Mercury

ARRIVAL

Saito Yamagata had to squint against the Sun’s overwhelming glare, even through the heavily tinted visor of his helmet.

“This is truly the realm of fire,” he whispered to himself. “Small wonder our ancestors worshiped you, Daystar.”

Despite his instinctive unease, Yamagata felt physically comfortable enough inside his thickly insulated spacesuit; its cooling system and the radiators that projected from its back like a pair of dark oblong wings seemed to be working adequately. Still, the nearness, the overpowering brightness, the sheer size of that seething, churning ball of roiling gases made his nerves flutter. It seemed to fill the sky. Yamagata could see streamers arching up from the Sun’s curved limb into the blackness of space, huge bridges of million-degree plasma expanding and then pouring back down onto the blazing, searing surface of the photosphere.

He shuddered inside the cramped confines of his suit. Enough sight-seeing, he told himself. You have proven your courage and audacity for all the crew and your guests to see and remember. Get back inside the ship. Get to work. It is time to begin your third life.

Yamagata had come to Mercury to seek salvation. A strange route to blessedness, he thought. I must first pass through this fiery inferno, like a Catholic serving time in purgatory before attaining heaven. He tried to shrug philosophically, found that it was impossible in the suit, so instead he lifted his left arm with the help of the suit’s miniaturized servomotors and studied the keyboard wrapped around his wrist until he felt certain that he knew which keys he must touch to activate and control his suit’s propulsion unit. He could call for assistance, he knew, but the loss of face was too much to risk. Despite the lamas’ earnest attempts to teach him humility, Yamagata still held to his pride. If I go sailing out into infinity, he told himself, then I can call for help. And blame a suit malfunction, he added, with a sly grin.

He was pleased, then, when he was able to turn himself to face Himawari, the big, slowly rotating fusion torch ship that had brought him and his two guests to Mercury, and actually began jetting toward it at a sedate pace. With something of a shock Yamagata realized this was the first time he had ever been in space. All those years of his first life, building the power satellites and getting rich, he had remained firmly on Earth. Then he had died of cancer, been frozen, and reborn. Most of his second life he had spent in the lamasery in the Himalayas. He had never gone into space. Not until now.

Time to begin my third life, he said to himself as he neared Himawari. Time to atone for the first two.

Time for the stars.

LANDFALL

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 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, and 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, slightly over 175 centimeters tall, who appeared to be no more than fifty-some years old, thanks to rejuvenation therapies. 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 clown 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.”

DATA BANK

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 one hundred seventy-six 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 4,879 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 bull’s-eye of circular mountain ridges some 1,300 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.

DANTE’S INFERNO

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 copilot. Both the humans were redundancies: the shuttle could have flown perfectly well on its internal computer guidance, but 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 Himawari was gentle, and landing in Mercury’s light gravity was easy.

As soon as the landing struts touched down and the propulsion system automatically cut off, the pilot turned in his chair and said to Yamagata, “Gravity here is only one-third of Earth’s, sir.”

The copilot, a handsome European woman with pouty lips, added, “About the same as Mars.” The Japanese pilot glared at her.

Yamagata smiled good-naturedly at them both. “I have never been to Mars. My son once thought of moving me to the Moon, but I was dead then.”

Both pilots gaped at him as he unstrapped his safety harness and stood up, his head a bare centimeter from the cabin’s metal overhead. Their warning about the Mercurian gravity was strictly pro forma, of course. Yamagata had instructed Himawari’s captain to spin the fusion torch vessel at one-third normal gravity once it reached Mercury after its four-day flight from Earth. He felt quite comfortable at one-third g. Leaning between the two pilots’ chairs, Yamagata peered out the cockpit window. Even through the window’s tinting, it looked glaring and hot out there. Pitiless. Sun-baked. The stony surface of Mercury was bleak, barren, pockmarked with craters and cracked with meandering gullies. He saw the long shadow of their shuttle craft stretched out across the bare, rocky ground before them like an elongated oval.

“The Sun is behind us, then,” Yamagata muttered.

“Yes, sir,” said the pilot. “It will set in four hours.”

The copilot, who still had not learned that she was supposed to be subordinate to the pilot, added, “Then it will rise again for seventy-three minutes before setting for the night.”

Yamagata saw the clear displeasure on the pilot’s face. The man said nothing to his copilot, though. Instead, he pointed toward a rounded hillock of stony rubble.

“There’s the base,” he informed Yamagata. “Dante’s Inferno.”

Yamagata said, “They are sending out the access tube.”

A jointed tube was inching toward them across the uneven ground on metal wheels, reminding Yamagata of a caterpillar groping its way along the stalk of a plant on its many feet. He felt the shuttle rock slightly as the face of the tube thumped against the craft’s airlock.

The pilot watched the display on his panel, lights flicking on and off, a string of alphanumerics scrolling across the screen. He touched a corner of the screen with one finger and a visual image came up, with more numbers and a trio of green blinking lights.

“Access tube mated with airlock,” he announced, reverting to the clipped jargon of his profession. To the copilot he commanded, “Check it and confirm integrity.”

She got up from her chair wordlessly and brushed past Yamagata to head back to the airlock. He appreciated the brief touch of her soft body, the hint of flowery perfume. What would she do if I asked her to remain here at the base with me? Yamagata wondered. A European. And very independent in her manner. But I have a dinner appointment with my two guests, he reminded himself. Still, the thought lingered.

After a few silent moments, the pilot rose from his chair and walked a courteous three steps behind Yamagata to the airlock’s inner hatch. The copilot stepped through from the opposite direction, a slight smile curving her generous lips.

“Integrity confirmed,” she said, almost carelessly. “The tube is airtight and the cooling system is operational.”

Yamagata saw that the outer airlock hatch was open, as well, and the access tube stretched beyond it.

He politely thanked the two pilots and headed down the tube. Despite her insouciance, at least the copilot had the sense to bow properly. The tube was big enough for him to stand without stooping. The flooring felt slightly springy underfoot. It curved gently to the left; within a few paces he could no longer see the two pilots standing at the shuttle’s hatch.

Then he saw the hatch to the base, which was closed. Someone had scrawled a graffito in blood-red above the curved top of the hatch: Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.

Yamagata grunted at that. As he reached out his hand to tap the electronic panel that controlled the hatch, it swung open without his aid.

A lean, pale-skinned man with dark hair that curled over his ears stood on the other side of the hatch, wearing not the coveralls Yamagata expected, but a loose-fitting white shirt with flowing long sleeves that were fastened tightly at his wrists and a pair of dark baggy trousers stuffed into gleamingly polished calf-length boots. A wide leather belt cinched his narrow, flat middle.

He smiled politely and extended his hand to Yamagata. “Welcome to Goethe base, Mr. Yamagata. I can’t tell you how pleased I am to have you here. I am Dante Alexios.”

Yamagata accepted his hand. His grip was firm, his smile gracious. Yet there was something wrong with his face. The two sides of it seemed slightly mismatched, almost as if two separate halves had been grafted together by an incompetent surgeon. Even his smile was slightly lopsided; it made him appear almost mocking, rather than friendly.

And his eyes. Dante Alexios’s dark brown eyes burned with some deep inner fury, Yamagata saw.

Dante’s Inferno indeed, he thought.

SUNPOWER FOUNDATION

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 thought about establishing the base in orbit around 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.

“My 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’s strangely asymmetrical face. The man seemed to be completely serious; not a trace of sarcasm. He dipped his chin slightly in acknowledgment 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’s 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 we 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 your 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 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.

“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.”

Saito 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.

PAHS

Even after a dozen years of living with the lamas, Yamagata could not separate himself from his desire for creature comforts. He did not consider the accommodations aboard his ship Himawari to be particularly sumptuous, but he felt that he had a right to a certain amount of luxury. Sitting at the head of the small dining table in his private wardroom, he smiled as he recalled that the great fifteenth-century Chinese admiral Zheng He had included “pleasure women” among the crews of his great vessels of exploration and trade. At least I have not gone that far, Yamagata thought, although the memory of the Sundsvall woman still lingered in the back of his mind.

Seated at his right was Bishop Danvers, sipping abstemiously at a tiny stemmed glass of sherry. He was a big man, with heavy shoulders and considerable bulk. Yet he looked soft, round of face and body, although Yamagata noticed that his hands were big, heavy with horny calluses and prominent knuckles.

The hands of a bricklayer, Yamagata thought, on the body of a churchman. On Yamagata’s left sat Victor Molina, an astrobiologist from some Midwestern American university. The ship’s captain, Chuichi Shibasaki, sat at the far end of the table.

Bishop Danvers had come along on Himawari because the New Morality had insisted that Mercury Base must have a chaplain, and the project manager had specifically asked for Danvers to take up the mission. Danvers, however, showed no inclination to leave the comforts of the ship and actually go down to the planet’s surface. Hardly any of the ship’s mainly Japanese crew paid the scantest attention to him, but the bishop did not seem to mind their secularist indifference in the slightest. Sooner or later he would go down to Goethe base and offer the men and women there his spiritual guidance. If anyone wanted some. What would the bishop think of pleasure women? Yamagata wondered, suppressing a grin.

Danvers put down his barely touched glass and asked in a sharp, cutting voice, “Victor, you don’t actually expect to find living creatures on Mercury, do you?”

Victor Molina and Bishop Danvers knew each other, Yamagata had been told. They had been friends years earlier. The bishop had even performed Molina’s wedding ceremony.

Molina was olive-skinned, with startling cobalt blue eyes and a pugnacious, pointed chin. His luxuriant, sandy hair was tied back in a ponytail, fastened by a clip of asteroidal silver that matched the studs in both his earlobes. He had already drained his sherry, and answered the bishop’s question as one of the human waiters refilled his glass.

“Why not?” he replied, a trifle belligerently. “We’ve found living organisms on Mars and the moons of Jupiter, haven’t we?”

“Yes, but—”

“And what about those enormous creatures in Jupiter’s ocean? They might even be intelligent.”

The bishop’s pale eyes snapped angrily. “Intelligent? Nonsense! Surely you can’t believe—”

“It isn’t a matter of belief, Elliott, it’s a question of fact. Science depends on observation and measurement, not some a priori fairytales.”

“You’re not a Believer,” the bishop muttered.

“I’m an observer,” Molina snapped. “I’m here to see what the facts are.”

Yamagata thought that Dr. Molina could use some of the lamas’ lessons in humility. He found himself fascinated by the differences between the two men. Bishop Danvers’s round face was slightly flushed, whether from anger or embarrassment Yamagata could not tell. His hair was thinning, combed forward to hide a receding hairline. He refuses to take rejuvenation treatments, Yamagata guessed; it must be against his religious principles. Molina, on the other hand, looked like a young Lancelot: piercing eyes, flowing hair, strong shoulders. Yamagata pictured him on a prancing charger, seeking out dragons to slay.

Before the discussion became truly disagreeable Yamagata tried to intervene: “Everyone was quite surprised to find creatures living in the clouds of Venus, and even on that planet’s surface,” he said.

“Silicone snakes, with liquid sulfur for blood,” Captain Shibasaki added, taking up on his employer’s lead.

Bishop Danvers shuddered.

“Incredible organisms,” Molina said. “What was that line of Blake’s? ‘Did He who made the lamb make thee?’ ” He stared across the table at the bishop, almost sneering.

“But none of those creatures have the intelligence that God gave us,” Danvers countered.

“Those Jovian Leviathans just might,” said Molina.

The table fell silent. At a nod from Yamagata, the two waiters began to serve the appetizers: smoked eel in a seaweed salad. Yamagata and the captain fell to with chopsticks. The two others used forks. Yamagata noted that neither of the gaijin did more than pick at the food. Ah well, he thought, they’ll feel more at home with the steak that comes next.

Bishop Danvers wouldn’t let the subject drop, however.

“But surely you don’t expect to find anything living down on the surface of Mercury,” he said to Molina.

“I’ll grant you, it’s not the most likely place to look for living organisms,” Molina admitted. “The planet’s been baked dry. Except for the ice caches near the poles there’s not a drop of water anywhere, not even deep underground.”

“Then what makes you think—”

“PAHs,” said Molina.

“I beg your pardon?”

“PAHs,” Molina repeated.

The bishop frowned. “Are you being deliberately rude to me, Victor?”

“I believe,” Yamagata intervened, “that our noted astrobiologist is referring to a certain form of chemical compound.”

“Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons,” Molina agreed. “P-A-H. PAHs.”

“Oh,” said Bishop Danvers.

“You have found such compounds on the surface of Mercury?” Yamagata asked.

Nodding vigorously, Molina replied, “Traces of PAHs have been found in some of the rock samples sent for analysis by the people building your base down there.”

“And you believe this indicates the presence of life?” Danvers challenged. “A trace of some chemicals?”

“PAHs are biomarkers,” Molina said firmly. “They’ve been found on Earth, on other planets, on comets—even in interstellar clouds.”

“And always in association with living creatures?” Yamagata asked.

Molina hesitated a fraction of a second. “Almost always. They can be created abiologically, under certain circumstances.”

Danvers shook his head. “I can’t believe anything could live on that godforsaken world.”

“How do you know god’s forsaken this planet?” Molina challenged.

“I didn’t mean it literally,” Danvers grumbled.

“How strong is this evidence?” Yamagata asked. “Does the presence of these compounds mean that life is certain to be found on Mercury?”

“Nothing’s certain,” Molina said. “As a matter of fact, the PAHs deteriorate very rapidly in the tremendous heat and totally arid conditions down there.”

“Ah,” said the bishop, smiling for the first time.

Molina’s answering smile was bigger, and fiercer. “But don’t you see? If the PAHs deteriorate quickly, yet we still find them present in the rocks, then something must be producing them constantly. Something down there must be continuously creating those complex, fragile compounds. Something that’s alive.”

The bishop’s face blanched. Yamagata suddenly foresaw his sun-power project being invaded by armies of earnest environmentalists, each eager to prevent any activity that might contaminate the native life-forms.

