Below Mercury (34 page)
‘Whoah.’ Abrams let out an involuntary cry of surprise as the sunlight smote him in the face. Even at Mercury’s South Pole, the Sun’s radiant energy was intense; it was like walking from an air-conditioned lobby into the full heat of a tropical day. His helmet visor darkened instantly at the first touch of sunlight, and the suit’s cooling unit increased power to compensate for the sudden inrush of heat.
Elliott came up and stood beside him, and surveyed the scene. The robot halted behind them.
‘Jesus.’
They had emerged from the cutting to stand on a levelled area high on Chao Meng-fu’s ramparts, on the spur that thrust out into the crater. A lightweight post-and-wire guard fence ran around the perimeter of the area. Ahead to their left, the Sun glared over the southern peaks of Chao Meng-fu’s crater wall, a mass of terraces, boulder slopes and hills that climbed up into the black sky.
On their right, northwest, a sheer fall plunged into blackness, and an array of repeater antennas pointed down into the crater, providing infill coverage for the radio shadow behind the crater walls. Feeder bundles from the antenna array snaked across the rock into large junction boxes, and from one of these boxes, a set of heavy cables led off alongside a sloping pathway to the left. It wound its way up into the higher peaks, hugging the shadows.
Abrams and Elliott walked over to the right-hand edge and looked out across the crater. From this high vantage point, they could see almost the entire ring of the crater wall. In the sharp relief of the low sunlight, the encircling peaks looked like a ring of small, broken teeth.
Standing there above the sheer drop, they had the impression that they were staring out over a gigantic, bottomless pit, a gateway to a hidden underworld. Only the central peaks broke the illusion; they rose into the sky in the distance, rising up out of nothingness, their steep-sided peaks blazing in the sunlight above the blackness of the crater floor. No trace of the crater floor could be made out; the sunlight reduced the landscape to a world of stark whites and absolute blacks.
‘That’s one fantastic view,’ Abrams commented, following the line of peaks round with his eyes. Elliott didn’t reply; words seemed superfluous as he gazed out over the spectacular scene.
The two men remained there for long moments, taking in the forbidding majesty of Mercury’s landscape.
‘Better get moving,’ Abrams said at last, tearing himself away from the view. He turned to the antenna array. ‘I guess we can’t use any of these?’
‘No, we’re still too low on the mountainside, and these are too small to reach Earth anyway.’ Elliott reached up and prodded one of the VHF antennas. It shook at his touch.
‘Yeah, I knew it couldn’t be that easy,’ Abrams said, and looked up the pathway that led off into the peaks. ‘That looks like one hell of a climb.’
As their eyes became used to the bright sunlight, they saw that the mountainside was not white, but only appeared so in the intense sunlight. In the shade, the exposed rocks were a mixture of charcoal and paler grey, the shattered basalt and breccia of the crater walls. Here and there, an occasional sparkle came from lumps of ancient anorthosite, blown out of the crater by the colossal impact that formed it. Everything was layered thickly with the pulverised soil and dust of billions of years of meteorite impacts, rounding the rough edges of the rocks and boulders, like grey snow on the landscape.
Abrams set off towards the path, Elliott and the robot behind him.
The path had been cut into the solid rock, like the flat area they had just left. It went upwards at a steep grade, but in the low gravity, it was very like walking back on Earth. They walked steadily, being careful not to over-exert themselves and cause their visors to mist over. The path snaked its way through the rising, tumbled terrain towards the unseen peaks, favouring a route that gave greatest shade from the Sun.
The cable bundles from the repeater station followed the path as it climbed upwards. The cables ran between supports set at regular intervals by the side of the path, but in several places where the path twisted and turned through the tumbled boulders, the cable leapt away from the path on a route of its own, reappearing besides them a short distance further on.
After they had been climbing for about thirty minutes, they plunged into the deep shadow of a hollow in the mountainside. A sign by the side of the path announced:
HALF WAY TO PEAK
HEIGHT ABOVE ICE FIELD: 3,150 m
Elliott and Abrams took a breather in the cool darkness. The robot halted beside them.
