Olympus Mons by William Walling

doing, Bwana.”
    â€œI said about one hundred kilometers. At six or seven percent grade, it shouldn’t be much worse than going over level ground.”
    â€œYou keep insisting that the break or block can’t be higher up.”
    â€œRedundancy rules out that notion,” he said firmly. “A break or blockage higher than the base of the manifold outfall is a virtual impossibility. Too many catch basins and collection vats are scattered around the slopes, not to mention gross numbers of independently connected and interconnected manifold system links, for the quake to have torn apart the whole installation. Portions of either could be damaged, granted. But if so, it wouldn’t put a significant dent in the quantity of water supplied by the remainder. We’ve been totally cut off, ergo the problem has to be lower down, possibly much lower down.
    â€œRemember this,” he emphasized. “Big Oly’s the youngest of the Tharsis shield volcanoes. What the hell! As a lump, it’s bigger than the smaller Martian satellite, Phobos. Monolithic it may be, but it’s also shot through and through with blowholes, vents, fractures, levees galore, plus other types of faults and obstructions. Logic says nothing too terrible could have happened to the multiply redundant water collection system itself. It has to be a pipeline break, or blockage. Despite being slung on shock
    dampening struts atop support pyons, the main downfall pipe string must be broken, cracked or blocked, and the latter condition strikes me as unlikely. I’d wager my lifetime beer ration on a break.”
    I speculated, ruminated, cogitated, and did some heavy-duty thinking. “Can’t get rid of a notion that the upper pipe might’ve froze solid.”
    Jesperson halted and turned and looked back at me, disgust written plainly in what I could see of his features. “Come to the party, Barnes! Beside being triple-insulated with fiberglass, who ever heard of a rushing mountain stream freezing even in the arctic? Molecular agitation keeps flowing water liquid because gravity forces it to run downhill too turbulently to freeze. From the manifold outfall connection all the way down, the collected water discharges into the holding tanks, then it’s gravity feed all the way across Tharsis to Burroughs, albeit at a decreasing gradient. The shallowness of the depressed, downslope terrain closest to the scarp is the only place where heaters are needed.”
    â€œFair enough,” I told him, “but glass is brittle stuff. What if a few klicks of pipe are busted up, or buried under a few thousand tonnes of rock tumbled down by the quake, or buried under a new lava flow? What the hell do we do about that?”
    He didn’t turn around this time, but I could almost see his negative head shake. “The pipeline,” he declared with typical Jespersonian conviction, “is visibly intact. Didn’t we trace it all the way downhill in the telescope?”
    â€œYeah, what stretches we could see, except it kept dipping and diving in and out of clefts and furrows and levees. Besides, no way could a break be picked out at that distance.”
    â€œNo argument,” he said. “You’d have to be up there to spot a break. Your brittleness objection is off base, however.” Sounding mildly exasperated, he told me the civil engineers who designed the aqueduct had felt the same way I did about the mechanical properties of glass. “Unfortunately, silica was the only readily available raw material, and those pipe sections were annealed in an electric furnace.”
    I stewed about his lecture. The more I stewed, the more I sensed the winds of con sweeping over me as fast, or faster, than the winds of Mars. “Jesperson,” I said, losing the last gram of patience I’d been struggling to hang on to, “level with me. Do you honest to God believe we can heist ourselves up the scarp,