Mercury (6 page)

Despite his bland outward appearance, Elliott Danvers had led a far from dull life. Born in a Detroit slum, he was always physically big for his age. Other kids took one look at him and thought he was tough, strong. He wasn’t. The real bullies in the ’hood enlarged their reputations by bloodying the big guy. The wiseguys who ran the local youth club made him play on the local semipro football team when he was barely fourteen. In his first game he got three ribs cracked; in the next contest they broke his leg. When he recovered from that the gamblers put him in the prizefight ring and quietly bet against him. They made money. Danvers’s share was pain and blood and humiliation.

When he broke his hand slugging it out with a young black kid from a rival club, they tossed him out onto the street, his hand swollen monstrously, his face unrecognizable from the beating he’d taken.

One of the street missionaries from the storefront New Morality branch found Danvers huddled in the gutter, bleeding and sobbing. He took Danvers in, dressed his wounds, fed his body and spirit, and turned his gratitude into a life of service. At twenty he entered a New Morality seminary. By the time he was twenty-two, Elliott Danvers was an ordained minister, ready to be sent out into the world in service to God. He was never allowed to return to his old Detroit neighborhood. Instead he was sent overseas and saw that there were many wretched people around the globe who needed his help.

His rise through the hierarchy was slow, however. He was not especially brilliant. He had no family connections or well-connected friends to help push him upward. He worked hard and took the most difficult, least rewarding assignments in gratitude for the saving of his life.

His big chance came when he was assigned as spiritual counselor to the largely Latin-American crew building the skytower in Ecuador. The idea of a space elevator seemed little less than blasphemous to him, a modern-day equivalent to the ancient Tower of Babel. A tower that reached to the heavens. Clearly technological hubris, if nothing else. It was doomed to fail, Danvers felt from the beginning.

When it did fail, it was his duty to report to the authorities on who was responsible for the terrible tragedy. Millions of lives had been lost. Someone had to pay.

As a man of God, Danvers was respected by the Ecuadorian authorities. Even the godless secularists of the International Astronautical Authority respected his supposedly unbiased word.

Danvers phrased his report very carefully, but it was clear that he—like most of the accident investigators—put final blame on the leader of the project, the man who was in charge of the construction.

The project leader was disgraced and charged with multiple homicide. Because the international legal system did not permit capital punishment for inadvertent homicide, he was sentenced to be banished from Earth forever.

Danvers was promoted to bishop, and—after another decade of patient, uncomplaining labor—sent to be spiritual advisor to the small crew of engineers and technicians working for the Sunpower Foundation building solar power satellites at the planet Mercury.

He was puzzled about the assignment, until his superiors told him that the director of the project had personally asked for Danvers. This pleased and flattered him. He did not realize that the fiery-eyed Dante Alexios, running the actual construction work on the hell-hot surface of Mercury, was the young engineer who had been in charge of the skytower project, the man who had been banished from Earth in large part because of Danvers’s testimony.

Victor Molina licked his lips nervously. “I’ve never been out on the surface of another world before,” he said.

Dante Alexios put on a surprised look. “But you told me you’ve been to Jupiter’s moons, didn’t you?”

The two men were being helped into the heavily insulated spacesuits that were used for excursions on Mercury’s rocky, Sun-baked surface. Half a dozen technicians were assisting them, three for each man. The suits were brightly polished, almost to a mirror finish, and so bulky that they were more individual habitats than normal spacesuits.

Molina’s usual cocky attitude had long since vanished, replaced by uncertainty. “I was at Europa, yeah,” he maintained. “Most of the time, though, I was in the research station
Gold,
orbiting Jupiter. I spent a week in the smaller station in orbit around Europa itself but I never got down to the surface.”

Alexios nodded as the technicians hung the life-support package to the back of his suit. Even in Mercury’s light gravity it felt burdensome. Both men’s suits were plugged into the base’s power system, mainly to keep the cooling fans running. Otherwise they would already be uncomfortably hot and sweaty inside the massive suits.

