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Urteil, himself, was a main focus of disturbance. He was intent on ruining the Council, and the object of his main attack was Mindes. Yet his arrogance naturally spread hate of himself wherever he went. Mindes hated him, of course, and so did Gardoma. Dr. Peverale hated him in a much more restrained fashion. He would not even discuss the man with Lucky.
At the banquet, Cook had seemed to shrink from talking to Urteil, never let his eyes as much as move in his direction. Was this simply because Cook was anxious to avoid the sharp, flailing edge of Urteil's tongue, or were there more specific reasons?
Cook thought little of Peverale too. He was ashamed of the old man's preoccupation with Sirius.
And there was one question that remained to be answered aside from all these things. Who had slashed Lucky's inso-suit?
There were too many factors. Lucky had a line of thought that threaded through them, but as yet that line was weak. Again he avoided concentrating on that line. He must retain an open mind.
The ground was sloping upward and he had adjusted his stride to suit it automatically. So preoccupied was he with his thoughts that the sight that caught his eyes as he topped that rise found him unprepared and struck him with amazement.
The extreme upper edge of the Sun was above the broken horizon, yet not the Sun itself. Only the prominences that edged the Sun showed, a small segment of them.
The prominences were brilliant red in color, and one, in the very center of those visible, was made up of blazing streamers moving upward and outward with inching slowness.
Sharp and bright against the rock of Mercury, un-dimmed by atmosphere, unhazed by dust, it was a sight of incredible beauty. The tongue of flame seemed to be growing out of Mercury's dark crust as though the planet's horizon were on fire or a volcano of more than giant size had suddenly erupted and been trapped in mid-blaze.
Yet those prominences were incomparably more than anything that could have appeared on Mercury. The one he watched, Lucky knew, was large enough to swallow a hundred Earths whole, or five thousand Mercuries. And there it burned in atomic fire, lighting up Lucky and all his surroundings.
He turned off his suit-light to see.
Those surfaces of the rocks that faced directly toward the prominences were awash with ruddy light, all other surfaces were black as coal. It was as though someone had painted a bottomless pit with streaks of red. Truly it was the "red ghost of the Sun."
The shadow of Lucky's hand on his chest made a patch of black. The ground ahead was more treacherous, since the patches of light that caught every fragment of uneve
Lucky turned on Ms suit-light once again and moved forward toward the prominences along the curve of Mercury, the Sun rising six minutes of arc for every mile he went.
That meant that in less than a mile, the body of the Sun would be visible and he would be on Mercury's Sun-side.
Lucky had no way of knowing then that at that moment Bigman was facing death by freezing. His thought as he faced the Sun-side was only this: There lies the danger and the crux of the problem, and there lies the solution too.