Olympus Mons by William Walling Page B

way, letting me in on the reasons why she felt that way, book, chapter, verse and footnotes. I knew arguing with her was useless once she got that hot, but deep down inside I also knew she had cause to be temperish.
    Choking on my own irate mindset, I gave up and busted out of our digs at quickmarch and answered an urgent need to let off steam by doing something hard and physical. I called Jesperson, suited-up in my vacuum gear, and met him outside North Tunnel. The two of us got straight to foot-foot-slog-sloggin’up ‘n down the everlovin’ ringwall trail.
    Afterward, stuck in my latest homelife role of undesirable spouse, I gave up homelife altogether, met my partner again the following morning, and the next, the next, and the one after that. We got to be the butt of wiseacre one-liners and gibes doled out by Gimpy and his grunts. The maintenance bo’s took to calling us “trail zombies” for foot-foot-slog-sloggin’ up and down their miserable trail. We went at it hot ‘n heavy for most of a week, sticking to my partner’s prescription for “getting in shape,” by which time Gimp and his hard-hats figured us for genuine head cases, and no doubt racked their brains, wondering why a pair of Marsrats with their heads screwed on fairly tight had developed an urge to keep on yo-yoing up and down their private maintenance trail.
    The stiff-’n-sore days dragged past at a monotonous, foot-slogging tempo, salted in my case with abusive blasts from dear Mrs. Barnes. It upset Jesperson when the survey team trucked back from Olympus Rupes and voiced an up-to-date report on the pipeline’s visible condition. The following morning, as my partner had predicted, the director called another special council session.
    In the partitioned “meeting hall” area, I sat in the folding chair beside Jesperson. After parking our youngster with Mrs. Chang’s daughter, the teenage sweetie who does what little babysitting my better half allows, Lorna stationed herself in the row behind us, taking the tactical high ground from where she could launch poison-tipped zingers at the back of my partner’s head, and the one belonging to her own true-blue spouse.
    I did a quick and dirty headcount. A hundred and forty interested adults were jam-packed in the rows of folding chairs; some had even brought along the older kiddies. Compared to the bunch at that first session, this crop was fairly subdued. Looming beside Scheiermann and Yokomizo on the podium, the council’s new sergeant-at-arms sat rocked back on the rear legs of a folding chair looking fit to collapse under his muscle-bound frame. On a scale of one to ten, I would’ve awarded the glassblower’s frown only a two and a half, or maybe a three. Compared to the audience at that first special session, these Marsrats didn’t partake of any shouting matches, cries for attention or self-centered complaining about quake damage. No hooraw at all, which struck me as surprising and surely disappointed Black-like-me.
    Wait, hold it. I should’ve said almost no hooraw. Jesperson believes Herr Doktor Walther Scheiermann, Ph.D, suffers from an ingrown fetish for by-the-numbers “parliamentary procedure.” Light metronome beats of his gavel pulsed through the meeting area as he called the session to order and cagily attended to old and new business before meandering around to the topic of our dried-up aqueduct, listening politely to one long-suffering Marsrat after another, but not once did he offer a nugget of advice or assistance. The juiciest morsel, and cause of the minor “hooraw,” came from a luckless woman who happened to be among the most recent batch of immigrants.
    Now “immigrant” needs a few words of explanation. At first an out-of-sight, out-of-mind dumping ground for cons, misfits and deportees like Jesperson, Black-like-me and yours truly, that put ‘em out of sight drill soon became