‘How’s your air?’ Elliott asked. His face, which had been invisible behind his darkened visor, gradually emerged as the visor adjusted to the shadow.
Abrams studied his wrist console. ‘Got just over two hours left at present usage. You?’
‘The same. We’ll use less once we’ve stopped climbing, but we’re likely to need a cylinder change on the way back.’
‘I think you’re right. It’s nearly thirteen hundred hours. I’m going to try to contact the others.’ Abrams used his wrist console to select the comlink, but after a few moments, he shook his head, and started to tap out a message on the console. ‘No coverage here. I’ll send a text to go later.’
They rested for a few more minutes, letting their suit temperatures stabilise after the exertion of the climb, and then set out again on the final stage of their journey.
They rounded the hillside above the hollow that they had rested in, and found themselves at the bottom of a wide boulder slope that ran upwards towards a pass between two peaks. The Sun blazed down on the sloping plain from above the hills on the left as the path swung to the right and headed up towards the high pass.
Abrams and Elliott toiled up the path, followed by the armoured bulk of the robot. There were few shadows on the sun-baked plain to offer any respite from the Sun, and they had to keep on stopping at regular intervals in the shade of one of the larger boulders, to avoid overheating.
They spoke little on the long climb upwards. It was further than it looked; it was difficult to judge distances and angles in the oblique lighting, and the slope seemed to unroll endlessly before them. By the time of their third rest, however, they could look down and see that they had come up a long way.
The tumbled peaks fell away below them; from this vantage point, they appeared less sharp-edged; a landscape of rolling hills that disappeared towards the unseen edge of the crater. The long slope that they had climbed was a shallow fault that cut across the folds of the terrain, a remnant of some ancient slumping of the mountain walls after the impact of the huge meteorite.
‘Not far now,’ Abrams said, ‘one last push and I think we’ll be able to see the main antenna.’
They turned their backs on the view behind them and continued upwards, and now the high pass seemed much closer. The path climbed very steeply now, and in places, it was cut into broad, shallow stairs to allow robots to ascend. They plunged into cool shadow again as the walls of the pass rose above them; they were steep-sided, as if some giant knife had cut the hills in half. As they tramped up another flight of steps, Abrams looked up.
‘There it is.’ He pointed up to where the silver bowl of a parabolic dish antenna stood out on the skyline against the black sky.
Elliott looked up at the dish. It seemed to be on the left-hand side of the pass, high above them. The path became steeper still, and started to wind, first to one side then the other, as it climbed the final slopes of the pass. The bundle of cables, that had followed them all the way here, left the path now and took its own route up the sides of the pass, heading straight for the antenna.
After several reversals of direction, the path turned left and came out into sunlight again. Abrams and Elliott looked up and realised that their climb was over.
At the top of a gentle slope, the main antenna and the solar power array stood on a high ridge that fell away on all sides. To their right, southeast, the ridge plunged down into darkness. On that side, the spur of the mountains fell away down to the surface of the ice field, 3,750 metres below. Beyond the gulf, the Sun blazed above the southern horizon, across the continuation of the crater walls.
On the ridge itself, in a clearing cut into the rock, the large dish of the main antenna pointed towards the horizon on its steerable mounting, with a cluster of smaller antennas and other radio equipment nearby. A short way further on, a huge solar power array stood on a concrete pillar, its glittering array of solar cells jammed at a useless angle to the Sun.
‘Jesus, at last,’ Abrams muttered, ‘that’s not a climb I’d like to do in a hurry.’
They walked up the final slope until they stood in the shadow of the main antenna mount. Fifteen metres in diameter, the lightweight structure of the parabolic dish loomed above them. Another parabolic dish, half the size of the one above them, stood about fifty metres away in its parked position, pointing directly upwards. An array of smaller antennas on fixed mounts littered the area, with a mass of feeder cables running between them.
