by Earl
Welton jabbed expertly at the controls. Relays opened the fuel valves wide. Fat sparks pulsed doubly rapid in the explosion chambers. The off-side bow tubes burst out volcanically. The momentum of the ship yielded before the hammer of reaction as though it had plowed suddenly into an area of thick, clogging syrup. Osgood cursed a steady stream at the racking shocks that battered him into the cushions as the Thunderbolt sideslipped off its former straight course. The stars wheeled dizzily.
Ten minutes later, Welton called off the demon of power and an aching silence came over the cabin. The ship was riding an even keel a thousand miles over a dark surface of indeterminate texture.
“I’m sorry that’s over,” lied Osgood, wiping a sweaty face. He eyed the terrain through the lower nose port. “Uninviting as hell frozen over. No atmosphere. I’d say—frozen.”
They circled the globe once, unable to make out any distinguishing features beyond large areas of light and dark. “Down we go,” announced Welton, retarding velocity. “Shall we land in a secluded spot and avoid the brass band? We—holy Andromeda!” He stared bug-eyed at the meters. Their readings had suddenly all become crazy.
“What’s up?”
“Plenty. We’re in a strong magnetic field, stronger than I’ve seen in a long time. Powerful enough to twist all my hairsprings out of whack. It’s infernal!” He tried the stern rockets, to raise the falling ship, but there was no response. He tried the front rockets with a prayer, to curse at their failure. “Huh, playing tricks too. What next?”
As though in answer, a weird St. Elmo’s fire began dancing along the central handrail and spread to every part of the cabin. And all over the hull of the ship, as they could see. A whistling sound from outside proclaimed an atmosphere through which they were dropping.
“Wade! The ground is coming up fast!” gulped Osgood. “Are we going to crash?”
Welton had ripped the panel away covering the distributor for the spark system. His eyes searched feverishly for trouble. It was hopeless to figure that out in the short minutes left. He straightened up with a bleak look.
Osgood met his eyes, and shrugged.
“Well. Wade, we’ve come a long way together.” He forced a wry grin. “We will presently heat the well-known light-speed limit—by being infinitely remote in almost no time.”
Welton watched the uprushing, dark surface in fascination. Then he wrenched his eyes away with a grin. “It’s been a great game. Archie, hasn’t it? We’ve just been dealt out, that’s all.”
THEY SAID no more and waited stolidly. They were not too shocked at this sudden appearance of disaster. In space, one had to expect catastrophe at any given moment. They had learned to expect the Grim Reaper on the shortest possible notice—none whatever.
The Thunderbolt plummeted down like its namesake. A screeching roar filled the overheated cabin. Then, as though it had struck an invisible rubber cushion, the mass of beryllium-bronze slowed in mid-air. retarded smoothly and swiftly to a stop, and oozed the remaining ten feet to the ground.
Osgood swam out of a temporary senselessness, aware of the miracle of being alive. “Wade!” he called hoarsely. “How can this be? Hut hurray, anyway!” He danced on his feet to keep the floor’s terrific heat from working through his shoes.
Welton scrambled out of a corner, rubbing his hip and limping. “If this had been a steel ship, nothing would have saved us.” He danced in company with his companion. Rivers of sweat ran down their faces.
“Hut what did save us?” Osgood insisted on knowing.
“Eddy-current losses. I should have expected it. Our ship cut the lines of force. Cutting magnetic lines always produces current. That was the St. Elmo’s fire, from ionization of air. The current flowed in some pattern of circles around our hull, meeting resistance and dissipating our energy of motion as heat. The magnetic field acted like a viscous liquid, lowering us smoothly. Two things saved us—the great magnetic field with high flux density, and the Thunderbolt not being made of steel. The heat, Archie, is a by-ptoduct of our motion in this titanic magnetic field—a large scale hysteresis. Check?”
“You know too much.” Osgood handed over a pillow for Welton to stand on, as he was himself.
“Mind, that’s only a possible explanation,” admitted Welton modestly.
“Natural phenomena cover a wide range, and my physics do a little limping. And so will I for a while, the way my hip feels.” He looked down, yawning. “I’d rather have my head on this pillow than my feet. Let’s have general inspection and then cuddle in the arms of Morpheus.”
