Olympus Mons
OLYMPUS MONS
2nd Edition
William Walling
© Cover image NASA/MOLA Science Team/O. DeGoursac, Adrian Lark
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
“Olympus Mons,” by William Walling. ISBN: 978-1-62137-319-3 (softcover); 978-1-62137-320-9 (hardcover); 978-1-62137-321-6 (ebook).
Library of Congress number on file with the publisher.
Published 2013 by Virtualbookworm.com Publishing Inc., P.O. Box 9949, College Station, TX 77842, US. 2013, William Walling. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of William Walling.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
You will do your work on water,
an’ you’ll lick the bloomin’ boots
of ‘im what’s got it!
Rudyard Kipling
Barrack Room Ballads, 1892
Contents
Foreword
One: Partners
Two: Tharsis
Three: Croatoan
Four: Special Session
Five: Foot-sloggers
Six: Hoots and Catcalls
Seven: The Blue Planet
Eight: The United Nations Two-Step
Nine: Olympus Rupes
Ten: Wolf Chase
Eleven: Glorious Gloria
Twelve: Hoists and Brewers
Thirteen: Chutes and Sledges
Fourteen: Iatrogenic Solution
Fifteen: Crunch Time
Sixteen: Go for Broke
Seventeen: The Canyon
Eighteen: Shaker
Nineteen: A Bad Break
Twenty: The Iceman
Twenty-one: Olympus Mons
Afterword
Foreword
We have a fountain in Burroughs now, a small tiled affair in the plaza leading to South Tunnel’s utility airlock. Water trickles down through the aqueduct pipeline, jets in the air, sparkles against the enclave’s translucent roof-shield, and tinkles back into the pool. I sit beside my fountain and listen to the water music and reminisce. Between times I talk into a recorder, telling tall tales about whichever goings-on in the bad ol’ days strike me as most memorable.
Memories, so many memories . . .
Time has fast-forwarded past me at a fearsome rate, picking up speed as the E-years go by, and leaving me only memories, sorrows and the catch-as-catch-can pleasures of old age. Lorna went to her reward a dozen E-years ago, shortly after Jay came back from the homeworld with a civil engineering sheepskin in hand, on it the fancy Universitas Academica Edinensis hologram seal. Once the medics invented a way to reverse the Bevvinase Process — a major breakthrough partly credited to workaholic Dr. Gloria Steinkritz-Jesperson — Marsrats able to chivvy up the outrageous amount of scratch needed for round-trip passage to the Earth-Luna System could undergo a fix, spend an E-week or so in oxygen quarantine, and visit the homeworld. Youngsters think nothing of taking the plunge, but damn few of us old-timers elect to go that route.
Our son, Jay, put up with each months-long whirligig trajectory for the best of good reasons: to do his studies in Edinburgh, where his Marsrat pedigree gave him second-string celebrity status. He went right to work soon’s he got back, too. He lent a hand in designing the upland Jesperson Enclave to the east of us on the doorstep of Pavonis Mons, one of three giant volcanoes roosting in a neat line atop the Tharsis bulge. Jay also helped design the subsurface tube that links Jesperson and ol’ Burroughs.
Some time ago I took the tube over to the fancy new digs bearing my former work-partner’s name, mainly to pay my respects at the memorial pillar his twin sons erected to honor their famous dad. Nested in a larger crater, the new enclave is sleek n’ shiny, lots roomier than ours. The esplanade ring over there makes our midway look sort of cramped and old hat, a reminder that Burroughs is showing its age — no surprise what with the wear, tear and hard times it’s seen. That can also be said of a creaky bag of bones and dried-up meat named Barnes, who’s content to sit beside his fountain with only dreams and memories for company.
So many memories, mostly routine granted, yet salted with a choice few anything but ordinary. The nostalgia bubble pops in my head more ‘n more often of late, sending me back in spirit to what began as just another breezy summer afternoon, then reversed course quicklike and turned into a red letter day that shook up Burroughs like it was in a blender, and woke us Marsrats from a long snooze.
