Olympus Mons (14 page)

“On average,” he informed unnecessarily, “four of every ten Marsrat newbies are subsidized professionals
—
“valued specialists” in the lexicon once favored by the Vonex propaganda mill, and now probably the U.N.'s as well. Hundreds if not thousands of suckers are urged to sweeten the applicant pot, while the established professionals willing to sign on are awarded a ‘fair market price' for their homes and businesses, perpetual care for their elderly, indigent or disabled relatives, and sundry other benefits few are allowed to talk about. The current batch departed lunar orbit months before Vonex handed us over to U.N. jurisdiction. My faultless intuition tells me the thinned-out passenger complement is not due to suckering an insufficient quantity of volunteers. I suspect the list was shortened because the conglomerate Vonex monstrosity's petty cash fund was a tad deficient.”

“Vonex
had the shorts? You've got to be kidding!”

“His brows arched. “Am I? Sample the piece on page one. An overload of the negative has been SOP for centuries in the print and electronic media; it's something Vic knows all about, so the most interesting tidbits are on page one of his news sheet.”

I followed directions like a proper stooge. The lead story, also highlighted in yellow marker, left me round-eyed, openmouthed. “Mother of God!” I yelped. “Papa Korasek's been outed at Vonex.” The aristocratic gentleman in question had been the conglomerate's autocratic board chairman since I was in short pants. Now he was the
former
Grand Old Man of multinational business.

“Read on,” urged Jess. “It gets more interesting.”

A short, highlighted paragraph farther down the page included a news item worth chewing on, coughing up and re-chewing. It so happened that Armin Korasek, newly ousted from his Vonex leadership pinnacle, had accepted a post as director of the U.N. Department of Extraterrestrial Affairs.

“Be double-damned, cross-eyed, and fit to be tied!” I didn't have to pretend surprise. “Bounced from the spot as our former big boss, Papa Korasek spun around heel-to-toe and took a job as our
new
big boss.”

“Ain't high-level politics grand!” Grinning, Jesperson snatched the hardcopy out of my hand. “Rest your tired eyes, Barney, and I'll spell it out. Friend Aguilar has to be ten times brighter than anyone knew or guessed. Vic told me he hardly ever editorializes the watered-down verbiage that spills our way every month. He rarely does more than screen the copy, and make his own judgments and interpretations about what to include, what to trash. I called him not many minutes before you walked in the door.”

“And the punch line . . ?” I hate it worse'n sin when he keeps me hanging.

“Vic told me every earthworm on six of the seven continents is jawboning bitterly about the persistent, deepening recession. It's an economic downturn rudely exacerbated by Artsutanov, the principal villain capping China's efforts to further
—
”

“By Art who . . ?”

“Artsutanov was once a real ‘who,' but no more.” Schoolmaster Jesperson described the ground-to-orbit space elevator system the PRC had put in service. High-strength, lightweight tethers anchored deep in an equatorial mountain peak stretching almost thirty-six thousand kilometers spaceward, connecting the ground and a huge geosynchronous manufacturing satellite named for whatever reason after a Russian scientist from Soviet times. Using their sky-rending elevator system, the PRC's been shipping made-in-Luna wares groundside at negligible cost, dumping them on world marketplaces at prices no one else can come close to matching.

“Far as we're concerned,” he continued, “major earthside economic troubles guarantee that Scheiermann's Mayday call will fall on stone-deaf ears. Every major and minor Western business enterprise is worried about the financial sky falling
—
a first for most of them, and a sledgehammer blow in the gut for a multi-tentacled international octopus like Vonex. Now it's crystal clear why Papa Korasek dumped us on the U.N. before he jumped ship at Vonex. With economic tidings bad and fast growing worse, the U.N. movers and shakers will play hell coming up with enough scratch to
think
about dispatching a rescue mission to an insignificant collection of misfit, offworld Marsrats.”

“Bwana, you don't exactly make it sound real cheery for . . .” His ear-to-ear grin stopped me from saying what I'd been about to say.

“All things considered,” he told me, “it's the best news we could hear.”

“That so? Got to confess I've heard a whole lot better.”

