Olympus Mons (2 page)

If your bag is watching a toddler try to toddle loaded down with belt-slung batteries powering his or her reworked metabolism, be sure to beat a path to the fabulous Red Planet. Inflicting Mars on one innocent babe seemed crime enough; my squeeze and I have made double-sure we'll never have another. All but two of the current crop were born under the roof-shield enclosing Burroughs Enclave, out where the harsh, ocher highlands of Tharsis taper west into the harsh, ochre lowlands of Amazonis Planitia, as if you could tell the difference. Our enclave nests in a smallish dimple less than three kilometers across ringwall rim-to-rim, smallish I should say in comparison to impact craters in other parts of this frozen dustball. Doc Franklin, once an earthside know-it-all seismologist, relabeled himself a Martian know-it-all areographer upon arriving here. He describes craters as “astroblemes,” and by that reckoning we Marsrats spend our touch-and-go lives in a shallow, moderate-sized “blemish.”

Self-interest tops the list of all homeworld corporations, and Vonex International is no exception. Vonex is the giant conglomerate that stole the limelight from an international group of founders who'd poured man-years of effort and billions or trillions of new dollars into an ambitious program to seed-populate Mars. The Vonex fat cats tried to name the raw enclave they funded Vonex Colony, but the half-dozen pioneers who first set foot here nixed that notion. Contrary to what earthside consumers may think, our orphaned slice of modified humanity scratches out an existence in a complex named after Dr. Alan C. Burroughs, the sterling pioneer who led a small group of brave original settlers, not Edgar Rice Burroughs, a scribbler of yore who wrote fanciful tales about Martian canals and derring-do sword wavers busy rescuing damsels in distress and strayed princesses, but that was long before my time. By all accounts the very best of good guys, Doc Burroughs lies beneath a sculpted marker out in the rubble-strewn Tharsis wasteland.

At any rate, exit through either access tunnel and you'll wait in the big utility airlock while pumps scavenge the enclave's pressurized, humidified air. Step outside the ringwall, not forgetting to zip a hooded ultraviolet cloak over your vacuum gear, and you'll see the wan sun standing in a sky that shades from dull salmon pink near the too-close horizon to less of a dull shade overhead. If you're foolhardy enough to go out into the bone-freezing night, best wear powered thermal underwear, the heaviest insulating parka in your closet, and take care to check the charge in your pressure-suit batteries else be found stretched out stiff ‘n brittle under the unwinking stars like nice Mrs. Whatzername.

Jesperson and I hung in there listening to Yokie's kickoff spiel until he began to trumpet the “selfless dedication” of Vonex, the conglomerate octopus contracted till now to sustain our brave, nonprofit new world, all the while filing for billions in tax write-offs. Yokie's propaganda spiel, wrung straight from Vonex recruitment brochures, touted Burroughs as, “A self-sustaining bastion of humanity, a nucleus society interdicted from overpopulation and the ever present threat of thermonuclear Armageddon,” et cetera, so forth ‘n so on. His cheerleader spiel earned a flatulent raspberry from Jesperson, a sentiment I echoed. We'd both heard that “self-sustaining” line of bullshit once too often. Not counting an arm-long list of pharmacy items, any number of synthetic goods and a grab bag of “luxuries” we can't make for ourselves, the enclave's “self-sustaining independence”
—
call it a “colony” to some Marsrat's face if you feel extra-brave
—
has been oversold to the billions who spend their lives beneath sunny blue skies, with green grass growing all around, all around. Independent and self-sustaining are we? Sure, until a piece of sky junk with our name on it screams down through the thin, all-but-vacuum atmosphere at umpteen klicks-per-second and turns our smallish “astrobleme” into a biggie, or the gawdawful cold does us in, or we run out of precious water, or Olympus Mons wakes from ancient slumbers and blows its sky-high top.

***

After a while Jesperson began fidgeting restlessly, nor was he alone. Yokie was praising the remarkable strides our engineering and agronomy teams had taken during the past year
—
our
year, 686.996 E-days to be exact. In the middle of his spiel he must've realized he was rambling. He hemmed and hawed, backed and filled before introducing about-to-be-crowned Burroughs Director-elect Walther Scheiermann.

