The Martians

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  One night he wakes up to darkness and silence, fully awake in an instant, heart pounding. Confused, he thinks he may have dreamed of the Thank God Ledge. But then he notices the silence again and realizes his oxygen bottle has run out. It happens every week or so. He uncouples the bottle from the regulator, finds another bottle in the dark, and clips it into place. When he tells Arthur about it next morning, Arthur laughs. “That happened to me a couple of nights ago. I don't think anybody could sleep through their oxygen bottle running out—I mean you wake up very awake, don't you?"

  In the hard rock band Roger porters up a pitch that leaves him whistling into his mask: The gullies have disappeared, above is a nearly vertical black wall, and breaking it is one lightning-bolt crack, now marked by a fixed rope with slings attached, making it a sort of rope ladder. Fine for him, but the lead climb! “Must have been Dougal at it again."

  And the next day he is out in the lead himself with Arthur, on a continuation of the same face. Leading is very unlike portering. Suddenly the dogged, repetitious, almost mindless work of carrying loads is replaced by the anxious attentiveness of the lead. Arthur takes the first pitch and finishes it bubbling over with enthusiasm. Only his oxygen mask keeps him from carrying on a long conversation as Roger takes over the lead. Then Roger is up there himself, above the last belay on empty rock, looking for the best way. The lure of the lead returns, the pleasure of the problem solved fills him with energy. Fully back in lead mode, he collaborates with Arthur—who turns out to be an ingenious and resourceful technical climber—on the best storm day yet: five hundred meters of fixed rope, their entire supply, nailed up in one day. They hurry back down to camp and find Eileen and Marie still there, dumping food for the next few days.

  “By God we are a team!” Arthur cries as they describe the day's work. “Eileen, you should put us together more often. Don't you agree, Roger?”

  Roger grins, nods at Eileen. “That was fun.”

  Marie and Eileen leave for the camp below, and Arthur and Roger cook a big pot of stew and trade climbing stories, scores of them: And every one ends, “but that was nothing compared to today.”

  Heavy snow returns and traps them in their tents, and it's all they can do to keep the high camp supplied. “Bloody desperate out!” Marie complains, as if she can't believe how bad it is. After one bad afternoon Stephan and Arthur are in the high camp, Eileen and Roger in the middle camp, and Hans, Marie, and Dougal in the low camp with all the supplies. The storm strikes Roger and Eileen's tent so hard they are considering bringing in some rocks to weight it down more. A buzz sounds from their radio and Eileen picks it up.

  “Eileen, this is Arthur. I'm afraid Stephan has come up too fast.”

  Eileen scowls fearfully, swears under her breath. Stephan has gone from low camp to high in two days' hard climbing.

  “He's very short of breath, and he's spitting up bloody spit. And talking like a madman.”

  “I'm okay!” Stephan shouts through the static. “I'm fine!”

  “Shut up! You're not fine! Eileen, did you hear that? I'm afraid he's got edema.”

  “Yeah,” Eileen says. “Has he got a headache?”

  “No. It's just his lungs right now, I think. Shut up! I can hear his chest bubbling, you know.”

  “Yeah. Pulse up?”

  “Pulse weak and rapid, yeah.”

  “Damn.” Eileen looks at Roger. “Put him on max oxygen.”

  “I already have. Still . . .”

  “I know. We've got to get him down.”

  “I'm okay!”

  “Yeah,” Arthur says. “He needs to come down, at least to your camp, maybe lower.”

  “Damn it,” Eileen exclaims when off the radio. “I moved him up too fast.”

  An hour later—calls made below, the whole camp in action—Roger and Eileen are out in the storm again, in the dark, their helmet headlights showing them only a portion of the snowfall. They cannot afford to wait until morning—pulmonary edema can be quickly fatal, and the best treatment by far is to get the victim lower, where his lungs can clear out the excess water. Even a small drop in altitude can make a dramatic difference. So off they go; Roger takes the lead and bashes ice from the rope, jumars up, scrabbles over the rock blindly with his crampon tips to get a purchase in the snow and ice. It is bitterly cold. They reach the bottom of the blank wall pitch that so impressed Roger, and the going is treacherous. He wonders how they will get Stephan down it. The fixed rope is the only thing making the ascent possible, but it does less and less to aid them as ice coats it and the rock face. Wind hammers them, and Roger has a sudden very acute sensation of the empty space behind them. The headlamps' beams reveal only swirling snow. Fear adds its own kind of chill to the mix.

