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.