by Earl
They saw a mirage, too. A startlingly clear, detailed picture refracted through the metal-vapor atmosphere ahead. It mirrored a vast, molten ocean that stretched to all horizons, with “white-caps” of coppery metal splashings. No man-made vessel could sail those violent waves, stormier than any Earth typhoon. Substitute liquid-metal “rollers” and metal-vapor “wind” for water and air and you have forces that would crush a battleship like an eggshell.
The mirage was a mere glimpse of what lay beyond, for thousands of miles under the direct rays of the Sun. It glinted so brightly that the men’s eyes hurt behind the darkened visor-glasses.
They turned back when the outside temperature had hit 300 Fahrenheit. Their cooling units were balking. The heated underfooting worked through their vacuum soles. They lost five pounds each, in perspiration.
“Worth it,” Captain Atwell said. “Sight you can’t see on any other planet.”
Markers sends along this bit of information. Sun-spot barrage due on Earth any minute. Aurora displays will be particularly brilliant on Earth in the next 24 hours. Markers suggests black-outs of all cities within range, to enjoy the spectacle. In the war-days of last century, blacked-out cities saw memorable displays.
ONE Hundred Forty-Eighth Day.
Captain Atwell also made an exploration to the Night Side, with Swinerton and von Zell.
The battery units of their suits were this time hooked to heating-coils. And well they needed them. The temperature dropped and dropped. Thirty miles beyond, it was 200 below. Beyond that, out where the Sun’s rays had never shone for staggering eons of time, it must finally reach quite close to Absolute Zero, more than 500 Fahrenheit degrees below zero.
A white tufting of “snow” lay over everything out there, within the edge of the eternal Night Side. A snow of frozen gases. Sluggish streams of liquid air flowed from beyond and steamed into vapor. It is from here that the Day Side gets its constant replenishment of atmosphere. In fact, there is a steady “trade wind” across from the Night Side to the Day Side, like the trade winds of Earth caused by equatorial and arctic winds circulating.
Von Zell described the scene somewhat poetically. Eternal night.
Bright stars like jewels in the jet drapery of space. Earth, Venus and Mars all in the sky. Mars low and garnet. Earth higher, a beautiful blue star. Venus shone so brightly that they thought it was another moon of Mercury, besides the one discovered by Markers. Venus from Mercury is the brightest planet, as seen from any other planet. They saw Markers’ moon, too—he named it Phaeton—diving up and then down in a swift arc, as though looking for the Sun.
Swinerton suddenly stooped, with a startled cry. A biologist, he hardly cared about the magnificent firmament. His eyes had spied a tuft of green moss-algae. Life, out in this bitter frozen waste!
Almost feverishly, he picked up a lump of metal with a pitted depression and placed some of the algae in this natural container, for later examination under a microscope.
They did not stay long. Captain Atwell snapped a roll of film of the weird, chilling scenes, and they went back. Suddenly Atwell’s heating-coil went dead. It was all that protected him from lethal cold. He broke into a run, to work up a sweat. Von Zell and Swinerton dragged him between them for the last mile, when Atwell had gone numb.
He was brought into the ship unconscious and frost-bitten. Parletti stripped him and rubbed him down. He came to, with no worse effects than a bad cold.
“Cheated death again, didn’t we, men?” he said with a grin.
We burst out laughing, then, at Swinerton. He was staring in dismay at his knapsack. Silvery mercury metal was dribbling from it. The metal lump he had picked up to carry his precious algae in had been mercury frozen solid, out there on the Night Side. Here, naturally, it reverted to liquid form, crushing his algae.
Von Zell was screeching. “I knew it all the time!” he gasped, holding his sides. “I knew it was mercury! I couldn’t resist letting you gravely carry off what would become a handful of running metal!”
And then, before poor Swinerton broke down and cried, as he seemed about to do, von Zell opened his own knapsack and revealed more of the algae, safely carried on a slab of hardier metal.
Swinerton later found the algae to be cold-resisting spores, accidentally blown to the Night Side, waiting patiently for the touch of life-giving sunlight. They had waited perhaps thousands of years already, in suspended animation. Would they wait all eternity for a sun that would never rise? The thought awed us. The stuff of life, of which we are part, challenges infinity.
But we all hated the sight of that mercury dripping from Swinerton’s knapsack. It reminded us of the vast lake of it all around, beneath which was buried our reserve fuel.
