by Ben Bova
“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 arm
s 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.
BOOK II
TEN YEARS EARLIER
And much of Madness, and more of Sin,
And Horror the soul of the plot.
THE SKYTOWER
Lara Tierney couldn’t catch her breath. It wasn’t merely the altitude, although at more than three thousand meters the air was almost painfully thin. What really took her breath away, though, was the sight of the tower splitting the sky as the ancient Humvee rattled and jounced along the rutted, climbing road. Mance, sitting beside her, handed her a lightweight pair of electronic binoculars.
“They’ll lock onto the tower,” he shouted over the grinding roar of the Humvee’s diesel engine. “Keep it in focus for you.”
Lara put the binoculars to her eyes and found that they really did make up for some of the bumps in the Humvee’s punishing ride. The skytower wavered briefly, then clicked into sharp focus, a thick dark column of what looked in the twin eyepieces like intertwined cables spiraling up, up, higher and higher, through the soft clouds and into the blue sky beyond, up into infinity.
“It’s like a banyan tree,” she gasped, resting the binoculars on her lap.
“What?” Mance Bracknell yelled from beside her. They were sitting together on the bench behind the driver, a short, stocky, dark-skinned mestizo who had inherited this rusting, dilapidated four-wheel-drive from his father, the senior taxi entrepreneur of the Quito airport.
Lara took several deep breaths, trying to get enough air into her lungs to raise her voice above the noise of the Humvee’s clattering diesel engine.
“It’s like a banyan tree,” she shouted back, turning toward him. “All those strands … woven together … like a … banyan.” She had to pull in more air.
“Right! That’s exactly right!” Mance yelled, his dark brown eyes gleaming excitedly. “Like a banyan tree. It’s organic! Nanotubes spun into filaments and then wrapped into coils; the coils are wound into those cables you’re looking at.”
She had never seen him so tanned, so athletically fit, so indestructibly cheerful. He looks more handsome than ever, she thought.
“Just like a banyan tree,” he repeated, straining to make himself heard. “Damned near a hundred thousand individual buckyball fibers wound into those strands. Strongest structure on the face of the Earth.”
“It’s magnificent!”
Bracknell’s smile grew wider. “We’re still almost thirty kilometers away. Wait’ll you get up close.”
Like the beanstalk of the old fairy tale, the skytower rose up into the heavens. Lara spent the jouncing, dusty ride alternately staring at it and then glancing at Mance, sitting there as happy as a little boy on Christmas morning opening his presents. He’s doing something that no one else has been able to do, she thought, and he’s succeeding. He has what he wants. And that includes me.
All during the long flight from Denver to Quito she had wondered about her impulsive promise to marry Mance Bracknell. For the past three years all she’d seen of him was his quick visits back to the States and his occasional video messages. He had gone to Ecuador, asked her to marry him, and she had agreed. She had flown to Quito once before, when Mance was just starting on the project. He was so busy, so happily buried in his work that she had quietly returned home to Colorado. He didn’t need her underfoot, and he barely raised more than a perfunctory objection when she told him she was going back home.
That was more than three years ago. I have a rival for his attentions, Lara realized. This tower he’s building. She wondered if her rival would always stand between them. But when Mance called this latest time and asked her to come to Ecuador and stay with him, she h
ad agreed immediately even though he hadn’t mentioned a word about marriage.
Once she saw him, though, waiting for her at the airport terminal in Quito, the way his whole face lit up when he caught sight of her, the frenetic way he waved to her from the other side of the glass security partition as she went through the tiresome lines at customs, the way he smiled and took her in his arms and kissed her right there in the middle of the crowded airport terminal—she knew she loved him and she would follow him wherever he went, rival and marriage and everything else fading into trivia.
“…if it works,” he was hollering over the rumble of the truck’s groaning engine, “we’ll be able to provide electricity for the whole blinking country. Maybe for Colombia, Peru, parts of Brazil, the whole blasted northwestern bloc of South America!”
“If what works?” she asked.
“Tapping the ionosphere,” he answered. Gesturing with both hands as he spoke, he shouted, “Enormous electrical energy up there, megawatts per cubic meter. At first we were worried that the tower would be like a big lightning rod, conducting down to the ground. Zap! Melt the bedrock, maybe.”
“My god,” Lara said.
“But we insulated the outer shell so that’s not a problem.”
Before Lara could think of something to say, Mance went on, “Then I started thinking about how we might tap some of that energy and use it to power the elevators.”
“Tap the ionosphere?”
“Right. It’s replenished by the solar wind. Earth’s magnetic field traps solar protons and electrons.”
“That’s what causes the northern lights,” Lara said, straining to raise her voice above the laboring diesel’s growl.
“Yep. If we work it right, we can generate enough electricity to run the blinking tower and still have enough to sell to users on the ground. We can recoup all the costs of construction by selling electrical power!”
“How much electricity can you generate?” she asked.
“What?” he yelled.
She repeated her question, louder.