Olympus Mons (18 page)

We churned across the rock-strewn landscape, rounded the perimeter of Burroughs's ringwall, and took a heading just south of due west. Only a kilometer or two fell away behind the crawler before the hypnotic jouncing and mild swaying got to me. I decided Black-like-me, who was already snoring like a damaged chainsaw, had the right idea. I tugged open a foldbunk, fell I into it and let my troubles do a fast fade.

***

For me early reveille occurs naturally; most times I'm up before dawn to prep for my now and then labor pool duties, or take part in Jesperson's foot-sloggin' expeditions. For some reason I must've been more tired than usual that morning because I slept for hours, not reviving until we were rolling past the way station compound's stubby wall. Through Cee Two's transpex forward bubble, the half-buried structures looked puny against the escarpment's craggy, gouge-raddled backdrop.

Having roused and gone forward, the glassblower hulked motionless as an ebony statue in the co-driver seat. Jesperson was slouched in the seat behind them. I guess they'd run out of conversation, but then Black-like-me's not much when it comes to making small talk, or for that matter big talk. Throwing gouts of sand from the tracks, Gimpy slewed the crawler around and powered-down, parking parallel to the scarp not far from the pitted, scarred, igloo-shaped shed housing the aged hoist system's control gear.

“Suit-up!” Jesperson rose in the aisle and stretched. He came aft, opened the equipment locker and broke out his vacuum gear.

Leaning far forward, the glassblower peered up through the crawler's forward transpex bubble. “So you clowns're thinkin' serious about climbin'
that?”

“Wait and see.” Jesperson was busy laying out and wriggling into his p-suit.

Black-like-me dripped sarcasm. “Yeah, I'll wait, but sure enough miss seein' anything.”

I joined the glassblower, sliding into the vacated driver's seat. From directly below, the scarp's perspective is awesome, a feeble use of the word. Bending far back, I looked almost straight up through the crawler's transpex bubble, making the crick in my neck pop. From directly down below, Olympus Rupes doesn't look like a gently curving set of humongous cliffs surrounding Big Oly. The volcano's so gigantic, its girdling all-around base so enormous, that the escarpment looks like a continuous, sloping wall that runs forever in both directions.

I stayed cranked back, eyeballing the near-vertical, corrugated cliff face soaring skyward until it disappeared in wispy, thinning orographic clouds three or four kilometers overhead. Suspended from shock-dampening struts sticking out ladder-fashion from the freakish, giant ripples of basalt, the pipeline dove straight down at me, a gradually thickening dark thread that came out of the orographic cloud layer on high, gradually turns into an undernourished soda straw, a fatter black tube, and finally a black glass pipe steadily growing larger until it hit the knee a half-dozen meters overhead, came off the face at a shallow angle and disappeared above the central holding tank. Pipes emerge from sand-blown fillets at the base of both adjacent holding tank and join the slightly larger, elevated pipe string that runs straight as a taut bow string across Tharsis to Burroughs. Alongside the pipeline, a stately procession of short, spindly pylons support windmills spinning slowly in the stiff morning breeze. The sentinel windmill pylons stretch east into the Tharsis plains, dwindling in height and then disappearing beyond the final lava terrace a good many klicks from the volcano's base.

Anxious to get outside, I had to wait my turn; it takes a while for a quartet of bo's in vacuum gear to do a one-at-a-time exit from a crawler's small airlock. Tail end Charlie, I jumped down to the sand. The three pressure-suited figures were gathered around the small prefab hut set up decades ago by the hard-hat construction gang.

At first glance, the wind-battered, domed igloo looked anything but promising. Over and over, again and again, gravel, sand and powdery dust had piled up around the small structure, been torn away by the ravening winds, and piled up again. In front, what could be seen of the sand-scoured, pitted sheet metal door was bent a bit here, caved in slightly there; I doubt if anyone had wanted to open it, or tried, since the prehistoric day when the homeward bound hard-hats shut down the hoist system, closed the door, heaved a wholesome sigh of relief, and blew Mars goodbye kisses.