GOETHE BASE

Dante Alexios sat rigidly in his chair and tried not to let his satisfaction show on his face. The wall screen in his office clearly showed the earnest, intent expression on Molina’s face.

He wants to come down to the base, Alexios said to himself, delighted. He’s asking me for permission to come down here.

“My mission is sanctioned by the International Astronautical Authority,” Molina was saying, “as well as the International Consortium of Universities and the science foundations of—”

“Of course,” Alexios interrupted, “of course. I have no intention of interfering with your important research, Dr. Molina. I was merely trying to explain to you that conditions down here on the surface are rather difficult. Our base is still fairly rugged, you know.”

Molina’s intent expression softened into a smug smile. “I’ve been in rugged places before, Mr. Alexios. You should see the site on Europa, with all that radiation to protect against.”

“I can imagine,” Alexios replied dryly.

“Then you have no objection to my coming down to your base?”

“None whatsoever,” said Alexios. “Our facility is at your disposal.” Molina’s bright blue eyes sparkled. “Wonderful! I’ll start the preparations immediately.”

And with that, Molina ended the transmission. Alexios’s wall screen went suddenly blank. He didn’t bother to thank me, or even to say good-bye, Alexios thought. How like Victor, still as impetuous and self-centered as ever.

Alexios got up from his chair and stretched languidly, surprised at how tense his body had become during his brief conversation with the astrobiologist.

Victor didn’t recognize me, Alexios said to himself. Not the slightest flicker of recall. Of course, it’s been more than ten years and the nanosurgery has altered my face considerably. But he didn’t even remember my voice. I’m dead and gone, as far as he’s concerned.

All to the good, Alexios told himself. Now he’ll come down here on his fool’s errand and destroy himself.

I’ll hardly have to lift a finger. He’s eager to rush to his own annihilation.

Alexios dreamed troubling dreams that night. The steel-hard determination that had brought him to Mercury and lured Victor Molina to this hellhole of a world softened as he slept, thawed slightly as he sank into the uncontrollable world of his inner thoughts, the world that he kept hidden and firmly locked away during his waking hours.

In his dream he was standing once again at the base of the sky-tower, craning his neck to follow its rigidly straight line as it rose beyond the clouds, up, up, farther than the eye could follow, stretching up toward the stars.

Lara was standing beside him, her arm around his waist, her head resting on his strong shoulder. The diamond ring on her finger was his, not Victor’s. She had chosen him and rejected Molina. Alexios turned to her, took her in his arms, kissed her with all the tenderness and love his soul could contain.

But she pulled away from him, suddenly terrified. Her lovely face contorted into a scream as the proud tower began to slowly collapse, writhing like an immense snake of man-made fibers, coiling languidly, uncontrollably, unstoppably, as it slowly but inexorably crashed to the ground. All in silence. In utter silence, as if he had suddenly gone completely deaf. Alexios wanted to scream, too, but his throat was frozen. He wanted to stop the tower’s collapse with his bare hands, but he could not move, his feet were rooted to the spot.

The immense collapsing tower smashed into the workers’ village and beyond, crushing houses and cinderblock work buildings, smashing the bodies of men, women, and children as it thundered to the ground, pulverizing dreams and plans and hopes beyond repair. The whole mountainside shook as dust rose to cover all the work, all the sweat and labor that had raised the tower to its full height. Alexios’s mouth tasted of ashes and a bitterness that went beyond human endurance.

Lara had disappeared. All around him, as far as the eye could see, there was nothing but devastation and the mangled bodies of the dead.

My fault, he told himself. The sin of pride. My pride has ruined everything, killed all those millions of people. Covered with ashes, his soul crushed along with everything else, he screamed to the vacant sky, “My fault! It’s all my fault!”

He awoke with a start, covered with cold sweat. In the years since the skytower’s destruction, Alexios had learned that the catastrophe was not his fault, not at all. The soul-killing guilt he had once felt had long since evolved into an implacable, burning hatred. He thirsted not for forgiveness, nor even for the clearing of his name. He lived for vengeance.

THERMOPHILES

Victor Molina also dreamed that night as he slept on the airfoam bed in his stateroom aboard Himawari, in orbit around the planet Mercury.

He dreamed of the Nobel ceremony in Stockholm. He saw himself dressed in the severely formal attire of the ritual as the king of Sweden handed him the heavy gold award for biology. The discoverer of thermophiles on the planet Mercury, Molina heard the king announce. The courageous, intrepid man who found life where all others said it was impossible for life to exist. Lara sat in the front row of the vast audience, beaming happily. Victor reminded himself to add a line to his Nobel lecture, thanking his wife for her love and support through all the years of their marriage.

Then he began his lecture. The huge audience hall, crammed with the elite of every continent on Earth, fell into an expectant silence. Thermophiles are organisms that live at temperatures far beyond those in which human beings can survive, he told the rapt and glittering audience. On Earth, microscopic thermophiles were discovered in the latter part of the twentieth century, existing deep underground at temperatures and pressures that were, up until then, considered impossible as habitats for living organisms. Yet these bacterial forms not only exist, they are so numerous that they actually outweigh all the living matter on the surface of the Earth! What is more, they survive without sunlight, shattering the firmly held belief that all life depends on sunlight as its basic source of energy. The thermophiles use the heat of Earth’s hellish core to derive their metabolic energy.

A British cosmologist, Thomas Gold, had earlier predicted that a “deep, hot biosphere” existed far below the surface not only of Earth, but of Mars and any other planet or moon that had a molten core. Scornfully rejected at first, Gold’s prediction turned out to be correct: bacterial life forms have been found deep below the surface of Mars, together with the cryptoendoliths that have created an ecological niche for themselves inside Martian surface rocks.

While astrobiologists found various forms of life on the moons of Jupiter and even within the vast, planet-girdling ocean of that giant planet itself, the next discovery of true thermophiles did not occur until explorers reached the surface of Venus, where multicelled creatures of considerable size were found living on that hothouse planet’s surface, their bodies consisting largely of silicones, with liquid sulfur as an energy-transfer medium, analogous to blood in terrestrial organisms.

Still, no one expected to find life on Mercury, not even thermophilic life. The planet had been baked dry from its very beginnings. There was no water to serve as a medium for biochemical reactions; not even molten sulfur. Mercury was nothing but a barren ball of rock, in the view of orthodox scientists.

Yet the surprising discovery of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons on the surface of Mercury challenged this orthodox view. PAHs are quickly broken down in the high-temperature environment of Mercury’s surface. The fact that they existed on the surface meant that some ongoing process was generating them continuously. That ongoing process was life: thermophilic organisms living on the surface of Mercury at temperatures more than four times higher than the boiling point of water. Moreover, they are capable of surviving long periods of intense cold during the Mercurian night, when temperatures that sink down to –135° Celsius are not uncommon.

Now came the point in his lecture when Molina must describe the Mercurian organisms. He looked up from the podium’s voice-activated display screen, where his notes were scrolling in cadence with his speaking, and smiled down at Lara. His smile turned awkward, embarrassed. He suddenly became aware that he had nothing to say. He didn’t know what the creatures looked like! The display screen was blank. He stood there at the podium while his wife and the king and the huge audience waited in anticipation. He had no idea of what he should say. Then he realized that he was naked. He clutched the podium for protection, tried to hide behind it, but they saw him, they all saw he was naked and began to laugh at him. All but Lara, who looked alarmed, frightened. Do something! he silently begged her. Get out of your chair and do something to help me!

Suddenly he had to urinate. Urgently. But he couldn’t move from behind the podium because he had no clothes on. Not a stitch. The audience was howling uproariously and Molina wanted, needed, desperately to piss.

He awoke with a start, disoriented in the darkness of the stateroom. “Lights!” he cried out, and the overhead panels began to glow softly. Molina stumbled out of bed and ran barefoot to the lavatory. After he had relieved himself and crawled back into bed he thought, I wish Lara were here. I shouldn’t have made her stay at home.

TORCH SHIP HIMAWARI

The ship’s name meant “sunflower.” Yamagata had personally chosen the name, an appropriate one for a vessel involved in tapping the Sun’s energy. Earlier generations would have said it was a fortunate name, a name that would bring good luck to his enterprise. Yamagata was not superstitious, yet he felt that Himawari was indeed the best possible name for his ship.

While all except the ship’s night watch slept, Yamagata sat in the padded recliner in his stateroom, speaking to a dead man.

The three-dimensional image that stood before Yamagata was almost solid enough to seem real. Except for a slight sparkling, like distant fireflies winking on a summer’s evening, the image was perfect in every detail. Yamagata saw a short, slightly chubby man with a shock of snow white hair smiling amiably at him. He was wearing a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows and blue jeans, with a soft turtleneck sweater of pale yellow and an incongruous velvet vest decorated with colorful flowers.

Robert Forward had died nearly a century earlier. He had been a maverick physicist, delving into areas that most academics avoided. Long before Duncan and his fusion propulsion drive, which made travel among the planets practical, Forward was examining the possibilities of antimatter rockets and laser propulsion for interstellar travel. Yamagata had hired a team of clever computer engineers to bring together every public lecture that Forward had given, every seminar appearance, every journal paper he had written, and incorporate them into a digitized persona that could be projected as an interactive holographic image. Calling themselves “chip-monks,” the young men and women had succeeded brilliantly. Yamagata could hold conversations with the long-dead Forward almost as if the man were actually present. There were limits to the system, of course. Forward never sat down; he was always on his feet. He paced, but only a few steps in any direction, because the image had to stay within the cone of the hologram being projected from the ceiling of Yamagata’s stateroom. And he always smiled. No matter what Yamagata said to him, Forward kept the same cheerful smile on his round, ruddy face. Sometimes that smile unnerved Yamagata.

As now. While Yamagata showed the disastrous efficiency curves to Forward’s image, the physicist’s hologram continued to smile even as he peered at the bad news.

“Degraded by solar radiation, huh?” Forward said, scratching at his plump double chin.

Yamagata nodded and tried not to scowl at the jaunty smile.

“The numbers check out?” Forward asked.

“My people back at New Kyoto are checking them.”

“You didn’t expect the degradation to be so severe, eh?”

“Obviously not.”

Forward clasped his hands behind his back. “Wellll,” he said, drawing the word out, “assuming the numbers check out and the degradation is a real effect, you’ll simply have to build more power satellites. Or larger ones.”

Yamagata said nothing.

Forward seemed to stand there, frozen, waiting for a cue. After a few seconds, however, he added, “If each individual powersat can produce only one-third the power you anticipated, then you’ll need three times as many powersats. It’s quite simple.”

“That is impossible,” said Yamagata.

“Why impossible? The technology is well in hand. If you can build ten powersats you can build thirty.”

“The costs would be too high.”

“Ah!” Forward nodded knowingly. “Economics. The dismal science.”

“Dismal, perhaps, but inescapable. The Foundation cannot afford to triple its costs.”

“Even if you built the powersats here at Mercury, instead of buying them from Selene and towing them here from the Moon?”

“Build them here?”

Forward’s image seemed to freeze for an eyeblink’s span, then he began ticking off on his chubby fingers, “Mercury has abundant metals. Silicon is rarer than on the Moon but there’s still enough easily scooped from the planet’s surface to build hundreds of powersats. You’d save on transportation costs, of course, and you’d cut out Selene’s profits.”

“But I would have to hire a sizeable construction crew,” Yamagata objected. “And they will want premium pay to work here at Mercury.”

Forward smile almost faded. But he quickly recovered. “I don’t know much about nanotechnology; the field was in its infancy when I died. But couldn’t you program nanomachines to build powersats?”

“Selene makes extensive use of nanomachines,” Yamagata agreed.

“There you are,” said Forward, with an offhand gesture.

Yamagata hesitated, thinking. Then, “But focusing thirty laser beams on a starship’s lightsail… wouldn’t that be difficult?”

Forward’s smile returned in full wattage. “If you can focus ten lasers on a sail you can focus thirty. No problemo.”

Yamagata smiled back. Until he realized that he was speaking to a man who had lived a century earlier and even then was known as a wild-eyed theoretician with no practical, hands-on experience.

NANOMACHINES

Nanomachines?” Alexios asked the image on his office wall.

“Yes,” replied Yamagata with an unhappy sigh. “It may become necessary to use them.”

“We have no nanotech specialists here,” said Alexios, sitting up tensely in his office chair. It was a lie: he himself had experience with nanotechnology. But he had kept that information hidden from everyone.

“I am aware of that,” Yamagata replied. “There are several in Selene who might be induced to come here.”

“We’re crowded down here already.”

Yamagata’s face tightened into a frown momentarily, then he regained control of himself and put on a perfunctory smile. “If it becomes necessary to build more power satellites than originally planned, your base will have to be enlarged considerably. We will need to build a mass launcher down there on the surface and hire entire teams of technicians to assemble the satellites in orbit.”

Alexios nodded and tried to hide the elation he felt. It’s working! he told himself. I’m going to bleed him dry.

Aloud, he said to Yamagata, “Many of my team are quite distressed by nanomachines. They feel that nanotechnology is dangerous.”

Strangely, Yamagata grinned at him. “If you think they will be unhappy, imagine how Bishop Danvers will react.”

Sure enough, Yamagata heard an earnest rap on his stateroom door within a half hour of his conversation with Alexios.

“Enter,” he called out, rising from his comfortable chair.

Bishop Danvers slid the door open and stepped through, then carefully shut it again.

“How kind of you to visit me,” said Yamagata pleasantly.

Danvers’s usually bland face looked stern. “This is not a social call, I’m afraid.”

“Ah so?” Yamagata gestured to one of the plush armchairs arranged around his recliner. “Let’s at least be physically comfortable. Would you like a refreshment? Tea, perhaps?”

The bishop brushed off Yamagata’s attempts to soften the meeting. “I understand you are considering bringing nanomachines here.”

Yamagata’s brows rose slightly. He must have spies in the communications center, he thought. Believers who report everything to him.

Coolly, he replied, “It may become necessary to use nanotechnology for certain aspects of the project.”

“Nanotechnology is banned.”

