Olympus Mons (36 page)

Hours after the noon break, we hit a kilometers-long stretch that turned into pure hell. Ancient eruptions and quakes had further split the volcano's flank, leaving a jagged, God-alone-knows-how-deep crevasse running in erratic jinks along the narrowest, most squeezed-in part of the canyon floor
—
not really a “floor,” only the sandy, vee-shaped bottom of a debris-strewn cleft. Every Marsrat in the procession had to skirt the gaping chasm one careful, antsy footfall at a time, planting his overboots too near the edge, then sliding his way through loose talus debris that threatened with every step to avalanche into the crevasse and take one or more of us along with it.

The spooky going on that stretch can't be described. It stalled the procession to where time after time it ground to a standstill, or at best we moved in a slow, jerky crawl. Jesperson finally ordered four bo's to hustle ahead, catch up with the sledgemen, take hold and help stabilize the sledges going over the really rough, dangerous spots in that rugged stretch. The sledge teams had to move at an ultra-cautious creep; losing a man in the crevasse would've been bad enough, but losing a sledge and what was packed aboard probably would've killed the climb stone-dead, and with it every Marsrat in the planet.

I poked my cautious way through the loose, sandy talus, taking extra care to watch my balance. It made me truly appreciate the level of bold, daredevil feats performed by the hard-hats who'd somehow done toilsome, strenuous work under purely horrific conditions. Damn little imagination was needed to picture the daily frets and frights and superhuman efforts they must've lived through day after day whilst installing the pipe string. The more I thought about what they'd done, the more I wondered how the hell they had ever managed to do it. Building the aqueduct had included feats that grabbed and held my absolute and total respect and admiration.

Not far above our heads, solidly anchored in the rough, sloping basalt face, the pipeline's stubby support pylons stuck out at a shallow angle. Plodding through that giant, ascending cut, it got to where you had to plan ahead before daring to lift an overboot and take one more cautious step
—
no simple task when enclosed in vacuum gear that made it tough to see what lay directly ahead and below you, not to mention the extra attention it took to balance yourself while planning and taking each step forward.

Farther on, believe it or not, things got a sight worse, and the going turned into something slower, harder, and more painstaking. It gave me the shudders to
think
what it must've been like to stay put and do manual work perched on a crumbly talus slope with a bottomless crevasse at your back, while encased in one of that bygone period's cruder, more difficult to wear and manage pressure-suits.

Jesperson kept coming on the comm circuit as we edged along the length of that rotten crevasse. He nagged us, doing the mother hen bit, reminding us over and over again that even whilst making wary progress we had to stay alert for a break in the pipeline lest it be missed. He was right to concentrate on our one and only reason for being in that rotten canyon in the first place, and also right to keep reminding us that reaching the destination of our scary, exhausting uphill trek was what it was all about. Transmitted grunts and the labored breathing of the sledgemen came through steadily, making it easy to feel sorry for the quartet of draft animals. Hiking unburdened was strain enough, but a loafer's paradise compared to what
those
bo's were going through.

Jesperson had been judging the condition of the sledgemen, gauging their transmitted pants, snorts, wheezes, gasps and muttered curses. Once we reached the end of the crevasse and arrived at a stretch of relatively safe ground, he surprised us with a short mid-afternoon break.

***

The column of Marsrats gratefully straggled to a badly needed halt, sagged, folded up and found places to flake out right where they were. We underwent the food, water and waste bladder change ritual, and loafed there for another quarter-hour or so until Jesperson told everyone to saddle up, and we forged onward and upward. For the last few kilometers, the steep canyon walls had been coming down in height, the “vee” floor narrowing still further. In late afternoon our cavalcade of heroes ran into another rolling, abruptly curved rise. An ancient secondary vent had choked what little remained of the canyon with a blob of once molten lava with a shield layer that lofted upward like an upside-down salad bowl, it's fairly smooth, sandblasted surface looking as if it rose forever into a sky which, hour by hour, had been turning from a faint tinge of salmon pink along the horizon to a hazier, darker hue overhead.

