Olympus Mons (37 page)

Later in the day, my tongue was hanging out. No more than semiconscious, I was going on willpower alone over a moderately rough, steeper than usual stretch when my partner keeled over without warning. Poor bo slumped to the articulated knees of his pressure-suit, sagged forward and banged his faceplate lens dangerously on naked rock. He slid downhill a meter or two before I could scrabble sideways and grab him by one gauntlet. The Marsrats coming up behind us saw what had taken place, charged uphill and took hold of the sledge to keep it from dragging me and the fallen Marsrat downhill. I checked my partner's carbon dioxide bottles and valves. The readout showed a normal feed.

Jesperson had been bringing up the rear, trailing the shortened procession to goose along stragglers. Hearing the commotion suit-to-suit, he hustled uphill. My fellow sledgeman stayed passed out for five or six minutes. I could see Jesperson's worried squint dimly through the polarized filter-visor of his faceplate. The stricken bo came around slowly and tried to act game about going on. Jesperson handed us a longer than usual breather to let the bo recover some. He got back in harness and tried hard, giving it his best shot. He seemed okay for a spell, but a few hundred grueling meters farther uphill he sagged again, this time leaning sideways and rolling to protect his faceplate lens.

Jesperson yakked briefly with the designated sledgeman who by the grace of my big mouth had been given a chance to gratefully rest, then came over to me, switched off his transceiver and touched lenses. “He's had it, Barney. Get out of harness. I never should've let you to use yourself up this way. I'll saddle-up one of the alternates and the bo you replaced.”

“If you insist,” I muttered, feeling close to ‘having had it' my ownself. I was so fumble-fingered, what with no feeling in the fingers inside my p-suit's gauntlets, that I had to ask for help unbuckling the chest straps to get shut of the damned horse collar. Once free, prickly sets of pins and needles began flashing through my hands and arms as blood figured out the way was clear once again and circulated. My arms came back to life a little at a time, but my legs stayed wobbly, feeling like lumps of lead that got heavier to lift with each foot-slog.

“We have to top the rise up ahead before sundown,” Jesperson told us, indicating yet another discouraging sight. The “rise” in question looked to be the biggest and baddest we'd yet come across
—
a tumbled battlement formed by ancient lava flow from another subsidiary vent. From down below, the damned thing looked like it climbed forever into the near-jet sky. The pipeline dodged into a narrow defile that split the bulge like a quartered grapefruit before it disappeared in deep shadow. I stared up at the curving bulge; it was so high you couldn't see the top of the blasted thing.

We may make it by nightfall,
I remember thinking, then reconsidered and thought,
or maybe not.

We didn't.

 

Our climbing team, what was left of it, failed to reach the summit of that awesome bulge by nightfall, but it wasn't due to a lack of effort, and definitely not our fault. The deep split the pipeline ran up and into proved rougher than an ol' sun-dried corncob. The cut was steep and a touch zig-zaggy; fractured walls pinched in tight here, widened out there. The footing was rotten, too; on one pitch, the sledge teams had no chance of making it on their own, forcing Jess to call a halt.

My partner stood below, staring up at the monster, deliberating, scowling, deliberating some more. An ancient set of alternatives became apparent
—
yin, or yang, both no-win propositions. I felt for his quandary in sort of a weary, half-alive way. A decision had to be made right then and there, on the spot, not later. If we abandoned the sledges and fell back on portage, it would've been humanly impossible to pack what was left of the gear and supplies on our backs. The team had shrunk drastically, and my former sledgemate was out of action. Had Jesperson chosen the portage alternative, there would've been no practical way to drop off enough caches of supplies to ensure a safe descent for Marsrats slated to go higher.

Being who and what he was, Jesperson invented a third alternative: dump the sledge loads, pack the gear up the nasty-looking cut on our backs in relays, then pull the sledges up by rope, reload ‘em at the top and push on. The king-sized catch was doing the deed that way would burn the last hours of daylight, and maybe more than that.

The word indecision never found its way into Jesperson's all but unlimited vocabulary. He couldn't stomach the notion of standing there letting the team loaf while he made up his mind. Motioning in jerky fashion for me to switch off my suit transceiver, we touched faceplate lenses. “This one's a genuine ball-buster!”

