Refugee (21 page)

“Close your eyes,” Helse told me, helmet to helmet. “Pretend it's only a few yards. Meters.”

Coward that I was, I did, and it helped. But soon I was looking again, reminding myself that I hadn't been acrophobic while in the bubble. On the bubble had been another matter—but I believe that was understandable. Out here it was the feel of weight and the uncertainty of the rope that jittered me, rather than the actual elevation. Had I, for example, been using a reliable flying suit, this same elevation and slope would hardly have bothered me. At least, this is what I now prefer to believe.

So I scrambled over the dread ridge in my turn, just as if I felt no fear, and Helse followed me, and with that conquest of my hesitancy, my apprehension abated without actually disappearing. Commitment does seem to help. The women before and after us seemed to have no problems, though I was sure each experienced similar qualms.

The vista below was dramatic. The surface of Io was a tapestry of orange even in the reflected light from Jupiter. Dark runnels showed where some recent flow of sulfur had passed, and bright flame—or whatever it should be called, since no fire as we know it can burn in near-vacuum—showed at a roughly circular vent to the right. The observation dome was near this vent, partly sheltered by a lesser escarpment. It looked precarious to me, but I suppose there's no way to gather significant data on a sulfur volcano except by sitting beside it for a while and making on-the-spot notes. I wondered what the life expectancy of such researchers was. Probably that was a super-strong, super-insulated dome, able to withstand what it had to. But probably, too, the researchers possessed a certain quality of courage. A person did not have to be a muscular warrior to be brave, as the women of our bubble were showing.

We were step-sliding down the steep slope at about five kilometers per hour, so we had a half-hour descent to do. That was all right. But what, I wondered, about the return trip? And how much rope did we have? Not any kilometer length, for certain!

Sure enough, the rest of us had to set ourselves against the slope, clinging to sulfur-ice, while our end-person separated herself and us from the anchor at the top. She left a trailing length, so that we could use it to haul ourselves up the vertical portion of the slope and over the lip, but that was all. On our return trip we would have to climb unaided to that point. I didn't like it.

Now that we were no longer anchored, we proceeded more swiftly. Too swiftly—I tried to brake, for safety, but the onrush of sliding women hauled me along. In moments we were out of control.

Inexperience was telling.

I think someone screamed. As I mentioned, it is not a complete vacuum on Io; the sulfur dioxide gas is around, especially near the hot vents where it can't freeze out, so sound is theoretically possible. Maybe it was conducted along the ground, or the rope. Anyway, there was reason to scream. We were sliding toward a sharper drop-off—and, judging from our present angle, this one had to be virtually vertical.

I dug in my feet with renewed desperation, chewing up a mass of chips and dust. So did Helse and the women. But the drag of those in front, who were completely out of control, was too great. We were all being hauled to that dread brink.

Then a woman toward the front drew a knife. She sawed at the rope, and in a moment it parted. Then she dug in her heels, and the rest of us did likewise, and this concerted effort was effective at last, and slowly we slowed.

But as we crunched to a nervous halt, we watched the first five women tumble over the brink, led by Señora Ortega.

Maybe it was just an irregularity, leading to a gentler slope below. In that case they would be all right, just bruised and perhaps angry at the rest of us for cutting them loose. It was an anger we could accept.

We worked our way sidewise, finding a better slope, avoiding the ledge. We each jammed our heels in at each step, making sure we would not get out of control again, though this slowed us enormously. Then we moved down. When we got below the level of the ledge we looked across anxiously, to see what had become of our leading segment.

There was nothing. The ledge overhung a developing crevice that widened into a channel for an avalanche, almost vertical. Those women might as well have fallen straight down.

What could we do but go on? We could not even see the lost women, let alone reach them, let alone help them, in the highly unlikely chance they survived. Even the time it took to make the effort would prejudice the success of our mission.

All of us had known this trek would be dangerous; now we had the proof. A similar fate would befall the rest of us if we didn't complete our mission.