One: Partners
My assigned work-partner, Jesperson, is a control freak. What’s more, he dotes on being a control freak, and isn’t shy about boasting of his “polar” likes and dislikes Don’t know about polar, but whatever the hell it is he’s got more ‘n plenty.
Slouched in the driver’s seat, his mind on autopilot, Jess moved the joystick with two casual fingers, steering Crawler Two around the bigger boulders in our path, letting the cleated tracks mash smaller rocks. Through the forward transpex bubble I saw the curved way station roof begin t’poke above the too-close horizon. “Jess, I’m bushed,” I complained one last time before losing the chance for good. “What say we skip the video, truck on home?”
Zero response.
As usual, I figured my partner had ignored my notion to skip the holovision whoop-de-do, and as usual I was wrong. The crawler rolled on another half-kilometer or so, jouncing and swaying over windrows of sand, crunching smaller rocks under the cleated tracks, when out of the blue he said, “Got to see it, Barney.”
“Why? You won’t learn a thing. It’ll be like watching a movie you’ve seen before. Why not just listen in on audio whilst trucking for home?”
Zero response.
I gave up, sat back in the co-driver seat and closed my eyes. The inauguration ceremony was slated to be piped sunward live for homeworld propaganda purposes — “live” that is, if you don’t count the light-minutes our lasercomm signal takes to bang the big dish in the far off Mojave, or its mates in the Gobi and elsewhere. The brain trust-elect at Burroughs, eighty-odd kilometers southeast of the volcano, had prepped for the transmission like it’d kick off a royal coronation. Jesperson was hot to watch the doings. I was indifferent, but saw no point in complaining again about stopping to see the show.
Two-man teams like us sashay out to the volcano once each E-month, or on occasion oftener. We use a telescope to inspect the downfall stretch of pipeline tacked to the sky-high, corrugated face of the Olympus Rupes escarpment, and then check-out the windmills powering heaters in the holding tanks at the base of the cliffs, where our precious water’s stored.
I opened my eyes when the crawler slowed, slewed on its port track and plowed twin furrows in the sand as it forged into the way station’s stub-walled compound. Don’t know if any ground-pounders in Seattle, Stuttgart or Sydney have ever heard of our way station, which is nothing much; a pair of connected, pressurized Quonset-type shelters half-buried in drifted, rust-colored sand a few klicks southeast of the volcano. Now and then, if a team’s plumb tuckered out or its too late in the day to safely truck back to Burroughs, we overnight in the less than comfy hidey hole stocked with tools, belt and pressure-suit batteries, freeze-dried food, water, first-aid supplies and so forth. The way station also doubles-down as a lifeboat in an emergency.
Jesperson slewed Cee Two in a half-circle on its starboard track, parked and flipped switches to power-down. We took our time going through the wriggles and contortions it takes to get into vacuum gear, and as a matter of habit checked the vitals in each others’ life support readouts — a drill no seasoned Marsrat would e
ver dare skip. Exiting through the crawler’s small, coffin-sized airlock chamber one at a time, we crossed the short stretch of windblown sand to the way station airlock.
Inside pressure, I opened my faceplate lens, wincing when the sudden arctic chill hit my face, undogged and lifted off the suit’s headpiece, turned up the heat in the compartment, and went through the contortions and monkey-motions it takes to get out of a pressure-suit. Next came the battery exchange ritual. Plugging-in both sets of depleted energy cells for quick recharge, I swilled water and choked down one of the horse-pill caplets that replenish your electrolytes.
After doing his personal housekeeping duties same as me, Jesperson energized the aged holovision tank that gathers dust for E-weeks or sometimes months on end. Tuning in the pre-ceremony warmup doings at Burroughs, he watched for a few seconds and then, snide by nature, sang out, “Hark, ye Earthworms, to a live broadcast from Botany Bay!”
I quibbled about ‘live,’ mentioning the transmission signal delay.
His “apology” mocked my objection. “Sorry, make that dead from Botany Bay.”
