Olympus Mons (39 page)

Some distance farther on, not long after another false alarm when I thought I might've spotted damage to the pipeline, we ran into going so rugged it nearly put an end to our two-man expedition's “suicide” finale. Roughly halfway up the face of an abruptly rising bulge, with Jesperson's overboots a full meter ahead and above me, out of the corner of my eye I saw my partner slip. By now second nature, I'd paused and swung around to scan the nearby section of pipe for any sign of a break, and was paying no particular nevermind to my partner's progress when he put his weight on an overboot to step up, and it slid right out from under him. He caromed sideways, bounced once on the butt of his suit, and clawed for a purchase with both gauntlets, but his life support backpack and strapped-on parachute pack overbalanced him and he came down squarely on me.

If I had turned even a tad, we would've spun off the cut's sharply canted face together and gone down, bouncing from shelf to cornice to ledge, maybe even tumbling part way across the curving hump of basalt decorated with obsidian shards. I caught him around the waist, instinctively flexing the articulated knees of my pressure-suit to help take up the sudden overload, but his backpack and chute were jammed against my faceplate lens, forcing my headpiece and torso backward.

It was a near thing. We teetered there, coming within an ace of going over backward. I pushed forward, my heart drumming paradiddles, knees going all soft and buttery, and recovered. I didn't twig to what had taken place until Jesperson's excited voice boomed in my headpiece, penetrating my fog of terror.

“Ice, Barney! I slipped on
ice!”

The message raised my blood pressure. Except for the smidge issuing from fumaroles, blowholes and volcanic vents, there is
no such thing
as a molecule of free water on the surface of Mars. High up in the arid near-vacuum where we were, water evaporates in the dust-dry atmosphere with lightning speed, long before it has a chance to freeze. The most obvious source of ice was frozen spill from a break in the pipeline, the same notion that had excited Jesperson to a state of super-elation. I also got worked up over the notion, hoping and praying that we had reached our goal.

We clambered down a half-dozen meters to a nook where two bo's in pressure-suits could stand side by side, took crampons and ice axes from each other's packs, knelt down awkwardly one at a time and strapped the spiked crampons on each other's overboots. Knowing what to expect settled me down some, but Jesperson warned me that wearing crampons didn't entirely ensure less than precarious footing on any icy pitch, shallow or steep. He went back up the ravine ahead of me, taking extra-care after our near disaster. I followed a ways behind him, paying close attention to his handwork and footwork. Minutes later he halted and cried, “Barney, look!”

A miniature glacier peeked over the brow of the cliff on our left, not far from where the pipeline disappeared above us. Super-excited, I scrambled upward, reached the lip close behind him, and beheld the most disappointing sight I've ever seen, or could hope to see. Not frozen wash from the busted pipeline, the icefall had formed when water spewing from a volcanic vent like those feeding the catch basins and collection vats higher up had bubbled out too fast for all of it to evaporate. The miniature Niagara cascading downhill had frozen into a widened fan of ice.

My partner took a stab at being philosophical, but it fell flat. “All in the game, Barney,” he said. Instantly realizing how lame it had sounded, he lost no time trying to encourage me, cheer me up some. “We're getting close; I can smell it. Come on, let's hike.”

As God is my witness, we hiked. After crossing the ice fan, we halted to take off the crampons, then hiked onward and upward with a vengeance. We climbed and hiked and climbed and hiked until coming to a layer of ancient, all but level basalt that pitched upward at a slightly less gentle grade. We foot-slogged hour after hour, sticking close to the pipeline a few meters to the west of us, leaning into a wind from the east that had grown stronger teeth.

In mid-afternoon Jesperson finally gave in and called the rest halt I'd been making a nuisance of myself agitating for. I sagged down, slumped back against the scalloped face of a rough boulder. Not until we knocked off hiking did I appreciate how much steam the wind had picked up. Keening like an angrified banshee, the windsong coming through my suit's external audio pickup now and then changed in pitch from a moan to a howl. The wind had grown forceful enough to subconsciously make me work extra hard hiking against it, though I'd been too tired and footsore to know I'd been doing it until Jess called a halt to the afternoon trek. I mentioned how strong the wind had become. He nodded gravely, his features indistinct behind the polarized faceplate lens, but didn't comment on my observation.

