by Ben Bova
THE TALLEST MOUNTAIN IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM IS A MASSIVE SHIELD Volcano that has been dormant for tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of years.
Once, though, its mighty outpourings of lava dwarfed everything else on the planet. Over time, they built a mountain three times taller than Everest, with a base the size of the state of Iowa.
The edges of that base are rugged cliffs of basalt more than a kilometer high. The summit of the mountain, where huge calderas mark the vents that once spewed molten rock, stands some twenty-seven kilometers above the supporting plain: 27,000 meters, more than 88,000 feet. For comparison, Mt. Everest is 8848 meters high, 29,028 feet.
Olympus Mons is so tall that, on Earth, its summit would poke high above the troposphere—the lowest layer of air, where weather phenomena take place—and rise almost clear of the entire stratosphere. On Mars, however, the atmosphere is so thin that the atmospheric pressure at Olympus Mons’ summit is only about one-tenth lower than the pressure at ground level.
At that altitude, the carbon dioxide that forms the major constituent of Mars’ atmosphere can freeze out, condense on the cold, bare rock, covering it with a thin, invisible layer of dry ice.
AFTERNOON: SOL 48
“SO HOW DOES IT FEEL TO HAVE ALL THREE OF US TO YOURSELF?” Vijay asked.
Jamie and the three women had just sat down for a late lunch. Rodriguez and Fuchida would be landing at Olympus Mons in less than an hour. Trumball and Possum Craig had reported a few minutes earlier that they were trundling along toward Xanthe with no problems.
Vijay grinned devilishly as she said it. Jamie felt his brows knit slightly in a frown.
“Yes,” added Trudy Hall. “You’ve very cleverly removed all the other men, haven’t you?”
To cover his embarrassment, Jamie turned to Dezhurova. “Don’t you have anything to add to this, Stacy?”
She was already munching on a hastily-built sandwich. Stacy chewed thoughtfully, swallowed, then said, “What is the American word for it? Kinky?”
All three of the women laughed; Jamie forced a smile, then turned his attention to his plate of microwaved pasta and tofu herb salad.
He was thankful when the women began to talk among themselves about the food, the taste of the recycled water, the way the washer/dryer was fading their clothes. They all wore the standard-issue coveralls, but Jamie noticed that they each had individualized their clothing: Dezhurova had stylish Russian logos from her days as a government astronaut sewn above her breast pockets; Hall always clipped bits of glittery costume jewelry to hers; Shektar added a bright scarf at her throat or a colorful sash around her waist.
“We should try the clothes-cleaning system they use at Moonbase,” Dezhurova said. “It is much easier on the fabric.”
“I’ve heard about that,” Trudy said. “They just put the clothes out in the open, do they?”
Stacy nodded vigorously. “Yes. In vacuum on the lunar surface the dirt flakes completely off the fabric. And the unfiltered ultraviolet light from the sun sterilizes everything.”
Vijay pointed out, “We don’t have a vacuum outside.”
“Very damned close,” Dezhurova countered.
“Plenty of UV,” said Trudy.
“What do you think, Vijay?” Dezhurova prompted. “Worth a try, no?”
“We’ll need some sort of container, won’t we? You don’t just hang the clothes on a line.”
“I suppose we could,” said Trudy.
”At Moonbase they put clothes in a big mesh basket and run it up and down a track set into the ground,” Stacy explained. “The basket rotates, like the tumbling action in a washing machine.”
“We don’t have anything like that here.”
“I could rig one up,” Dezhurova said confidently. “It should be simple enough.”
“Do you think you could?”
She nodded solemnly. “Possum is not the only one here who is good with his hands.”
“What do you think, Jamie?” Shektar asked.
Grateful that they were no longer teasing him, he replied, “What about the dust? It would get onto the clothes, wouldn’t it?”
“There’s dust on the Moon, too,” Trudy said.
“But no wind.” - “Oh. Yes.”
Dezhurova said, “We could put the basket track on poles, off the ground.”
“I suppose,” said Jamie.
“Otherwise our clothes will keep on fading and fraying.”
