Mercury (3 page)

Alexios showed Yamagata through the cramped, steamy base. It was small, built for efficiency, not human comfort. Little more than an oversized bubble of honeycomb metal covered with rubble from Mercury’s surface to protect it from the heat and radiation, its inside was partitioned into cubicles and larger spaces. Goethe base was staffed with a mere two dozen engineers and technicians, yet it seemed as if hundreds of men and women had been packed into its crowded confines.

‘We decided to establish the base here on the surface of the planet,’ Alexios explained as they walked down a row of humming consoles. Yamagata felt sweaty, almost disgusted at the closeness of all these strangers, their foreignness, their body odors. Most of them were Europeans or Americans, he saw; a few were obviously African or perhaps African-American. None of them paid the slightest attention to him. They were all bent over their consoles, intent on their tasks.

‘The original plan was for the base to be in orbit,’ Yamagata said.

Alexios smiled diplomatically. ‘Economics. The great tyrant that dictates our every move.’

Remembering the lessons in tolerance the lamas had pressed upon him, Yamagata was trying to keep the revulsion from showing on his face. He smelled stale food and something that reminded him of burned-out electrical insulation.

Continuing as if none of this bothered him in the slightest, Alexios explained, ‘We ran the numbers a half-dozen times. If we’d kept the base in orbit we’d have to bring supplies to it constantly. Raised the costs too high. Here on the surface we have access to local water ice and plenty of silicon, metals, almost all the resources we need, including oxygen that we bake out of the rocks. Plenty of solar energy, of course. So I decided to plant the base here, on the ground.’

‘You decided?’ Yamagata snapped.

‘I’m an independent contractor, Mr. Yamagata. These people are my employees, not yours.’

‘Ah yes,’ Yamagata said, recovering his composure. ‘Of course.’

‘Naturally, I want to do the best job possible for you. That includes keeping the project’s costs as low as I can.’

‘As I recall it, you were the lowest bidder of all the engineering firms that we considered, by a considerable margin.’

‘Frankly,’ Alexios said, smiling slightly, ‘I deliberately underbid the job. I’m losing money here.’

Yamagata’s brows rose in surprise.

‘I’m fairly well off. I can afford a whim now and then.’

‘A whim? To come to Mercury?’

‘To work with the great Saito Yamagata.’

Yamagata searched Alexios’ strangely asymmetrical face. The man seemed to be completely serious; not a trace of sarcasm. He dipped his chin slightly in acknowledgement of the compliment. They had come to the end of the row of consoles. Yamagata saw a metal door in the thin partition before them, with the name
D. ALEXIOS
stenciled on it. Beneath it was a smeared area where someone had tried to wipe out a graffito, but it was still faintly legible:
He who must be obeyed
.

It was somewhat cooler inside Alexios’ office, and a good deal quieter. Acoustic insulation, Yamagata realized gratefully, kneading his throbbing temples as he sat in a stiff little chair. Alexios pulled up a similar chair and sat next to him, much closer than Yamagata would have preferred. The man’s unbalanced face disturbed him.

‘You need a drink,’ Alexios said, peering intently into Yamagata’s perspiring face. ‘Tea, perhaps? Or something stronger?’

‘Water would be quite welcome, especially if it’s cold.’ Yamagata could feel his coveralls sticking to his sweaty ribs.

The office was tiny, barely big enough for a quartet of the spartan little chairs. There was no desk, no other furniture at all except for a small bare table and a squat cubicle refrigerator of brushed aluminum. Alexios went to it and pulled out an unmarked ceramic flask.

Handing it to Yamagata, he said, ‘Local product. Mercurian water, straight from the ice cache nearby.’

Yamagata hesitated.

With a crooked grin, Alexios added, ‘We’ve run it through the purifiers, of course, although we left a certain amount of carbonation in it.’

Yamagata took a cautious sip. It was cold, sparkling, and delicious. He pulled in a longer swallow.

The room’s only table was on Alexios’s far side, so there was no place to set the bottle down except on the floor. Yamagata saw that it was tiled, but the plastic felt soft to his touch.

‘Now then,’ he said as he deposited the bottle at his foot, ‘where do we stand? What are your major problems?’

Alexios leaned back in his chair and took a palm-sized remote from the table. The partition on Yamagata’s right immediately lit up with a flat screen display.

‘There’s Mercury,’ Alexios began, ‘the gray circle in the middle. The blue oblongs orbiting the planet are the first four solar power satellites, built at Selene and towed here.’

Yamagata said, ‘With six more on their way here from the Moon.’

‘Correct,’ said Alexios. Six more blue oblongs appeared on the screen, clustered in the upper right corner.

‘So it goes well. How soon can we be selling electrical power?’

‘There is a problem with that.’

Despite the fact that he knew, intellectually, that no project proceeds without problems, Yamagata still felt his insides twitch. ‘So? What problem?’

Alexios replied, ‘The point of setting up powersats in Mercury orbit is that they can generate power much more efficiently. Being almost two-thirds closer to the Sun than Earth is, we can take advantage of the higher power density to—’

‘I know all that,’ Yamagata snapped impatiently. ‘That is why I started this project.’

‘Yes,’ Alexios said, his smile turning a trifle bitter. ‘But, as they say, the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘The very intensity of sunlight that improves the solar panels’ efficiency so beautifully also degrades the solar cells very quickly.’

‘Degrades them?’

The image on the wall screen changed to a graph that showed a set of curves.

