Olympus Mons (4 page)

I once let my guard down and stung Jesperson by mentioning that no matter how fast our thin air zips past it shouldn't be able to spin windmills and do damage during bigger storms. He put me down with complicated force diagrams, buzzwords like “Bernoulli effects,” whatever they are, the specific weight of air, gas dynamics, and how Burroughs' handy-dandy master computer flutes or feathers windmill vanes relative to wind direction, velocity, and so on. My partner can be maddening when his mainspring gets wound up tight, but I'm accustomed to his salty explanations. The wind also can be plenty maddening, yet it has an upside, too. The perpetual wind cranks the windmills that furnish us with more electrical power than we can use, the onliest surplus that comes to mind.

We went through the usual marionette gyrations it takes to desuit inside the crawler, where elbow room's at a premium. I stowed my vacuum gear in the portside equipment locker, and by unspoken agreement drove the first lap while Jesperson flaked out in a foldbunk and snoozed. Shoving Cee Two's joystick forward caused the cleated tracks to churn sand before taking hold. I ooched the beast out of the way station compound, located what was left of the ruts we'd made outbound that morning, slewed the crawler around on its portside track, and swung southeast on a heading parallel to the pipeline.

I mentioned how the Tharsis plains roundabout the volcano sag under Big Oly's stupendous weight on the clayish subsoil underneath the “aureoles”
—
ugly lava badlands that're especially rugged in the Lycus Sulci region on the volcano's far northwest side. The “pyroclastic slag heaps,” to again borrow Jesperson's term, are fragmented chunks of “igneous” rock leftover from the old, older and really ancient lava flows that fan out from the escarpment in all directions, mostly overlaid by furrowed rows of windblown sand.

I checked the fuel-cell gauges, all riding the green line, and dodged the crawler north a few degrees to skirt a protruding hardscrabble slag layer, and hiked up the pace to thirty-five kph, keeping it there till reaching the first declivity between lava terraces, then eased back some. Off to the left, the pipeline elevated on pylons of diminishing height looked like a black line ruled by straightedge across the desert. Cee Two rocked and jounced, crunching smaller rocks under the tracks until the last evenly spaced, monotonously whirling windmills feeding power to the holding tank heaters at the base of the scarp fell behind us.

An hour and a half later I coaxed and wrestled the crawler down through the last terraced upland and rolled out into the flats. In the view aft video monitor, a good bit more of the Olympus Rupes escarpment was visible rearing toward the really thin semi-vacuum on high. From that close in, the summit caldera and its crown of windblown water ice were too high and hundreds of kilometers too far off to see. Big Oly sticks up almost twenty-seven klicks above the mean radius of Mars, a tall order by anyone's measure.

Jesperson once drew a word picture of Mars, and included one of his news flashes: the fact that our home away from home is slightly pear-shaped. A few millions or however many E-years ago, the most active volcanic area was the elongated Tharsis Montes dome that humps up roughly nine klicks above the lower Tharsis plains. Sounds high, and it is; but there's high, and then there is
high.
The scale of Jesperson's pet volcano is mind-bending. The brute squats on the plains eighteen degrees north of the equator, its huge base roughly six klicks lower down than the crest of Tharsis Montes. Catch is, bare numbers make it tough for your mind to appreciate the scale of Big Oly. A comparison tells the tale much better.

Hawaii's Mauna Loa, the biggest homeworld shield volcano, rises a puny nine klicks from its watery base on the Pacific seabed. The summit caldera of Olympus Mons soars almost twenty-seven kilometers above the planet's “mean radius.” If Big Oly was to be plunked down to scale over Arizona, only the tips of the state's four corners would stick out beyond the escarpment. Big and high are relative. Burroughs' next door neighbor is
colossal,
and
that
is a major understatement. Long ago in the era of ground telescopes only, earthside astronomers spotted the whitish plume made by water ice blowing off the summit caldera, and guessed it marked a bright, reflective crater, a depression or whatever, and hung a poetic Greek label on the feature: Nix Olympica, “Snow of Olympus.” Later the first Mariner bird's pix from orbit tore the lid off, showing the monster for what it really is, and Olympus Mons was given its rightful name.