“They’ll fall apart completely, sooner or later,” said Trudy.
Vijay’s evil grin returned. “Jamie wouldn’t mind that, would you, Jamie?”
He tried to stare her down, but instead pushed himself away from the table. “Tomas should be calling in, in five minutes or so.”
As he got to his feet and fled to the comm center, Jamie was certain he heard them giggling behind him.
Rodriguez was a happy man. The plane was responding to his touch like a beautiful woman, gentle and sweet.
They were purring along at—he glanced at the altimeter—twenty-eight thousand and six meters. Let’s see, he mused. Something like three point two feet in a meter, that makes it eighty-nine, almost ninety thousand feet. Not bad. Not bad at all.
He knew the world altitude record for a solar-powered plane was above one hundred thousand feet. But that was a UAV, an unmanned aerial vehicle. No pilot’s flown this high in a solar-powered plane, he knew. Behind his helmet visor he smiled at the big six-bladed propeller as it spun lazily before his eyes.
Beside him, Fuchida was absolutely silent and unmoving. He might as well be dead inside his suit; I’d never know the difference, Rodriguez thought. He’s scared, just plain scared. He doesn’t trust me. He’s scared of flying with me. Probably wanted Stacy to fly him, not me.
Well, my silent Japanese buddy, I’m the guy you’re stuck with, whether you like it or not. So go ahead and sit there like a fuckin’ statue, I don’t give a damn.
Mitsuo Fuchida felt an unaccustomed tendril of fear worming its way through his innards. This puzzled him, since he had known for almost two years now that he would be flying to the top of Olympus Mons. He had flown simulations hundreds of times. This whole excursion had been his idea; he had worked hard to get the plan incorporated into the expedition schedule.
He had first learned to fly while an undergraduate biology student, and had been elected president of the university’s flying club. With the single-minded intensity of a competitor who knew he had to beat the best of the best to win a berth on the Second Mars Expedition, Fuchida had taken the time to qualify as a pilot of ultralight aircraft over the inland mountains of his native Kyushu and then went on to pilot soarplanes across the jagged peaks of Sinkiang.
He had never felt any fear of flying. Just the opposite: he had always felt relaxed and happy in the air, free of all the pressures and cares of life.
Yet now, as the sun sank toward the rocky horizon, casting eerie red light across the barren landscape, Fuchida knew that he was afraid. What if the engine fails? What if Rodriguez cracks up the plane when we land on the mountain? One of the unmanned soarplanes had crashed while it was flying over the mountain on a reconnaissance flight; what if the same thing happens to us?
Even in rugged Sinkiang there was a reasonable chance of surviving an emergency landing. You could breathe the air and walk to a village, even if the trek took many days. Not so here on Mars.
What if Rodriguez gets hurt while we’re out there? I have only flown this plane in the simulator; I don’t know if I could fly it in reality.
Rodriguez seemed perfectly at ease, happily excited to be flying. He shames me, Fuchida thought. Yet … is he truly capable? How will he react in an emergency? Fuchida hoped he would not have to find out.
They passed Pavonis Mons on their left, one of the three giant shield volcanoes that lined up in a row on the eastern side of the Tharsis bulge. It was so big that it stretched out to the horizon and beyond, a massive hump of solid stone that had once oozed red-hot l
ava across an area the size of Japan. Quiet now. Cold and dead. For how long?
There was a whole line of smaller volcanoes stretching off to the horizon and, beyond them, the hugely massive Olympus Mons. What happened here to create a thousand-kilometer-long chain of volcanoes? Fuchida tried to meditate on that question, but his mind kept coming back to the risks he was undertaking.
And to Elizabeth.
DOSSIER: MITSUO FUCHIDA
THEIR WEDDING HAD TO BE A SECRET. MARRIED PERSONS WOULD NOT BE allowed on the Mars expedition. Worse yet, Mitsuo Fuchida had fallen in love with a foreigner, a young Irish biologist with flame-red hair and skin like white porcelain.
“Sleep with her,” Fuchida’s father advised him, “enjoy her all you want to. Bin lather no children with her! Under no circumstances may you marry her.”