“On Earth. Not in Selene or anywhere else.”

“It is dangerous. Nanomachines have killed people. They have been turned into monstrous weapons.”

“They will be used here to construct a mass driver on Mercury’s surface and to assemble components of power satellites. Nothing more.”

“Nanotechnology is evil!”

Yamagata steepled his fingers, stalling for time to think. Do not antagonize this man, he warned himself. He can bring the full power of Earth’s governments against you.

“Bishop Danvers,” Yamagata said placatingly, “technology is neither evil nor good, in itself. It is men who are moral or not. It is the way we use technology that is good or evil. After all, a stone can be used to help build a temple or to bash someone’s brains in. Is the stone evil?”

“Nanotechnology is banned on Earth for perfectly good reasons,” Danvers insisted.

“On a planet crowded with ten billion people, including the mentally sick, the greedy, the fanatic, I understand perfectly why nanotechnology is banned. Here in space the situation is quite different.”

Danvers shook his head stubbornly. “How do you know that there are no mentally sick people among your crew? No one who is greedy? No fanatics?”

A good point, Yamagata admitted silently. There could be fanatics here. Danvers himself might be one. If he knew this project’s ultimate aim is to reach the stars, how would he react?

Aloud, Yamagata replied, “Bishop Danvers, every man and woman here has been thoroughly screened by psychological tests. Most of them are engineers and technicians. They are quite stable, I assure you.”

Danvers countered, “Do you truly believe that anyone who is willing to come to this hellhole for years at a time is mentally stable?”

Despite himself, Yamagata smiled. “A good point, sir. We must discuss the personality traits of adventurers over dinner some evening.”

“Don’t try to make light of this.”

“I assure you, I am not. If we need nanomachines to make this project succeed, it will mean an additional investment that will strain the resources of the Sunpower Foundation to the utmost. Let me tell you, this decision will not be made lightly.”

Danvers knew he was being dismissed. He got slowly to his feet, his fleshy face set in a determined scowl. “Think carefully, sir. What does it gain a man if he wins the whole world and suffers the loss of his immortal soul?”

Yamagata rose, too. “I am merely trying to provide electrical power for my fellow human beings. Surely that is a good thing.”

“Not if you use evil methods.”

“I can only assure you, Bishop, that if we use nanomachines, they will be kept under the strictest of controls.”

Clearly unhappy, Bishop Danvers turned his back on Yamagata and left the stateroom.

Yamagata sank back into his recliner. I’ve made an enemy of him, he realized. Now he’ll report back to his superiors on Earth and I’ll get more static from the International Astronautical Authority and god knows what other government agencies.

Ordinarily he would have smiled at his unintentional pun about god. This time he did not.

Bishop Elliott Danvers strode back toward his own stateroom along the sloping corridor that ran the length of Himawari’s habitation module. He passed several crew personnel, all of whom nodded or muttered a word of greeting to him. He acknowledged their deference with a curt nod each time. His mind was churning with other thoughts.

Nanotechnology! My superiors in Atlanta will go ballistic when they learn that Yamagata plans to bring nanomachines here. Godless technology. How can God allow such a mockery of His will to exist? Then Danvers realized that God would not allow it. God will stop them, just as he stopped the skytower, ten years ago. And he realized something even more important: I am God’s agent here, sent to do His work. I haven’t the power to stop Yamagata, not unless God sends a catastrophe to this wicked place. Only some disaster will bring Yamagata to his senses.

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.

FIELD TRIP

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.

LARA

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.

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.

GOETHE BASE

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.

TORCH SHIP HIMAWARI

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.”

“Not yet,” Alexios said, in a barely voiced whisper.

Yamagata frowned at him.

“We won’t have to stop all our work,” Alexios said, trying to sound a little brighter. “We still have the power satellites coming in from Selene. Getting them up and running will be a considerable task.”

“But how will we provide the life-support materials for the crew?” Yamagata growled. “I depended on your team on the surface for that.” Alexios clasped his hands behind his back and turned to stare at the planet’s surface gliding past. He knew his base on Mercury was too small to be seen by the unaided eye from the distance of the Himawari’s orbit, yet he strained his eyes to see the mound of rubble anyway.

“Well?” Yamagata demanded. “What do you recommend?”

Turning back to look at his decidedly unhappy employer, Alexios shrugged. “We’ll have to bring in the life-support materials from Selene, I suppose, if we can’t scoop them from Mercury’s regolith.”

“That will bankrupt us,” Yamagata muttered.

“Perhaps the suspension will only be for a short time,” said Alexios. “The scientists will come, look around, and then simply declare certain regions to be off-limits to our work.”

Even in the shadows of the darkened observation blister Alexios could see the grim expression on Yamagata’s face.

“This will ruin everything,” Yamagata said in a heavy whisper. “Everything.”

Alexios agreed, but forced himself to present a worried, downcast appearance to his boss.

Fuming, trying to keep his considerable temper under control, Yamagata repaired to his private quarters and called up the computer program of Robert Forward. The long-dead genius appeared in the middle of the compartment, smiling self-assuredly, still wearing that garish vest beneath his conservative tweed jacket.

Between the smile and the vest, Yamagata felt too irritated to sit still. He paced around the three-dimensional image, explaining this intolerable situation. Forward’s holographic image turned to follow him, that maddening smile never slipping by even one millimeter.

“But finding life on Mercury is very exciting news,” the image said. “You should be proud that you helped to facilitate such a discovery.”

“How can we continue our work if the IAA forces us to shut down all activities on the surface?” Yamagata demanded.

“That won’t last forever. They’ll lift the suspension sooner or later.”

“After Sunpower Foundation has gone bankrupt.”

“You have four powersats in orbit around Mercury and six more on the way. Can’t you begin to sell energy from them? You’d have some income—”

“The solar cells degrade too quickly!” Yamagata snapped. “Their power output is too low to be profitable.”

Forward seemed to think this over for a moment. “Then spend the time finding a solution for the cell degradation. Harden the cells; protect them from the harmful solar radiation.”

“Protect them?”

“It’s probably solar ultraviolet that’s doing the damage,” Forward mused. “Or perhaps particles from the solar wind.”

Yamagata sank into his favorite chair. “Solar particles. You mean protons?”

Forward nodded, making his fleshy cheeks waddle slightly. “Proton energy density must be pretty high this close to the Sun. Have you measured it?”

“I don’t believe so.”

“If it’s the protons doing the damage you can protect the powersats with superconducting radiation shields, just as spacecraft are shielded.”

Yamagata’s brows knit. “How do you know about radiation shielding? You died before interplanetary spacecraft needed shielding.”

“I have access to all your files,” Forward reminded him. “I know everything your computer knows.”

Yamagata rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “If we could bring the powersats’ energy output up to their theoretical maximum, or even close to it…”

“You’d be able to sell their energy at a profit,” Forward finished his thought. “And go ahead with the starship.”

Nodding, Yamagata closed the Forward program. The physicist winked out, leaving Yamagata alone in his quarters. He put in a call for Alexios, who had returned to the base on the planet’s surface.

“I want to find out what’s causing this degradation of the solar cells,” Yamagata said sternly. “That must be our number one priority.”

Alexios’s mismatched image in the wall screen looked as if he had expected this decision. “I already have a small team working on it, sir. I’ll put more people on the investigation.”

“Good,” said Yamagata. To himself he added silently, Let’s hope we can solve this problem before the IAA drives me into bankruptcy.

EARTH

The International Consortium of Universities was less an organization than a collection of powerful fiefdoms. It consisted of nearly a hundred universities around the world, no two of which ever agreed completely on anything. Moreover, each university was a collection of departments ranging from ancient literature to astrobiology, from psychodynamics to paleontology, from genetic engineering to gymnastics. Each department head tenaciously guarded her or his budget, assets, staff, and funding sources.

It took a masterful administrator to manage that ever-shifting tangle of alliances, feuds, jealousies, and sexual affairs.

Jacqueline Wexler was such an administrator. Gracious and charming in public, accommodating and willing to compromise at meetings, she nevertheless had the steel-hard will and sharp intellect to drive the ICU’s ramshackle collection of egos toward goals that she herself selected. Widely known as “Attila the Honey,” Wexler was all sweetness and smiles on the outside and ruthless determination within.

Today’s meeting of the ICU’s astrobiology committee was typical. To Wexler it seemed patently clear that a top-flight team of investigators must be sent to Mercury to confirm Dr. Molina’s discovery and organize a thorough study of the planet’s possible biosphere. Indeed, everyone around the long conference table agreed perfectly on that point.

Beyond that point, however, all agreement ended. Who should go? What would be their authority? How would they deal with the industrial operation already planted on Mercury’s surface? All these questions and more led to tedious hours of wrangling. Wexler let them wrangle, knowing precisely what she wanted out of them, realizing that sooner or later they would grow tired and let her make the effective decisions. So she smiled sweetly and waited for the self-important farts—women as well as men—to run out of gas.

The biggest issue, as far as they were concerned, was who would lead the team sent to Mercury. Rival universities vied with one another and there was much finger-pointing and cries of “You got the top spot last time!” and “That’s not fair!”

Wexler thought it was relatively unimportant who was picked as the lead scientist for the team. She worried more about who the New Morality would send as their spiritual advisor to watch over the scientists. The spiritual advisor’s ostensible task was to tend to the scientists’ moral and religious needs. His real job, as far as Wexler was concerned, was to spy on the scientists and report what they were doing back to Atlanta.

There was already a New Morality representative on Mercury, she knew: somebody named Danvers. Would they let him remain in charge of the newcomers as well, or send in somebody over his head?

A similar meeting was going on in Atlanta, in the ornate headquarters building of the New Morality, but there were only four people seated at the much smaller conference table.

Archbishop Harold Carnaby sat at the head of the table, of course. Well into his twelfth decade of life, the archbishop was one of the few living souls who had witnessed the birth of the New Morality, back in those evil days of licentiousness and runaway secularism that had brought down the wrath of God in the form of the greenhouse floods. Although his deep religious faith prohibited Carnaby from accepting rejuvenation treatments such as telomerase injections or cellular regeneration, he still availed himself of every mechanical aid that medical science could provide. He saw nothing immoral about artificial booster hearts or kidney dialysis implants.

So he sat at the head of the square table in his powered wheelchair, totally bald, wrinkled and gnomelike, breathing oxygen through a plastic tube inserted in his nostrils. His brain still functioned perfectly well, especially since surgeons had inserted stents in both his carotid arteries.

“Bishop Danvers is a good man,” said the deacon seated at Carnaby’s left. “I believe he can handle the challenge, no matter how many godless scientists they send to Mercury.”

Danvers’s dossier was displayed on the wall screen for Carnaby to scan. Apparently someone in Yamagata’s organization had specifically asked for Bishop Danvers to come to Mercury. Unusual, Carnaby thought, for those godless engineers and mechanics to ask for a chaplain at all, let alone a specific individual. Danvers must be well respected. But there was more at stake here than tending souls, he knew.

The deacon on Carnaby’s right suggested, “Perhaps we could send someone to assist him. Two or three assistants, even. We can demand space for them on the vessel that the scientists ride to Mercury.”

Carnaby nodded noncommittally and focused his rheumy eyes on the man sitting at the foot of the table, Bishop O’Malley. Physically, O’Malley was the opposite of Carnaby: big in the shoulders, wide in the middle, his face fleshy and always flushed, his nose bulbous and patterned with purple-red veins. O’Malley was a Catholic, and Carnaby did not completely trust him.

“What’s your take on the situation, Bishop?” Carnaby flatly refused to use the medieval Catholic terms of address; “your grace” and “my lord” had no place in his vocabulary.

Without turning even to glance at the dossier displayed on the wall behind him, O’Malley said in his powerful, window-rattling voice, “Danvers showed his toughness years ago in Ecuador. Didn’t let personal friendship stand in the way of doing his duty. Let him handle the scientists; he’s up to it. Send him an assistant or two if you feel like it, but keep him in charge on Mercury.”

“He’s done good work since Ecuador, too,” Carnaby agreed, his voice like a creaking hinge.

The two deacons immediately fell in line and agreed that Danvers should remain in charge.

“Remember this,” Carnaby said, folding his fleshless, blue-veined hands on the table edge in front of him, “every time these secularists find another form of life on some other world, people lose a portion of their faith. There are even those who proclaim that extraterrestrial life proves the Bible to be wrong!”

“Blasphemy!” hissed the younger of the deacons.

“The scientists will send a delegation out to Mercury,” Carnaby croaked on, “and they will confirm this man Molina’s discovery. They’ll trumpet the news that life has been found even where no one expected it to exist. More of the Faithful will fall away from their belief.”

O’Malley hunched his bulky shoulders. “Not if Danvers can show that the scientists are wrong. Not if he can give them the lie.”

“That’s his real mission, then,” Carnaby agreed. “To do whatever is necessary to disprove the scientists’ claim.”

The deacon on the left, young and still innocent, blinked uncertainly. “But how can he do that? If the scientists show proof that life exists on the planet—”

“Danvers must dispute their so-called proof,” Carnaby snapped, with obvious irritation. “He must challenge their findings.”

“I don’t see how—”

O’Malley reached out and touched the younger man on his shoulder. “Danvers is a fighter. He tries to hide it, but inside his soul he’s a fighter. He’ll find a way to cast doubt on the scientists’ findings, I’m sure.”

The deacon on the right understood. “He doesn’t have to disprove the scientists’ findings, merely cast enough doubt on them so the Faithful will disregard them.”

“At the very least,” Carnaby said. “It would be best if he could show that those godless secularists are lying and have been lying all along.”

“That’s a tall order,” said O’Malley, with a smile.

Carnaby did not smile back.

MERCURY ORBIT

Captain Shibasaki allowed himself a rare moment of irony in the presence of his employer.

“It’s going to become crowded here,” he said, perfectly straight-faced.

Yamagata did not catch his wry attempt at humor. Standing beside the captain on Himawari’s bridge, Yamagata unsmilingly watched the display screen that showed the two ships that had taken up orbits around Mercury almost simultaneously.

