Ben Bova - Mercury

by Mercury(lit)

  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.

  "So what if I black out the base?" he said to himself, almost giggling, as he plugged the thick power cord into a wall outlet. His quarters were hardly a sterile environment, but Molina was in too much of a hurry to care about that. I'll just work on a couple of the samples and save the rest for the lab up in Himawari, he told himself. Besides, he reasoned, these samples are fresh from the site; there hasn't been enough time for any terrestrial organisms to contaminate them.

  Time meant nothing now. Hours flew by as Molina sawed sample microslices from the rocks and ran them through the spectrometer. When he got hungry or sleepy he popped cognitive enhancers and went back to work revitalized. Wish I had brought the scanning tunneling microscope here, he thought. For a moment he considered asking Alexios if there was one in the base, but he thought better of it. I've got one up in the ship, he told himself. Be patient.

  But patience gave way to growing excitement. It was all there! he realized after nearly forty hours of work. Pushing a thick flop of his sandy hair back from his red-rimmed eyes, Molina tapped one-handed at his laptop. The sample contained PAHs in plenitude, in addition to magnetized bits of iron sulfides and carbonate globules, unmistakable markers of biological activity.

  There's life on Mercury! Molina exulted. He wanted to leap to his feet and shout the news but he found that his legs were cramped and tingling from sitting cross-legged on the floor for so long. Instead, he bent over his laptop and dictated a terse report of his discovery to the astrobiology bulletin published electronically by the International Consortium of Universities. As an afterthought he fired off a copy to the International Astronautical Authority. And then a brief, triumphant message to Lara.

  He realized that he hadn't called his wife since he'd left Earth, despite his promise to talk to her every day. Well, he grinned to himself, now I've got something to tell her.

  I'll be famous! Molina exulted. I'll be able to take my pick of professorships. We can live anywhere we choose to: California, Edinburgh, New Melbourne, any of the best astrobiology schools on Earth!

  He hauled himself slowly to his feet, his legs shooting pins and needles fiercely. Hobbling, laughing aloud, he staggered around his cluttered compartment, nearly tripping over the equipment he had scattered across the floor until his legs returned to normal. A glance at the digital clock above his bunk, which displayed the base's time, showed him that the galley had long since closed for the night. What matter? He was hungry, though, so he put in a call for Alexios. He's the head of this operation, Molina told himself. He ought to be able to get them to produce a meal for the discoverer of life on Mercury.

  Alexios did better than that. He invited Molina to his own quarters to share a late-night repast, complete with a dust-covered bottle of celebratory champagne.

  Alexios's living quarters were no larger than Molina's compartment, the astrobiologist saw, but the furnishings were much better. The bed looked more comfortable than Molina's bunk, and there was a real desk instead of a wobbly pullout tray, plus a pair of comfortably padded armchairs. Their supper-cold meats and a reasonably crisp salad-was augmented by a bowl of fruit and the champagne. It all tasted wonderful to Molina.

  "Living organisms?" Alexios was asking. "You've found living organisms?"

  "Not yet," said Molina, leaning back in the luxurious chair as he munched on a boneless pseudochicken wing.

  Alexios raised his dark brows.

  "As a point of fact," Molina said, gesturing with his plastic fork, "there might not be living organisms on Mercury."

  "But I thought you said-"

  Falling into his lecturer's mode of speech, Molina intoned, "What I've discovered here is evidence of biological activity. This shows conclusively that there was once life on Mercury. Whether life still exists here is another matter, calling for much more extensive exploration and study."

  Alexios's slightly mismatched face showed comprehension. "I see. You're saying that life once existed here, but there's no guarantee that it is still extant."

  "Precisely," said Molina, a trifle pompously. "We'll have to bring in teams to search the planet's surface extensively and bore deeply into the crust."

  "Looking for organisms underground? Like the extremophiles that have been found on Earth?"

  Nodding, Molina replied, "And Mars. And Venus. And even on Io."

