Olympus Mons (29 page)

“Aw, f'Chrissake!” An ominous note crept into Jesperson's exclamation. “Gimpy recited book, chapter and verse on how to refit the spare track.”

“Yeah, made it sound like a fairly straightforward job of work, he did.”

“What he didn't say would be straightforward,” declared my partner, biting his words short, “was refitting the track on an immobile beast canted nose-down on an incline.”

“Ouch! See what you mean. So what's the bottom line?”

“Just that, the crater floor. We'll have to truck Cee Five in there, and tow the stranded beast down to a halfway level area. On the other hand, if we're not careful going about it Cee Four's untracked drivers and rollers could get torn up on rocks.”

“We'll have to be careful about something else, too,” I told him.

“What?”

“Taking care to stay extra-cautious so as not to run over any pedestrians when we boogie into the crater.” I motioned for him to step closer to me, and pointed. Screened from Jesperson' view by the downed crawler, a pair of bo's in pressure-suits were using dinky, fold-handled spades to dig near the center of the crater, next to the short splash peak.

Jesperson took in the spectacle and chuckled drily. “Ice pirates hard at work,” was his salty comment. “Now all becomes crystal clear. Didn't I tell you Franklin was logical? He has the Marsrats digging for ice in the lowest spot.”

“Successfully!” crackled a different voice in my headpiece. Below us, a figure in matte silver vacuum gear had emerged from Cee Four's airlock. “Bring your machine on into the crater, gentlemen. I have something of momentous importance to show you.”

“Yessir! At once, sir!” Jesperson's voice crackled sharply in my headpiece. “We'll pop over into the crater right away, sir. However, I do believe it might be best to try somewhere off to the left, where it looks safer than the route you took, sir. We certainly don't want to end up in your situation, do we, sir?”

Silence, miffed, boil-over silence filled the airwaves. Franklin clammed up, refusing to discuss the carelessness demonstrated by he and his crewmen. We picked our way back down the outer ringwall, stepping carefully, sliding through loose rubble, and re-boarded Cee Five, where we unsealed but stayed in our vacuum gear. At the controls, Jesperson switched off his suit transceiver, motioned for me to do likewise. “The nerve of that arrogant bastard! ‘Bring your machine on into the crater, gentlemen',” he mimicked in a squeaky falsetto. “It'd serve the fat-mouthed genius right if we did as your glassblower pal suggested, truck the hell out of here and leave him and his ice pirates to rot.”

“Can't hardly do that. Just isn't the sporting thing to do,” I objected. “Especially since the man's got ‘something of momentous importance' to show us. Think he really found ice?”

“A possibility,” he grudged. “Serendipity, or just dumb luck, your choice. Even a blind hog will now and then root up an acorn.”

Daylight was almost gone by the time Cee Five bucked and bounced and slowly ground its way up the crater's outer incline. Jesperson pitched us over the ringwall's sharp lip and we tilted nose down, slowly forging into the crater, and parked a ways below Franklin's stove-up machine. I lifted a fold-handled spade from the portside equipment locker, sealed my headpiece, and was first out through the airlock. I began scooping a shallow trench in front of the damaged crawler's screwed-up starboard track, intending to shovel aside rocks all the way down to the crater floor. When Franklin's bo's saw what I was about, they left off digging for ice cubes, came over and helped roll or drag aside a few of the larger boulders.

Jess jockeyed Cee Five into position. We cabled up from the crawler's rear winch to the stranded beast, towed it off the busted starboard track at about five meters per hour, and on down to a semi-level area where it could be serviced.

In the morning, we took care of removing Cee Four's bad track and installing the replacement. Franklin's helpmates lent a hand with a will, and it went one, two, three, chop-chop, exactly the way Gimp said it would. With the new track properly seated, adjusted tension-wise, the locking pins driven home and secured, I helped Franklin's guys stow and tie-down the damaged track aboard Crawler Five, where there was more room.

Dusk shrouded the crater. The dirty salmon-pink horizon turned a grayish hue as Jesperson and I preceded the ice pirates one by one going through Cee Four's airlock.

