“Ed?”
He looks down, then at the crevasse sides. “Why don’t I help Randi with the camp and prepare for climbing out of here?”
Apparently, we will sleep here—under the sword of Damocles.
“Wojciech?” Dr. Lotati asks.
I am at a loss for words. I am more tired and sore than I have ever been. How much more tired and sore can I be before I am a danger, I wonder? Everyone has been pummeled and challenged. But these people, these comrades of mine, will not admit disaster. They will press on. It is a collective decision—a spontaneous informal vote of voices that is already a majority. Voicing misgivings on my part would do no good at all, and my fate is tied to theirs. But I wonder that such things can still be in this age of robots. May the ghosts of Byrd, Amundsen, Lewis and Clark, and Bering fill my mind with whatever it is that gets one through. I came here to prove myself worthy and now the question is upon me. I look at the crevasse sides and down into its deep.
“Three climbers would be best.” Dr. Lotati says.
“I’m… I can go with a little rest.”
Dr. Lotati nods. “We can all use some. It’s only 1100. We’ll set up on the bridge. Mike and Karen, we’ll take the big tent—you can probably slide it down on ropes.”
This only takes a few minutes. We anchor the large vacuum tent to the bridge. It fits with about a meter to spare in width—with the door toward the intact wall. Room in the tent is limited. It was meant to sleep four and it is crowded with six of us. Our body odors again mingle in a forgettable stew of smells, and the drop curtain for its tiny commode is woefully inadequate for privacy. But we are relieved and happy—we have been through a memorable adventure and nobody has gotten killed.
Ed is quiet, eats quickly, and is asleep in his sack, fully clothed, in minutes. He says nothing. We will take a very real risk shortly, far, far, from help—for the sake of samples that could easily be gathered by robots a month from now.
As a certified—and some might say certifiable—poet, suicidal undertakings are perhaps in my nature. But the milieu of the Gentleman Adventurer requires that one return from the adventure to recount it. While Ed was gallant in the crisis, the closeness of his brush with death might only now be sinking into him. I, with far less experience, accepted a challenge he did not—does he resent this? No, I tell myself, he is just exhausted.
I have to make myself eat—I’m hungry, but more tired. A warm sleep-sack never felt so good, I realize. It seems I have barely closed my eyes when Dr. Lotati is gently rocking me awake.
“It’s 1400,” he says. “Time to go.”
The trip to the bottom of the crevasse is a straightforward rappel. With Randi resting her arm, Eloni and I head for the bottom with Juanita in the lead.
“This could be Calorian clathrate—proof that Chao Meng Fu is older.”
“But doesn’t its flatness mean it’s young?” I ask. Old surfaces are heavily cratered.
“Watch for a hollow to your left. No, the surface is young due to deposition—the crater itself is ancient. I’d guess we’re about 3.8 billion years down, below the original crater floor. The walls are shock-fractured rock, not exposed sediment layers. No strata—” a swing of her ax tears a rough section of about a square meter from the wall “—underneath.”
“Look, more signs of erosion,” she adds later.
“Erosion?” The wall is a rough breccia, a compressed clathrate and gravel mixture. The larger stones are sharp, not rounded.
“There is evidence of atmosphere all around us—you can see icicles in the hollows, and a cold glistening wetness on the walls.”
I turn off my radio. “Can you hear me?” I shout.
There is no answer—the vapor is still too thin, even at the bottom, to conduct sound.
We hang from the wall and gaze into the utterly still pool of nitrogen trifluoride in the circles of our helmet lamps below us. Unable to resist the temptation, I reach into one of Mercury’s nostrils and break off an icicle and toss it into the pool. It ripples like oily water.
“Wojciech,” Eloni says in a mildly scolding voice, “have some respect! That pool has been built up, molecule by molecule, probably over billions of years.”
“How?” Juanita asks, gently. “Even if the crater is that old, the crevasse isn’t.”
Eloni is silent, then says. “Oh, of course. But where does it come from then?”
“The pool is a mystery, for now,” Juanita says. “Perhaps some comet with an unusual concentration of fluorine ices struck not too long ago. Or something else.” She laughs. “Fortunately, not all mysteries can be solved now. We would run out of things to do!”
I envision tentacles reaching out of that deep to pluck us from the crevasse wall. “Could something have evolved to base its blood on that, the way we use seawater?”
“Not my field,” Juanita answers. “But let’s take a sample.”
She is closest, and deftly dips a sample capsule into the liquid. Nothing emerges to bite her hand off—-so much for that fantasy. I might not have had the nerve. Then I have a moment of insight; to do this requires the right balance of imagination and nerve.
“I do not think,” Eloni offers, “that there would be enough energy for life. If there were, the liquid would boil away. Hydrocarbons at these temperatures would be frozen solid, so what could one use to build life molecules? How could anything that would work at these temperatures get here without being destroyed by the Sun first? Still, it is an interesting thought, Wojciech.”
“If the crack could go down a hundred kilometers or so,” Juanita remarks, “it would be warm enough to evaporate everything, possibly warm enough to walk around with the right atmosphere. But Mercury would close a crack that deep; its crust is surprisingly thin, even now. This is not Mars.”
She sounds like my fifth-year teacher back in Krakow. I suddenly feel far, far over my head. These people understand where they are and what they are doing: it holds no terror for them, no fear of sticking a hand where it might not come back. But for me, my overripe literary imagination haunts my mind like the tale of the bogeyman that kept me out of grandfather’s basement until I was seven. I am not comfortable here—but, I tell myself, I will enjoy having been here more when, and if—always if—we get back.
“It’s time to go back,” Juanita says, her vials filled. “Climbing.”
“Climbing,” we all say.
“Belay on,” Dr. Lotati says, from far above us.
The climb back up to the bridge is slow. Once we hit the layered material, we stop to take half-meter cores, drilled slantwise, at those layers which Juanita estimates to have been laid down during the great events of the inner Solar System: layers that may contain glass beads from the Imbrium impact on Luna, Caloris here, Hellas on Mars, and, just possibly, a few grains with the right isotope ratios to be from the K-T impact on Earth. If we find these, we can bring the geological history of the planets together. If, the paradigm goes, we understand better why the Solar System is the way it is, we will understand better why we are the way we are—the forces that have shaped our evolution and those of other sentient races. But we won’t know if the samples contain what we suspect for many months, by which time we will have scattered to the nether ends of the Solar System.
We are tired and bruises remind us of yesterday’s avalanche with each bump, but there is a sense of elation about us. We are the first people to see a pool of liquid on an alien planet in its natural state. And no machine saw it first.
When we arrive back at the ice bridge, Juanita sees me staring nervously at the slide.
“I’ve calculated the slope and the coefficient of friction, Wojciech—I think it’s fully relaxed. It may stay that way for a billion years.”