  Alexios smiled thinly. "I wonder what Bishop Danvers will think about this? The thought of extraterrestrial intelligence seems to bother him."

  "Oh, I don't expect we'll find anything intelligent," said Molina, with a wave of one hand. "Microbes. Bacterial forms, that's what we're looking for."

  "I see." Alexios hesitated, then asked, "But tell me
, if you bring in teams to scour the surface and dig deep boreholes, how will that affect my operation? After all, we're planning to scoop ores from the surface and refine them with nanomachines so that we can-"

  "All that will have to stop," Molina said flatly.

  "Stop?"

  "We can't risk contaminating possible biological evidence with your industrial operation. And nanomachines-they might gobble up the very evidence we're seeking."

  Alexios sank back in his chair. "Mr. Yamagata is not going to be pleased by this. Not one bit." Yet he was smiling strangely as he spoke.

  TORCH SHIP HIMAWARI

  But that could ruin us!" Yamagata yowled, his usually smiling face knotted into an angry grimace.

  Alexios had come up to the orbiting ship to present the troubling news personally to his boss. He shrugged helplessly. "The IAA regulations are quite specific, sir. Nothing is allowed to interfere with astrobiological studies."

  The two men were standing in Himawari's small observation blister, a darkened chamber fronted by a bubble of heavily tinted glassteel. For several moments they watched in silence as the heat-blasted barren surface of Mercury slid past.

  At last Yamagata muttered, "I can't believe that any kind of life could exist down there."

  Alexios raised his brows slightly. "They found life on the surface of Venus, which is even hotter than Mercury."

  "Venus has liquid sulfur and silicone compounds. Nothing like that has been found here."

  "Not yet," Alexios said, in a barely voiced whisper.

  Yamagata frowned at him.

  "We won't have to stop all our work," Alexios said, trying to sound a little brighter. "We still have the power satellites coming in from Selene. Getting them up and running will be a considerable task."

  "But how will we provide the life-support materials for the crew?" Yamagata growled. "I depended on your team on the surface for that." Alexios clasped his hands behind his back and turned to stare at the planet's surface gliding past. He knew his base on Mercury was too small to be seen by the unaided eye from the distance of the Himawari's orbit, yet he strained his eyes to see the mound of rubble anyway.

  "Well?" Yamagata demanded. "What do you recommend?"

  Turning back to look at his decidedly unhappy employer, Alexios shrugged. "We'll have to bring in the life-support materials from Selene, I suppose, if we can't scoop them from Mercury's regolith."

  "That will bankrupt us," Yamagata muttered.

  "Perhaps the suspension will only be for a short time," said Alexios. "The scientists will come, look around, and then simply declare certain regions to be off-limits to our work."

  Even in the shadows of the darkened observation blister Alexios could see the grim expression on Yamagata's face.

  "This will ruin everything," Yamagata said in a heavy whisper. "Everything."

  Alexios agreed, but forced himself to present a worried, downcast appearance to his boss.

  Fuming, trying to keep his considerable temper under control, Yamagata repaired to his private quarters and called up the computer program of Robert Forward. The long-dead genius appeared in the middle of the compartment, smiling self-assuredly, still wearing that garish vest beneath his conservative tweed jacket.

  Between the smile and the vest, Yamagata felt too irritated to sit still. He paced around the three-dimensional image, explaining this intolerable situation. Forward's holographic image turned to follow him, that maddening smile never slipping by even one millimeter.

  "But finding life on Mercury is very exciting news," the image said. "You should be proud that you helped to facilitate such a discovery."

  "How can we continue our work if the IAA forces us to shut down all activities on the surface?" Yamagata demanded.

  "That won't last forever. They'll lift the suspension sooner or later."

  "After Sunpower Foundation has gone bankrupt."

  "You have four powersats in orbit around Mercury and six more on the way. Can't you begin to sell energy from them? You'd have some income-"

  "The solar cells degrade too quickly!" Yamagata snapped. "Their power output is too low to be profitable."

