 What is the Red Lion?
Brightside Crossing by Alan E. Nourse JAMES BARON was not pleased to hear that he had had a visitor when he reached the Red Lion that evening. Street trade was discouraged at the Red Lion, gently but persuasively; the patrons were few in number. Across to the right was a group that Baron knew vaguely—Andean climbers, or at least two of them were. Over near the door he recognized old Balmer, who had mapped the first passage to the core of Vulcan Crater on Venus. It was the planet that whipped us, that and the Sun . After that, I followed Sanderson’s work in the Twilight Lab up there and began to get Brightside into my blood, sure as death. 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. 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. “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. 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. The Twilight Lab, near the northern pole of Mercury, was the obvious jumping-off place. F. No permanent installation with a human crew could survive at either extreme. But with Mercury’s wobble, the twilight zone between Brightside and Darkside offers something closer to survival temperatures. The Solar ’scope could take that much change and they’d get good clear observation of the Sun for about seventy out of the eighty-eight days it takes the planet to wheel around. The Major was counting on Sanderson knowing something about Mercury as well as the Sun when we camped at the Lab to make final preparations.
 A club for explorers and adventurers
 A gentlemen's club  A restaurant  A club for explorers and adventurers  A bar