Among his other likes and dislikes, quirks, follies and whatever else, calling our home away from home “Botany Bay” is true-to-form, certified Jesperson. He loves to bait me by trolling with sly word traps that’re certain to egg me into asking what the hell he’s talking about. I fooled him this time by not from biting on “Botany Bay.” I’d looked it up in our database, and learned how the Brits had first made Australia a penal colony. An oddball in dozens of cockeyed ways, my partner never explains his smartass remarks. It pains me to ‘fess up, but an ex-high school football coach like me gets left in the dark by eighty or ninety percent of the jargon that rolls off my partner’s forked tongue, let alone the ditzy things he ups and does.
The broadcast went on the air, and the brain trust-elect opened the doings with a canned version of our new anthem: the “Mars” theme from an astrology-inspired mishmash called “The Planets” by a British musicsmith named Gustav Holst, information supplied by the Jespersonian Fount of all Knowledge. My partner loves to spew music, art, and book talk, most of it so highfalutin’ that hardly anyone would have enough patience to try and unravel. I lean on his smarts, but only up to a point. “You’re joshing,” I said. “What’s a Brit doing with a moniker like Holst?”
He put a finger to his lips. “Shush, Barney! Pretend you’re a music lover, and listen.”
Huh, some anthem! You can’t hum, whistle, or sing along with Mr. Holst’s ear-bending brass and thunder. Oh, it does grab you in sort of a monotonous, grinding way. On that score it suits Mars to a tee.
At the fadeout our enclave’s senior medic, Deputy Director-elect Dr. Hiroshi Yokomizo faced the three-headed holovision camera at the podium smiling like the happy troop he is. Flushed with the dignity of his new office, Yokie looked serenely nervous. Even in the midst of a hand-waving argument his ranting comes at you through a cherub’s toothy grin.
Back-and-forth conversation with the homeworld doesn’t work so good; nobody’d be willing to put up with a minutes-long wait ‘twixt question and answer. He did his best to convince the earthside holovision audience he faced a good-sized crowd, not just a hundred-and-ninety leathery, semi-starved Marsrats, barring the few handfuls who hadn’t bothered to stop work and show up in the meeting area.
Wait, hold on. The current headcount’s a hundred and eighty-nine Marsrats, including absentees like Jesperson and me. About an E-month ago, nice Mrs. Whatzername, a roly-poly Inuit lady who most likely smiled even while she slept, had been found frozen outside North Tunnel. The headcount I mentioned only chalks up us adults, not the clutch of hardy, resilient little demons Vic Aguilar likes to call Marsratons in the be-yoo-ti-ful Spanish language. One of the kiddies is mine and Lorna’s.
If your bag is watching a toddler try to toddle loaded down with belt-slung batteries powering his or her reworked metabolism, be sure to beat a path to the fabulous Red Planet. Inflicting Mars on one innocent babe seemed crime enough; my squeeze and I have made double-sure we’ll never have another. All but two of the current crop were born under the roof-shield enclosing Burroughs Enclave, out where the harsh, ocher highlands of Tharsis taper west into the harsh, ochre lowlands of Amazonis Planitia, as if you could tell the difference. Our enclave nests in a smallish dimple less than three kilometers across ringwall rim-to-rim, smallish I should say in comparison to impact craters in other parts of this frozen dustball. Doc Franklin, once an earthside know-it-all seismologist, relabeled himself a Martian know-it-all areographer upon arriving here. He describes craters as “astroblemes,” and by that reckoning we Marsrats spend our touch-and-go lives in a shallow, moderate-sized “blemish.”
Self-interest tops the list of all homeworld corporations, and Vonex International is no exception. Vonex is the giant conglomerate that stole the limelight from an international group of founders who’d poured man-years of effort and billions or trillions of new dollars into an ambitious program to seed-populate Mars. The Vonex fat cats tried to name the raw enclave they funded Vonex Colony, but the half-dozen pioneers who first set foot here nixed that notion. Contrary to what earthside consumers may think, our orphaned slice of modified humanity scratches out an existence in a complex named after Dr. Alan C. Burroughs, the sterling pioneer who led a small group of brave original settlers, not Edgar Rice Burroughs, a scribbler of yore who wrote fanciful tales about Martian canals and derring-do sword wavers busy rescuing damsels in distress and strayed princesses, but that was long before my time. By all accounts the very best of good guys, Doc Burroughs lies beneath a sculpted marker out in the rubble-strewn Tharsis wasteland.