“See here, gentlemen,” said the areographer, by no means fully recovered from his sulks and fits over Jesperson's taunting ways. Displaying one-upmanship, Franklin couldn't resist repeatedly sticking his “something of momentous importance” knife into Jesperson, and twisting it. He'd convinced himself that the few kilograms of rusty ice melt sloshing around in a pair of glass buckets vindicated the vital necessity of commencing the major, all-out ice hunt he'd pitched in council session after session. Digging up a skosh of frozen water had apparently validated his blueprint for finding and recovering vast ice fields as Burroughs' path to salvation, and moreover proved his thesis to everyone's satisfaction, while at the same time shooting down Jesperson's wrongheaded, “impossible” scheme to climb Big Oly and repair the pipeline.

Somehow my partner kept his cool, but I was the only one present who appreciated what it cost him. Now and then I've seen Jesperson transform himself into a wild wolverine
no one
would dream of trying to handle, but underneath that fiery nature is an inner core of integrity, honesty, or . . . Call it whatever you want. He went so far as to congratulate Franklin, and even made his good words sound sincere if maybe a touch hollow. I've come to know my main man inside and out. He's a true phenomenon. He can wedge his tongue in both cheeks at the same time if he wants to be truly snide, and that's a real difficult maneuver.

Jess and I trudged back to Cee Five in total darkness, walking extra-cautiously on the crater floor strewn with ejecta, and lit only by our built-in pressure-suit headlamps. Back inside Cee Five, we got out of the vacuum gear, saying very little, and decided to leave the beast parked where it was overnight. While we fixed ourselves supper, I found my partner's expression as hard to read as his silence. “I realize Franklin bent you way out of shape,” I told him. “It was to be expected, Bwana. I was you, I wouldn't let his big mouth torque you all that much.”

A solemn head shake. “I'm not sore at Franklin. I'm scared.”

“Scared, hell! You're too mean to ever get scared.”

“Scared,” he insisted, staring at me with that flat, dangerous glint in his icy baby blues that makes you want to go somewhere else.

I had to know, so I summoned all my courage and asked, “Scared of what?”

“Franklin,” he said, delivering the name slowly, distinctly, “is pissing against the wind with his Great Ice Discovery. What scares me is waiting to learn the fallout once he trucks back to Burroughs with two piddling bucketfuls of dirty water that could shortly grow into king-sized icebergs.”

“No way,” I scoffed. “One of his bo's told me they dug all around the crater's middle and couldn't turn up one more ice cube. Franklin may think he knows what he's talking about, but he's exaggerating his own exaggerations.”

“Don't you wish!” Jesperson chewed his underlip
—
a genuine storm signal. “The story isn't finished yet, Barney. We haven't heard the snapper.”

“So lay it on me. What exactly's got you spooked?”

“The dismal, heartbreaking scenario it's only reasonable to expect,” he said on a note of genuine regret, “is that Franklin's hyped-up enthusiasm could easily infect the brain trust. If he convinces our esteemed leader and the council that he's made a gigantic score, tapped into the first vein of an icy mother lode, well just imagine what a misleading impression his phantom ‘icebergs' could create.”

“You don't really believe a ditzy wrong impression like that could get Franklin home free, maybe kick off an
actual
giant ice hunt?”

Jesperson nodded. “Think about it. A sudden, dazzling impression of ice wealth could turn the trick,” he assured me. “What could come down if Dr. Wesley Franklin, Ph.D., areographer par excellence, cons Professor emeritus Walther Scheiermann, Ph.D., scholarly academic, into falling for his final solution as a virtual certainty and buying into it. The ‘fact' that Franklin is certain to label finding his water ice find the one and
only
true path to Burroughs' salvation is a given.”

I thought about it and thought about it. Back there during the last emergency council session it hadn't been much of a stretch to notice how far Scheiermann was leaning toward Franklin's “solution.” The director had seemed two-thirds persuaded
then
that an ice hunt was the enclave's main and perhaps only chance. If he'd felt that way
before
Franklin's ice pirates dug up what turned into buckets of rusty ice water, well . . .

“Should my ‘what if' get the council's nod,” declared Jesperson, “where does it leave us foot-sloggers?”

“Up the famous creek without a paddle.”

“See now why I'm scared?”

