Brightside Crossing — Reading Notes

Baron’s eyes were wide with excitement, all trace of anger gone. “Great balls of fire, man—_where have you been hiding?_ We’ve been trying to contact you for months!”

“I know. I was hoping you’d quit looking and chuck the whole idea.”

“Quit looking!” Baron bent forward over the table. “My friend, we’d given up hope, but we’ve never quit looking. Here, have a drink. There’s so much you can tell us.” His fingers were trembling.

Peter Claney shook his head. “I can’t tell you anything you want to hear.”

“But you’ve _got_ to. You’re the only man on Earth who’s attempted a Brightside Crossing and lived through it! And the story you cleared for the news—it was nothing. We need _details_. Where did your equipment fall down? Where did you miscalculate? What were the trouble spots?” Baron jabbed a finger at Claney’s face. “That, for instance—epithelioma? Why? What was wrong with your glass? Your filters? We’ve got to know those things. If you can tell us, we can make it across where your attempt failed—”

“You want to know why we failed?” asked Claney.

“Of course we want to know. We _have_ to know.”

“It’s simple. We failed because it can’t be done. We couldn’t do it and neither can you. No human beings will ever cross the Brightside alive, not if they try for centuries.”

“Nonsense,” Baron declared. “We will.”

Claney shrugged. “I was there. I know what I’m saying. You can blame the equipment or the men—there were flaws in both quarters—but we just didn’t know what we were fighting. It was the _planet_ that whipped us, that and the _Sun_. They’ll whip you, too, if you try it.”

“Let me tell you,” Peter Claney said.

I’d been interested in the Brightside for almost as long as I can remember (Claney said). I guess I was about ten when Wyatt and Carpenter made the last attempt—that was in 2082, I think. I followed the news stories like a tri-V serial and then I was heartbroken when they just disappeared.

I know now that they were a pair of idiots, starting off without proper equipment, with practically no knowledge of surface conditions, without any charts—they couldn’t have made a hundred miles—but I didn’t know that then and it was a terrible tragedy. After that, I followed Sanderson’s work in the Twilight Lab up there and began to get Brightside into my blood, sure as death.

But it was Mikuta’s idea to attempt a Crossing. Did you ever know Tom Mikuta? I don’t suppose you did. No, not Japanese—Polish-American. He was a major in the Interplanetary Service for some years and hung onto the title after he gave up his commission.

He was with Armstrong on Mars during his Service days, did a good deal of the original mapping and surveying for the Colony there. I first met him on Venus; we spent five years together up there doing some of the nastiest exploring since the Matto Grasso. Then he made the attempt on Vulcan Crater that paved the way for Balmer a few years later.

I’d always liked the Major—he was big and quiet and cool, the sort of guy who always had things figured a little further ahead than anyone else and always knew what to do in a tight place. Too many men in this game are all nerve and luck, with no judgment. The Major had both. He also had the kind of personality that could take a crew of wild men and make them work like a well-oiled machine across a thousand miles of Venus jungle. I liked him and I trusted him.

He contacted me in New York and he was very casual at first. We spent an evening here at the Red Lion, talking about old times; he told me about the Vulcan business, and how he’d been out to see Sanderson and the Twilight Lab on Mercury, and how he preferred a hot trek to a cold one any day of the year—and then he wanted to know what I’d been doing since Venus and what my plans were.

“No particular plans,” I told him. “Why?”

He looked me over. “How much do you weigh, Peter?”

I told him one-thirty-five.

“That much!” he said. “Well, there can’t be much fat on you, at any rate. How do you take heat?”

“You should know,” I said. “Venus was no icebox.”

“No, I mean _real_ heat.”

Then I began to get it. “You’re planning a trip.”