Hello, Venus Expedition Two! Congratulations on your safe landing. The news was relayed to us through the Earth etherline station. If you think it’s wet there, at first glance, wait till the daily cloudburst comes! But after it’s over, you’ll be treated to rainbows that will knock your eye out.
ONE Hundred Forty-Ninth Day.
After that, we avoided the Day Side and Night Side entirely. The only habitable part of Mercury is this narrow Twilight Zone, circling the planet. It is all we are really interested in. There is life, here in this zone. And the pyramid.
Robertson, poking around like a human bloodhound, finally found an entrance to the pyramid. A small square tunnel, set high, like the shafts in Earth pyramids. He dutifully reported to Captain Atwell, before rushing in. Atwell took Parletti and Robertson with him, to investigate.
More than our interest in Mercurian phenomena, almost, is our breathless wonder about the ancient Martian colonizers, and why they set up these time-defying structures on Mars, Venus, Earth and now Mercury.
Atwell and his party found a central chamber, apparently once living quarters. More, they found a shaft dropping straight down into lightless depths, far below the foundations. Returning with more men, Captain Atwell allowed Robertson to be lowered on a long rope.
Robertson stayed down for hours, till we were nervous about him. Finally he jerked the rope and was hauled up. He told us what he had seen. His eyes were faraway, as though he had looked into a past age.
He had found the chamber below a gigantic one, braced with metal beams that on erosionless Mercury had lasted without collapse. His flashlight revealed huge enigmatic machinery, most of it twisted and torn as though by some explosion. Broken-off cables had obviously led through wall-conduits to the pyramid’s apex.
What energy or force had the underground machine produced, radiating from the apex? The pyramid on Venus had had similar machinery at the apex, but long since reduced to rust by the slow bite of water-vapor. The pyramid on Mars perhaps has the same machinery underground, filled in long ago by drifting sand.
There is some common denominator to it all, Robertson muses. As for Earth, the actual Martian pyramid or pyramids there must have been destroyed by some natural or artificial event. The Cheops and other Egyptian pyramids are simply copies of the Martian. The old Egyptians had perhaps deified the Martians and their works. Their bird-beaked god Osiris is suspiciously like an insectal Martian with his natural proboscis.
ROBERTSON says Halloway and his staff of translators on Earth will eventually run into the explanation of the true purpose of the pyramids on four—or more—planets. Simply sturdy stations for their interplanetary communication system? Robertson says no. The machinery he saw is designed to hurl out tremendous forces, not just etherline impulses. It is mysteriously linked with the vanishment of the Martian civilization.
Captain Atwell, Parletti, Markers and I are the most intrigued, besides Robertson. We were among the first men to reach another planet—Mars. We still remember that first incredible shock—a pyramid on another world! The main purpose of our expeditions has been to pioneer for future colonization. Yet at times we find our digging into past history far more significant. We prepare for the future, but our eyes turn always back. Back to a hoary, anci
ent story of another civilization that stirs the blood and makes us feel like scavengers in the ruins of a mighty but dead city.
Time has wiped away all but a whisper of that great Martian saga. As Robertson put it, rather theatrically:
“If only these stones could speak!”
Attention, Mars and Venus expeditions! Markers has just spotted a small new comet coming around the Sun and heading out again. Please watch for it and take readings of its course. Correction—Venus expedition excused, since astronomical observation is impossible through its dense cloud-packs. But watch for it on Earth and Mars.
ONE Hundred Fiftieth Day.
All this while, you understand, we had been waiting and hoping the mercury lake would roll away somewhere. Parletti took daily measurements of the mountains melting on the Day Side barrier, to see if one would eventually open a gap for the mercury to pour out there.
But our hopes faded, as the weeks passed. The mercury lake might very likely remain in its new bed for years. Years! We shudder at the word. Our food, water and air supplies can’t be stretched more than five or six months. We can’t gather food here. The metallo-organic life of Mercury would be sheer poison to our metabolism. Air and water are contaminated hopelessly.
Tarnay showed us the way out of our bleak prospect.
He proposed dynamiting the valley-crest, against which the mercury lake lapped. Our fuel would do it, open a gap. Into this gap the mercury would pour, down into the valley which is at a much lower level. It would destroy all that valley’s life, but that is the harsh rule of survival.
That was ten days ago, with takeoff time dangerously near. We planned the dynamiting eagerly. And then, the next day, we paused.
