THE SHIP WAS A COMMERCIAL job, fairly slow but sturdy. Gray strapped Jill Moulton into one of the bucket seats in the control room and then checked the fuel and air gauges. The tanks were full.
"What about you?" he said to Ward. "You can't go back."
"Nah. I'll have to go with you. Warm her up, Duke, while I open the dome."
He darted out. Gray set the atmosphere motors idling. The dome slid open, showing the flicker of the auroras, where areas of intense heat and cold set up atmospheric tension by rapid fluctuation of adjoining air masses.
Mercury, cutting the vast magnetic field of the Sun in an eccentric orbit, tortured by the daily change from blistering heat to freezing cold in the thin atmosphere, was a powerful generator of electricity.
Ward didn't come back.
Swearing under his