If I'd had the strength left to take advantage of it, the view would've been super-spectacular. Though relatively flat, the lower stretches of Big Oly's southeastern slopes shortened the view; the horizon looked to be only a short distance from where I sat, hiding everything below for many kilometers. During that brief rest stop we exchanged empties, and worried about having to plug in the last of the food, water and waste bladders we'd been carrying. Time to pay the piper was coming on in a rush; our remaining hours had shrunk to not very many. With any luck, enough fresh suit- and pack-batteries were left to allow us to hang there and breathe overnight, and an indeterminant few hours into tomorrow.

That would be it, period.

I suppose is was about then that plain, ordinary hopelessness began getting the best of me. I wasn't anywhere near ready to admit failure even to myself, and Jesperson wouldn't have admitted the climate was too warm if he was being boiled alive. Even so, I could sense the onset of despair moving from a back burner of my mind to the forefront. It looked as if Olympus Mons had won for sure. The dice seemed to have rolled one more time and come up snake eyes. The invincible mongoose began to look like it would whip the poor-trash cobra again, and keep on doing it for all time to come.

I found enough energy to up the polarization of my visor-filter, shielded my eyes against the westering sun and looked toward far-off, far out-of-sight Amazonis Planitia, now beyond and far below the foreshortened horizon. Somewhere way to hell and gone in that direction, lost in the rock-strewn, rust-colored dust of the lowlands on the leeward side of the humongous, slate-colored monolith Jesperson and I were resting on, three invisible dots were supposedly waiting. A trio of crawlers was supposedly stationed at twenty-klick intervals in a semi-downwind direction out thataway. Each two-man crew would be hanging close to the long-range transceiver output, waiting and maybe praying to hear the beep-beep of the transponders sewn into our parachute canopies as my partner and I were bodily yanked from Big Oly's unforgiving flank.

I had a sinking feeling that Aguilar and our other friends would wait in vain. As long as he was conscious and able to crawl, Jesperson's demons would drive him higher and higher across the endless basalt bulges and ravines, flats and furrows Big Oly had laying in wait for us. I knew my partner better than I knew myself. He'd chase the pipeline until he fell and couldn't summon the strength to get up again. Failure was a word Jesperson had never learned, a term not in his humongous vocabulary, and omitted from his recipe for life as well, not a part of his live-on-the-edge nature. Much as I hate to admit it even to myself, I also knew I'd be tagging the ditzy bastard's heels, trailing him up through the devastation of ancient, ropy lava flows, with the unbelievably broad, gray-black shoulder of the upper heights looming forever against a sky now for whatever reason smudged with a faint haze. The volcano's perpetual whitish plume of water ice crystals blowing off the distant, invisible summit was still dirtied slightly by a faint residue of smoke and ash left over from the minor eruption.

While I'd been flaked out against the boulder, resting and thinking gloomy-doomy inspirational thoughts, Jesperson had been making a thoughtful survey of the terrain above and ahead of us. “Barney,” he said, “see the crosswise ridge a few klicks above us?”

“Uh-huh.” I didn't bother to look.

“What's it remind you of?”

“Hell,” I mumbled. “The exact inner circle of Hades.”

“Close,” he said, “but you're a hair off the mark. Some of the bigger boulders scattered around here, including that block you're leaning against, are remindful of the ejecta blanket scattered all around Burroughs' crater.”

“Do tell.”

“Listen to me, dammit! Take a stab at catching what I'm pitching, okay?”

Feeling somewhere between a quarter and half-alive, I used all the energy I could afford to spare, and dutifully looked up at the desolate scene a few hundred kilometers above, careful to note of the ridge and the boulders. “Sure . . . ejecta. So what?”

“So this!” he said. “Maybe we're not seeing the edge of another bedding layer. What if that long ridge is the tilted ringwall of the small crater I pointed out in the remote sensing pix, remember?”

“Yeah, uh-huh . . . dimly. Crater . . .”

