“All the more reason for you to go with Randi. You’re a team.”
“Thank you, friend, but I am sixty-two years old and you are thirty-eight. You and Randi climb well together.” There is a slight hint of humor in Emilio’s voice to suggest to my perhaps oversensitive mind that he knows they do more than climb well together.
“It’s only a kilometer, mate. You’re as good as ever.”
“I’ll second that,” Juanita says.
Dr. Lotati smiles and shakes his head. “The group comes first.”
Randi embraces her father, wordlessly, but I can see her eyes glisten. Then Dr. Lotati reaches over to Ed and they grasp hands.
Something has passed, I realize, and who am I to witness such a passing? More than ever, I feel an ambitious interloper. I look over at Eloni. She is looking at me. Wistfully? I smile back.
We pack quickly and efficiently, filling the soft pressure packs first with the things that can stand vacuum, then the hard ones. When the tent is bare, the last pack is sealed and we take it down to a tenth of an atmosphere. We check each other’s seals and fit. Randi frowns at mine, and has me depressurize to readjust my fit. If the pressure were much lower, I think, my blood would boil. We normally breathe a fifty-fifty oxygen-nitrogen mix at four-tenths atmosphere, so I still have a quarter of Earth normal oxygen partial pressure. I try not to get excited.
Randi treats this like an everyday event. She tugs, pulls, and smooths all my joint areas. She is utterly clinical about this, but happens to glance up with a wink when she adjusts my leg seams. “Its all in the family,” her look seems to say.
I find myself slipping as if to an event horizon. Do I want to befriend this woman to pursue fame and fortune on her distant namesake moon, or has my idea for an expedition to the moon become an excuse to be near the woman? I suddenly realize that I am very, very taken by her.
She reseals my suit and I tell it to bring its pressure up again. She has indeed worked wonders, and I am much more comfortable than I was the day before. She apparently likes what she sees, grins, and squeezes my arm, then turns to the business at hand.
The tent finishes taking itself down to near vacuum. When the sides are noticeably softer, we open the main seal, and the tent ripples as the remaining millibar or so of air escapes. We turn our helmet lights on and emerge into the crevasse again.
The wall is suddenly lit with floodlights—Mike and Karen have seen us emerge. It is one kilometer of gray-banded dirty clathrate, vertical, except for the parts that are more than vertical.
Randi leads; if she falls, she is less weight on the bolts and pitons that hold our ropes.
“This stuff is like soft sandstone,” Ed says. “I can almost push a piton in by hand, here and there.”
“Use more.” Randi says. “Angle down.”
“OK.” He is silent for a while. “There. I suggest we do this before I lose my nerve. Belay on.”
“Climbing,” Randi answers. They proceed upward carefully but steadily, taking turns.
I happen to be looking up when it happens. Randi is climbing when her foothold crumbles. She grabs for a line, says “Damn!” then, “Falling.” Her effort to grab has pushed her out from the wall, and when the rope goes taut, one of the pitons pops out of the wall with a shower of dust and ice. After a brief hesitation, the other two follow, and Ed yells, “Slack!”
Desperately, Randi tries to slow her fall by digging her hands and crampons into the wall beside her, throwing up a wake of dust. The smoothness of the wall helps; it is not completely vertical, and there are no bumps to throw her out.
The next set of pitons catches her rope, and for half a second it looks like it might hold. But before she comes to a complete halt, they pull out too and she starts to slide down again. Now, only Ed’s own precarious hold on the wall stands between them and a five hundred-meter fall. He is furiously trying to hammer in more pitons, but there is little rope left between him and Randi.
They need another secure line. Why, with six other more experienced explorers present, I am the one to think of something is a mystery. Perhaps it has something to do with creativity, or with not having a mind full of the knowledge of things that wouldn’t work.
“Mike, Wojciech. Can you fire a rocket line right into the wall above them? It ought to penetrate that stuff and anchor itself.”
He doesn’t take time to answer me. There is a flash from overhead and an impact ten meters above Ed. The line it carries is much thinner than climbing rope, but drapes down beside them quickly in the vacuum. It continues to play out, draping all the way down to our little camp.
The line between Randi and Ed snaps tight, and his foot and arm come free in a shower of ice. He should hit the release, I think. Better one death than two, but he tries to hold on to the wall. He doesn’t dare let go and reach for the new, untested line, hanging less than a meter away.
It almost works. Randi, caught short, manages to reach her ax and digs into the wall like a desperate fly. Working with her right hand, she sets one piton and then another, hammering them in with her fist.
Above her, the rest of the ice holding Ed begins to give way as he tries to regain his handhold. “Can’t hold, falling!” He flails for the new line as he starts to slip, but it is out of reach.
They, would, I think, be dead on Earth—but Mercury gravity is more forgiving. Working as Ed slides, Randi reaches the new line and yanks hard on it. She yanks hard again—it must not have been firmly set. Another hard pull and she seems satisfied. Ed slides down beside her in a plume of dust and ice, barely in contact with the wall.
Quickly Randi connects the new line to the line that still connects them, slack now, and loops it around the piton she has just set. “Protection in!”
Thirty meters below her, Ed bounces as the line pulls taut and pops the piton out of the wall in another shower of debris. Ed’s weight pulls Randi free of her holds as well.
They both slide another ten meters, but now the slack in the line from the rocket has been taken up. They slide some more as it stretches, then, finally, stop. All told, Randi has fallen about a hundred meters and Ed perhaps fifty.
“Jupiter!” Karen, on the crevasse rim, exclaims. “Randi, Ed, set yourselves if you can. I can see the rocket: it’s wedged itself vertically in the hole it made when it hit the wall, only about ten centimeters from the face. Try to hold tight while we think of something.”
“OK,” Ed says. “But don’t take too long. I think I’m about at the end of my rope about this.”
The laughter, fueled by relief, is perhaps a little too loud for the quality of the pun. Ed quickly starts hammering in additional protection. Randi, however, is simply hanging passively in her harness.
“Randi?” Mike calls.
“Injured. Both arms.” Her voice attempts calm, but I can hear the pain in it.
“Can you climb?” Mike asks.
Randi tries to lift an arm up to her rope and gasps. “Not now.”
“Descending,” Ed says. “I’d like another belay if you can think of something.”
What we think of is setting our remaining line rocket for maximum range and steering it about six meters under the far edge of the crevasse. It slams in hard, burying itself too far in for Karen to see. “Ice,” Mike says, instantly, as a patch of icy regolith loosened by the rocket impact snows down left of the climbers. The upper layers, as we know, are softer. They pull the line from the far edge until it sets hard—ten kilonewtons tension, Mike estimates. Then they let the line drape down to us, and we walk it over to where Ed can reach it.
He connects the lines, and continues down.
Randi tries to descend. We hear the slightest hint of a cry of pain over the radio, then a loud “Damn! Dad, I can’t lift my hands over my shoulders. Both shoulders shot.”