“Achtung!”
Jesperson's drill sergeant bark would've rattled the windows if there'd been any.
“Sprach auch den Führer,”
he added, or words to that effect; it made him sound self-satisfied, maybe a touch dimwitted, too.

“Softly,” I advised, “show some respect, and while you're at it talk American.”

He snorted something foulmouthed I won't bother to record. “Energetic, articulate gnome,” and “Pluperfect paradigm of pomposity,” are two favorite terms my snotty partner uses to describe Scheiermann, whose heart may be in the right place though he himself is not; he should've stayed home teaching grad students philosophy at some ivied university. Anyhow, the enclave's about-to-be minted father figure slipped into his sermon the way a landlubber eases into chilly water, by way of a folksy anecdote, then laid it on more thickly than had Yokomizo
—
pure Vonex party line and a waste of breath. Nine of every ten homeworld consumers think of us Marsrats as freaks. What burns and smarts and festers is that they're probably right.

Once, whilst goofing off in Jesperson's messy two-room domicile, I happened to gripe about being forever stuck as a Marsrat, but had never been told the nitty-gritty details of what or how it'd changed me. Without a word, my partner had gone to the computer terminal that's in every assigned domicile, muttering, “Once there was a great book in the database that covered the subject.” He talked to the computer, surfing for the author and title. “Ah, here we are. Come have a look, Barney. Read just the foreword; farther on, it gets hairy and technical.”

“Never mind, Bwana. I really should be getting over to
—
”

“
Read
it!” he invited none too politely, practically shoving me into the chair. “It'll do wonders to eclipse your ignorance.”

A good soldier, I did as I was told. Later I was glad.

***

“If I have seen farther, it is by

standing on the shoulders of giants.”

 

Sir Isaac Newton, from

a letter written in 1675

 

In every field of medicine, the view from on top of equally impressive shoulders has enhanced numberless careers — Harvey and Hooke; Vesalius, Pasteur and Koch; Jenner, Reed, Fleming, the list is endless.

The author would be remiss in failing to commemorate the remarkable achievements of a recent giant, Dr. Edwin C. “Clancy” Bevvins. No biomedical researcher has ever been more farsighted while poised on the shoulders of his illustrious predecessors, or selflessly awarded an equal amount of credit to his peers past and present for his own singular accomplishments. Reared on a sheep station in the shadow of New Zealand's Southern Alps, and educated at the University of New South Wales, Dr. Bevvins quickly became preeminent in his chosen field, cellular physiology, and devoted himself exclusively to research until losing his life in pursuit of a dream, its fulfillment tantalizingly close over the horizon.

Bevvinase, the “miracle enzyme” developed aboard a research satellite orbiting mighty Jupiter, was the result of a lengthy, exhaustive quest. Problems then unknown regarding metabolic degradation, acidosis and the formation of toxic substances and byproducts within the human organism defeated his desperate attempt to save the lives of two colleagues as well as his own. Perfected a decade after his passing, the revolutionary process he conceived and developed has contributed directly and dramatically to the colonization of Planet Mars.

Isolated for obscure “security reasons” among a cross-rough of physical scientists aboard the circum-Jupiter research satellite, his diary tells us Dr. Bevvins “paid his way” by rolling pills, relieving sprains and performing physical exams, all the while conducting intensive experiments with the gibbon monkeys he colorfully described as “marvelously useful human analogs.” The visionary, long-range programme he brought to near-fruition — adapting humans to the hostile Martian environment in situ — had been bureaucratically funded by a senior medical board, then shuffled aside shortly after its inception and ignored. In lay terms, Dr. Bevvins' goal was to devise a viable alternative to breathing oxygen, specifically a modus vivendi that required semi-radical alteration of human metabolic processes in order to safely convert carbon dioxide, by far the tenuous Martian atmosphere's major constituent, into oxygen en vivo, within the organism proper.

Heavily shielded against Jupiter's severe radiation environment, the research satellite was accidentally struck by a random fragment of celestial debris. With no warning whatever, the small, high-velocity object ripped through all habitation decks and both oxygen pressure vessels ironically installed poles apart to mitigate the likelihood of just such a disaster. Adding to the satellite's misfortune, its modest size had demanded logistic resupply of life support materiel from the frigid base on Jupiter's largest natural satellite, Ganymede. A Mayday lasercomm transmission earned an immediate if disheartening reply: the relative orbital positions of the stricken research satellite, and Ganymede, prevented a rescue vehicle from arriving for at least thirty hours.

