“You can put me down now.”
I set him on his feet. He was silent, clutching his sleeve. “Joe—you won’t tell anyone about this. Please.”
“Sure—forget it.”
“I’ll always remember.”
“Glad to help. We’re all supermen on Earth, so it’s no big deal. Try the radio again. It might be easier if we’re closer.”
“Svoboda calling Central—please answer.” We listened to the crackling.
“Good thing I can transmit by pressing down with my chin,” he said.
“Bob! Where are you?” Robert Svoboda demanded suddenly, his voice clear against the background hiss.
“We came out by the surface lock over the police station,” Bob said.
“Get off the surface!”
“Don’t worry, Dad—Joe and I are in a safe shadow.”
“You’ve got the greenhorn out there?”
I felt foolish.
“Dad—listen to me! We’ve got to run a bus over and evacuate the hall. Some people have died. Air’s running out. We need digging tools. What’s delayed you?”
My ears filled with hiss and crackle.
“What? We don’t show any air cutoff on our big board.”
“Forget the board! Is the tunnel cutter working?”
“No,” his father said after a moment. “Spare parts problems—they’re fixing it.”
Bob cursed. “Dad—you’ve got to get a digging crew into a vehicle, bring it over to the cop station, cut through to the hall and start bringing people out. Police station air won’t last forever either!”
“That bad—” Robert Svoboda said softly, defeat in his voice.
“Don’t blame him for trying,” Eleanor cut in. “We could have all been dead here, for all he knew.”
“Son—you took such a risk,” Svoboda added.
“Dad—how bad is it elsewhere?”
“Pretty bad, I guess. From what you’ve said, we can’t rely on our sensor board. It’s all too old—the whole system is coming apart.…”
“Where are you?” Eleanor asked.
“Just near the dome—we think.”
“Joe?”
“I’m here … Eleanor.”
“We’re coming in, Dad,” Bob said. “Should be a few minutes.”
“The asteroid is here,” Svoboda announced, “for what it’s worth. It’s a giant potato on our screens, baking in the Sun. West, thirty degrees high.”
We turned and looked above the sea of sunlight. A bright star was rising in its orbit, bringing hope to the miners of Mercury, and I prayed that there would be no more disasters before the habitat was livable.
“We see it!” Bob shouted, his voice catching with emotion.
“Get going,” Robert Svoboda said. “I want you two safe as soon as possible.”
We broke contact and started back along the widened crack. As I looked at the landscape of white light to our right, I realized how small was our area of safety.
We stopped suddenly. A great shaft of sunlight had broken through the scarp some kilometers ahead, burning through the shadow zone to rejoin the Sun-blasted plain.
“There must be a pass up there,” Bob said, “and the Sun moved into position to shine through.”
I looked around, suddenly afraid of hidden breaks in the cliffs. The idea of playing peekaboo with a nearby fusion furnace did not appeal to me. Old Sol, grand light of all Sunspace, might still get us. He didn’t like the creatures he had cooked up out of the primordial slime to get too close to him. I saw my body sprouting cancerous cauliflowers as it stood in a giant sunbeam.…
“There’s … dome!” Bob shouted, losing a word in the static.
My eyes found the small hemisphere huddling in the shadows, daring to reflect a bit of starlight.
We moved toward it.
“Watch it,” I said. The cracks were all pointing to the dome as if to a target.
“They’re small. As long as we can reach one of the locks.”
We were about fifty feet away when the ground shook again. The cracks opened, and I rolled into one.
I tensed, but it took forever to hit.
Finally I felt scraping and pressure from two sides. My wrist snapped, and pain jolted into my elbow and shoulder. I was caught between the narrowing walls of the fissure.
“Joe!”
“Get inside, I ordered as calmly as I could, “and send someone without a damn hole in their suit.”
“Keep talking!”
“Get going!”
“Try not to move.”
“Are you still here?”
Merk had me in its teeth. It had been waiting for me since the time when the planets formed. At the slightest tremor, its angry jaws would crush me; or the crack would yawn and I would be swallowed.
“Can you breathe?”
“Yes—get moving,” I managed to say. “Now it’s your turn.”
The universe hissed at me. Mercury, the Sun’s henchman, would kill me, or at least maim me, because the earthies had not cared enough to protect their own against him.
I drew a deep breath; it tasted wrong.
“Bob?”
There was no answer on the suit com. I tried to press my chin down inside the helmet, to open the radio channel to the Control Center, but I couldn’t move my head.
“Bob,” I whispered, “there’s something wrong with my air.”
The universe shoved itself into my head—a million gears grinding away, rending and tearing by fits and stops, as if trying to shape abusive sentences. Alien stars sang deep inside the chaos in my head. Solid black cement crept in around me, tucking in close, filling my lungs. I stopped breathing, grateful that I would no longer have to make the effort.
Looking Back
The sun reached out with fiery knives and cut away my arm and leg.…
I swam through a sea of molten metal, under a giant red Sun, struggling to reach the icy coolness of the rock before the liquid metal burned through to my bones.…
Rosalie waited for me on the rock. I loved her, desired and needed her more than ever—but my hands were skeletons when I pulled myself up on the soothing shore.…
As the painkillers wore off, my dislocated shoulder and broken wrist, together with a touch of oxygen starvation, taught me a lot of respect for old Merk. I was so glad to be alive that I wished I might have broken the other wrist, just so as not to push my luck.
