by Ben Bova
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 comin
g?”
“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 c
all 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.”