“Righto,” seconded Osgood. They found the air-regulator jammed, and sweated over it for a half hour in the overheated cabin. All else was shipshape, except for the engine. “Hut that,” reasoned Welton, climbing into his bunk, “can wait.” The lights went out.
Osgood’s voice came solemnly out of the darkness. “Wade, that was what one might call a narrow escape, eh?” He wasn’t sure whether his answer was a snore or snort.
OSGOOD pushed the vac-suit containing Welton toward the lock. “To you, my friend, goes the honor of first stepping out on planet X. I’ll be out there in a minute.” The seal’s pneumatic valves hissed shut.
Welton jumped the five feet to the ground and landed with enough of a jar to realize surface gravity was at least Earth’s equal. The gravity gauge in the ship had not been awry then. He swept his flash around. The ground was of a loamy texture, dark purple in color. He moved a few steps forward in his micro-mesh garment, to get out of the shadow of the Thunderbolt. He winced a little at the pain in his bruised hip. Then he glanced around. It looked much the same through his glassite helmet as it had from the ship’s ports—an endless, flat stretch of barrenness, without detail in the light of the somber stars.
Welton caught movement in the corner of his eye and turned swiftly. A tall figure loomed up in the dark. Welton limelighted it with his flash, then gasped and staggered back a step.
“Howdy, Columbus!” greeted Osgood cheerily. lie was dressed in a Ganymedian parka, only the circle of his face exposed, but with his nose free to the atmosphere. He took a deep breath of air and thumped his chest while exhaling.
“Jumping Jupiter!” said Welton, gagging.
“Glorious to breathe fresh air for a change, Wade old stuff. Stuff is right, in that vac-suit. Why the devil are you wearing it?” Osgood doubled up in pantomime mirth. “You see,” he explained. straightening up, “you took it for granted the atmosphere was unbreathable, and surface temperature down around the toes, as on most other extra-terrestrial globes. I, Wade, I took the trouble—before you awoke this alleged morning—to tune with my X-gun. It can give gases the Fraunhofer once-over with very soft X-rays. I found 40% oxygen, 50 of nitrogen, and 10 rare gases—close enough to Earth’s mixture to satisfy me. And a little sulfur, but I can’t smell it.”
He sniffed noisily. “As for temperature—this will curl your whiskers next time you grow them. Wade—it’s only thirty below zero, Centigrade. Nothing more than a nice cold Earth winter, or a Ganymedian summer. The pressure seems to be comparable to Earth’s, too.” He goggled in suppressed mirth. “I couldn’t help it. Wade—it was too much fun seeing you wabble out in a vac-suit. like a sea-diver diving in a dry Martian seabottom.”
“It’s not so funny,” came tinnily from Welton’s suit. “I remember the time you used an air-lock three times on Earth, when the back end of our dry-docked ship was wide open.” He gave a sour grin and changed the subject. “Well, here’s your planet X, only it’s probably an oversized comet. Anyway, what are we going to do with it? Looks like an unswept corner of purgatory.”
A GUST of wind took Osgood’s first words away and he had to begin again. “Wade, we’re here on serious business. As Earth’s first official landing party, we must take over the planet in her name.” He added hastily—“It” it is a planet, of course.” He frowned. “Just what docs a person say in a case like this?”
Welton grinned. “Sanderson, on Mars, is reporte
d to have said: ‘Mars, brother world of Earth.’ since Venus had already been taken into the family as sister. You could perhaps say something original like ‘planet X, uncle world of Earth.’ Or maybe you could just sprinkle some of our earth-water on it and baptize it as a son of Mother Earth.”
Osgood pointed to the horizon. “Jupiter rising. The sun ought to be up in a few minutes from this swift rotation, which I’d estimate at no more than ten total hours.”
Together they watched Jupiter—a fiery first-magnitude-plus star—climb rapidly, like a giant firefly. Five minutes later a moon-sized zodiacal glow presaged the coming sun. It popped up with surprising brightness, though it was little more than an enormously bright star, well over a billion miles distant. Yet it illumined the surrounding topography with a far greater intensity than the full moon lighted Earth.
