Olympus Mons (41 page)

My admiration for Jesperson, stratospheric to begin with, soared another huge notch during that exhibition. It was the coolest, most methodical piece of work anyone has ever done anywhere, under any conditions. He got the roped pipe wound tightly with glass-cloth, ending the wrap on the far side of the break, then inched backward and liberally gunked the glass-cloth shroud top, bottom and sides, doing it quickly, neatly, as if he'd been sitting at a workbench in Burroughs.

Then he surprised me for maybe the ten-thousandth time. Before the near end of the shroud had a chance to set completely, he let the wind have the first patch kit entire, opened the second kit and started the
other
roll of glass-cloth.

Typical Jesperson! If my partner did anything, he would by God do it
right!

Fifteen arm-aching minutes later he finished with the second patch kit, tossed it to the wind and began gingerly inching backward along the pipe toward the ringwall. I climbed the inner slope step by cautious step as he retreated, doing my damnedest to stay as directly upwind of him as I could, whatever the cost. Jesperson reached safe ground at last and half-slid, half-fell off the pipe. When I reached him near the top, he needed help to clamber on up to the crest. Completely and totally done, he snatched an air flask from me soon as I scooped it up and held it out. I reconnected the bayonet fitting of his air hose, and he slumped back, his life support pack resting against a boulder, breathing in ragged gasps.

“Helluva job of work, Bwana!”

I could barely hear his answer: “Week, ten days . . . sun melt backed . . . up ice choked . . . all way to . . . manifold outfall.”

“Amen! Soon now we'll be drinking the snow of Olympus again. What say we haul our butts off this rotten mound of rock, get shut of it for good?”

“My thought . . . too.” Only partly recovered from his ordeal, Jesperson needed me to help pull him to his feet. “By rights . . . should trek ‘round shoulder . . . to quarter wind. Sundown . . . soon, and . . . No lead left . . . my pencil.”

“None in mine, either.”

He grinned, or tried to, still panting. “Wait for . . . morning and . . . zip to breathe. Then there's . . . sandstorm.”

“Your call, Bwana. Anything's better ‘n doing a permanent fade here on your godforsaken hill.”

“Mean it?”

“Hell yes! Say the word. I'll be right behind you.”

“Done!” He chuckled weakly. “Grab . . . chutes. We chance it . . . from here.”

“Damn right!” I wasn't sure I meant it, but said it anyhow.

My partner's cocky grin was a pale imitation of what I'd seen before. “Warned you about . . . hitting hard, fast. Odds . . . not good.”

“Yeah, I make our chances somewhere twixt slim and none. No sweat! Life's one big crapshoot, so we roll the cubes. Don't cotton to going tits-up on this volcano.”

Breathing easier, yet all played-out physically, determination seemed to suddenly erupt from Jesperson's every pore. I helped him struggle into his chute, buckled it tight for him.

“Once clear of . . . scarp,” he said, “spill air with . . . risers. Get down into . . . volcano lee fast. Don't yank too hard . . . collapse chute.”

“Gotcha!”

“See surface close,” he added, “look downwind . . . spot sandy stretch. Storm . . . nixes chance . . . decent landing. See level ground . . . few rocks, dump chute . . . land and roll”

“I hear you, Bwana. Hope to hell our friends're waiting out there.”

He used the last of his strength to nod reassurance.

I doffed my ultraviolet cloak
—
we had to shed every throwaway milligram
—
then strapped on and buckled my parachute pack. Jess uncoupled the nearly empty air flask he'd been sucking on, let go and let it bounce and shatter on the raw basalt underfoot. Full or empty, we had to trim weight by dumping the few the remaining flasks.

I staggered along the ringwall's crest behind Jesperson with the screaming wind hitting us more from the side than the back. In the late sun, with the polarization turned all the way down in my faceplate lens, I saw Jesperson lean into the wind and stare fixedly at the windswept heights above us.

We won't make it,
he didn't have to say. I could almost hear him think, but kept my yap shut although I felt the same way.

What Jesperson did say was, “Here goes nothing!” With no more fanfare than that, no words of wisdom or anything else, he faced away, his pressure-suit catching the brunt of the wind screaming past, stuck two gauntleted fingers through the chute's small D-ring and yanked hard.

