Mercury Read online

  “You have tractors sitting here at the base doing nothing. Let me borrow one. I’ve got to get out there and find more specimens.”

  Alexios’s oddly irregular face slowly curled into a lopsided smile. “It’s against safety regulations for anyone to go out on a tractor alone.”

  Molina’s already-flushed face turned darker. Before he could say anything, though, Alexios added, “So I’ll go out with you.”

  “You will?” Molina seemed about to jump for joy.

  With a self-deprecating little shrug, Alexios said, “I have little else to do, thanks to the IAA.”

  He could have said, Thanks to you, but Molina never thought of that possibility.

  Instead he asked, “When? How soon?”

  “As soon as you’re ready.”

  “I’m ready now!”

  In truth, it took more than a day for Molina to be ready. He shuttled back up to Himawari to gather the equipment he wanted, and by then it was time for dinner. So he spent the night aboard Yamagata’s torch ship with his wife. Alexios slept in his quarters alone, trying not to think of Molina in bed with Lara. He slept very little, and when he did his dreams were monstrous.

  Molina arrived at the base early the next morning, with four crates of equipment. Alexios hid his amusement and walked him to the garage where the base’s tractors were housed. A baggage cart trundled behind them on spongy little wheels, faithfully following the miniature beacon Alexios had clipped to his belt.

  The garage was empty and quiet. “Mr. Yamagata came in here just once since the IAA embargoed us,” Alexios said, his voice echoing off the steel ribs of the curving walls. “He wasn’t happy to see all this equipment sitting idle.”

  Molina said nothing. The tractors were simple and rugged, with springy-looking oversized metal wheels and a glassteel bubble up front where the driver and passengers sat. The two men loaded Molina’s equipment into the cargo deck in back, then closed the heavy cermet hatch.

  “I’ll get into my suit now,” said Molina.

  Alexios could see dark stains of perspiration on his coveralls. It couldn’t be from the exertion of lifting those crates in this light gravity, he thought. Victor must be nervous. Or maybe he’s afraid of going outside again.

  He went with Molina and suited up also.

  “But you won’t have to leave the tractor,” Molina objected as a team of technicians began to help them into the bulky suits.

  “Unless you get into trouble,” said Alexios.

  “Oh.”

  “You wouldn’t want to wait a half hour or more while I wiggled myself into this outfit.”

  “No, I imagine not.”

  At last they were both ready, the cumbersome, heavily insulated suits fully sealed and checked out by the technicians.

  Alexios called base control with his suit radio. “Dr. Molina and I are going out on tractor number four. We will go beyond your camera range.”

  The controller’s voice sounded bored. “Copy you’ll go over the horizon. Sunup in one hour, seventeen minutes.”

  A flotilla of miniature surveillance satellites hugged the planet in low orbits, so every square meter of Mercury’s surface was constantly covered by at least two of the minisats. They provided continuous communications links and precise location data.

  “Sun in one seventeen,” Alexios acknowledged.

  “You are clear for excursion,” said the controller.

  It wasn’t easy to climb up into the tractor’s cab in the awkward suits, despite the low gravity. Alexios heard Molina grunt and puff until he finally settled in the right-hand seat.

  “Comfortable?” Alexios asked.

  “Are you kidding?”

  Laughing lightly, Alexios engaged the tractor’s electric engine and drove to the open inner airlock hatch.

  “Do you have a specific route for us to follow or will we simply meander around out there?” Alexios asked as the inner hatch closed and the air was pumped out of the lock.

  Molina struggled to fish a thumbnail-sized chip from his equipment belt and clicked it into the computer in the tractor’s control panel. The display screen showed a geodetic map of the area with a route marked clearly by a red line.

  Alexios studied the display for a moment, then tapped a gloved finger against it. “That’s a pretty steep gully. We should avoid it.”

  Molina’s voice in his earphones sounded irked. “That’s the most likely spot to find what I’m looking for.”