  By the time they reach high camp Stephan is quite ill. No more protests from him. “I don't know how we'll get him down,” Arthur says anxiously. “I gave him a small shot of morphine to get the peripheral veins to start dilating.”

  “Good. We'll just have to truss him into a harness and lower him.”

  “Easier said than done, in this stuff.”

  Stephan is barely conscious, coughing and hacking with every breath. Pulmonary edema fills the lungs with water; unless the process is reversed, he will drown. Just getting him into the sling (another function of the little wall tents) is hard work. Then outside again—struck by the wind—and to the fixed ropes. Roger descends first, Eileen and Arthur lower Stephan using a power reel, and Roger collects him like a large bundle of laundry. After standing him upright and knocking the frozen spittle from the bottom of his mask, Roger waits for the other two, and when they arrive he starts down again. The descent seems endless, and everyone gets dangerously cold. Windblown snow, the rock face, omnipresent cold: nothing else in the world. At the end of one drop Roger cannot undo the knot at the end of his belay line, to send it back up for Stephan. For fifteen minutes he struggles with the frozen knot, which resembles a wet iron pretzel. Nothing to cut it off with either. For a while it seems they will all freeze to death because he can't untie a knot. Finally he takes his climbing gloves off and pulls at the thing with his bare fingers until it comes loose.

  Eventually they arrive at the lower camp, where Hans and Dougal are waiting with a medical kit. Stephan is zipped into a sleeping bag, and given a diuretic and some more morphine. Rest and the drop in altitude should see him back to health, although at the moment his skin is blue and his breathing ragged: no guarantees. He could die—a man who might live a thousand years—and suddenly their whole enterprise seems crazy. His coughs sound weak behind the oxygen mask, which hisses madly on maximum flow.

  “He should be okay,” Hans pronounces. “Won't know for sure for several hours.”

  But there they are—seven people in two wall tents. “We'll go back up,” Eileen says, looking to Roger. He nods.

  And they go back out again. The swirl of white snow in their headlights, the cold, the buffets of wind. . .they are tired, and progress is slow. Roger slips once and the jumars don't catch on the icy rope for about three meters, where they suddenly grab hold and test his harness, and the piton above. A fall! The spurt of fear gives him a second wind. Stubbornly he decides that much of his difficulty is mental. It's dark and windy, but really the only difference between this and his daytime climbs during the last week is the cold, and the fact that he can't see much. But the helmet lamps do allow him to see—he is at the center of a shifting white sphere, and the rock he must work on is revealed. It is covered with a sheet of ice and impacted snow, and where the ice is clear it gleams in the light like glass laid over the black rock beneath. Crampons are great in this—the sharp front points stick in the snow and ice firmly, and the only problem is the brittle black glass that will break away from the points in big jagged sheets. Even black ice can be distinguished in the bright bluish gleam of the lights, so the work is quite possible. Look at it as just another climb, he urges himself, meanwhile kicking like a maniac with his left foot to spike clear a c
rack where he can nail in another piton to replace a bad hold. The dizzying freeness of a pull over an outcropping; the long reach up for a solid knob: He becomes aware of the work as a sort of game, a set of problems to be solved despite cold or thirst or fatigue (his hands are beginning to tire from the long night's hauling, so that each hold hurts). Seen that way, it all changes. Now the wind is an opponent to be beaten, but also to be respected. The same of course is true of the rock, his principal opponent—and it is a daunting one, an opponent to challenge him to his utmost performance. He kicks into a slope of hard snow and ascends rapidly.

