"Very good idea, Tanya," Joseph said loudly over Ozaki's protestations. "Come, Ozaki, let us suit up."
"But ..."
"Come!" Joseph said, handing him his Marsuit and helmet. Gus continued to sit looking out the window from the copilot seat and said nothing.
THE RIDE back down the northwest side of the mountain was long and tedious. Although Gus tried to keep a vigilant scientist's eye looking at every rock and vent and lava tube, he often found his head jerking upright as he was lulled to sleep by the hum of the cableway and the rocking of his harness by the periodic bumps as they passed over the idler wheels that kept the cable off the ground.
"Too big," Ozaki observed during one long boring stretch. Gus could only agree.
Finally they came to the end of the line.
"Northwest Ten," Tanya sang brightly. "Time for dinner—and then we go to see Pavlova Falls!"
Gus, who had found it necessary to use his suit system an hour previously during the long last leg of the journey, cooperated by staying outside and dumping his suit tank into the holding tank through an outside service tube, while the others crowded into the cramped six-person hut and took turns using the tiny bathroom. They cooked one of their larger meals and, at Tanya's urging, left the housekeeping chores for later.
"The falls are thirty kilometers away and we want to get there before the Sun is setting," she said, getting into her Marsuit.
Tanya drove them up the volcano a little to get around the end of a ridge that towered above their campsite, then around the flank of the volcano toward the west. Far ahead of them they could see a long sheer scarp formed in the northwest flank from a large slumping of the side of the mountain. The scarp extended a third of the way up the side of the volcano from the rim. After about an hour and a half of travel, Tanya turned the crawler to the right and headed for the rim. There was a deep gash in the slope, indicating a canyon below, and she drove to the sunward side of the gash, stopping about halfway along. They climbed out of the crawler and walked carefully to the edge of the rim.
"There is Pavlova Falls," Tanya said, pointing proudly.
Gus looked across the canyon to the cliff face on the other side. The setting Sun was almost behind them so the cliff face was in full sunlight. About three hundred meters down from the rim of the cliff was a thick dark red-brown layer over a lighter gray-black layer. The softer red-brown layer had eroded away at one point just above the harder gray-black layer to form a cave, and from that cave came a small stream of water and steam.
The steam rose into the air and dissipated, while the water flowed to the lip of the gray-black layer and fell off down to the surface of Mars, some six kilometers below. The waterfall broke up into a veil of droplets almost immediately and slowly trailed away to the south and west, carried away by the thin cyclonic Martian trade winds that made their way around the base of the Olympus Mons cliffs. On one side of the falls was a semicircular band of reflected sunlight, brightly colored near the top and fading into white.
"A rainbow!" Gus said. "A Martian rainbow."
"Technically a spraybow," Chris interjected.
"I notice that colors only last for a few hundred meters, then rainbow turns white, although back reflection is quite strong," Ozaki said. "Water must be freezing as it falls and turning into ice crystals."
"What is the temperature of the emerging stream?" Gus asked.
"I climbed down and obtained samples," Tanya said. "The water is superheated by the volcano to one hundred three Celsius and has dissolved many minerals."
"That's why I detect plenty of volcanic gases," Chris said, looking at the readouts on his atmospheric analyzer.
Tanya continued. "This waterfall shows that there was plenty of water in the ground to lubricate faults and cause the kind of uplift faulting needed to make these ramparts around Olympus Mons."
"They are just the proof I need to show that thick ice existed at these altitudes above the Martian surface," Joseph countered loudly. "Ice intruding on an old, cold, dormant layer was later covered by ashes from a subsequent eruption. You are now seeing this trapped ice finally find its way out."
"Ashes? Ashes?" Tanya said, looking around. "If this volcano has ash eruptions, where are the cinder cones you see on every other ash-emitting volcano? No ash cones, no ashes."
"Every other Earth volcano, Tanya," Joseph said. "This is Mars, and things are different here."
"The sun has set," Ozaki interrupted. "It will be getting dark soon."
"All right," Tanya said, swallowing her reply to Joseph. "We should go now." She grabbed Ozaki and Chris by the elbows and led the way back to the crawler.
