Free Mercury by Ben Bova Page B

and Carnaby did not completely trust him.
    “What’s your take on the situation, Bishop?” Carnaby flatly refused to use the medieval Catholic terms of address; “your grace” and “my lord” had no place in his vocabulary.
    Without turning even to glance at the dossier displayed on the wall behind him, O’Malley said in his powerful, window-rattling voice, “Danvers showed his toughness years ago in Ecuador. Didn’t let personal friendship stand in the way of doing his duty. Let him handle the scientists; he’s up to it. Send him an assistant or two if you feel like it, but keep him in charge on Mercury.”
    “He’s done good work since Ecuador, too,” Carnaby agreed, his voice like a creaking hinge.
    The two deacons immediately fell in line and agreed that Danvers should remain in charge.
    “Remember this,” Carnaby said, folding his fleshless, blue-veined hands on the table edge in front of him, “every time these secularists find another form of life on some other world, people lose a portion of their faith. There are even those who proclaim that extraterrestrial life proves the Bible to be wrong!”
    “Blasphemy!” hissed the younger of the deacons.
    “The scientists will send a delegation out to Mercury,” Carnaby croaked on, “and they will confirm this man Molina’s discovery. They’ll trumpet the news that life has been found even where no one expected it to exist. More of the Faithful will fall away from their belief.”
    O’Malley hunched his bulky shoulders. “Not if Danvers can show that the scientists are wrong. Not if he can give them the lie.”
    “That’s his real mission, then,” Carnaby agreed. “To do whatever is necessary to disprove the scientists’ claim.”
    The deacon on the left, young and still innocent, blinked uncertainly. “But how can he do that? If the scientists show proof that life exists on the planet—”
    “Danvers must dispute their so-called proof,” Carnaby snapped, with obvious irritation. “He must challenge their findings.”
    “I don’t see how—”
    O’Malley reached out and touched the younger man on his shoulder. “Danvers is a fighter. He tries to hide it, but inside his soul he’s a fighter. He’ll find a way to cast doubt on the scientists’ findings, I’m sure.”
    The deacon on the right understood. “He doesn’t have to disprove the scientists’ findings, merely cast enough doubt on them so the Faithful will disregard them.”
    “At the very least,” Carnaby said. “It would be best if he could show that those godless secularists are lying and have been lying all along.”
    “That’s a tall order,” said O’Malley, with a smile.
    Carnaby did not smile back.

Mercury Orbit

    Captain Shibasaki allowed himself a rare moment of irony in the presence of his employer.
    “It’s going to become crowded here,” he said, perfectly straight-faced.
    Yamagata did not catch his wry attempt at humor. Standing beside the captain on Himawari’s bridge, Yamagata unsmilingly watched the display screen that showed the two ships that had taken up orbits around Mercury almost simultaneously.
    One was the freighter Urania, little more than a globular crew module and a set of nuclear ion propulsion units, with dozens of massive rectangular cargo containers clipped to its long spine. Urania carried equipment that would be useless if the scientists actually closed Mercury to further industrial operations. It also brought Molina’s wife to him, a matrimonial event to which Yamagata was utterly indifferent.
    The other vessel was a fusion torch ship, Brudnoy, which had blasted out from Earth on a half-g burn that brought its complement of ICU scientists and IAA bureaucrats to Mercury in a scant three days. Yamagata wished it would keep on accelerating and dive straight into the Sun. Instead, it braked expertly and took up an orbit matching Himawari’s. Yamagata could actually see through the bridge’s main port the dumbbell-shaped vessel