  He looks down as Eileen kicks up the slope: quick reminder of the stakes of this game. The light on the top of her helmet makes her look like a deep-sea fish. She reaches him quickly; one long-gloved hand over the wall's top, and she joins him with a smooth contraction of the biceps. Strong woman, Roger thinks, but decides to take another lead anyway. He is in a mood now where he doubts anyone but Dougal could lead as fast.

  Up through the murk they climb.

  An odd point is that the two climbers can scarcely communicate. Roger “hears” Eileen through varieties of tugging on the rope linking them. If he takes too long to study a difficult spot above, he feels a mild interrogatory tug on the rope. Two tugs when Roger is belaying means she's on her way up. Very taut belaying betrays her belief that he is in a difficult section. So communication by rope can be fairly complex and subtle. But aside from it, and the infrequent shout with the mask pulled up to one side (which includes the punishment of a face full of spindrift) they are isolated. Mute partners. The exchange of lead goes well—one passes the other with a wave—the belay is ready. Up Eileen goes. Roger watches and holds the belay taut. Little time for contemplating their situation, thankfully; but while taking a rest on crampon points in steps chopped out with his ice axe, Roger feels acutely the thereness of his position, cut off from past or future, irrevocably in this moment, on this cliff face that drops away bottomlessly, extends up forever. Unless he climbs well, there will never be any other reality.

  Then they reach a pitch where the fixed rope has been cut in the middle. Falling rock or ice has shaved it off. A bad sign. Now Roger must climb a ropeless pitch, hammering in pitons on his way to protect himself. Every meter above the last belay is a two-meter fall. . .

  Roger never expected so hard a climb, and adrenaline banishes his exhaustion. He studies the first small section of a pitch that he knows is ten or twelve meters long, invisible in the dark snow flurries above. Probably Marie or Dougal climbed this crack the first time. He discovers that the crack just gives him room for his hands. Almost a vertical crack for a while, with steps cut into the ice. Up he creeps, crablike and surefooted. Now the crack widens and the ice is too far back in it to be of use—but the cramponed boots can be stuck in the crack and turned sideways, to stick tenuously into the thin ice coating the crack's interior. One creates one's own staircase, mostly using the tension of the twisted crampons. Now the crack abruptly closes and he has to look around, ah, there, a horizontal crack holding the empty piton. Very good—he hooks into it and is protected thus far. Perhaps the next piton is up the rampway to the right? Clawing to find the slight indentations that pass for handholds, crouching to lean up the ramp in a tricky walk—he wonders about the crampons here . . . ah. The next piton, right at eye level. Perfect. And then an area lined with horizontal strata about a meter in thickness, making a steep—a very steep—ladder.

  And at the top of that pitch they find that the high-camp tent has been crushed under a load of snow. Avalanche. One corner of the tent flaps miserably.

  Eileen comes up and surveys the damage in the double glare of their two headlamps. She points at the snow, makes a digging motion. The snow is so cold that it can't bind together—moving it is like kicking coarse sand. They get to work, having no other choice. Eventually the tent is free, and as an added benefit they are warmed as well, although Roger feels he can barely move. The tent's poles have been bent and some broken, and splints must be tied on before the tent can be redeployed. Roger kicks snow and ice chunks around the perimeter of the tent, until it is “certifiably bombproof,” as the leads would say. Except if another avalanche hits it, something they can't afford to think about, as they can't move the camp anywhere else. They simply have to risk it. Inside, they drop their packs and start the stove and put a pot of ice on. Then crampons off, and into sleeping bags. With the bags around them up to the waist, they can start sorting out the mess. There is spindrift on everything, but unless it gets right next to the stove it will not melt. Digging in the jumbled piles of gear for a packet of stew, Roger feels again how tired his body is. Oxygen masks off, so they can drink. “That was quite an excursion.” Raging thirst. They laugh with relief. He brushes an unused pot with his bare hand, guaranteeing a frostnip blister. Eileen calculates the chance of another avalanche without visible trepidation: “. . . so if the wind stays high enough we should be okay.” They discuss Stephan, and sniff like hunting dogs at the first scent of the stew. Eileen digs out the radio and calls down to the low camp. Stephan is sleeping, apparently without discomfort. “Morphine will do that,” Eileen says. They wolf down their meal in a few minutes.

