It is the strongest sort of duality: Facing the rock and climbing, his attention is tightly focused on the rock within a meter or two of his eyes, inspecting its every flaw and irregularity. It is not particularly good climbing rock, but the Gully slopes at about seventy degrees in this section, so the actual technical difficulty is not that great. The important thing is to understand the rock fully enough to find only good holds and good cracks—to recognize suspect holds and avoid them. A lot of weight will follow them up these fixed ropes, and although the ropes will probably be renailed, his piton placements will likely stand. One has to see the rock and the world beneath the rock.
And then he finds a ledge to sit and rest on, and turns around, and there is the great expanse of the Tharsis Bulge. Tharsis is a continent-sized bulge in the Martian surface; at its center it is eleven kilometers above the Martian datum, and the three prince volcanoes lie in a line, northeast to southwest, on the bulge's highest plateau. Olympus Mons is at the far northwestern edge of the bulge, almost on the great plain of Amazonis Planitia. Now, not even halfway up the great volcano's escarpment, Roger can just see the three prince volcanoes poking over the horizon to the southeast, demonstrating perfectly the size of the planet itself. He looks around one-eighteenth of Mars.
By midafternoon Roger and Stephan have run out their three hundred meters of rope, and they return to Camp Three pleased with themselves. The next morning they hurry up the fixed ropes in the mirror dawn, and begin again. At the end of Roger's third pitch in the lead he comes upon a good site for a camp: A sort of pillar bordering the Great Gully on its right side ends abruptly in a flat top that looks very promising. After negotiating a difficult short traverse to get onto the pillar top, they wait for the midday radio conference. Consultation with Eileen confirms that the pillar is about the right distance from Camp Three, and suddenly they are standing in Camp Four.
“The Gully ends pretty near to you anyway,” Eileen says.
So Roger and Stephan have the day free to set up a wall tent and then explore. The climb is going well, Roger thinks: no major technical difficulties, a group that gets along fairly well together . . . perhaps the great South Buttress will not prove to be that difficult after all.
Stephan gets out a little sketchbook. Roger glances at the filled pages as Stephan flips through them. “What's that?”
“Chir pine, they call it. I saw some growing out of the rocks above Camp One. It's amazing what you find living on the side of this cliff.”
“Yes,” Roger says.
“Oh I know, I know. You don't like it. But I'm sure I don't know why.” He has the blank sheet of the sketchbook up now. “Look in the cracks across the Gully. Lot of ice there, and then patches of moss. That's moss campion, with the lavender flowers on top of the moss cushion, see?”
He begins sketching and Roger watches, fascinated.
“That's a wonderful talent to have, drawing.”
“Skill. Look, there's edelweiss and asters, growing almost together.” He jerks, puts finger to lips, points. “Pika,” he whispers.
Roger looks at the broken niches in the moat of the Gully opposite them. There is a movement and suddenly he sees them—two little gray furballs with bright black eyes—three—the last scampering up the rock fearlessly. They have a hole at the back of one niche for a home. Stephan sketches rapidly, getting the outline of the three creatures, then filling them in. Bright Martian eyes.
And once, in the northern autumn in Burroughs, when the leaves covered the ground and fell through the air, leaves the color of sand, or the tan of antelopes, or the green of green apples, or the white of cream, or the yellow of butter—he walked through the park. The wind blew stiffly from the southwest out of the big funnel of the delta, bringing clouds flying overhead swiftly, scattered and white and sunbroken to the west, massed and dark dusky blue to the east; and the evergreens waved their arms in every shade of dark green, before which the turning leaves of the hardwoods flared; and above the trees to the east a white-walled church, with reddish arched roof tiles and a white bell tower, glowed under the dark clouds. Kids playing on the swings across the park, yellow-red aspens waving over the brick city hall beyond them to the north—and Roger felt—wandering among widely spaced white-trunked trees that thrust their white limbs in every upward direction—he felt—feeling the wind loft the gliding leaves over him—he felt what all the others must have felt when they walked around, that Mars had become a place of exquisite beauty. In such lit air he could see every branch, leaf, and needle waving under the tide of wind, crows flying home, lower clouds lofting puffy and white under the taller black ones, and it all struck him all at once: freshly colored, fully lit, spacious and alive in the wind—what a world! What a world.