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surface. The fact that they existed on the surface meant that some ongoing process was generating them continuously. That ongoing process was life: thermophilic organisms living on the surface of Mercury at temperatures more than four times higher than the boiling point of water. Moreover, they are capable of surviving long periods of intense cold during the Mercurian night, when temperatures that sink down to –135° Celsius are not uncommon.
    Now came the point in his lecture when Molina must describe the Mercurian organisms. He looked up from the podium’s voice-activated display screen, where his notes were scrolling in cadence with his speaking, and smiled down at Lara. His smile turned awkward, embarrassed. He suddenly became aware that he had nothing to say. He didn’t know what the creatures looked like! The display screen was blank. He stood there at the podium while his wife and the king and the huge audience waited in anticipation. He had no idea of what he should say. Then he realized that he was naked. He clutched the podium for protection, tried to hide behind it, but they saw him, they all saw he was naked and began to laugh at him. All but Lara, who looked alarmed, frightened. Do something! he silently begged her. Get out of your chair and do something to help me!
    Suddenly he had to urinate. Urgently. But he couldn’t move from behind the podium because he had no clothes on. Not a stitch. The audience was howling uproariously and Molina wanted, needed, desperately to piss.
    He awoke with a start, disoriented in the darkness of the stateroom. “Lights!” he cried out, and the overhead panels began to glow softly. Molina stumbled out of bed and ran barefoot to the lavatory. After he had relieved himself and crawled back into bed he thought, I wish Lara were here. I shouldn’t have made her stay at home.

Torch Ship Himawari

    The ship’s name meant “sunflower.” Yamagata had personally chosen the name, an appropriate one for a vessel involved in tapping the Sun’s energy. Earlier generations would have said it was a fortunate name, a name that would bring good luck to his enterprise. Yamagata was not superstitious, yet he felt that Himawari was indeed the best possible name for his ship.
    While all except the ship’s night watch slept, Yamagata sat in the padded recliner in his stateroom, speaking to a dead man.
    The three-dimensional image that stood before Yamagata was almost solid enough to seem real. Except for a slight sparkling, like distant fireflies winking on a summer’s evening, the image was perfect in every detail. Yamagata saw a short, slightly chubby man with a shock of snow white hair smiling amiably at him. He was wearing a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows and blue jeans, with a soft turtleneck sweater of pale yellow and an incongruous velvet vest decorated with colorful flowers.
    Robert Forward had died nearly a century earlier. He had been a maverick physicist, delving into areas that most academics avoided. Long before Duncan and his fusion propulsion drive, which made travel among the planets practical, Forward was examining the possibilities of antimatter rockets and laser propulsion for interstellar travel. Yamagata had hired a team of clever computer engineers to bring together every public lecture that Forward had given, every seminar appearance, every journal paper he had written, and incorporate them into a digitized persona that could be projected as an interactive holographic image. Calling themselves “chip-monks,” the young men and women had succeeded brilliantly. Yamagata could hold conversations with the long-dead Forward almost as if the man were actually present. There were limits to the system, of course. Forward never sat down; he was always on his feet. He paced, but only a few steps in any direction, because the image had to stay within the cone of the hologram being projected from the ceiling of Yamagata’s stateroom. And he always smiled.