Olympus Mons (19 page)

“The doubled carabiners on each cable segment,” he concluded, can be separated and the horns of each respectively inserted and closed on the upper and lower rings of an inserted cargo net. Then the topside winch drives the take-up spool, while resistance from the drag spindle keeps the cable taut. To attach a payload, you unclutch the drag spindle, pay out cable to give it some slack, insert the cargo net, clutch in the drag spindle and drive the winch until cable tension's restored, then hoist away.”

“Hell's bells!” Gimpy's gravelly baritone boomed in my fishbowl. “You know more ‘n me about how this abandoned rig works.”

“I cheated,” admitted Jess. “I read and re-read the specs until I had the operating schema down pat. I even skimmed the daily construction log still in the database to get a feel for what problems the hard-hats ran into building the hoist rig. Come to think of it, one item wasn't spelled out clearly. How does command and control work, Gimp? Do we station a man at each level to operate the respective winches and booms?”

“Uh-uh, don't think so,” denied Gimpy. “Way I see it, whole shebang's commanded down here at the console. Only manual operation I learned about is clutching and unclutching the drag spindle
—
same handle you touched.” He indicated a lever inside the igloo. “Only needs t'be done by hand in remote control failure.”

Jess reflected briefly. “The operator at the console reacts to radioed commands?”

“Yeah, has to work that way.”

“Ouch!” My partner's enthusiasm slacked off, then revived stronger than ever. “I doubt if the range of our pressure-suit transceivers will stretch anywhere near six klicks to the top of the scarp. The minute we're back inside pressure, can you look up Vic Aguilar, ask him if there's some quick and dirty way to beef up a suit's wireless range?”

“Sure, consider it done.”

“Good! Soon's we get extended range transceivers, will the three of you come back out and help me run a full upside test? We'll need a cargo net, too; I couldn't find out what happened to the originals. How about it?”

The first responder was Black-like-me. “Test ride a friggin' cargo net up
there?”

“Right to the tippy-top,” confirmed Jesperson. “If any glitches crop up, we have to find out now. Later might as well be never.”

I looked up, and up, and up some more. I have no special fear of heights, but there are heights, then there are
heights.
Leaning back alongside the glassblower, I searched the towering, twenty-thousand-foot-plus wall of channeled, corrugated basalt hanging above us, loosed a silent curse and turned a favorite saying arsey-versey in my head:
Better never than late!

Earlier, Jesperson had figured on having the four of us overnight in the way station. He scrapped that notion, and was in the act of shooing us back inside the crawler for the trip home when Gimpy mentioned an oversight. “By rights,” he advised, “we ought to hang the door back on the igloo so sand don't blow in and maybe clobber the works. Even a Force Two duster could trash the unsealed console. To be on the safe side, I should also de-energize.”

“Good thinking,” applauded Jesperson. “Do it.”

Black-like-me glared at the pitted metal door he'd ripped from the control shed and tossed aside. Any ordinary door would've jumped back in place under that kind of visual punishment. This one lay there looking terminal, its hinges ruined.

After Gimpy depowered the hoist system, the ornery glassblower went to work. Solving the problem
his
way, he took a coil of fiberglass rope from the crawler's external equipment locker, and urged us three to hold the hingeless door in place and push against it hard. We manhandled the door, pressed it against the seals, and leaned on it to ensure full closure. Winding the rope round and round, Black-like-me lashed the door tight to the igloo, reaching between us to pull it taut after each full circle. Pressure-suit gauntlets make for clumsy knot tying, but didn't hinder the glassblower. His knots looked worth an Eagle Scout badge.

Soon as everyone was aboard, with the airlock hatches closed and sealed, Jesperson energized Cee Two. We rolled out into the wasteland toward home, jouncing along for hours in Big Oly's lengthening afternoon shadow.

***

I was in the driver's seat hours later, riding herd on Cee Two, with the others still sacked out in foldbunks, when the shiny roof-shield of Burroughs poked above the horizon. A clear chime sounded, announcing a carrier wave banging Cee Two's wideband topside horn. I guessed it was Aguilar even before answering his hail.