One was the freighter Urania, little more than a globular crew module and a set of nuclear ion propulsion units, with dozens of massive rectangular cargo containers clipped to its long spine. Urania carried equipment that would be useless if the scientists actually closed Mercury to further industrial operations. It also brought Molina’s wife to him, a matrimonial event to which Yamagata was utterly indifferent.

The other vessel was a fusion torch ship, Brudnoy, which had blasted out from Earth on a half-g burn that brought its complement of ICU scientists and IAA bureaucrats to Mercury in a scant three days. Yamagata wished it would keep on accelerating and dive straight into the Sun. Instead, it braked expertly and took up an orbit matching Himawari’s. Yamagata could actually see through the bridge’s main port the dumbbell-shaped vessel rotating slowly against the star-strewn blackness of space.

“Urania is requesting a shuttle to bring Mrs. Molina over to us,” Captain Shibasaki said, his voice low and deferential. “They are also wondering when they will be allowed to offload their cargo containers.” Yamagata clasped his hands behind his back and muttered, “They might as well leave the containers in orbit. No sense bringing them down to the surface until we find out what the scientists are going to do to us.”

“And Mrs. Molina?”

“Send a shuttle for her. I suppose Molina will be glad to see his wife.”

Hesitantly, the captain added, “Two of the scientists from Brudnoy are asking permission to come aboard and meet you, as well.”

“More mouths to feed,” Yamagata grumbled.

“Plus two ministers from the New Morality. Assistants to Bishop Danvers.”

Yamagata glowered at the captain. “Why didn’t they send the Mormon Tabernacle Choir while they were at it?”

It took every ounce of Shibasaki’s will power to keep from laughing.

Molina had rushed up to Himawari immediately after he had finished his preliminary examination of the rocks down at Mercury base. Once aboard the orbiting ship, he shut himself into the sterile laboratory facility that Yamagata had graciously allowed him to bring along and spent weeks on end studying his precious rocks.

The more he examined them, the more excited he became. Not only PAHs and carbonates and sulfides. Once he started looking at his samples in the scanning tunneling microscope he saw tiny structures that looked like fossils of once-living nanobacteria: ridged conical shapes and spiny spheroids. Life! Perhaps long extinct, but living organisms once existed on Mercury! Perhaps they still do!

He stopped his work only long enough to gulp a scant meal now and then, or to fire off a new set of data to the astrobiology journal. He stayed off the cognitive enhancers. Not that the pills were habit-forming or had serious side effects; he simply had run through almost his entire supply and decided to save the last few for an emergency. He slept when he could no longer stay awake, staggering to his quarters and collapsing on his bunk, then going back to his laboratory once his eyes popped open again and he showered and pulled on a clean set of coveralls.

It was only the announcement that his wife would be arriving aboard Himawari within the hour that pulled him away from his work. For weeks he had ignored all incoming messages except those from the International Consortium of Universities. He accepted their praise and answered their questions; personal messages from his wife he had no time for.

Dumbfounded with surprise, it took him several moments to register what the communications technician was telling him. “Lara? Here?” he asked the tech’s image on his compartment’s wall screen.

Once he was certain he had heard correctly, Molina finally, almost reluctantly, began to strip off his sweaty clothes and headed for the shower.

“What’s Lara doing here?” he asked himself as the steamy water enveloped him. “Why did she come? What’s wrong?”

To Molina’s surprise, Yamagata himself was already waiting at the airlock when he got there, scant moments before his wife arrived.

“I should be very angry at you,” Yamagata said, with a smile to show that he wasn’t.

“Angry?” Molina was truly surprised. “Because there’s life on Mercury?”

“Because your discovery may ruin my project.”

Molina smiled back, a trifle smugly. “I’m afraid that momentous scientific discoveries take precedence over industrial profits. That’s a well-established principle of the International Astronautical Authority.”

“Yes,” Yamagata replied thinly. “So it seems.”

The speaker set into the metal overhead announced that the shuttle craft had successfully mated to Himawari’s airlock. Again Molina wondered worriedly why Lara had come. He saw the indicator lights on the panel set into the bulkhead beside the hatch turn slowly from red to amber, then finally to green. The hatch clicked, then swung inward toward them.

One of the shuttle’s crew, a Valkyrie-sized woman in gunmetal gray coveralls, pushed the hatch all the way open and Lara Molina stepped daintily over the coaming, then, with a smile of recognition, rushed into her husband’s waiting arms.

He held her tightly and whispered into her ear, “You’re all right? Everything is okay back home?”

“I’m fine and so is Victor Jr.,” she said, beaming happily.

“Then why didn’t you tell me you were coming? What made you—”

She placed a silencing finger on his lips. “Later,” she said, glancing toward Yamagata.

Molina understood. She wanted to speak to him in private.

Yamagata misunderstood her glance. “Come,” he urged. “Dinner is waiting for us. You must be famished after having nothing but the freighter’s food.”

She’s not truly beautiful, Yamagata thought as he sat at the head of the dinner table, but she is certainly lovely.

He had seated Mrs. Molina at his right, her husband on his left. Next to them, Bishop Danvers and Alexios sat opposite one another, and the two cochairmen of the ICU’s scientific investigation team sat next to them. Captain Shibasaki was at the end of the table.

Yamagata saw that Lara Molina was slim as a colt; no, the picture that came to his mind was of a racing yacht, trim and sleek and pleasing to the eye. Her features were nothing extraordinary, but her amber-colored eyes were animated when she spoke. When she was silent, she kept her gaze on her husband, except for occasional glances in Alexios’s direction. Alexios stared unabashedly at her, as if she were the first woman he’d seen in ages.

Molina was in his glory, with his wife hanging on his every word and two of the leading astrobiologists of Earth paying attention to him, as well. His obvious misgivings about his wife’s unexpected arrival seemed far behind him now.

“Chance favors the prepared mind, of course,” he was saying, wineglass in hand. “No one expected to find any trace of biological activity on Mercury, but I came out here anyway. Everybody said I was being foolish; even my lovely wife told me I was throwing away months that could be better spent back at Jupiter.”

His wife lowered her eyes and smiled demurely.

“What brought you to Mercury, then?” Alexios asked. He had not touched his wine, Yamagata noted.

“A hunch. Call it intuition. Call it a belief that life is much tougher and more ubiquitous than even our most prestigious biologists can understand.”

The elder of the ICU investigators, Ian McFergusen, russet-bearded and heavy-browed, rumbled in a thick Scottish accent: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist says something is possible, he is almost always right. When he says something is impossible, he is almost always wrong.”

Everyone around the table laughed politely, Molina loudest of all.

“Clarke’s Law,” said the younger ICU scientist.

“Indeed,” Yamagata agreed.

“But surely you must have had more than a hunch to bring you all the way out here,” Alexios prodded, grinning crookedly.

Yamagata saw that Mrs. Molina stared at Alexios now. Is she angry at him for doubting her husband’s word?

Molina seemed not to notice. He drained his wineglass and put it down on the tablecloth so carefully that Yamagata thought he must be getting drunk. One of the waiters swiftly refilled it with claret.

“More than a hunch?” Molina responded at last. “Yes. Of course. A man doesn’t leave his loving wife and traipse out to a hellhole like this on a lark. It was more than a hunch, I assure you.”

“What decided you?” Alexios smiled, rather like the smile on a cobra, Yamagata thought.

“Funny thing,” Molina said, grinning. “I received a message. Said that the team working on the surface of Mercury was finding strange-looking rocks. It piqued my curiosity.”

“A message? From whom?” asked Bishop Danvers.

“It was anonymous. No signature.” Molina took another gulp of wine. “I kind of thought it was from you, Elliott.”

“Me?” Danvers looked shocked. “I didn’t send you any message.”

Molina shrugged. “Somebody did. Prob’ly one of the work crew down on the surface.”

“Strange-looking rocks?” Alexios mused. “And that was enough to send you packing for Mercury?”

“I had the summer off,” Molina replied. “I was in line for an assistant professorship. I thought a poke around Mercury would look good on my curriculum vitae. Couldn’t hurt.”

“It has certainly helped!” Danvers said.

“I think it probably has,” said Molina, reaching for his wineglass again.

“I’m sure it has,” said Alexios.

Yamagata noticed that Alexios stared straight at Lara Molina as he spoke.

EXPLANATIONS

“Messages?” Molina blinked with surprise.

He and Lara were alone now in the stateroom that Yamagata had graciously supplied for them. It was larger than Molina’s former quarters aboard the ship. The Japanese crewmen who had moved Molina’s belongings to this new compartment laughingly referred to it as the Bridal Suite. In Japanese, of course, so neither of the gaijin would be embarrassed by their little joke.

“I couldn’t leave you alone out here,” Lara said as she unpacked the travel bag on the stateroom’s double-sized bed. “You looked so sad, so lonely.”

Molina knew he had never sent a single message to his wife until his triumphant announcement of his discovery. He also knew that he had promised to call her every day he was away from her.

“You got messages from me?” he asked again.

She turned from her unpacking and slid her arms around his neck. “Don’t be shy, Victor. Of course I got your messages. They were wonderful. Some were so beautiful they made me cry.”

Either I’ve gone insane or she has, Molina thought. Has she been hallucinating? Blurring the line between her dreams and reality?

“Lara, dearest, I—”

“Others were so sad, so poignant … they nearly broke my heart.” She kissed him gently on the lips.

Molina felt his body stirring. One thing he had learned over nearly ten years of marriage was not to argue with success. Accept credit when it comes your way, no matter what. It had been a good guide for his scientific career, as well.

He kissed her more strongly and held her tightly. Wordlessly they sat on the edge of the bed. Molina pushed his wife’s half-unpacked travel bag off the bed; it fell to the floor with a gentle thump in Mercury’s low gravity. They lay side by side and he began undressing her. I’ll figure out what this message business is all about tomorrow, Molina told himself as the heat of passion rose in him. Tomorrow will be time enough.

Dante Alexios had returned to Goethe base on Mercury’s surface after dinner aboard Himawari. Lara hasn’t changed a bit, he thought. She’s as beautiful as she was ten years ago. More beautiful, even.

Did she recognize me? he wondered as he undressed in his tiny compartment. Not my face, surely, but maybe she remembers my voice. The nanomachines didn’t change my voice very much.

He stretched out on his bed and stared at the low ceiling. The room’s sensors automatically turned the lights out, and the star patterns painted across the ceiling glowed faintly.

Victor looked puzzled that his wife had flown out here, Alexios said to himself. Wait until she tells him about the messages she got from him. That’ll drive him crazy, trying to figure it out. Who would be nutty enough to send love letters to Lara and fake his image, his voice, for them?

It had been easy enough to do. Alexios had secretly recorded Molina’s face and voice from his university dossier. It was simple to morph that imagery into the messages that Alexios composed. He had poured his heart into those messages, told her everything he wanted to say to her, everything he wanted her to know. Plagiarized from the best sources: Shakespeare, Browning, Rostand, Byron, and the rest.

He told Lara how much he loved her, had always loved her, would always love her. But he said it with her husband’s image, with Victor’s voice. He didn’t dare use his own. Not yet.

Ian McFergusen was a burly man of delicate tastes. His fierce bushy beard and shaggy brows made him look like a Highland warrior of old, yet he had dedicated his career to the study of life. He was a biologist, not a claymore-swinging howling clansman.

Still, he was a fighter. Throughout academia he was known as a tough, independent thinker. A maverick, a burr under the saddle, often an inconvenient pain in the ass. He seldom followed the accepted wisdom on any subject. He asked the awkward questions, the questions that most people wished to shove under the rug.

McFergusen had studied all the data about the evidence for Mercurian biology that Molina had sent Earthward. Alone now in his compartment, as he sipped his usual nightcap of whisky, neat, he had to admit that the data were impressive. Molina may have made a real find here, McFergusen said to himself.

But something nagged at him. As he drained the whisky and set the empty glass on his night table, he fidgeted uneasily, scratched at his beard, knitted his heavy brows. It’s all too convenient, he told himself, too convenient by far. He began pacing across his narrow compartment. Molina gets an anonymous tip. He’s given a clutch of rocks that the construction workers have found. All in the same location.

The rocks contain PAHs and all the other biomarkers, that’s sure enough. But it’s all too easy. Too convenient. Nature doesn’t hand you evidence on a platter.

He shook his shaggy head and sat heavily on the bunk. Maybe I’m getting too old and cranky, he said to himself. Then a new thought struck him. Maybe I’m just jealous of the young squirt.

GOETHE BASE

“So far,” Alexios was saying, “the scientists have not discovered any other sites that contain biomarkers.”

Yamagata had come down from Himawari to the surface base for this meeting, the first time he had been to Mercury’s surface in more than a month. For nearly five weeks now the IAA scientists had been combing the planet’s surface with automated tracked vehicles, searching for more rocks that contained signs of life.

“Yet still they prevent us from expanding this base,” Yamagata grumbled. He was too troubled to sit in the chair Alexios had offered him. Instead he stood, hands clasped behind his back, and stared at the display screen that took up one whole wall of Alexios’s modest office. It showed the barren, rock-strewn surface outside the base: the Sun was up and the hard-baked ground looked hot enough to melt.

The bleak landscape matched Yamagata’s mood perfectly. If the scientists didn’t lift their ban on industrial activities on Mercury’s surface soon, Sunpower Foundation would go bankrupt. It angered Yamagata to be so frustrated. Despite all the teachings that the lamas had tried to instill in him, he found it impossible to accept what was happening, impossible to be patient. Yamagata wanted to round up McFergusen and his entire crew and send them packing back to Earth. Now. This day.

Standing respectfully beside him, Alexios said quietly, “At least we’re putting the time to some good use. The preliminary tests on the shielded powersat look quite good.”

Yamagata turned toward him. Alexios was slightly taller than he, a fact that added to his displeasure.

“Just as you suspected, the power degradation is caused by the solar proton influx,” Alexios went on calmly.

“And the superconducting shields protect the cells?”