Black-like-me's Day-Glo orange pressure-suit would jump out at you in any crowd. He needed no prompting, had grabbed a fold-handled utility spade from the crawler's external equipment locker and was scooping sand aside like a burrowing hound. By the time I ambled over to join the others, he had most of the windblown debris cleared away from the igloo's door.

Jesperson and Gimpy went over to the foot of the hoist system, and were inspecting the cable and winches. My partner tugged experimentally on the upside cable, his voice crackling in my suit's headpiece. “Hear what I'm saying, Gimp? These lines may look slim and puny, but according to the specs they were woven on-orbit of exotic nanotechnology carbon strands.”

“Uh-huh.” The maintenance guru isn't likely to be swayed by rhetoric. “Except looks can fool you good. Besides, it's real tough to put any trust in stuff this old. We'll do a fairly stiff pull test; no other way to tell how much tension a cable can still handle.”

“Agreed,” said Jesperson, sounding reluctant to accept the suggestion. “Remember, these cable sets marching up the scarp in staggered leaps were designed to lift metric tonnes of glass pipe sections.”

“A true statement,” granted Gimpy, “but that hoisting took place back in the sweet bye ‘n bye.” Calling the maintenance chief conservative would be a whopping understatement. Cautious as a scrawny kitten trapped in a kennel full of rabid dogs, Gimpy believes in a belt, suspenders, both hands, and prayer. He probably looks both ways before climbing out of bed in the morning.

“Cable condition,” declared Jess, forever his salty self, “is what we're here to find out.”

“Shack's open,” announced Black-like-me. Corrosion works fast as a glacier here in Mars, but the results are identical, in this case freezing the hinges tight shut. An individualist through ‘n through, the glassblower had solved the problem in his own individual way, by ripping the battered door from its moorings. The hinges had suffered terminal punishment.

Gimpy poked the lens of his headpiece inside the hut. “Looks to be in better shape than I expected. If the winch motor seals're intact, Jesperson, we may have a shot at doing what you've a mind to do. Can't say that about the bearings, though; they've been shy of lube for a passel of E-years, and could burn out the first time we
—
”

“The specs,” pointed out Jess, “call for self-lubricating, permanently sealed bearings.”

“Ah, hah! Permanent . . .” Gimpy pronounced the word mistrustfully. “I've heard that fairy tale more ‘n once. Can't help feeling leery about engineers who tab anything ‘permanent.' It means something different to guys like me who sweat to keep machinery on line.” He clammed up and concentrated, feeling his way around the igloo's control console with gauntleted fingers, and then looked higher, tracing the arrows and symbols on a faded plastic diagram bonded to the uppermost blank panel.

“What will it take,” Jess asked impatiently, “to reroute power here from three or four windmills?”

“Might not need to,” said Gimp after a few seconds of further study. “Four armored power cables come in behind the main power panel, see there?” He pointed. “The bo's who rigged this setup could've hooked up a set of windmills to power the machinery down here and higher up, then switched juice back to the holding tank heaters once the hoisting was done, the aqueduct build finished. All we may need do according to this block diagram is throw these four higher voltage switches. Best not try just yet.”

“Why not?” demanded Jesperson.

“Divert power, it'll cut off juice to the holding tank heaters. Water'll freeze.”

Jesperson groaned. “Use your head, Gimp. The holding tanks are dust-dry.”

Clumsy in vacuum gear, Gimpy backed out of hut's doorway. “Be swoggled! Slipped my mind. Okay, do we cross our fingers, give ‘er a go? If so, you three'd best back off a ways. Who knows, sparks could fly. I have small faith in electrical systems this old, and truth be told a damsight less in mechanical gear unattended for more ‘n thirty E-years.”

We followed Gimp's suggestion, removing ourselves to a hopefully safe distance. The maintenance boss ducked back inside the hut. He swore over the difficulty of trying to lift the clear plastic safety cover on the first of four master power on-off switches; time had glued the covers to the panel surface. He ended up prying off the safety covers with a screwdriver from his utility belt, seized the insulated handle of an old-fashioned high-voltage switch first in a row and swung it over, jamming the contacts into a four-pronged receptacle. Far as I could tell, nothing bad happened. Jesperson led us back to the hut.

