Olympus Mons (28 page)

“Afraid that doesn't lessen my case of frets hardly at all.”

“What is truly worry making,” he added, amplifying his previous warning, “is that we're coming up on perihelion, the peak of the storm season. We'd be able to tough it out during a one- to three-day blow, but if a genuine monster hits before we reach the crest of the escarpment, a wait of E-weeks or longer until the blow dies down would wash Burroughs down the drain.”

“Cheery notion.” I sensed that he'd left out a few in between frets.

“Forget all the negatives, Barney. Put them out of mind. If the weather holds, we go in roughly an E-month. Hopefully sooner.”

***

At Jesperson's request, Gimpy's straw boss, Red, and one of his maintenance grunts pulled a midnight requisition raid in Cee Four. Black-like-me and yours truly aped their nefarious, thieving ways by pussyfooting into CeeTwo carrying tools, and doing a slick, hurry-up job unbolting the crawler's handrails from clamps fastened to the floor-mounted stanchions and bulkhead brackets. On second thought, we undid the stanchions, too. The idea of leaving naked posts sticking up here and there with no handrails attached struck me as weird.

Hauling the long, curved sections of aluminum tubing through the crawler's small airlock made for an awkward set of dance steps. Once we got the booty out on the loading dock, we bound the tubes into a rough, uneven bundle with fiberglass twine, hoisted the prize up on our shoulders, and ooched out of the big utility lock chamber in tandem. We toted the bundle over to the maintenance shed, wondering all the while if we'd been spotted. I doubt whether anyone who did see us paid more than passing attention to our thievery.

When we got into the shed, Gimp and Red had already returned with their load. Gimpy cast a speculative glance at our tubing and asked why we'd bothered to collect the stanchions.

“Naked, they, uh . . . nakedly stuck up all by their lonesome.”

“Uh-huh.” Gimp scratched his balding head, his expression announcing that he wasn't too impressed by my artistic reason for removing the posts. Then he snapped his fingers, sidled over to the workbench, opened a drawer and lifted out Jesperson's rolled design sketches. Holding one open, he studied it. “Good work after all, Barnes! A bare deck's better ‘n having raw posts sticking up, getting in everybody's way, but there's a better reason.” He swept a none-too-clean forefinger over the three-view drawing. “Larger diameter tubing can be used here, here, and maybe one or two other places.”

Red put on a smoked-glass welder's mask and fired up his arc-welder with a loud, crackling snap. Determined to learn the weldability of the tubing Vonex grunts in Pennsylvania had used to fab the handrails, he went to work on a sample. Not long afterward, he lifted the welder's mask and gave us a positive nod.

At Gimpy's urging, the glassblower and I jogged over to Cee Four at quick-march, hoping to beat the early risers, and hastily began scavenging the stanchions Red and his helpmate had neglected to dismantle. It went smoothly until we got caught.

I was using a speed ratchet to undo the flush spanner-head bolts fastening a forward stanchion to the crawler's deck, when a harsh baritone voice startled me by saying, “Exactly what do you think you're doing?”

Dr. Wesley Franklin, PhD, one time seismologist extraordinaire, areographer deluxe and prospective ice hunter, stood in the open airlock hatchway looking grossly affronted at having scragged us red-handed, and stared at Black-like-me and yours truly. Accusative stares may work fine on some people, but they bounce off the glassblower like hailstones. Caught with two pairs of hands in the cookie jar whilst committing what Franklin no doubt considered a dastardly act, my ornery pal and I paid no nevermind and went right on with what we were doing.

“Answer me!” insisted Franklin. “What the devil are you up to?” This time the question was more forceful. It was then that I noticed a pair of Marsrats behind Doc Franklin, craning their necks in wonderment at the rape of the crawler.

“Speak up! What the hell
is
this?” The areographer was losing it real fast.

Black-like-me swung around, head down, his attitude that of a black rhino getting set to charge, his searing glare all but blowing the three intruders out through the open airlock. “Orders,” he growled.

“Whose
orders?” Franklin had turned a perilous shade of pink. Getting zero satisfaction from the glassblower, he fastened on me as the more fit explainer. “Why, Mr. Barnes,” he wanted to know, “are you removing the crawler's handrails?”

