Mercury gt-14

by Ben Bova

  FIELD TRIP

  Victor Molina licked his lips nervously. “I’ve never been out on the surface of another world before,” he said.

  Dante Alexios put on a surprised look. “But you told me you’ve been to Jupiter’s moons, didn’t you?”

  The two men were being helped into the heavily insulated spacesuits that were used for excursions on Mercury’s rocky, Sun-baked surface. Half a dozen technicians were assisting them, three for each man. The suits were brightly polished, almost to a mirror finish, and so bulky that they were more individual habitats than normal spacesuits.

  Molina’s usual cocky attitude had long since vanished, replaced by uncertainty. “I was at Europa, yeah,” he maintained. “Most of the time, though, I was in the research station Gold, orbiting Jupiter. I spent a week in the smaller station in orbit around Europa itself but I never got down to the surface.”

  Alexios nodded as the technicians hung the life-support package to the back of his suit. Even in Mercury’s light gravity it felt burdensome. Both men’s suits were plugged into the base’s power system, mainly to keep the cooling fans running. Otherwise they would already be uncomfortably hot and sweaty inside the massive suits.

  He knew that Molina had never set foot on the surface of another world. Alexios had spent years accumulating a meticulous dossier on Victor Molina, the man who had once been his friend, his schoolmate, the buddy he had asked to be his best man when he married Lara. Molina had betrayed him and stolen Lara from him. Now he was going to pay.

  It took two technicians to lift the thick-walled helmet over Molina’s head and settle it onto the torso ring, like churchmen lowering a royal crown on an emperor. As they began sealing the helmet, two other techs lowered Alexios’s helmet, muffling all the sounds outside. Strange, Alexios thought. We don’t really notice the throbbing of the base’s pumps and the hiss of the air vents until the sound stops. Through his thick quartz visor he could see the technicians fussing around Molina’s suit, and the serious, almost grim expression on the astrobiologist’s face. Once we pull down the sun visors I won’t be able to see his face at all, Alexios knew.

  He moved his arm with a whine of servomotors and pressed the stud on his left wrist that activated the suit’s radio.

  “Can you hear me, Dr. Molina?”

  For a moment there was no reply, then, “I hear you.” Molina’s voice sounded strange, preoccupied.

  The woman in charge of the technicians at last gave Alexios a thump on the shoulder and signaled a thumbs-up to him. He switched to the radio frequency for the base’s control center:

  “Molina and Alexios, ready for surface excursion.”

  “You are cleared for excursion,” came the controller’s voice. Alexios recognized it; a dour Russian whom he sometimes played chess with. Once in a while he even won.

  “Cameras on?” Alexios asked, as he started clumping in the heavy boots toward the airlock hatch.

  “Exterior cameras functioning. Relief crew standing by.”

  Two other members of the base’s complement had suited up at the auxiliary airlock and were prepared to come out to rescue Alexios and Molina if they ran into trouble. Neither the main airlock nor the auxiliary was big enough to hold four suited people at the same time.

  The inner airlock hatch swung open. Alexios gestured with a gloved hand. “After you, Dr. Molina.”

  Moving uncertainly, hesitantly, Molina stepped over the hatch’s sill and planted his boots inside the airlock chamber. Alexios followed him, almost as slowly. One could not make sudden moves in the cumbersome suits.

  Once the inner hatch closed again and the air was pumping out of the chamber, Molina said, “It’s funny, but over this radio link your voice sounds kind of familiar.”

  Alexios’s pulse thumped suddenly. “Familiar?”

  “Like it’s a voice I know. A voice I’ve heard before.”

  Will he recognize me? Alexios wondered. That would ruin everything.

  He said nothing as the panel lights indicated the airlock chamber had been pumped down to vacuum. Alexios leaned a hand on the green-glowing plate that activated the outer hatch. It swung outward gradually, revealing the landscape of Mercury in leisurely slow motion. Molten sunlight spilled into the airlock chamber as both men automatically lowered their sun visors.

  “Wow,” said Molina. “Looks freaking hot out there.”