His grin faded. “Instead of dreaming up snappy comebacks, try
thinking
for a change!” Jesperson never neglects sarcasm when there's a teentsy chance of it drawing blood. “My message went in one of your shell-like ears, and out the other.
Think,
dammit!” he insisted.

“I am, but
—”

“Barney, with a galloping recession eating profits and stock values like peanuts, the West is sliding toward a genuine depression. That alone should make it easy to predict how Geneva and New York will view Scheiermann's cry for help. The U.N. brain trust will wring its hands, play a sleight-of-hand game known as, ‘Oh, dear me, what can we hope to do about rescuing the poor, endangered Marsrats?' Then that wonderful international organization will backslide, waffle, tap dance around the issue and wonder if sending expensive help our way could possibly, by any stretch of the imagination be done in time to . . . Getting the picture?”

“Uh-huh, in ultra-hi-def, three-D and Technicolor.”

“In the end,” he added knowingly, “we'll become victims of a fast-shuffle known as the United Nations Two-step, a dance replete with a euphonious off-key musical score and splendiferous wooden-legged choreography. Eventually a Dear John transmittal will bang Vic's lasercomm receiver along with a phony message from the U.N. cheerleaders urging us to stop whining and take a stab at solving our own damn water problem.”

“Bwana,” I said, by this time mightily annoyed my ownself, “if that prediction amounts to good news, I'd sure as hell hate to hear what you think of as
bad.”

“Still
don't get it?” His grin sunnier and nastier than ever, he said earnestly, “The recent defection by Vonex, teetering and heading for the skids, tells me our new step-daddy, Korasek, took a firm grip on the risers of his golden parachute before he bailed at Vonex and drifted down into the ‘safe' welcoming arms of the U.N. But, lo and behold! Now all of a sudden poor Armin finds himself mired in bigger, deeper yogurt than was lapping at his underlip when he dumped the stewardship of Vonex on some other exec's head.”

“Okay, enough! It's plain where you're coming from, but
—
”

“But me no buts!” He snapped, too impatient to hear me out. “Ordinarily a money machine breakdown in the homeworld would go unnoticed here in our cozy enclave. Not now. Once the gravity of earthside conditions sink in, Scheiermann and his council will have to give up dithering, do some astute pondering and face the crisis squarely, head-on. If and when they do, it will leave them with only one choice: to conclude that our way is indeed the only way to achieve salvation. They'll come around quicker than you can say Armin Korasek.”

“Hope to hell you aren't just blowing smoke my way. Your whole sales job sounds to me more than a touch half-assed.”

“Don't fret,” he advised with typical Jespersonian conviction. “I'm right, I know I am. When our noble council wakes up to the real-world situation, the only light at the far end of the tunnel will be ours.”

He was dead wrong
—
a first in itself
—
but at the time neither of us had any inking
how
wrong.

 

My partner had called a temporary halt to our foot-sloggin' drill, which suited me fine, but for whatever reason I couldn't shake the habit of rising early to prep for the daily grind. On this particular morning I spent the early hours giving the woman of the house a tidy-up hand in our humble domicile. We put things right here and there, cleaned up this and that, fixed the other. I thought to ease my guilty conscience, maybe even edge my way back into Lorna's middling good graces by horsing around for a while with Jay, and ended up taking the boy for a long walk around the enclave.

In mid-afternoon, Jesperson, yours truly and a trio other work-dodgers were cashing in part of our monthly beer ration, tossing down a brew in Art the Barkeep's sleazy makeshift tavern. Vic Aguilar wandered in looking downcast. Without a word or a nod, he drew out a wobble-legged glass chair at our table, called to Art for a stein, glanced from Jesperson to me and loosed a woebegone,
“¡Ay de mì!”

“That bad?” inquired Jesperson with a chilling absence of sympathy.

Vic's head wagged sadly.
“Es muy malo.”

