Rapport was not total. It could only be so in line-of-sight. Relay, whether by satellite or by spires planted along the way, inevitably reduced the bandwidth and degraded the signal. Christian remained dimly conscious of his surroundings, the recliner in which he lay connected, meters and instruments, air odorless and a little chilly, tensions and easings—instinctive responses, which sometimes made him strain against his bonds. From the corner of an eye he glimpsed Willem Schuyten seated at a control console, monitoring what went on. That had seldom been necessary elsewhere, Christian thought vaguely. Or, at least, he’d avoided it. But this was a team effort, and on Mercury the unknowns were many and the stakes high.
It was just half a minute’s distraction, while Gimmick did some data analysis that he couldn’t follow. A certain direction of search seemed promising, and the explorer set off again. Christian’s whole attention returned to the scene.
Heaven glimmered and shimmered, its manifold brilliances arcing down to a horizon that on the left was near and sharp. Craters pocked the murky terrain, boulders lay strewn. When he glanced at any, he could tell its age within a few million years, as he could tell the age of a person or a tree on Earth; the clues were countless, the deductions subconscious. Close on the right a scarp four kilometers high, hundreds of kilometers long, loomed like a wall across the world. The enhancement that was Christian-Gimmick perceived it as more than rock. He noted traces as he went along; brain and computer joined to read the history, the tale of a gigantic upthrust along a fault line long ago when the planet was still cooling and shrinking after its birth.
He spied possibilities in something ahead.
Gimmick was following the cliff southwesterly, back toward the polar region where Clement waited. Rubble scrunched beneath the treads, soundlessly to human ears; dust smoked up and fell quickly down, under low gravity but unhindered by air. It did not cling to the robot, whose material repelled it.
There, Christian thought, that crag yonder. Maybe a good anchor point. We’ll have a look. The partnership veered slightly and trundled nearer the heights. Debris lay deep here. Shards slipped aside. Motors labored. He considered deploying the six legs but decided that wasn’t needful.
The peak sheered out of a lower slope above the rubble, a rough-edged hundred-meter obelisk. He had seen others as he traveled, though none so large. Probably shock-wave resonances in the age of uplift had split them from the massif.
He visualized this one as an almost ready-made core for a transmission tower, part of the global network that was to collect the solar energy cataracting down onto Mercury’s dayside and hurl it out to orbiting antimatter factories—ultimately, to the laser beams that would send the first starships on their way! Passion thrummed in him.
A quick structural exam. The self-robots can map the details later. A disc at the end of an arm snugged tightly. Vibrations through stone returned their echoes, bearing tales.
The stone gave way. Thunder and blindness crashed down.
2
“Wat drommel?” Willem Schuyten cried. He went back to the expedition’s English. “What the hell?” After a glance at the other man’s face: “Hell indeed.”
“N-no.” Secured in the system, Christian Brannock could neither lift a braceleted arm nor shake his helmeted head. His voice shuddered. “Hold on. Keep going. Let me try to find out—what’s happened—”
Willem nodded and concentrated on his instruments. Grown gray in the artificial intelligence field, he could make inferences from these readings and computations that might well escape an on-site observer.
Shards and tatters of input went through Christian like a nightmare, blackness, deafness, crushing heaviness, powers lost, strength in ebb. Instinct panicked; his flesh struggled against the restraints. But somehow his mind clung to the steadiness that was Gimmick’s. Together they tried to interpret what little the sensors gave them.
Those fitful moments of reality turned more and more chaotic. They weakened, too, until he could not make out whatever form they still had.
The linkage is failing fast. Better break it altogether and start work. Christian never knew whether the decision was his alone or rooted also in his partner’s calm logic. Nor did he know or care why it ended with: So long. Good luck.
“Terminate,” he rasped aloud.
“Terminate,” Willem repeated. He swept a glance and a judgment across the gauges, deemed that an immediate breakoff was neurologically safe, and pressed the command button. Voice-activated, the communication center could have done everything by itself, but a human in the loop was an added precaution. He could better tell what another human required.
All channels shut down. The neuroconnectors released Christian. He lay for a minute breathing hard, then sat up. Willem stood above him with a tumbler of water. Christian drained it in two gulps. “Thanks,” he mumbled. “Dry as yon landscape, my mouth was.”
“Terror will do that,” his companion replied. “I saw your involuntary reactions. Want a levozine?”
Christian half grinned, without merriment. “What I really want is a stiff drink. But we’re in a hurry. Yes, I’ll take a pill.”
Willem gave him one. Some were always on hand, in case a mission got unexpectedly long or difficult and the operator could not stop to rest. “In a hurry, you said? Do you mean there is something we can do at once?”
Christian nodded. “We’d bloody well better.” He climbed to his feet. The medication began to tranquilize and stimulate. His trembling died away, his voice gained force. “Whew! Hope I can snatch a shower during preparations. I smell six weeks dead, don’t I?” Sweat sheened on his skin and darkened his shirt.
Willem regarded him narrowly. “My monitors say the machine is a ruin. The transceiver’s badly damaged. It can carry some information, erratically, but the power unit’s out of commission. Anything that could perhaps function, like an arm, can’t anymore. And the energy reserve is dwindling fast.”
“Gimmick’s intact.”
Willem sighed. “Yes, evidently. That hurts, doesn’t it?” He had often heard such