“Yeah, I do. Come right down to it, so am I.”

***

Par for the course, Jesperson's “scare” proved anything but groundless, and his prophesy accurate to ninety-nine point nine decimals. The Burroughs grapevine lit up even before Cee Four rolled into South Tunnel. Word of Franklin's “momentous importance” discovery circulated at the speed of light, “good news” that inspired Scheiermann to new heights of dynamic leadership. He quicklike summoned the ice pirate chieftain to a conference held behind closed doors. Franklin and the brain trust put their heads together for more than an hour. The upshot was a command decision by the council that had Scheiermann's fingerprints all over it. He complimented the areographer's “supremely effective effort,” and appointed him the official organizer and leader of a widespread ice expedition.

In what Jesperson loudly cursed as the “opposite extreme,” our action committee received a written order
—
not a request, an official council
order
—
to dissolve said committee and henceforth cease and desist from “vain efforts” to plan and equip a “futile” manned expedition to repair the Olympus Mons Aqueduct.

During a second closed session to which not a single foot-slogger was invited, the director and his newly crowned, fair-haired ice champion urged the council to officially recommend and endorse a search for subsurface water ice as the one and only solution to Burroughs' water crisis, a goal Jesperson judged totally lacking in practicality or a faint, tenuous prayer of success.

From my seat in the front row, I was privileged to watch Jesperson grow more desperate, agitated and angrified. Collaring Yokomizo in private, wheedled and cajoled and pleaded with him, sweet-talked him and cursed him, trying every which way he knew how to persuade Yokie to lend a helping hand and arrange a one-on-one, face-to-face meet between himself and the director. This meeting of the unstoppable force and immovable object finally did take place, yet in hardly any time at all it turned into a confrontation. Jess said at first he tried to reason with Scheiermann, using cold logic, and realized he was butting his head against a high, thick, steel-reinforced stone wall. Franklin had conned the director out of his socks, effectively persuading him that vast, potentially
gigantic
pockets of water ice” were waiting to be harvested out there beneath the windrows of sand and widely scattered southern craters.

My impression was that Jess had held his temper in check and refuted that notion with uncustomary delicacy, using all his wiles plus maps from the computer database to describe the impact craters south of Burroughs as being very, very few, and very, very far between. Most cratering at or near our longitude does occur thirty degrees or more below the equator, which unfortunately places most of them thousands of kilometers beyond crawler range.

Later, during private get-togethers before the assembled council, that obstinate bastard Franklin contradicted every argument Jesperson offered. He even went so far as to suggest that the lowlands of western Amazonis Planitia might also prove fertile ice hunt territory. Jess was reported as countering Franklin's counter-argument with the only ammunition he had, news that the reachable portions of Amazonis were equally lacking in craters.

They went round and round, back and forth, then round and round again, with diminishing results that meant anything at all. Jesperson appealed to the deputy director for a second private hearing with Scheiermann. Yokie managed to stay Mr. Nice Guy by acting as go-between, and never failing to keep his friendly, sympathetic ears open. But he was too conservative by far, and almost servile in an unhealthy way, to give serious thought to opposing what he insisted on calling, “The council's better judgment.”

Teetering on the edge of a murderous rage, Jesperson came into Gimpy's shop late one afternoon seething inside, stumped and furious after another fruitless session conducted without Yokomizo's aid and assistance. I figured him for having given up the battle as lost
—
not the war, just the latest battle. He knew the war still
had
to be fought, never losing sight of the fact that it also had to be
won.
After calming down a little, he despondently inspected Red's sledge weldments, then swung around abruptly, staring hard at me. Shining through his towering anger and frustration, the gleam in those sky-blue eyes spelled determination doubled, redoubled and cubed, in spades.

Unhappy as he looked pacing slowly around the sledge weldments, his mind working overtime, he never lost focus. After a moment of silence, he speculated in a monotone, wondering if the bearing area of the runners would be up to the job, and ended up telling Gimpy and Red the single-tube runners might sink into loose sand and debris on the volcano's flanks and make pulling the load uphill much harder, more difficult work. He asked if parallel sections of tubing could be tacked to the existing runners, doubling their width and bearing area.