Alexios called out, “Computer: show results of shielding test.”

The landscape disappeared from the wall screen, replaced by a set of graphs with curving lines in red, green, yellow, and blue. As Alexios explained them, Yamagata saw that the superconducting shields performed much as the Forward persona had predicted.

“The high positive potential of the structure around the cells deflects the protons,” Alexios said, “and the magnetic field created by the superconducting wire keeps the electrons off.”

“Otherwise the electrons would discharge the high positive potential,” Yamagata muttered, showing his employee that he understood the physics involved.

“Exactly.” Alexios nodded. “So we can shield the powersats and get them up close to their nominal power output, if…” His voice trailed off.

“If?” Yamagata snapped.

“If we can afford enough superconducting wire.”

“It’s expensive.”

“Very. But most of the elements needed to make superconducting wire exist in Mercury’s soil.”

“You mean regolith,” said Yamagata.

Alexios bowed slightly. “Excuse me. Of course, regolith. Soil would imply living creatures in the ground, wouldn’t it?”

“We can manufacture the superconductors here, out of local materials?”

“I believe so. If we use nanomachines it should be relatively inexpensive.”

“Once we are allowed to work on the surface again,” Yamagata muttered.

Alexios stifled the satisfied little smile that began to form on his lips. Forcing his face into a sorrowful mask, he agreed, “Yes, we must get permission from the IAA before we can even begin to do anything.”

Yamagata fumed. Instead of a mantra, he silently cursed the International Astronautical Authority, the International Consortium of Universities, all their members past and present, and all their members’ mothers back to five generations.

Ian McFergusen looked around at the barren, sun-blasted rocky ground and shook his head. Nothing. Every site we’ve investigated has turned up nothing. Only that one site next to the base Yamagata’s people have built.

Thanks to the virtual reality equipment that the ICU team had brought with them, McFergusen could sit in the laboratory they had set up aboard Brudnoy and still experience precisely what the tracked robot vehicle was doing down on the surface of Mercury. The first time he had used VR equipment, back when he was part of the third Mars expedition, it had seemed little less than a miracle to him. He could see, feel, hear what the robot machines were experiencing thousands of kilometers away, all while sitting in the comfort of a secure base. Now, so many years later, virtual reality was just another tool, no more wondrous than the fusion engines that propelled interplanetary torch ships or the tunneling microscopes that revealed individual atoms.

Sitting on a lab stool, his head and lower arms encased in the VR helmet and gloves, McFergusen picked up a rock in his clawlike pincers and brought it close to his sensors. A perfectly ordinary piece of volcanic ejecta, he thought. With the strength of the robot he broke the rock apart, then brought the broken edges to his sensor set and scanned their exposed interiors for several minutes.

Nothing. No PAHs, no sulfides, no iron nodules. If I bring it up to the ship’s tunneling microscope, McFergusen thought, I won’t find any nanometer-sized structures, either. He tossed the broken fragments of the rock back to the ground in disgust.

For long moments he simply sat there, his body aboard the torch ship Brudnoy, his eyes and hands and mind on the blazing hot surface of Mercury.

How can there be such rich specimens at one site and nothing anywhere else? Of course, he reminded himself, we have an entire planet to consider. In these few weeks we’ve barely tested a few dozen possible sites. Perhaps we’re looking in the wrong places.

Yet, he reasoned, we concentrated our searches on sites that are similar to the one where Molina found his specimens. We should have found something by now.

Unless…

McFergusen did not want to consider the possibility that had arisen in his mind. We’ve got to widen our net, he told himself, search different kinds of sites.

That won’t be easy, he knew. Not with Yamagata breathing down our necks. Lord, he’s been sending messages to IAA headquarters daily, demanding to know when we’ll allow him to start digging up the regolith again.

None of it is easy, McFergusen said to himself. It never is. Then that nagging suspicion surfaced in his mind again. How could Molina have been so lucky?

Luck plays its role in science, he knew. It’s always better to be lucky than to be smart. But so damnably lucky? Is it possible?

Victor Molina was in his lab, flicking through the tunneling microscope’s images of the latest rock samples brought up from the surface. Nothing. These samples were as dead and inert as rocks from the Moon. No hydrates, no organic molecules, no long-chain molecules of any sort. Baked dry and dead.

He leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes wearily. How can this be? Even the samples of dirt scraped off the ground showed no biomarkers of any kind.

Sitting up straight again, he reminded himself that the dirt samples from the surface of Mars tested by the old Viking landers a century ago showed no signs of biological activity, either. Not even a trace of organic molecules in the soil. And Mars not only bears life today but once bore intelligent life, before it was wiped out in an extinction-level meteor impact.

He turned and looked at the set of rocks he himself had tested when he’d first arrived at Mercury. They were carefully sealed in airtight transparent plastic containers. McFergusen wants me to let him send them back to Earth for further testing. Never! I’m not letting them out of my sight. They’ll go back to Earth when I do, and they’ll be tested by third parties only when I’m present.

Molina felt a fierce proprietary passion about those rocks. They were his key to a future of respect and accomplishment, his ticket to Stockholm and the Nobel Prize.

It took a few moments for him to realize that someone was knocking at his laboratory door, rapping hard enough to make the door shake. With some irritation he called out, “Enter.”

Bishop Danvers slid the door back and stepped into the lab, a look of stern determination on his fleshy face. The door automatically slid shut.

“Hello, Elliott,” Molina said evenly. “I’m pretty busy right now.” It was a lie, but Molina was in no mood for his old friend’s platitudes.

“This is an official visit,” Danvers said, standing a bare two paces inside the doorway.

“Official?” Molina snapped. “What do you mean?”

Without moving from where he stood, Danvers said, “I’m here in my capacity as a bishop in the New Morality Church.”

Despite himself, Molina grinned. “What are you going to do, Elliott, baptize me? Or maybe bless my rocks?”

“No,” said Danvers, his cheeks flushing slightly. “I’m here to interrogate you.”

Molina’s brows shot up. “Interrogate? You mean like the Inquisition?”

Danvers’s face darkened, his heavy hands knotted into fists. But he quickly regained control of himself and forced a thin smile.

“Victor, the New Morality has placed a heavy burden on my shoulders. I’ve been tasked with the responsibility of disproving your claim of finding life on Mercury.”

Molina smiled and relaxed. “Oh, is that all.”

“It’s very serious!”

Nodding, Molina said, “I understand, Elliott.” He gestured to the only other chair in the room. “Please, sit down. Make yourself comfortable.”

The plastic seat of the tubular metal chair squeaked as Danvers settled his bulk into it. The bishop looked tense, wary.

“Elliott, how long have we known each other?” Molina asked.

Danvers thought a moment. “I first met you in Ecuador, more than twelve years ago.”

“It’s closer to fourteen years, actually.”

“To be sure. But I haven’t seen you since the trial at Quito, and that was about ten years ago.”

Nodding again, Molina said, “But we were friends back in Ecuador. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t still be friends.”

Danvers gestured to the analytical equipment lining the laboratory’s walls. “We live in two different worlds, Victor.”

“Different, maybe, but not entirely separate. There’s no reason for us to be adversaries.”

“I have my responsibilities,” Danvers countered, somewhat stiffly. “My orders come straight from Atlanta, from the archbishop himself.”

Molina let out a little sigh, then said, “All right, just what do they want you to do?”

“As I told you: they want me to disprove your claim that life exists on Mercury.”

“I’ve never claimed that.”

“Or once existed, ages ago,” Danvers added.

“That seems irrefutable, Elliott.”

“Because of the chemicals you’ve found in those rocks?” Danvers pointed to the clear plastic containers.

“That’s right. The evidence is unmistakable.”

“But as I understand it, McFergusen and his team haven’t found any corroborating evidence.”

“Corroborating evidence!” Molina smirked. “You’re learning how to talk like a scientist, Elliott.”

Danvers grimaced slightly. “Your fellow scientists seem terribly puzzled that they haven’t been able to find anything similar to what you’ve discovered.”

With a shrug, Molina replied, “Mercury may be a small planet, Elliott, but it’s still a planet. A whole world. Its surface area must be similar to the continent of Eurasia, back on Earth. How thoroughly do you think a handful of scientists could explore all of Eurasia, from the coast of Portugal to the China Sea? In a few weeks, no less.”

“Yet you found your rocks the first day you set foot on Mercury.”

“So I did. I was lucky.” Suddenly Molina came up with a new thought. “Perhaps, in your terms, God guided me to those rocks.”

Danvers rocked back in his chair. “Don’t make a joke of God. That’s blasphemy.”

“I didn’t mean to offend you, Elliott,” Molina said softly. “I was simply trying to put my good fortune in terms you’d understand.”

“You should try praying, instead,” said Danvers. “As far as your fellow scientists are concerned, they don’t believe in your luck. Or God’s grace.”

TORCH SHIP BRUDNOY

“I want it clearly understood,” McFergusen said, in his gravelly Highland brogue, “that this is strictly an informal meeting.”

Informal, Molina repeated silently. Like a coroner’s inquest or a session of the Spanish Inquisition.

The Scottish physicist sat at the head of the table, Molina at its foot. Along the table were ranked the other scientists that the IAA had sent, together with Bishop Danvers, who sat at Molina’s right. They were using the captain’s conference room; it felt crowded, tight, and stuffy. Too many people for a compartment this size, Molina thought.

“Although the ship’s computer is taking a verbatim record of what we say,” McFergusen went on, “no report of this meeting will be sent back to IAA headquarters until each person here has had a chance to read the record and add any comments he or she wishes to make. Is that clear?”

Heads nodded up and down the table.

McFergusen hesitated a moment, then plunged in. “Now then, our major problem is that we have been unable to find any specimens bearing biomarkers.”

“Except for the ones I found,” Molina added.

“Indeed.”

“How do you account for that?” asked the woman on Molina’s left.

He shrugged elaborately. “How do you account for the fact that, during some war back in the twentieth century, the first cannon shell fired into the city of Leningrad killed the zoo’s only elephant?”

Everyone chuckled.

Except McFergusen. “We have been scouring the planet for some six weeks now—”

“Six weeks for a whole planet?” Molina countered. “Do you really believe you’ve covered everything?”

“No, of course not. But you found your specimens on your first day, didn’t you?”

Feeling anger simmering inside him, Molina said, “You forget that I came here because of a tip from one of the construction workers. I didn’t just blindly stumble onto those rocks.”

“A tip from whom?” asked one of the younger men.

“I don’t know. It was an anonymous message. I’ve questioned the workers down there on the surface and none of them admits to sending me the message.”

“An anonymous tip that no one admits to sending,” grumbled McFergusen. “It strains credulity a bit, doesn’t it?”

The woman on Molina’s left, young, slightly plump, very intense, asked, “Why you?”

“Why me what?”

“Why did he—or she—send that message to you? You’re not a major figure in planetary studies. Why not to Professor McFergusen,” she gestured toward the older man, “or the head of the IAA?”

“Yes,” picked up one of the others. “Why wasn’t the message sent to the head of the astrobiology department of a major university?”

“Why is the sky blue?” Molina snapped. “How the hell should I know?”

“We know why the sky is blue,” McFergusen murmured, a slight smile on his bearded face.

“Rayleigh scattering,” said the young woman on the other side of the table.

“The question remains,” McFergusen said, in a voice loud enough to silence the others, “that you received an anonymous message that led you directly to the specimens you discovered, and no one else has been able to find anything similar.”

“And no one else has tested your specimens,” said the woman on Molina’s left.

Seething, Molina hissed, “Are you suggesting that I faked my findings?”

“I am suggesting,” she said, unfazed by his red-faced anger, “that you allow us to independently test your specimens.”

“It’s possible to make an honest mistake,” Bishop Danvers said softly, laying a placating hand on Molina’s arm.

“Look at Percival Lowell, spending his life seeing canals on Mars that didn’t exist.”

“Or the first announcement of pulsar planets.”

McFergusen said gently, “No one is impugning your honesty, Dr. Molina. But we can’t be certain of your results until they are checked by a third party. Surely you understand that.”

Reluctantly, Molina nodded. “Yes. Of course. I’m sorry I got so excited.”

Everyone around the table seemed to relax, ease back in their chairs.

“But,” Molina added, pointing straight at McFergusen, “I want to be present when the tests are made.”

“Certainly,” McFergusen agreed. “I see no problem with that. Do any of you?”

No one objected.

“Very well, then. We can test the rocks tomorrow. Dr. Baines, here, is the best man for the job, don’t you agree?”

Molina nodded.

“I will attend the procedure myself,” McFergusen said, almost jovially. “With you, Dr. Molina.”

Molina nodded again and muttered, “Thank you,” through gritted teeth.

GOETHE BASE

“You’ve got to help me,” Victor Molina said, his voice trembling slightly. “You’ve got to!”

Dante Alexios sat stiffly in his straight-backed chair and struggled to keep any emotion from showing on his face. “I have to help you?”

“None of the others will. You’re the only one who can.”

The two men were in Alexios’s bare little office. Molina was on his feet, pacing like a caged animal back and forth. Alexios sat unmoving, except for his eyes, which tracked Molina’s movements like a predator sizing up its intended victim.

Molina paced to the wall, turned around, strode back to the opposite wall, turned again.

“I’ve got to find more samples!” he blurted. “They won’t believe me if I don’t. I’ve got to go out on the surface and find more rocks that contain biomarkers.”

As evenly as he could manage, Alexios said, “But the IAA team is looking for samples all over the planet, aren’t they? They’ve stopped us from doing any further activities—”

“The IAA team! McFergusen and his academics! A bunch of incompetent fools! They sit up there safe and comfortable in their ship and send teleoperated rovers to snoop around the surface for them.”

“Virtual reality is a powerful tool,” Alexios goaded. Standing in front of him, bending over so that their noses nearly touched, Molina cried, “They won’t allow me to use their VR system! I let them examine my rocks but they won’t let me touch their equipment! It’s not fair!”

Alexios slowly rose to his feet, forcing Molina to back off a few steps. “And that’s why you’ve come to me.”