‘Looks like we won’t have to move the main antenna round very far,’ Elliott said. ‘If I’m not mistaken, Earth is over there.’ He pointed to their left, to the west.
Abrams scanned the horizon. ‘Is that it?’ He indicated a brilliant star low down to their left, which stood out even against the glare of the hills.
‘Ah – no, that’s Venus,’ Elliott said. ‘Keep going to the left, about the same altitude above the horizon. It’ll be a bit less bright than Venus.’
‘Got it.’ Abrams pointed at the bright star of their home world, with the small speck of the Moon close by, rising above a shoulder of the hills. It seemed impossibly far away, and he felt a sudden rush of emotion, a desire to be home, so strong that tears welled in his eyes. He blinked, and looked away, back toward the antenna structure.
Elliott seemed to be affected as well, because he remained standing, staring at the horizon, while Abrams directed the robot to unload the rucksacks and air cylinders.
Elliott came over at last, and helped Abrams unpack the radio equipment and move it over to the large equipment cabinet that housed the high-frequency transmitter. Neither of them said anything; they were busy with their own thoughts.
Using a T-shaped key from his tool pocket, Elliott opened up the cabinet, and traced the feed cable from where it entered the enclosure. Eventually, he spoke.
‘Okay, I think I know what to do here. Can you give me the baseband feed patch cable, the one with the right-angled connector on?’
Abrams bent down and unravelled one of the cables that they had made that morning, and handed it to Elliott, who was busy disconnecting cables inside the cabinet.
‘Thanks.’ Elliott hooked up the cable from the radio, and rerouted more connections inside the cabinet.
Abrams passed him more cables and connectors as he worked. It was hot in the sunlight, and Elliott moved himself round a little to spread the heat load on his suit. He took his time, double-checking the connections, until he was satisfied he had completed the patch correctly.
‘Okay – I’m ready to give it a try now. Can you get that note we made of the coordinates, and turn the antenna mount to face Earth? The control box is over there, where the power cables enter.’
‘Sure.’ Abrams retrieved a small plastic slate from one of his suit pockets and went over to the mount controls. The antenna was normally pointed remotely, by a computer in the control centre, but had evidently been stuck in one position since the accident. He opened the cover to the control panel. A small keypad and control panel lay inside, and a tiny monitor screen that showed a telescopic view from the antenna mount.
Abrams switched the antenna mount to manual control, and punched in the altitude and azimuth figures written on the slate. He pressed the ALIGN button.
For several moments nothing happened; the antenna mount remained stuck in place. Then, with a jerk, the mount freed, and began moving round slowly to its new setting. The shadows around the antenna changed shape as the huge bowl panned across the landscape, turning to point at the bright star of the Earth. Elliott looked up as the shadow of the dish fell over him.
‘That’s great. Right, we’re all hooked up here. I’m going to scan across the Deep Space Control channels, and see if we can hear any transmissions.’
‘Hey, it’s not pointing directly at the Earth,’ Abrams said, looking at the telescopic view. The tiny disc of the Earth was off to one side of the crosshairs.
‘Oh, okay, my numbers are probably a bit out. Can you manually move the antenna to point at the target, and move it around very slightly, until we get a signal?’
‘Yeah, I think so,’ Abrams responded. ‘Okay, I’m moving it now.’
Elliott switched the radio on, and set it up to scan across the frequency range.
‘Right. Let’s hope this works. I’ve set the gain as high as it goes, and patched it into our suit radio channel. Okay, keep as quiet as you can, and move the antenna round, very slowly. If you hear a signal, stop. Okay?’
‘Okay. I’m centred on the target. Moving it around now.’
Elliott closed his eyes and listened to the swish and hiss of the radio. The sound changed in quality as the antenna moved imperceptibly against the sky, becoming thin and faint, and then close and loud again. A high-pitched trilling sound broke out, and Abrams halted the antenna. Elliott listened to the sound, and tried switching the radio coding scheme. The sound changed, but nothing useful could be heard.