by Mercury(lit)
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.
The Sun was dipping lower. Turning, he could see bright stars spangling the blackness on the other side of the sky. Alone with the stars. And his thoughts.
Lara. She was Molina's wife. Had been for just about ten years now. They have a child, a son. Victor, Jr. His son, out of her body.
The pain Alexios felt was real, physical. He realized his jaws had clamped so tightly that he could hear his teeth grinding against one another.
With a physical effort, he forced himself to relax and tapped the keypad to reopen the suit-to-suit link.
"-dark down here," Molina was saying. "My helmet lamp isn't all that much help."
"The Sun's going down for a while," said Alexios.
"How long?"
Alexios had memorized the day's solar schedule. "Fifty-eight minutes, twelve seconds."
"A whole hour?" Molina's voice whined like a disappointed child's.
"Just about."
"What the hell am I supposed to do down in this hole in the dark for an hour? You should have told me about this!"
"I thought you knew."
"I can't see fucking shit down here!"
"You have the helmet lamp."
"Big help. It's like trying to find your way across the Rocky Mountains with a flashlight."
"Have you found anything?"
"No," Molina snapped. "And I won't, at this rate."
You won't at any rate, Alexios replied silently. Aloud, he asked, "Do you want to come back to the tractor?"
A long silence. Alexios could picture Molina angrily weighing the alternatives in his mind.
"No, dammit. I'll wait here until the frigging Sun comes up again."
"I'll move the tractor down to your location."
"Good. Do that."
With no atmosphere to dilute their brightness, the stars provided adequate light for Alexios to reel up the winch's cable, disassemble the rig and pack it all back onto the tractor's rear deck. Then he drove carefully along the rim of the crevasse to the spot where Molina sat, waiting and fuming, for enough sunlight to resume his search. A waste of time, Alexios knew. Victor won't find what he's looking for.
By the time he had drilled the holes in the ground for the rig's supporting frame and set the winch in place, the Sun was rising above the bare, too-near horizon once again. This time it would remain up for weeks. Even through the heavy tinting of his visor Alexios had to squint at its powerful glare. The Sun was tremendous, huge, a mighty presence looming above him.
The hours dragged on. Alexios listened to Molina panting and grumbling as he searched for rocks that might harbor biomarkers.
"Christ, it's hot," the astrobiologist complained.
Alexios flicked a glance at the outside temperature readout on the tractor's control panel. "It's only three-eighty Celsius. A cool morning on Mercury."
"I'm broiling inside this damned suit."
"You'd broil a lot faster outside the suit," Alexios bantered.
"There's nothing here. I'm going farther up the gully."
"Check your suit's coolant systems. If the levels are down in t
he yellow region of the display, you should come back."
"It's still in the green."
Alexios called up the suit monitoring program and saw that Molina's coolant systems were on the edge of the yellow warning region. He's got about an hour left before they'll dip into the red, he estimated.
Nearly an hour later, Alexios called, "Time to come back, Dr. Molina."
"Not yet. There's a bunch of rocks up ahead. I want to take a look at them."
"Safety regulations, sir," Alexios said firmly. "Your life-support systems are going critical."
"I can see the readouts as well as you can," Molina replied testily. "I've got a good hour or more before they reach the red line, and even then there's a considerable safety margin built in."
"Dr. Molina, the safety regulations must be followed. They were formulated for your protection."
"Yeah, yeah. Just let me take a look at-hey! Damn! Ow!"
"What happened?" Alexios snapped, genuinely alarmed. "What's wrong?"
"I'm okay. I fell down, that's all. Tripped over a crack in the ground."
"Oh."
Alexios heard grunting, then swearing, then quick, heavy breathing. The sound of panic.
"Christ, I can't get up!"
"What?"
"I can't lift myself up! I'm down on my left side and I can't get enough leverage in this goddamned suit to push myself up onto my feet again."
Alexios could picture his predicament. The suit's servomotors were designed to assist the wearer's normal arm and leg movements. Basically they were designed to allow a normal human being's muscle power to move the suit's heavy sleeves and leggings. Little more. Molina was down on the ground, trying to lift the combined weight of his body plus the suit back into a standing position. Even in Mercury's light gravity, the servos were unequal to the task.
"Can you sit up?" he asked into his helmet mike.
A grunt, then an exasperated sigh. "No. This damned iron maiden you've got me in doesn't bend much at the middle."
Alexios thought swiftly. He can last about two more hours in the suit, maybe three. I can leave him there and let him broil in his own juices. He left me when I needed him; why should I save his life? It's not my fault-he wanted to go down there. He insisted on it.
Base control wasn't on the suit-to-suit frequency. The suit radios could be picked up by the commsats, of course, but you had to plug into the commsat frequency and Victor didn't know that. He rushed out here without learning all the necessary procedures, Alexios thought. He depended on me to handle the details.
Just as I depended on him to help me when I needed it. And he walked away from me. He took Lara and left me to the wolves.