Elizabeth Vernon seemed content with that. She loved Mitsuo.
They had met at Tokyo University. Like him, she was a biologist. Unlike him, she had neither the talent nor the drive to get very far in the competition for tenure and a professorship.
“I’ll be fine,” she told Mitsuo. “Don’t ruin your chance for Mars. I’ll wait for you.”
That was neither good nor fair, in Fuchida’s eyes. How could he go to Mars, spend years away from her, expect her to store her emotions in suspended animation for so long?
His father made other demands on him, as well.
”The only man to die on the First Mars Expedition was your cousin, Konoye. He disgraced us all.”
Isoruku Konoye suffered a fatal stroke while attempting to explore the smaller moon of Mars, Deimos. His Russian teammate, cosmonaut Leonid Tolbukhin, said that Konoye had panicked, frightened to be outside their spacecraft in nothing more than a spacesuit, disoriented by the looming menace of Deimos’ rocky bulk.
“You must redeem the family’s honor,” Fuchida’s father insisted. “You must make the world respect Japan. Your namesake was a great warrior. You must add new honors to his name.”
So Mitsuo knew that he could not marry Elizabeth openly, honestly, as he wanted to. Instead, he took her to a monastery in the remote mountains of Kyushu, where he had perfected his climbing skills.
“It’s not necessary, Mitsuo,” Elizabeth protested, once she understood what he wanted to do. “I love you. A ceremony won’t change that.”
“Would you prefer a Catholic rite?” he asked.
She threw her arms around his neck. He felt tears on her cheek.
When the day came that he had to leave, Mitsuo promised Elizabeth that he would come back to her. ‘ ‘And when I do, we will be married again, openly, for all the world to see.”
“Including your father?” she asked wryly.
Mitsuo smiled. “Yes, including even my noble father.”
Then he left for Mars, intent on honoring his family’s name and returning to the woman he loved.
SUNSET: SOL 48
FUCHIDA’S EXCURSION PLAN CALLED FOR THEM TO LAND LATE IN THE AFTERNOON, almost at sunset, when the low sun cast its longest shadows. That allowed them to make the flight in full daylight, while giving them the best view of their landing area once they arrived at Olympus Mons. Every boulder and rock would show in bold relief, allowing them to find the smoothest spot for their landing.
It also meant, Fuchida knew, that they would have to endure the dark frigid hours of night immediately after they landed. What if the batteries failed? The lithium-polymer batteries had been tested for years, Fuchida knew. They stored electricity generated in sunlight by the solar panels and powered the plane’s equipment through the long, cold hours of darkness. But what if they break down when the temperature drops to a hundred and thirty below zero?
Rodriguez was making a strange, moaning sound. Turning sharply to look at the astronaut sitting beside him, Fuchida saw only the inside of his own helmet. He had to turn from the shoulders to see the spacesuited pilot—who was humming tunelessly.
“Are you all right?” Fuchida asked nervously.
“Sure.”
“Was that a Mexican song you were humming?”
“Naw. The Beatles. ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.’ “
“Oh.”
Rodriguez sighed happily. “There she is,” he said.
“What?”
“Mount Olympus.” He pointed straight ahead.
Fuchida did not see a mountain, merely the horizon. It seemed rounded, now that he paid attention to it: a large gently rising hump.
It grew as they approached it. And grew. And grew. Olympus Mons was an immense island unto itself, a continent rising up above the bleak red plain like some gigantic mythical beast. Its slopes were gentle, above the steep scarps of its base. A man could climb that grade easily, Fuchida thought. Then he realized that the mountain was so huge it would take a man weeks to walk from its base to its summit.
Rodriguez was humming again, calm and relaxed as a man sitting in his favorite chair at home.
“You enjoy flying, don’t you?” Fuchida commented.
“You know what they say,” Rodriguez replied, a serene smile in his voice. “Flying is the second most exciting thing a man can do.”
Fuchida nodded inside his helmet. “And the most exciting must be sex, right?”
“Nope. The first most exciting thing a man can do is landing.”
Fuchida sank into gloomy silence.