Vic wasted no words filling me in on the latest goings-on. Seems the director had called another emergency council session, and summoned our never-say-die action committee to attend — not invited, Vic emphasized,
summoned.
He said Scheiermann had been bent out of shape something fierce when told that neither member of our, ahem! action committee was on hand to RSVP his imperial summons, and his indignation had sailed up into the apoplexy stage when he found out Jesperson had “requisitioned” a crawler without official approval, then compounded his capital crime by conscientiously “neglecting” to file a trip report and have it approved.

Spurred by the news flash, I poured extra watts to the crawler, especially when Vic advised me not to dilly-dally, urging all of us to haul our tokuses straight to the meeting area the second we were back inside pressure. When I tried to question him about what had inspired the rash of high-level panic, he wouldn't come right out and tell me over the air, but his hint was easy to decipher. Seems a redhot had sizzled in from Geneva, and when the director read it he turn two shades paler than death warmed over. While Scheiermann had been trotting around in a tizzy, Vic had skimmed the message as the printer spewed out a mylar hardcopy. He wouldn't comment it, except to say it'd jarred the director into a distant, fuzzy grasp of reality.

“Give me three guesses,” I told Vic, “and you can scratch the first two. I'll bet my horse and dog word of the U.N. two-step's filtered through the fog of con and made him damned nervous, right?”

A two-beat pause filled the airwaves with silence. No longer holding back, Aguilar said, “Nervous no,
amigo mio.
He's scared shitless.”

“I hear you.”

“And so,” added Vic soberly, “am I.”

***

Thirty-two minutes later by Cee Two's dashboard chronometer, I parked alongside the loading dock in South Tunnel's utility airlock. Once inside pressure, my travel-weary cronies and I hastily de-suited in the airlock service area and made a beeline for the partitioned meeting area. Our shuffling entrance and scruffy appearance earned dark looks from the podium, and suspicious stares from an audience made up of seven or eight score Marsrats and their ladies. We took seats at the rear of the gathering, but the stares still came our way, telling me that separating our leper colony from the other attendees was not a saving grace.

Smiling like a dental patient about to undergo a root canal without anesthetic, Deputy Director Yokomizo still managed to look sulky, while our unforgiving director shot silent zingers our way loaded to the tippy-top with acid-laced annoyance. Despite his obvious unhappiness, Scheiermann didn't choose to interrupt Doc Franklin's ongoing spiel. Running true to form, the areographer was belaboring the audience with six-bit words when two-bit words would've turned the trick a lot better. He'd sort of looked us over sideways when we filed inside, and his word spill slowed some, slowed further and ground to a dead stop. In a thick silence, he eyeballed our fearless foursome with frank curiosity.

Deciding no invitation was needed, the director jumped into the gap. “Mis-ter Jes-per-son,” he said, drawing out the name like it was a grand jury indictment, “I understand that you absconded with a crawler after failing to submit a formal trip plan, or obtaining permission to use the machine. May I ask why that was so?”

Publicly charged with “absconding,” a violation of long-established rules no one ever paid any attention to, I expected my partner's comeback to be couched in typical Jespersonian sword thrusts. Not this time. He fell all over himself apologizing for the “oversight,” and promised faithfully to never,
ever
repeat the heinous offense.

“Oversight indeed!” Scheiermann's indignation upped several more notches. “Our six crawlers are the enclave's most precious possessions,” he added, and went on to caution the miscreant absconder about onerously using a vital, irreplaceable crawler “for personal reasons,” and then chafed expectantly while waiting for an account of where the “absconded” machine had been absconded to, and more importantly
why
it'd been absconded. Further disgruntled when no explanation was forthcoming, he gargled, inhaled,
harrumphed!
twice in rapid succession, turned to Doc Franklin and asked him to pardon the interruption, then launched a recap of recent developments for the benefit of “those individuals”
—
read screw-ups
—
who had purposely “absented” themselves at the most crucial time imaginable.