Deciding my ornery pal had taken the right tack, I said, “Orders.”

“Who
gave
the orders?” Franklin clouded up like a force five sandstorm.

I let him run out of bad words before saying, “You sure are up early, Doc.”

Hearing me repeat the glassblower's excuse for our misdeeds had popped the rest of Franklin's circuit breakers. Now in a genuine, first-class tizzy, he was angrified and sort of frothing at the mouth, yelling unseemly threats at everyone concerned over the fact that he had filed a trip plan for this same Crawler Four, now being energetically “dismantled.” He and the pair of bo's he'd conscripted were getting set to truck out in search of permafrost or subsurface ice deposits, whichever showed up first. Without bothering to broadcast the news, or let the other council members in on his venture, I assumed Director Scheiermann had personally vetted his ice hunt.

I wished Franklin luck with his expedition, hand-signaled Black-like-me, and we split the collection of stanchions between us, and boosted the bundle up on our shoulders. With the glassblower in the fore, we charged toward the airlock, giving Franklin a choice of stepping aside, or getting bowled over. The confused pair of ice hunters fidgeting behind him on the dock scrambled out of our way, and we escaped, leaving in our wake a red-faced areographer shouting assorted nastinesses much too rude and crude to be recorded.

By the time we got back, Jesperson had arrived in the maintenance shed. Holding a welder's mask in front of his face, he was nit-picking Red's technique. Raising the mask, he looked away from the arc-welder's dazzle when us dismantlers waltzed in carrying our bundle. We told him about the run in with Franklin and he set the welder's mask aside, a lopsided grin transforming his features. “An ice hunt? Really?”

“That's what the man said, Bwana.”

His grin widened. “Good news in a way.

“Yeah, real good,” said Black-like-me, earning a chuckle. “Maybe he'll get lost.”

Later that afternoon, with a sledge's skeleton framework beginning to look like a weldment, not a collection of haphazardly attached scrap aluminum alloy tubing, I decided the glassblower was some strange variety of exalted prophet. Gimpy fielded a call when one of his grunts summoned him to the phone. It appeared that Franklin's crawler, minus handrails and stanchions, hadn't gotten lost chasing ice cubes as my ornery pal had predicted. Cee Four had broken down, throwing its starboard cleated track on a boulder way to hell and gone down south toward the equator.

Our appreciation of Franklin's misfortune doubled, then redoubled after Jesperson himself fielded a panicky call from Scheiermann that made my partner cackle so gleefully that when he went to cage the phone he missed on the first try. The director, he reported, gargling laughter, trying to breathe between gargles, had pleaded with him to organize and lead a rescue team. Laughing his fool head off, Jess laughed until his eyes teared. “Grab your long johns . . . and vacuum gear,” he faltered, choking over the need to pause for breath. “We're going out . . . to search for . . . the iceman.”

“Hand you my beer ration for a whole friggin' E-year,” declared Black-like-me, “if you promise not to find the sumbitch.”

The glassblower's jolly words caused more hilarity in Burroughs than I've seen or heard since that bighearted white bread judge offered me Mars instead of the hoosegow.

 

Exactly ninety-four minutes after officialdom yelled for help by forming a rescue mission, Cee Five's dashboard chronometer rolled over as my partner and I rolled out of South Tunnel's big utility airlock. A replacement cleated track was coiled up, lashed to tie-down rings aft next to the portside equipment locker. Gimpy had wanted to come along and supervise dismantling the busted track and installing the replacement. Jesperson had nixed that notion, urging Gimp to stay and oversee Red's sledge welding. Before we trucked out, the maintenance guru packed the necessary tools aboard, along with detailed instructions on how to get the job done.

Why the enclave's one and only areographer had chosen to head south in a search of hoped-for pockets of buried water ice was anybody's guess. Naturally my partner didn't have to guess. He knew, and wasted no time filling me in on how extensive lava terrace “aureoles” beneath the sands radiated in all directions from Big Oly
—
hard-crust invasive “igneous” rock underpans that were beneficial for runoff, but bad for percolation.