  Alexios got a vision of the astrobiologist licking his lips. Molina stayed rooted inside the chamber, actually backing away slightly from the sunshine.

  “It’s wintertime now,” Alexios joked, stepping out onto the bare rocky surface. “The temperature’s down below four hundred Celsius.”

  “Wintertime.” Molina laughed shakily.

  “When you step through the hatch, be careful of your radiator panels. They extend almost thirty centimeters higher than the top of your helmet.”

  “Yeah. Right.”

  Molina finally came out into the full fury of the Sun. All around him stretched a barren, broken plain of bare rock, strewn with pebbles, rocks, boulders. Even through the heavily tinted visor, the glare was enough to make his eyes tear. He wondered if the suit radio was picking up the thundering of his pulse, the awed gushing of his breath.

  “This way,” he heard Alexios’s voice in his helmet earphones. “I’ll show you where the crew found those rocks you’re interested in.”

  Moving like an automaton, Molina followed the gleaming armored figure of Alexios out across the bare, uneven ground. He glanced up at the Sun, huge and menacing, glaring down at him.

  “You did remember your tool kit and sample boxes, didn’t you?” Alexios asked, almost teasingly.

  “I’ve got them,” said Molina, nodding inside his helmet. Something about that voice was familiar. Why should a voice transmitted by radio sound familiar when the man was a complete stranger?

  They plodded across the desolate plain, steering around the rocks strewn haphazardly across the landscape. One of the boulders was as big as a house, massive and stolid in the glaring sunlight. The ground undulated slightly but they had no trouble negotiating the gentle rises and easy downslopes. Molina noticed a gully or chasm of some sort off to their right. Alexios kept them well clear of it.

  It was hot inside the suit, Molina realized. Cooling system or not, he felt as if the juices were being baked out of him. If the radiators should fail, he said to himself, if the suit’s electrical power shuts down—I’d be dead in a minute or two! He tried to push such thoughts out of his mind, but the sweat trickling down his brow and stinging his eyes made that impossible.

  “You’re nearing the edge of our camera range,” came the voice of the controller back at the base. He sounded almost bored.

  “Not to worry,” Alexios replied. “We’re almost there.”

  Less than a minute later Alexios stopped and turned slowly, like a mechanical giant with rusty bearings.

  “Here we are,” he said brightly.

  “This is it?” Molina saw that they were in a shallow depression, most likely an ancient meteor crater, about a hundred and fifty meters across.

  “This is where the construction team found the rocks you’re interested in.”

  Molina stared at the rock-strewn ground. It wasn’t as dusty as the Moon’s surface was. They had walked all this way and their boots were barely tarnished. He saw their bootprints, though, looking new and bright against the dark ground.

  “What was your construction crew doing all the way out here?” he heard himself ask.

  Alexios did not reply for a moment. Then, “Scouting for locations for new sites. Our base is going to grow, sooner or later.”

  “And they found the rocks with biomarkers here, at this site?”

  He sensed Alexios nodding solemnly inside his helmet. “You can tell which rocks contain the biomarkers,” Alexios said. “They’re the darker ones.”

  Molina saw that there were dozens of dark reddish rocks scattered around the shallow crater. He forgot all
his other questions as he unclipped the scoop from his equipment belt and extended its handle so he could begin picking up the rocks—and the possible life-forms in them.

  LARA

  It was not easy for her to leave their eight-year-old son on Earth, but Lara Tierney Molina was a determined woman. Her husband’s messages from the Japanese torch ship seemed so forlorn, so painful, that she couldn’t possibly leave him alone any longer. When he suddenly departed for Mercury, he had told her that his work would absorb him totally and, besides, the rugged base out there was no place for her. But almost as soon as he’d left, he began sending pitifully despondent messages to her every night, almost breaking into tears in his loneliness and misery. That was so unlike Victor that Lara found herself sobbing as she watched her husband’s despondent image.

  She tried to cheer him with smiling responses, even getting Victor Jr. to send upbeat messages to his father. Still, Victor’s one-way calls from Mercury were full of heartbreaking desolation.

