“Not there!” snapped Professor Fournier, spreading her arms wide in a typically Gallic shrug of frustration. “There!”
Corporal Heath gritted his teeth and managed a weary “Ma’am?” as, for the fourth time, he tried to remain professional and to remember that, despite her lack of military rank, Professor Maria Fournier was currently his superior officer….
He glanced across the cavern, two hundred yards below the surface of Mercury, to where the professor was standing, hands on hips like a pioneering explorer. In the light of the electric lamps around the periphery of the cavern he could see her face and managed a weak smile and a deferential nod. When she was in a good mood, Professor Fournier was funny and irreverent and a pleasure to be around; when she wasn’t, she was dreadful. And today was not a good one.
He followed her imperious gesture to where another of the crystal clusters—that the professor had earlier referred to as “geodes”—bulged from the wall like a glittering, diamond-encrusted boil.
“Yes, ma’am.”
In the stillness of the cavern, Heath felt sure he heard her exhalation as she tipped her head back to gaze around.
“To think,” she said so quietly that Heath almost missed it, “that we may be the first people to ever gaze on this….” There was a sense of awe in her voice—an awe that Heath was most definitely not sharing. For once he was grateful for the weak Mercurial gravity that allowed him to carry the backpack containing the hammers and drills and explosives, with which he’d been charged to carry for the professor by Princess Christiana Station’s commander, Colonel Shawbridge. The heavy, lead-weighted boots that everyone was issued gave a very poor semblance of normal gravity, but at least they helped to prevent every step turning into some sort of music hall performance. In the three months that he’d been stationed here, Heath hadn’t once forgotten that he was on a planet with gravity just one half that of his much-missed home. Despite the numerous other ridiculous features of this tiny lump of rock, it was the gravity that he missed the most—the gentle, ever-present hug that reassured him that everything was normal, everything was okay. In his sleep, even with the heavy, blankets, he still found himself dreaming of floating in the ocean or falling…. But he thanked the Lord that they were the only recurring dreams he had: others at Princess Christiana Station were not so lucky.
“Corporal!” bellowed Fournier, shattering his reverie. He jerked his head up sharply.
“Sorry, ma’am.”
Professor Fournier fixed her gaze on a glittering mound where the uneven floor of the cavern met the arching dome of its roof, like an ugly mess of soap bubbles.
“Come on,” she said. “Dépêche-toi!”
Hurry up! he translated. One of the professor’s favourite phrases, and one of the few he’d learned since she’d arrived two months ago. He wondered what her urgency was—the cavern had been there long before man discovered it and, Heath assumed, would be there for many years to come.
He made his way across the cavern, remembering that even though the backpack had only half the weight that it would have done on Earth, it still had the same inertia—something that he’d struggled to understand when Professor Fournier had explained it to him, but which had become painfully—and embarrassingly—evident when, as a demonstration, the professor had picked up the rucksack and gently thrown it at him—only for him to be thrown backwards by its momentum, ending up in an undignified heap on his rear. Professor Fournier hadn’t even tried not to laugh—but, to her credit, she’d bounded straight over and helped him to his feet.
“Weight and mass,” she’d said as he’d dusted off the fine, grey, Mercurial dust from his uniform. “Everyone thinks that they are the same thing. As you see,” she smiled, “they are not.”
So, things on Mercury might not be as heavy to lift as they would be on Earth. But once they were moving, they were just as hard to stop as they would have been back home. Something like that, anyway.
As he made his way across the damp floor of the cavern, his boots crunching grittily on the uneven rocks, he saw that Fournier had clambered up onto the crystalline mound, her feet slipping and sliding. Despite her apparent age—which Heath guessed at as late forties, perhaps early fifties, but would never ask—she was surprisingly nimble, aided by the feeble gravity. He wondered whether her claims that—in accordance with Colonel Shawbridge’s instructions—she’d never visited the cavern on her own were actually true. He knew she had little regard for the colonel (or, for that matter, for the authority of the British) and it was no secret that Shawbridge had little time for her “scientific nonsense.” But despite that—or perhaps because of it—Shawbridge seemed to have a certain respect for the diminutive French geologist. He let her have her head as much as he could, rarely interfering with her flights of fancy. Shawbridge’s major concerns were for the well-being of Princess Christiana Station’s personnel, both military and civilian; and as long as she didn’t make ridiculous demands on the station staff or act recklessly or foolishly, he tended to let her be.
