Olympus Mons (24 page)

We later found out approval for the junket had been granted by Doc Yokomizo, who'd been part way converted to Jesperson's scheme of ensuring Burroughs survival. Seems that when Scheiermann began to jawboned his deputy director about giving in to my partner's “crazy,” arrogant request, and hinted about shooting down the sortie with assorted reasons why reprobate Marsrats did not deserve to be shown an overabundance of privilege, Yokie had insisted on the suggested day use of Cee Four as being not only acceptable, but mandatory, and had dared to put his own chop on the request.

Our prospective expedition's father figure used his self-advertised but not necessarily self-taken advice about not making waves, and instead made a show of bighearted righteousness
—
something foreign and far out of the ordinary for him
—
by biting his tongue to keep from biting his victim and stooping to invite the areographer to come along and eyeball the hoist system his ownself. Stung to the quick by Jesperson's put-down of his wild ‘n woolly scheme to hunt for buried ice treasure, Franklin got all prickly and touchy and stiffly voiced his disinclination to accept my partner's magnanimous offer.

Four of us trucked out of South Tunnel aboard Cee Four at daybreak, jounced and swerved across the Tharsis wasteland for hours, and arrived at the foot of the scarp armed with the webbed fiberglass cargo net little Jay's teacher, Mrs. Chang, and her stitch-minded helpers had sewn together per Jesperson's sketchwork. Our pressure-suits were now equipped with Vic's extended-range transceivers, a major advantage that upped everyone's confidence. You could either call it confidence, or in my case the first surge of desperate desperation. Maybe unequal doses of both.

Black-like-me was again first out of the crawler. He untied, unwound and stowed the fiberglass rope we'd used to batten the shed's beat-up door. Gimpy ducked inside, energized the single-bay control console and quicklike put it through its paces, running what he called, “Self-test procedures.” Finishing that, he explained the controls for our benefit. I watched and listened, learning more than I wanted to know about how the antique hoist system worked.

A half-dozen numbered joysticks stuck up in a row on the console's lowermost desktop panel. Gimpy tapped Lever One with a gauntleted forefinger. “Push forward, up goes the first cable segment; pull back for down. Cable ‘n payload velocity's regulated by how far you push forward, or pull back; the readouts're these here speed ‘n position linear indicators. Lighted switches in this other row command the booms at each topside level; cue any one, and the system's minicomputer swing the boom around to contact the cable, and the other commands retracting it.

“This here's the drag spindle release.” He touched a larger handle, but didn't move it. “You engage the clutch and regulate the cable-drag like so.” He demonstrated. “The dials, meters and indicators on this upper panel are redundant readouts, duplicates of the fail-safe payload position indicators for each lift system segment. This other stuff includes readouts on a slew of secondary functions.”

Gimpy pulled back on the first lever in the row, bringing down to ground level the hooked-together carabiners joining the cable segments; as it came down, the skinny cable below the coupling automatically wound around the drag spindle that kept it taut. He unclutched the spindle, gave the cable some slack and gave Black-like-me a “Go!” The glassblower separated the doubled carabiner cable junction, hooked the upper one's horns to the upper cargo net ring and closed it, then connected the lower net hook, closing the lower cable's carabiner's horns on the bottom net ring, and stood back.

Jesperson surveyed the setup. Satisfied, he said, “Ready to lift, Gimp?” The hyped-up transceiver made his voice crackle extra loud in my fishbowl. I turned down the gain a little.

“By rights,” Gimpy told him, “we ought to run a dummy load test.”

“A time-waster,” argued Jess, eager to get the show on the road.

“Not to me it isn't,” said Gimpy. “We owe it to ourselves to make damn sure the topside winch stays anchored. If not, hanging tension on that cable could yank the winch out by the roots and it'd come crashing down on our heads, maybe even cause a rockfall that'd bury us and the crawler.”

Jesperson revolved the maintenance guru's hairy warning. “In which case,” he said a touch glumly, “we're walking dead men anyhow.” He stewed about the wisdom of Gimp's belt, suspenders and both hands approach, and argued, “Loading rocks in an open-weave cargo net will be tough.”

