Mercury (7 page)

By and large, though, life was pleasant enough. Her father taught her how to shoot both rifles and pistols, and he always made certain that one of the guards accompanied Lara whenever she went out into the lovely green woods.

At school in Boulder, her friends said she led a charmed life. Nothing unhappy ever seemed to happen to her. She was bright, talented, and pleasant to everyone around her.

Lara knew that she was no beauty. Her eyes were nice enough, a warm gold-flecked amber, but her lips were painfully thin and she thought her teeth much too big for her slim jaw. She was gangly—her figure hardly had a curve to it. Yet she had no trouble dating young men; they seemed attracted to her like iron filings to a magnet. She thought it might have been her money, although her mother told her that as long as she smiled at young men they would feel at ease with her.

The most popular men on campus pursued her. Victor Molina, dashing and handsome, became her steady beau—until Molina introduced her to a friend of his, an intense, smoldering young engineer named Mance Bracknell.

“He’s interesting,” Lara said.

“Mance?” Molina scoffed. “He’s a weirdo. Not interested in anything except engineering. I think I’m the only friend he has on campus.”

Another student warned, “You know engineers. They’re so narrow-minded they can look through a keyhole with both eyes.”

Yet she found Bracknell fascinating. He was nowhere near handsome, she thought, and his social skills were minimal. He dressed carelessly; his meager wardrobe showed he had no money. Yet he was the only male in her classes who paid no attention to her: he was far too focused on his studies. Lara saw him as a challenge, at first. She was going to make him take his nose out of his computer screen and smell the roses.

That semester, she and Molina shared only one class with the young engineering student, a mandatory class in English literature. Bracknell was struggling through it. Lara decided to offer her help.

“I don’t need help,” Bracknell told her, matter-of-factly. “I’m just not interested in the material.”

“Not interested in Keats? Or Shakespeare?” She was shocked.

With an annoyed little frown, Bracknell replied, “Are you interested in Bucky Fuller? Or Raymond Loewy?”

She had never heard of them. Lara made a deal with him. If he paid attention to the literature assignments, she would sign up for a basic science class.

Molina was not pleased. “You’re wasting your time with Mance. For god’s sake, Lara, the guy doesn’t even wear socks!”

It took most of the semester for her to penetrate Bracknell’s self-protective shell. Late one night after they had walked from one end of campus to the other as he flawlessly—if flatly—recited Keats’s entire poem
The Eve of St. Agnes
to her, Bracknell finally told her what his dream was. It took her breath away.

“A tower that goes all the way up into space? Can it be built?”

“I can do it,” he answered, without an eyeblink’s hesitation.

He wanted to build a tower that rose up to the heavens, an elevator that could carry people and cargo into orbit for mere pennies per kilogram.

“I can do it,” he told her, time and again. “I know I can! The big problem has always been the strength-to-weight ratio of the materials, but with buckyball fibers we can solve that problem and build the blasted thing!”

His enthusiasm sent Lara scurrying to her own computer, to learn what buckyball fibers might be and how a space elevator could be built.

Her friends twitted her about her fascination with “the geek.” Molina fumed and sulked, angry that she was paying more attention to Bracknell than to him.

“How is he in bed?” Molina growled at her one afternoon as they walked to class together.

“Not as good as you, Victor dear,” Lara replied sweetly. “I love him for his mind, not his body.”

And she left him standing there in the autumn sunshine, amidst the yellow aspen leaves that littered the lawn.

It took months, but Lara realized at last that she was truly and hopelessly in love with Mance Bracknell and his dream of making spaceflight inexpensive enough so that everyone could afford it.

Even before they graduated, she used her father’s connections to introduce Bracknell to industrialists and financiers who had the resources to back his dream. Most of them scoffed at the idea of a space elevator. They called it a “skyhook” and said it would never work. Bracknell displayed a volcanic temper, shouting at them, calling them idiots and blind know-nothings. Shocked at his eruptions, Lara did her best to calm him down, to soothe him, to show him how to deal with men and women who believed that because they were older and richer, they were also wiser.