“You have tractors sitting here at the base doing nothing. Let me borrow one. I’ve got to get out there and find more specimens.”

Alexios’s oddly irregular face slowly curled into a lopsided smile. “It’s against safety regulations for anyone to go out on a tractor alone.”

Molina’s already-flushed face turned darker. Before he could say anything, though, Alexios added, “So I’ll go out with you.”

“You will?” Molina seemed about to jump for joy.

With a self-deprecating little shrug, Alexios said, “I have little else to do, thanks to the IAA.”

He could have said, Thanks to you, but Molina never thought of that possibility.

Instead he asked, “When? How soon?”

“As soon as you’re ready.”

“I’m ready now!”

In truth, it took more than a day for Molina to be ready. He shuttled back up to Himawari to gather the equipment he wanted, and by then it was time for dinner. So he spent the night aboard Yamagata’s torch ship with his wife. Alexios slept in his quarters alone, trying not to think of Molina in bed with Lara. He slept very little, and when he did his dreams were monstrous.

Molina arrived at the base early the next morning, with four crates of equipment. Alexios hid his amusement and walked him to the garage where the base’s tractors were housed. A baggage cart trundled behind them on spongy little wheels, faithfully following the miniature beacon Alexios had clipped to his belt.

The garage was empty and quiet. “Mr. Yamagata came in here just once since the IAA embargoed us,” Alexios said, his voice echoing off the steel ribs of the curving walls. “He wasn’t happy to see all this equipment sitting idle.”

Molina said nothing. The tractors were simple and rugged, with springy-looking oversized metal wheels and a glassteel bubble up front where the driver and passengers sat. The two men loaded Molina’s equipment into the cargo deck in back, then closed the heavy cermet hatch.

“I’ll get into my suit now,” said Molina.

Alexios could see dark stains of perspiration on his coveralls. It couldn’t be from the exertion of lifting those crates in this light gravity, he thought. Victor must be nervous. Or maybe he’s afraid of going outside again.

He went with Molina and suited up also.

“But you won’t have to leave the tractor,” Molina objected as a team of technicians began to help them into the bulky suits.

“Unless you get into trouble,” said Alexios.

“Oh.”

“You wouldn’t want to wait a half hour or more while I wiggled myself into this outfit.”

“No, I imagine not.”

At last they were both ready, the cumbersome, heavily insulated suits fully sealed and checked out by the technicians.

Alexios called base control with his suit radio. “Dr. Molina and I are going out on tractor number four. We will go beyond your camera range.”

The controller’s voice sounded bored. “Copy you’ll go over the horizon. Sunup in one hour, seventeen minutes.”

A flotilla of miniature surveillance satellites hugged the planet in low orbits, so every square meter of Mercury’s surface was constantly covered by at least two of the minisats. They provided continuous communications links and precise location data.

“Sun in one seventeen,” Alexios acknowledged.

“You are clear for excursion,” said the controller.

It wasn’t easy to climb up into the tractor’s cab in the awkward suits, despite the low gravity. Alexios heard Molina grunt and puff until he finally settled in the right-hand seat.

“Comfortable?” Alexios asked.

“Are you kidding?”

Laughing lightly, Alexios engaged the tractor’s electric engine and drove to the open inner airlock hatch.

“Do you have a specific route for us to follow or will we simply meander around out there?” Alexios asked as the inner hatch closed and the air was pumped out of the lock.

Molina struggled to fish a thumbnail-sized chip from his equipment belt and clicked it into the computer in the tractor’s control panel. The display screen showed a geodetic map of the area with a route marked clearly by a red line.

Alexios studied the display for a moment, then tapped a gloved finger against it. “That’s a pretty steep gully. We should avoid it.”

Molina’s voice in his earphones sounded irked. “That’s the most likely spot to find what I’m looking for.”

The outer hatch slid open. The barren landscape looked dark and foreboding, the horizon frighteningly near, thousands of stars gleaming steadily beyond it. Alexios saw the glowing band of the Milky Way stretching across the sky.

As he put the tractor in gear, he checked the status of the electrical power systems on the control panel displays. Fuel cells at max, backup batteries also. Once the Sun came up, he knew, the solar cells would take over.

They bounced over the hatch’s edge and onto the rugged, uneven rocky surface.

“I’m afraid we can’t take the tractor down into that gully,” Alexios said.

Silence from Molina for a moment, although Alexios could hear his breathing in his helmet earphones. Then, “All right. Get as close to it as you can and I’ll go down on foot.”

Alexios felt his brows rise. Victor has guts, he said to himself. Or, more likely, he’s driven by a demon.

Alexios knew all about being driven by demons.

SURFACE EXCURSION

Molina sat in silence inside the heavy pressurized suit, jouncing slightly as the tractor trundled along the route he had selected. They passed the shallow crater where he had found his specimens. In the tractor’s headlights it looked gray and lifeless.

A relentless anger simmered through him, overwhelming the uneasiness he felt about being out on the surface of this deadly world, where a slight mistake could kill you.

Once he allowed McFergusen and his dilettantes to examine his samples, they wouldn’t let go of them. Just one more test. Oh, yes, we thought of another way to probe the samples. You don’t mind our keeping them another day or two, do you?

Molina saw that the results they were getting matched his own almost exactly. Within the margin of measurement error, at least. So why are they still sawing away at my rocks? What do they think they’ll find that I haven’t already found? They can’t take the credit for discovering them away from me. What in hell are they trying to do?

He thought he knew the answer. They’re trying to prove I’m wrong. They’re doing their damnedest to discredit me. They’ll keep poking and probing and studying until they find some error in my analysis, some mistake I’ve made.

Never! he told himself. There’s no mistake. No error. The bio-markers are there and no matter what they do they can’t make them go away.

But still they’re hammering away at it, trying to show I’m wrong. Molina seethed with barely controlled fury. He tried to remember that age-old saw: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Who said that originally? Fermi? Sagan?

What fucking difference does it make? he raged inwardly. The evidence is there. It’s real, goddammit. They can’t make it disappear.

But they won’t be satisfied until more specimens with biomarkers are found. All right. They can’t find them, sitting up there in orbit with their virtual reality thumbs up their asses. So I’ll find them down here. I’ll bring back more specimens and shove them under their noses and then they’ll have to admit I’m right.

“We’re coming up on that gully.” Alexios’s voice in his earphones startled him back to the here and now.

Blinking away his angry ruminations, Molina saw off to their right a long, fairly straight gorge paralleling their course, a split in the bare rocky surface. It didn’t look very deep on the geodetic map, but now as he stared through the glassteel bubble of the tractor’s cab, it seemed as yawning as the Grand Canyon.

It’s just an illusion, he told himself. With no light except the stars, everything looks dark and deep and scary.

“Where do you want me to pull up?” Alexios asked.

Strange how familiar his voice sounded through the earphones, Molina thought. I couldn’t have heard it before; I just met the man a few weeks ago. And yet—

“Where should I stop?” Alexios asked again.

“Get as close to the edge as you can,” Molina said, feeling his insides fluttering with anticipation and more than a little fear.

Alexios drove the tractor up to the rim of the gully, so close that Molina was momentarily alarmed that they would topple into it. When he finally stopped the tractor, Molina could peer down into its shadowy depths.

“Better wait until the Sun comes up,” Alexios suggested.

Nodding inside his helmet, Molina started to get up from his seat. “I’ll get my equipment out of the back.”

Alexios pressed the keypad on the control panel that popped the hatch on Molina’s side of the bubble, then opened the hatch on his side. “I’ll give you a hand.”

They worked by starlight, hauling the cases of equipment out of the tractor’s cargo bay. One of the metal boxes stuck to the tractor’s deck.

“Frozen,” Alexios muttered. “It must have had some moisture on its bottom when you put it in.”

Molina realized that it was more than a hundred below zero in the nighttime darkness.

“It’ll thaw quickly enough when the Sun comes up,” said Alexios.

Impatient, Molina climbed up onto the deck and opened the crate there. He began hauling out the equipment it held: sample scoops, extensible arms, handheld radiation meters. One by one, he handed them to Alexios, who laid them in a neat row on the ground.

Alexios lifted his left arm so he could see the miniature display screen on his wrist. “Still another half hour to sunrise.”

Molina was already setting up a winch and buckyball cable. Alexios saw a power drill among the equipment arrayed on the ground and helped the astrobiologist to firmly implant the steel-tubed frame into the hard, rocky ground. Then they fastened the winch to it and connected its power cable to the tractor’s electrical outlet.

Worldlessly they lowered Molina’s equipment to the bottom of the gully. It was a fair test of the winch, although none of the paraphernalia weighed as much as Molina and his suit.

Despite the coldness of the night, Alexios was sweating from his exertions. Good, he thought. The suit’s well insulated. He straightened up and saw a pearly glow on the horizon.

“Look,” he said to Molina, pointing.

For a moment Molina felt confused. Mercury has no atmosphere, he knew. There can’t be a gradual dawn, like on Earth. Then he realized that what he was seeing was the Sun’s zodiacal light, the sunlight scattered off billions of dust motes that orbited the Sun’s equator, leftover bits of matter from the earliest times of the solar system’s birth that hovered close to the star like two long oblate arms, too faint to see except when the overwhelming glare of the Sun itself was hidden, as it was now.

Molina grunted, then said, “I’d better get into the rig.”

Inside his helmet, Alexios shook his head. You never were the poetic sort, Victor. Not a romantic neuron in your entire brain. But then a sardonic voice in his head reminded him, But he got Lara, didn’t he?

By the time he had helped Molina into the climbing harness, the rim of the Sun was peeping above the horizon, sending a wave of heat washing across the desolate landscape. Alexios heard his suit ping and groan as its cermet expanded in the sudden roasting warmth. The air fans whirred like angry insects. The visor of his helmet automatically darkened.

“Ready?” he asked Molina.

He heard the man gulp and cough. Then he replied, “Yes, I’m ready.

The gully was filling with light as the Sun climbed higher against the black sky. Alexios stood by the winch as it unreeled its cable and Molina slowly, carefully, picked his way down the steep slope of the crevasse.

It’s not all that deep, Alexios saw, peering down into the ravine. Ten meters, maybe twelve. Just deep enough. He watched as Molina reached the bottom and unhitched the cable from his climbing harness.

“Good hunting,” Alexios called to him.

“Right,” said Molina faintly. His voice was already breaking up slightly, relayed from the bottom of the crevasse to one of the commsats orbiting overhead and then to Alexios’s suit radio.

In pace requiescat, Alexios added silently.

Once he’d removed the climbing cable from his suit, Molina took in a deep, steadying breath and looked up and down the gully. It was like a long, slightly irregular hallway without a roof. One steep wall was bathed in sunlight, the other in shadow. But enough light reflected off the bright side so that he could see the uneven floor and even the shadowed side fairly well.

This must be a fault line, he told himself. Maybe it cracked open when a meteor impacted. He attached his sampling scoop to the metal arm and extended it to its full length. Not much dust on the ground, he saw. The bottom here must be exposed ancient terrain. If I can get some ratio data from the radioactives I’ll be able to come up with a rough date for its age.

It was all but impossible to kneel in the heavy, cumbersome suit, but slowly Molina lowered himself to his knees. Inside the suit he could hear its servomotors whine in complaint. He chipped out a small chunk of rock, then fumbled through the sets of equipment lying on the ground until he found the radiation counter. No sense trying for argon ratios, he told himself. The heat’s baked all the volatiles out of these rocks eons ago.

The radiation signature of uranium was there, however. Weak, but clearly discernable in the handheld’s tiny readout screen. Then he tried the potassium signature. Stronger. Unmistakable. Molina weighed the sample, then did some rough calculating on the computer built into his suit’s wrist. This sample is at least two and half billion years old, he concluded. If I can dig deeper, I should find older layers of rock.

He looked down the length of the slightly uneven corridor of rock. The floor seemed to drop away farther down. Maybe I can get to older strata without digging, he thought. I don’t have a really powerful drill with me, anyway.

It took a mighty effort to get back on his feet again, even with the servomotors doing their best. Molina blinked sweat from his eyes and called up to Alexios:

“I’m going down the arroyo about a hundred meters or so.”

It took a moment for the radio signal to bounce off the nearest commsat.

“Which direction?” Alexios asked.

Molina pointed, then realized it was foolish. He tapped at his wrist keyboard, then peered at the positioning data that came up on its display.

“North,” he said into his helmet microphone. “To your left as you face the rim.”

A silence longer than the time for the signal to be relayed off the satellite. Then, “Very well. If you go any farther, let me know and I’ll bring the tractor and rig to your position.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Molina answered immediately.

Again a delay. Finally, “Very well. I’ll wait here.”

Molina started slogging along the rock-walled chasm. That voice, he said to himself. Why should it sound so familiar?

Alexios climbed back into the tractor’s bubble of a cab and sat awkwardly in the driver’s seat. The chair was bare metal, designed to accommodate the bulky suits that the tractor crew had to wear.

No sense standing in the open, Alexios thought. The glassteel doesn’t afford that much protection against radiation, but every little bit helps. He remembered an old adage he had heard from a mercenary soldier out in the Belt: “Never stand when you can sit. Never stay awake when you can sleep. And never pass a latrine without using it.”

No latrines out here, Alexios knew. Nor out in the Belt, either. You piss into the relief tube built into your suit and you crap when you can find a toilet inside a pressurized vessel.

The Sun was halfway above the horizon now, already frighteningly large and glaring.

Alexios smiled. In another fifteen minutes or so it will dip back down and plunge this whole region into darkness again. What’s Victor going to do when the light goes away and he’s stuck down in that crevasse?

FALSE DAWN

Dante Alexios sat in the cab of the tractor and watched the Sun drop toward the horizon, a twisted smile on his slightly mismatched face. Although Molina hadn’t spoken to him since he announced he was heading farther up the gully, he could hear Victor’s breathing through the open microphone in the astrobiologist’s helmet.

Alexios turned off the suit-to-suit link and called in to the base on another frequency.

“Alexios to base control.”