“Local runnels, dry gulches and erosion patterns,” he added, “are a record of how millions or billions of E-years ago a significant amount of surface water flowed from the volcano and had no way to percolate through the lava schist, so it ran off. For all his pomposity and an absence of winning ways, Franklin is no dunce. He's searching down toward the equator, beyond the major volcanic radius, where there's at least an infinitesimal chance of finding frozen subsurface seepage. Catch is, what might've once been there, maybe, was beyond doubt deposited eons ago. If any still exists, it's likely as not deeply buried.”

“Makes sense. Think the sucker'll find ice?”

“Who can say? Call it a shot in the dark with an unloaded weapon.”

Our course due south took us into what my schoolmaster partner called
martia incognita.
Neither of us, or for that matter anyone else far as I know, had ever ventured very many klicks on the ground in a southerly direction. The rock-strewn, sandy wasteland dips at a shallow grade as it leaves the Tharsis highland bulge, and the surroundings gradually turn into a series of windblown hummocks that are not quite dunes, but make it tough to see where you're going, or keep to a constant visual heading. A gag line I once heard about empty stretches in New Mexico fits the area to a tee: “There's nothing for miles and miles but miles and miles.”

Vic Aguilar kept his RDF gear hot back in Burroughs
—
a necessity, since no global positioning satellites as yet circle our rust-colored planet. Vic stayed on the airwaves, talking to us from time to time, tweaking his radio direction finder gear to keep us homed in on the signal from Franklin's brokedown crawler.

Leaving Burroughs late in the day, we had to call a halt and power-down when darkness closed in. The southerly region's hummocks make travel rugged enough in daylight; plowing ahead in the dark would've been foolhardy. Jess and I fixed ourselves a bite of supper. We got out the board, played a half-dozen hands of cribbage, then crawled into the foldbunks.

At first light Jess took his turn behind the joystick, and we were rolling. In midmorning we came across faint lines in the sand that might've been dual ruts left by Franklin's outbound crawler. We chased the disappearing, reappearing rut signature for an hour, then tracked it off and on for another ten klicks until the parallel lines in the sand got less ‘n less predictable, and eventually petered out altogether.

Jess slowed Cee Five to a crawl and began casting back and forth like a sniffing hunting dog, trying to relocate the ruts. One'r two klicks farther on, the vanished tracks showed up again faintly. We followed them until they disappeared again, and stayed disappeared. Sometime in the afternoon Vic called to say his RDF gear showed us on approximately the correct line, and judging by our travel time likely somewhere in the target's general vicinity.

We swept back and forth, to and fro, round and about for another three-quarters of an hour, and turned up no sign of the crawler. I got on the radio, tried and tried and finally got through to one of Franklin's ice hunters. The short conversation, plus the bearing Vic had been feeding us, told us we had to be close, except “close” may work fine with horseshoes and hand grenades, but not when finding stove-up Crawler Four. The beast could've been a short rock throw ahead, and we'd never know it.

I got on the airwaves again, hoping to ask Franklin where he was hiding his damaged machine. The question sort of answered itself when Jesperson spotted a low mesa poking higher above the short horizon than any nearby windblown hummocks, and swung Cee Five toward what proved to be the ringwall of a smallish impact crater with moderately steep outsides. Sure enough, Cee Four's phantom ruts reappeared on the ringwall's leeward slope and went up ‘n over the crest.

Jess slewed our crawler to a halt out in the flats next to the crater. He powered-down looking unhappy. “That jerkjolly you contacted forgot to tell you Cee Four was stuck out of sight in a crater.”

“Must've slipped his mind. Taking us on in, Bwana?”

“Wouldn't be smart,” he said. “Cee Five could wind up alongside Cee Four in the same predicament. This beast won't budge another meter until we see what the inner slope looks like. Hustle aft and suit-up.”

The precautionary move proved wise. Donning vacuum gear, we exited the crawler one by one, clambered up the small crater's fairly steep ringwall. Sure enough, there below, maybe two-thirds of the way down the inner slope, sat Cee Four. It must've pitched over the crest, careened down the inner slope sliding cattywampus on loose sand and rubble until colliding with what looked like a fair-sized boulder. The starboard cleated track had been nudged off the drivers and lay askew, curled half-on, half-off where it should've been. At a distance, it looked like maybe a few cleats also had been sheared off.