Mercury Read online

  He awoke with a start, covered with cold sweat. In the years since the skytower’s destruction, Alexios had learned that the catastrophe was not his fault, not at all. The soul-killing guilt he had once felt had long since evolved into an implacable, burning hatred. He thirsted not for forgiveness, nor even for the clearing of his name. He lived for vengeance.

  Thermophiles

  Victor Molina also dreamed that night as he slept on the airfoam bed in his stateroom aboard Himawari, in orbit around the planet Mercury.

  He dreamed of the Nobel ceremony in Stockholm. He saw himself dressed in the severely formal attire of the ritual as the king of Sweden handed him the heavy gold award for biology. The discoverer of thermophiles on the planet Mercury, Molina heard the king announce. The courageous, intrepid man who found life where all others said it was impossible for life to exist. Lara sat in the front row of the vast audience, beaming happily. Victor reminded himself to add a line to his Nobel lecture, thanking his wife for her love and support through all the years of their marriage.

  Then he began his lecture. The huge audience hall, crammed with the elite of every continent on Earth, fell into an expectant silence. Thermophiles are organisms that live at temperatures far beyond those in which human beings can survive, he told the rapt and glittering audience. On Earth, microscopic thermophiles were discovered in the latter part of the twentieth century, existing deep underground at temperatures and pressures that were, up until then, considered impossible as habitats for living organisms. Yet these bacterial forms not only exist, they are so numerous that they actually outweigh all the living matter on the surface of the Earth! What is more, they survive without sunlight, shattering the firmly held belief that all life depends on sunlight as its basic source of energy. The thermophiles use the heat of Earth’s hellish core to derive their metabolic energy.

  A British cosmologist, Thomas Gold, had earlier predicted that a “deep, hot biosphere” existed far below the surface not only of Earth, but of Mars and any other planet or moon that had a molten core. Scornfully rejected at first, Gold’s prediction turned out to be correct: bacterial life forms have been found deep below the surface of Mars, together with the cryptoendoliths that have created an ecological niche for themselves inside Martian surface rocks.

  While astrobiologists found various forms of life on the moons of Jupiter and even within the vast, planet-girdling ocean of that giant planet itself, the next discovery of true thermophiles did not occur until explorers reached the surface of Venus, where multicelled creatures of considerable size were found living on that hothouse planet’s surface, their bodies consisting largely of silicones, with liquid sulfur as an energy-transfer medium, analogous to blood in terrestrial organisms.

  Still, no one expected to find life on Mercury, not even thermophilic life. The planet had been baked dry from its very beginnings. There was no water to serve as a medium for biochemical reactions; not even molten sulfur. Mercury was nothing but a barren ball of rock, in the view of orthodox scientists.

  Yet the surprising discovery of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons on the surface of Mercury challenged this orthodox view. PAHs are quickly broken down in the high-temperature environment of Mercury’s surface. The fact that they existed on the surface meant that some ongoing process was generating them continuously. That ongoing process was life: thermophilic organisms living on the surface of Mercury at temperatures more than four times higher than the boiling point of water. Moreover, they are capable of surviving long periods of intense cold during the Mercurian night, when temperatures that sink down to –135° Celsius are not uncommon.

  Now came the point in his lecture when Molina must describe the Mercurian organisms. He looked up from the podium’s voice-activated display screen, where his notes were scrolling in cadence with his speaking, and smiled down at Lara. His smile turned awkward, embarrassed. He suddenly became aware that he had nothing to say. He didn’t know what the creatures looked like! The display screen was blank. He stood there at the podium while his wife and the king and the huge audience waited in anticipation. He had no idea of what he should say. Then he realized that he was naked. He clutched the podium for protection, tried to hide behind it, but they saw him, they all saw he was naked and began to laugh at him. All but Lara, who looked alarmed, frightened. Do something! he silently begged her. Get out of your chair and do something to help me!