  The outer hatch slid open. The barren landscape looked dark and foreboding, the horizon frighteningly near, thousands of stars gleaming steadily beyond it. Alexios saw the glowing band of the Milky Way stretching across the sky.

  As he put the tractor in gear, he checked the status of the electrical power systems on the control panel displays. Fuel cells at max, backup batteries also. Once the Sun came up, he knew, the solar cells would take over.

  They bounced over the hatch’s edge and onto the rugged, uneven rocky surface.

  “I’m afraid we can’t take the tractor down into that gully,” Alexios said.

  Silence from Molina for a moment, although Alexios could hear his breathing in his helmet earphones. Then, “All right. Get as close to it as you can and I’ll go down on foot.”

  Alexios felt his brows rise. Victor has guts, he said to himself. Or, more likely, he’s driven by a demon.

  Alexios knew all about being driven by demons.

  Surface Excursion

  Molina sat in silence inside the heavy pressurized suit, jouncing slightly as the tractor trundled along the route he had selected. They passed the shallow crater where he had found his specimens. In the tractor’s headlights it looked gray and lifeless.

  A relentless anger simmered through him, overwhelming the uneasiness he felt about being out on the surface of this deadly world, where a slight mistake could kill you.

  Once he allowed McFergusen and his dilettantes to examine his samples, they wouldn’t let go of them. Just one more test. Oh, yes, we thought of another way to probe the samples. You don’t mind our keeping them another day or two, do you?

  Molina saw that the results they were getting matched his own almost exactly. Within the margin of measurement error, at least. So why are they still sawing away at my rocks? What do they think they’ll find that I haven’t already found? They can’t take the credit for discovering them away from me. What in hell are they trying to do?

  He thought he knew the answer. They’re trying to prove I’m wrong. They’re doing their damnedest to discredit me. They’ll keep poking and probing and studying until they find some error in my analysis, some mistake I’ve made.

  Never! he told himself. There’s no mistake. No error. The bio-markers are there and no matter what they do they can’t make them go away.

  But still they’re hammering away at it, trying to show I’m wrong. Molina seethed with barely controlled fury. He tried to remember that age-old saw: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Who said that originally? Fermi? Sagan?

  What fucking difference does it make? he raged inwardly. The evidence is there. It’s real, goddammit. They can’t make it disappear.

  But they won’t be satisfied until more specimens with biomarkers are found. All right. They can’t find them, sitting up there in orbit with their virtual reality thumbs up their asses. So I’ll find them down here. I’ll bring back more specimens and shove them under their noses and then they’ll have to admit I’m right.

  “We’re coming up on that gully.” Alexios’s voice in his earphones startled him back to the here and now.

  Blinking away his angry ruminations, Molina saw off to their right a long, fairly straight gorge paralleling their course, a split in the bare rocky surface. It didn’t look very deep on the geodetic map, but now as he stared through the glassteel bubble of the tractor’s cab, it seemed as yawning as the Grand Canyon.

  It’s just an illusion, he told himself. With no light except the stars, everything looks dark an
d deep and scary.

  “Where do you want me to pull up?” Alexios asked.

  Strange how familiar his voice sounded through the earphones, Molina thought. I couldn’t have heard it before; I just met the man a few weeks ago. And yet—

  “Where should I stop?” Alexios asked again.

  “Get as close to the edge as you can,” Molina said, feeling his insides fluttering with anticipation and more than a little fear.

  Alexios drove the tractor up to the rim of the gully, so close that Molina was momentarily alarmed that they would topple into it. When he finally stopped the tractor, Molina could peer down into its shadowy depths.

  “Better wait until the Sun comes up,” Alexios suggested.

  Nodding inside his helmet, Molina started to get up from his seat. “I’ll get my equipment out of the back.”

  Alexios pressed the keypad on the control panel that popped the hatch on Molina’s side of the bubble, then opened the hatch on his side. “I’ll give you a hand.”

  They worked by starlight, hauling the cases of equipment out of the tractor’s cargo bay. One of the metal boxes stuck to the tractor’s deck.

