“But sometimes that may not be possible.”
“Not for Sartre. The past is always assumed, because we are not free to stop creating new values for it. It’s just a question of what those values will be. For Sartre it’s a question of how you will assume your past, not whether you will.”
“And for you?”
“I’m with him on that. That’s why I’ve been reading him these last several years. It helps me to understand things.”
“Hmph.” He thinks about it. “You were an English major in college, did you know that?”
She ignores the comment. “So—” She nudges him lightly, shoulder to shoulder. “You have to decide how you will assume this past of yours. Now that your Mars is gone.”
He considers it.
She stands. “I have to plunge into the logistics for tomorrow.”
“Okay. See you inside.”
A bit disconcerted, he watches her leave. Dark tall shape against the sky. The woman he remembers was not like this. In the context of what she has just said, the thought almost makes him laugh.
For the next few days all the members of the team are hard at work ferrying equipment up to Camp Three, except for two a day who are sent above to find a route to the next camp. It turns out there is a feasible reeling route directly up the Gully, and most of the gear is reeled up to Camp Three once it is carried to Camp Two. Every evening there is a radio conversation, in which Eileen takes stock and juggles the logistics of the climb, and gives the next day’s orders. From other camps Roger listens to her voice over the radio, interested in the relaxed tone, the method she has of making her decisions right in front of them all, and the easy way she shifts her manner to accommodate whomever she is speaking with. He decides she is very good at her job, and wonders if their conversations are simply a part of that. Somehow he thinks not.
Roger and Stephan are given the lead, and early one mirror dawn they hurry up the fixed ropes above Camp Three, turning on their helmet lamps to aid the mirrors. Roger feels strong in the early going. At the top of the pitch the fixed ropes are attached to a nest of pitons in a large, crumbling crack. The sun rises and suddenly bright light glares onto the face. Roger ropes up, confirms the signals for the belay, starts up the Gully.
The lead at last. Now there is no fixed rope above him determining his way; only the broad flat back and rough walls of the Gully, looking much more vertical than they have up to this point. Roger chooses the right wall and steps up onto a rounded knob. The wall is a crumbling, knobby andesite surface, black and a reddish gray in the harsh morning blast of light; the back wall of the gully is smoother, layered like a very thick-grained slate, and broken occasionally by horizontal cracks. Where the back wall meets the sidewall the cracks widen a bit, sometimes offering perfect footholds. Using them and the many knobs of the wall Roger is able to make his way upward. He pauses several meters above Stephan at a good-looking vertical crack to hammer in a piton. Getting a piton off the belt sling is awkward. When it is hammered in he pulls a rope through and jerks on it. It seems solid. He climbs above it. Now his feet are spread, one in a crack, one on a knob, as his fingers test the rock in a crack above his head; then up, and his feet are both on a knob in the intersection of the walls, his left hand far out on the back wall of the Gully to hold on to a little indentation. Breath rasps in his throat. His fingers get tired and cold. The Gully widens out and grows shallower, and the intersection of back wall and sidewall becomes a steep narrow ramp of its own. Fourth piton in, the ringing of the strikes filling the morning air. New problem: The degraded rock of this ramp offers no good cracks, and Roger has to do a tension traverse over to the middle of the Gully to find a better way up. Now if he falls he will swing back into the sidewall like a pendulum. And he’s in the rockfall zone. Over to the left sidewall, quickly a piton in. Problem solved. He loves the immediacy of problem solving in climbing, though at this moment he is not aware of his pleasure. Quick look down: Stephan a good distance away, and below him! Back to concentrating on the task at hand. A good ledge, wide as his boot, offers a resting place. He stands, catches his breath. A tug on the line from Stephan; he has run out the rope. Good lead, he thinks, looking down the steep Gully at the trail left by the green rope, looping from piton to piton. Perhaps a better way to cross the Gully from right to left? Stephan’s helmeted face calls something up. Roger hammers in three pitons and secures the line. “Come on up!” he cries. His fingers and calves are tired. There is just room to sit on his bootledge: immense world, out there under the bright pink morning sky! He sucks down the air and belays Stephan’s ascent, pulling up the rope and looping it carefully. The next pitch will be Stephan’s; Roger will have quite a bit of time to sit on this ledge and feel the intense solitude of his position in this vertical desolation. “Ah!” he says. Climbing up and out of the world. . . .
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.