It wasn’t easy to climb up into the tractor’s cab in the awkward suits, despite the low gravity. Alexios heard Molina grunt and puff until he finally settled in the right-hand seat.
“Comfortable?” Alexios asked.
“Are you kidding?”
Laughing lightly, Alexios engaged the tractor’s electric engine and drove to the open inner airlock hatch.
“Do you have a specific route for us to follow or will we simply meander around out there?” Alexios asked as the inner hatch closed and the air was pumped out of the lock.
Molina struggled to fish a thumbnail-sized chip from his equipment belt and clicked it into the computer in the tractor’s control panel. The display screen showed a geodetic map of the area with a route marked clearly by a red line.
Alexios studied the display for a moment, then tapped a gloved finger against it. “That’s a pretty steep gully. We should avoid it.”
Molina’s voice in his earphones sounded irked. “That’s the most likely spot to find what I’m looking for.”
The outer hatch slid open. The barren landscape looked dark and foreboding, the horizon frighteningly near, thousands of stars gleaming steadily beyond it. Alexios saw the glowing band of the Milky Way stretching across the sky.
As he put the tractor in gear, he checked the status of the electrical power systems on the control panel displays. Fuel cells at max, backup batteries also. Once the Sun came up, he knew, the solar cells would take over.
They bounced over the hatch’s edge and onto the rugged, uneven rocky surface.
“I’m afraid we can’t take the tractor down into that gully,” Alexios said.
Silence from Molina for a moment, although Alexios could hear his breathing in his helmet earphones. Then, “All right. Get as close to it as you can and I’ll go down on foot.”
Alexios felt his brows rise. Victor has guts, he said to himself. Or, more likely, he’s driven by a demon.
Alexios knew all about being driven by demons.
SURFACE EXCURSION
Molina sat in silence inside the heavy pressurized suit, jouncing slightly as the tractor trundled along the route he had selected. They passed the shallow crater where he had found his specimens. In the tractor’s headlights it looked gray and lifeless.
A relentless anger simmered through him, overwhelming the uneasiness he felt about being out on the surface of this deadly world, where a slight mistake could kill you.
Once he allowed McFergusen and his dilettantes to examine his samples, they wouldn’t let go of them. Just one more test. Oh, yes, we thought of another way to probe the samples. You don’t mind our keeping them another day or two, do you?
Molina saw that the results they were getting matched his own almost exactly. Within the margin of measurement error, at least. So why are they still sawing away at my rocks? What do they think they’ll find that I haven’t already found? They can’t take the credit for discovering them away from me. What in hell are they trying to do?
He thought he knew the answer. They’re trying to prove I’m wrong. They’re doing their damnedest to discredit me. They’ll keep poking and probing and studying until they find some error in my analysis, some mistake I’ve made.
Never! he told himself. There’s no mistake. No error. The bio-markers are there and no matter what they do they can’t make them go away.
But still they’re hammering away at it, trying to show I’m wrong. Molina seethed with barely controlled fury. He tried to remember that age-old saw:
What fucking difference does it make? he raged inwardly. The evidence is there. It’s real, goddammit. They can’t make it disappear.
But they won’t be satisfied until more specimens with biomarkers are found. All right. They can’t find them, sitting up there in orbit with their virtual reality thumbs up their asses. So
“We’re coming up on that gully.” Alexios’s voice in his earphones startled him back to the here and now.
Blinking away his angry ruminations, Molina saw off to their right a long, fairly straight gorge paralleling their course, a split in the bare rocky surface. It didn’t look very deep on the geodetic map, but now as he stared through the glassteel bubble of the tractor’s cab, it seemed as yawning as the Grand Canyon.
It’s just an illusion, he told himself. With no light except the stars, everything looks dark and deep and scary.
“Where do you want me to pull up?” Alexios asked.
Strange how familiar his voice sounded through the earphones, Molina thought. I couldn’t have heard it before; I just met the man a few weeks ago. And yet—
“Where should I stop?” Alexios asked again.
“Get as close to the edge as you can,” Molina said, feeling his insides fluttering with anticipation and more than a little fear.
Alexios drove the tractor up to the rim of the gully, so close that Molina was momentarily alarmed that they would topple into it. When he finally stopped the tractor, Molina could peer down into its shadowy depths.
“Better wait until the Sun comes up,” Alexios suggested.
Nodding inside his helmet, Molina started to get up from his seat. “I’ll get my equipment out of the back.”
Alexios pressed the keypad on the control panel that popped the hatch on Molina’s side of the bubble, then opened the hatch on his side. “I’ll give you a hand.”
They worked by starlight, hauling the cases of equipment out of the tractor’s cargo bay. One of the metal boxes stuck to the tractor’s deck.
“Frozen,” Alexios muttered. “It must have had some moisture on its bottom when you put it in.”
Molina realized that it was more than a hundred below zero in the nighttime darkness.
“It’ll thaw quickly enough when the Sun comes up,” said Alexios.
Impatient, Molina climbed up onto the deck and opened the crate there. He began hauling out the equipment it held: sample scoops, extensible arms, handheld radiation meters. One by one, he handed them to Alexios, who laid them in a neat row on the ground.
Alexios lifted his left arm so he could see the miniature display screen on his wrist. “Still another half hour to sunrise.”
Molina was already setting up a winch and buckyball cable. Alexios saw a power drill among the equipment arrayed on the ground and helped the astrobiologist to firmly implant the steel-tubed frame into the hard, rocky ground. Then they fastened the winch to it and connected its power cable to the tractor’s electrical outlet.
Worldlessly they lowered Molina’s equipment to the bottom of the gully. It was a fair test of the winch, although none of the paraphernalia weighed as much as Molina and his suit.
Despite the coldness of the night, Alexios was sweating from his exertions. Good, he thought. The suit’s well insulated. He straightened up and saw a pearly glow on the horizon.
“Look,” he said to Molina, pointing.
For a moment Molina felt confused. Mercury has no atmosphere, he knew. There can’t be a gradual dawn, like on Earth. Then he realized that what he was seeing was the Sun’s zodiacal light, the sunlight scattered off billions of dust motes that orbited the Sun’s equator, leftover bits of matter from the earliest times of the solar system’s birth that hovered close to the star like two long oblate arms, too faint to see except when the overwhelming glare of the Sun itself was hidden, as it was now.
