by Ben Bova
“I have no strength left.”
Alexios turned his head slightly and sucked on the water nipple inside his helmet. Nothing. Either it was blocked or he’d drunk the last of his suit’s water supply. It’s all coming out as sweat, he said to himself.
“There ought to be some way to recondense our sweat and recycle it back into drinkable water,” he mused.
“An engineer’s mind never stops working,” said Yamagata.
“Fat lot of good it does us.”
“You should record the idea, however,” said Yamagata, “so that whoever finds us will be able to act on it.”
“A tycoon’s mind never stops working,” Alexios muttered.
“This tycoon’s mind will stop soon enough.”
Alexios was too hot and tired to argue the point. We’re being baked alive, he thought. The suits’ life support systems are running down.
“What do you think will kill us,” Yamagata asked, “dehydration or suffocation, when our air runs out?”
Squeezing his eyes shut to block out the stinging sweat, Alexios replied, “I think we’ll be parboiled by this blasted heat.”
Yamagata was silent for a few moments. Then, “Do you think the base has sent out a search team?”
“Probably, by now. They’ll follow the tractor’s beacon, though.”
“But when they find the tractor is empty…?”
Alexios desperately wanted to lean back against the rock wall, but was afraid it would damage his radiators. “Then they’ll start looking for us. They’ll have to do that on foot, or in tractors. We’ll be dead by the time they find us.”
“Hmm,” Yamagata murmured. “Don’t you think they could hear our suit radios?”
“Down in this rift? Not likely.”
“Then we will die here.”
“That’s about the size of it.”
After several silent minutes Yamagata asked, “Is your sense of justice satisfied?”
Alexios thought it over briefly. “All I really feel right now is hot. And tired. Bone tired. Tired of everything, tired of it all.”
“I too.”
“Vengeance isn’t much consolation for a man,” Alexios admitted.
“Better to have built the starship.”
“Better to have built the skytower.”
“Yes,” said Yamagata. “It is better to create than destroy.”
“I’ll drink to that.”
Yamagata chuckled weakly. “A bottle of good champagne would be very fine right now.”
“Well chilled.”
“Yes, ice cold and sparkling with bubbles.”
“That’s not going to happen.”
“No, I fear not.”
“Maybe we should just open the suits and get it over with. I’m broiling in here.”
Yamagata said, “First I want to record my last will and testament, but I can’t reach the keypad on my wrist. Can you assist me?”
Alexios let out a weary breath, then slowly rolled over onto all fours and crawled over the gritty ground to Yamagata’s extended left hand. It took all his strength to move less than two meters. At last he reached his outstretched arm and pressed the record tab on the wrist keypad. In his earphones he heard a faint click and then a deadness as Yamagata’s suit-to-suit frequency shut off.
Lying there on his own belly now, head to helmeted head with Yamagata, Alexios thought, Last will and testament. Not a bad idea. With his last iota of strength, he turned his own suit radio to the recording frequency and began speaking, slowly, his throat dry, his voice rasping, offering his final words to the woman he had loved.
When the rescue team finally found them, some twelve hours later, Alexios and Yamagata were still lying head to head. Their gloved hands were clasped, Alexios’s right with Yamagata’s left. It was impossible to tell if their hands were locked in a final grasp of friendship or a last, desperate grip of struggle. Some of the rescuers thought the former, some the latter.
The team argued about it as they tenderly carried their space-suited bodies back to Goethe base. From there they were flown up to Himawari, still in orbit around Mercury. The medical team there determined that both men had died of dehydration. They were only five kilometers from Goethe base when they died.
The recording found on Yamagata’s suit radio was sent to his son, Nobuhiko, in New Kyoto. Alexios’s recording was sent to Lara Tierney Molina, in her family’s home in Colorado.
EPILOGUE: LAST WILLS
Lara sat alone in her old bedroom in her family’s house in Colorado, listening to Mance’s grating, bone-dry voice forcing out the words that would clear her husband. He confessed to everything: to assuming the identity of Dante Alexios, to spiriting the rocks from Mars and planting them on Mercury, to luring Victor to Mercury and making him the victim of the hoax.
