Ben Bova - Mercury

by Mercury(lit)

  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 aboa
rd 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.