Mercury (2 page)

The nearest star was Alpha Centauri, but it was too far south to be seen from these frigid mountains.

Suddenly Yamagata threw his head back and laughed, a hearty, full-throated roar of delight that he hurled back into the teeth of the keening night wind. Of course! he said to himself. The answer has been all around me for all these years and I was too blind to see it. The stars! My path must lead to the stars.

Even with three subordinates assisting him, it took Yamagata nearly an hour to disencumber himself of the bulky, heavily insulated spacesuit. He was dripping wet with perspiration and must have smelled ripe, but none of his aides dared say a word or show the slightest expression of distaste. When they had helped him into the suit Yamagata had thought of a Spanish toreador being assisted in donning his ‘suit of lights’ for the bullring. Now he felt like a medieval knight taking off his battered armor after a bruising tournament.

Going outside the ship in the spacesuit had been little more than a whim, Yamagata knew, but a man of his wealth and power could be indulged his whims. Besides, he wanted to impress his subordinates and guests. Even though his son Nobu actually ran Yamagata Corporation, and had for decades, the elder Yamagata was treated deferentially wherever he went. Despite the years of patient instruction that the lamas had spent on him, Yamagata still relished being fawned upon.

Money brings power; he understood that. But he wanted more than that. What he wanted now was respect, prestige. He wanted to be remembered not merely as a wealthy or powerful man; he wanted to go down in history for his vision, his munificence, his drive. He wanted to be the man who gave the stars to the human race.

Yamagata Corporation’s solar power satellites were bringing desperately-needed electrical power to an Earth devastated by greenhouse flooding and abrupt climate shifts. Under Nobuhiko’s direction, the corporation was helping to move Japan and the other nations crippled by the global warming back onto the road toward prosperity.

And freedom. The two went hand in hand, Yamagata knew. When the greenhouse cliff climate disaster struck so abruptly, flooding coastal cities, collapsing the international electrical power grid, wrecking the global economy, Earth’s governments became repressive, authoritarian. People who are hungry, homeless, without hope, will always trade their individual liberties for order, for safety, for food. Ultraconservative religious groups came to power in Asia, the Middle East, even Europe and America; they ruled with an absolute faith in their own convictions and zero tolerance for anyone else’s.

Now, with the climate stabilizing and some prosperity returning, many of the world’s peoples were once again struggling for their individual rights, resuming the age-old battle that their forebears had fought against kings and tyrants in earlier centuries.

All to the good, Yamagata told himself. But it is not enough. The human race must expand its frontier, enlarge its horizons. Sooner or later, humankind must reach out to the stars. That will be my gift to humanity.

Can I do it? he asked himself. Do I have the strength and the will to succeed? He had been tough enough in his earlier lives, a ruthless industrial giant before the cancer had struck him down. But that had been for myself, he realized, for my corporation and my son’s legacy. Now I am striving to accomplish greatness for humanity, not merely for my own selfish ends. Again he smiled bitterly. Foolish man, he warned himself. What you do now you do for your own purposes. Don’t try to delude yourself. Don’t try to conceal your own ambitions with a cloak of nobility.

Yet the question remained: Do I have the determination, the strength, the single-minded drive to make this mad scheme a success?

Finally freed of the suit with all its paraphernalia and boots and undergarments, Yamagata stood in his sweat-soaked sky-blue coveralls, which bore on its breast the white flying crane symbol of his family and his corporation. He dismissed his subordinates with a curt word of thanks. They bowed and hissed respectfully as Yamagata turned and started up the corridor that led to his private compartment and a hot shower.

Yamagata was a sturdily-built man who appeared to be no more than fifty-some years old, thanks to rejuvenation therapies. Slightly over one hundred seventy-five centimeters tall, in his youth he had been as slim as a samurai’s blade, but the years of good living in his first life had softened him, rounded his body and his face. The cancer ate away much of that, and his years in the lamasery had kept him gaunt, but once he left the Himalayas to begin his third life he soon reverted to his tastes in food and drink. Now he was slightly paunchy, his sodden, stained coveralls already beginning to strain at the middle. His face was round, also, but creased with laugh lines. In his first life Yamagata had laughed a lot, although during those years of remorse and penance he had spent with the lamas in their stone fortress high in the Himalayas there was precious little laughter.

Freshly showered and dressed in a crisply clean open-necked shirt and fashionable dark trousers, Yamagata made his way to the ship’s bridge. He thought about dropping in on his two guests, but he would see them later at dinner, he knew. As soon as he stepped through the open hatch into the bridge the Japanese crew, including the captain, snapped to respectful attention.

Waving a hand to show they should return to their duties, Yamagata asked the captain, ‘Are we ready to send the landing craft to the planet?’

The captain tried to keep his face expressionless, but it was clear to Yamagata that he did not like the idea.