THE NEXT day they got up early, cleaned up the hut and crawler, and went out on the level plain around the Northwest Ten cable-way station.
"How do we get down off this cliff?" Gus asked, looking around for another cable station.
"We have to go up first," Tanya said, putting one hand on his shoulder and pointing to the top of a nearby ridge with her other. Gus looked up and saw a tiny cable station perched high above them.
"Ohh ..." he groaned.
"It's only two kilometers away," Tanya said with a grin in her voice.
"Yeah—but one of those kilometers is up!" Gus objected.
"You are getting too heavy anyway." Tanya dropped her arm to hug him around the waist. "Exercise will help you lose weight."
"Too heavy?" Joseph chided. "Tanya, how would you know?"
Tanya was glad her helmet tint was set on dark. She didn't answer, but dropped her arm from Gus' waist and started off on the path to the steps cut up the side of the nearby ridge.
"This ridge we are on is really something," Gus said as they reached the northwest lift station sitting on a ledge halfway down from the crown of the ridge. "It goes all the way down to the plains below. Looks like you should be able to climb down along the spine of the ridge all the way to the bottom without too much trouble."
"That's how we got first cable down," Tanya said. "We drove a crawler up the east side lava slope to get on top of the mountain, then came to this point on the northwest cliff face. We couldn't throw a rope over, since the cliff face was not steep enough; so two techs with mountain experience and I went down the spine of the ridge, leaving a length of light tether behind us as we went."
"How far was it?" Gus asked.
"The ridge is sixty kilometers long and drops eight kilometers in that distance, so the average slope was not bad," Tanya said. "Once we got to the bottom, they tied the tether to the crawler and pulled it northward, keeping it taut, until the tether came free. Then they moved it over to the middle of the valley to the east of the ridge and used it to haul up the first cable from the bottom lift station." While she had been talking, Gus had been using the magnification capabilities of his helmeyes to scan the distant ground below them.
"I can see the bottom lift station now," Gus said. "It's much further away than the southeast lift."
"That's because there is more slumping at the base of the cliffs on the northwest side, and the station has to be placed further away."
"I can see the hopiter waiting for us," Gus said. "They must have landed yesterday. Their refueler modules are all spread out."
"Give them a call," Tanya said.
"Gus Armstrong at Northeast Ten Lift Station calling Hopiter Eight," Gus sent.
"Thank goodness you have arrived," a strained, high-pitched voice replied.
"Fred Whimple!" Gus exclaimed. "What are you doing here? I thought you were running things at the institute!"
"I'm sorry, Dr. Armstrong," the reply came. "But it was very important. I received a message for you. From your ... from General Alexander Armstrong. It starts out with top secret, NOFORN, eyes only, and other classification statements. Then there's a short message in code. Only I didn't decode the message, since I didn't know if you would want me to. I came with the message and your codebook. Since the codebook is top secret and the hopiter has no classified storage facility
, I've been staying awake to keep it safe."
"How long have you been without sleep, Fred?" Gus gently asked.
"Only thirty-six hours, sir ... but I am doing fine, sir," Fred replied, but there was a stifled yawn at the end of the transmission.
"I'll be right down. Tell the hopiter engineer to monitor the cable-lift station down there in case I don't handle the radio controls right." He turned to Tanya, but she had been listening and had the harness ready for him.
"I'll go with you," she said, pulling down another harness. "The others can ride down with our supply bag."
The two of them stepped off the edge of the ledge and the cable whirred softly up to speed as they glided down alongside the ridge into the valley below. Gus tried to take a professional interest in the ridge formation as he moved along it, but his mind was busy trying to puzzle out what could be in the message from Alex.
Tanya pushed the cable-lift to its maximum speed, but it was still over ninety minutes before they came to a landing.
"Mr. Whimple is waiting for you in the hopiter," the engineer said as they landed. "He gave me instructions that no one else should come in until you say so, sir."
