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left the lamasery and returned to the world, he used his personal fortune to establish the Sunpower Foundation and began the Mercury project. As far as Nobu and the rest of the world were concerned, the Mercury project was devoted to generating inexpensive electrical power for the growing human habitations spreading through the solar system. Only Saito Yamagata knew that its true goal was to provide the power to send human explorers to the stars.
    Saito—and one other person.

Pahs

    Even after a dozen years of living with the lamas, Yamagata could not separate himself from his desire for creature comforts. He did not consider the accommodations aboard his ship Himawari to be particularly sumptuous, but he felt that he had a right to a certain amount of luxury. Sitting at the head of the small dining table in his private wardroom, he smiled as he recalled that the great fifteenth-century Chinese admiral Zheng He had included “pleasure women” among the crews of his great vessels of exploration and trade. At least I have not gone that far, Yamagata thought, although the memory of the Sundsvall woman still lingered in the back of his mind.
    Seated at his right was Bishop Danvers, sipping abstemiously at a tiny stemmed glass of sherry. He was a big man, with heavy shoulders and considerable bulk. Yet he looked soft, round of face and body, although Yamagata noticed that his hands were big, heavy with horny calluses and prominent knuckles.
    The hands of a bricklayer, Yamagata thought, on the body of a churchman. On Yamagata’s left sat Victor Molina, an astrobiologist from some Midwestern American university. The ship’s captain, Chuichi Shibasaki, sat at the far end of the table.
    Bishop Danvers had come along on Himawari because the New Morality had insisted that Mercury Base must have a chaplain, and the project manager had specifically asked for Danvers to take up the mission. Danvers, however, showed no inclination to leave the comforts of the ship and actually go down to the planet’s surface. Hardly any of the ship’s mainly Japanese crew paid the scantest attention to him, but the bishop did not seem to mind their secularist indifference in the slightest. Sooner or later he would go down to Goethe base and offer the men and women there his spiritual guidance. If anyone wanted some. What would the bishop think of pleasure women? Yamagata wondered, suppressing a grin.
    Danvers put down his barely touched glass and asked in a sharp, cutting voice, “Victor, you don’t actually expect to find living creatures on Mercury, do you?”
    Victor Molina and Bishop Danvers knew each other, Yamagata had been told. They had been friends years earlier. The bishop had even performed Molina’s wedding ceremony.
    Molina was olive-skinned, with startling cobalt blue eyes and a pugnacious, pointed chin. His luxuriant, sandy hair was tied back in a ponytail, fastened by a clip of asteroidal silver that matched the studs in both his earlobes. He had already drained his sherry, and answered the bishop’s question as one of the human waiters refilled his glass.
    “Why not?” he replied, a trifle belligerently. “We’ve found living organisms on Mars and the moons of Jupiter, haven’t we?”
    “Yes, but—”
    “And what about those enormous creatures in Jupiter’s ocean? They might even be intelligent.”
    The bishop’s pale eyes snapped angrily. “Intelligent? Nonsense! Surely you can’t believe—”
    “It isn’t a matter of belief, Elliott, it’s a question of fact. Science depends on observation and measurement, not some a priori fairytales.”
    “You’re not a Believer,” the bishop muttered.
    “I’m an observer,” Molina snapped. “I’m here to see what the facts are.”
    Yamagata thought that Dr. Molina could use some of the lamas’ lessons in humility. He found himself fascinated by the differences between the two men. Bishop Danvers’s round face was slightly flushed, whether from anger or