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By Root 1957 0

from its even greater breadth; it is twenty-five kilometers higher than the surrounding plain, but eight hundred kilometers across, so its slope averages about six degrees. But around the circumference of its great bulk there is a circular escarpment some seven kilometers high, and this spectacular cliff, twice as tall as that at Echus Overlook, is in many places close to vertical. Sections of it had already lured the few climbers on the planet, but no one had yet succeeded in climbing it, and for most of the inhabitants of the planet it remained merely a stupendous impediment on the way to the summit caldera. Travelers on the ground made it up the escarpment by way of a wide ramp on the north side, where one of the last lava flows had overrun the cliff. Areologists told tales of what that must have been like, of a river of molten rock a hundred kilometers wide, too bright to look at, falling seven thousand meters onto the black lava-crusted plain, piling higher and higher and higher . . . This spill of lava had left a rampway with nothing more than a slight jog in it where the escarpment had been overrun; it was an easy ascent, and after it an uphill drive of some two hundred kilometers took one to the rim of the caldera.

The summit rim of Olympus Mons is so broad and flat that while it has an excellent view down into the many-ringed caldera, the rest of the planet cannot be seen from it. Looking outward one sees only the outer edge of the rim, and then the sky. But on the south side of the rim there is a small meteor crater, with no name but its map designation, THA-Zp. The interior of this little crater is somewhat sheltered from the thin jet stream rushing over Olympus Mons, and standing on the southern arc of its fresh spiky rim, an observer finally has a view down the slope of the volcano, and then over the vast rising plain of west Tharsis; it is like looking down at the planet from a platform in low space.

• • •

It took almost nine months before the asteroid was brought to a rendezvous with Mars, and word of John’s celebration had had time to get around. So they came in scattered rover caravans, in twos and fives and tens, up the north ramp and around to the southern outer slope of Zp. There they erected a number of big crescent-shaped clear-walled tents, with rigid clear floors that stood two meters off the ground, resting on clear entry stalks. They were the very latest thing in temporary shelter, in fact, and all set with their inner arcs facing uphill, so that when they were done they had a row of crescents stacked like stairs, like greenhouse gardens on a terraced hillside, overlooking the immense sweep of a bronze world. Every day for a week the caravans arrived, and dirigibles labored up the long slope, and were tethered inside Zp, filling it so that the interior of the little crater looked like a bowl of birthday balloons.

The size of the crowd surprised John, as he had expected only a few friends to travel to such a remote site. It was yet another proof of his inability to comprehend the planet’s current population; there were nearly a thousand people gathered there together, it was amazing. Although many were faces he had seen before, and quite a few he knew by name. So it was a collection of friends, in a way. It was as if a home town that he hadn’t known existed had suddenly sprung up around him. And many of the first hundred had come, forty of them in all, including Maya and Sax, Ann and Simon and Nadia and Arkady, Vlad and Ursula and the rest of the Acheron group, Spencer, Alex and Janet and Mary and Dmitri and Elena and the rest of the Phobos group, and Arnie and Sasha and Yeli and several more, some of whom he hadn’t seen in twenty years— everyone he was close to, in fact, except for Frank, who had said he was too busy, and Phyllis, who hadn’t replied to the invitation at all.

And it wasn’t just the first hundred. Many of the others were old friends as well, or friends of friends— a lot of Swiss, including the road-building gypsies; Japanese from all over; most of the Russians on the planet;