Brightside Crossing. Nourse Alan Edward
ourse
Brightside Crossing
Now Baron drummed his fingers on the table top, staring about the quiet lounge. Street trade was discouraged at the Red Lion, gently but persuasively; the patrons were few in number. Across to the right was a group that Baron knew vaguely – Andean climbers, or at least two of them were. Over near the door he recognized old Balmer, who had mapped the first passage to the core of Vulcan Crater on Venus. Baron returned his smile with a nod. Then he settled back and waited impatiently for the intruder who demanded his time without justifying it.
Presently a small, grizzled man crossed the room and sat down at Baron’s table. He was short and wiry. His face held no key to his age – he might have been thirty or a thousand – but he looked weary and immensely ugly. His cheeks and forehead were twisted and brown, with scars that were still healing.
The stranger said, “I’m glad you waited. I’ve heard you’re planning to attempt the Brightside.”
Baron stared at the man for a moment. “I see you can read telecasts,” he said coldly. “The news was correct. We are going to make a Brightside Crossing.”
“At perihelion?”
“Of course. When else?”
The grizzled man searched Baron’s face for a moment without expression. Then he said slowly, “No, I’m afraid you’re not going to make the Crossing.”
“Say, who are you, if you don’t mind?” Baron demanded.
“The name is Claney,” said the stranger.
There was a silence. Then: “Claney? Peter Claney?”
“That’s right.”
Baron’s eyes were wide with excitement, all trace of anger gone. “Great balls of fire, man —where have you been hiding? We’ve been trying to contact you for months!”
“I know. I was hoping you’d quit looking and chuck the whole idea.”
“Quit looking!” Baron bent forward over the table. “My friend, we’d given up hope, but we’ve never quit looking. Here, have a drink. There’s so much you can tell us.” His fingers were trembling.
Peter Claney shook his head. “I can’t tell you anything you want to hear.”
“But you’ve got to. You’re the only man on Earth who’s attempted a Brightside Crossing and lived through it! And the story you cleared for the news – it was nothing. We need details. Where did your equipment fall down? Where did you miscalculate? What were the trouble spots?” Baron jabbed a finger at Claney’s face. “That, for instance – epithelioma? Why? What was wrong with your glass? Your filters? We’ve got to know those things. If you can tell us, we can make it across where your attempt failed – ”
“You want to know why we failed?” asked Claney.
“Of course we want to know. We have to know.”
“It’s simple. We failed because it can’t be done. We couldn’t do it and neither can you. No human beings will ever cross the Brightside alive, not if they try for centuries.”
“Nonsense,” Baron declared. “We will.”
Claney shrugged. “I was there. I know what I’m saying. You can blame the equipment or the men – there were flaws in both quarters – but we just didn’t know what we were fighting. It was the planet that whipped us, that and the Sun. They’ll whip you, too, if you try it.”
“Never,” said Baron.
“Let me tell you,” Peter Claney said.
I’d been interested in the Brightside for almost as long as I can remember (Claney said). I guess I was about ten when Wyatt and Carpenter made the last attempt – that was in 2082, I think. I followed the news stories like a tri-V serial and then I was heartbroken when they just disappeared.
I know now that they were a pair of idiots, starting off without proper equipment, with practically no knowledge of surface conditions, without any charts – they couldn’t have made a hundred miles – but I didn’t know that then and it was a terrible tragedy. After that, I followed Sanderson’s work in the Twilight Lab up there and began to get Brightside into my blood, sure as death.
But it was Mikuta’s idea to attempt a Crossing. Did you ever know Tom Mikuta? I don’t suppose you did. No, not Japanese – Polish-American. He was a major in the Interplanetary Service for some years and hung onto the title after he gave up his commission.
He was with Armstrong on Mars during his Service days, did a good deal of the original mapping and surveying for the Colony there. I first met him on Venus; we spent five years together up there doing some of the nastiest exploring since the Matto Grasso. Then he made the attempt on Vulcan Crater that paved the way for Balmer a few years later.
I’d always liked the Major – he was big and quiet and cool, the sort of guy who always had things figured a little further ahead than anyone else and always knew what to do in a tight place. Too many men in this game are all nerve and luck, with no judgment. The Major had both. He also had the kind of personality that could take a crew of wild men and make them work like a well-oiled machine across a thousand miles of Venus jungle. I liked him and I trusted him.
He contacted me in New York and he was very casual at first. We spent an evening here at the Red Lion, talking about old times; he told me about the Vulcan business, and how he’d been out to see Sanderson and the Twilight Lab on Mercury, and how he preferred a hot trek to a cold one any day of the year – and then he wanted to know what I’d been doing since Venus and what my plans were.
“No particular plans,” I told him. “Why?”
He looked me over. “How much do you weigh, Peter?”
I told him one-thirty-five.
“That much!” he said. “Well, there can’t be much fat on you, at any rate. How do you take heat?”
“You should know,” I said. “Venus was no icebox.”
“No, I mean real heat.”
Then I began to get it. “You’re planning a trip.”
“That’s right. A hot trip.” He grinned at me. “Might be dangerous, too.”
“What trip?”
“Brightside of Mercury,” the Major said.
I whistled cautiously. “At aphelion?”
He threw his head back. “Why try a Crossing at aphelion? What have you done then? Four thousand miles of butcherous heat, just to have some joker come along, use your data and drum you out of the glory by crossing at perihelion forty-four days later? No, thanks. I want the Brightside without any nonsense about it.” He leaned across me eagerly. “I want to make a Crossing at perihelion and I want to cross on the surface. If a man can do that, he’s got Mercury. Until then, nobody’s got Mercury. I want Mercury – but I’ll need help getting it.”
I’d thought of it a thousand times and never dared consider it. Nobody had, since Wyatt and Carpenter disappeared. Mercury turns on its axis in the same time that it wheels around the Sun, which means that the Brightside is always facing in. That makes the Brightside of Mercury at perihelion the hottest place in the Solar System, with one single exception: the surface of the Sun itself.
It would be a hellish trek. Only a few men had ever learned just how hellish and they never came back to tell about it. It was a real hell’s Crossing, but someday, I thought, somebody would cross it.
I wanted to be along.
The Twilight Lab, near the northern pole of Mercury, was the obvious jumping-off place. The setup there wasn’t very extensive – a rocket landing, the labs and quarters for Sanderson’s crew sunk deep into the crust, and the tower that housed the Solar ’scope that Sanderson had built up there ten years before.
Twilight Lab wasn’t particularly interested in the Brightside, of course – the Sun was Sanderson’s baby and he’d picked Mercury as the closest chunk of rock to the Sun that could hold his observatory. He’d chosen a good location, too. On Mercury, the Brightside temperature hits 770° F. at perihelion and the Darkside runs pretty constant at -410° F. No permanent