I reached for a tone of professorial authority. “Randi, uh. You’ve come a long way in your composition…”
She shrugged. “Yeah. Thanks to you. Someone’s got to do the article. Someone who fits on the team. Wish I wrote better.”
“Randi, I suppose I shouldn’t be obscure. Is there any chance I might come myself?”
Her eyes lit up for a moment, then she frowned. “Rough business, exploring.”
“Then my accounts of it should draw interest, maybe enough to push Solar System Astrographic’s allocation priorities a little further up.” Not to mention that a single Astrographic article could bring in the equivalent in allocations of my entire Jovis Tholus University stipend for a year. A Martian year.
“Uh, huh.” A doubtful assent on her part.
“Might even help you get to your namesake, out by Uranus. Now there would be an angle that people would notice!”
That got her attention. “Dad’s idea too. My name. Not that easy, though. No place for amateurs, out there.”
I smiled at her. “I bet I’ll make a good explorer. I’m observant, handy, and in reasonably good shape.”
She gave me a somewhat skeptical look and a sigh. “Mercury first. Chao Meng Fu. Hundred fifty kilometer-wide. Never sees the Sun. Covered with granite-hard permafrost. Probably take us two, three weeks to walk it.”
“Walk?”
She nodded. “Unassisted. Carry everything. Vacuum suits, tents, supplies, samples.”
“Walk it? Uh, why?”
She looked at me as if I was born in some other cosmos. “Because we can.”
There is this recklessness about me that allows me to throw words around without fully considering the consequences. “Well, I think I can too. I’ve done enough hiking around Tharsis—I even have a cinder cone named after me.”
She looked skeptically at me. “Oh? How high?”
She had me there. I grinned sheepishly, “Well, ‘Bubka Mons’ is only a hundred meters above local mean. But it’s kind of impressive because there’s nothing else around it.” And I knew someone in the Martian Geology Institute that was laying out the local real estate.
She giggled.
“It is registered, Randi. Anyway, my Ascraeus trip was solo, and by a new route.”
She looked judiciously at me and sighed. “Lose ten kilos. Do fifty kilometers a day.” We stood silent for a couple of seconds as I tried to digest that.
She turned away. “Physics final—see you.” And she was gone, gliding easily down the hall.
Dreams are free; but realizing them has a price. And I resolved to pay it.
By the end of last semester, I had walked up a few Martian mountains and lost the ten kilos. I talked to her again and we arranged a checkout hike down to the base of Jovis Tholis and back up to the town again with full packs, breather gear, and by the most difficult route she could pick. She watched every move I made, and seemed satisfied enough to make another “date.”
As this went on, I grew utterly fascinated with her. She was a busy woman. Reporters called her, outfitters called her. She was always meeting young women explorers who knew her reputation as a companion of her father, and old men explorers who had been somewhere with her father. My metaphor for Randi was a black hole; people and things seem to swirl around and accrete to her without any significant verbal effort on her part, as if her presence distorts space so that all roads simply lead to her and none away.
The week she was to leave Mars for Mercury she called me.
“You’re in, Professor Bubka. Can you make the Shannon inbound? Friday?”
By moving heaven and Mars, I could, and did. I had, it seemed, been within her event horizon for some time now.
So, Mercury. Mercury gravity is the same as Mars gravity, which some say is more than a coincidence, but a coincidence as yet unexplained. The gravity here is exactly the same as on Mars, but I’m carrying three times my mass in supplies and vacuum survival equipment. I might as well be hiking in Antarctica with a light pack. Indeed, I could use the conditioning to visit Earth! Despite the extra mass, we try to keep up the fifty kilometers a day—a pace I must maintain.
There are eight of us strung out along the Chao Meng Fu crater floor, Dr. Lotati in the lead. Dr. Juanita Tierzo, a Harvard-trained geologist, follows him. Juanita is actually on the JTU faculty—in the Martian Geology Institute—but I had to come to Mercury to meet her. Randi follows her. Then comes Ed, myself, and one of Dr. Tierzo’s graduate students, Eloni Wakhweya, a slight Kenyan woman with a big grin. Solar System Astrographic expedition staffers Mike and Karen Svenson come last, pulling an equipment pallet on two large wire wheels.
They meant it; no robots, no powered vehicles, and in my now humbled opinion, no sense. If Mercury had a breathable atmosphere, they’d have done without the spacesuits and all their built-in communications and amenities, too. I’m exhausted, uncomfortable, and increasingly uneasy with this exercise in cosmic hubris.
The view is simple, unrelieved flatness, the kind of view that should reach one’s soul in the way of all great expanses. The crater’s stark lines go its namesake’s art one spareness better; the vertical dimension is almost absent. It too is painted in an ink of five colors, all gray. It is Aldrin’s magnificent desolation, without relief. I appreciate it more in intellectual abstract than in person.
There is light to see: the tips of the peaks behind us blaze like distant arc lamps, and fill die bowl of Chao Meng Fu with a ghostly kind of moonlight. Small, rounded crater rims dot this frozen plane—very few higher than a man, for ice flows in time. The brighter stars shine down on us hard and free. Brilliant Earth hangs just over the horizon, a tiny dazzling blue-white star. Luna lies well away from it, a faint gray dot lost in Sagittarius.
Invisible to us in the Earth’s glare is the beginning of Earth’s Sunshield. This mammoth project will partly shade the heat-polluted atmosphere from the fires of Apollo’s chariot someday. It is taking form at the Earth-Sun L-1 point, balanced there with the help of reflected light—they plan to reduce insolation by 1 percent. But more relevant to our endeavor is that it is the home of Solar System Astrographic’s solar radio antenna, which we use to apprise the rest of the Solar System of the status of this madcap adventure. I look that way wondering why I ever left.
“Another five kilometers to the crevasse,” Dr. Lotati tells us on the comnet.
This desolate flat sameness is an illusion; we have real work ahead. The crevasse is a major obstacle, or a major objective if you are a geologist. Halfway between the rim of Chao Meng Fu crater and its central peaks lies a huge crack in the permafrost caused, they think, by an almost infinitely slow lifting of the crater floor, still rebounding from the billion-year-old impact that formed the crater. To this poet, overhead views make the crevasse looks like the mouth of the planet—and I worry about being devoured.
By noon, universal time, the mouth of Mercury yawns directly in front of us, an ugly black crack that makes the dark gray plain around us look silvery by comparison. We halt to plan our crossing. Juanita proposes that we simply go down into this thing, down into a darkness that has never known the Sun, and out again on the other side. That idea creates enough interest to scare me. But not now. A descent will take planning, and, in the meantime, I luxuriate in not having to move my body.
Yet, standing still, I forget my pain and become curious. The crevasse seems to run to the horizon to my right and left. The other side is the length of a football field away. I shudder—it is impossible to repress the thought that such darkness is not meant for human beings, that the laws of physics will become conscious and punish us for trying it. Perversely, the challenge of that danger attracts me.