“We're screwed either way the coin lands.”

“True, without getting kissed first. The big picture,” he said, “makes the predicament posed by the little picture look hairier
—
a sure loser time-wise, either way. Worst of all would be to let darkness catch us two-thirds of the way up this rotten looking cut.”

I'd been tossing what-to-dos back and forth in my own head. “How about having the team pack a load to the top, overnight up there, then come back down at first light to collect the rest. We can rope the empty sledges in daylight, haul ‘em to the top and reload.”

I barely heard his conducted sigh. “Great minds do think alike after all. It's a lousy, time-consuming compromise, but our best shot. I still don't like it even a little bit.”

“Strikes me as the least of two evils.”

“The lesser of two evils,” he pointed out, “is still an evil. Doing it that way will eat way too much time, and . . . Aw, what the hell! Call it the optimum solution.”

“Want me to start roping the bo's together?”

He backed off a ways, peered upward again, studying what could be seen inside the deeply shadowed ravine, then came back and touched lenses again. “The going doesn't look too awful in what's I can see, just steeper that anything we've run into, and that makes it treacherous. Okay, let's make it march.”

Having settled on a variation of yang over yin, Jesperson flipped his utility belt switch and began issuing orders. His homemade parachutes were our most precious possessions; without them, he and I could forget about being potential suicide candidates and become dedicated kamikazes. We each untied a chute pack from either sledge, set them aside and pitched in, lending a hand to the Marsrats busy offloading the rest of the gear and supplies. The cargo on each sledge had shrunk drastically due to consumption and the caches dropped off at intervals along the pipeline's right of way. The air compressors worried Jesperson most of all. While not terribly heavy, they were bulky, cumbersome, tough to lug manually. Wisely deciding to leave one compressor behind and collect it in the morning, Jess assigned a pair of bo's to tote the second unit by roping it between them.

You had to have your gauntlets free to climb up through the tumbled junkpile clogging that ravine. Even under the mild Martian gravity we were accustomed to, balancing yourself on a moderately steep pitch encumbered in vacuum gear was dicey, not to mention being loaded-down for bear with supplies and equipment hanging from your suit's utility belt like Christmas presents. What made the tough going a lot tougher was that hand holds and decent places to set your overboots were neither plentiful nor easy to locate, making it iffy in the trustworthy department trying to find a decent purchase to grab onto, a safe place to plant an overboot and step up.

Jesperson and I filled each other's backpacks chock-a-block, strapped on the chute packs beneath them, and then chest-slung as many spare air flasks as we could carry and started up into the ravine ahead of the rest of the gang, I sympathized with the poor bo's burdened with a clumsy air compressor slung between them. That knife cut chopped a wild, crazy path through a lava bulge that must've humped up half a kilometer. Toiling upward, I had to concentrate on reaching here, clinging there, not till it felt safe to do so gingerly stepping up. Climbing directly below Jesperson, I tried to keep track of his gauntlet purchases and footholds, noting where he stepped, what cornices, protrusions or cracks he grabbed.

I scraped the lens of my faceplate against rock more than once doing my damnedest to ape my partner's route, and eventually dropped too far below him to check on how he was using his gauntlets and overboots, driving me to make my own way. Panting noises punctuated by soft curses, grunts and short-bitten warnings filled the airwaves as the chain of Marsrats started toiling upward beneath us.

The last few meters going up that cut amounted to plain bad news. The vee carrying the pipeline shrank to a slit barely wide enough for a bo in vacuum gear to pass through, but ample for the pipe string suspended in the wider opening above our heads. Jesperson halted three or four meters above me, leaned backward and shined his headlamp up into the shadowed gap, trying to determine whether or not a break in the pipe string might be there. I prayed hard that we'd find it somewhere else
—
anywhere
else. He pulled himself back against the face, looked down at me, and said, “Can't see any sign of damage. Too shadowed and dark in there.”

Following Jess roughly two meters below his overboots, I veered off to the right lest a rock he happened to dislodge come down on me. We clawed our way up a fractured wall nowhere close to being straight up and down, though it sure seemed like it. I saw my partner's overboots disappear over the top. He turned back at the brink, bent down
—
a clumsy exercise wearing vacuum gear
—
and offered me a hand up. We moved back from the edge and began dumping the chutes, air flasks and other toted gear.