“Right! Judging from the hi-res photos, if it does turns out to be what I think it might be, one solemn fact we learned from those pix is that other than jigging and jagging to avoid major obstacles, the pipeline never varies from the most direct, straight-line route it takes coming downhill from the manifold outfall. Recall how the pipeline dodged straight across the middle of the small crater like a faint, ruled line?”

“S'pose so.” I tried to piece together his meaning, to figure out what the hell he was saying, but it overtaxed me. I was just too damn tired to think or feel much of anything.

“What I'm trying say,” he rasped, exasperation cutting through his own weariness like a newly honed straight-razor, “is that a few hundred meters beyond that dinky, bleeding crater, if that's what it is, is the manifold outfall.”

It was a news item worth hearing, and perked me up some. “You telling me it . . ? You mean we're almost there, where we have to get to?”

“Damn near within hailing distance maybe.”

“Wouldn't feed me a ration of crap just to egg me on, would you, Bwana?”

“Certainly I would, except in this case it's not necessary. It's the straight skinny.”

“Really?”

“Really! Scout's honor, cross my heart, and hope to . . . Skip it! Come on, get your overboots under you. Time to bite the bullet, maybe time to do what we came up here to do.”

That grand and glorious sentiment may sound good when chanted by a squad of cheerleaders, but trying to make me move my stone-dead limbs didn't work well. I grunted and groaned and had a really tough time coming erect slowly, and then staggering. One reason for the stagger was being totally bushed and halfway out of my senses; the other was that the wind screaming past my bulky pressure-suit was exerting enough force to made it real hard to stand up straight.

Jess and I struggled upward through much of what was left of the afternoon, staying close beside the pipeline, keeping our eyes peeled for the break. The pipe string vanished up ahead in what from a distance below looked like a notch in the broken basalt ridge of what might be the ringwall of the smallish crater Jesperson thought it was. The footing got more treacherous with every upward, toiling step. We picked our way back forth, swinging around huge obstructing boulders that did begin to look different from any we'd seen earlier while on march. Approaching the base of the curved ridge, the closer I got the more I began to think my partner might've been right in judging it a crater ringwall.

Large, medium and smaller chunks of scoria, slag from once melted basalt, plus multitudes of smaller sharp-edged rocks littered the basalt between the huge and lesser boulders. The canted field of rubble did resemble the ejecta blanket strewn all around Burroughs. Brick-sized rocks rolled under my overboots if I wasn't careful about where and how I stepped, how fast I put my weight down. We started climbing the rise, ringwall, whatever turned out to be, and the wind got stronger, growing bigger teeth and making me work harder to stay balanced. It was a new experience; never before had I been out in the open when the wind had that much “shove” behind it. At the time, I chalked it up to the altitude, to being nakedly exposed on an upsweeping, rock-strewn slope strewn with boulders and rubble. Other than those times when a major storm had banged into Burroughs full force, and everyone ducked for cover inside the complex and stayed ducked, I'd never felt or heard the Martian wind whistle past with enough force to make me lean into it bent over. I was too worn-out, too numbed in mind, body and spirit to appreciate what was happening, but of course Jesperson knew.

He'd also known better than to mention it and thereby add a dollop of worrisomeness to my already sky-high overload. Clawing his way up the steep face of the ridge ahead of me, he stayed off to one side to keep from knocking any loose rubble down on me. He reached the top a few meters above me, stood erect a little at a time leaning hard into the wind. He spun around clumsily, almost losing his balance, and lowered the polarization in his faceplate lens to where I could see him grinning like a cheerful skull, and did sort of an awkward foot-shuffle intended as a happy jig.

“The break, Barney!” he cried loud enough to hurt my ears. “It's the
break!”

My heart fluttered and rose up into my throat. I climbed faster than I should have, stumbled, slid back, scrambled to the crest and jerked myself upright.

The fluttering stopped suddenlike, and my heart plummeted right back down into my overboots. A fracture in the pipeline it sure as hell was, except the break was also a dozen or more meters from the ringwall's inner crest, with nothing underneath it all the way down to the crater floor except five or six meters of moaning wind.