Olympus Mons (10 page)

“You don't say.”

“I
do
say! The specs cover a winch system designed to lift thousands of heavy glass pipe sections. I doubt if a cable will do more than go taut carrying a few Marsrats in pressure-suits, plus assorted supplies and repair equipment.”

“Slow down, Bwana! Your sales pitch is getting out of hand.” I was beginning to feel like some poor skier mashed under a monster avalanche. “So once upon a time hefty loads got winched upside the scarp. Catch is, it happened here in Mars, where there's only a smidgen of gravity compared to what earthside ground-pounders take for granted. What you've got to remember is —”

“Nonsense!” he said loudly, putting me down with customary tact and hurting my ears in the bargain. “Here in Mars under three-eighths gee, in Toledo, Timbuktu, Tibet, or freefall for that matter
— anywhere —
mass is mass is mass, and traditional mass-momentum equations apply. The point I'm trying to make is that despite being inoperative for thirty-plus E-years, the staggered hoist system that steps up the escarpment jump by jump was designed by a topnotch engineering team. It should still be intact, and minimally sound enough to lift a few dozen men, supplies and equipment to the brow of Olympus Rupes.”

I ruminated for maybe half-dozen foot-slogs. “Okay, fine ‘n dandy. I might maybe buy into that part of your fairytale, but mark it an extra-huge m-a-y-b-e.”

“Consider it so marked. Now then,” he said, picking up right where he'd left off earlier, “consider the twenty-thou in altitude you're so worried about.”

“I have been considering,” I said. “That's two-thirds the height of Mount Everest.”

A disgusting, flatulent raspberry sizzled from my headpiece speakers. “Think before you speak, Barnes!
Chomolungma's
summit rises just under thirty thousand feet above
sea level
.”

“The summit of
wha-a-at . . ?”

“Chomolungma,
the Sherpas' Goddess Mother of Mountains. What you insist on missing is that the summit of the highest earthside peak rises almost thirty thousand feet above Earth's orthometric elevation baseline,
sea level.
What you keep ignoring is that the Himalayas sit on a plateau that humps up many thou
above
sea level, not above its base.”

“Thanks for reminding me. You just made
my
point.”

“No, you just missed it again! We won't have to get anywhere
near
the summit.”

“Feet, schmeet!” His propaganda pitch was raising the temperature under the collar of my pressure-suit's neck dam. “Knock off the ‘feet' and talk meters. Ever since getting sentenced to living death in this frozen dustball, I can't picture ‘feet' so good.”

“Glad to oblige. As a distance metric, the English system is idiotic. Let's see, the datum confusing you is that the summit of Big Oly is roughly twenty-seven klicks above the planetary Martian baseline, so —”

“Klicks? Thousand of meters?”

“Hell yes, kilometers!” he said. “The summit is absolutely
not
our concern. Much as I hate to sound pedantic, a quick and dirty profile of the lowermost southeastern slopes will illustrate roughly how high and far the climbing team will have to hike.”

Jesperson's mainspring was wound up tight, so I let “pedantic” slide. “Go on.”

He drew a word picture of the volcano, starting with the fact that Big Oly squatted on the western edge of the bulging, stretched-out dome of neighboring Tharsis Montes, except about six klicks lower down, adding that a suspected thin spot in the crust made the region a major source of volcanism. He described the volcano as more of a gigantic pancake that covered an area almost the size of Arizona, and was nothing like cone-shaped Etna, Vesuvius of other homeworld volcanoes, the reason being that Mars has no “tectonic” plates floating on a ball of magma, and volcanic eruptions therefore stayed stationary, vomiting successive magma flows from the exact same spots. Big Oly built up layer after layer of “igneous” lava flowing all the way out to the boundary, by which time it had begun to cool and congeal to a point where much of it stayed plastic enough to drip down toward the foot and form the Olympus Rupes' perimeter escarpment.

***

My private schoolmaster took pains getting to the crux of his lesson, and at the same time threatening to brain-damage his captive audience. He described Big Oly's lower-to-middle slopes as canting uphill at a moderate grade of six or seven degrees, and that going over the data time after time had made him realize that the manifold outfall was far, far below the steeper, central rise leading up to the summit caldera.