I think highly of Aguilar. When he teases me by yakking in Spanish, I know he's ruffling my feathers just for love of the game, and I go into my gringo redneck act, carrying on with the back-and-forth routine we both enjoy. Vic's a sterling, brown-skinned brother, not a black screw-up like me, or a blue-eyed smartass of Jesperson's delicate hue and spiny disposition. Shrewd through and through, pleasant and even-tempered, Vic's got brains he hasn't bothered to use yet. The scam in Burroughs is that his one-way trip to our dusty purgatory was the aftermath of an extra-stiff sentence handed down by some rabidly confused Gulf Coast judge. Hearsay says the tiff kicked-off in some Galveston watering hole and went straight from bad words to Fist City. The scuffle was supposedly going Vic's way until, to his endgame regret, the other bo yanked a switchblade out of his boot. Vic supposedly took the shiv away from the guy and gave it back to him, if you catch my drift.

The enclave's communications maven, Vic routinely gets a peek at each word of traffic that flies between Burroughs and the homeworld, including the monthly news tidbits and graphics that go into his monthly
Blue Planet
newsletter. He's of course sternly directed to look the other way whenever transmittals flagged politically sensitive come in, or rarely go out. Something he once told me stuck in my mind: “If you must know,
compañero,
lasercomm traffic is mostly dishwater-dull drivel.”

Acting edgy and out of sorts, Vic sipped his suds, downing maybe half a stein before we prodded him into unburdening himself. Seems that Scheiermann, Doc Yokomizo and the council secretary had stayed up half the night concocting the Mayday cry for help Vic had dispatched to disenthroned Armin Korasek, now re-enthroned as head of the U.N. Department of Extraterrestrial Affairs, the collection of bureaucratic geniuses charged with caring for us Marsrats, as well as the looney tunes characters who live and work in space and in Luna. Vic told us the brain trust must've spent the night's other half editing, revising, polishing and sprinkling holy water on their single page of choice verbiage.

Bleary eyed and fussbudgety from lack of sleep, yet bent on upholding the awesome dignity of his lofty official office, Scheiermann had bustled into the comm cubicle at daybreak. Subjecting Aguilar to a fatherly lecture, he'd extracted Vic's pledge to keep his tongue well back in his mouth with regard to any and all exchanges between Burroughs and the U.N. The director had explained and re-explained how those unaware of the big picture must not become needlessly alarmed over the diplomatic fencing so often necessary to effect a resolution to the crisis now facing Burroughs.

The director had also warned Vic more than twice of the extremely serious consequences in store if he should so much as
think
about violating the council's trust. Aguilar knows the score. He told us he invoked a gaggle of Saints as witnesses, solemnly promising to never, ever, under any circumstances, breathe one sacred word of a transmittal to anyone, and had then vastly improved his image in the director's eyes by suggesting an ignore-proof caption for the red hot cry for help transmittal, to wit:

MOST URGENT, FOR DIRECTOR KORASEK'S EYES ONLY.

Endorsing the cloak-and-daggerish salutation with feverish, unbridled enthusiasm, Vic was ordered to send the “bombshell” sunward in a compressed spray of lasercomm digits.

Vic said he'd made a production of deleting the transmittal from computer memory and handing Scheiermann the “only” copy in existence, after which the red-eyed director had paced the comm cubicle for almost two hours, waiting anxiously through a pair of transmission lags and a timeless, in-between interlude for the homeworld to acknowledge reception.

Aguilar may not always tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but, yet in my personal opinion he never lies. The mylar flimsy sheet he passed to the director
was
the one and only hardcopy in existence, but there are copies, and then there are copies. During the wait Aguilar told us he'd been forced to listen to the director's playback of what Vic called the “snotty, arrogant” way Doc Franklin had shredded and trashed Jesperson's grand scheme to climb Big Oly and save our respective white, black, brown and yellow hides.

Vic assured us he'd done his best to follow and swallow Scheiermann's “Chin up, chest out, let's all pull together and keep a stiff upper lip” pep talk even while internally feeling grossly underwhelmed after his covert skim of the council's “weak-worded, officiously couched” plea for emergency aid and assistance. A sharp sense of foreboding had taken Vic by the throat, or so he claimed, shaking him up with what he termed a “presque vu” image, whatever that is, of our waterless enclave hellbent on the road to “wroth in death and envy after.” At which point I quit trying to unravel his flowery recital, but even so his meaning came through loud ‘n clear.