I was maybe a half-beat behind him.

 

Over the keening windsong coming through my p-suit's external audio pickup, I heard a very faint
whoup-p-p!
as my pack came open and the chute deployed, activating the tiny, battery-powered transponder sewn into the canopy. The gale snatched me and my pressure-suit off the ringwall with a rude jolt.

Much of my first, last and only parachute ride was a blur, like the dreams of flying we've all had, fuzzy around the edges and unreal. I caught a brief glimpse of my partner's homemade chute airborne in the thinly dust-laden sky, with him an elongated dot beneath the canopy's extra-wide translucent bubble. Something struck me as not right, just plain
wrong
. His chute wasn't where it should've been, lower than mine, downwind to the west. Unless my overtired eyes were letting me down it looked to be higher, not lower than I was zooming along at a fearsome clip, being swept above the furled and furrowed basalt flows like a windborne thistle, angling away from the smallish impact crater where my partner had done his superhuman job of work.

Then I figured out what was wrong, and nip-ups and flip-flops raddled my guts. We weren't dropping off the volcano per my partner's scenario, but
rising
. A moderate updraft caused by raging winds being channeled along the slightly up-tilted volcanic terrain was carrying us and our chutes higher downwind and westward, angling away from Big Oly's invisible, many-kilometers-distant summit.

Beneath me, the volcano's deeply grooved flank fell away some more. I twisted in the risers, looking back past the ugly bedding layer we'd trekked across that afternoon. Indistinct in the failing light, I could just make out the indistinct outlines of what might have been the vee-shaped notch marking the upper end of the ravine where we'd spent that purely awful night. Or was it? Seeing it sort of cleared things up
—
sort of. I wasn't exactly thinking straight at the time, but at least no longer completely puzzled.

Winds raging in what Jess had guessed were in the one-fifty to two hundred kph range were carrying hardly any dust up this high, but the hurricane winds must've been channeled through all the up-sloping furrows and ravines and fissures and levees of ancient basalt that corrugate almost every square kilometer of the lower flanks above the escarpment's brow. For me and my partner, it was like being in a gigantic, multichannel flume that was taking us up, not down, bearing us along faster, lifting us higher.

I tried again to locate Jesperson's chute, but the storm had matured into a foursquare howler. Me and my parachute were now sailing along so high and fast that light flurries of dust half-obscured everything above and below. I searched and searched, trying to estimate where Jesperson's chute might be. Looking ahead, downwind, I got scared in a detached, secondhand way, as if it was someone else taking the dizzy-making ride and I was only watching.

Ripping along at a phenomenal tear, the chute slowed its rise and in my gut I felt it dropping toward the bulging, fast-approaching massif on the horizon. Duly streaked with ancient, furrowed lava flows that in cooling had turned gluey, and then solid eons ago as they were washing over the brink. The southwestern escarpment's dust-clouded brow was impossible to mistake, hiding the Amazonis plains beyond that were beneath streaking, blanketing airborne dust.

Time to pray!
I thought inanely, sure that not even a direct, person-to-person hookup to the Almighty would've helped my parachute carry me far enough, high enough to sail over the escarpment's brink. Some justice! Jesperson had to be ahead of me somewhere. He'd splash first, and I wouldn't be far behind him.

I expect very few others believe in miracles. I turned into a believer the hard way, while flying at a ferocious rate of speed toward what loomed as an abrupt light's out smashing down on the gently rounded battlement forming the southwestern crest of Olympus Rupes.

Never happened! Near as I can figure, the winds must've been deflected when the air blast hit the escarpment wall and curled into an updraft. Still and all, it was the closest of close calls. My chute sailed over the scarp's rim like a stone from a slingshot, so close I instinctively lifted my suit's legs to keep from clipping the volcano's rolling shoulder not too many meters below my overboots. My chute briefly bounced skyward, caught in the updraft coming off the scarp's face, and then it began settling real fast, and what was twice as scary is that I got swung farther toward the west, traveling and dropping almost parallel to the gently rounded scarp. Right about then, a panicky overdose of adrenalin and exhaustion pulled me in opposite directions and I must've blacked out.