Luckily the bulge looked tougher from below than it turned out to be, and flattened out nicely at the top. Every member of the team, especially the sledgemen, was relieved to find an easier place to hike than the blasted canyon. We trudged upward in fairly good order, and crossed the huge, curving lava dome making good time and reached the gently upsloping terrain beyond. It stayed much like that for hours
—
almost level, but not quite
—
and then dipped abruptly at a shallow pitch and we reentered the canyon's final stretch. Here the pipeline soared meters above our procession, with the length of each support pylon growing to keep the pipeline's angle fairly constant, managing to defeat a slight drop in the otherwise rising terrain.

Jesperson touched faceplate lenses with me during the day's final rest stop and said he had been praying for the break to be found
anywhere
but in the deepest part of that gawdawful canyon, where it would've been plain impossible to climb up anywhere near the pipe string high on the wall and make repairs. I tried to figure out how the hard hats had managed to install the pipe string that high above the canyon floor, and quicklike gave up.

A few foot-slogging kilometers farther uphill I spotted a suspicious looking section of pipe, left the file and picked my way over for a closer look. It proved to be a different sort of shadow cast below a support pylon's shock-dampening struts, where one flared joint nested in the next pipe section's black glass coupling.

In early evening, with hardly any daylight left, the Marsrats climbing with free gauntlets overran the sledge teams. The draft animals had halted in harness and stood there panting, staring up at a discouraging sight. Above them, a broken, fissured wall formed by another bulge of ancient molten magma leaped skyward too many meters for estimation, and the pipeline leaped up with it. Jesperson uttered a few words of instruction over the suit-to-suit circuit, and the sledge teams accordingly changed their drill. After a short, unscheduled rest stop to let them catch their breath, the sledgemen began moving their loads upward in tandem, one bo staying in harness to pull, the other shoving the sledge from behind. The sledge loads had gotten noticeably lighter with each overnight bivouac, and at regular intervals during the March when caches of supplies had been dropped off to sustain the lucky Marsrats slated to trek back downhill. Even doing it in what my partner had decided was a more expeditious way, the sledgemen were having one helluva time negotiating bends. Worst of all, the lava flow in that section, partially protected from windblown sand by increasing altitude, exposed knifelike cornices and sharp edges of basalt. Here and there, protruding chunks of volcanic glass Jesperson called obsidian began to shred the soles of our overboots.

The pipeline up ahead rose beyond a ravine that chopped slaunchwise through the bulge as if it'd been hacked with a monster ax. The sledgemen again slowed to a crawl, gingerly putting down their overboots with extra care. A fall there along the edge of that narrow, sharply rising crosscut would've meant writing someone off, and maybe a sledge along with everything packed aboard, including one of our getaway parachutes. The pair of alternates who'd been marching unburdened hustled forward, thinking to lend the sledgemen a hand. Jesperson shooed them back with a reminder about how important it was to conserve energy for the days of trekking to come.

The westering sun dropped close to the horizon, leaving us in deep shadow; it made my partner change his mind. If darkness had overtaken us there, before reaching the far end of that deep, cluttered crosscut, it would've meant spending a dangerous, uncomfortable night far from semi-level terrain. According to his instruction, those of us with free gauntlets came up in rotation and relieved the exhausted bo's who fell back and rested. We took turns, helping to boost the sledges from behind. The lead sledge team went over the top just as the lucky old sun nosedived into Amazonis Planitia.

Our next-to-nothing atmosphere makes darkness fall abruptly, almost like pulling a thick blanket over a table lamp. We changed food, water, and waste bladders by the glow of an electric lantern. Jesperson asked one of the Marsrats to connect power from the spare mini fuel-cell to a portable compressor. Four bo's took turns recharging depleted air flasks and a bunch of spares. This time Jess made his rounds slowly, personally supervising the plug-in of fresh suit- and pack-batteries for the Marsrats too weary to react smartly to his urgings.

He finished the chore, switched off his transceiver and touched faceplate lenses. “Hanging in there, are you?”

“By the tippy tips of my fingernails, Bwana. I'm pooped through and through, side to side, and ready to fold. How'd we do today?”

“Better than yesterday, but not a whole lot. Mind your batteries and get some rest.”

I did as best I could, gratefully crashing on a stony bed of basalt with a howling ghost wind stirring the flaps of my UV cloak, and did a fast fade. Goes to show how footsore and bone tired you can get dragging your much-abused bod up the shallow, endless lower slopes of Olympus Mons.

