Olympus Mons (42 page)

I had to find Jesperson, and find him fast.

The sandstorm raged. Earlier I had judged it a mature blow, but the wind song now warbled higher in pitch. Streaming flurries of powdery dust turned the setting sun into a puff of orange fuzz close to the invisible western horizon. Jolted into action by momentary panic and the adrenaline surge that came with it, I struggled against the gale, trying to rise, fell back in defeat, and eventually strained and struggled and staggered to my feet. Leaning hard against the wind, able to see only a scant meter or two of the ground through the streaming murk, I limped downwind clutching my useless left arm in my right gauntlet, careening back and forth sideways along the line I thought Jesperson might have taken, worrying about whether the cracked faceplate lens would let go and trash me for good.

Coming down from the heights, I'd seen snatches of Jesperson's chute more than once before the fast-flowing, reddish brown dust river swallowed it. We'd both been chuting along, airborne on what had to've been roughly the same line, so unless by some quirk of the winds I'd passed him in the air there was no way he could have landed much farther ahead of where I'd bounced and rolled and been dragged to a stop. Logic said he had to be fairly close, except logic doesn't always pay back the principal, let alone a dividend.

Dusk was closing in. Approaching darkness worried me almost as much as my cracked lens, busted shoulder, departed parachute transponder, and lack of fresh air to breathe. Failing to locate Jesperson could easily do both of us in because of the continuous build-up of toxic stuff in our bloodstreams. I stumbled across what might've been drag marks in the sand being rapidly abraded by the storm. Bent over almost double in the wind, fighting to stay upright, I trudged doggedly after the furrows, losing them for a half-dozen paces, then scouting back and forth again until I found what was left of them.

The lower legs and overboots of a white pressure-suit showed up dimly in the swirling gloom. I whooped, shouted my partner's name and charged toward the huddled figure, clumsily tripped and fell face down in the sand beside Jesperson.

I kept calling his name, but he neither spoke, nor moved. What I could see brought me up short. His pressure-suit was wedged between two thrusts of a small rock outcropping, and his chute was billowing like a spinnaker sail, weaving and snapping and jibbing in the gale. I put my back into it, hauling on the chute's risers with my good arm to spill air, then ripped open his chest latch, eased off the chute harness and repeated the same stupid blunder, letting the howling gale blow away Jesperson's chute as well as the transponder.

It was getting murkier, windier and darker by the minute, and also becoming awfully stuffy inside my pressure-suit. After dumping the depleted air flasks high on the volcano, my partner and I had both been living on rebreathed carbon dioxide. Despite the pack-batteries still powering the Bevvinase Process, without an exchange of fresh carbon dioxide it meant toxic bad news stuff was building up fairly fast in his bloodstream as well as mine. Switching on my suit's headlamp, surprised to find that it still worked, I rolled on my side, struggled to my hands and knees beside the still figure, and probed his pressure-suit experimentally, trying to figure out what might be wrong. I was beginning to wonder if Jesperson was even alive when a faint, crackling pop in my headpiece signaled a carrier wave banging my suit's extended-range transceiver.

“Jesperson, Barnes! Do you read?”

Recognizing Aguilar's familiar voice, I called, “We're here, Vic! Get a hustle on! Jesperson's hurt bad. Maybe real bad.”

“We have you five-by-five on RDF. Don't move, Barnes. Stay right where you are and keep talking. I think we're close. Hang on a few minutes more.”

“Step it up! Jess needs help.”

“Any idea what's wrong?”

“No, can't . . . say.”

Not many minutes later the headlamps of a crawler nosed into view
—
dim, twin globs of brightness glowing through the raging murk stopped moving as the beast churned to a stop. After a moment the small airlock hatch cycled open and a dim figure in vacuum gear jumped down to the sand, the wind blast staggering whoever it was backward a step.

Bent over in the gale, the figure approached and in the light of my headlamp I could make out Doc Yokomizo's gray-green pressure-suit. Vic had to wait for the small airlock to recycle before he followed Yokie outside and fought against the keening wind and join us.