‘It is not necessary for you to go down to the surface, sir,’ he said, almost in a whisper. ‘We have all the necessary facilities here on the ship—’

‘I understand that,’ said Yamagata, smiling to show that he was not offended by the captain’s reluctance. ‘Still, I wish to see the surface installation for myself. It’s near the north pole, I understand.’

‘Yes, sir. Borealis Planitia.’

‘Near the crater Goethe,’ said Yamagata.

The captain dipped his chin to acknowledge Yamagata’s understanding of the geography. But he murmured, ‘It is very rugged down there, sir.’

‘So I have been told. But personal comfort is not everything, you know. My son, Nobuhiko, enjoys skiing. I cannot for the life of me understand why he would risk his life and limbs for the joy of sliding down a snowy mountain in all that cold and wet, but still he loves it.’

The captain bowed his head. But then he added one final warning. ‘Er . . . They call it “Dante’s Inferno” down there. Sir.’

The closest planet to the Sun, Mercury is a small, rocky, barren, dense, airless, heat-scorched world.

For centuries astronomers believed that Mercury’s rotation was ‘locked,’ so that one side of the planet always faced the Sun while the other side always looked away. They reasoned that the sunward side of Mercury must be the hottest planetary surface in the solar system, while the side facing away from the Sun must be frozen down almost to absolute zero.

But this is not so. Mercury turns slowly on its axis, taking 58.6 Earth days to make one revolution. Its year – the time it takes to complete one orbit around the Sun – is 87.97 Earth days.

This leads to a strange situation. Mercury’s rotation rate of nearly fifty-nine Earth days is precisely two-thirds of the planet’s year. A person standing on the surface of the planet would see the huge Sun move from east to west across the dark airless sky, but it would slow down noticeably, then reverse its course and head back east for a while before resuming its westerly motion. At some locations on Mercury, the Sun rises briefly, then dips down below the horizon before finally rising again for the rest of the Mercurian day. After sunset the Sun peeks back up above the horizon before setting for the length of the night.

Counting the Mercurian day from the time the Sun appears directly overhead (local noon) to the next time it reaches that point, it measures 176 Earth days. From the standpoint of noon-to-noon, then, the Mercurian day is twice as long as its year!

The Sun looms large in Mercury’s sky. It appears twice as big as we see it from Earth when Mercury is at the farthest point from the Sun in its lopsided orbit and three times larger at the closest point.

And it is 
hot.
 Daytime temperatures soar to more than 400° Celsius, four times higher than the boiling point of water, hot enough to melt zinc. At night the temperature drops to –135°C because there is no atmosphere to retain the day’s heat; it radiates away into space.

With a diameter of only 4879 kilometers, Mercury is the smallest planet in the solar system, except for distant-most Pluto. Jupiter and Saturn have moons that are larger than Mercury. The planet is slightly more than one-third larger than Earth’s own Moon.

Yet Mercury is a dense planet, with a large iron core and a relatively thin overlay of silicon-based rock. This may be because the planet formed so close to the Sun that most of the silicate material in the region was too hot to condense and solidify; it remained gaseous and was blown away on the solar wind, leaving little material for the planet to build on except iron and other metals.

Another possibility, though, is that most of Mercury’s rocky crust was blasted away into space by the impact of a mammoth asteroid early in the solar system’s history. Mercury’s battered, airless surface looks much like the Moon’s, testimony to the pitiless barrage of asteroids and larger planetesimals that hurtled through the solar system more than three billion years ago. Caloris Basin is a huge bullseye of circular mountain ridges some 3700 kilometers in diameter. This gigantic impact crater is the center of fault lines that run for hundreds of kilometers across the planet’s rocky surface.

An asteroid roughly one hundred kilometers wide smashed into Mercury nearly four billion years ago, gouging out Caloris Basin and perhaps blasting away most of the planet’s rocky crust.

Despite the blazing heat from the nearby Sun, water ice exists at Mercury’s polar regions. Ice from comets that crashed into the planet has been cached in deep craters near the poles, where sunlight never reaches. Just as on the Moon, ice is an invaluable resource for humans and their machines.

Yamagata rode the small shuttle down to the planet’s airless surface in his shirtsleeves, strapped into an ergonomically cushioned chair directly behind the pilot and co-pilot. Both the humans were redundancies: the shuttle could have flown perfectly well on its internal computer guidance, but the
Himawari
’s captain had insisted that not merely one, but two humans should accompany their illustrious employer.

The shuttle itself was little more than an eggshell of ceramic-coated metal with a propulsion rocket and steering jets attached, together with three spindly landing legs. Yamagata hardly felt any acceleration forces at all. Separation from the
Himawari
was gentle, and landing in Mercury’s light gravity was easy.