“Logic,” he concluded as we neared level ground, “says our target
—
the highest, most distant point we'll have to reach
—
has to be our goal.”

“Why?” I wanted to know.

“Because above the manifold outfall there
is
no pipeline for the quake to have broken or blocked. In order to reach that level, I estimate we'll have to trek about roughly one hundred klicks distance-wise from the brow of the escarpment.”

“All uphill.”

“True.”

The more I rolled the number around in my head, the hairier it got. “Marching that far uphill in pressure-suits, packing gear and supplies, will take
some
doing, Bwana.”

“I said
about
one hundred kilometers. At six or seven percent grade, it shouldn't be much worse than going over level ground.”

“You keep insisting that the break or block can't be higher up.”

“Redundancy rules out that notion,” he said firmly. “A break or blockage higher than the base of the manifold outfall is a virtual impossibility. Too many catch basins and collection vats are scattered around the slopes, not to mention gross numbers of independently connected and interconnected manifold system links, for the quake to have torn apart the whole installation. Portions of either could be damaged, granted. But if so, it wouldn't put a significant dent in the quantity of water supplied by the remainder. We've been totally cut off, ergo the problem
has
to be lower down, possibly much lower down.

“Remember this,” he emphasized. “Big Oly's the youngest of the Tharsis shield volcanoes. What the hell! As a lump, it's bigger than the smaller Martian satellite, Phobos. Monolithic it may be, but it's also shot through and through with blowholes, vents, fractures, levees galore, plus other types of faults and obstructions. Logic says nothing too terrible could have happened to the multiply redundant water collection system itself. It
has
to be a pipeline break, or blockage. Despite being slung on shock

dampening struts atop support pyons, the main downfall pipe string
must
be broken, cracked or blocked, and the latter condition strikes me as unlikely. I'd wager my lifetime beer ration on a break.”

I speculated, ruminated, cogitated, and did some heavy-duty thinking. “Can't get rid of a notion that the upper pipe might've froze solid.”

Jesperson halted and turned and looked back at me, disgust written plainly in what I could see of his features. “Come to the party, Barnes! Beside being triple-insulated with fiberglass, who ever heard of a rushing mountain stream freezing even in the arctic? Molecular agitation keeps flowing water liquid because gravity forces it to run downhill too turbulently to freeze. From the manifold outfall connection all the way down, the collected water discharges into the holding tanks, then it's gravity feed all the way across Tharsis to Burroughs, albeit at a decreasing gradient. The shallowness of the depressed, downslope terrain closest to the scarp is the only place where heaters are needed.”

“Fair enough,” I told him, “but glass is brittle stuff. What if a few klicks of pipe are busted up, or buried under a few thousand tonnes of rock tumbled down by the quake, or buried under a new lava flow? What the hell do we do about that?”

He didn't turn around this time, but I could almost see his negative head shake. “The pipeline,” he declared with typical Jespersonian conviction, “is visibly intact. Didn't we trace it all the way downhill in the telescope?”

“Yeah, what stretches we could see, except it kept dipping and diving in and out of clefts and furrows and levees. Besides, no way could a break be picked out at that distance.”

“No argument,” he said. “You'd have to be up there to spot a break. Your brittleness objection is off base, however.” Sounding mildly exasperated, he told me the civil engineers who designed the aqueduct had felt the same way I did about the mechanical properties of glass. “Unfortunately, silica was the only readily available raw material, and those pipe sections were annealed in an electric furnace.”

I stewed about his lecture. The more I stewed, the more I sensed the winds of con sweeping over me as fast, or faster, than the winds of Mars. “Jesperson,” I said, losing the last gram of patience I'd been struggling to hang on to, “level with me. Do you honest to God believe we can heist ourselves up the scarp, waltz God knows how many klicks higher in semi-vacuum, fix the break or blockage
—
wait, make that the possible breaks or blockages
—
and skip back down to drink hearty forevermore?”

“No,” he admitted, “not yet. As of right now, it can't be done.”

“Well, at least you're honest.” For the first time in our acquaintance his tone had hinted at less than ironclad, one thousand percent Jespersonian assurance.