Three more gigantic volcanoes poke up along the Tharsis Montes bulge. The northernmost, Ascraeus Mons, humps up twelve degrees north of the equator, while the other pair, Pavonis and Arsia, march southwest from Ascraeus in a line as neat and orderly as soldiers on parade. Jesperson's obsession rises halfway to the stars northwest of the second-string trio, near the hundred-degree meridian. In bulk and height, none of the other three come anywhere close to Big Oly in girth, height or any other dimension.

Ever since I started partnering with him, Jesperson's been hyped about one fine day taking the bit in his teeth, suiting-up, strapping on his overboots and climbing his pet volcano. Big Oly fascinates the mountain climber in him the same way a mongoose fascinates a cobra, weaving its head back and forth, sort of putting a hypnotic spell on the snake, daring it to strike and get chopped. Jess damn well knows in that scenario he'd have to play the cobra, and automatically buck really stiff, one-sided odds because the mongoose never loses. Privately, I think that's why the challenge tweaked him so hard. He'd fallen in love with a simple silly notion that the poor trash cobra
had
to come out on top at least once. The fact that Big Oly's huge, pitted and bashed, hundred-kilometer-wide caldera hangs more than a dozen miles above his less than humble head, not to mention being one helluva of number of kilometers off distance-wise, doesn't faze him a bit.

Make no mistake, lots of men have been up there. Forty-plus E-years ago the Colonize Mars challenge was met by a flock of dedicated heads of state who pooled their resources, picked up the lion's share of a
very
hefty tab, and construction gangs arrived circum-Mars in a pair of whirligig ships preceded by a staggered series of drone freighters. A pair of custom-designed Mars Landers shuttled up and down from orbit, dumping “hard-hats” clad in old-fashioned pressure-suits as well as tonnes of equipment and supplies on the less-than-trustworthy volcanic plug forming the caldera's southeastern floor. A second crew landed in the adjacent Tharsis wasteland, rigged solar-powered electric furnaces and fused the sands of Mars into thousands and thousands of meters of black glass pipe sections.

An oversupply of heartbreak and spilt blood went into the aqueduct project. Catch basins and collection vats installed a hundred klicks or more below Big Oly's summit were rigged to drain into an outfall manifold system feeding into the uppermost section of pipeline. At the southeastern foot of the scarp, sections of glass pipe were hoisted up the cliffs using a staggered winch and cable system that's still in place, and pipe was laid from the bottom up, not just from the top down. The pipeline drops down the scarp's near-vertical wall to a pair of holding tanks feeding into the larger diameter pipe string running at a shallow downgrade across the Tharsis flatlands to Burroughs. There's plenty of water
in
Mars, you see, but nary a drop on the surface, or in our skimpy atmosphere. Shallow subsurface water probably also exists, yet if so it has to be either frozen in deep underground aquifers and ice pockets, or trapped as permafrost under the polar carbon dioxide “snow cap.”

Experts twigged to the problems early on, and played it shrewd, putting down a smart-money bet on the fact that all volcanoes exhale carbon dioxide and water. We need both to survive, of course; yet first, foremost and above all else water. Big Oly's deep inner fires melt subsurface ice and internal gas pressure forces water out of thousands of fumeroles, blowholes and vents dotting the middle slopes. Free water evaporates or freezes during the subzero nights, but each day's sun melts a tad, and the catch basins and collection vats are filled with insulating “tufa”
—
another tidbit I picked up from Jesperson
—
that helps to keep water liquid as it percolates deeper, dribbles into the manifold system, and gurgles downhill through the main pipeline. Plain and simple, the aqueduct is what keeps Burroughs alive; building it was an outrageous, high-risk project. Eleven good and true “hard-hats” clad in pressure-suits lost their lives on the middle slopes and escarpment of Olympus Mons.

Once the aqueduct was finished and running water became available, another set of hard-hats turned to and erected the sealed, ultraviolet-screening roof-shield that snugly encloses Burroughs. Tonnes and tonnes of raw materials, Mars-rationalized seeds, cuttings, dry-frozen foodstuffs and suchlike were brought through the North and South access tunnel airlocks and dumped inside. Then the lucky hard hats waved bye-bye to Mars and took ship sunward, heading home to the fond and familiar. From where I stand, those hardy bo's earned their premium pay and hazard bonuses twenty thousand times over. Worked major miracles, they did. Especially proud of them were us Marsrats who were handed the leisure to appreciate what a terrific, staggering job of work they did whilst encumbered in clumsy, old-fashioned vacuum gear.

