Olympus Mons Read Online Free

to United Nations stewardship, then the U.N. Secretary-general will swear in Scheiermann by proxy. Sure you want to miss all the hoopla?”
    I hadn’t exactly liked Scheiermann’s version of Hearts and Flowers. “Deeds’ll get done without my help. Let’s suit-up ‘n truck for home.”
    It looked like he’d taken me at my word by tapping the off switch, but didn’t budge. He just sat there stroking his stubbled chin, stewing about something, which I’ve learned can be a bad sign. Then without a word, he reenergized the holotank, switched inputs and diddled with the view selector until the lowermost section of the Olympus Rupes escarpment swelled to fill the display. The way station is way too close to the volcano for the roof camera to pick up more than a tiny slice of a piece of a smidgen of the monster’s soaring curtain wall. We had inspected the downfall stretch of pipeline earlier that morning, using what my partner calls “the Schmidt-Cassegrain reflector” that gets swapped around between the enclave’s half-dozen crawlers. Magnified in the telescope, the visible pipe string way high up is a faint thread that dives down at you after it comes over the scarp’s beetling brow. The aqueduct, our lifeline, carries a steady dribble down from the volcano’s middle heights, the enclave’s one and only source of water.
    â€œSomeday,” vowed Jesperson, “I’ll climb that mother. I swear I will!”
    â€œBe a cinch,” I encouraged, “once you sprout wings.”
    He took no offense; we’d had the same meaningless conversation a dozen times in the past. My zinger rolled off his back like a Ping-Pong ball.
    â€œI mean it!” he insisted, studying the holotank intently as if willpower alone would make Big Oly’s gawdawful escarpment do some kind of change. He did mean it, but it was the ex-mountain climber in him doing the brave talking, not what any bo with a smidgen of common sense would say. Most experts peg the humongous volcano as dormant; others subscribe to the notion that it’s been stone cold dead one full day longer than forever. Either way, except for minor burps and a now-and-then shiver shake, Big Oly hasn’t done any kind of major turn for thousands or maybe millions or billions of E-years.
    The lowermost stretch of the escarpment’s three-D image reared in the holotank like a colorized clip from some grainy old black-and-white King Kong movie — vertical, rugged bulwarks and furled ropes of lava drip that had serpentined down from the heights in ages past. In literally any number of places, the Olympus Rupes escarpment soars six kilometers above a layered crust the monster’s tremendous weight has actually depressed some. High as it is, the scarp itself is only the first baby step in a truly awesome rise. All told, from its base on the Tharsis highlands to the caldera up on the edge of space Jesperson insists on calling the mesosphere, Olympus Mons is roughly three times the height of Mt. Everest.
    After a long, thoughtful silence, my partner said, “I won’t need wings, Barney.”
    My astute observation was, “Uh-huh.”
    During my first weeks as his assigned work-partner, I thought I’d gotten to know the man backward, forward and upside down, at least to the point of developing a genuine urge to kill the ornery sonuvabitch. Then I started to catch on, to begin figuring out what Jesperson was all about. In a dozen different ways, he’s one helluva puzzling puzzle to try to unravel until you learn he always speaks his mind, and always minds what he’s about to say before he speaks. At heart, my partner’s a moody, bad-tempered, overeducated, Marsrat as lean and UV-irradiated and parchment dry as every other bo stuck in this frozen, rust-colored dustball. His conversation, what little there is of it, tends to be laced with acid.
    I gradually found out that