***

At first light we survivors wasted only seconds squeezing the sleep out of our eyes before Jesperson sang out the new day's marching orders. We ribbed the homeward-bound quartet of Marsrats, kidding and ragging the fortunate bo's without mercy, telling ‘em they'd surely go to hell for shirking the tough duty in store and running out on the climbing team. Rested, but too tired and stiff and sore to respond, the used up sledgemen looked as if it took the last of their strength to mumble and wish us good luck, then wearily plodded off downhill.

We foot-slogged upward behind the day's sledge teams, and in short order I started hearing the supposedly fresh draft animals panting, now and then muttering hard-to-hear curses.We climbed hour after hour after hour, topping one rise, then another, slowly but surely, persistently and determinedly going up the volcano's awesome flank, chasing the pipeline up the gentle, neverending grade. The going wasn't too terrible most of the morning, and our diminished procession of Marsrats covered a better than fair stretch of monotonous, featureless volcanic terrain. My tail was dragging when we finally halted for the noon break. Tired or not, I decided to change my lacerated overboots then, when it was warmest. Earlier or later in the day disconnecting your heater plugs even for a short spell invites frostbite.

The afternoon was a dull, hypnotic monotony of fatigue, rough, dark gray basalt, and mounting fatigue. Jesperson drove us hard, though truth be told he drove himself every bit as hard, or harder. That evening the self-encouraging chatter on the transceiver circuit petered out and died a sudden death not long after it began. My partner made his rounds. He flashed a barely visible grin my way, not bothering to keep our conversation private, and said, “An honest day's hike, Barney.”

“We're getting there.” I motioned for him to switch off his transceiver, and we touched lenses. I goofed, voicing a thought that later made me real sorry I hadn't kept my yap shut. “What say you and I take a turn on one of the sledges tomorrow?”

He thought over the proposition. “Not smart.”

“Could be a lot smarter than letting what's left of the bo's wear themselves out all the way till they're completely tuckered. Why not save ‘em for higher up, where there's maybe some killer stretches waiting for us. I feel fairly strong. What say we give it a go? We can rest up some on the following day's march. If you're not agreeable, let me give it a whirl.”

“I'll sleep on it,” was all he said.

I helped one of the bo's hook up the hose to glass flask after flask. Working as a team, we used one of the portable air compressors to recharge a couple dozen depleted flasks. I went through the bladder exchange ritual, changed suit- and pack-batteries in kind of a weary daze, ate what I could stomach by sucking liquified veggie glop through the tube, and slept fitfully on a canted mattress of uneven, lumpy rock.

At daybreak we said fond farewell to the descending foursome, and the short procession formed up, looking puny with less ‘n a dozen Marsrats left for the upward ‘n onward trek. Jesperson hadn't said yea or nay to my suggestion of the previous evening. Without a word of warning, he told one of the Marsrats slated to haul the lead sledge to step aside, and motioned for me to slip into the harness. I teamed up with a grinning bo who already had one of the sledge's horse collars draped across his shoulders, around and behind his p-suit's neck dam.

“Barney,” Jess told me, “be leery of what you ask for.  You were so eager to be a masochist, I decided to let you have your way.”

“Thanks, you sadist.”

His ‘you had it coming' chuckle taunted me. “Ever hear the formal definition of a sadist?”

“No, but I've a hunch you'll let me in on it.”

“A sadist,” he said, earning snickers from the gathered Marsrats's, “is someone who's kind to masochists.”

“You are one funny man, Bwana!”

“Okay, troops,” urged Jesperson, “let's hike.”

I found out in the first dozen staggering paces what a breeze those previous marches had been. The improvised sledge's doubled aluminum alloy runners were no longer smooth; they'd been nicked and pitted, abraded by grinding over sand and bare rock hour after hour, day after day. Although far less burdened than during the earlier marches, the damn sledge had a mind of its own; it tried to crimp and hang up on every rough spot, edge and basalt cornice, yawing and tugging and pulling away from me every chance it got. The lesson I'd learned testing a raw sledge weldment with Black-like-me came back to haunt me. The horse collar does a decent job of cutting down chafe, but it also squeezes the ultraviolet cloak and the fabric of your suit, cutting down the circulation in your arms. After little more than half an hour tugging the sledge uphill it was hard to feel anything beyond either shoulder. I guess the harness helped some, but it aggravated me for hours. I was of a mind to give up subscribing to the use of harness and horse collar for sledge-pulling duty.