I lay there for more than a month, wondering if the planet was really done with me; a new quake might kill me as I slept. Bob and Rosalie calmed me down in the evenings, but I still had trouble accepting sleep.
When I was finally able to doze regularly, my dreams were filled with guilt and anxiety about the work that was starting without me. If I wasn’t going to be part of the work, then everything that had happened to me would be meaningless. I was fixated on this, even though there was no chance of the habitat being finished before I got there.
Sometimes I dreamed that I was dying by pieces—first my legs, then my arms and torso, leaving only my head, which was not enough to go home with; they would probably just throw it away.
“Bob told us how you helped save his life,” Robert Svoboda said, as he and his wife sat by my bed one day.
“He still had to hold his suit together.”
Eleanor touched my hand. “He felt differently about telling us after you were both inside.”
I looked up at the ceiling and felt very unheroic. “We might both have died.”
“Couldn’t expect you not to try something,” Robert said. “I’m glad you did, as it turned out. The judgments you two made about the situation were right. Bob learned a few things. Eleanor and I had always shielded him a bit.”
“I want to get to my real job as soon as possible.”
Eleanor’s look of gratitude was making me nervous. It surprised me that Bob had decided to tell the whole story. How would it go over with his friends? Maybe it would draw us all together.
Bill Turnbull, my orientation advisor from the university, surprised me with a visit one Friday afternoon.
“I joined up with the second wave,” he said. “Brought you some letters from home.”
“Thanks—how’s the work going?”
“Can’t go on without you,” he said cheerfully, putting the sealed fax-letter copies on my table. “Half the workers are on the asteroid, building temporary quarters on the inner surface. The engineers took all the livable space in the construction sphere.” He smiled. “Don’t lie around here too long.”
I stared at the letters after he left, afraid to open them; if you don’t feed old problems, they fade away.
I picked up one and tore it open:
25 MAY 2057, BERNAL HALL, BERNAL ONE
DEAR JOE,
I DON’T KNOW IF YOU WANT TO HEAR FROM ME OR NOT OUT THERE WHERE YOU’RE PIONEERING. I HEARD YOUR NAME ON THE NEWS, AMONG THOSE WHO WERE INJURED, SO I DECIDED YOU SHOULD HEAR FROM ME.
I GUESS YOU WERE ALWAYS A PRACTICAL SORT, LOOKING FOR A PLACE TO SHINE. I KNOW I SAID NOT MUCH COULD BE DONE ABOUT THE MERCURY PROBLEM, AND I’M STILL SKEPTICAL, BUT I DIDN’T EXPECT YOU TO GO AND MAKE YOURSELF PART OF THE SOLUTION, SUCH AS IT IS—HATS OFF!
I STILL HOPE THAT YOU’LL COME BACK TO SCHOOL SOONER OR LATER. YOU MIGHT MAKE A GOOD
EXPERIMENTAL
PHYSICIST, WITH YOUR PRACTICAL TURN OF MIND. YOU ALWAYS SEEMED TO NEED PEOPLE AROUND TO DO THINGS WITH. ME, I STILL THINK LIFE IS FOR THE PRIVATE STRUGGLE TO UNDERSTAND THE UNIVERSE, THE WAY EINSTEIN OR HAWKING TO CLIMB THE MOUNTAIN OF KNOWLEDGE IN THEIR MINDS—JUST TO SEE IF THEY COULD SEE NATURE WHOLE.
Morey still sounded a million years old, but I would have been disappointed if he had changed.
MAYBE I HAVE TO SHUT OUT EVERYTHING ELSE, JUST TO BE ABLE TO DO WHAT I WANT? SOMETIMES I CAN’T BEAR TO THINK THAT THERE ARE OTHER ROADS IN LIFE, OR THAT I MIGHT WANT TO TAKE THEM AND FORGET THE SLOW CLIMB TOWARD THE WALL OF MYSTERY THAT IS PHYSICS. IF THERE IS ANYTHING THAT YOU WANT VERY MUCH, THEN YOU
MUST
KNOW WHAT I MEAN.THERE’S NO RUSH, YOU KNOW. THE BIOLOGISTS SAY PEOPLE OUR AGE MAY MAKE IT TO 200, IF NOT MORE. I THINK YOU’LL FEEL THE PULL OF STUDY AGAIN WHEN YOU’RE OLDER. SOME PEOPLE APPRECIATE KNOWING THINGS MORE WHEN LIFE GETS CHANCY.
NOW THAT I’M WELL INTO THE BIG MATH AND TALKING SMOOTHLY TO THE ARTIFICIAL BRAIN CORES, I FIND THAT I’M DEVELOPING ALL SORTS OF NEAT SUSPICIONS ABOUT THE UNIVERSE—AS IF IT WERE SOME SORT OF STAGE SCENERY. TELL YOU MORE IN THE NEXT LETTER.