The meat and potatoes of his recap was what Vic had hinted at: a thinly veiled U.N. admission of the worsening worldwide recession, and the time constraint imposed on any effort to relieve our emergency, which was making it extremely difficult to define and organize a Burroughs relief expedition. Korasek's Cossacks, to borrow my partner's favorite label, had admitted the necessity to pull in their horns on said relief effort for several reasons, including China's stranglehold on Western commerce and its upshot, the on again, off again semi-shooting war taking place in and around the lunar crater Aristarchus. He cited the PRC's space elevator system as the “catalyst” wholly responsible for creating “extremely serious” worldwide economic chaos, and for breeding widespread discord among those nations aligned with the Western bloc, not to mention several within Asia's commercial sphere. During his account of the situation, the director managed to circumnavigate Planet Mars at least twice.

What made me queasy listening to the aging academic windbag's speech was the nervy way he seemed to
side
with the U.N.'s decision to “consider” abandoning Burroughs to its fate. Be damned if he didn't do his best to halfway forgive the near-criminal behavior of the U.N. movers and shakers. He couldn't bring himself to say it outright, but he sure gave an impression of left-handedly
apologizing
for the tentative death sentence pronounced by the Korasek's “office,” and said everything he could think of to let the multinational bigwigs off the hook. In effect, it was a weasel-worded, half-assed
defense
of the bureaucratic bastards' inaction decision.

After he circled the reasons for “considering” to abandon us a third time, Scheiermann finally found the guts to halfway condemn the good ol' homeboys for inferring
—
not for forthrightly saying so, mind you, but
inferring
—
that our enclave was to be cut adrift, and letting us down easy with a sincere hope that we outcasts might, perchance, in the final analysis, and only as the ultimate last resort, of course, seek a pathway to salvation on our own.

The astronomical budget sucked up from member nations has transformed the U.N. Into what Jesperson described as “A quasi-not-quite world government.” Multinational U.N. Peacekeeping Forces may be second to none when it comes to fast reaction counterinsurgency and counterterrorist deployment, but the U.N. itself stays true to its classic role: an assembled herd of talking heads now and forever pledged to remain nothing more than an assembled herd of talking heads.

When at last Scheiermann ran dry, the expressions on row after row of glum, antagonistic Marsrats had not changed a whit, hopefully making our director appreciate the fact that he'd been running off at the mouth to little or no purpose. He apologized again to Franklin again, and turned the floor back to the areographer.

During the previous council session, Jesperson had refused to argue with Franklin's negative assessment of the action committee's “mission impossible” climb the volcano and repair the aqueduct scenario. Now he obviously considered my partner's wild scheme a dead issue, believed he could pick up where he'd left off, and began revisiting his own fanciful ambition to organize and lead a hunt for buried water ice. Before he finished the second sentence, Franklin found out my partner was a changed Marsrat and wore an entirely different hat.

“Hold it!” Jesperson reared to his feet beside me and spoke his mind — never a problem with him
—
by proceeding to steal the areographer's thunder. He ignored the director's gavel-pounding out of order declarations, and advised the audience to pay no attention to the areographer's balderdash about digging for phantom pockets of water ice hidden “somewhere” beneath the sands of Mars.

At which point Scheiermann lost all control of the meeting. Harsh words started flying back and forth ‘twixt Franklin on the podium and Jesperson at the rear of the meeting area. The director kept yelling, “Order, order!” and rapping his gavel in a tattoo frenzy. Despite the fact that Black-like-me has no better nature, the Chair tried appealing to the sergeant-at-arms' better nature, urging him to restore order. I was fairly sure our visit to Olympus Rupes had done much to convince the glassblower the smart move would be to cast his lot with Jesperson's scheme. Cleve, Clive or Clyde sitting beside me at the rear of the hall had obviously developed an acute hearing problem.

The director's gavel-banging consternation doubled, yet did zip to slow the verbal dueling of Jesperson and Franklin, who were shouting loud enough to be heard over the rising clamor. Their back and forthings turned into a game of one-upmanship pure ‘n simple. Franklin would bellow to make a point, and no sooner had the words left his mouth than Jess would shoot them down like ducks in flight. The hotheaded debate went something like this: