Olympus Mons Read Online Free Page B

or wherever. He once told me he and another pair of carefree crazies had hitched their bods up the sheer granite face of Yosemite’s El Capitan, and proudly said they’d gone up the wall “clean,” anchoring their carabiners, ropes and whatnots in chocks and handset aluminum wedges instead of hammered-in pitons — more big words borrowed from Jesperson.
    Why do a super-tough climb the super-tough way? Not, for the love of God just because it’s there! That has to be the lamest damned excuse for risking it all I ever did hear. No, he said he and the other two clucks had done it the hard way so as not to “spoil” the rock face for any head cases dumb enough to follow them up a few thousand meters of vertical granite.
    All things considered, I think that explains my wild ‘n crazy work-partner better than anything else I could tell you.
    Â 

 Two: Tharsis
    Suiting up for the short hike from the way station airlock to the crawler was a bother. Our next-to-nothing surface air pressure is less than one percent of what it is at sea level earthside, so we bothered. The summer afternoon was mild, the air temp wobbling around minus forty degrees C, with a light wind from the southeast — a homeworld gale, but here in Mars a gentle zephyr.
    My education, such as it was, ended in a battle to earn a bachelor’s degree in Physical Education. I staggered through college with the help of some dear friends I never had a chance to meet: a herd of do-gooder alums who eagerly picked up the tab on my grant-in-aid for playing football. All things considered, high school was twice as tough as college. As an eleventh grader, I had to make a purely adult decision: did I want to stay a student, or dropout and maybe turn up my toes and turn into a dead gang-banger? My dad’s older brother, Uncle Jeremy, used a pair of attitude correction tools — fists like family size tomato cans — to help me decide. After bouncing me around some to warm-up, he reached for the never-to-to-be-sufficiently-damned leather strap he used to whet his straight razor before scraping the steel wool off his jowls. The adroit way he used the strap helped persuade me to go along with his kindly straighten-up-and-fly-right “suggestions.”
    The point of this personal stuff is that hanging out with Jesperson earns you the sort of liberal education on which money won’t make a deposit, let along the down payment. Unwilling student I may be, but it’s tough not to swallow the sterling pearls of wisdom my partner keeps dropping. Among other incidentals, he taught me more than I wanted to know about the whys and wherefores of Martian wind.
    Our atmosphere boasts six measly “millibars” of surface pressure, and has a smallish “heat capacity,” meaning it cools down faster than the homeworld’s thick air blanket, and heats up quicker, too. Above the long Tharsis Montes bulge east of us, the air hangs in at a lower pressure, while higher pressure sits over the lower down plains to the west, and over Burroughs. The pressure differential’s small, but enough to give us upslope winds in the daytime, and downslope blows during the cold, cold nights. Most times a paper tiger, the wind seems all sound and no fury as it whistles and moans in your pressure-suit’s audio pickup, but there’s hardly any “shove” behind it. Surface altitude hereabouts varies by quite a few kilometers, so air pressure can change up to thirty percent from one slice of Tharsis to another. High up or low down, too few molecules are packed into every cubic centimeter of air to have much force during an ordinary blow.
    Yet during the warmest parts of late spring, summer and early fall, look out! Our seasons are twice as long as those in the homeworld, with the windiest period of all coming around “perihelion,” when Mars swings closest to the Sun and solar heating jumps up thirty or forty