  So she made arrangements for her sister to take care of Victor Jr., flew from Earth to lunar orbit aboard a Masterson shuttlecraft, then boarded the freighter Urania that was carrying supplies to Mercury on a slow, economical Hohmann minimum energy trajectory. No high-acceleration fusion torch ship for her; she could not afford such a luxury and the Sunpower Foundation was unwilling to pay for it. So she coasted toward Mercury for four months, her living quarters a closet-sized compartment, her toilet facilities a scuffed and stained lavatory that she shared with the three men and two women of the freighter’s crew.

  She had worried, at first, about being penned up in such close quarters with strangers, but the crew turned out to be amiable enough. Within a few days of departure from Earth orbit, Lara learned that both the women were heterosexual and one of them was sleeping with the ship’s communications officer. The other two males didn’t come on to her, for which Lara was quite grateful. The entire crew treated her with a rough deference; they shared meals together and became friends the way traveling companions do, knowing that they would probably never see each other again once their voyage was over.

  Lara Tierney had been born to considerable wealth. When the greenhouse floods forced her family from their Manhattan penthouse, they moved to their summer home in Colorado and found that it was now a lakeside property. Father made it their permanent domicile. Lara had been only a baby then, but she vaguely remembered the shooting out in the woods at night, the strangers who camped on Father’s acreage and had to be rooted out by the National Guard soldiers, the angry shouts and sometimes a scream that silenced all the birds momentarily.

  By and large, though, life was pleasant enough. Her father taught her how to shoot both rifles and pistols, and he always made certain that one of the guards accompanied Lara whenever she went out into the lovely green woods.

  At school in Boulder, her friends said she led a charmed life. Nothing unhappy ever seemed to happen to her. She was bright, talented, and pleasant to everyone around her.

  Lara knew that she was no beauty. Her eyes were nice enough, a warm gold-flecked amber, but her lips were painfully thin and she thought her teeth much too big for her slim jaw. She was gangly—her figure hardly had a curve to it. Yet she had no trouble dating young men; they seemed attracted to her like iron filings to a magnet. She thought it might have been her money, although her mother told her that as long as she smiled at young men they would feel at ease with her.

  The most popular men on campus pursued her. Victor Molina, dashing and handsome, became her steady beau—until Molina introduced her to a friend of his, an intense, smoldering young engineer named Mance Bracknell.

  “He’s interesting,” Lara said.

  “Mance?” Molina scoffed. “He’s a weirdo. Not interested in anything except engineering. I think I’m the only friend he has on campus.”

  Another student warned, “You know engineers. They’re so narrow-minded they can look through a keyhole with both eyes.”

  Yet she found Bracknell fascinating. He was nowhere near handsome, she thought, and his social skills were minimal. He dressed carelessly; his meager wardrobe showed he had no money. Yet he was the only male in her classes who paid no attention to her: he was far too focused on his studies. Lara saw him as a challenge, at first. She was going to make him take his nose out of his computer screen and smell the roses.

  That semester, she and Molina shared only one class with the young engineering student, a mandatory class in English literature. Bracknell was struggling through it. Lara decided to offer her help.

  “I don’t need help,” Bracknell told her, matter-of-factly. “I’m just not interested in the material.”

  “Not interested in Keats? Or Shakespeare?” She was shocked.

  With an annoyed little frown, Bracknell replied, “Are you interested in Bucky Fuller? Or Raymond Loewy?”

  She had never heard of them. Lara made a deal with him. If he paid attention to the literature assignments, she would sign up for a basic science class.

  Molina was not pleased. “You’re wasting your time with Mance. For god’s sake, Lara, the guy doesn’t even wear socks!”

  It took most of the semester for her to penetrate Bracknell’s self-protective shell. Late one night after they had walked from one end of campus to the other as he flawlessly—if flatly—recited Keats’s entire poem The Eve of St. Agnes to her, Bracknell finally told her what his dream was. It took her breath away.