The reply was almost immediate. “Control here.”

“Do you have our position?”

A slight delay. Alexios could picture the controller flicking his eyes to the geographic display.

“Yes, your beacon is coming through clearly.”

“Good. Anything happening that I should know about?”

A slight chuckle. “Not unless you have a prurient interest in what the safety director and her assistant are up to.”

Alexios laughed, too. “Not as long as they keep their recreations confined to the privacy of their quarters.”

“So far. But there’s a lot of heavy breathing going on at their workstations.”

“I’ll speak to her when I get back.”

“Her? What about him?”

“Her,” Alexios repeated. “The woman’s always in control in situations like this.”

“That’s news to me,” said the controller.

There was nothing else significant to report. One of the powersats was getting some experimental shielding; otherwise, the base was running in standby mode until the IAA gave them clearance to resume their work.

Alexios clicked off the link to the base and sat back as comfortably as he could manage inside the suit. How long will it take Yamagata to go bankrupt? he wondered. And when the Sunpower Foundation does go bust, will Yamagata simply siphon more money out of his corporation? Will his son allow that? A battle between father and son would be interesting.

The Sun was dipping lower. Turning, he could see bright stars spangling the blackness on the other side of the sky. Alone with the stars. And his thoughts.

Lara. She was Molina’s wife. Had been for just about ten years now. They have a child, a son. Victor, Jr. His son, out of her body.

The pain Alexios felt was real, physical. He realized his jaws had clamped so tightly that he could hear his teeth grinding against one another.

With a physical effort, he forced himself to relax and tapped the keypad to reopen the suit-to-suit link.

“—dark down here,” Molina was saying. “My helmet lamp isn’t all that much help.”

“The Sun’s going down for a while,” said Alexios.

“How long?”

Alexios had memorized the day’s solar schedule. “Fifty-eight minutes, twelve seconds.”

“A whole hour?” Molina’s voice whined like a disappointed child’s.

“Just about.”

“What the hell am I supposed to do down in this hole in the dark for an hour? You should have told me about this!”

“I thought you knew.”

“I can’t see fucking shit down here!”

“You have the helmet lamp.”

“Big help. It’s like trying to find your way across the Rocky Mountains with a flashlight.”

“Have you found anything?”

“No,” Molina snapped. “And I won’t, at this rate.”

You won’t at any rate, Alexios replied silently. Aloud, he asked, “Do you want to come back to the tractor?”

A long silence. Alexios could picture Molina angrily weighing the alternatives in his mind.

“No, dammit. I’ll wait here until the frigging Sun comes up again.”

“I’ll move the tractor down to your location.”

“Good. Do that.”

With no atmosphere to dilute their brightness, the stars provided adequate light for Alexios to reel up the winch’s cable, disassemble the rig and pack it all back onto the tractor’s rear deck. Then he drove carefully along the rim of the crevasse to the spot where Molina sat, waiting and fuming, for enough sunlight to resume his search. A waste of time, Alexios knew. Victor won’t find what he’s looking for.

By the time he had drilled the holes in the ground for the rig’s supporting frame and set the winch in place, the Sun was rising above the bare, too-near horizon once again. This time it would remain up for weeks.

Even through the heavy tinting of his visor Alexios had to squint at its powerful glare. The Sun was tremendous, huge, a mighty presence looming above him.

The hours dragged on. Alexios listened to Molina panting and grumbling as he searched for rocks that might harbor biomarkers.

“Christ, it’s hot,” the astrobiologist complained.

Alexios flicked a glance at the outside temperature readout on the tractor’s control panel. “It’s only three-eighty Celsius. A cool morning on Mercury.”

“I’m broiling inside this damned suit.”

“You’d broil a lot faster outside the suit,” Alexios bantered.

“There’s nothing here. I’m going farther up the gully.”

“Check your suit’s coolant systems. If the levels are down in the yellow region of the display, you should come back.”

“It’s still in the green.”

Alexios called up the suit monitoring program and saw that Molina’s coolant systems were on the edge of the yellow warning region. He’s got about an hour left before they’ll dip into the red, he estimated.

Nearly an hour later, Alexios called, “Time to come back, Dr. Molina.”

“Not yet. There’s a bunch of rocks up ahead. I want to take a look at them.”

“Safety regulations, sir,” Alexios said firmly. “Your life-support systems are going critical.”

“I can see the readouts as well as you can,” Molina replied testily. “I’ve got a good hour or more before they reach the red line, and even then there’s a considerable safety margin built in.”

“Dr. Molina, the safety regulations must be followed. They were formulated for your protection.”

“Yeah, yeah. Just let me take a look at—hey! Damn! Ow!”

“What happened?” Alexios snapped, genuinely alarmed. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m okay. I fell down, that’s all. Tripped over a crack in the ground.”

“Oh.”

Alexios heard grunting, then swearing, then quick, heavy breathing. The sound of panic.

“Christ, I can’t get up!”

“What?”

“I can’t lift myself up! I’m down on my left side and I can’t get enough leverage in this goddamned suit to push myself up onto my feet again.”

Alexios could picture his predicament. The suit’s servomotors were designed to assist the wearer’s normal arm and leg movements. Basically they were designed to allow a normal human being’s muscle power to move the suit’s heavy sleeves and leggings. Little more. Molina was down on the ground, trying to lift the combined weight of his body plus the suit back into a standing position. Even in Mercury’s light gravity, the servos were unequal to the task.

“Can you sit up?” he asked into his helmet mike.

A grunt, then an exasperated sigh. “No. This damned iron maiden you’ve got me in doesn’t bend much at the middle.”

Alexios thought swiftly. He can last about two more hours in the suit, maybe three. I can leave him there and let him broil in his own juices. He left me when I needed him; why should I save his life? It’s not my fault—he wanted to go down there. He insisted on it.

Base control wasn’t on the suit-to-suit frequency. The suit radios could be picked up by the commsats, of course, but you had to plug into the commsat frequency and Victor didn’t know that. He rushed out here without learning all the necessary procedures, Alexios thought. He depended on me to handle the details.

Just as I depended on him to help me when I needed it. And he walked away from me. He took Lara and left me to the wolves.

Inside his helmet, Alexios smiled grimly. He remembered Poe’s old story, “The Cask of Amontillado.” What were Fortunato’s last words? “For the love of God, Montresor!” And Montresor replied, as he put the last brick in place and sealed his former friend into a lingering death, “Yes, for the love of God!”

“Hey!” Molina called. “I really need some help here.”

“I’m sure you do,” Alexios said calmly.

And he pictured himself bringing the sad news back to the base. Telling Yamagata how the noted astrobiologist had killed himself out on the surface of Mercury, nobly searching for evidence of life. I tried to help him, Alexios saw himself explaining, but by the time I reached him he was gone. He just pushed it too far. I warned him, but he paid no attention to the safety regs.

Then I’ll have to tell his widow. Lara, your husband is dead. No, I couldn’t say it like that. Not so abruptly, so brutally. Lara, I’m afraid I have very bad news for you…

He could see the shock in her soft gold-flecked eyes. The pain.

“I’m really stuck here,” Molina called, a hint of desperation in his voice. “I need you to help me. What are you doing up there?”

Alexios heard himself say, “I’m coming down. It’ll take a few minutes. Hang in there.”

“Well for Christ’s sake don’t dawdle! I’m sloshing in my own sweat inside this frigging suit.”

Alexios smiled again. You’re not helping yourself, Victor. You’re not making it easier for me to come to your aid.

But he pushed the door of the tractor’s cab open and jumped to the ground, almost hoping that he’d snap an ankle or twist a knee and be unable to save Victor’s self-centered butt. Angry with himself, furious with Victor, irritated at the world in general, Alexios marched to the winch and wrapped the cable around both his gloved hands. Slowly he began lowering himself down the steep side of the gully.

“What are you doing?” Molina demanded. “Are you coming?”

“I’ll be there in a few minutes,” Alexios said between gritted teeth.

I’ll save your ass, Victor, he thought. I’ll save your body. I won’t let you die. I’ll bring you back and let you destroy yourself. That’s just as good as killing you. Better, even. Destroy yourself, Victor. With my help.

TORCH SHIP BRUDNOY

“Had a bit of a scrape out there, eh?” asked Professor McFergusen as he poured a stiff whisky for himself.

Molina was sitting on the curved couch of the Brudnoy’s well-stocked lounge, his wife close beside him. Two tall glasses of fruit juice stood on the low table before them. No one else was in the lounge; McFergusen had seen to it that this meeting would be private.

McFergusen kept a fatherly smile on his weather-seamed face as he sat down in the plush faux-leather chair at the end of the cocktail table. He and the chair sighed in harmony.

’You’re all right, I trust?” he asked Molina. “No broken bones, as far as I can see.”

“I’m fine,” Molina said. “It was just a little accident. Nothing to fuss over.”

Mrs. Molina looked to McFergusen as if she thought otherwise, but she said nothing and hid her emotions by picking up her glass and sipping at it. Fruit juice. McFergusen suppressed a shudder of distaste.

“I think the entire affair has been exaggerated,” said Lara. “From what Victor tells me, he was never in any real danger.”

McFergusen nodded. “I suppose not. Good thing that Alexios fellow was there to help out, though.”

“That’s why the safety regulations require that no one goes out onto the surface alone,” Molina said, a bit stiffly.

“Yes. Of course. The important thing, though—the vital question—is: did you find any more specimens while you were out there?” Now Molina grabbed for his glass. “No,” he admitted, then took a gulp of the juice.

McFergusen’s bearded face settled into a worried frown. “You see, the problem is that we still have nothing but those specimens you collected your very first day on the planet.”

“There must be more,” Molina insisted. “We simply haven’t found them yet.”

“We’ve searched for weeks, lad.”

“We’ll have to search further. And more extensively.”

The tumbler of whisky had never left McFergusen’s hand. He took a deep draft from it, then finally put it down on the table. Shaking his head, he said firmly, “Yamagata’s putting pressure on the IAA. And, frankly, I’m running out of excuses to send back to headquarters. Do you realize how much it costs to keep this ship here? And my committee?”

Molina looked obviously irritated. “How much is the discovery of life on Mercury worth? Can you put a dollar figure on new knowledge?”

“Is there life on Mercury?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?”

“Some of my committee members think we’re here on a fool’s errand,” McFergusen admitted.

“They’re the fools, then,” Molina snapped.

“Are they?”

Molina started to reply, but his wife put a hand on his arm. Just a feather-light touch, but it was enough to silence him.

“Wasn’t it Sagan” she asked, in a soft voice, “who said that absence of proof is not proof of absence?”

McFergusen beamed at her. “Yes, Sagan. And I agree! I truly do! I’m not your enemy, lad. I want you to succeed.”

Lara immediately understood what he had not said. “You want Victor to succeed, but you have doubts.”

“Worse than that,” McFergusen said, his tone sinking. “There’s a consensus among my committee that your evidence, Dr. Molina, is not conclusive. It may not even be pertinent.”

Molina nearly dropped his glass. “Not pertinent! What do you mean?”

Decidedly unhappy, McFergusen said, “I’ve called a meeting for tomorrow morning at ten. I intend to review all the evidence that we’ve uncovered.”

“We’ve gone over the evidence time and again.”

“There’s something new,” McFergusen said. “Something that’s changed the entire situation here.”

“What is it?” Lara asked.

“I prefer to wait until the entire committee is assembled,” said McFergusen.

“Then why did you ask us to join you here this evening?”

Looking squarely at Molina, the professor said grimly, “I wanted to give you a chance to think about what you’ve done and consider its implications.”

Molina’s brow wrinkled in puzzlement. “I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

“All to the good, then,” said McFergusen. “If you’re telling the truth.”

“Telling the truth! What the hell do you mean?”

Raising his hands almost defensively, McFergusen said, “Now, now, there’s no sense losing your temper.”

“Is somebody calling me a liar? Are any of those academic drones saying my evidence isn’t valid?”

“Tomorrow,” McFergusen said. “We’ll thrash all this out tomorrow, when everyone’s present.” He gulped down the rest of his whisky and got to his feet.

Molina and his wife stood up, too.

“I don’t understand any of this,” Lara said.

McFergusen realized she was just as tall as he was. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have met with you this evening. I merely wanted to give you a fair warning about what to expect tomorrow.”

Molina’s face was red with anger. His wife clutched at his arm and he choked back whatever he was going to say.

“I’ll see you tomorrow at ten, in the conference room,” McFergusen said, clearly embarrassed. “Good evening.”

He hurried out of the lounge and ducked through the hatch into the ship’s central passageway.

Lara turned to her husband. “At least he didn’t have the effrontery to wish us pleasant dreams.”

Molina was too furious to smile at her attempted humor.

TRIBUNAL

Molina could see from the expressions on their faces that this was going to be bad. McFergusen sat at the head of the conference table, his team of scientists along its sides. What bothered Molina most was that Danvers and his two young acolytes were also present, seated together toward the end of the table. The only empty chair, waiting for Molina, was at the absolute foot of the table.

They all looked up as Molina entered the conference room at precisely ten o’clock. A few of them smiled at him, but it was perfunctory, pasted on, phony. Obviously McFergusen had ordered them to come in earlier, most likely because he wanted to go over their testimony with them. Testimony.Molina grimaced at the word he had automatically used. This was going to be a trial, he knew. Like a court martial. Like a kangaroo court.

The conference room fell into complete silence as soon as he opened the door from the passageway and entered. In silence Molina took his chair and slipped his data chip into the slot built into the faux mahogany table.

“Dr. Molina,” said McFergusen, “I presume you know everyone here.”

Molina nodded. He had met most of the scientists and knew of their reputations. Danvers was an old friend, at least an old acquaintance. The two other ministers with him were nonentities, as far as Molina was concerned, but that didn’t matter.