  Suddenly he had to urinate. Urgently. But he couldn’t move from behind the podium because he had no clothes on. Not a stitch. The audience was howling uproariously and Molina wanted, needed, desperately to piss.

  He awoke with a start, disoriented in the darkness of the stateroom. “Lights!” he cried out, and the overhead panels began to glow softly. Molina stumbled out of bed and ran barefoot to the lavatory. After he had relieved himself and crawled back into bed he thought, I wish Lara were here. I shouldn’t have made her stay at home.

  Torch Ship Himawari

  The ship’s name meant “sunflower.” Yamagata had personally chosen the name, an appropriate one for a vessel involved in tapping the Sun’s energy. Earlier generations would have said it was a fortunate name, a name that would bring good luck to his enterprise. Yamagata was not superstitious, yet he felt that Himawari was indeed the best possible name for his ship.

  While all except the ship’s night watch slept, Yamagata sat in the padded recliner in his stateroom, speaking to a dead man.

  The three-dimensional image that stood before Yamagata was almost solid enough to seem real. Except for a slight sparkling, like distant fireflies winking on a summer’s evening, the image was perfect in every detail. Yamagata saw a short, slightly chubby man with a shock of snow white hair smiling amiably at him. He was wearing a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows and blue jeans, with a soft turtleneck sweater of pale yellow and an incongruous velvet vest decorated with colorful flowers.

  Robert Forward had died nearly a century earlier. He had been a maverick physicist, delving into areas that most academics avoided. Long before Duncan and his fusion propulsion drive, which made travel among the planets practical, Forward was examining the possibilities of antimatter rockets and laser propulsion for interstellar travel. Yamagata had hired a team of clever computer engineers to bring together every public lecture that Forward had given, every seminar appearance, every journal paper he had written, and incorporate them into a digitized persona that could be projected as an interactive holographic image. Calling themselves “chip-monks,” the young men and women had succeeded brilliantly. Yamagata could hold conversations with the long-dead Forward almost as if the man were actually present. There were limits to the system, of course. Forward never sat down; he was always on his feet. He paced, but only a few steps in any direction, because the image had to stay within the cone of the hologram being projected from the ceiling of Yamagata’s stateroom. And he always smiled. No matter what Yamagata said to him, Forward kept the same cheerful smile on his round, ruddy face. Sometimes that smile unnerved Yamagata.

  As now. While Yamagata showed the disastrous efficiency curves to Forward’s image, the physicist’s hologram continued to smile even as he peered at the bad news.

  “Degraded by solar radiation, huh?” Forward said, scratching at his plump double chin.

  Yamagata nodded and tried not to scowl at the jaunty smile.

  “The numbers check out?” Forward asked.

  “My people back at New Kyoto are checking them.”

  “You didn’t expect the degradation to be so severe, eh?”

  “Obviously not.”

  Forward clasped his hands behind his back. “Wellll,” he said, drawing the word out, “assuming the numbers check out and the degradation is a real effect, you’ll simply have to build more power satellites. Or larger ones.”

  Yamagata said nothing.

  Forward seemed to stand there, frozen, waiting for a cue. After a few seconds, however, he added, “If each individual powersat can produce only
one-third the power you anticipated, then you’ll need three times as many powersats. It’s quite simple.”

  “That is impossible,” said Yamagata.

  “Why impossible? The technology is well in hand. If you can build ten powersats you can build thirty.”

  “The costs would be too high.”

  “Ah!” Forward nodded knowingly. “Economics. The dismal science.”

  “Dismal, perhaps, but inescapable. The Foundation cannot afford to triple its costs.”

  “Even if you built the powersats here at Mercury, instead of buying them from Selene and towing them here from the Moon?”

  “Build them here?”

  Forward’s image seemed to freeze for an eyeblink’s span, then he began ticking off on his chubby fingers, “Mercury has abundant metals. Silicon is rarer than on the Moon but there’s still enough easily scooped from the planet’s surface to build hundreds of powersats. You’d save on transportation costs, of course, and you’d cut out Selene’s profits.”