Facing slow suffocation, Dr. Bevvins had nothing to lose by revealing to the sole pair of fellow survivors the for-whatever-reason highly classified details of his programme. He was of course utterly disbelieved. The volume of breathable air in the satellite's sealed-off quadrant shrank steadily, growing more contaminated. Bevvins checked on his gibbons, fortunately housed in a quadrant where fail-safe hermetic hatches had automatically closed, interdicting the still-pressurized compartments. He found the current test specimen waggishly named “Bess” alive and well and constantly monitored for phrenic nerve activity, hemoglobin oxygen versus carbon-dioxide content, turnover rate — the enzyme's regeneration rate in the tissues — oxygen diffusion rate, the buildup of toxins in the bloodstream, and similar esoteric parameters. Enzymes are pure protein substances, hence most subject gibbons were Bevvinase “factories,” whereas Bess, the enzyme's then-current recipient, constituted the latest in a succession of noble failures.

Grasping the only straw available, rapidly weakening Dr. Bevvins ordered his companions to don EVA-rated vacuum gear and injected the experimental enzyme. The diary records how anxiously he watched for signs of hypernea, ultra-rapid breathing, until his companions lapsed into a semi-comatose condition. Feeling that the enzyme was “taking hold nicely,” he scribbled instructions for the care of his companions and himself on blank pages torn from the diary, and then waited with unbelievable patience until his own consciousness began slipping away to inject himself and seal his pressure-suit.

The three survivors regained consciousness many hours later. Lethargic and disoriented, yet also elated to still be among the living, they found themselves sequestered in an isolated carbon dioxide compartment within Ganymede's small medicenter. Their elation proved short-lived; none survived longer than forty-eight hours.

One cannot help but feel deep, abiding appreciation for the wondrous doors opened by this remarkable biomedical scientist. The refined Bevvinase Process has offered humankind a second home, our near neighbor in the sky, the Red Planet, and perhaps holds forth a promise of prospective human tenancy on potential extrasolar planets that sustain carbon dioxide environments. A less-heralded spinoff of his wondrous innovative lifework may prove of even greater significance to those of us dwelling in the here and now — the laboratory simulation of photosynthesis in the form of a synthetic molecule capable of sustaining polarization long enough to react usefully with other molecules. This serendipitous corollary achievement threw wide a second enormous door: the ability to efficiently and economically tap and convert limitless solar energy to electrical potential.

Among other profound reasons to revere Dr. Bevvins' profound legacy is the fact that he left us shoulders to stand on of considerably greater breadth than those of any recent savant in the history of biomedical science.

Lest the scientifically unsophisticated feel talked down to, or perhaps given to wondering if certain details of the Bevvinase Process may have been glossed over, here in vastly simplified form are the basics of mammalian electrosynthesis as opposed to photosynthesis in plants, algae, fungi, and certain strains of anaerobic bacteria, so as to run mammalian oxidation “backwards.” Bevvinase is able to promote analogous though radically different conversions and energy transfers in mammalian organisms by means of a series of catalytic reactions, reductions, and antioxidant embellishments presented here as an excessively simplified, unbalanced organic formula:

CO
2
+NADH+H
2
O=HCOOH+NAD+ +OH-
HCOOH+NADH=HCHO

+NAD+ +OH- HCHO+2NADH+H
2
O=CH
4
+2NAD+ +2OH-

The reducing agent, NADH, a source of H- is a hydride ion not present in the free state, but created when a proton and electron are transferred from NADH to the substance being reduced, in this case carbon dioxide. Mars-rationalized humans resort to a quixotic definition, referring to themselves as “Marsrats,” and are sustained by a network of surgically implanted mini-electrodes that supply microenergy to drive the conversion process via a complex method semi-analogous to that driven by sunlight. Prior to the formulation and introduction of specific blood-cleansing agents and processes, byproducts deriving from the Bevvinase Process eventually and invariably proved lethal. Methane is relatively harmless — relatively — yet the buildup of formic acid, lactic acid and formaldehyde are definitely not conducive to the health and well being of living tissue. It is both sorrowful and ironic to realize that Dr. Bevvins and the short-lived companions he did his utmost to save were poisoned by acidosis, while simultaneously embalming themselves.