“Don't need,” Gimpy told him. “I'll run the tensiometer readout up to, say, two hundred kilograms, and take the empty net up a ways, then bring ‘er right back down. You three'd best back off a ways in case the upside winch does comes down.”

“Take care,” cautioned Jesperson, “not to tear the net apart.”

“No sweat. It'll handle fifty times the stretch I figure to hang on it.”

“How about you, Gimp?” asked Jesperson. “The shed's right under the winch.”

“I'll keep one eye on the tensiometer,” said the maintenance guru. “If the cable goes slack suddenlike, I'll cut ‘n run like the hammers of hell.”

Three of us picked our way out to a safer spot alongside the parked crawler. I tried to picture limpy Gimpy trying to cut ‘n run like the hammers of hell across a rough, sandy lava bed strewn with jagged, sharp-edged boulders of take-your-pick sizes and shapes.

The cargo net elongated as the cables stretched it taut, then crept slowly upward at a steady pace. The net halted fifty meters or so overhead, stayed there a minute're two, and started a downward crawl. Gimp halted the cable drive when the lower segment touched sand, then unclutched the drag spindle and gave a “down” command that let the net flatten out on the ground.

“How much you lay on?” Jesperson wanted to know.

“A hair less ‘n two hundred kaygee. It's one helluva lot more than the mass of whichever of you daredevils figures to be a net-rider.”

Jess swiveled toward me, an unspoken question in his dimly seen baby blues.

I imitated a brave halfwit, and said, “Sure, why not?” My thirty-five kaygee, plus Jesperson's twenty-eight, toted up to about sixty-three kilograms. Gimpy said the pair of us, plus the mass of our pressure-suits and two spare air flasks Jesperson wanted to pack along, was next to no load for the hoist system or net webbing. I desperately wanted to believe him.

Black-like-me detached the cargo net from the dangling upper carabiner. He walked all around it, folding it open flat. Jess stepped in first, and I sat down opposite him, bracing my overboots
—
protective buffers you pull on over a pressure-suit's built-in footwear
—
against his. Each of us laid a spare air bottle beside him, and the glassblower closed the net around us, then stretched, slid apart the horns of the upper cable's oblong carabiner, and close them over the upper net ring. Gimpy raised us just far enough to let the glassblower check the net's lower ring cable attachment. About then butterflies began chasing each other around my guts in tight spirals.

Jesperson sang, “Go!”

Gimpy took up the topside slack, and the cable unreeled from the drag spindle.

Up we went. Up and up, up, up, and
up . . .

Smoothly.

It was like riding a moderate-speed elevator, where acceleration doesn't shove you against the floor, except in this case only net webbing was underneath us; there
was
no “floor.” If there had been a floor, my first fearful glance down through the bands of that open-weave net wouldn't have turned me inside out the way it did. The ground fell away at a dizzy clip. The wind soughed ominously in the rigging, its thin banshee whine coming through my suit's external audio pickup not very loud, but clear and scary as hell.

I started taking deep breaths to hyperventilate like I used to do before a football kickoff, believing it to be an antidote for queasiness. Being sealed inside vacuum gear makes you a whole lot less than eager to upchuck.

Jesperson grinned at me from across the net and said, “Whee-e-e-e!”

I wanted to strangle the sumbitch. He
liked
the hellish ride, was
enjoying
it.

The first upside leap is the shortest; it lofts you about twelve hundred meters straight up, and that's close on three-quarters of a mile. I looked at the stark, every-which-way gouged wall of basalt sliding downward eight or ten meters from the end of my nose. I looked out over the deadly dull Tharsis highlands, now partly darkened by the volcano's short, early afternoon shadow. I looked up at the overcast, a thinning orographic cloud layer still two or more klicks overhead.

I looked anywhere and everywhere except
down.

By the time the net's rise began to slow, I had turned into a shivering, quivering mass of raw nerve endings. The Olympus Rupes escarpment is not vertical, but it sure does seem like it. The rugged face had receded gradually the higher the upside cable took us. The net came to a smooth, jerkless stop and left us dangling like a spider on a strand a dozen meters or less from safety.

Jesperson's voice rang in my ears. “Watch what happens now, Barney.”

I closed my eyes tightly. “Damn thing . . . works great. Let's for God's sake go back down!”

