“Listen,” she said, obviously collecting herself. “Have you given any thought to the route?”
Taylor smiled. He wasn’t sure that he’d enjoy working with this pitifully thin, washed-out, abrasive woman, but what choice had he? “I figured on following Chu San’s route.”
Surra sneered. “That’s what most of them will do. But there’s a shorter way—riskier—but faster by an hour or so, providing your bike can handle it.”
“With the modifications I’ve made she should be able to do fifty on the flat, and corner at thirty. That good enough for you?”
“Yeah, but you’re pushing it with that kind of speed, maybe too much. Especially on the old lady’s broken terrain. Lucky if you can get up to thirty, until you get to the plains, that is. Oh well, finish your drink and let’s go somewhere where we can work on some ideas.”
“So you’re with me?” he stuck out his hand.
Surra hesitated, sighed, and then grasped his hand. “It’s a deal. But it’s just for the money. And the bike, of course,” she added. “Now, finish your drink.”
“We’re going to win this race!” Taylor exclaimed and lifted his cup in salute.
“Yeah, to winning the freaking, idiotic race,” she said with a note of resignation in her voice. She tossed the contents of her cup back with a quick twist of her wrist.
Taylor did likewise. The peppery whiskey burned even worse than before.
After their meeting in the bar Surra had shown him the tricky course she’d wanted to take. He wasn’t sure that the risk of traversing the rimae, as the Martians called the long fissures that ran across Mons’s skirts, was worth the savings in time and distance. He asked why they couldn’t just follow the rimae-avoiding course that Chu San had followed twenty years before when she made her desperate run across the mountain to rescue the downed shuttle.
Back in ’34 Chu had covered the distance in fifty-four hours and thirty minutes in her rover, a cobbled-up affair that she’d thrown together when it was clear that she was the only one close enough to get to the crash site before the crew’s life support died.
Years later they’d whittled the time down to forty-eight and a fraction hours. Ten people had been killed trying to beat that record, the last just four years ago.
The attraction of breaking the record for a downhill race on the largest mountain in the Solar System was too much. Finally, responding to an onslaught of financial, political, and commercial pressures, the rump Mars government had decided to sponsor a formal race, one that would bring in much-needed revenue and attention.
“The tricky part of the race will be at the top, above Mars’s atmosphere,” Surra explained as she spread her photographic survey maps out on the table top. That fact alone still struck wonder in him. “We won’t have the thicker air around us until we’re nearly three hundred klicks down the old lady’s skirts. But Mars’s air is so thin we don’t have to worry about it.”
“Yeah, I know; it’s so thin that it hardly comes up to your knees,” he said, repeating the well-worn joke.
Surra didn’t even smile. “When we’re above the atmosphere it’ll be tough going; bright highlights and stark shadow in the day and dim starlight at night. Have to use the headlights most of the time. Down below, the heavier air’ll diffuse the light some, so we’ll have decent vision during the day. Most of the racers should hit the finish line in late afternoon with the Sun behind them.”
“We’ll finish at noon—forty-six hours,” Taylor replied quickly. “I want to cut at least two hours off the record!”
“You can’t shave it by that much,” Surra protested.
“Sure we can. You said you could save us an hour, didn’t you? If I can cut off another hour with my bike’s speed and stability, we can do it easily.”
“Crazy kid,” she muttered, but not so softly that he didn’t hear. “What the hell do I know?”
They leaned over the maps and began to calculate the odds; balancing risk against time. Their final route was a compromise.
They’d arrived at Bottomos, the humorously named research station at the edge of Olympus’s caldera, a few days before the start of the race. Surra swore with a straight face that the station was the lowest synchronous space station above the Martian atmosphere, lower than both Deimos and Phobos by several orders of magnitude.
The flat, cratered caldera around Bottomos was the lip of the Olympus volcano that spewed out the millions upon millions of tons of lava and formed the thousand-kilometer-wide mountain millennia before. The caldera was ten kilometers across and dotted with the relics of previous research projects. The radio tower sported antennae for various purposes and had a half-dozen microwave dishes that pointed to the widely scattered habitats surrounding the base of Olympus, including Rescue Point station, the final destination of the racers. There were four large satellite dishes, two pointed up and the others at each horizon, where they could acquire the synchronous satellites one-third of the way around the planet.
Also scattered about were the brightly colored temporary plastic blisters that covered a few of the racing bikes. Taylor’s was colored a pale rose—the true color of Jupiter’s great spot. The pressurized structures were more for the comfort of those working in them. The racers who couldn’t afford blisters had to work on their bikes out in the open, wearing their suits.
“Adjust that cable, would you?” Taylor asked Surra as they prepared the bike for the race. The rough transport up the mountain had shaken quite a few things loose and he wanted everything brought back to spec before they put it on the starting line.
Surra nodded and turned the tensioning spring’s bolt until the mark on the steering cable came even with the indicator scratch he’d marked on the strut. “Done,” she said and turned her attention to the cradle that would hold her at the bike’s side.
The four-meter-long vehicle was Taylor’s modification of an ordinary three-wheeled prospector’s cart. He’d stripped the high saddles from its back and mounted cradles—open stretchers is what they resembled—on either side. They’d be riding in a prone position instead of sitting up.
“Putting our weight as low as possible on the sides brings the center of gravity down,” he explained to Surra. “That gives us greater stability and allows the bike to handle turns better. That’s why I put those skids underneath, to stop the cradle from dragging if the bike does bank too far.”
The huge front wheel was a fat metal mesh that acted as the shock absorber and driving wheel combined, thus saving weight and simplifying construction. Taylor’d replaced the wheel’s standard drive motors with a pair of high torque induction units that would deliver higher rpm’s on a lower electrical load. He’d also installed a capacitive discharge system that would provide a better acceleration. “They’re the same motors we use for the hoists on JBI’s sailing ships,” he explained.
Taylor had the rear metal mesh wheels splayed wider—nearly twenty degrees—than usual, again for stability. The top edges of the wheels just barely cleared the fairing of the bike’s main body.
Aside from the lack of saddles, the body of the bike was fairly standard. A set of extension hoses ran from the life support connections to each of the outboard cradles. There was the standard radio dish at the back of the bike, and inside were the usual batteries, air and water tanks, and storage space. For this race that space contained spare gear instead of the usual prospector’s collection of equipment, tools, and supplies.
Steering and other control cables had been run out of the side of the fairing to yokes at the head of each cradle. “Duplicate controls so one of us can rest while the other drives,” Taylor explained when she asked.