In the weird dawn, the surroundings were not so monotonous as had first seemed. A line of great cliffs towered against the stars in one direction. At another spot in the distance, thick murky vapors hung in the air, as though arising from some steaming pool. Much of the horizon seemed taken up with jagged rock formations. The Thunderbolt had fortuitously landed free of these things, on a barren plateau.
Osgood reached down, and in the new light Welton saw what he had brought with him. First he came up with Earth’s green-and-gold banner and stuck the end of its staff firmly into the soil.
“Planet Ten, unnamed, Earth’s sons grant you Earth’s protection and friendship.” burst out Osgood sonorously, with a dramatic gesture. “If it is a planet,” he capitulated to Welton.
Then he placed the United American banner of seventy-one stars and bars a little to the back of the first flag. “Planet Ten. unnamed but of Earth’s empire, we hereby establish the sovereignty of United America!” he droned out. “If it is a planet,” he added.
Welton looked on disparagingly. “Archie, that’s silly. You know the awful squabble there’ll be over this planet. Priority claims won’t mean a thing compared to who has the strongest fleet and most nerve.”
“If it is a planet,” reminded Osgood. He bent over and scooped dirt into a glass dish with a spoon.
“What’s that for?” queried Welton.
“Don’t you know the rules? One must bring back a sample of the new planet’s soil. They’ll put it in a glass case in the Interplanetary Museum at New York with our names on it. We’ll probably get a write-up in the Interplanetary Archives, too.”
“Yeah, three lines of print in an overstuffed book to equal a month of stale air, sawdust food, and a square yard of spacesuit rash,” said Welton scathingly.
But Osgood was staring at the spoon closely. “Say, Wade, look at these little purple growths—like algae. Life on this planet! And if there’s this, there’s more and different kinds. Perhaps even X-ians. That is, a race of intelligent creatures. We’ll have to practice up on our telepathy.”
Welton moved toward the ship. “First and foremost. I’ll have to get our rocket plant in running condition. Else we’ll have to practice up on being marooned.”
WADE WELTON sweated over the engine the rest of that day. mystified, for everything seemed in order. He pawed its parts from reaction chambers to spark relays and even tested the fuel without accounting for the reasonless failure of the unit as a whole. Like a possum playing dead, it was obviously ready to jump to life, but made no response to the controls. And these Welton had specifically examined for proper connections. He sat down to ruminate and scratch his head.
Osgood clumped in from the lock, clucking with his tongue. “Such language, Wade! If we hooked a pulley to it, we could drag the ship to hell and Halifax without the rockets.” He set his portable mass-atom analyzer in its stand with a loving pat and leaned his comet-gun in a corner. Then he scrambled out of his parka, face red from the raw outer cold. “What seems to be the trouble—still dead?”
Welton brought out a curse, sigh and wail in one-two-three order. “Yes, and apparently gone to the Valhalla of engines. I can’t get a thing out of it, not one miserable dyne of force.”
“Dyne,” echoed Osgood. “Dyne—dine——” He rummaged around in the food closet.
“And where all have you been?”
“Me, I’ve had quite a jaunt.” Osgood continued between spoonfuls. “I struck due east and reached a forest about two miles along—huge fungoid growths, dead-white in color, angular in outline. Ghastly looking things in this half lumination. I saw some vague forms skittering about farther in, and decided to stay out. I skirted the fungoids and hit one of the places where vapors arise. It’s a sunken pool with some thick, murky solution in it. Sounds crazy, but it looked like molten metal with oxides over it. Animals in it. too. or fish. Saw ’em splash up now and then.” His voice became preoccupied. “Plenty of life—queer.”
Welton stared in mild interest.
“You see.” continued Osgood, thus rewarded, “my robot atom-tagger indicated only the heavier elements, wherever I went. Zinc, lead, mercury, cobalt, palladium, radium, lots of iron, lots of manganese—all in a gnarled conglomeration of oxides and sulfides. The radium accounts for the abnormally high surface temperature, of course. The manganese for the purple color of the soil. But, Wade, where are the lighter elements—calcium, magnesium, aluminum. silicon, etc., which make up soil on all other planets? And where in the name of the bald gods is your carbon? It’s impossible. A world without carbon. Life without carbon!”
Welton became interested. “No carbon, eh? What are they composed of, your fungoids, your fish and all the rest?”