“There are several catches,” he said, sounding reluctant to come right out with it.

“Uh-huh, there usually are.”

“Always,” he confirmed. “Climbing that high and far will be a tough component of our travel plans, but not the toughest.”

“Your
travel plans,” I corrected.

He went on as if I hadn't piped up. “A whopping collateral deficit is tacked on to the prospective altitude goal, Barney. As told you, the most devilish detail will be a week or more spent hiking a distance uphill over incredibly rugged terrain.”

“There goes the ball game.”

“You could be right, except for one inescapable, indisputable cast-in-concrete fact.”

“I'm all ears.”

“The most colossal, least avoidable catch,” he said with a trace of uncertainty that didn't sound natural coming from him, “is that climbing that big hill and doing a fix is the only game in town, plus a corollary we'll have to deal with that's every bit as gargantuan.”

“Not sure I want to hear it,” I said.

“Even if we can scratch out some way to make the uphill trek and repair the pipeline,” he said, “I haven't figured out a way to get us down again.”

Some goddamn catch! “Not get down! Jesperson,” I said hotly, “I used to think you were plain stone crazy. Now I
know
you are!"

 

Her dark eyes blazing like beacon fires, her lower lip quivering like it was about to fall off, my one and only cried, “Say
wha-a-at!”

At times the woman of the house gets downright peevish over my lacks and faults and blunders. On this hurtful morning a force five temper storm was blowing through our humble domicile. “Does your half-wit buddy,” she demanded, acute indignation steaming from every pore, “honestly think anyone can
climb
that . . . that
thing
out there? Is he nuts, or just plain stupid saying stuff like that?”

“Only way to save ourselves,” I told her, using my extra-sincere tone of voice that sounds kind of lame.

“Onliest
way? Sez who?”

“Listen, Babe, it's sort of . . . well, it's real complicated. Let me fill you in on why Jesperson insists that we don't have any choice except to
—
”

“Oh, no! You're not doin' no fancy-word tap dance on
my
head, Mr. Barnes. What's more, don't you bother callin' me ‘Babe' no more, neither. If I told you once I told you ten thousand times: keep hangin' out with that wild man and you'll end up in big, deep serious trouble. Hear what I'm sayin'? Jesperson's tetched in the head, as fulla crap as a Christmas goose, and you know it well as me. Get shut of him! Get shut of him once and for all, and save yourself bags ‘n bundles of agony.”

Our little guy's eyes were round-eyed, and his head kept swinging back and forth from she to me like he was watching a tennis match. A smart kid, if I say so myself, Jay learned early on to sweat us out when we both got angrified at the same time. We must've disappointed little Jay something fierce. More ‘n once he'd wrongly figured the fireworks had all shot off and it was time for kiss-and-make-up season. It got to where I couldn't stomach any more of Lorna's sass or my own cork would have popped, except she hadn't finished her say, and kept beating her gums in a fishwifey way, letting me in on the reasons why she felt that way, book, chapter, verse and footnotes. I knew arguing with her was useless once she got that hot, but deep down inside I also knew she had cause to be temperish.

Choking on my own irate mindset, I gave up and busted out of our digs at quickmarch and answered an urgent need to let off steam by doing something hard and physical. I called Jesperson, suited-up in my vacuum gear, and met him outside North Tunnel. The two of us got straight to foot-foot-slog-sloggin'up ‘n down the everlovin' ringwall trail.

Afterward, stuck in my latest homelife role of undesirable spouse, I gave up homelife altogether, met my partner again the following morning, and the next, the next, and the one after that. We got to be the butt of wiseacre one-liners and gibes doled out by Gimpy and his grunts. The maintenance bo's took to calling us “trail zombies” for foot-foot-slog-sloggin' up and down their miserable trail. We went at it hot ‘n heavy for most of a week, sticking to my partner's prescription for “getting in shape,” by which time Gimp and his hard-hats figured us for genuine head cases, and no doubt racked their brains, wondering why a pair of Marsrats with their heads screwed on fairly tight had developed an urge to keep on yo-yoing up and down their private maintenance trail.