Olympus Mons (40 page)

We had bucked the stiff odds against finding it, and despite those oppressive odds had
located
the damage. Catch was, getting near enough to do the fix would be a cinch
only
if either of us had wings.

To me, it was as if we'd stumbled across the mother lode only to learn that every gram of the bonanza was pure fool's gold. Standing on the ringwall beside Jesperson, I fought the howling wind with a sick, helpless feeling growing inside me. I agonized over the discovery, and that made whatever I'd meant to say stick in my throat. The longer I agonized, the sicker I felt.

In some bygone age a piece of sky junk had sailed down through the super-thin atmosphere at umpteen klicks-per-second and smashed into the volcano, blasting out a smallish impact crater. Below the windswept ringwall crest, the crater floor tilted upward along with the gently rising terrain, and the pipeline came through the hacked out, man-made notch beside us, went uphill about three meters to a knee, then jogged upward and ran parallel to the incline of the crater's rubble strewn floor. The pipe string passed above the top of the splash peak at the crater's center, where it was anchored by a short pylon, supported on either side of the peak by shock-dampening struts slung from a set of spindly, evenly spaced pylons walking away across the crater floor.

Not far past the knee, where the pipeline jogged upward at a moderate angle, a lower coupling had let go. Jesperson guessed that the quake had swayed the span's unsupported section too far laterally for the dampening struts on either side of the break “to relieve the sudden, rapidly shifting back-and-forth loads”
—
his very words. The fractured coupling hung in the screaming wind, dangling by thicknesses of unbroken fiberglass insulation. Beneath the break, a stalactite of frozen water had all but joined a cone-shaped stalagmite of ice mounded up from the crater's inner slope.

Two-thirds dead from exhaustion, and for the moment dead certain everything we had struggled and fought for had been in vain, I thought about the agonies we'd endured on the trek. I thought about the two bo's who had given their all to help us get here, and who now lay unmoving on slopes lower down.

It brought me back to the present when I noticed Jesperson shucking off his backpack and parachute, as well as the pair of chest-slung carbon dioxide flasks he'd been carrying. Unzipping and shrugging off his summer parka, he bent over to set the air bottles and a few chunks of scoria on the cloak to keep it from blowing away. In his raw pressure-suit, he looked naked.

“What're you . . . up to, Bwana?”

“Getting set to tackle the busted pipe. What the hell did you think?”

“How?”

“Watch and see.”

I revolved his answer, and it scared me. “Best wait till morning to do whatever craziness you have in mind. Not much daylight's left, so the
—
”

“Can't.” He bit the word short, gestured with a gauntlet. “Look east, toward Ascraeus.”

I did as directed, facing in the direction where I thought the distant volcano might be, and the keening wind staggered me backward a half-step. I had to lean into the wind at an angle just to stay upright and see what it was he wanted me to see. Long, reddish-brown tongues were licking swatches of dust from the plains below, far beyond the volcano's too-close horizon. Much of the eastern sky was blotted out by a murky undercast.

“Sandstorm!” My yelp sounded too loud in my own ears.

Jesperson's confirming nod was hard to see.

“Why the hell didn't you warn me?”

“Extra frets never make anything easier,” he told me. “From the look and feel of it, a major blow's on the way, coming fast enough to serve up a king-sized problem for thee and me.” Using his right gauntlet, he scraped loose, powdery dust from the lee side of a boulder and held it aloft. The wind instantly snatched it away. “I make it a hundred and fifty kph, maybe more, and steadily getting stronger. We can't wait, Barney. It's now-or-never time.”

“You said the dust rarely if ever gets up this high.”

“True, far as I know; yet the wind sure as hell does. Feel it?”

I glanced at the break in the pipeline suspended above a windblown gulf, and swallowed hard. “You're thinking to . . . crawl out there and do the fix?”

“How else?”

