Mercury

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks once again to Jeff Mitchell, who really is a rocket scientist from MIT; to Steven Howe, as bright and innovative a physicist as I ever met; and to David Gerrold, whose description of a “beanstalk” in his novel Jumping Off the Planet is the best I have seen—true friends in need, each one of them.

The epigraphs heading the prologue and main sections of this novel are from William Shakespeare, Sonnets 29 and 123; Edgar Allan Poe, “The Conqueror Worm”; John Dryden, “Absalom and Achitophel”; and Shakespeare again, Titus Andronicus, Act II, Scene 3.