I could tell straight off Yokie was worried. Distracted by what little I could tell him, mainly the news that Jess and I had no life support air, and had to get inside pressure right away. Yokie's answer told me what I already knew, that there was no way to examine and treat Jesperson out in the open. He had Vic duck back and break out the collapsible litter stored overhead in the crawler's airlock chamber. When Aguilar came back, Yokie coached him on how to help gingerly roll and slide Jesperson in his pressure-suit on the litter. Once my partner's pressure-suit was strapped down securely, they handled him gently as a crate of eggs, and somehow got him aboard the crawler by sandwiching his pressure-suit, litter and all, upright in the small airlock chamber, with Yokie, who's smaller than Vic, with a smaller p-suit, sandwiched in beside him. Doc Yokomizo was anxious to get me inside before the cracked lens blew out and did me in, so Vic helped me get aboard next, then brought up the rear.

Jesperson stayed unconscious after Yokie opened the lens of his fishbowl and quick-checked his vitals. Then he sort of clucked and crooned and shook his head all at the same time, and opted to cut Jesperson out of the pressure-suit instead of risking further injury by the contortions that would've been needed to get him out of his vacuum gear. Before he started slicing, Yokie injected a hefty dose of painkiller in the vein at Jesperson's neck.

Inside pressure for the first time in too many days, I unsnapped the latches and eased open the cracked faceplate lens. In between deep breaths of fresh, recirculated carbon dioxide, I related to our rescuers Jesperson's miraculous work doing a fix on the busted pipe coupling. After he finished tending to Jesperson, Yokie dosed me with painkiller to ease the tearing agony in my busted shoulder, then he and Vic gently got me desuited. Instead of a sling, Yokie hurriedly taped my useless arm to my side and went back to seeing if there was anything more he could do for Jesperson.

Worn to a nub, half out of my head and ready to keel over, I must've mumbled a ration of nonsense before collapsing in a foldbunk. Later, back in Burroughs, Vic laughed and told me I'd been raving like an idiot ever since boarding the crawler. Seems I'd warned him a half-dozen times that if he bounced Jesperson around even a little bit on the long trek back to Burroughs I'd feed him his own
cojones.

The crawler rocked gently in the wind, slewed to a heading that would take us around the foot of the escarpment and back to distant Burroughs. We rolled along fairly smoothly, buffeted by the fierce, dust-laden winds. Once Yokie had done what little he could for Jesperson, he cut away the tape immobilizing my broken shoulder, shot me up with painkiller again, then set my busted shoulder and hung a better restraint on my arm.

While all this was going on I kept pestering Yokie, wanting to know when he could tell me about Jesperson's condition. Prod every which way I knew how, I could get only a few meaningless words out of him. A sterling professional, all he had to say was how essential it would be to get Jesperson X-rayed back in Burroughs, and consult with Dr. Klein and Dr. Steinkritz, which he assured me would have to take place before he could diagnose the problem, and even think about making a prognosis. His perpetual smile absent, Yokie's long face was not encouraging, making me afraid my partner's injuries were anything but minor.

Later, with the crawler blindly creeping along in the wind, making its way across the stormy Tharsis highlands, I woke up in the foldbunk across the aisle from Jesperson. I watched him lying there for a while, still and unmoving, and hoped and prayed that he'd come around. He didn't move, hadn't moved or opened his eyes since we were picked up.

Maybe an hour later I heard a faint groan. Jesperson's eyes were open only a slit. I awkwardly rolled out of the foldbunk, my busted shoulder letting me know it didn't care for the exercise, and knelt down across the aisle beside him.

Doped to the gills, he recognized me and tried to grin. His lips moved. I had to bend down close to catch what he said.

“Oly,” he croaked. “Did . . . it.”

“Damn straight, Bwana! We climbed your motherhumping pet volcano. The snake finally ate the mongoose.

His grin faded. His eyes closed.

“Rest now,” I told him. “Just lay back, and rest . . .”

 

I had called ahead before visiting the Jesperson Enclave so Glorious Gloria, her twin terrors and my own lad, Jay, could meet me at the tube station. We made a holiday of the overdue get together, mostly for my benefit. I never fail to get a kick out of the congenial bad-mouthings and jovial insults that fly betwixt Gloria's double-trouble duplicates and my own good-natured lad. Excuse my fatherly pride, but I can honestly say that most times Jay holds his own firing zingers back at the unholy Brothers Jesperson; then too, listening to the twins sound off is like hearing dual echoes of my famous, once-upon-a-time partner. The twins are . . . well, carbon copies of the wild and woolly Marsrat I take a great deal of pride saying was my best friend, and now regarded as Burroughs' savior.

