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
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.