Inside his helmet, Alexios smiled grimly. He remembered Poe's old story, "The Cask of Amontillado." What were Fortunato's last words? "For the love of God, Montresor!" And Montresor replied, as he put the last brick in place and sealed his former friend into a lingering death, "Yes, for the love of God!"
"Hey!" Molina called. "I really need some help here."
"I'm sure you do," Alexios said calmly.
And he pictured himself bringing the sad news back to the base. Telling Yamagata how the noted astrobiologist had killed himself out on the surface of Mercury, nobly searching for evidence of life. I tried to help him, Alexios saw himself explaining, but by the time I reached him he was gone. He just pushed it too far. I warned him, but he paid no attention to the safety regs.
Then I'll have to tell his widow. Lara, your husband is dead. No, I couldn't say it like that. Not so abruptly, so brutally. Lara, I'm afraid I have very bad news for you...
He could see the shock in her soft gold-flecked eyes. The pain.
"I'm really stuck here," Molina called, a hint of desperation in his voice. "I need you to help me. What are you doing up there?"
Alexios heard himself say, "I'm coming down. It'll take a few minutes. Hang in there."
"Well for Christ's sake don't dawdle! I'm sloshing in my own sweat inside this frigging suit."
Alexios smiled again. You're not helping yourself, Victor. You're not making it easier for me to come to your aid.
But he pushed the door of the tractor's cab open and jumped to the ground, almost hoping that he'd snap an ankle or twist a knee and be unable to save Victor's self-centered butt. Angry with himself, furious with Victor, irritated at the world in general, Alexios marched to the winch and wrapped the cable around both his gloved hands. Slowly he began lowering himself down the steep side of the gully.
"What are you doing?" Molina demanded. "Are you coming?"
"I'll be there in a few minutes," Alexios said between gritted teeth.
I'll save your ass, Victor, he thought. I'll save your body. I won't let you die. I'll bring you back and let you destroy yourself. That's just as good as killing you. Better, even. Destroy yourself, Victor. With my help.
TORCH SHIP BRUDNOY
"Had a bit of a scrape out there, eh?" asked Professor McFergusen as he poured a stiff whisky for himself.
Molina was sitting on the curved couch of the Brudnoy's well-stocked lounge, his wife close beside him. Two tall glasses of fruit juice stood on the low table before them. No one else was in the lounge; McFergusen had seen to it that this meeting would be private.
McFergusen kept a fatherly smile on his weather-seamed face as he sat down in the plush faux-leather chair at the end of the cocktail table. He and the chair sighed in harmony.
'You're all right, I trust?" he asked Molina. "No broken bones, as far as I can see."
"I'm fine," Molina said. "It was just a little accident. Nothing to fuss over."
Mrs. Molina looked to McFergusen as if she thought otherwise, but she said nothing and hid her emotions by picking up her glass and sipping at it. Fruit juice. McFergusen suppressed a shudder of distaste.
"I think the entire affair has been exaggerated," said Lara. "From what Victor tells me, he was never in any real danger."
McFergusen nodded. "I suppose not. Good thing that Alexios fellow was there to help out, though."
"That's why the safety regulations require that no one goes out onto the surface alone," Molina said, a bit stiffly.
"Yes. Of course. The important thing, though-the vital question-is: did you find any more specimens while you were out there?" Now Molina grabbed for his glass. "No," he admitted, then took a gulp of the juice.
McFergusen's bearded face settled into a worried frown. "You see, the problem is that we still have nothing but those specimens you collected your very first day on the planet."
"There must be more," Molina insisted. "We simply haven't found them yet."
"We've searched for weeks, lad."
"We'll have to search further. And more extensively."
The tumbler of whisky had never left McFergusen's hand. He took a deep draft from it, then finally put it down on the table. Shaking his head, he said firmly, "Yamagata's putting pressure on the IAA. And, frankly, I'm running out of excuses to send back to headquarters. Do you realize how much it costs to keep this ship here? And my committee?"
Molina looked obviously irritated. "How much is the discovery of life on Mercury worth? Can you put a dollar figure on new knowledge?"
"Is there life on Mercury?"
"That's the question, isn't it?"
"Some of my committee members think we're here on a fool's errand," McFergusen admitted.
"They're the fools, then," Molina snapped.
"Are they?"
Molina started to reply, but his wife put a hand on his arm. Just a feather-light touch, but it was enough to silence him.
"Wasn't it Sagan" she asked, in a soft voice, "who said that absence of proof is not proof of absence?"
McFergusen beamed at her. "Yes, Sagan. And I agree! I truly do! I'm not your enemy, lad. I want you to succeed."
Lara immediately understood what he had not said. "You want Victor to succeed, but you have doubts."
"Worse than that," McFergusen said, his tone sinking
. "There's a consensus among my committee that your evidence, Dr. Molina, is not conclusive. It may not even be pertinent."
Molina nearly dropped his glass. "Not pertinent! What do you mean?"
