 What wasn't an issue their bodies were going through?
He had no stomach for mysteries, vast or trifling, and there were pressing things to think about at this time. Street trade was discouraged at the Red Lion, gently but persuasively; the patrons were few in number. Then he settled back and waited impatiently for the intruder who demanded his time without justifying it. It was the planet that whipped us, that and the Sun . 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. 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 want to make a Crossing at perihelion and I want to cross on the surface. 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. Only a few men had ever learned just how hellish and they never came back to tell about it. It was a real hell’s Crossing, but someday, I thought, somebody would cross it. The Twilight Lab, near the northern pole of Mercury, was the obvious jumping-off place. The setup there wasn’t very extensive—a rocket landing, the labs and quarters for Sanderson’s crew sunk deep into the crust, and the tower that housed the Solar ’scope that Sanderson had built up there ten years before. 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. Sanderson built the Lab up near the pole, where the zone is about five miles wide, so the temperature only varies 50 to 60 degrees with the libration. 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.
 malnutrition
 dehydration  malnutrition  headaches  irritation