Mercury

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 aboard 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.