Yet the question remained: Do I have the determination, the strength, the single-minded drive to make this mad scheme a success?
Finally freed of the suit with all its paraphernalia and boots and undergarments, Yamagata stood in his sweat-soaked sky-blue coveralls, which bore on its breast the white flying crane symbol of his family and his corporation. He dismissed his subordinates with a curt word of thanks. They bowed and hissed respectfully as Yamagata turned and started up the corridor that led to his private compartment and a hot shower.
Yamagata was a sturdily built man, slightly over 175 centimeters tall, who appeared to be no more than fifty-some years old, thanks to rejuvenation therapies. In his youth he had been as slim as a samurai’s blade, but the years of good living in his first life had softened him, rounded his body and his face. The cancer ate away much of that, and his years in the lamasery had kept him gaunt, but once he left the Himalayas to begin his third life he soon reverted to his tastes in food and drink. Now he was slightly paunchy, his sodden, stained coveralls already beginning to strain at the middle. His face was round, also, but creased with laugh lines. In his first life Yamagata had laughed a lot, although during those years of remorse and penance he had spent with the lamas in their stone fortress high in the Himalayas there was precious little laughter.
Freshly showered and dressed in a crisply clean open-necked shirt and fashionable dark trousers, Yamagata made his way to the ship’s bridge. He thought about dropping in on his two guests, but he would see them later at dinner, he knew. As soon as he stepped through the open hatch into the bridge the Japanese crew, including the captain, snapped to respectful attention.
Waving a hand to show they should return to their duties, Yamagata asked the captain, “Are we ready to send the landing craft to the planet?”
The captain tried to keep his face expressionless, but it was clear to Yamagata that he did not like the idea.
“It is not necessary for you to go down to the surface, sir,” he said, almost in a whisper. “We have all the necessary facilities here on the ship—”
“I understand that,” said Yamagata, smiling to show that he was not offended by the captain’s reluctance. “Still, I wish to see the surface installation for myself. It’s near the north pole, I understand.”
“Yes, sir. Borealis Planitia.”
“Near the crater Goethe,” said Yamagata.
The captain dipped his chin to acknowledge Yamagata’s understanding of the geography. But he murmured, “It is very rugged down there, sir.”
“So I have been told. But personal comfort is not everything, you know. My son, Nobuhiko, enjoys skiing. I cannot for the life of me understand why he would risk his life and limbs for the joy of sliding clown a snowy mountain in all that cold and wet, but still he loves it.”
The captain bowed his head. But then he added one final warning: “Er… They call it ‘Dante’s Inferno’ down there. Sir.”
DATA BANK
The closest planet to the Sun, Mercury is a small, rocky, barren, dense, airless, heat-scorched world.
For centuries astronomers believed that Mercury’s rotation was “locked,” so that one side of the planet always faced the Sun while the other side always looked away. They reasoned that the sunward side of Mercury must be the hottest planetary surface in the solar system, while the side facing away from the Sun must be frozen down almost to absolute zero.
But this is not so. Mercury turns slowly on its axis, taking 58.6 Earth days to make one revolution. Its year—the time it takes to complete one orbit around the Sun—is 87.97 Earth days.
This leads to a strange situation. Mercury’s rotation rate of nearly fifty-nine Earth days is precisely two-thirds of the planet’s year. A person standing on the surface of the planet would see the huge Sun move from east to west across the dark airless sky, but it would slow down noticeably, then reverse its course and head back east for a while before resuming its westerly motion. At some locations on Mercury, the Sun rises briefly, then dips down below the horizon before finally rising again for the rest of the Mercurian day. After sunset the Sun peeks back up above the horizon before setting for the length of the night.
Counting the Mercurian day from the time the Sun appears directly overhead (local noon) to the next time it reaches that point, it measures one hundred seventy-six Earth days. From the standpoint of noon-to-noon, then, the Mercurian day is twice as long as its year!
The Sun looms large in Mercury’s sky. It appears twice as big as we see it from Earth when Mercury is at the farthest point from the Sun in its lopsided orbit and three times larger at the closest point. And it is hot. Daytime temperatures soar to more than 400° Celsius, four times higher than the boiling point of water, hot enough to melt zinc. At night the temperature drops to –135° C because there is no atmosphere to retain the day’s heat; it radiates away into space.
With a diameter of only 4,879 kilometers, Mercury is the smallest planet in the solar system except for distant—most Pluto. Jupiter and Saturn have moons that are larger than Mercury. The planet is slightly more than one-third larger than Earth’s own Moon.
Yet Mercury is a dense planet, with a large iron core and a relatively thin overlay of silicon-based rock. This may be because the planet formed so close to the Sun that most of the silicate material in the region was too hot to condense and solidify; it remained gaseous and was blown away on the solar wind, leaving little material for the planet to build on except iron and other metals.
Another possibility, though, is that most of Mercury’s rocky crust was blasted away into space by the impact of a mammoth asteroid early in the solar system’s history. Mercury’s battered, airless surface looks much like the Moon’s, testimony to the pitiless barrage of asteroids and larger planetesimals that hurtled through the solar system more than three billion years ago. Caloris Basin is a huge bull’s-eye of circular mountain ridges some 1,300 kilometers in diameter. This gigantic impact crater is the center of fault lines that run for hundreds of kilometers across the planet’s rocky surface.
An asteroid roughly one hundred kilometers wide smashed into Mercury nearly four billion years ago, gouging out Caloris Basin and perhaps blasting away most of the planet’s rocky crust.
Despite the blazing heat from the nearby Sun, water ice exists at Mercury’s polar regions. Ice from comets that crashed into the planet has been cached in deep craters near the poles, where sunlight never reaches. Just as on the Moon, ice is an invaluable resource for humans and their machines.
DANTE’S INFERNO
Yamagata rode the small shuttle down to the planet’s airless surface in his shirtsleeves, strapped into an ergonomically cushioned chair directly behind the pilot and copilot. Both the humans were redundancies: the shuttle could have flown perfectly well on its internal computer guidance, but Himawari’s captain had insisted that not merely one but two humans should accompany their illustrious employer.
The shuttle itself was little more than an eggshell of ceramic-coated metal with a propulsion rocket and steering jets attached, together with three spindly landing legs. Yamagata hardly felt any acceleration forces at all. Separation from Himawari was gentle, and landing in Mercury’s light gravity was easy.
As soon as the landing struts touched down and the propulsion system automatically cut off, the pilot turned in his chair and said to Yamagata, “Gravity here is only one-third of Earth’s, sir.”
The copilot, a handsome European woman with pouty lips, added, “About the same as Mars.” The Japanese pilot glared at her.