Sanderson built the Lab up near the pole, where the zone is about five miles wide, so the temperature only varies 50 to 60 degrees with the libration. The Solar ’scope could take that much change and they’d get good clear observation of the Sun for about seventy out of the eighty-eight days it takes the planet to wheel around.
The Major was counting on Sanderson knowing something about Mercury as well as the Sun when we camped at the Lab to make final preparations.
Sanderson did. He thought we’d lost our minds and he said so, but he gave us all the help he could. He spent a week briefing Jack Stone, the third member of our party, who had arrived with the supplies and equipment a few days earlier. Poor Jack met us at the rocket landing almost bawling, Sanderson had given him such a gloomy picture of what Brightside was like.
Stone was a youngster – hardly twenty-five, I’d say – but he’d been with the Major at Vulcan and had begged to join this trek. I had a funny feeling that Jack really didn’t care for exploring too much, but he thought Mikuta was God, followed him around like a puppy.
It didn’t matter to me as long as he knew what he was getting in for. You don’t go asking people in this game why they do it – they’re liable to get awfully uneasy and none of them can ever give you an answer that makes sense. Anyway, Stone had borrowed three men from the Lab, and had the supplies and equipment all lined up when we got there, ready to check and test.
We dug right in. With plenty of funds – tri-V money and some government cash the Major had talked his way around – our equipment was new and good. Mikuta had done the designing and testing himself, with a big assist from Sanderson. We had four Bugs, three of them the light pillow-tire models, with special lead-cooled cut-in engines when the heat set in, and one heavy-duty tractor model for pulling the sledges.
The Major went over them like a kid at the circus. Then he said, “Have you heard anything from McIvers?”
“Who’s he?” Stone wanted to know.
“He’ll be joining us. He’s a good man – got quite a name for climbing, back home.” The Major turned to me. “You’ve probably heard of him.”
I’d heard plenty of stories about Ted McIvers and I wasn’t too happy to hear that he was joining us. “Kind of a daredevil, isn’t he?”
“Maybe. He’s lucky and skillful. Where do you draw the line? We’ll need plenty of both.”
“Have you ever worked with him?” I asked.
“No. Are you worried?”
“Not exactly. But Brightside is no place to count on luck.”
The Major laughed. “I don’t think we need to worry about McIvers. We understood each other when I talked up the trip to him and we’re going to need each other too much to do any fooling around.” He turned back to the supply list. “Meanwhile, let’s get this stuff listed and packed. We’ll need to cut weight sharply and our time is short. Sanderson says we should leave in three days.”
Two days later, McIvers hadn’t arrived. The Major didn’t say much about it. Stone was getting edgy and so was I. We spent the second day studying charts of the Brightside, such as they were. The best available were pretty poor, taken from so far out that the detail dissolved into blurs on blow-up. They showed the biggest ranges of peaks and craters and faults, and that was all. Still, we could use them to plan a broad outline of our course.
“This range here,” the Major said as we crowded around the board, “is largely inactive, according to Sanderson. But these to the south and west could be active. Seismograph tracings suggest a lot of activity in that region, getting worse down toward the equator – not only volcanic, but sub-surface shifting.”
Stone nodded. “Sanderson told me there was probably constant surface activity.”
The Major shrugged. “Well, it’s treacherous, there’s no doubt of it. But the only way to avoid it is to travel over the Pole, which would lose us days and offer us no guarantee of less activity to the west. Now we might avoid some if we could find a pass through this range and cut sharp east – ”
It seemed that the more we considered the problem, the further we got from a solution. We knew there were active volcanoes on the Brightside – even on the Darkside, though surface activity there was pretty much slowed down and localized.
But there were problems of atmosphere on Brightside, as well. There was an atmosphere and a constant atmospheric flow from Brightside to Darkside. Not much – the lighter gases had reached escape velocity and disappeared from Brightside millennia ago – but there was CO2, and nitrogen, and traces of other heavier gases. There was also an abundance of sulfur vapor, as well as carbon disulfide and sulfur dioxide.
The atmospheric tide moved toward the Darkside, where it condensed, carrying enough volcanic ash with it for Sanderson to estimate the depth and nature of the surface upheavals on Brightside from his samplings. The trick was to find a passage that avoided those upheavals as far as possible. But in the final analysis, we were barely scraping the surface. The only way we would find out what was happening where was to be there.
Finally, on the third day, McIvers blew in on a freight rocket from Venus. He’d missed the ship that the Major and I had taken by a few hours, and had conned his way to Venus in hopes of getting a hop from there. He didn’t seem too upset about it, as though this were his usual way of doing things and he couldn’t see why everyone should get so excited.
He was a tall, rangy man with long, wavy hair prematurely gray, and the sort of eyes that looked like a climber’s – half-closed, sleepy, almost indolent, but capable of abrupt alertness. And he never stood still; he was always moving, always doing something with his hands, or talking, or pacing about.
Evidently the Major decided not to press the issue of his arrival. There was still work to do, and an hour later we were running the final tests on the pressure suits. That evening, Stone and McIvers were thick as thieves, and everything was set for an early departure after we got some rest.
“And that,” said Baron, finishing his drink and signaling the waiter for another pair, “was your first big mistake.”
Peter Claney raised his eyebrows. “McIvers?”
“Of course.”
Claney shrugged, glanced at the small quiet tables around them. “There are lots of bizarre personalities around a place like this, and some of the best wouldn’t seem to be the most reliable at first glance. Anyway, personality problems weren’t our big problem right then. Equipment worried us first and route next.”
Baron nodded in agreement. “What kind of suits did you have?”
“The best insulating suits ever made,” said Claney. “Each one had an inner lining of a fiberglass modification, to avoid the clumsiness of asbestos, and carried the refrigerating unit and oxygen storage which we recharged from the sledges every eight hours. Outer layer carried a monomolecular chrome reflecting surface that made us glitter like Christmas trees. And we had a half-inch dead-air space under positive pressure between the two layers. Warning thermocouples, of course – at 770 degrees, it wouldn’t take much time to fry us to cinders if the suits failed somewhere.”
“How about the Bugs?”
“They were insulated, too, but we weren’t counting on them too much for protection.”
“You weren’t!” Baron exclaimed. “Why not?”
“We’d be in and out of them too much. They gave us mobility and storage, but we knew we’d have to do a lot of forward work on foot.” Claney smiled bitterly. “Which meant that we had an inch of fiberglass and a half-inch of dead air between us and a surface temperature where lead flowed like water and zinc was almost at melting point and the pools of sulfur in the shadows were boiling like oatmeal over a campfire.”