The conference room was stark. The narrow table that lined one of its walls was bare; no refreshments, not even an urn of coffee or a pitcher of water. The wall screens were blank. The room felt uncomfortably warm, stuffy, but Molina was ice-cold inside. This is going to be a battle, he told himself. They’re all against me, for some reason. Why? Jealousy? Disbelief? Refusal to accept the facts? It doesn’t matter. I have the evidence. They can’t take that away from me. I’ve already published my findings on the nets. Maybe that’s it. Maybe they’re pissed off because I didn’t send my findings through the regular academic channels to be refereed before putting them out for all the world to see.

McFergusen ostentatiously pressed the keypad on the board built into the head of the table. “I hereby call this meeting to order. It is being recorded, as is the usual practice.”

Molina cleared his throat and spoke up. “I wish to submit my findings as proof that evidence of biological activity has been discovered on Mercury.”

McFergusen nodded. “Your evidence is entered into the record of this meeting.”

“Good.”

“Any comments?”

A plump, grandmotherly woman with graying hair neatly pulled back off her roundish face spoke up. “I have a comment.”

“Dr. Paula Kantrowitz,” said McFergusen, for the benefit of the recording. “Geobiologist, Cornell University.”

You’re overdue for a regeneration treatment, Molina sneered silently at Dr. Kantrowitz. And a month or two in an exercise center.

She tapped at the keypad before her and Molina’s data sprang up on the wall screens on both sides of the room.

“The evidence that Dr. Molina has found is incontrovertible,” she said. “It clearly shows a range of signatures that are indicative of biological activity.”

Molina felt his entire body relax. Maybe this isn’t going to be so bad after all, he thought.

“There is no question that the rocks Dr. Molina tested bear high levels of biomarkers.”

A few nods around the table.

“The question is,” Kantrowitz went on, “did those rocks originate on Mercury?”

“What do you mean?” Molina snapped.

Avoiding his suddenly angry eyes, Kantrowitz went on, “When I tested the rock samples that Dr. Molina so kindly lent to us, I was bothered by the results I saw. They reminded me of something I had seen elsewhere.”

“And what is that?” McFergusen asked, like the straight man in a well-rehearsed routine.

Kantrowitz touched another keypad and a new set of data curves sprang up on the wall screens alongside Molina’s data. They looked so similar they were almost identical.

“This second data set is from Mars,” she said. “Dr. Molina’s rocks bear biomarkers that are indistinguishable from the Martian samples.”

“What of it?” Molina challenged. “So the earliest biological activity on Mercury produces signatures similar to the earliest biological activity on Mars. That in itself is an important discovery.”

“It would be,” Kantrowitz replied, still not looking at Molina, “if your samples actually came from Mercury.”

“Actually came from Mercury?” Molina was too stunned to be angry. “What do you mean?”

Kantrowitz looked sad, as if disappointed with the behavior of a child.

“Once I realized the similarity to Martian rocks, I tested the morphology of Dr. Molina’s samples.”

The data sets on the walls winked off, replaced by a new set of curves.

“The upper curves, in red, are from well-established data on Martian rocks. The lower curves, in yellow, are from Dr. Molina’s samples. As you can see, they are so parallel as to be virtually identical.”

Molina stared at the wall screen. No, he said to himself. Something is wrong here.

“The third set of curves, in red at the bottom, is from random samples of rocks I personally picked up from the surface of Mercury. They are very different in mineral content and in isotope ratios from the acknowledged Martian rocks. And from Dr. Molina’s samples.”

Molina sagged back in his chair, speechless.

Relentlessly, Kantrowitz went on, “I then used the tunneling microscope to search for inclusions in the samples.”

Another graph appeared on the wall screen.

“I found several, which held gasses trapped within the rock. The ratio of noble gases in the inclusions match the composition of the Martian atmosphere, down to the limits of the measurement capabilities. If these samples had been on the surface of Mercury for any reasonable length of time, the gases would have been baked out of the rock by the planet’s high daytime temperatures.”

“Are you saying,” McFergusen asked, “that Dr. Molina’s samples are actually rocks from Mars?”

“They’re not from Mercury at all?” Danvers asked, unable to hide a delighted smile.

“That’s right,” Kantrowitz replied, nodding somberly. At last she turned to look directly at Molina. “I’m very sorry, Dr. Molina, but your samples are Martian in origin.”

“But I found them here,” Molina said, his voice a timid whine. “On Mercury.”

McFergusen said coolly, “That raises the question of how they got to Mercury.”

A deadly silence fell across the conference table. After several moments, one of the younger men sitting across from Kantrowitz, raised his hand. An Asian of some sort, Molina saw. Or perhaps an Asian-American.

“Dr. Abel Lee,” pronounced McFergusen. “Astronomy department, Melbourne University.”

Lee got to his feet. Molina was surprised to see that he was quite tall. “It’s well known that some meteorites found on Earth originated from Mars. They were blasted off the planet by the impact of a much more energetic meteor, achieved escape velocity, and wandered through interplanetary space until they fell into Earth’s gravity well.”

“In fact,” McFergusen added, “the first evidence that life existed on Mars was found in a meteorite that had landed in Antarctica—although the evidence was hotly debated for many years.”

Lee made a little bow toward the professor, then continued, “So it is possible that a rock that originated on or even beneath the surface of Mars can be blasted free of the planet and eventually impact on another planet.”

Molina nodded vigorously.

“But is it likely that such a rock would land on Mercury?” asked one of the other scientists. “After all, Mercury’s gravity well is considerably smaller than Earth’s.”

“And with its being so close to the Sun,” said another, “wouldn’t the chances be overwhelming that the rock would fall into the Sun, instead?”

Lee replied, “I’d have to do the statistics, but I think both points are valid. The chances of a Martian rock landing on Mercury are vanishingly small, I would think.”

“There’s more to it than that,” said McFergusen, his bearded face looking grim.

Molina felt as if he were the accused at a trial being run by Torquemada.

“First,” said McFergusen, raising a long callused finger, “Dr. Molina did not find merely one Martian rock, but a total of eight, all at the same site.”

“It might have been a single meteor that broke up when it hit the ground,” Molina said.

McFergusen’s frown showed what he thought of that possibility. “Second,” he went on, “is the fact that although we have searched an admittedly small area of the planet’s surface, no other such samples have been found.”

“But you’ve only scratched the surface of the problem!” Molina cried, feeling more and more desperate.

McFergusen nodded like a judge about to pronounce a death sentence. “I agree that we have searched only a small fraction of the planet’s surface. Still…” he sighed, then, staring squarely down the table at Molina, he went on, “There is such a thing as Occam’s razor. When faced with several possible answers to a question, the simplest answer is generally the correct one.”

“What do you mean?” Molina whispered, although he knew what the answer would be.

“The simplest answer,” McFergusen said, his voice a low deadly rumble, “is that the site at which you discovered those rocks was deliberately seeded with samples brought to that location from Mars.”

“No!” Molina shouted. “That’s not true!”

“You worked on Mars, did you not?”

“Four years ago!”

“You had ample opportunity to collect rocks from Mars and eventually bring them to Mercury.”

“No, they were already here! Some of the construction people found them! They sent a message to me!”

“That could all have been prearranged,” McFergusen said.

“But it wasn’t! I didn’t—”

McFergusen sighed again, even more heavily. “This committee will make no judgment on how your samples arrived on Mercury, Dr. Molina. Nor will we accuse you or anyone else of wrongdoing. But we must conclude that the samples you claimed as evidence of biological activity on Mercury originated on Mars.”

Molina wanted to cry. I’m ruined, he thought. My career as a scientist is finished. Ended. Absolutely ruined.

SCAPEGOAT

Bishop Danvers felt almost gleeful as he composed a message of triumph for New Morality headquarters in Atlanta.

The scientists themselves had disproved Molina’s claim of finding life on Mercury! That was a victory for Believers everywhere. The entire thing was a sham, a hoax. It just shows how far these godless secularists will go in their efforts to destroy people’s faith, Danvers said to himself.

He was saddened to see Molina’s credibility shattered. Victor was a friend, an acquaintance of long standing. He could be boorish and overbearing at times, but now he was a broken man. He brought it on himself, though, Danvers thought. The sin of pride. Now he’s going to pay the price for it.

Yet Danvers felt sorry for the man. They had known each other for almost a decade and a half, and although they were far removed from one another for most of that time, still he felt a bond with Victor Molina. Danvers had even performed the ceremony when Victor married Lara Tierney. It’s wrong for me to rejoice in his mistake, he thought.

Deeper still, Danvers knew that the real bond between them had been forged in the destruction of another man, Mance Bracknell. Danvers and Victor had both played their part in the aftermath of that terrible tragedy in Ecuador. They had both helped to send Bracknell into exile. Well, Danvers said to himself, it could have been worse. After all, we saved the man from being torn apart by an angry mob.

With a heavy sigh, Danvers pushed those memories out of the forefront of his mind. Concentrate on the task at hand, he told himself. Send your report to Atlanta. The archbishop and his staff will be delighted to hear the good news. They can trumpet this tale as proof of how scientists try to undermine our faith in God. I’ll probably be promoted higher up the hierarchy.

He finished dictating his report, then read it carefully as it scrolled on the wall screen in his quarters aboard the Himawari, adding a line here, changing an emphasis there, polishing his prose until it was fit to be seen by the archbishop. Yamagata must be pleased, he realized as he edited his words. He can resume his construction work, or whatever it is the engineers are supposed to be doing down on the planet’s surface.

Nanomachines, he remembered. They want to begin using nanomachines on Mercury. What can I do to prevent that? If I could stop them, this mission to Mercury would become a double triumph for me.

When he was finally satisfied with his report, Danvers transmitted it to Earth. As an afterthought he sent courtesy copies to the two young ministers that Atlanta had sent to assist him. They’ll be heading back to Earth now, he thought. He got to his feet and rubbed his tired eyes. In all probability I’ll be heading back to Earth myself soon. He smiled at the prospects of a promotion and a better assignment as a reward for his work here. His smile turned wry. I hardly had to lift a finger, he thought. The scientists did all the work for me.

Then his thoughts returned to Molina. Poor Victor. He must be beside himself with grief. And anger, too, I suppose. Knowing Victor, the anger must be there. Perhaps suppressed right now, he’s feeling so low. But sooner or later the anger will come out.

Bishop Danvers knew what he had to do. Squaring his shoulders, he left his quarters and marched down the ship’s passageway toward the compartment that housed Victor Molina and his wife.

Molina was close to tears, Lara realized. He had burst into their compartment like a drunken man, staggering, wild-eyed. He frightened her, those first few moments.

Then he blubbered, “They think I falsified it! They think I’m a cheat, a liar!” And he nearly collapsed into her arms.

More than an hour had passed. Lara still held her husband in her arms as they sat on the couch. He was still shuddering, his face buried in her breast, his arms wrapped around her, mumbling incoherently. Lara patted his disheveled hair soothingly. Haltingly, little by little, he had told her what had transpired at the meeting with McFergusen and the other scientists. She had murmured consoling words, but she knew that nothing she could say would help her husband. He had been accused of cheating, and even if he eventually proved he hadn’t, the stigma would remain with him all his life.

“I’m ruined,” he whimpered. “Destroyed.”

“No, it’s not that bad,” she cooed.

“Yes it is.”

“It will pass,” she said, trying to ease his pain.

Abruptly, he pushed away from her. “You don’t understand! You just don’t understand!” His eyes were red, his hair wild and matted with perspiration. “I’m done! Finished! They’ve destroyed me. It would’ve been kinder if they’d blown my brains out.”

Lara sat up straighter. “You are not finished, Victor,” she said firmly. “Not if you fight back.”

His expression went from despair to disgust. “Fight back,” he growled. “You can’t fight them.”

“You can if you have the courage to do it,” she snapped, feeling angry with her husband’s self-pity, angry at the vicious fools who did this to him, angry at whoever caused this disaster. “You don’t have to let them walk all over you. You can stand up and fight.”

“You don’t know—”

“Someone sent you a message, didn’t they?”

“Yes, but—”

“You have a record of that message?”

“In my files, yes.”

Lara said, “Whoever sent that message to you probably put those Martian rocks at the site you found.”

Molina blinked several times. “Yes, but McFergusen and the others think that I set that up using a stooge.”

“Prove that they’re wrong.”

“How in hell—”

“Find the man who set you up,” Lara said. “He had to come to Mercury to plant those rocks at the site. He’s probably still here.”

“Do you think …” Molina fell silent. Lara studied his face. He wasn’t bleating any more. She could see the change in his eyes.

“I don’t think anybody’s left Mercury since I arrived here. Certainly none of the team down at the base on the surface. None of Yamagata’s people, I’m pretty sure.”

“Then whoever set you up is probably still here.”

“But how can we find him?”

Before Lara could think of an answer, they heard a soft rap at their door.

“I’ll get it,” she said, jumping to her feet. “You go wash up and comb your hair.”

She slid the door open. Bishop Danvers’s big, blocky body nearly filled the doorway.

“Hello, Lara,” he said softly. “I’ve come to do what I can to solace Victor and help him in his hour of need.”

Lara almost smiled. “Come right in, Elliott. We’re going to need all the help we can get.”

In his bare little office at Goethe base, Dante Alexios heard the news directly from Yamagata.

“It was all a hoax!” Yamagata was grinning from ear to ear. “The rocks were planted here. They actually came from Mars.”

“Molina salted the site?” Alexios asked, trying to look astonished.

“Either he or a confederate.”

“That’s … shocking.”

“Perhaps so, but it means that the blasted scientists have withdrawn their interdict on our operations.”

“So soon?”

Yamagata shrugged. “They will, in a day or so. In the meantime, I want you to come up here to Himawari first thing tomorrow morning. We must plan the next phase of our operation.”

“Building powersats here, out of materials from Mercury itself.”

“Yes. Using nanomachines.”

Alexios nodded. “We’ll have to plan this very carefully.”

“I realize that,” Yamagata said, his grin fading only slightly. “That’s why I want you here first thing in the morning.”

“I’ll be there.”

“Good.” Yamagata’s image winked out.

Alexios leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head. Victor’s finished, he said to himself. Now to get Danvers. And then my dear employer, Mr. Saito Yamagata, the murderer.