“Jesus! It's awful chancy. If even a dab of moisture's clinging to that pipe and your pressure-suit freezes to it, you'll turn into a permanent resident. Then there's the wind. Slip and fall, and it's a killer tumble down to the
—
”

“There's a way to cheat the breeze,” he said airily, making me think his confidence in his own ability just might be misplaced. “Wind isn't yet strong enough to blow me away, and you can forget about loose moisture on the pipe. Every molecule of water evaporates here, the exception being a gross, continuous spill like that from the broken coupling. I'll have to watch every move, but the fix is doable.”

He asked me to open his backpack, take out an ice ax, and slide it handle-first into the loop at his pressure-suit's utility belt, then wanted both special patch kits. I turned around, let him take one kit from my backpack, then went around behind him and lifted the other from his pack. He plugged the heater elements of both kits into his pressure-suit's external power outlets, hung the canisters on either side of his belt by the clips, and had me unhitch the length of safety line we'd used to rope ourselves together during the hairiest pitches whilst climbing those ravines. Thick-fingered due to the p-suit's hampering gauntlets, I tied one end of fiberglass line to the padeye at his suit's utility belt; he wound the slack twice around his torso, again around his p-suit's neck dam.

He handed the coil back to me, grimaced, indulged in a two-beat pause as if psyching himself up for the effort, and said, “Ease down the inner slope, Barney. Get directly upwind of me, and pace me as I crawl out. Guy me with the line; don't pull, just keep it taut. Can do?”

“Bet your sweet ass!”

“That's
exactly
what I'm betting,” he quipped, his patented go-to-hell grin flashing briefly through the clear, unpolarized lens of his faceplate. He snapped the bayonet fitting of his air hose into the socket of a charged, discarded flask, took five or six deep whiffs of carbon dioxide and disconnected. Sans air supply, with both gauntlets free, he bent forward into the wind, and stepped over to the notch. First lifting one articulated knee of his pressure-suit over the pipe
—
an awkward move for anyone in vacuum gear
—
and climbed astride the slick glass pipe.

Designed to carry a small, constant outflow dribble from the manifold system, not a large volume of water, the heavily insulated pipe sections between coupling flanges are about a third of a meter in outside diameter. Antsy as hell, I took pains to carefully pick my way down through the rubble, paying out fiberglass line as I went, halted when I found a reasonable place to stand, and gently pulled the line taut. Winding the free end twice around my left gauntlet, I clutched it firmly with the right gauntlet.

Jesperson shinnied out on the pipe, moving extra-cautiously, straddling the pipe torso-erect to let the guy line take up the strain caused by the hefty wind blast on his bulky, fully inflated pressure-suit. I did my best to stay directly abreast of his progress, moving farther downhill one slow, careful step at a time, but the ground fell away too steeply for the move to be effective. Obstacles were everywhere underfoot, mostly rubble that tended to roll or slide beneath my overboots. It was a chancy descent, and I took it real slow and easy, being extra-careful not to stumble.

Without the guy line to help stabilize him, Jesperson would never have been able to stay balanced on that frigid, nearly frictionless glass pipe. The term “slick as glass” is no laughing matter when you're clinging to the real article in a hurricane blowing above a meters-deep gulf above floor of a crater. He reached the knee not far below the break, and I was sure enough upwind of him, but quartering in a half-crouch, knees bent, in a spot neither of us would have chosen.

Obviously caring not at all for my anchor point, Jesperson leaned forward very slowly, supporting himself with both gauntlets, crossed his overboots underneath the pipe and bent farther until the lens of his faceplate touched the pipe's sharply curved upper surface. He made a choppy gesture with one gauntlet. “Get downhill, Barney,” he requested, his voice sounding high-pitched, strained. “Find a spot directly across from me.”

“Can do.”

Clutching the pipe tightly with knees and gauntlets, he waited torso-prone while I worked my way down step by cautious step, making double-sure to keep the line taut. When I halted, he said, “A little more.”

Not letting the line go entirely slack, I made my way down through the jumbled mess one slow footfall at a time. When it looked like I was as directly upwind of him as I could get, I gave two light jerks on the line to let him know I was in position, and held the fiber glass rope firmly with both gauntlets.

“Good, that's good,” he said. “Plant your overboots firmly, and stay put.”

“Hang on till I set myself.” Saying it was easier than doing it. Once I figured I was stable, I told him so.