  “Frozen,” Alexios muttered. “It must have had some moisture on its bottom when you put it in.”

  Molina realized that it was more than a hundred below zero in the nighttime darkness.

  “It’ll thaw quickly enough when the Sun comes up,” said Alexios.

  Impatient, Molina climbed up onto the deck and opened the crate there. He began hauling out the equipment it held: sample scoops, extensible arms, handheld radiation meters. One by one, he handed them to Alexios, who laid them in a neat row on the ground.

  Alexios lifted his left arm so he could see the miniature display screen on his wrist. “Still another half hour to sunrise.”

  Molina was already setting up a winch and buckyball cable. Alexios saw a power drill among the equipment arrayed on the ground and helped the astrobiologist to firmly implant the steel-tubed frame into the hard, rocky ground. Then they fastened the winch to it and connected its power cable to the tractor’s electrical outlet.

  Worldlessly they lowered Molina’s equipment to the bottom of the gully. It was a fair test of the winch, although none of the paraphernalia weighed as much as Molina and his suit.

  Despite the coldness of the night, Alexios was sweating from his exertions. Good, he thought. The suit’s well insulated. He straightened up and saw a pearly glow on the horizon.

  “Look,” he said to Molina, pointing.

  For a moment Molina felt confused. Mercury has no atmosphere, he knew. There can’t be a gradual dawn, like on Earth. Then he realized that what he was seeing was the Sun’s zodiacal light, the sunlight scattered off billions of dust motes that orbited the Sun’s equator, leftover bits of matter from the earliest times of the solar system’s birth that hovered close to the star like two long oblate arms, too faint to see except when the overwhelming glare of the Sun itself was hidden, as it was now.

  Molina grunted, then said, “I’d better get into the rig.”

  Inside his helmet, Alexios shook his head. You never were the poetic sort, Victor. Not a romantic neuron in your entire brain. But then a sardonic voice in his head reminded him, But he got Lara, didn’t he?

  By the time he had helped Molina into the climbing harness, the rim of the Sun was peeping above the horizon, sending a wave of heat washing across the desolate landscape. Alexios heard his suit ping and groan as its cermet expanded in the sudden roasting warmth. The air fans whirred like angry insects. The visor of his helmet automatically darkened.

  “Ready?” he asked Molina.

  He heard the man gulp and cough. Then he replied, “Yes, I’m ready.

  The gully was filling with light as the Sun climbed higher against the black sky. Alexios stood by the winch as it unreeled its cable and Molina slowly, carefully, picked his way down the steep slope of the crevasse.

  It’s not all that deep, Alexios saw, peering down into the ravine. Ten meters, maybe twelve. Just deep enough. He watched as Molina reached the bottom and unhitched the cable from his climbing harness.

  “Good hunting,” Alexios called to him.

  “Right,” said Molina faintly. His voice was already breaking up slightly, relayed from the bottom of the crevasse to one of the commsats orbiting overhead and then to Alexios’s suit radio.

  In pace requiescat, Alexios added silently.

  Once he’d removed the climbing cable from his suit, Molina took in a deep, steadying breath and looked up and down the gully. It was like a long, slightly irregular hallway without a roof. One steep wall was bathed in sunlight, the other in shadow. But enough light reflected off the bright side so that he could see the uneven floor and even the shadowed side fairly well.

  This must be a fault line, he told himself. Maybe it cracked open when a meteor impacted. He attached his sampling scoop to the metal arm and extended it to its full length. Not much dust on the ground, he saw. The bottom here must be exposed ancient terrain. If I can get some ratio data from the radioactives I’ll be able to come up with a rough date for its age.

  It was all but impossible to kneel in the heavy, cumbersome suit, but slowly Molina lowered himself to his knees. Inside the suit he could hear its servomotors whine in complaint. He chipped out a small chunk of rock, then fumbled through the sets of equipment lying on the ground until he found the radiation counter. No sense trying for argon ratios, he told himself. The heat’s baked all the volatiles out of these rocks eons ago.

