freeze during below-zero nights, only a thimbleful of erosion takes place.

From midway on up to the rim the trail's a tougher hike. The adage may have it that the tough get going when the going gets tougher. Pure propaganda! When the going got tough, I was overtaken by a strong urge to sit down and rest. Not my partner. Jesperson is part Renaissance man, part mountain goat, and part stubborn pack mule. He toted the Schmidt-Cassegrain reflector he'd swiped from Crawler Two like it weighed next to nothing. Truth is the ‘scope tips the scale at about what your lunch pail would in Milwaukee, but the carrying case is bulky, cumbersome. I offered twice to spell him. Negative grunts in my headpiece quashed that notion, so I shut up and doggedly plodded uphill.

We crested not long after sunrise. A white half-circle had arched above the horizon while we were on the trail, a dawn phenomenon Jesperson once explained as the solar blast coming through the thicker, horizontal air blanket that resulted in “intense scattering.” With full dawn, the sunrise halo gradually faded and the sky turned to grayish salmon pink.

I wasn't breathing hard, and felt fairly spry when we topped the ringwall's narrow crest. Through the pressure-suit's external audio pickup, I could hear the morning wind's faint keening. It had warmed some since we started out. Glare from the low sun reflecting from Burroughs' roof-shield panels made me turn away toward the volcano. Jess likewise hiked up the polarization in the filter-visor of his faceplate lens.

Staying in Jesperson's bootprints, I tagged his heels along the ringwall's curving lip, dodging around boulders, skirting each of the evenly spaced structural pilasters that anchor the roof-shield. Jess soon found what he'd been searching for, a flattish slab of rock on which to set up the telescope. He sent his appointed gofer to round up handfuls of scoria
—
rough, once-melted chunks of crustal rock scattered all about. I carried back an armload and we built little stabilizing cairns around the telescope tripod's stubby legs.

From our viewpoint on the ringwall, the corrugated lower scarp of Olympus Rupes hung above the short horizon like a still life painted by some loopy artist with a headful of acid. We waited a spell for the heavier than usual orographic cloud layer to start breaking up, then took turns surveying what could be seen of the distant volcano. The previous evening's spidery, glowing threads of lava flow had either dwindled in brightness, dimmed and disappeared, or were lost in the sunrise glare. The caldera was far too high and distant to be seen, but a cloud of grayish, ash-laden smoke still mixed with the perpetual plume of water ice, casting an indistinct pall to the west over Amazonis Planitia.

Jesperson experimented. First he tried a magnification of fifty diameters, then switching to a 70X eyepiece. We took turns studying his pet volcano until voices started echoing faintly in my headpiece. Not long afterward the newcomers came into full transceiver range. The wireless gabble turned out to be from the maintenance chieftain, Gimpy, and a pair of his grunts. Gimp earned his moniker by adopting a slight limp that, for some reason, gets a sight more noticeable whenever he's asked to do something strenuous. He and his helpmates had come up to re-erect and tear-down or repair one or more of the spindly, quake-damaged power windmills. When the maintenance bo's reached us, Gimpy told us he and his helpers had also been assigned to do a thorough, all around inspection of the roof-shield's anchoring structures.

We briefly chitchatted with the maintenance hard hats, then waved so-long as his helpmates filed off in limpy Gimpy's wake, between them carting battery-powered tools and repair gear on a litter. The three figures in vacuum gear were still in sight when Jesperson tapped his suit's utility belt meaningfully, switched off his transceiver and motioned for me to do likewise.

Stepping close, he gingerly touched the lens of his fishbowl to mine. “Work-dodger, overachiever, however he may be thought of,” my partner said, his conducted voice tinny and weak, “Gimpy runs a tight ship. Ask politely, and we can maybe sign up three or four of his toilers as climb candidates.

“Gimp'll be overjoyed,” I said, “when you start stealing his helpers.”

“For a damn good reason!” insisted Jesperson, his nose six inches from mine through two faceplate lenses darkened by polarized filter-visors. “Once he appreciates what thirsty times are in the offing, he'd better be overjoyed. Saddle up now. We've seen what we came to see.”

“Downsville already? We just got up here.”

“Where else? We'll dump the ‘scope back in Cee Two, turn around and do it again, then maybe once more after that.”

“Haul our butts back up here?” I must've sounded indignant.

“We have to get in shape,” he reminded.

“Great t'hear, Bwana! Except the only thing we'll get in shape for is wearing out our overboots yo-yoing up ‘n down this friggin' ringwall trail.”

“Stout lad! I knew you'd catch on fast.”

“Hey, you may be off on a new crusade, but don't be so damn certain I'll let you drag me along. There are a doz-dozen things need doing around our place.”

As if he hadn't heard a word, he invited me to help repack and stow the telescope.

***

Marching downhill toward finishing a repeat round trip over that hateful set of switchbacks, I plodded along, putting one overboot ahead of the other, thinking about nothing in particular, when without warning Jesperson began spieling a weird chant of some kind.

