Mercury

himself. Then a new thought struck him. Maybe I’m just jealous of the young squirt.

GOETHE BASE

“So far,” Alexios was saying, “the scientists have not discovered any other sites that contain biomarkers.”

Yamagata had come down from Himawari to the surface base for this meeting, the first time he had been to Mercury’s surface in more than a month. For nearly five weeks now the IAA scientists had been combing the planet’s surface with automated tracked vehicles, searching for more rocks that contained signs of life.

“Yet still they prevent us from expanding this base,” Yamagata grumbled. He was too troubled to sit in the chair Alexios had offered him. Instead he stood, hands clasped behind his back, and stared at the display screen that took up one whole wall of Alexios’s modest office. It showed the barren, rock-strewn surface outside the base: the Sun was up and the hard-baked ground looked hot enough to melt.

The bleak landscape matched Yamagata’s mood perfectly. If the scientists didn’t lift their ban on industrial activities on Mercury’s surface soon, Sunpower Foundation would go bankrupt. It angered Yamagata to be so frustrated. Despite all the teachings that the lamas had tried to instill in him, he found it impossible to accept what was happening, impossible to be patient. Yamagata wanted to round up McFergusen and his entire crew and send them packing back to Earth. Now. This day.

Standing respectfully beside him, Alexios said quietly, “At least we’re putting the time to some good use. The preliminary tests on the shielded powersat look quite good.”

Yamagata turned toward him. Alexios was slightly taller than he, a fact that added to his displeasure.

“Just as you suspected, the power degradation is caused by the solar proton influx,” Alexios went on calmly.

“And the superconducting shields protect the cells?”

Alexios called out, “Computer: show results of shielding test.”

The landscape disappeared from the wall screen, replaced by a set of graphs with curving lines in red, green, yellow, and blue. As Alexios explained them, Yamagata saw that the superconducting shields performed much as the Forward persona had predicted.

“The high positive potential of the structure around the cells deflects the protons,” Alexios said, “and the magnetic field created by the superconducting wire keeps the electrons off.”

“Otherwise the electrons would discharge the high positive potential,” Yamagata muttered, showing his employee that he understood the physics involved.

“Exactly.” Alexios nodded. “So we can shield the powersats and get them up close to their nominal power output, if…” His voice trailed off.

“If?” Yamagata snapped.

“If we can afford enough superconducting wire.”

“It’s expensive.”

“Very. But most of the elements needed to make superconducting wire exist in Mercury’s soil.”

“You mean regolith,” said Yamagata.

Alexios bowed slightly. “Excuse me. Of course, regolith. Soil would imply living creatures in the ground, wouldn’t it?”

“We can manufacture the superconductors here, out of local materials?”

“I believe so. If we use nanomachines it should be relatively inexpensive.”

“Once we are allowed to work on the surface again,” Yamagata muttered.

Alexios stifled the satisfied little smile that began to form on his lips. Forcing his face into a sorrowful mask, he agreed, “Yes, we must get permission from the IAA before we can even begin to do anything.”

Yamagata fumed. Instead of a mantra, he silently cursed the International Astronautical Authority, the International Consortium of Universities, all their members past and present, and all their members’ mothers back to five generations.

Ian McFergusen looked around at the barren, sun-blasted rocky ground and shook his head. Nothing. Every site we’ve investigated has turned up nothing. Only that one site next to the base Yamagata’s people have built.

Thanks to the virtual reality equipment that the ICU team had brought with them, McFergusen could sit in the laboratory they had set up aboard Brudnoy and still experience precisely what the tracked robot vehicle was doing down on the surface of Mercury. The first time he had used VR equipment, back when he was part of the third Mars expedition, it had seemed little less than a miracle to him. He could see, feel, hear what the robot machines were experiencing thousands of kilometers away, all while sitting in the comfort of a secure base. Now, so many years later, virtual reality was just another tool, no more wondrous than the fusion engines that propelled interplanetary torch ships or the tunneling microscopes that revealed individual atoms.

Sitting on a lab stool, his head and lower arms encased in the VR helmet and gloves, McFergusen picked up a rock in his clawlike pincers and brought it close to his sensors. A perfectly ordinary piece of volcanic ejecta, he thought. With the strength of the robot he broke the rock apart, then brought the broken edges to his sensor set and scanned their exposed interiors for several minutes.

Nothing. No PAHs, no sulfides, no iron nodules. If I bring it up to the ship’s tunneling microscope, McFergusen thought, I won’t find any nanometer-sized structures, either. He tossed the broken fragments of the rock back to the ground in disgust.

For long moments he simply sat there, his body aboard the torch ship Brudnoy, his eyes and hands and mind on the blazing hot surface of Mercury.

How can there be such rich specimens at one site and nothing anywhere else? Of course, he reminded himself, we have an entire planet to consider. In these few weeks we’ve barely tested a few dozen possible sites. Perhaps we’re looking in the wrong places.

Yet, he reasoned, we concentrated our searches on sites that are similar to the one where Molina found his specimens. We should have found something by now.

Unless…

McFergusen did not want to consider the possibility that had arisen in his mind. We’ve got to widen our net, he told himself, search different kinds of sites.

That won’t be easy, he knew. Not with Yamagata breathing down our necks. Lord, he’s been sending messages to IAA headquarters daily, demanding to know when we’ll allow him to start digging up the regolith again.

None of it is easy, McFergusen said to himself. It never is. Then that nagging suspicion surfaced in his mind again. How could Molina have been so lucky?

Luck plays its role in science, he knew. It’s always better to be lucky than to be smart. But so damnably lucky? Is it possible?

Victor Molina was in his lab, flicking through the tunneling microscope’s images of the latest rock samples brought up from the surface. Nothing. These samples were as dead and inert as rocks from the Moon. No hydrates, no organic molecules, no long-chain molecules of any sort. Baked dry and dead.

He leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes wearily. How can this be? Even the samples of dirt scraped off the ground showed no biomarkers of any kind.

Sitting up straight again, he reminded himself that the dirt samples from the surface of Mars tested by the old Viking landers a century ago showed no signs of biological activity, either. Not even a trace of organic molecules in the soil. And Mars not only bears life today but once bore intelligent life, before it was wiped out in an extinction-level meteor impact.

He turned and looked at the set of rocks he himself had tested when he’d first arrived at Mercury. They were carefully sealed in airtight transparent plastic containers. McFergusen wants me to let him send them back to Earth for further testing. Never! I’m not letting them out of my sight. They’ll go back to Earth when I do, and they’ll be tested by third parties only when I’m present.