Olympus Mons (38 page)

At the first hint of the predawn sunrise halo, the stark volcanic jumble around us started dimly revealing itself. Jesperson wiped away the sympathetic expression he'd worn to match that of the sorrowing Marsrats, and became himself again. Coaching what remained of the team in harsh drillmaster terms, he warned us twice to stay alert for more aftershocks. We were given no choice about doing the right thing about the fallen Marsrat; there was no chance of doing what had been done to ease his passage through eternity the way it'd been done for my glassblower pal. Only a few small, loose rocks lay about, no available material with which to build a cairn over the Marsrat. We had to leave the still, pressure-suited figure where he'd fallen, there at the foot of that hellish ravine.

The previous day's sledge-haulers rebelled, saying they didn't want to head back downhill just yet, and insisted on making one last trip up the ravine to help repack our remaining sledge. Jesperson wouldn't hear of it, and straight off ordered them to hightail it downhill, but two of the bo's ignored him and climbed up the ravine anyhow, stubbornly hanging around to help reload the remaining sledge. Then, without so much as a goodbye or farewell waves, they headed back down on the ropes and followed their mates foot-slogging downhill. Up top, a pair of hardy draft animals got in harness and started pulling our single loaded sledge uphill.

All through that dull, sleepless morning it was more than just the toil of taking turns hauling the lone sledge that wrung the energy out what remained of our team. Every Marsrat was in a state of near-total exhaustion. Successfully beavering the remaining cargo topside without incident had taken a hefty toll in time, and a heftier toll in endurance and morale. I myself had gone back down through that rugged cleft twice more, twice more clawing my way back up, doing my share of cargo toting. There were only a few of us now, dog-tired but also still doggedly determined.

The afternoon stretched into hours, turning into an extended blur on that ungodly stretch of the trek. Every step became dull, foot-slogging torture. I sensed the general mood to be like that of a football down by two touchdowns with less that a minute to play
—
a creeping “I no longer give a damn!” attitude that had sneaked up on us and settled in, infecting the whole team with unhealthy despair I knew would sooner not later sag into downright apathy, and finally into out ‘n out hopelessness, a strong urge to throw in the towel come what may, have the bleeding nightmare over and done with.

Footsore and stiff-muscled, their spirits down around their sweat socks after losing a second teammate, what remained of attitude was fast closing in on the “hopelessness” stage, a condition not entirely due to exhaustion. Jesperson didn't comment privately or publicly, but his concern was plain to read.

One of the sledgemen collapsed in late afternoon, and had to be revived by upping the feed in his life support system, flooding his suit with excess carbon dioxide. Jesperson urged the bo to swallow a stimulant. When he didn't comply right away by sucking on the tube, Jess bent and keyed the medication into his p-suit's water bladder.

We forced ourselves to go on a spell farther, then began taking turns pulling the sledge at ever more frequent intervals. The radically shortened procession kept staggering onward, putting one overboot ahead of the other for maybe another hour. Eventually my partner called a rest break that lasted twice as long as usual.

He edged over to me for a private, lens-to-lens talk. “They've had it, Barney.”

“I know.”

“We'll cut short the evening march,” he said, “hand ‘em some extra sleep.”

“Good. Didn't cover much ground today.”

“Maybe enough, maybe not. No way to tell.” His conducted voice was faint, but overtones of irritation came through.

“Whereabouts are we altitude-wise?”

“Tough to say.”

“Don't flimflam me, Bwana! How high up your goddamn ‘hill' are we?”

“Not high enough!” he snapped, badly riled. Dead-tired or not, my insistence on getting a numbers answer had stirred his angries. “What difference would a definite answer make?” he demanded. “Either the break's within range of what we can do, or it's not. No sense mooning about it.”

“No mooning from me, just asking.” I backed off a trifle, unsatisfied, sat down and rested my life support backpack against a mass of unyielding basalt, welcoming the bliss that washed through over not having to move for a few minutes, I sat there feeling sorry for myself and fell into a sound, dreamless sleep.