At any rate, exit through either access tunnel and you’ll wait in the big utility airlock while pumps scavenge the enclave’s pressurized, humidified air. Step outside the ringwall, not forgetting to zip a hooded ultraviolet cloak over your vacuum gear, and you’ll see the wan sun standing in a sky that shades from dull salmon pink near the too-close horizon to less of a dull shade overhead. If you’re foolhardy enough to go out into the bone-freezing night, best wear powered thermal underwear, the heaviest insulating parka in your closet, and take care to check the charge in your pressure-suit batteries else be found stretched out stiff ‘n brittle under the unwinking stars like nice Mrs. Whatzername.
Jesperson and I hung in there listening to Yokie’s kickoff spiel until he began to trumpet the “selfless dedication” of Vonex, the conglomerate octopus contracted till now to sustain our brave, nonprofit new world, all the while filing for billions in tax write-offs. Yokie’s propaganda spiel, wrung straight from Vonex recruitment brochures, touted Burroughs as, “A self-sustaining bastion of humanity, a nucleus society interdicted from overpopulation and the ever present threat of thermonuclear Armageddon,” et cetera, so forth ‘n so on. His cheerleader spiel earned a flatulent raspberry from Jesperson, a sentiment I echoed. We’d both heard that “self-sustaining” line of bullshit once too often. Not counting an arm-long list of pharmacy items, any number of synthetic goods and a grab bag of “luxuries” we can’t make for ourselves, the enclave’s “self-sustaining independence” — call it a “colony” to some Marsrat’s face if you feel extra-brave — has been oversold to the billions who spend their lives beneath sunny blue skies, with green grass growing all around, all around. Independent and self-sustaining are we? Sure, until a piece of sky junk with our name on it screams down through the thin, all-but-vacuum atmosphere at umpteen klicks-per-second and turns our smallish “astrobleme” into a biggie, or the gawdawful cold does us in, or we run out of precious water, or Olympus Mons wakes from ancient slumbers and blows its sky-high top.
***
After a while Jesperson began fidgeting restlessly, nor was he alone. Yokie was praising the remarkable strides our engineering and agronomy teams had taken during the past year — our year, 686.996 E-days to be exact. In the middle of his spiel he must’ve realized he was rambling. He hemmed and hawed, backed and filled before intro
ducing about-to-be-crowned Burroughs Director-elect Walther Scheiermann.
“Achtung!” Jesperson’s drill sergeant bark would’ve rattled the windows if there’d been any. “Sprach auch den Führer,” he added, or words to that effect; it made him sound self-satisfied, maybe a touch dimwitted, too.
“Softly,” I advised, “show some respect, and while you’re at it talk American.”
He snorted something foulmouthed I won’t bother to record. “Energetic, articulate gnome,” and “Pluperfect paradigm of pomposity,” are two favorite terms my snotty partner uses to describe Scheiermann, whose heart may be in the right place though he himself is not; he should’ve stayed home teaching grad students philosophy at some ivied university. Anyhow, the enclave’s about-to-be minted father figure slipped into his sermon the way a landlubber eases into chilly water, by way of a folksy anecdote, then laid it on more thickly than had Yokomizo — pure Vonex party line and a waste of breath. Nine of every ten homeworld consumers think of us Marsrats as freaks. What burns and smarts and festers is that they’re probably right.
Once, whilst goofing off in Jesperson’s messy two-room domicile, I happened to gripe about being forever stuck as a Marsrat, but had never been told the nitty-gritty details of what or how it’d changed me. Without a word, my partner had gone to the computer terminal that’s in every assigned domicile, muttering, “Once there was a great book in the database that covered the subject.” He talked to the computer, surfing for the author and title. “Ah, here we are. Come have a look, Barney. Read just the foreword; farther on, it gets hairy and technical.”
“Never mind, Bwana. I really should be getting over to —”
“Read it!” he invited none too politely, practically shoving me into the chair. “It’ll do wonders to eclipse your ignorance.”