“Magnifique!”he heard the professor whisper, her hands gripping the crystal “plates”—as she’d named them—that made up the mound upon which she stood. The size of an outstretched palm and half an inch thick, they were hexagonal and rough-surfaced, as though they were made of etched glass. There was a frostiness to the surface of them, like the mist of condensation on a glass of cold beer. Just the thought made him sigh inwardly, and he restrained himself from checking his watch: it was a long time until his duty with Professor Fournier was due to end and he could go back above ground and take advantage of the cold side of the planet’s exports.
Despite its proximity to the sun, Mercury was a world of two drastically different personalities: the raging, blistering, almost inconceivable heat of the Bright Side—six hundred degrees Fahrenheit at the centre of the sunward face; and the frigid cold of the Dark Side—weighing in at an almost equally inconceivable two hundred degrees. Heath was sure that nowhere in the Solar System had mankind discovered such opposing extremes of temperature as here on Mercury. It was these two extremes that made Mercury such a valuable—if hazardous—world for the British Empire to bring under its wing. The Bright Side provided molten tin and zinc, cast into huge wheel-shaped moulds and dragged back to the Twilight Zone—the ring of habitable temperature that encircled the planet at what the scientists called “the terminator”. The Dark Side provided solid dry ice (or carbon dioxide) and ammonia, a noxious gas that, as Heath understood it, was useful in numerous chemical and scientific processes. As far as he and the other army staff were concerned, it was the Dark Side that provided the only apparent advantage to living on Mercury: the ability to provide a chilled beer, on demand, whenever they wanted it. Huge chunks of frozen dry ice and ammonia were dragged back from the darkness towards the Twilight Zone by huge, land-crawling machines, crumbling and steaming as the temperature rose around them, destined—as far as Heath was concerned—to provide ice-cold beer on tap.
“Corporal?” called Fournier, glancing back over her shoulder. The electric lights strung around the walls of the cavern cast bleak, satanic shadows across her face.
“Yes, ma’am. Coming ma’am,” Heath said and clomped his way clumsily over to her, halting at the foot of the mound upon which she stood.
The dome of the cavern stretched a hundred feet into the air, its surface glittering with grey rock and random crystal plates, uneven and misshapen, as though they had only recently formed. The smallest were the size of his palm; some of the larger ones the size of his chest. They huddled up against each other, reflecting back the light redly as though the fires of Hell themselves burned within. Although Heath couldn’t quite put his finger on it, there was something wrong about the way they seemed to transform the electric light falling on them. He put it from his mind as Professor Fourier dropped her hammer and cursed in French. It clattered and skittered down the hummock on which she stood, the sound reverberating around the chamber.
“I’ll get it, Professor,” he said.
“I have another,” she replied, reaching over her shoulder into her backpack and fishing out something more like a sledgehammer than a geologist’s tool. Had it not been for Mercury’s weaker gravity, Heath doubted that she’d have been able to carry it. He watched her manhandle it awkwardly, almost dropping it, and as she hefted it in her hands, Heath thought she might overbalance.
“Professor…” he said hesitantly, still looking around for the smaller hammer. “Are you sure that’s—”
She looked down at him sharply. “Yes, Corporal?”
Her tone made him feel like a schoolboy and he shut up.
Fourier turned away from him and her foot slipped, almost sending her tumbling back down to join her hammer, but she managed to steady herself.
“If you wait a minute, Professor…” Heath couldn’t help himself: she was hefting it in her hands, and although she was only a small woman, he didn’t doubt that she could do some serious damage with it. “I’ll find the other one. It’ll be a lot easier to use.”
He knelt down and peered into the inky shadows at his feet, reaching out to feel for the smaller tool.
“I am fine with this one,” she said, and out of the corner of his eye, a shadow swept across the wall—her arm and the hammer…
As it made contact with the rounded cluster of crystals above her, there was an almighty crunching, splintering sound and fragments pattered down all around in slow motion. Heath raised his hand reflexively to protect himself as he heard another sound: something altogether more terrifying—a deep crack, like the sound of distant thunder.
Heath looked up to see the wall above the professor—and above himself—tear and split, opening like a stormcloud. As the cluster shattered and collapsed, burying the professor and raining down on him, Corporal Heath was almost certain that he heard a voice….