Victor Molina also dreamed that night as he slept on the airfoam bed in his stateroom aboard
He dreamed of the Nobel ceremony in Stockholm. He saw himself dressed in the severely formal attire of the ritual as the king of Sweden handed him the heavy gold award for biology. The discoverer of thermophiles on the planet Mercury, Molina heard the king announce. The courageous, intrepid man who found life where all others said it was impossible for life to exist. Lara sat in the front row of the vast audience, beaming happily. Victor reminded himself to add a line to his Nobel lecture, thanking his wife for her love and support through all the years of their marriage.
Then he began his lecture. The huge audience hall, crammed with the elite of every continent on Earth, fell into an expectant silence. Thermophiles are organisms that live at temperatures far beyond those in which human beings can survive, he told the rapt and glittering audience. On Earth, microscopic thermophiles were discovered in the latter part of the twentieth century, existing deep underground at temperatures and pressures that were, up until then, considered impossible as habitats for living organisms. Yet these bacterial forms not only exist, they are so numerous that they actually outweigh all the living matter on the surface of the Earth! What is more, they survive without sunlight, shattering the firmly held belief that all life depends on sunlight as its basic source of energy. The thermophiles use the heat of Earth’s hellish core to derive their metabolic energy.
A British cosmologist, Thomas Gold, had earlier predicted that a “deep, hot biosphere” existed far below the surface not only of Earth, but of Mars and any other planet or moon that had a molten core. Scornfully rejected at first, Gold’s prediction turned out to be correct: bacterial life forms have been found deep below the surface of Mars, together with the cryptoendoliths that have created an ecological niche for themselves inside Martian surface rocks.
While astrobiologists found various forms of life on the moons of Jupiter and even within the vast, planet- girdling ocean of that giant planet itself, the next discovery of true thermophiles did not occur until explorers reached the surface of Venus, where multicelled creatures of considerable size were found living on that hothouse planet’s surface, their bodies consisting largely of silicones, with liquid sulfur as an energy-transfer medium, analogous to blood in terrestrial organisms.
Still, no one expected to find life on Mercury, not even thermophilic life. The planet had been baked dry from its very beginnings. There was no water to serve as a medium for biochemical reactions; not even molten sulfur. Mercury was nothing but a barren ball of rock, in the view of orthodox scientists.
Yet the surprising discovery of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons on the surface of Mercury challenged this orthodox view. PAHs are quickly broken down in the high-temperature environment of Mercury’s surface. The fact that they existed on the surface meant that some ongoing process was generating them continuously. That ongoing process was life: thermophilic organisms living on the surface of Mercury at temperatures more than four times higher than the boiling point of water. Moreover, they are capable of surviving long periods of intense cold during the Mercurian night, when temperatures that sink down to –135° Celsius are not uncommon.
Now came the point in his lecture when Molina must describe the Mercurian organisms. He looked up from the podium’s voice-activated display screen, where his notes were scrolling in cadence with his speaking, and smiled down at Lara. His smile turned awkward, embarrassed. He suddenly became aware that he had nothing to say. He didn’t know what the creatures looked like! The display screen was blank. He stood there at the podium while his wife and the king and the huge audience waited in anticipation. He had no idea of what he should say. Then he realized that he was naked. He clutched the podium for protection, tried to hide behind it, but they saw him, they all saw he was naked and began to laugh at him. All but Lara, who looked alarmed, frightened. Do something! he silently begged her. Get out of your chair and do something to help me!
Suddenly he had to urinate. Urgently. But he couldn’t move from behind the podium because he had no clothes on. Not a stitch. The audience was howling uproariously and Molina wanted, needed, desperately to piss.
He awoke with a start, disoriented in the darkness of the stateroom. “Lights!” he cried out, and the overhead panels began to glow softly. Molina stumbled out of bed and ran barefoot to the lavatory. After he had relieved himself and crawled back into bed he thought, I wish Lara were here. I shouldn’t have made her stay at home.
TORCH SHIP
The ship’s name meant “sunflower.” Yamagata had personally chosen the name, an appropriate one for a vessel involved in tapping the Sun’s energy. Earlier generations would have said it was a fortunate name, a name that would bring good luck to his enterprise. Yamagata was not superstitious, yet he felt that
While all except the ship’s night watch slept, Yamagata sat in the padded recliner in his stateroom, speaking to a dead man.
The three-dimensional image that stood before Yamagata was almost solid enough to seem real. Except for a slight sparkling, like distant fireflies winking on a summer’s evening, the image was perfect in every detail. Yamagata saw a short, slightly chubby man with a shock of snow white hair smiling amiably at him. He was wearing a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows and blue jeans, with a soft turtleneck sweater of pale yellow and an incongruous velvet vest decorated with colorful flowers.
Robert Forward had died nearly a century earlier. He had been a maverick physicist, delving into areas that most academics avoided. Long before Duncan and his fusion propulsion drive, which made travel among the planets practical, Forward was examining the possibilities of antimatter rockets and laser propulsion for interstellar travel. Yamagata had hired a team of clever computer engineers to bring together every public lecture that Forward had given, every seminar appearance, every journal paper he had written, and incorporate them into a digitized persona that could be projected as an interactive holographic image. Calling themselves “chip-monks,” the young men and women had succeeded brilliantly. Yamagata could hold conversations with the long-dead Forward almost as if the man were actually present. There were limits to the system, of course. Forward never sat down; he was always on his feet. He paced, but only a few steps in any direction, because the image had to stay within the cone of the hologram being projected from the ceiling of Yamagata’s stateroom. And he always smiled. No matter what Yamagata said to him, Forward kept the same cheerful smile on his round, ruddy face. Sometimes that smile unnerved Yamagata.
As now. While Yamagata showed the disastrous efficiency curves to Forward’s image, the physicist’s hologram continued to smile even as he peered at the bad news.
“Degraded by solar radiation, huh?” Forward said, scratching at his plump double chin.
Yamagata nodded and tried not to scowl at the jaunty smile.
“The numbers check out?” Forward asked.
“My people back at New Kyoto are checking them.”
“You didn’t expect the degradation to be so severe, eh?”
“Obviously not.”
Forward clasped his hands behind his back. “Wellll,” he said, drawing the word out, “assuming the numbers check out and the degradation is a real effect, you’ll simply have to build more power satellites. Or larger ones.”
Yamagata said nothing.
Forward seemed to stand there, frozen, waiting for a cue. After a few seconds, however, he added, “If each individual powersat can produce only one-third the power you anticipated, then you’ll need three times as many powersats. It’s quite simple.”
“That is impossible,” said Yamagata.
“Why impossible? The technology is well in hand. If you can build ten powersats you can build thirty.”
“The costs would be too high.”
“Ah!” Forward nodded knowingly. “Economics. The dismal science.”
“Dismal, perhaps, but inescapable. The Foundation cannot afford to triple its costs.”
“Even if you built the powersats here at Mercury, instead of buying them from Selene and towing them here from the Moon?”