  The radiation signature of uranium was there, however. Weak, but clearly discernable in the handheld’s tiny readout screen. Then he tried the potassium signature. Stronger. Unmistakable. Molina weighed the sample, then did some rough calculating on the computer built into his suit’s wrist. This sample is at least two and half billion years old, he concluded. If I can dig deeper, I should find older layers of rock.

  He looked down the length of the slightly uneven corridor of rock. The floor seemed to drop away farther down. Maybe I can get to older strata without digging, he thought. I don’t have a really powerful drill with me, anyway.

  It took a mighty effort to get back on his feet again, even with the servomotors doing their best. Molina blinked sweat from his eyes and called up to Alexios:

  “I’m going down the arroyo about a hundred meters or so.”

  It took a moment for the radio signal to bounce off the nearest commsat.

  “Which direction?” Alexios asked.

  Molina pointed, then realized it was foolish. He tapped at his wrist keyboard, then peered at the positioning data that came up on its display.

  “North,” he said into his helmet microphone. “To your left as you face the rim.”

  A silence longer than the time for the signal to be relayed off the satellite. Then, “Very well. If you go any farther, let me know and I’ll bring the tractor and rig to your position.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Molina answered immediately.

  Again a delay. Finally, “Very well. I’ll wait here.”

  Molina started slogging along the rock-walled chasm. That voice, he said to himself. Why should it sound so familiar?

  Alexios climbed back into the tractor’s bubble of a cab and sat awkwardly in the driver’s seat. The chair was bare metal, designed to accommodate the bulky suits that the tractor crew had to wear.

  No sense standing in the open, Alexios thought. The glassteel doesn’t afford that much protection against radiation, but every little bit helps. He remembered an old adage he had heard from a mercenary soldier out in the Belt: “Never stand when you can sit. Never stay awake when you can sleep. And never pass a latrine without using it.”

  No latrines out here, Alexios knew. Nor out in the Belt, either. You piss into the relief tube built into your suit and you crap when you can find a toilet inside a pressurized vessel.

  The Sun was halfway above the horizon now, already frighteningly large and glaring.

/>   Alexios smiled. In another fifteen minutes or so it will dip back down and plunge this whole region into darkness again. What’s Victor going to do when the light goes away and he’s stuck down in that crevasse?

  False Dawn

  Dante Alexios sat in the cab of the tractor and watched the Sun drop toward the horizon, a twisted smile on his slightly mismatched face. Although Molina hadn’t spoken to him since he announced he was heading farther up the gully, he could hear Victor’s breathing through the open microphone in the astrobiologist’s helmet.

  Alexios turned off the suit-to-suit link and called in to the base on another frequency.

  “Alexios to base control.”

  The reply was almost immediate. “Control here.”

  “Do you have our position?”

  A slight delay. Alexios could picture the controller flicking his eyes to the geographic display.

  “Yes, your beacon is coming through clearly.”

  “Good. Anything happening that I should know about?”

  A slight chuckle. “Not unless you have a prurient interest in what the safety director and her assistant are up to.”

  Alexios laughed, too. “Not as long as they keep their recreations confined to the privacy of their quarters.”

  “So far. But there’s a lot of heavy breathing going on at their workstations.”

  “I’ll speak to her when I get back.”

  “Her? What about him?”

  “Her,” Alexios repeated. “The woman’s always in control in situations like this.”

  “That’s news to me,” said the controller.

  There was nothing else significant to report. One of the powersats was getting some experimental shielding; otherwise, the base was running in standby mode until the IAA gave them clearance to resume their work.

  Alexios clicked off the link to the base and sat back as comfortably as he could manage inside the suit. How long will it take Yamagata to go bankrupt? he wondered. And when the Sunpower Foundation does go bust, will Yamagata simply siphon more money out of his corporation? Will his son allow that? A battle between father and son would be interesting.