He looked at Tanya. "He was especially specific about you not being allowed in, Dr. Pavlova, because of the NOFORN restriction. You'll have to wait in the hut over there with the hopiter pilot, I guess."
"Humph," Tanya said. "I'll stay here and monitor the cable-lift station while the other two come down. You had better go read your secret message, Mr. Director."
Gus headed for the hopiter. The airlock door didn't open as he approached. He had to cycle it by himself. When he reached the main cabin, he found Fred Whimple, toppled over in a chair, sound asleep.
Fred Whimple's small body was as thin as that of a starving street waif. Everyone else in space wore coveralls and boots. But Fred's expensive, tailored, brown-vested business suits with the padded shoulders and the custom-made brown Italian shoes for his tiny feet gave his body a substance that it lacked when unclothed. Even now, sound asleep, the large head with the bulging brow under neatly combed, thinning brown hair still looked as superintelligent as ever. Fred had a Ph.D. in chemistry—magna cum laude—but as he had never had the self-confidence needed to write a convincing research grant proposal, he had drifted into administration. The envelope containing the coded message was still gripped in the slim, manicured fingers of his right hand, but the top secret code-book had slipped to the floor.
"You did well, Fred," Gus said as he quietly removed his helmet and Marsuit. "And no, I won't accept your resignation for failing to stay awake. You're too talented to lose. If only you had some tiny little bit of self-confidence ..." He reached down and picked up the codebook, then gently extracted the envelope from Fred Whimple's fingers.
WITH THE message decoded and read, Gus woke Fred up by starting a conversation with him and then speaking louder and louder.
"... and so in view of the content of the message, Fred, instead of returning to Olympia, I'm going on to visit Boreal Base at the North Pole. If you are not too tired, Fred, please arrange for another hopiter and pilot. You are not too tired, are you, Fred?"
Fred struggled awake, "Oh! No, sir! Not too tired ..."
"Good. Please arrange for another hopiter and pilot to take me to Boreal Base."
"Yes, sir. Right away." Fred Whimple staggered to his feet, blinked himself awake, and headed for the radio on the control deck.
IT TURNED out to be impossible to get Tanya alone to talk to her for almost a full sol. If it wasn't Joseph or Chris or Ozaki in the hut, it was the pilot or engineer either in the hut or in the hopiter. He couldn't talk to her outside, because then anything they said could be heard over the suit radios, which were automatically monitored by the hut and the hopiter. Once the second hopiter had lifted off from Olympia and was on its way, Gus gathered them all in the hut to try to explain what was going on.
Tanya was sitting opposite Gus, her arms draped in a friendly fashion around the shoulders of the hopiter pilot and engineer. Chris was curled up in a top bunk overhead, for his knees kept banging the hanging table when he sat on the middle bunk.
"I can't tell you why, right now, but it's important that I go on to the North Pole from here as soon as possible. The rest of you need to get back to your activities at Olympia, so I've called a second hopiter to hop you back. It's now on its way, so I'll be leaving shortly in the hopiter that is here."
"Good thing we stayed an extra day," the hopiter engineer said. "I was able to process a lot more CO2 with the extra time, and now we got plenty of LOX and carbon monoxide for the big hop to the pole."
"Tanya will be going with me," Gus went on bluntly, not knowing any other way to do it.
"Me?" Tanya exclaimed, bewildered and a little annoyed at not being consulted. She pulled down her arms from the two men on either side of her and leaned forward on the hanging table.
"I've got to get my team together to restart the caldera core survey program," she said intently.
"It's important, Tanya," he replied. "I'll have to let you know why later ..." He reached across the table to put his hand imploringly on hers. "Trust me."
Tanya hesitated. But one thing was sure—she trusted Gus. "Okay," she said.
"I am completely at a loss, Dr. Armstrong," Fred Whimple said, turning to look at Gus. "You do recall the NOFORN designation on the message."
"I do, Fred," Gus said patiently.
"Then I can conceive of no logical reason for Dr. Pavlova to accompany you on this classified mission."
Joseph leaned back in the bunk with a smirk on his face and reached around Gus to tap Fred on the shoulder. "Someday I'll have to tell you a little story, Fred," he said in a fake whisper. "About unusual uses for crawlers."