To Jesperson, my suggestion was folly cast in reinforced concrete, earning me a nasty snicker. “Fun's just starting.” To the controller below, he called, “In position, Gimp.”

The maintenance guru's raspy radio voice rang in my headpiece. “Readout shows you maybe a half-meter higher than the platform. How's it look up there?”

“Check, Gimp; sounds about right. Take us in.”

At each intermediate level my long-gone hero hard-hats had struggled and risked their butts to blast and jackhammer a narrow platform and an upper shelf in the scarp's rugged, slate-colored wall. The winch for the stage one rise and drag spindle for stage two are secured in the smallish niche, or shelf meters above the larger, lower-down staging platform. Yet “larger” is a loose term; the platform only runs maybe a meter-plus into the cliff face, with chopped-out basalt angled part way above it, cutting down headroom. The long boom is designed to swing out over emptiness from atop a short post anchored in the upper shelf. A too narrow ramp leads up through a set of narrow switchbacks to the upper shelf, where you have to go to catch the system's next higher stretch. The ramp's a tight squeeze; in places you have to duck under overhanging rock as you climb; that means slightly leaning out over thin air.

The cable went slack below, and things got a sight scarier than during the upside ride. The mild force of the wind started to sway our dangling cargo net back and forth in a gentle arc. Plain petrified, I looked up and watched the boom's long skinny arm rotate around, contact the upper cable segment above our heads in sort of a menacing way, and warp us and our net in over the platform.

“Okay, Gimp,” called Jess, “dump us.”

“Coming down, you two. Watch yourselves.” Gimpy's amplified voice made me close my eyes, grit my teeth.

The cable unreeled, and we landed on our bums harder than I'd expected, leaving me with a sore tailbone. I fumbled the net open, scrambled out and collapsed, breathing hard, with my life support backpack jammed against the jackhammered wall of basalt. “Th-thirsting to . . . death,” I told Jesperson, looking anywhere ‘n everywhere except down, “isn't such a terrible way to go.”

“Quit dramatizing yourself, Barney!” He collected the spare air flasks, set them aside. “Here, help me uncouple the net. Take care to anchor the lower cable's carabiner over the hook fixed in the platform, see it? If the downside cable isn't secured, its weight will drag it over the edge and we'll lose it.”

“Jesus save us!” The notion horrified me. “We'd be stuck up here forever.”

“A while, but forever is, well . . . a very long time. We'd have to wait for Gimpy to bring down the first stage upper cable and re-couple it.”

“The hook,” I pointed out, “is over near the platform's edge.”

“So it is. Stop griping, and take care of it.”

My partner's less than reassuring reassurance egged me into edging toward the hook gingerly tugging the net and slack cable. I eased apart the upper oblong carabiner's horns and panicked a bit. The pencil-sized cable, supposedly fabbed of lightweight foamed strands laced with some kind of magic nanofibers, was worrymaking; it's “pull” didn't feel all that strong, but still hefty enough to try and drag me over the brink. I clumsily inserted the carabiner horn into the fixed hook and closed the horns. Straightening, I undid the carabiner from the net's upper ring, and also secured it to the platform's fixed ring. Reconnecting the net on our way back down would be a snap.

The second stage upside segment is offset horizontal meters from the vertical, toward the up-sloping scarp face. Gimpy brought the stage two upside cable's joined segments down per Jesperson's radioed instructions, commanded the boom to warp it in, and gave us some slack cable.

“Grab an air flask,” ordered Jess, “and follow me.” He slung the net over his pressure-suit's articulated shoulder, grabbed the other flask and set off up the ramp.

If riding up in the net had scared the liver out of me, edging up that narrow, back and forth ramp trashed all the rest of my organs. There's no guardrail, of course; nor will the ramp let you get away with anything like a false step, a single act of clumsiness. What made it so gawdawful was that the incline was fairly steep, and on each switchback just a tiny, chopped-out turnaround area available, and it was barely big enough to let you dance and change direction. What mades it twice as hard was the fact that toe dancing to plant the overboots you can't see underneath you anyhow wearing a pressure-suit is only decimeters from that same very thin air, nor does the mild force of the wind on your bulky, distended pressure-suit help you stay balanced.