Victor can clear his name with this, she thought. He’ll never outlive the stigma entirely, but at least he can show that he was deliberately duped, that he’s not a cheat. He can rebuild his career.
She looked out the bedroom window and saw that evening shadows were draping the distant mountains in shades of purple. Victor would be coming home soon, she knew. She briefly wondered why she felt no joy, not even a sense of relief that Victor’s ordeal was at last finished. But she knew why: Mance. Mance is dead. That’s finished, too.
Tears misted her eyes as she thought of all the things that might have been. But a chill ran through her. Victor was willing to send Mance to hell because he loved me and wanted me. And Mance fought his way out of exile and died on Mercury because he loved me. He gave up his revenge on Victor, he even gave up his life, because he loved me.
She began sobbing softly, wondering what she should do now, what she could do. She felt surrounded by death.
Then she heard footsteps pounding up the stairs and before she could dab at her eyes with a tissue the bedroom door flung open and Victor, Jr., burst in.
“Daddy’s home!” the eight-year-old announced, as if it was the most glorious event in history. “He’s parking his car in the driveway.”
Lara got to her feet and smiled for her son. Life goes on, she told herself. Life goes on.
Sitting alone in the dim shadows of the small, teak-paneled office of his privacy suite, where not even the oldest family retainer dared to interrupt him, Nobuhiko Yamagata listened in stony silence to his father’s gasping, grating final words.
He knows that I caused the skytower to fall, Nobuhiko said to himself. He blames himself for teaching me to be ruthless. How like my father: credit or blame, he takes it all for himself.
“…four million deaths,” the elder Yamagata’s voice was rasping. “That is a heavy burden to bear, my son.”
Nobu nodded. Unbidden, a childhood memory rushed upon him. He was six years old, and he had run down one of the house’s cats with his electric go-cart. His father loomed before him, his face stern. Young Nobu admitted he’d killed the cat, and even confessed that it was no accident; he’d deliberately tried to hit the animal.
“I thought it would get out of my way,” he said. “It was too fat and lazy to save itself.”
Father’s face showed surprise for an instant, then he regained his self-control. “That creature’s life was in your hands,” he said. “It was your responsibility to protect it, not to kill it. The world is filled with fat and lazy creatures. You have no right to kill them simply because they get in your way.” And he walked away from his son. No punishment, although Nobu drove his go-cart with greater care afterward. For a while.
“Four million deaths,” his father’s voice rasped from the audio speaker. “And mine, too. I’m dying because of the skytower.”
Nobu’s eyes widened. Father! I’ve murdered you!
Aloud, he cried, “What have I done? What have I done?”
As if he could hear his son’s sudden anguish, Saito Yamagata gasped, “If you have any… feelings for me … come to Mercury. Finish … my work. Please, Nobu. Give us… the stars.”
&
nbsp; His father’s voice went silent. Nobuhiko sank back against his desk chair. The intimate office was lit only by the lamp on his desk, a single pool of light against the shadows.
Nobu fingered the controls in his chair’s armrest that turned the office ceiling transparent. Leaning his head back, he saw the stars glittering in the dark night sky.
Father went to Mercury to atone for his sins, Nobuhiko thought. Now he expects me to do the same to atone for my own.
His lips curled into an ironic smile. Leave everything and traipse off to Mercury to build power satellites that will propel a starship. How like Father. Always trying to make me live up to my responsibilities.
Nobu got to his feet. I suppose I could direct the star project from here, he thought. I can visit Mercury but I don’t have to remain there permanently.
He knew he was fooling himself. As he left his office and rejoined his family, he wondered how long it would take to travel to Alpha Centauri.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks once again to Jeff Mitchell, who really is a rocket scientist from MIT; to Steven Howe, as bright and innovative a physicist as I ever met; and to David Gerrold, whose description of a “beanstalk” in his novel Jumping Off the Planet is the best I have seen—true friends in need, each one of them.
The epigraphs heading the prologue and main sections of this novel are from William Shakespeare, Sonnets 29 and 123; Edgar Allan Poe, “The Conqueror Worm”; John Dryden, “Absalom and Achitophel”; and Shakespeare again, Titus Andronicus, Act II, Scene 3.
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