Next Door to the Sun

A little more than five centuries before Roy Bentley and Chris Hartridge set out for Mercury, Earth had been devastated in a Nuclear War. After a barrage of hydrogen bombs, the original nations had ceased to be, and the world's population had dropped by ninety-five percent! But amid the panic of those last days, tens of thousands had boarded spaceships and set out for other planets. Unfortunately, the Russians had been first to Mars, while the Westerners had aimed for Venus and Mercury. But from most of these interplanetary pioneers, no word had ever come back to Earth. Now, five centuries later, with the revival of science and space travel, a great question was being asked: Might not some of the descendants of the original space travelers have survived? It was in an attempt to answer this enigmatic question that Bentley and Hartridge set out across space...