It took years, years in which Bracknell supported himself with various engineering jobs, traveling constantly, a techno-vagabond moving from project to project. Lara met him now and then, while her parents prayed fervently that she would eventually get tired of him and his temper and find a young man more to their liking, someone like Victor Molina. Although she occasionally saw Molina as he worked toward his doctorate in biology, she found herself thinking about Bracknell constantly during the months they were separated. Despite her parents she flew to his side whenever she could.

Then he called from Ecuador, of all places, so excited she could barely understand what he was saying. An earlier attempt at building a space elevator in Ecuador had failed; probably it had been a fraud, a sham effort aimed at swindling money from the project’s backers. But the government of Ecuador wanted to proceed with the project, and a consortium of European bankers had formed a corporation to do it, if they could find an engineering organization capable of tackling the job.

“They want me!” Bracknell fairly shouted, his image in Lara’s phone screen so excited she thought he was going to hyperventilate. “They want me to head the project!”

“In Ecuador?” she asked, her heart pounding.

“Yes! It’s on the equator. We’ve picked a mountaintop site.”

“You’re really going to do it?”

“You bet I am! Will you come down here?”

“Yes!” she answered immediately.

“Will you marry me?”

The breath gushed out of her. She had to gulp before she could reply, “Of course I will!”

But Bracknell’s tower had collapsed, killing millions. He was disgraced, tried for mass homicide, exiled from Earth forever.

And now Lara Tierney Molina, married to Bracknell’s best friend, mother of their eight-year-old son, rode a shabby freighter to Mercury to be with her husband.

Yet she still dreamed of Mance Bracknell.

As soon as the technicians peeled him out of the cumbersome spacesuit, Molina grabbed his sample box and rushed to the makeshift laboratory he had squeezed into the bare little compartment that served as his living quarters at Mercury base.

From the equipment box that blocked the compartment’s built-in drawers he tugged out the miniature diamond-bladed saw. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, he wormed the safety goggles over his eyes, tugged on a pair of sterilized gloves, then grabbed one of the rocks out of his sample box and immediately began cutting microthin slices out of it.

He got to his knees and lifted out the portable mass spectrometer from his equipment box. Despite Mercury’s low gravity it was so heavy he barely was able to raise it clear of the box. “Portable is a relative term,” he muttered as he looked around for an electrical outlet. The spectrometer’s laser drew a lot of power, he knew.

“So what if I black out the base?” he said to himself, almost giggling, as he plugged the thick power cord into a wall outlet. His quarters were hardly a sterile environment, but Molina was in too much of a hurry to care about that. I’ll just work on a couple of the samples and save the rest for the lab up in
Himawari,
he told himself. Besides, he reasoned, these samples are fresh from the site; there hasn’t been enough time for any terrestrial organisms to contaminate them.

Time meant nothing now. Hours flew by as Molina sawed sample microslices from the rocks and ran them through the spectrometer. When he got hungry or sleepy he popped cognitive enhancers and went back to work revitalized. Wish I had brought the scanning tunneling microscope here, he thought. For a moment he considered asking Alexios if there was one in the base, but he thought better of it. I’ve got one up in the ship, he told himself. Be patient.

But patience gave way to growing excitement. It was all there! he realized after nearly forty hours of work. Pushing a thick flop of his sandy hair back from his red-rimmed eyes, Molina tapped one-handed at his laptop. The sample contained PAHs in plenitude, in addition to magnetized bits of iron sulfides and carbonate globules, unmistakable markers of biological activity.

There’s life on Mercury! Molina exulted. He wanted to leap to his feet and shout the news but he found that his legs were cramped and tingling from sitting cross-legged on the floor for so long. Instead, he bent over his laptop and dictated a terse report of his discovery to the astrobiology bulletin published electronically by the International Consortium of Universities. As an afterthought he fired off a copy to the International Astronautical Authority. And then a brief, triumphant message to Lara.