  “But I would have to hire a sizeable construction crew,” Yamagata objected. “And they will want premium pay to work here at Mercury.”

  Forward smile almost faded. But he quickly recovered. “I don’t know much about nanotechnology; the field was in its infancy when I died. But couldn’t you program nanomachines to build powersats?”

  “Selene makes extensive use of nanomachines,” Yamagata agreed.

  “There you are,” said Forward, with an offhand gesture.

  Yamagata hesitated, thinking. Then, “But focusing thirty laser beams on a starship’s lightsail… wouldn’t that be difficult?”

  Forward’s smile returned in full wattage. “If you can focus ten lasers on a sail you can focus thirty. No problemo.”

  Yamagata smiled back. Until he realized that he was speaking to a man who had lived a century earlier and even then was known as a wild-eyed theoretician with no practical, hands-on experience.

  Nanomachines

  Nanomachines?” Alexios asked the image on his office wall.

  “Yes,” replied Yamagata with an unhappy sigh. “It may become necessary to use them.”

  “We have no nanotech specialists here,” said Alexios, sitting up tensely in his office chair. It was a lie: he himself had experience with nanotechnology. But he had kept that information hidden from everyone.

  “I am aware of that,” Yamagata replied. “There are several in Selene who might be induced to come here.”

  “We’re crowded down here already.”

  Yamagata’s face tightened into a frown momentarily, then he regained control of himself and put on a perfunctory smile. “If it becomes necessary to build more power satellites than originally planned, your base will have to be enlarged considerably. We will need to build a mass launcher down there on the surface and hire entire teams of technicians to assemble the satellites in orbit.”

  Alexios nodded and tried to hide the elation he felt. It’s working! he told himself. I’m going to bleed him dry.

  Aloud, he said to Yamagata, “Many of my team are quite distressed by nanomachines. They feel that nanotechnology is dangerous.”

  Strangely, Yamagata grinned at him. “If you think they will be unhappy, imagine how Bishop Danvers will react.”

  Sure enough, Yamagata heard an earnest rap on his stateroom door within a half hour of his conversation with Alexios.

  “Enter,” he called out, rising from his comfortable chair.

  Bishop Danvers slid the door open and stepped through, then carefully shut it again.

  “How kind of you to visit me,” said Yamagata pleasantly.

  Danvers’s usually bland face looked stern. “This is not a social call, I’m afraid.”

  “Ah so?” Yamagata gestured to one of the plush armchairs arranged around his recliner. “Let’s at least be physically comfortable. Would you like a refreshment? Tea, perhaps?”

  The bishop brushed off Yamagata’s attempts to soften the meeting. “I understand you are considering bringing nanomachines here.”

  Yamagata’s brows rose slightly. He must have spies in the communications center, he thought. Believers who report everything to him.

  Coolly, he replied, “It may become necessary to use nanotechnology for certain aspects of the project.”

  “Nanotechnology is banned.”

  “On Earth. Not in Selene or anywhere else.”

  “It is dangerous. Nanomachines have killed people. They have been turned into monstrous weapons.”

  “They will be used here to construct a mass driver on Mercury’s surface and to assemble components of power satellites. Nothing more.”

  “Nanotechnology is evil!”

  Yamagata steepled his fingers, stalling for time to think. Do not antagonize this man, he warned himself. He can bring the full power of Earth’s governments against you.

  “Bishop Danvers,” Yamagata said placatingly, “technology is neither evil nor good, in itself. It is men who are moral or not. It is the way we use technology that is good or evil. After all, a stone can be used to help build a temple or to bash someone’s brains in. Is the stone evil?”

  “Nanotechnology is banned on Earth for perfectly good reasons,” Danvers insisted.

  “On a planet crowded with ten billion people, including the mentally sick, the greedy, the fanatic, I understand perfectly why nanotechnology is banned. Here in space the situation is quite different.”