Jesperson went to work. Knees locked around the pipe, he gradually came torso-erect, lifted the ice axe from his utility belt, looping the fiberglass thong around the wrist of his right gauntlet, and grasped the handle. He began chipping away at the long, wind-curved stalactite hanging underneath the break. He worked steadily, without pause. When most of the giant icicle was gone on one side, he switched the ax to his left gauntlet and chipped away some more. A few larger ice shards plunged to the crater floor, but the ravening wind carried most away in a hailstorm of shining particles.

If I live a thousand E-years, I'll
never
forget the picture Jesperson made silhouetted against the low sun astride that black glass pipe, buffeted by a howler of a sandstorm screaming high across the most humongous volcanic pile in the whole Solar System. He chipped and chipped steadily, sending showers of ice crystals that sparkled in the low sun flying away horizontally each time the tip of his axe hit the stalactite.

Once the fixed pipe coupling was cleared of most ice, the lower stalactite fell away and he began to chip a concave cavity inside the open break on the pipe's underside. Working awkwardly, blindly with what to me was unbelievable dexterity he chipped away here, chipped away there, using agonizing care, little by little hollowing the opening. Standing below and off to the side, directly upwind of him clutching the guy line in a two-gauntlet death grip, I was able to see up into the cavity, but he could not, and had to judge his progress by feel. I coached him on how and where to chip.

Finishing, he backed up a short ways, then bent forward again until he was semi-prone. Taking extra pains, he used the ax's pointy tip to scour the inner lip of the fixed pipe section, where it had once nested against the broken, dangling coupling held in place by two thicknesses of fiberglass insulation. After slipping the ax handle back through his utility belt loop, he stayed prone, knees still locked around the pipe, reached underneath with both gauntlets and felt around, trying to assure himself that the pipe's lower lip, where the broken coupling section had once nested, was mostly free of ice. Satisfied at last, he sat up halfway and inched forward.

Unclipping a short coil of line from his utility belt, he passed one end under the pipe; the wind obliged, blowing the free end over to where he could reach for and grab it with his other gauntlet. Cautiously straightening until he was upright again, he tied a thick-fingered loop in the line and began fiddling with it, flipping the loop again and again as he shinnied slowly backward. He tried and tried, then he tried again and finally got the loose, flapping noose under the forward end of the dangling coupling section. Rearing back, he yanked upward hard, using both gauntlets. The broken chunk of coupling rose a few decimeters; it'd been frozen in place so long that it stuck fast again in the changed position. He kept on tugging upward, and the coupling chunk moved a little more after each series of hearty yanks.

After a few more minutes of arm-weary tugging, the gap had almost closed. He struggled with the rope, leaned backward, strained to tug harder. The gap narrowed, narrowed still more, and at last slipped almost totally back in its proper place, the broken section again nesting against the pipe's curved, flanged underside.

I could hear Jesperson panting not only from exertion; rebreathing his exhalation was beginning to weaken him. I stayed to windward, overboots firmly planted, and waited patiently while he rested. Then he tied off the line, backed up a short distance along the pipe and opened the patch kit slung his on the left side of his utility belt. Extracting the glass-cloth roll wound around a spindle, he clutched it tightly in both gauntlets lest it blow away, keeping the flap short; even so, it fluttered wildly in the rising gale. Holding the roll flat against the pipe with one straining gauntlet, he opened the electrically warmed pot and used his free gauntlet to daub a brush loaded with gunk
—
some kind of gluey, fast-curing epoxy resin we had stocked to do emergency pipeline repairs down in Tharsis
—
over the flap's far end to start it. He stuck the brush back in the warmed pot and snapped down the lid. The gunk, whatever it was, air-cured in no time in that gale. Jess took great pains to slowly wind a glass-cloth shroud around and under the break. It was painstaking, tedious work
—
a major understatement, since much of it had to be done by feel alone. My arms ached from holding the safety line taut, but I would've cheerfully let both arms fall off before releasing my grip and letting the guy line go slack. His arms, if he could feel them at all, he must've felt had already dropped off.