  The snow under the tent is torn up by boot prints, and Roger's sleeping surface is unbelievably lumpy. He rolls over until he is wedged against the length of Eileen's bag, coveting the warmth and hoping for a flatter surface. It is just as lumpy there. Eileen snuggles back into him and he can feel the potential for warmth; he can tell he will warm up. He wonders if getting into one bag would be worth the effort.

  “Amazing what some people will do for fun,” Eileen comments drowsily.

  Short laugh. “This isn't the fun part.”

  “Isn't it? That climb . . .”

  Big yawn. “That was some climb,” he agrees. No denying it.

  “That was a great climb.”

  “Especially since we didn't get killed.”

  “Yeah.” She yawns too, and Roger can feel a big wave of sleep about to break over him and sweep him away. “I hope Stephan gets better. Otherwise, we'll have to take him down.”

  In the next few days everyone has to go out several times in the storm, to keep the high camp supplied and to keep the fixed ropes free of ice. The work is miserable when they can do it, and sometimes they can't: The wind on some days shuts down everything, and they can only huddle inside and hope the tents hold to the face. One dim day Roger is sitting with Stephan and Arthur in low camp. Stephan has recovered from the edema, and is anxious to climb again. “No hurry,” Roger says. “No one's going anywhere anyway, and water in the lungs is serious business. You'll have to take it slow—"

  The tent door is unzipped and a plume of snow enters, followed by Dougal. He grins hello. The silence seems to call for some comment. “Pretty invigorating out there,” he says to fill it, and looks after a pot of tea. The shy moment having passed he chats cheerfully with Arthur about the weather. Tea done, he is off again; he is in a hurry to get a load up to the high camp. A quick grin and he is out the tent and gone. And it occurs to Roger that there are two types of climbers on their expedition (another duality): those who endure the bad weather and accidents and all the various difficulties of the face that are making this climb so uncomfortable, and those who, in some important peculiar way, enjoy all the trouble. In the former group are Eileen, who has the overriding responsibility for the climb—Marie, who is in such a hurry for the top—and Hans and Stephan, who are less experienced and would be just as happy to climb under sunny skies and with few serious difficulties. Each of these is steady and resolute, without a doubt; but they endure.

  Dougal, on the other hand, Dougal and Arthur: Those two are quite clearly enjoying themselves, and the worse things get the more fun they seem to have. It is, Roger thinks, perverse. The reticent, solitary Dougal, seizing with quiet glee every possible chance to get out into the gale and climb. . . . “He certainly seems to be enjoying himself,” Roger says out loud,
and Arthur laughs.

  “That Dougal!” he cries. “What a Brit he is. You know climbers are the same everywhere. I come all the way to Mars and find just the people you'd expect to find on Ben Nevis. 'Course it stands to reason, doesn't it? That New Scotland school and all.”

  It is true; from the very start of the colonization, British climbers have been coming to Mars in search of new climbs, and many of them have stayed.

  “And I'll tell you,” Arthur continues, “those guys are never happier than when it's blowing force ten and dumping snow by the dump truck. Or not snow, actually. More like sleet, that's what they want. One degree rain, or wet snow. Perfect. And you know why they want it? So they can come back in at the end of the day and say, 'Bloody desperate out today, eh mate?' They're all dying to be able to say that. 'Bluidy dasperate, mite.' Ha! Do you know what I mean? It's like giving themselves a medal or something, I don't know.”

  Roger and Stephan, smiling, nod. “Very macho,” Stephan says.

  “But Dougal!” Arthur cries. “Dougal! He's too cool for that. He goes out there in the nastiest conditions he can possibly find—I mean look at him just now—he couldn't wait to get back out there! Didn't want to waste such a fine opportunity! And he climbs the hardest pitches he can find too. Have you seen him? You've seen the routes he leaves behind. Man, that guy could climb buttered glass in a hurricane. And what does he say about it? Does he say that was pretty bloody desperate? No! He says,” and Roger and Stephan join in, like a chorus: “How invigorating!”