Jesperson woke me by kicking my overboot; he had a tough time rousing me even by using that degree of annoyance. The team slowly saddled up and we foot-slogged upward across a long, thankfully shallow rise for the better part of another two hours until one of the struggling sledgemen halted, turned and pointed upward. The lone remaining pair of sledgemen had halted close to the foot of another steep-sided ravine that sliced through an even more gigantic bulge constructed of ancient lava. From below, this one looked like a carbon copy of the death ravine where the quake had caught us unawares, except it was bigger, deeper, and from below looked half again as steep-sided.

Jesperson forgot himself, left his transceiver switched on and swore softly for all to hear. He breezed past me to reconnoiter. When he came back from doing pathfinder duty, he found the rest of us flaked out, either sound asleep or semiconscious when we should've been upright and ready to ramble.

He didn't let us down easy. “On your feet, you lazy bastards!” He said it would be touch and go whether the sledge teams could pull the killer ravine up ahead, and said we might have to fall back on portage, a repeat of the drill we'd gone through right after the shaker and aftershock. Trudging uphill toward the cut that promised a brutal replay of the former deadly ravine misery, the sledge bogged down every few meters on the rugged, fairly steep incline. Jess ordered a round robin of help for the sledge teams, and we went forward by ones and twos, boosting the sledge from the behind, putting our backs into it while the draft animals stayed in harness and tugged for all they were worth. Soon we were swapping places every few minutes, stepping in when someone was heard panting hard, getting ready to collapse. There was no chatter over the comm circuit, just a steady chorus of labored breathing peppered with cuss words.

The sledge slid backward when one of the men tugging it slipped and fell. Though now packing a smaller, lighter load, the damned sledge broke free and skidded downhill dragging both exhausted pullers until it crashed against a boulder. The collision knocked one of the trailing bo's down, and made a second jump aside. The rest of us ganged up, grabbed hold of the sledge and secured it.

Once things had settled down, Jesperson talked it over with the downed Marsrat who had sprained his leg or ankle scrambling to stop the runaway sledge. The other bo, the alternate, tried to stiff-upper-lip it, claiming he wasn't hurt hardly at all. I would've called him a brave liar, and decided not to. Not to his face.

“That's it,” said Jesperson with a ring of finality. “We dump the sledge here and now. Barnes and I will plow on by ourselves. We can make better time, cover more ground. I want the rest of you to take the sledge and whatever else you can carry back to the base of this ravine. Rest up there overnight, then start trekking downhill at first light. You'll have to take turns lending a hand to the walking wounded. Use the sledge to haul whoever has the most trouble hiking. Okay, everyone in bed with the drill I've outlined?”

I heard more than one sigh of relief, a few punctuated by grumbled remarks intended as feeble, less than wholly sincere protests about not wanting to desert the team. A few more bo's muttered objections that circulated among the tuckered-out bo's who kept on insisting they could carry on. None of ‘em meant a word of it.

Jesperson snapped off his transceiver, touched his faceplate lens to mine. “Time to lighten ship, Barney.”

“Dump the excess, whatever we won't need?”

“Every scrap. Be picky and choosy about what goes on your back, what gets left behind.”

“I hear you.”

***

It didn't seem like the right time to worry about the long range consequences of ultraviolet exposure, so I followed my partner's example, unzipped my UV cloak, shrugged out of it and let it blow away in the stiffening breeze. We each chest-slung as many charged carbon dioxide flasks as we thought we could carry. One of the Marsrats collected our specially prepared “suicide” parachutes from the sledge and helped seat them high on the backs of our p-suits, resting on the life support bulges. I took a couple of experimental steps, rocking backward and forward, testing my balance. The arrangement was ungainly; my chute pack wanted to bounce a tad with every step, and the weight distribution wouldn't have worked worth diddly in the homeworld. Here in Mars, the much lower gee helped a lot. I thought I could manage, but also realized balancing on a steep rise could become a nervous-making proposition.

“Okay, we're off,” Jesperson told our exhausted fellow climbers. “Do exactly as I said. Find a decent place to spend the night down below, then head straight back down to the crest of the scarp, and home. Take it careful and easy going downhill, too. That may sound like peculiar gratuitous advice, but long ago I learned that climbing is often safer and less wearing than descending, and much easier on the big toes. Ample supplies are stashed along the pipeline's route, so there's no point hurrying, and none at all in doing anything the least bit risky. Damn fine show, all of you! You've done one helluva fine job, so be proud of yourselves.”