“We're foot-foot-slog-slog-sloggin' over Africa. Foot-foot-foot-slog-sloggin' over Africa. Boots-boots-boots-boots-movin' up ‘n down again.”

Africa, yet!
“Don't tell me what's left of your marbles done rolled away,” I said politely, “or are you just bent on annoying me?” I was sweating a trifle now from the exertion it took to hike downhill. That may sound peculiar, but it's not. Sometimes it's more strenuous going downhill than climbing, and harder on the big toes.

“Kipling,” he said, making the word sound bright and cheery.

“Well, Kipling to you, too, Bwana!”

Jess chortled. The overinformed bastard can't resist showing off. “Those lines are from an onomatopoeic masterpiece scribed by a first-order wordsmith named Rudyard Kipling.”

“Do tell. Sure wish Rudy and his ony-poopy was here now. He knows so much about foot sloggin' he can take my place.”

Jesperson clammed up tight, didn't make another sound for a couple of dozen foot-slogs
—
an ominous sign in itself. It probably meant he was thinking, scheming. We turned into the straight downhill section of trail, all but ending our second up ‘n down of the scenic ringwall trail, when all of a sudden he loosened up. “Still there, Barney?”

“Foot-sloggin' along behind you.”

“Last night I stayed up late,” he told me. “I dug into the database and did some homework. I think we may be in luck.”

“Yeah, all bad.” I edged around a boulder close to the trail,

His guffaw was loaded with boil-over enthusiasm. Jesperson's lightning mood swings are like those of a spoiled toddler. “First, foremost, and above all else,” he said, “we have to keep one salient fact uppermost in mind.”

“Uppermost says it all, Bwana. What tops off the list?”

“Big Oly's eighty-four-thousand-foot-high summit is the apex. To locate and fix the pipeline break or blockage, I want to make sure you realize that we do
not
have to climb anywhere near the summit caldera.”

“Whew! That's some relief.”

“Pay attention! As the first giant step, I'm beginning to think we might be able to hoist ourselves up the escarpment's southeast face using the electric winch system the construction gang left behind all those E-years ago.”

“Now there's a thrilling notion!” It was a notion so thrilling it made me think my partner had gone around the bend. “Do tell how such an amazing miracle might be wrought.”

“By cross-connecting the output of a half-dozen windmills to the winch electrical system. Should be a snap,” he assured me.

“Ah, now I see. A
snap!
Why the hell didn't I think of that?”

“Hear me out before you decide to quibble,” he advised. “The escarpment tops out at an altitude of roughly twenty-thousand feet above the base.”

“If you say so, Bwana.”

“I do say so. Once we find out if the winch system's intact and usable, it'll chop roughly twenty thou in altitude from the overall climb.”

“Wonderful!” I clucked approvingly. “Except for maybe one small detail. Those cables, winches, and other machinery's been freezing, thawing and corroding more than thirty E-years. I get a peek at those skinny, pencil-sized cables every time we go out to inspect the downfall pipe string. What's more, even if those cables, worn-out gears and other ready-to-scrap hardware doesn't kill us straight off, we'll still have to hoof it some ungodly distance uphill. What's your best guess on how high, how far we'll have to go to get where you think we'll need to be?”

“Umm-m-m, can't come up with a solid answer on that,” he told me. “We have no clue about how high up, and how far from the brow of the scarp the break or blockage may have occurred. As a wild-ass guess, I'd say our ultimate target has to be the base of the manifold system, which is about . . . oh, give or take twenty thou above the crest of the scarp. That's beside the point. You're missing the most important datum.”

“No, you are,” I shot back. “It's owning and
using
common sense. Your pet volcano zooms up one helluva lot higher than twenty thou above the scarp.”

“Barney, let's reset this conversation to square one. I just explained that we do
not
have to climb anywhere near the summit, only to the base of the manifold system, where it dumps into the pipeline.”

I thought that over. “Okay, taking it for granted your arithmetic's in kilter, and your labor-saving hoist system gimmick works out, it still means the climbers will have to leg it maybe twenty thousand feet higher on
that.”
I gestured indignantly toward Olympus Mons. Both the volcano and Jesperson ignored my rude gesture.“Hear what I'm saying? Trekking uphill twenty thou higher than the brow of the scarp on yonder rough-as-a-cob volcano is
—
”

“No, no, no!” he blurted. “Someday that lump of muddled think meat inside your woolly head will do you in. Let's come back to your altitude worries later, and start from scratch. What matters,” he insisted as we foot-slogged down the straight stretch of trail, “is that the specs I pored over in the database described the electrical windings, gearing and mechanical components of the winch system as environmentally sealed at installation. Those ‘pencil-sized' cables you scoffed may
look
flimsy, but they were fabbed in microgravity
—
strands of foamed, maraging steel fibers tightly wound around a core of perfectly latticed metallic whiskers, their ultimate tensile strength an order of magnitude better than drawn piano wire of the same diameter.”