‘The blue curve, the one on the top, shows the predicted power output for a solar cell in Mercury orbit,’ Alexios explained.

Yamagata could see for himself. A yellow curve started out closely following the blue, then fell off disastrously. He looked along the bottom axis of the graph and gasped with dismay.

‘It gets that bad after only six weeks?’

‘I’m afraid so,’ Alexios said. ‘We’re going to have to harden the cells, which will cut down on their efficiency.’

‘How much?’

‘I have my people working on that now. I’ve also taken the liberty of transmitting this data back to your corporate headquarters on Earth so that their experts can double-check my people’s calculations.’

Yamagata sank back in the little chair. This could ruin everything, he thought. Everything!

As quickly as he gracefully could, Yamagata returned to the
Himawari
riding in orbit around Mercury. He sat in gloomy silence in the little shuttle craft, mulling over the bad news that Alexios had given him. From his seat behind the two pilots, however, he couldn’t help watching the European woman. It wouldn’t do to pay any attention to her in front of her superior, he reasoned. Still, she was a fine-looking woman with strong features. The profile of her face showed a firm jawline, a chiseled nose, high cheekbones. Nordic, perhaps, Yamagata thought, although her hair was a dark brown, as were her eyes. Her coveralls were tight, almost form-fitting. Her form pleased Yamagata’s discerning eye immensely.

Later, he thought. I’ll dig her name out of the personnel files. Perhaps she would not be averse to joining me for an after-dinner drink this evening.

He had almost forgotten her, though, by the time he reached his stateroom aboard the fusion-torch ship. His quarters were spacious and well-appointed, filled with little luxuries such as the single peony blossom in the delicate tall vase on the corner of his desk, and the faint aroma of a springtime garden that wafted in on the nearly-silent air blowers.

Yamagata peeled off his sweaty coveralls, took a quick shower, then wrapped himself in a silk kimono of midnight blue. By then he had worked up the courage to call his son, back at corporate headquarters in New Kyoto.

Earth was on the other side of the Sun at the moment, and his call had to be relayed through one of the communications satellites in solar orbit. Transmission lag time, according to the data bar across the bottom of Yamagata’s wall screen, would be eleven minutes.

A two-way conversation will be impossible, Yamagata realized as he put the call through on his private, scrambled channel. I’ll talk and Nobu will listen; then we’ll reverse the process.

It still startled him to see his son’s image. Nobuhiko Yamagata was physically almost exactly the same age as his father, because of the years Saito had spent in cryonic suspension, immersed in liquid nitrogen, waiting to be revived, cured of his cancer to begin life again.

‘Father,’ said Nobu, dipping his head in a respectful bow. ‘I trust you had a good journey and are safely in orbit at Mercury.’ Before Saito could reply, Nobu added jokingly, ‘And I hope you brought your sunblock lotion.’

Sai rocked back with laughter in his contoured easy chair. ‘Sunblock lotion indeed! I didn’t come out here for a tan, you know.

He knew it would take eleven minutes for his words to reach Nobu, and another eleven for his son’s reply. So Saito immediately launched into a description of his visit to Goethe base on Mercury and the problem with the solar panels on the powersats.

He ended with, “This Alexios person claims he has sent the data to your experts. I am anxious to hear what they think about it.”

And then he waited. Yamagata got up from his chair, went to the bar and poured himself a stiff Glenlivet, knocked it back and felt the smooth heat of the whisky spread through him. He paced around his compartment, admired the holograms of ancient landscapes that decorated the walls, and tried not to look at his wristwatch.

I know how to pass the time, he said to himself. Sliding into his desk chair, he opened a new window on the wall display and called up the ship’s personnel files. Scanning through the names and pictures of the pilots aboard took several minutes. Ah! He smiled, pleased. There she is: Birgitta Sundsvall. I was right, she’s Swedish. Unmarried. Good. Employee since…

He reviewed her entire dossier. There were several photographs of the woman in it, and Yamagata was staring at them when his son’s voice broke into his reverie.

“Alexios has transmitted the data on the solar cells’ degradation, Father,” Nobuhiko replied at last.

Yamagata immediately wiped the personnel file from the screen, as if his son could see it all the way back on Earth.

Nobu went on, “This appears to be quite a serious problem. My analysts tell me that the decrease in power output efficiency almost completely wipes out any advantage of generating the power from Mercury orbit.”

Yamagata knew it would be pointless to interrupt, and allowed his son to continue, “If this analysis stands up, your Mercury project will have to be written off, Father. The costs of operating from Mercury are simply too high. You might as well keep the sunsats in Earth orbit, all things considered.”

“But have we considered all things?” Yamagata snapped. “I can’t believe that this problem will stop us. We did analyses of cell degradation before we started this project. Why are the actual figures so much worse than our predictions?”

Yamagata realized he was getting angry. He took a deep breath, tried to remember a mantra that would calm him.

“Please call me,” he said to his son, “when your people have more definite answers to my questions.” Then he cut off the connection and the wall screen went blank.

Technically, the Mercury project was not being funded by Yamagata Corporation. Saito had officially retired from the corporation soon after he’d been revived from his long cryonic sleep. Instead, once he left the lamasery and returned to the world, he used his personal fortune to establish the Sunpower Foundation and began the Mercury project. As far as Nobu and the rest of the world were concerned, the Mercury project was devoted to generating inexpensive electrical power for the growing human habitations spreading through the solar system. Only Saito Yamagata knew that its true goal was to provide the power to send human explorers to the stars.

Saito—and one other person.