"Tanya will be going with me," Gus repeated. He paused to see if there were any additional protests. Then he rose and pushed the table between them up to the ceiling.
"Now, if those waiting for a hop back to Olympia will climb into the right-side bunks with Chris, the rest of us will raise the left-side bunks and have a little room to get into our Marsuits."
THE STUBBY, pointed body of the hopiter stood some distance away from the hut on its five landing legs, looking rather like a wounded scarab beetle with its nose pointed straight up into the air and its eviscerated trachea spread out on the ground around it. The hopiter was a suborbital rocket that was the vehicle of choice for exploration of the vast land area of Mars—nearly equal to the dry land area of Earth.
Starting from any point on Mars, a hopiter could fire its carbon monoxide-liquid oxygen rockets and "hop" off in a suborbital trajectory that could go to any other point on Mars in less than an hour. Once there, it did not need a prepared landing field, but could hover on its rockets, find a reasonably level place to land, and set down on its superstable platform of five actively controlled feet, any noncontiguous three of which would suffice to hold the ship upright.
Once landed, converters would be deployed to suck up the carbon dioxide atmosphere of Mars, decompose it into oxygen and carbon monoxide, and store the resultant propellants in tanks ready for the next takeoff. The only limitation of the hopiter was the time and energy it took to make the fuel. If the energy supply was weak, such as that provided by solar cells, then the time between hops could be weeks or months. With a Batusov reactor aboard to efficiently convert a few hundred micrograms of antimatter into electrical energy, the fuel needed could be generated in a day or two.
Tanya and Gus helped the pilot and engineer of the hopiter fold and store the air ducts, fans, and radiators that were the outside portions of the fuel manufacturing facility of the hopiter. There was still a lengthy checklist to go through, however, so they had a few minutes alone in the large passenger compartment in the base of the hopiter while the pilot was busy on the control deck up above and the engineer worked outside.
"What were you, Ivan Petrovich, and Viktor Braginsky doing on the North Pole ice when we attacked?"
Gus asked in a whisper.
"So that's why you want me to go with you to the North Pole," Tanya said, quickly catching on, but not really answering the question.
"What was out there that was so important that the commissar of Mars had to go there to see it in person?" Gus insisted.
"Why ..." Tanya hesitated, suddenly looking truly bewildered. "I don't know!"
"You don't know?" Gus asked in an unbelieving tone. He looked away from her.
"I don't know," she repeated firmly, stroking him across the shoulders with one hand and pulling his chin back around with the other so she was looking straight into his eyes. "I know it sounds strange, but so many things happened that day and the following days, that I never had time to wonder about the reason we three went to the North Pole Base."
She paused to think, her brow furrowing. "I do remember ... when I was called into the commissar's office that morning ... I was warned not to say anything to anyone. I was to pack an overnight bag, bring my surgeon's kit, and report to the launch facility within the hour. But such false urgency and unnecessary secrecy is not uncommon in Neocommunist bureaucracies."
"You were specifically told to bring your surgeon's kit?" Gus asked. "Then the reason you were brought along was because you were a surgeon. Why did they choose you and not someone else?"
"Simple," Tanya said. "The primary surgeon in Novomoskovsk was operating on an appendix in Novobaku. The other backup surgeon was the one on call, and I was the only one free. The smaller bases like Novobaku have paramedics, but no surgeons."
"Where were you going that day? To tend to someone hurt out on the glacier?"
"Very unlikely. The base paramedic is supposed to stabilize any patient needing surgery, get him under pressure, bring him back to base, and keep him alive until I arrive. There was no indication of trouble when we landed at the base. Whatever I was supposed to do, it wasn't to treat someone."
"What place were you going to?"
"I really don't know," Tanya said, looking puzzled. "When you are a woman, a woman the KGB doesn't trust, and the commissar says to come along, you come along without asking questions." She leaned close to him and put her hand on his chest. "I'm sorry I'm not much help. Is it important?"
Martian Rainbow Page 9