  Forward seemed to think this over for a moment. "Then spend the time finding a solution for the cell degradation. Harden the cells; protect them from the harmful solar radiation."

  "Protect them?"

  "It's probably solar ultraviolet that's doing the damage," Forward mused. "Or perhaps particles from the solar wind."

  Yamagata sank into his favorite chair. "Solar particles. You mean protons?"

  Forward nodded, making his fleshy cheeks waddle slightly. "Proton energy density must be pretty high this close to the Sun. Have you measured it?"

  "I don't believe so."

  "If it's the protons doing the damage you can protect the powersats with superconducting radiation shields, just as spacecraft are shielded."

  Yamagata's brows knit. "How do you know about radiation shielding? You died before interplanetary spacecraft needed shielding."

  "I have access to all your files," Forward reminded him. "I know everything your computer knows."

  Yamagata rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "If we could bring the powersats' energy output up to their theoretical maximum, or even close to it..."

  "You'd be able to sell their energy at a profit," Forward finished his thought. "And go ahead with the starship."

  Nodding, Yamagata closed the Forward program. The physicist winked out, leaving Yamagata alone in his quarters. He put in a call for Alexios, who had returned to the base on the planet's surface.

  "I want to find out what's causing this degradation of the solar cells," Yamagata said sternly. "That must be our number one priority."

  Alexios's mismatched image in the wall screen looked as if he had expected this decision. "I already have a small team working on it, sir. I'll put more people on the investigation."

  "Good," said Yamagata. To himself he added silently, Let's hope we can solve this problem before the IAA drives me into bankruptcy.

  EARTH

  The International Consortium of Universities was less an organization than a collection of powerful fiefdoms. It consisted of nearly a hundred universities around the world, no two of which ever agreed completely on anything. Moreover, each university was a collection of departments ranging from ancient literature to astrobiology, from psychodynamics to paleontology, from genetic engineering to gymnastics. Each department head tenaciously guarded her or his budget, assets, staff, and funding sources.

  It took a masterful administrator to manage that ever-shifting tangle of alliances, feuds, jealousies, and sexual affairs.

  Jacqueline Wexler was such an administrator. Gracious and charming in public, accommodating and willing to compromise at meetings, she nevertheless had the steel-hard will and sharp intellect to drive the ICU's ramshackle collection of egos toward goals that she herself selected. Widely known as "Attila the Honey," Wexler was all sweetness and smiles on the outside and ruthless determination within.

  Today's meeting of the ICU's astrobiology committee was typical. To Wexler it seemed patently clear that a top-flight team of investigators must be sent to Mercury to confirm Dr. Molina's discovery and organize a thorough study of the planet's possible biosphere. Indeed, everyone around the long conference table agreed perfectly on that point.

  Beyond that point, however, all agreement ended. Who should go? What would be their authority? How would they deal with the industrial operation already planted on Mercury's surface? All these questions and more led to tedious hours of wrangling. Wexler let them wrangle, knowing precisely what she wanted out of them, realizing that sooner or later they would grow tired and let her make the effective decisions. So she smiled sweetly and waited for the self-important farts-women as well as men-to run out of gas.

  The biggest issue, as far as they were concerned, was who would lead the team sent to Mercury. Rival universities vied with one another and there was much finger-pointing and cries
of "You got the top spot last time!" and "That's not fair!"

  Wexler thought it was relatively unimportant who was picked as the lead scientist for the team. She worried more about who the New Morality would send as their spiritual advisor to watch over the scientists. The spiritual advisor's ostensible task was to tend to the scientists' moral and religious needs. His real job, as far as Wexler was concerned, was to spy on the scientists and report what they were doing back to Atlanta.

  There was already a New Morality representative on Mercury, she knew: somebody named Danvers. Would they let him remain in charge of the newcomers as well, or send in somebody over his head?

  A similar meeting was going on in Atlanta, in the ornate headquarters building of the New Morality, but there were only four people seated at the much smaller conference table.