He realized that he hadn’t called his wife since he’d left Earth, despite his promise to talk to her every day. Well, he grinned to himself, now I’ve got something to tell her.

I’ll be famous! Molina exulted. I’ll be able to take my pick of professorships. We can live anywhere we choose to: California, Edinburgh, New Melbourne, any of the best astrobiology schools on Earth!

He hauled himself slowly to his feet, his legs shooting pins and needles fiercely. Hobbling, laughing aloud, he staggered around his cluttered compartment, nearly tripping over the equipment he had scattered across the floor until his legs returned to normal. A glance at the digital clock above his bunk, which displayed the base’s time, showed him that the galley had long since closed for the night. What matter? He was hungry, though, so he put in a call for Alexios. He’s the head of this operation, Molina told himself. He ought to be able to get them to produce a meal for the discoverer of life on Mercury.

Alexios did better than that. He invited Molina to his own quarters to share a late-night repast, complete with a dust-covered bottle of celebratory champagne.

Alexios’s living quarters were no larger than Molina’s compartment, the astrobiologist saw, but the furnishings were much better. The bed looked more comfortable than Molina’s bunk, and there was a real desk instead of a wobbly pullout tray, plus a pair of comfortably padded armchairs. Their supper—cold meats and a reasonably crisp salad—was augmented by a bowl of fruit and the champagne. It all tasted wonderful to Molina.

“Living organisms?” Alexios was asking. “You’ve found living organisms?”

“Not yet,” said Molina, leaning back in the luxurious chair as he munched on a boneless pseudochicken wing.

Alexios raised his dark brows.

“As a point of fact,” Molina said, gesturing with his plastic fork, “there might not be living organisms on Mercury.”

“But I thought you said—”

Falling into his lecturer’s mode of speech, Molina intoned, “What I’ve discovered here is evidence of biological activity. This shows conclusively that there was once life on Mercury. Whether life still exists here is another matter, calling for much more extensive exploration and study.”

Alexios’s slightly mismatched face showed comprehension. “I see. You’re saying that life once existed here, but there’s no guarantee that it is still extant.”

“Precisely,” said Molina, a trifle pompously. “We’ll have to bring in teams to search the planet’s surface extensively and bore deeply into the crust.”

“Looking for organisms underground? Like the extremophiles that have been found on Earth?”

Nodding, Molina replied, “And Mars. And Venus. And even on Io.”

Alexios smiled thinly. “I wonder what Bishop Danvers will think about this? The thought of extraterrestrial intelligence seems to bother him.”

“Oh, I don’t expect we’ll find anything intelligent,” said Molina, with a wave of one hand. “Microbes. Bacterial forms, that’s what we’re looking for.”

“I see.” Alexios hesitated, then asked, “But tell me, if you bring in teams to scour the surface and dig deep boreholes, how will that affect my operation? After all, we’re planning to scoop ores from the surface and refine them with nanomachines so that we can—”

“All that will have to stop,” Molina said flatly.

“Stop?”

“We can’t risk contaminating possible biological evidence with your industrial operation. And nanomachines—they might gobble up the very evidence we’re seeking.”

Alexios sank back in his chair. “Mr. Yamagata is not going to be pleased by this. Not one bit.” Yet he was smiling strangely as he spoke.

But that could ruin us!” Yamagata yowled, his usually smiling face knotted into an angry grimace.

Alexios had come up to the orbiting ship to present the troubling news personally to his boss. He shrugged helplessly. “The IAA regulations are quite specific, sir.
Nothing
is allowed to interfere with astrobiological studies.”

The two men were standing in
Himawari’s
small observation blister, a darkened chamber fronted by a bubble of heavily tinted glassteel. For several moments they watched in silence as the heat-blasted barren surface of Mercury slid past.

At last Yamagata muttered, “I can’t believe that any kind of life could exist down there.”

Alexios raised his brows slightly. “They found life on the surface of Venus, which is even hotter than Mercury.”

“Venus has liquid sulfur and silicone compounds. Nothing like that has been found here.”