I came around in a semi-daze, and dimly recall thinking of the parachute ride as some kind of weird hallucination, like a scene from some really bad fever dream, but a vivid fever dream all the same. The channeled windstream seemed to lose much of its punch there in the partial lee of the volcano, slacking off in the near-vacuum six kilometers above the Amazonis plain. Then without warning it was like being in a fast-dropping express elevator, and the rapid-fall sensation curdled my insides.

I caught another flashing glimpse of Jesperson's chute as the wind blew me away from the volcano at an angle. Scudding above the dust-shrouded badlands at the foot of the scarp still thousands of meters below, I ran through what I remembered of my partner's helpful hints and warnings about parachuting. “Get down into the lee of the volcano fast,” he had instructed. I accordingly reached up, took hold of the risers, tugged gently to spill air and felt myself dropping faster. It was still a long way down to what little was clearly visible of the surface. I watched the region below, looking downwind where I thought Jesperson's floating chute might be. Now and again I caught a flicker of white, but mostly all there was to see was the dust swirling and streaming above the murky plains of Amazonis Planitia.

***

The ground came up in a rush, what small patches and stretches I could make out shrouded by thick clouds of dust the wind was sweeping along too fast for me to think about a normal landing. Traveling faster sideways than dropping, I desperately searched for a place to bail out of the chute. It was hopeless; hardly anything could be seen except isolated, off and on wisps of boulder-strewn desert rushing past.

I gave up the notion of ditching the parachute in midair, and made up my mind to take my chances, stay in the chute, and bet the whole farm on a chance to land feet-first, bounce and maybe roll and get dragged to a stop. Seconds later I ditched that notion, and then on impulse went for it again, and finally abandoned it for good. Sandy stretch or one chock-a-block with rocks and boulders, there really was no way to choose. I had to hope for the best, and let chance decide where and when the ground and I met up.

Zipping across the flats at a fearsome rate, I braced myself to crash-land, thought better of it and tried to relax. Jesperson's warning about hitting the ground plenty hard banged around in my weary brain, but I was far too out of it to attempt to unravel whatever other instructions he'd passed along. Not being able to see the ground spooked me plenty, and I must've changed my mind again because I recall starting to fumble and unbuckle the chute harness, thinking to fall free, hit and roll. I was still fumbling at the latch when I dropped into the roaring river of dust close to the surface and never saw the ground before my overboots hit so hard it felt like my legs were being torn off.

I got spun around, bounced God knows how many times, collided with a slew of unseen whatevers, each shock buffered by the pressure-suit, then tumbled a ways farther, and ended up getting dragged by the billowing chute for what must've been quite a few meters. After several wild grabs, I caught the whipping risers and yank as hard as I could to dump air.

Everything stopped suddenlike. Half-alive and sick at my stomach, dizzy and hurting from top to bottom and side-to-side, I'd banged my p-suit's shoulder hard and hurtfully. Then I noticed a truly worrisome result of the rough landing; the lens of my faceplate was cracked. Even with all the bad that'd happened, I was still getting dragged along at a much slower clip. I made a fumbling effort, managed to wrench open the chest latch and got shut of the damn parachute.

Lying there, I must've blacked out again. Semi-revived a while later, feeling disoriented and in shock, I had an urge to stay where I was for a while to rest and take stock. After a moment I became aware of how loud I was panting from breathing my own exhalation, and how drained I felt, how helpless and out of it and unable to move a muscle. Windblown sand hissed against the cracked lens of my faceplate, the sandblasting sound doubly loud due it was being conducted directly into my headpiece, and also piped in through the suit's external audio pickup. I couldn't do much about the agony in my busted shoulder except groan, and lay there panting. Between groans I listened to the wind moan, to the infernal hiss of sand and dust bombarding the suit's damaged faceplate lens. More than half out of my head, I wondered if our rescuers had heard the transponder bleeps and were searching for us out there in the storm.

The thought abruptly filled me with a sense of self-disgust. I cussed my own stupidity for letting the parachute blow away with the transponder sewn into the canopy.