So we paused, helmets bowed in silent mourning for Doña Concha and the others. That was the best we could do.

Io had taken her first victims. I was very much afraid they would not be her last ones.

We continued down. There were other ledges and other crevices, none of them having been evident during our approach in the bubble. We proceeded slowly and avoided them. Once bitten, thrice shy!

This mountain had a great deal more character than we had anticipated, and now every trace irregularity loomed monstrously. Had we had any inkling of the enormity of the challenge the descent would represent, we would have landed elsewhere and avoided such a hazard. But that was most of our problem: ignorance and inexperience. Both were being rapidly abated, and we did at last make it to the base. But it took us almost an hour, twice as long as budgeted.

We untied ourselves and marched across the orange surface. The woman who had cut the rope was now our leader. I didn't know who she was, and suspect most of the others shared my ignorance, but it didn't matter. She had tried to decline the title, but the rest of us insisted, by gestures. She had saved herself and the rest of us by her quick action. Her snap judgments promised to be most reliable. There is indeed a place for hasty decisions, and that place is the surface of Io, for there simply is not time to consider all aspects of many alternatives at comfortable leisure.

Our new leader sought the ridges, not trusting the snow-filled recesses. But these ridges, though only a few meters high, were irregular and fragmented, so our firm footing exacted a price of devious routing.

We had to jump over crevices, and some of them were pretty wide and deep. Even with low gravity, this was nervous business.

Sure enough, one of our women slipped as she jumped over an especially bad one and fell down into it.

The crack was about thirty meters deep, closing into a dark crease. She was wedged down there unmoving.

We started to lower a rope to her, to pull her out. Then we saw her suit: It was deflating. The fall had punctured it; perhaps it had snagged on a sharp projection. Her air was gone. Further effort on our part was pointless. We could not reach her in time to do any good.

As it happened, I recognized the suit of this woman. She was the mother of one of the smaller children.

Her loss became more poignant in that moment, as I thought of what we would have to tell that child.

Señora Ortega's grandchildren, too, would have to be told. There was a grim business coming after we returned to the bubble, even if we completed our mission without further casualties. These were real people, not strangers, who were dying.

After that we avoided the worst cracks, though this meant risking the yellow snow. From some of the low areas fumes sprayed up, making little domes of frozen gas and particles like decorative waterfalls.

These were really miniature volcanoes, I realized, harmless as long as we didn't step in them. This was the land of volcanoes.

We tramped on for hours, sacrificing time in favor of safety. Dawn came, as the moon's rapid orbit brought it a quarter circle around Jupiter in ten hours—which hours we had used up in our pre-landing survey and then in our suiting-up and organization and slow descent and march. We had grossly underestimated the time such routine required.

On Callisto, dawn outside the dome is pretty but unremarkable since we have our own day-night schedule inside the domes. Here dawn was immediate and forceful—in fact, more savage than we had imagined.

Sulfur dioxide sublimates to gas in the ambience of day on Io. It is frozen only during the night. With the first touch of sunlight, the snow around us began to heat and convert. As that light slowly intensified, this conversion became explosive. The gas expanded upward and outward, filling the vacuum, swirling past the irregular features of the landscape. We were soon amidst an upward-flinging storm.

In addition, the ground quaked. Io was now in the close, swift phase of its orbit about Jupiter, and the tidal force was manifesting. The entire body of this world was being squished—and her molten interior was squirting out of every available pore. This was not a volcano, it was an entire planetary face of eruptions. We were caught in an awakening hell.

And this surely was the physical location of Hell, I realized. Hell did have to be somewhere, if it had any reality at all, and this was conveniently located. Satan could ship the newly damned souls out here at light-speed by the busload, less than an hour's trip from Earth, and dump them out amidst the burning sulfur and leave them to their own miserable devices. Where could they go? And we, like the unlikely fools we were, had come here voluntarily. Our souls would not have far to travel when they departed our bodies.