  Danvers shook his head stubbornly. “How do you know that there are no mentally sick people among your crew? No one who is greedy? No fanatics?”

  A good point, Yamagata admitted silently. There could be fanatics here. Danvers himself might be one. If he knew this project’s ultimate aim is to reach the stars, how would he react?

  Aloud, Yamagata replied, “Bishop Danvers, every man and woman here has been thoroughly screened by psychological tests. Most of them are engineers and technicians. They are quite stable, I assure you.”

  Danvers countered, “Do you truly believe that anyone who is willing to come to this hellhole for years at a time is mentally stable?”

  Despite himself, Yamagata smiled. “A good point, sir. We must discuss the personality traits of adventurers over dinner some evening.”

  “Don’t try to make light of this.”

  “I assure you, I am not. If we need nanomachines to make this project succeed, it will mean an additional investment that will strain the resources of the Sunpower Foundation to the utmost. Let me tell you, this decision will not be made lightly.”

  Danvers knew he was being dismissed. He got slowly to his feet, his fleshy face set in a determined scowl. “Think carefully, sir. What does it gain a man if he wins the whole world and suffers the loss of his immortal soul?”

  Yamagata rose, too. “I am merely trying to provide electrical power for my fellow human beings. Surely that is a good thing.”

  “Not if you use evil methods.”

  “I can only assure you, Bishop, that if we use nanomachines, they will be kept under the strictest of controls.”

  Clearly unhappy, Bishop Danvers turned his back on Yamagata and left the stateroom.

  Yamagata sank back into his recliner. I’ve made an enemy of him, he realized. Now he’ll report back to his superiors on Earth and I’ll get more static from the International Astronautical Authority and god knows what other government agencies.

  Ordinarily he would have smiled at his unintentional pun about god. This time he did not.

  Bishop Elliott Danvers strode back toward his own stateroom along the sloping corridor that ran the length of Himawari’s habitation module. He passed several crew personnel, all of whom nodded or muttered a word of greeting to him. He acknowledged their deference with a curt nod each time. His mind was churning with other thoughts.

  Nanotechnology! My superiors in Atlanta will go ballistic when they learn that Yamagata plans to bring nanomachines here. Godless technology. How can God allow such a mockery of His will to exist? Then Danve
rs realized that God would not allow it. God will stop them, just as he stopped the skytower, ten years ago. And he realized something even more important: I am God’s agent here, sent to do His work. I haven’t the power to stop Yamagata, not unless God sends a catastrophe to this wicked place. Only some disaster will bring Yamagata to his senses.

  Despite his bland outward appearance, Elliott Danvers had led a far from dull life. Born in a Detroit slum, he was always physically big for his age. Other kids took one look at him and thought he was tough, strong. He wasn’t. The real bullies in the ’hood enlarged their reputations by bloodying the big guy. The wiseguys who ran the local youth club made him play on the local semipro football team when he was barely fourteen. In his first game he got three ribs cracked; in the next contest they broke his leg. When he recovered from that the gamblers put him in the prizefight ring and quietly bet against him. They made money. Danvers’s share was pain and blood and humiliation.

  When he broke his hand slugging it out with a young black kid from a rival club, they tossed him out onto the street, his hand swollen monstrously, his face unrecognizable from the beating he’d taken.

  One of the street missionaries from the storefront New Morality branch found Danvers huddled in the gutter, bleeding and sobbing. He took Danvers in, dressed his wounds, fed his body and spirit, and turned his gratitude into a life of service. At twenty he entered a New Morality seminary. By the time he was twenty-two, Elliott Danvers was an ordained minister, ready to be sent out into the world in service to God. He was never allowed to return to his old Detroit neighborhood. Instead he was sent overseas and saw that there were many wretched people around the globe who needed his help.

  His rise through the hierarchy was slow, however. He was not especially brilliant. He had no family connections or well-connected friends to help push him upward. He worked hard and took the most difficult, least rewarding assignments in gratitude for the saving of his life.