He knew that Molina had never set foot on the surface of another world. Alexios had spent years accumulating a meticulous dossier on Victor Molina, the man who had once been his friend, his schoolmate, the buddy he had asked to be his best man when he married Lara. Molina had betrayed him and stolen Lara from him. Now he was going to pay.

It took two technicians to lift the thick-walled helmet over Molina’s head and settle it onto the torso ring, like churchmen lowering a royal crown on an emperor. As they began sealing the helmet, two other techs lowered Alexios’s helmet, muffling all the sounds outside. Strange, Alexios thought. We don’t really notice the throbbing of the base’s pumps and the hiss of the air vents until the sound stops. Through his thick quartz visor he could see the technicians fussing around Molina’s suit, and the serious, almost grim expression on the astrobiologist’s face. Once we pull down the sun visors I won’t be able to see his face at all, Alexios knew.

He moved his arm with a whine of servomotors and pressed the stud on his left wrist that activated the suit’s radio.

“Can you hear me, Dr. Molina?”

For a moment there was no reply, then, “I hear you.” Molina’s voice sounded strange, preoccupied.

The woman in charge of the technicians at last gave Alexios a thump on the shoulder and signaled a thumbs-up to him. He switched to the radio frequency for the base’s control center:

“Molina and Alexios, ready for surface excursion.”

“You are cleared for excursion,” came the controller’s voice. Alexios recognized it; a dour Russian whom he sometimes played chess with. Once in a while he even won.

“Cameras on?” Alexios asked, as he started clumping in the heavy boots toward the airlock hatch.

“Exterior cameras functioning. Relief crew standing by.”

Two other members of the base’s complement had suited up at the auxiliary airlock and were prepared to come out to rescue Alexios and Molina if they ran into trouble. Neither the main airlock nor the auxiliary was big enough to hold four suited people at the same time.

The inner airlock hatch swung open. Alexios gestured with a gloved hand. “After you, Dr. Molina.”

Moving uncertainly, hesitantly, Molina stepped over the hatch’s sill and planted his boots inside the airlock chamber. Alexios followed him, almost as slowly. One could not make sudden moves in the cumbersome suits.

Once the inner hatch closed again and the air was pumping out of the chamber, Molina said, “It’s funny, but over this radio link your voice sounds kind of familiar.”

Alexios’s pulse thumped suddenly. “Familiar?”

“Like it’s a voice I know. A voice I’ve heard before.”

Will he recognize me? Alexios wondered. That would ruin everything.

He said nothing as the panel lights indicated the airlock chamber had been pumped down to vacuum. Alexios leaned a hand on the green-glowing plate that activated the outer hatch. It swung outward gradually, revealing the landscape of Mercury in leisurely slow motion. Molten sunlight spilled into the airlock chamber as both men automatically lowered their sun visors.

“Wow,” said Molina. “Looks freaking hot out there.”

Alexios got a vision of the astrobiologist licking his lips. Molina stayed rooted inside the chamber, actually backing away slightly from the sunshine.

“It’s wintertime now,” Alexios joked, stepping out onto the bare rocky surface. “The temperature’s down below four hundred Celsius.”

“Wintertime.” Molina laughed shakily.

“When you step through the hatch, be careful of your radiator panels. They extend almost thirty centimeters higher than the top of your helmet.”

“Yeah. Right.”

Molina finally came out into the full fury of the Sun. All around him stretched a barren, broken plain of bare rock, strewn with pebbles, rocks, boulders. Even through the heavily tinted visor, the glare was enough to make his eyes tear. He wondered if the suit radio was picking up the thundering of his pulse, the awed gushing of his breath.

“This way,” he heard Alexios’s voice in his helmet earphones. “I’ll show you where the crew found those rocks you’re interested in.”

Moving like an automaton, Molina followed the gleaming armored figure of Alexios out across the bare, uneven ground. He glanced up at the Sun, huge and menacing, glaring down at him.

“You did remember your tool kit and sample boxes, didn’t you?” Alexios asked, almost teasingly.

“I’ve got them,” said Molina, nodding inside his helmet. Something about that voice was familiar. Why should a voice transmitted by radio sound familiar when the man was a complete stranger?