***

The crawler crossed a shallow rille, and the mild jolt woke Jesperson. He groaned, yawned, stretched in the foldbunk and lifted his head. In a grumbling mood after being awakened, he grumbled, “What's for supper?”

“Guess?” I told him.

“Swill,” he guessed.

It was a good guess. It's not possible to run into gridlock crossing the rock-strewn flats of Tharsis, and anywhere was a convenient place to grind Cee Two to a halt so we could enjoy each other's discontent over the evening meal. I powered-down, went aft to the galley, unfolded, erected and locked in place the collapsible deal table. Jesperson unlatched and slid open a cupboard. He one-handedly grabbed the stems of two wineglasses and set them on the table with the rims touching. Glass is our most important product; anything and everything that can be made of glass, is, including tableware.

I took down a half-full bottle of ersatz Chianti and pulled the stopper to let it breathe. We have wine and brandy; Mars-rationalized grape cuttings from California's Napa Valley do well here, but we do without distilled spirits. The grains advertised as likewise being processed for Mars shut up shop and refused to prosper, the single exception being a cereal grain, barley, that Brewster Karl Stier raises to make what he calls
“Ersatz Bier.”
A perfectionist, Karl's a world-class nit-picker who doesn't fully trust himself to do the brewing, and
never
lets any helpers in on the action. He pampers and nurses his “crops” in oxygenated Hops and barley hydroponic tanks, coddling them like they were his own kids. Karl may think of his suds as “ersatz,” and maybe he's right when comparing his Burroughs product to what he once brewed back in Munich. Ersatz or not, first-rate or mediocre, beer's a godsend. It puts a little zing in an otherwise humdrum, routine existence.

I poured a dollop of the peculiar “Italian” dressing Lorna makes on a double handful of greens from the fridge, and tossed the salad in a glass bowl. Jess smeared bean dip on few slices of barley bread, then nuked stewed onions in the crawler's small microwave unit. He was in the act of tipping the bottle to decant the Chianti when the empty wineglasses started to sing in a high-pitched, barely audible whine.

My pulse-rate jumped right off the scale.

“Quake!” yelled Jesperson. “Grab hold!”

His warning was a hair late. I was stretching toward the crawler's handrail, and missed it when a sledgehammer blow suddenlike rammed the crawler sideways, pitched me against an unfolded foldbunk. I rebounded, and ended up on the floor.

Cee Two's deck plate refused to sit still, dancing and jittering in time to the crash and tinkle of shattered glassware and a scary succession of creaks and groans. Our vehicles were engineered to hold up fine under Mars' moderate three-eighths gee, not for getting battered and tossed around in a hefty quake. I bounced and fretted about the crawler, wondering if it would hang together, stay pressure-tight.

Don't know how you feel about quakes; I'm against ‘em. In South Central L.A., my younger years were clouded more ‘n once by the helpless, choking terror that takes you by the throat when the solid ground you've taken for granted all your life starts to ripple like a shaken carpet. From time to time Burroughs has lived through a rash of small to medium tremors, but nothing like this king-sized shiver shake. It was a biggie, and went on longer than seemed reasonable.

Cee Two finally stopped pitching, rolling, heaving and groaning, leaving the floor plates and me canted slightly nose-down to starboard. In the unnatural quiet, I was scared spitless, so much so that I tried to say something, but no sound came out.

Across the cabin Jesperson clutched a leg of the deal table and cursed in a steady monotone. He elevated himself, getting his boots under him unsteadily, still swearing, and began to pick pieces of my delicious salad out of his hair. “Still among the living, Barney?”

“I don't, uh . . . Not sure.”

“So feel around and find out.”

“I think . . . Yeah, I'm okay, all of . . . a piece.”

“Good to hear.”

“Wh-why're we pitched down, tipped to one side?”

He pondered the question, looking thoughtful, then hustled forward to learn the answer, and cried, “Fissure! Get up here!”

I hurried to rise, bopped my head on the open foldbunk, reeled sideways seeing constellations of bright lights. I staggered forward, and fell into the co-driver seat just as Jesperson energized the crawler.