Gimpy turned around, his grin indistinct through the polarized faceplate lens of his suits headpiece. “Glory be!” He tapped a console-mounted meter. “We have wattage.” He threw over the other three switches. Each sealed power meter indicator climbed and steadied in the green band of its linear readout.

Hovering beside me, Jesperson clapped the shoulder of my pressure-suit a lusty whack. Through his faceplate lens, I saw his grin widen until he looked like a circus clown. He breathed “Glory be!” echoing Gimpy's sentiment to nine decimals.

 

At one time or another during my not altogether happy life as a Marsrat, I've seen my partner elated, but neither before nor since like he was late that breezy morning at the foot of the Olympus Rupes escarpment. His game plan to get a jump on conquering his pet volcano had taken an equally huge upward leap, making me begin to believe his crazy scheme might not be totally nuthouse after all. What I'd formerly and privately considered either improbable or out and out impossible, but still a desperate, last ditch hurdle we couldn't afford to pass up, had toppled, or at least was leaning in a positive direction, becoming only the first pitfall to overcome in a row of pitfalls.

Thanks to my partner's intuitive powers, and Gimpy's expertise, the problem of powering the winch system had solved itself, and the cables looked intact, usable, although more than a kernel of doubt obviously nagged Gimpy, who still had trouble believing the timeworn system had stayed halfway reliable. We heard him speculate, questioning the condition of the staggered, sets of cables rigged to climb higher and higher to the crest of the escarpment. Then he surprised me by voicing a positive opinion on his own hook, namely that the sealed, self-lubricating bearings inside the winches and what he called the drag spindles might have retained integrity as advertised. Yet in his finely honed technician's mind you could almost hear him add, “Could have won't ever begin to replace for certain.”

Under even ideal conditions Jesperson is not easy bo to read. Pokerfaced ninety-nine percent of the time, he keeps his inner self tightly bottled up. You have to be around him for a while, and learn the signs to a point where you can guess what he's really thinking and feeling. He didn't dance a jig, anything like that
—
an awkward drill encumbered in vacuum gear
—
or otherwise show how hyped he really was. Yet dimly through his polarized faceplate lens I could make out the up-tilted corners of his mouth, making me realize we were in the company of a very happy Marsrat. Gimp and I exchanged meaningful glances.

The scarp's lower reaches, where the downfall pipeline knees, splits and dives into the holding tanks is only a short stone's throw from the hoist system control igloo. Aloof is my glassblower pal's middle name. Leaning against the crawler's sloping side, his head tipped back against the quilted lining of his suit's headpiece, he stared up gawdawful cliffs hanging above us like a five-alarm fever dream. The Olympus Rupes escarpment isn't vertical; it rears back between twelve and seventeen degrees, but it sure seems straight up ‘n down when you're right at the base. Gigantic bulges, gouges, depressions and furrows break the scarp's towering flanks. Jesperson once told me he and his mountaineer pals use the French word for “collar”
—
“col,” something like that
—
to identify such gouges and depressions

The hoist system goes up the scarp in roughly thousand-meter jumps, some a tad longer than others, some a bit shorter. On each of five intermediate levels, and finally a stone's throw below the curling basalt brow topping off the humongous rise, the hard-hats had blasted and jackhammered a narrow platform in the face, and another, smaller shelf not far above it. A winch and drag spindle are anchored at the brink of each level's larger platforms, and on each higher shelf the long, skinny arm of a boom stands ready to swing way out on command, contact the cable and warp it and the payload across the gulf to a point above the lower platform; the gulf is due to lateral setbacks at each higher level as the scarp's enormous face steps farther and farther back from the vertical.

The glassblower's gravelly bass voice grated in my headpiece. “Barnes, what you s'pose those paired hooks are for?” He pointed to the cable running up toward the lowermost shelf more than a kilometer above us, out of sight from our vantage directly below. The cable had a double-hook break in it.

Jesperson slapped the drag spindle with his gauntlet, telling us a slack cable would be unsafe in Mars. Operating on what he called a “long moment arm,” even the mild force exerted by the perpetual winds would swing and sway a payload until finally it whapped into the cliff face. He complimented the engineers who'd designed the system for using excellent forethought and paying meticulous attention to detail.