Jamie was in the comm center, staring fixedly at the immersion table, trying not to look at his wristwatch.
Tomas will call when they land. There’s no point in his calling until they’re down safely. He’s probably reached the mountain by now and is scouting around, making sure the area is okay for an actual landing.
Behind him, he heard Stacy Dezhurova say tersely, “They are over the mountain now. Beacon is strong and clear, telemetry coming through. No problems.”
Jamie nodded without turning around. The immersion table showed a three-dimensional map of Tithonium Chasma, but if you pulled your head away you lost the depth sense and it took several moments of blinking and head movements to see the map in three-d again.
He had marked the electronic display so that the niche in the cliff face where he had seen the—artifact, Jamie called it—was clearly noted in white. Not that far from the landslide we went down to get to the Canyon floor, he saw. But it would save a day’s trip if we went straight to the spot and then I lowered myself down on a cable. No sense going to the floor of the Canyon; the niche is more than three-quarters of the way up to the top.
There are other niches along the Canyon wall, he knew. Are there buildings in them, too? And we haven’t even looked at the south face of the Canyon yet. There could be dozens of villages strung along the cliffs. Hundreds.
Behind him, he heard someone step into the comm center, then Vijay’s low, throaty voice asked, “Have you heard from them?”
“Not yet,” Stacy said.
Then Trudy Hall asked, “Anything?”
“Not yet,” Dezhurova repeated.
Jamie gave up his attempt to plan his excursion. He closed down the three-dimensional display and it turned into an ordinary-looking glass-topped table. Then he turned toward Dezhurova, sitting at the communications console. Its main screen showed a relief map of Olympus Mons and a tiny glowing red dot crawling slowly across it: the plane with Rodriguez and Fuchida in it.
“Rodriguez to base,” the astronaut’s voice suddenly crackled in the speaker. “I’m making a dry run over the landing area. Sending my camera view.”
“Base to Rodriguez,” Dezhurova snapped, all business. “Copy dry run.” Her fingers raced over the keyboard and the main display suddenly showed a pockmarked, boulder-strewn stretch of bare rock. “We have your imagery.”
Jamie felt his mouth go dry. If that’s the landing area, they’re never going to get down safely.
Rodriguez banked the plane slightly so he could see the ground better. To Fuchida it seemed as if the plane was standing on its left wingtip while the hard, bare rock
below turned in a slow circle.
“Well,” Rodriguez said, “we’ve got a choice: boulders or craters.”
“Where’s the clear area the soarplanes showed?” Fuchida asked.
” ‘Clear’ is a relative term,” Rodriguez muttered.
Fuchida swallowed bile. It burned in his throat.
“Rodriguez to base. I’m going to circle the landing area one more time. Tell me if you see anything I miss.”
“Copy another circle.” Stacy Dezhurova’s tone was terse, professional.
Rodriguez peered hard at the ground below. The setting sun cast long shadows that emphasized every pebble and dimple down there. Between a fresh-looking crater and a scattering of rocks was a relatively clean area, more than a kilometer long. Room enough to land if the retros fired on command.
“Looks okay to me,” he said into his helmet mike.
“Barely,” came Dezhurova’s voice.
“The wheels can handle small rocks.”
“Shock absorbers are no substitute for level ground, Tomas.”
Rodriguez laughed. He and Dezhurova had gone through this discussion a few dozen times, ever since the first recon photos had come back from the UAVs.
“Turning into final approach,” he reported.
Dezhurova did not reply. As the flight controller she had the authority to forbid him to land.
“Lining up for final.”
“Your imagery is breaking up a little.”
“Light level’s sinking fast.”
“Yes.”
Fuchida saw the ground rushing up toward him. It was covered with boulders and pitted with craters and looked as hard as concrete, harder. They were coming in too fast, he thought. He wanted to grab the control T-stick in front of him and pull up, cut in the rocket engines and get the hell away while they had a chance. Instead, he squeezed his eyes shut.
Something hit the plane so hard that Fuchida thought he’d be driven through the canopy. His safety harness held, though, and within an eyeblink he heard the howling screech of the tiny retro rocket motors.