Before the Marsrats departed, each of them stopped to clasp our gauntlets and wish us luck. The last bo saying his farewells told us he was glad to be heading home, but dreaded the notion of climbing down through the death ravine where the shaker'd caught us with our pants at half-mast. Jesperson assured him the ropes were still in place, right where we'd left them, and would make descending a snap if done with care. As my partner and I were fixing to set off, two bo's were busy strapping the Marsrat with a sprained leg on the all-but-empty sledge, and gabbing all the while about out how to best haul him downhill. The gutsy Marsrat refused to climb aboard the sledge until hobbling over to Jess and me, where he grinned and made a thumbs-up gesture with both gauntlets. I clapped his pressure-suit's shoulder to encourage him, my way of assuring him he hadn't let us down.

Calling back a last so-long, we started up the ravine, me dogging my partner's heels, and in very few minutes were all by ourselves. My partner's energy reserves have no limit, and what's more are also infectious, making me feel extra-spry for the first hour. No longer paced by the sledges, we reached the crest of the ravine and covered some ground that afternoon, foot-sloggin' over terrain sometimes fairly flat, but on average rising at a gentle grade.

We went up through a smaller cleft, and hours later hit another biggie a lot more difficult to get through. Both of us stuck to what had become a fixed habit: eyeballing the pipeline at every other step as we climbed, hoping
—
no, make that praying!
—
we'd spot a break sooner instead of later. The dismal, foot-sloggin' afternoon wore on, until both of us were hiking and climbing hand over foot in a dazed, semiconscious state. Feeling dull-witted and lead-footed is a recipe for making mistakes. I tried hard to do my best, and not worry about biting off more than I could chew.

The day ended in disappointment. We failed to reach the top of a fairly large cut before the volcano closed down around us in a rush of darkness.

 

Of all the rotten nights I've ever spent, staying alive through that neverending night of lightless misery three-quarters of the way up the cut was absolutely the worst, a sentiment echoed by Jesperson. Talking over the alternatives briefly at dusk, we agreed that climbing upward and onward with only our p-suit headlamps to light the way would invite disaster big time, so we scrambled around, tried find a decent place to rest before inky darkness enveloped the volcano and everything blacked out.

No such luck. My partner and I spent the endless, sightless hours lodged in an alcove in the canyon wall. Taking turns, we dug into each other's backpacks for supplies, and changed suit- and pack-batteries without a hitch. It was swapping food, water and waste bladders that came within a hair of doing me in. At the last second I caught myself in the act of turning a valve the wrong way, a mistake no one who wasn't up there at the time, and as beat to a frazzle as I happened to be, could begin to understand. No matter how sore-muscled and whipped an experienced Marsrat might be, he or she would never, under any circumstances pull a dumb greenhorn stunt like that. It would've meant explosive decompression, and Sayonara Barnes with no chance for fond farewells or one syllable of a snappy exit line.

Safety-roped together, we stayed semi-upright, leaning against each other hour after hour, our backs against a canted wall of rough basalt, and gave up trying get any sleep. Overtired, sore and aching as we were, the best I can remember was being jolted awake after a fitful, now and then doze.

Dawn found us groggy, but determined; me groggy, Jesperson determined. When there was enough light to dimly make out what was below, above and around us, he lengthened the safety line we had used to rope ourselves together, banged the shoulder of my pressure-suit instead of a pep talk, and we took off, clawing our way up the final stretches of that torturous cleft. It was rugged going even in daylight. We spent a solid hour and more at it, staying close alongside the pipeline, making gauntlet purchases here, finding a toehold there, and labored to the top of that cut.

At the crest, Jesperson angrified me some by shooting down my plea for a short rest stop. We trudged across a relatively level stretch of ground that looked like easy going, but turned out to be risky, not to say plain nasty. You had to watch where you put down your overboots; sharp chunks of volcanic glass stuck up all over the place. My partner eventually allowed a ten-minute stop after we'd reached safer ground, not because he wanted to but because he figured I was done in, and needed a breather in the worst way.