Don't get me wrong. Jesperson doesn't sleep beneath the memorial shrine in the brand spanking new enclave bearing his name. He lies out in the sere, rust-colored Tharsis wasteland beneath a basalt spire sculpted from a chunk of Olympus Mons that crashed down from the escarpment a few eons ago. He'll never be lonely; he rests beside the enclave's founding father, Doc Burroughs, a place of honor he earned and deserved, doubled and redoubled, in spades.

Jesperson hung in there for most of a decade, rolling around the walkways and ramps in the fancy powered chair Gimpy and Red busted a gut making for him. He listened to his Sibelius and other favorite music smiths blasted at ear-bending volume from the extra-fine supersonic sound system Vic Aguilar rigged for him. He reveled in Glorious Gloria's wifely support, too; and in the tit-for-tat repartee he and she never tired of bouncing off each other's thick hides. He even got to watch his mirror-image replicates grow up some. Yet man that he was
—
the most man I ever knew, or hope to know
—
he plain wasn't cut out for life as a paraplegic. Getting stuck in that powered rollabout withered his spirit a damsight faster than paralysis withered the rest of him. It was the sit-down life that finally rang down his curtain.

Anyhow, not long after meeting and greeting me at the tube station, the five of us waltzed over to the plaza and made sort of a . . . call it a pilgrimage at the Jesperson Memorial, a towering, ragged chunk of basalt with a sliced and polished face, on it his chiseled name and some lines of other noble words, including the dates of our climb, and below that is a sort of sentimental epitaph Glorious Gloria cribbed from Shakespeare:

He was a man, take him for all in all.

We shall not look on his like again

As we were leaving the monument, a comely young woman crossed our path
—
a newcomer to Mars, or one of our rare tourists
—
you can always tell by the high-stepping way newbies imitate walking. She recognized us from the documentaries, dramas and whatever else that still run and rerun on late, late homeworld holovision. The pert, mouthy young woman danced over to us all gushy and lit up with college gal charm to introduce herself. The unruly Jesperson twins were set to annihilate her when Glorious Gloria stepped in. She and only she can hold back those two.

The young woman begged us to tell her all about “the real Jesperson,” saying she absolutely had to hear the tale first-hand, front to finish, and insisted that nothing important be left out of the account, with special emphasis of course on the fateful Olympus Mons expedition. She announced an intention to “steep herself” in the awful, terrible hardships once making life a touch-and-go proposition on the Tharsis frontier in the bad ol' days.

Then the young woman made a whopping mistake. She told us she planned to write an article, and maybe earn a bucketful of new dollars if some homeworld editor could be sweet-talked into publishing it. The cheeky suggestion ruffled Gloria's feathers, and naturally the twins bristle like the hellcats they are. This time, Gloria let her twin terrors shoo away the brassy youngster.

End of story, or so I thought riding back to Burroughs in the tube. Wrong! That chance encounter set me to doing some extra heavy-duty thinking and remembering. It goosed me into bringing back as much as I could remember of the scary, thirsty times only a few of us old-timers are still able to boast about living through, not reading about. Who I asked myself knew Jesperson better than ol' Barnes? The answer was not nobody, nohow. So over a spell of E-months I've sat beside my fountain and talked into a recorder, telling as much of what I could reach out, grab hold of and bring back about the man himself, and at least some details leading up to what had to be the grandest, most ball-busting adventure ever to come the way of any Marsrat.

Now the write-up's finished, transcribed by Jay's girlfriend, who not only used her handy-dandy voicewriter but kindly looked up all the big words I inherited from Jesperson, spelled ‘em right and fixed most if not all my other goofs and so-so grammar. Still and all, I held back on a few items I didn't feel it proper for strangers to read, including one vignette that kept popping into my noggin every time I looked back on those thirsty E-weeks ‘n months of severe trial and tribulation, which I admit was fairly often.