  “A tower that goes all the way up into space? Can it be built?”

  “I can do it,” he answered, without an eyeblink’s hesitation.

  He wanted to build a tower that rose up to the heavens, an elevator that could carry people and cargo into orbit for mere pennies per kilogram.

  “I can do it,” he told her, time and again. “I know I can! The big problem has always been the strength-to-weight ratio of the materials, but with buckyball fibers we can solve that problem and build the blasted thing!”

  His enthusiasm sent Lara scurrying to her own computer, to learn what buckyball fibers might be and how a space elevator could be built.

  Her friends twitted her about her fascination with “the geek.” Molina fumed and sulked, angry that she was paying more attention to Bracknell than to him.

  “How is he in bed?” Molina growled at her one afternoon as they walked to class together.

  “Not as good as you, Victor dear,” Lara replied sweetly. “I love him for his mind, not his body.”

  And she left him standing there in the autumn sunshine, amidst the yellow aspen leaves that littered the lawn.

  It took months, but Lara realized at last that she was truly and hopelessly in love with Mance Bracknell and his dream of making spaceflight inexpensive enough so that everyone could afford it.

  Even before they graduated, she used her father’s connections to introduce Bracknell to industrialists and financiers who had the resources to back his dream. Most of them scoffed at the idea of a space elevator. They called it a “skyhook” and said it would never work. Bracknell displayed a volcanic temper, shouting at them, calling them idiots and blind know-nothings. Shocked at his eruptions, Lara did her best to calm him down, to soothe him, to show him how to deal with men and women who believed that because they were older and richer, they were also wiser.

  It took years, years in which Bracknell supported himself with various engineering jobs, traveling constantly, a techno-vagabond moving from project to project. Lara met him now and then, while her parents prayed fervently that she would eventually get tired of him and his temper and find a young man more to their liking, someone like Victor Molina. Although she occasionally saw Molina as he worked toward his doctorate in biology, she found herself thinking about Bracknell constantly during the months they were separated. Despite her parents she flew to his side whenever she could.

  Then he called from Ecuador, of all places, so excited she could barely understand what he was saying. An earlier attempt at building a space elevator
in Ecuador had failed; probably it had been a fraud, a sham effort aimed at swindling money from the project’s backers. But the government of Ecuador wanted to proceed with the project, and a consortium of European bankers had formed a corporation to do it, if they could find an engineering organization capable of tackling the job.

  “They want me!” Bracknell fairly shouted, his image in Lara’s phone screen so excited she thought he was going to hyperventilate. “They want me to head the project!”

  “In Ecuador?” she asked, her heart pounding.

  “Yes! It’s on the equator. We’ve picked a mountaintop site.”

  “You’re really going to do it?”

  “You bet I am! Will you come down here?”

  “Yes!” she answered immediately.

  “Will you marry me?”

  The breath gushed out of her. She had to gulp before she could reply, “Of course I will!”

  But Bracknell’s tower had collapsed, killing millions. He was disgraced, tried for mass homicide, exiled from Earth forever.

  And now Lara Tierney Molina, married to Bracknell’s best friend, mother of their eight-year-old son, rode a shabby freighter to Mercury to be with her husband.

  Yet she still dreamed of Mance Bracknell.

  GOETHE BASE

  As soon as the technicians peeled him out of the cumbersome spacesuit, Molina grabbed his sample box and rushed to the makeshift laboratory he had squeezed into the bare little compartment that served as his living quarters at Mercury base.

  From the equipment box that blocked the compartment’s built-in drawers he tugged out the miniature diamond-bladed saw. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, he wormed the safety goggles over his eyes, tugged on a pair of sterilized gloves, then grabbed one of the rocks out of his sample box and immediately began cutting microthin slices out of it.

  He got to his knees and lifted out the portable mass spectrometer from his equipment box. Despite Mercury’s low gravity it was so heavy he barely was able to raise it clear of the box. “Portable is a relative term,” he muttered as he looked around for an electrical outlet. The spectrometer’s laser drew a lot of power, he knew.