They plodded across the desolate plain, steering around the rocks strewn haphazardly across the landscape. One of the boulders was as big as a house, massive and stolid in the glaring sunlight. The ground undulated slightly but they had no trouble negotiating the gentle rises and easy downslopes. Molina noticed a gully or chasm of some sort off to their right. Alexios kept them well clear of it.

It was hot inside the suit, Molina realized. Cooling system or not, he felt as if the juices were being baked out of him. If the radiators should fail, he said to himself, if the suit’s electrical power shuts down—I’d be dead in a minute or two! He tried to push such thoughts out of his mind, but the sweat trickling down his brow and stinging his eyes made that impossible.

“You’re nearing the edge of our camera range,” came the voice of the controller back at the base. He sounded almost bored.

“Not to worry,” Alexios replied. “We’re almost there.”

Less than a minute later Alexios stopped and turned slowly, like a mechanical giant with rusty bearings.

“Here we are,” he said brightly.

“This is it?” Molina saw that they were in a shallow depression, most likely an ancient meteor crater, about a hundred and fifty meters across.

“This is where the construction team found the rocks you’re interested in.”

Molina stared at the rock-strewn ground. It wasn’t as dusty as the Moon’s surface was. They had walked all this way and their boots were barely tarnished. He saw their bootprints, though, looking new and bright against the dark ground.

“What was your construction crew doing all the way out here?” he heard himself ask.

Alexios did not reply for a moment. Then, “Scouting for locations for new sites. Our base is going to grow, sooner or later.”

“And they found the rocks with biomarkers here, at this site?”

He sensed Alexios nodding solemnly inside his helmet. “You can tell which rocks contain the biomarkers,” Alexios said. “They’re the darker ones.”

Molina saw that there were dozens of dark reddish rocks scattered around the shallow crater. He forgot all his other questions as he unclipped the scoop from his equipment belt and extended its handle so he could begin picking up the rocks—and the possible life-forms in them.

It was not easy for her to leave their eight-year-old son on Earth, but Lara Tierney Molina was a determined woman. Her husband’s messages from the Japanese torch ship seemed so forlorn, so painful, that she couldn’t possibly leave him alone any longer. When he suddenly departed for Mercury, he had told her that his work would absorb him totally and, besides, the rugged base out there was no place for her. But almost as soon as he’d left, he began sending pitifully despondent messages to her every night, almost breaking into tears in his loneliness and misery. That was so unlike Victor that Lara found herself sobbing as she watched her husband’s despondent image.

She tried to cheer him with smiling responses, even getting Victor Jr. to send upbeat messages to his father. Still, Victor’s one-way calls from Mercury were full of heartbreaking desolation.

So she made arrangements for her sister to take care of Victor Jr., flew from Earth to lunar orbit aboard a Masterson shuttlecraft, then boarded the freighter
Urania
that was carrying supplies to Mercury on a slow, economical Hohmann minimum energy trajectory. No high-acceleration fusion torch ship for her; she could not afford such a luxury and the Sunpower Foundation was unwilling to pay for it. So she coasted toward Mercury for four months, her living quarters a closet-sized compartment, her toilet facilities a scuffed and stained lavatory that she shared with the three men and two women of the freighter’s crew.

She had worried, at first, about being penned up in such close quarters with strangers, but the crew turned out to be amiable enough. Within a few days of departure from Earth orbit, Lara learned that both the women were heterosexual and one of them was sleeping with the ship’s communications officer. The other two males didn’t come on to her, for which Lara was quite grateful. The entire crew treated her with a rough deference; they shared meals together and became friends the way traveling companions do, knowing that they would probably never see each other again once their voyage was over.

Lara Tierney had been born to considerable wealth. When the greenhouse floods forced her family from their Manhattan penthouse, they moved to their summer home in Colorado and found that it was now a lakeside property. Father made it their permanent domicile. Lara had been only a baby then, but she vaguely remembered the shooting out in the woods at night, the strangers who camped on Father’s acreage and had to be rooted out by the National Guard soldiers, the angry shouts and sometimes a scream that silenced all the birds momentarily.