I had carefully and gently set aside the last of my roped-together air flasks when the whole blamed volcano shuddered beneath my overboots. I staggered, landed hard on my rump, panicked and stretched to find a purchase to hang on to, but there was nothing close that was fit to grab hold of.

A cascading crescendo of screams, cries and hoarse curses rang inside my headpiece, accompanied by a mixture of ominous thumps and crashes.

I heard a radio voice cry, “Gawdalmighty!”

The shaking stopped. I got my overboots under me, unsteadily clambered erect. “You okay, Jess?”

A curt, “Yeah.”

Another aftershock, seconds later, was nowhere as strong as that first jolt. Even so, it forced me to my knees and caught Jesperson in the act of tying a length of fiberglass line around an outcropping. When the ground steadied beneath us, he called, “Report, down there. Everyone okay?”

The scary silence lasted a second or two, then a weak voice replied, “Falls, two or three. Not good.”

“Stay put, all of you! Hang on right wherever you are,” ordered Jess. “Don't move!” Then to me, “Drop the rope end, Barney. I'll see if I can help the bo's stuck on the way up.”

Freed of his burden, Jesperson passed the fiberglass rope he'd tied fast to the outcrop under the thigh of his pressure-suit, wound it across his torso and over the opposite shoulder. Getting off to one side so as not to come down on any Marsrats still climbing or clinging to the face, he backed over the edge and rappelled down the steep wall, kicking away steadily. The rope made a faint, transmitted hiss sawing over the fabric of his ultraviolet cloak.

I had to wait up there, worried and a little sick at my stomach and scared silly by the anxious chatter coming over the comm circuit. The pair of alternates who'd been carting an air compressor slung between them had fared badly due to the bulky unit weighing them down like an anchor. The shaker had jarred both bo's right off the face; one was gone, his faceplate lens shattered during the tumbling fall. His partner had lucked out, unwittingly saving himself by still being close enough to the bottom to land on his life support backpack, and roll with the impact. The air compressor was half-smashed, ruined. Fortunately, the spare was still below beside the unloaded sledge.

Only the best of good fortune had kept any higher-climbing bo's from crashing down on those below them, but we almost lost another Marsrat in a freakish accident that should never have happened. Bowed down under the supplies he was getting set to lug up the ravine, he'd been knocked off his feet by the shaker, but survived in good order. Then, once things had settled down, he had thought to start the climb again and the aftershock we'd felt up on top had caught him unprepared. He must've stumbled backward, tried to recover his balance and tripped, falling against the raw weldment of the unloaded sledge and puncturing his UV cloak and the buffer of his pressure-suit, but as luck would have it not the suit fabric itself.

I mourned the dead Marsrat, a latecomer to the foot-sloggin' team who had volunteered to join us as an alternate. Explosive decompression may be quick, but the violent hemorrhaging from every body opening makes it a horrific, double-ugly finale. If it happens to a tradeoff that involves me, I'd as soon die of thirst. No, I'd rather.

***

Most of us spent the night mourning the lost Marsrat. Almost none of us got any sleep. I manned the rope topside, helping to pull the burdened bo's who'd been stuck on the face to the top of that gawdawful cut. A glum, gloomy group we were at the finish, halfheartedly going through the food, water and waste bladder change ritual, then swapped suit-and pack-batteries for recharged ones, and grieved some more.

Jesperson decided to abandon one sledge and consolidate the remaining load on the other, except he was too impatient to wait until morning. I was dead set against reloading the sledge at night, but also too tired to put up more than a token argument. My partner finally convinced me, and we used the ropes to clamber back down in total darkness, a risky business I strongly advise no one to imitate. We roped the undamaged compressor securely, using two lines, and Jesperson led the way climbing back to the top, while I stayed as close to him as possible going up the ravine, and guided the unit, trying to keep it from bumping or grinding against the rock as we hauled it to the crest. A pair of Marsrats spent an hour recharging all the unbroken glass air flasks. As I said, none of us got any rest to speak of.