“Metals and metal alloys, cemented together with oxides and sulfides. Robots of nature.” Osgood grinned. “Wade. I can just picture dissection revealing lanthanum lungs, copper kidneys, tantalum toes, a beryllium brain and a——”
“Quit it.” growled Welton, “or you’ll say iron nerves, muscles of steel, silvery voice and heart of gold. It’s not our place, though, to figure out their why and wherefore. Something for the biologists, when they get here. You may think your carbonless life is a mystery, but so is my ailing engine. Archie, we can’t leave here without rocket power, and at present it ain’t.”
“In that case, let’s stay a while.” Osgood stretched, yawned, and moved sinuously toward his bunk.
THINGS stood much the same for three days. Osgood ranged far afield with his robot divining rod and each evening carefully filed the aluminum spectrum records away. These would be turned over to Solar Metals Inc. upon return, for them to lay plans for exploitation of metal resources. Welton, in that time, developed maniacal fits over the idle rocket engine, which he could not coax to the roaring life which should inhabit it. He became a little haggard over it.
“Wake up.” commanded Welton on the fourth morning. He shook his companion insistently. “We have visitors.”
Osgood rubbed sleep from his eyes. “Who. for instance?”
“Probably the mayor with the keys to the city.”
Osgood stumbled to the nose port and looked out. A dozen squat figures were gathered in the half-gloom of broad daylight, apparently staring at the ship. They were misshapen to all earthly standards, huge and ungainly, glinting with a metallic sheen. Their several spindly legs had knee-joints pointing to all angles of the compass. The barrelshaped bodies were equipped with a variety of tentacles and surmounted by cone-shaped heads. They looked something like caricatured spiders. There was a peculiar angularity about them, as though all their surface was composed of innumerable flat facets.
They were pulling up the two flags from the soil and examining them closely. Osgood picked up his Fraunhofer analyzer and trained it on them. “There you are,” he declared presently. “Metallic intelligence—mainly iron and manganese. Creatures of crystal. In common with the fungoid trees, fish and other creatures I’ve seen, they’re put together in angles. The little purple algae were asymmetrical crystals, you remember. What beats me, though, is their metabolism.”
“They probably eat metal ores, and digest them with n
itric acid,” contributed Welton. “I’ve seen some outré beings in my time, but these galvanized gents stretch my credibility gland all out of joint.”
“Say, look——” began Osgood.
One of the creatures, bulkier than the rest, experimentally snapped the staffs of the flags into pieces and then ripped the cloth to shreds, passing the debris to his fellows. Welton snickered while Osgood glowered. “They can’t do that.
I’m going out there and——”
Welton grabbed him by the arm. “No, you don’t. Archie, don’t pick quarrels with alien races—it’s against the rules. You never know when you stir a hornets’ nest. Just let them have their fun, as long as they stop with that.” They watched for an hour. The creatures seemed to be holding a conference. Finally they all separated, and began twisting themselves around, faster and faster, like animated tops. After five minutes of this they stopped, then lumbered away from the ship, with the peculiar ungracefulness of spiders. They disappeared in the gloom.
“Whirling dervishes,” spluttered Osgood. “Now for Sirius’ sake, tell me why they did that.”
Welton laughed, but with an amazed look. “Sure, I’ll tell you. Look.” He had picked up the jar containing the soil and alga? Osgood had brought in the first day. As fast as he could, Welton swung the jar in a circle till his arm was tired. He held up the jar. “Quick, Archie—look! See the little alga; crystals glowing?” Then from his repair kit he picked up a small coil of copper whose ends were separated by a small gap. When this was rotated rapidly for a minute, a small spark snapped across.
“You and I don’t feel it,” Wade explained, “but we’re in a really colossal and powerful magnetic field. Anything metallic, cutting the lines of force, produces current and hysteresis heat. The core of this world must be solid iron and completely magnetized. So what else could evolution do here but produce life utilizing that great source of power? Especially with the Sun and sunpower so remote. Their innards must be helices, to induce electric current as they cross lines of force which are all around. It’s quite cute, when you think of it. They whirl—current generates, stores up. They are fed, as it were. That’s what makes them tick. Of course, it doesn’t explain their process of growth or reproduction, which must be some outlandish form of biometallurgy.”