SO—EVEN THOUGH I THINK STRIVING FOR ACHIEVEMENT IS EVERYTHING, ACCOMPLISHMENTS MAY VARY, EVEN GO UNSEEN. I DIDN’T SEE WHAT YOU WANTED, BUT NOW THAT I FEEL I’M GETTING CLOSER TO WHAT I WANT, AND DON’T FEEL SO DESPERATE ABOUT MOVING ALONG, I SEE WHAT I MIGHT BE MISSING ALONG THE WAY. YOU PAY FOR EVERYTHING SOMEWHERE. IF I DON’T CONCENTRATE STUBBORNLY, I WON’T GET WHAT I WANT. ONLY LUCK, THAT SUDDEN, UNEARNED INPUT OF ENERGY FROM SOMEWHERE ELSE, ENABLES US TO SOMETIMES COME OUT AHEAD. I GUESS I THINK MOST PEOPLE ARE PRETTY HOPELESS—THEY LIVE AND DON’T DO MUCH THAT I CAN SEE, EXCEPT TO SECURE THEIR LIVES AND THE LIVES OF THEIR CHILDREN. MAYBE MOST HUMANITY ISN’T READY FOR MORE YET.
WRITE WHEN YOU CAN, OR LEAVE MESSAGES. DAVID, MARCO, AND NARITA SAY HELLO.
YOUR FRIEND, MOREY
Good old Morey, I thought as I put the letter on my night table. For once he made me feel that it didn’t have to be an either/or choice. Distant moments of achievement were worth working for, if you could see that far. I hadn’t been able to do it on Bernal, but his letter made me feel good—not so threatened about making another choice. Scratch that problem. I would have called him immediately, but the delays between answers would have been frustrating, even if Merk had been in position to avoid static interference from the Sun.
I glanced uneasily at the envelopes from my parents; it seemed that their words were waiting to drag me back into my childhood. I scooped up the letters and opened one.
It was from Dad:
23 May 2057, NEW YORK CITY
DEAR JOE,
WE HEARD THAT YOU WERE INJURED, BUT THE SVOBODAS ASSURED US THAT IT WAS NOT SERIOUS ENOUGH FOR US TO COME OUT, BUT IF YOU WANT US THERE WE’LL TAKE THE NEXT SHIP OUT. I’M TOLD THAT THERE ARE QUITE A FEW GOING BACK AND FORTH THESE DAYS, TWICE A MONTH, IN FACT. I HEAR IT’S PRETTY RUGGED THERE.
WRITE OR LEAVE A MESSAGE WHEN YOU GET THIS. CALL IF YOU WANT AND SOLAR CONDITIONS PERMIT. I’LL SIT THROUGH THE DELAYS.
LOVE, DAD
P.S. YOU MIGHT LIKE TO HEAR THAT MARISA HAS GONE RIGHT INTO COMMERCIAL ART. HER LOOP SEQUENCES, MOSTLY LANDSCAPES, ARE REPLACING QUITE A FEW PICTURE WINDOWS IN THE LARGE CITIES.
I looked at the “We heard” part of the letter. Of course, they weren’t together. Old habits die hard. Was he trying to lure me back home with news of Marisa? Probably not; he just thought I’d be interested. I was—mildly.
I opened the last letter.
16 MAY 2057, BRASILIA
DEAREST JOE,
I WAS WORRIED SICK ABOUT YOUR BEING HURT. I PASSED THE NEWS THAT IT WAS NOTHING SERIOUS TO YOUR FATHER AND GRANDPARENTS, BUT I WON’T REALLY FEEL RIGHT UNTIL YOU WRITE OR CALL WITH DETAILS. PLEASE DON’T KEEP ME IN SUSPENSE!
I’VE BEEN STUDYING AND READING A LOT. JIM AND I LIVE OUT HERE ON HIS RANCH. HE’S AN AUSTRALIAN, BUT HE SPENT A LOT OF TIME ON LUNA. HE’S VERY IMPRESSED WITH YOUR DECISION TO WORK ON MERCURY. SAYS HE UNDERSTANDS YOU, AND HE’S BEEN EXPLAINING TO ME.
I SOMETIMES THINK THAT IF I WERE YOUR AGE I WOULD HAVE DONE THE SAME THING. YOUR FATHER AND I ARE ON AMIABLE TERMS, SO PLEASE DON’T WORRY ABOUT THAT, MY SON.
WRITE SOON.
LOVE, MOM
Scratch another problem. I was completely on my own, and it felt good.
The Habitat
By the time I got up to the asteroid in mid-July, the rocky inner surface of the hollow was dotted with the lights of work camps, creating an atmosphere of underground gloom within the ten-kilometer-long space. A gentle spin had been put on the big potato, a tenth-g to start, to make it easier to move around. Teams of specialists were hard at work, even as the rest of the workers and equipment continued to arrive.
Bob and I came in through the big locks at one end of the hollow world. As we passed inside and looked out across the open space, I thought of all the work that still had to be done. It was hard to imagine that these hundreds of square kilometers of rock and mud would ever begin to look like the out of doors I had come to know on Bernal.