We had to rope ourselves together again, lest the rising winds of the filling vacuum blow us away. New crevices were yawning, and the constant shaking of the ground was as deeply unsettling to our attitude as to our bodies. We were accustomed to a stable planet. Where could we hide—from this?

We plowed on toward the target dome, huddling against the titanic forces of nature being unleashed about us. When a person fell, two more picked her up. When a segment of our line of people was blown toward a crevice, the rest of the line dug in instantly and pulled them back. We were learning to react correctly.

But vicious Io would not permit us to continue so readily. She opened a battery of jets almost beneath us. The ground cracked open, and a line of ejecta spewed out immediately behind Helse. The sulfur sand and gas rose like the cutting edge of a knife—and what it cut was our rope. Suddenly the last eight women in our line were separated from us; we perceived their suited outlines dimly through the haze.

We tried to rejoin them—but now the vent widened, as if seizing on its advantage, and the wash of gas and sand expanded. The ground beneath the eight of them broke up; fragments of it were blasted out, raining down in a larger pattern. A central plume of eruption formed, surrounded by an envelope of swirling gas. We could no longer see our friends—and I suspected that was just as well. They could not have survived that blast.

It may seem that I lacked emotion as I watched my companions perish. I think this was not the case; my emotion was stifled, suppressed, voided, because I knew there was nothing to be gained by it, for me or the others. I had concerns of survival too pressing to be dissipated by the energy of emotion. So I watched with a kind of numbness, unable to comprehend the larger significance of what I saw, and plodded on.

The woman before me doubled over. I saw her suit deflating; a particle from the eruption had holed it. I tried to clap my hands over the puncture, but it was useless; her remaining pressure leaked out around my clumsy gloves and she was dead before I knew it. I saw her face inside the helmet, bloating out, the eyes—oh, God, depressurization is a terrible thing!

My numbness suffered another jolt. I realized that there was absolutely no merit in my survival. That particle could have holed my suit as readily as this woman's; only pure chance had dictated that she had occupied that spot in its trajectory instead of I. Had we been moving ahead a trifle faster, I would have been there; slower, and the woman ahead of her would have been there. Similarly, it had been luck that cut off the eight women behind us; it could as readily have been nine. That would have taken out Helse.

At that point my speculation balked.

There was nothing to do but salvage the dead woman's oxygen tank. Fumblingly I moved it to my suit as a potential spare for whoever might need it. My suit had had about twenty-four hours of service remaining at the start of the Io venture, but some of the other suits might have less. I disconnected her body from the chain and we went on. Already I wished ardently that we had never landed on terrible Io; but it was far, far too late for any change of mind.

The angry planet was not through with us. She would not be satisfied, I realized, until every one of us was dead. A new gas vent opened, this one at a slant, and its blast shoved the twelve of us who remained rapidly forward toward the dome we were headed for. This might have seemed fortuitous—but we already knew the danger of too-swift progress and didn't like this. We tried to slow down, to control our route and our destiny—but the vent only increased its exhalation, while the ground shook violently, impeding our footing, and we had to move at Io's will, not our own.

The consequence of this loss of control was not long in coming. We found ourselves charging a vent overflowing with sulfur lava, the viscous bright-yellow material flowing slowly across out path. It would have been easy enough to avoid—if the wind behind us had not been shoving us directly into it.

We saw it coming and tried to veer left to get around it. But the lead women were already too close; they were carried right into the glowing mass. Their suits inflated like bubbles and burst with the sudden heat overload.

One woman, just at the edge of the flow, managed to brace her feet and turn and point left. Helse and I and the woman now in front of us scrambled desperately left—and the braced woman pulled on the rope, helping us crack the whip, so that we could gain impetus to avoid the lava.

It worked, and we scrambled to relative safety—but the woman who helped us could not maintain her footing and was carried on into the lava. She fell headlong, her suit immersed for a moment before the rapid heat expansion lifted it to the surface and popped it. She died helping us to live and so did several of the women closest to her. The rope burned through, setting our end free.