I mentioned before that it would cost a life. Swinerton is down in that valley—lost.
He had gone down several times, collecting biological data on the strange indigenous life of Mercury, remnant of a once flowering fauna and flora, when there was rotation. Someone else always accompanied him. It was part of our caution against losing a man. Captain Atwell, fate willing, was determined to bring us all back to Earth alive.
Tarnay was with Swinerton, nine days ago. Swinerton was apt to run off abruptly, seeing some new plant or creature. Tarnay suddenly found him missing. He called again and again via helmet-radio, emptied his gun in the air, and searched in wide circles. Informing us, seven men joined the search, but Swinerton had vanished into thin air.
We’ve been firing three shots over the valley every hour since then. At my radio, I’ve been sending out a call in alternate hours. Daily search parties have almost beaten the valley vegetation flat.
“I know he’s alive!” Captain Atwell keeps saying. “We’ll wait till the last possible minute before dynamiting the gap. The mercury flood would make his death certain.”
We all feel he might be alive. The air in the valley floor is thin, but pure and breathable. None of the heavy, poisonous metallic vapors is in it, as elsewhere. Swinerton could therefore breathe and live, after his helmet-air ran out. He carried a week’s full food and water rations in his knapsack, enough to sustain life for at least two weeks if budgeted.
IS Swinerton alive, lost somewhere in the dense, tall reed-forests down there? Wandering in dazed circles perhaps, and unable to hear our signal shots in the thin air? His helmet-radio damaged? We don’t know.
Captain Atwell tries not to show it, but it’s grinding his soul to shreds, to lose a man after all.
“Do we always have to bargain with death?” I heard him mutter once, staring down into the valley.
We all hate to pay the price of one life, even though it saves nine.
The deadline for our departure is close. Captain Atwell just announced that tomorrow we will blast open the gap. We will barely have time, after the mercury has drained away, to retrieve our fuel and take off. Earth is almost at inferior conjunction, on our side of the Sun. Another day and we’ll be sweeping past, on another swift revolution around the Sun with Mercury. We can’t stay four more months.
Thanks for the music broadcast, Earth. It has helped lighten our spirits. We haven’t felt like smiling for a week.
ONE Hundred Fifty-First Day. Swinerton is back! We’re not paying the price of a life after all!
All was ready this morning for the blast. We had run the ship up on the higher slope of the plateau edge, safe from danger. Packing all the remaining fuel into one drum, we set it in the hole dug at the strategic spot. Karsen set up a timed clockwork, with spare engine parts, that will detonate the fulminate-cap.
But before we set it, a shot quivered through the air, like a lost wail, from the valley below! Rushing down, we found Swinerton stumbling along, panting in the skimpy air. Though rather gaunt, unkempt and weak, he seemed all right.
Except his eyes. There was a strange look in them.
He told his story. Wandering away from Tarnay, ten days ago, he had half-fallen into a cave-entrance covered with thick foliage. The fall damaged his helmet-radio, so that he couldn’t call Tarnay. Foolishly, as he admitted, he explored the cave instead of coming right out. But not simply out of the little-boy spark of adventure that lurks in all humans. He seemed to hear voices, somewhere back in the cave!
The next thing he knew, he was lost. The cave had opened out into several branches. He didn’t know which was his. He wandered on—for a week! He had stumbled into endless catacombs, like those of Mammoth Cave on Earth.
Parletti interrupted at this point with a nod.
“I suspected so. The strains between the heated Day Side and the congealed Night Side produced those caverns in the Twilight Zone. It also explains the pure air in the valley. Underground flows of liquid air, from the Night Side. Meeting heat from the Day Side, it evaporates and seeps out constantly into the valley floor.”
Swinerton went on, and now we noticed his eyes telling us he was going to say something amazing.
All the while he wandered in the labyrinth, eating and drinking sparingly from his rations, breathing the fresh air, he kept hearing those voices. It was maddening, he said, like ghostly echoes of lost souls who had died here.
Then suddenly he stumbled on them.
I don’t vouch for what follows. Captain Atwell says to report it strictly as Swinerton did.
Vegetable intelligence, in brief. A group of mushroomlike growths, in the phosphorescent cavern, rooted in the soil. The thick stems held large white pulpy masses, convoluted like—well, like brains, Swinerton says. And the “voices” he had heard had actually been telepathic impulses between them!
“Telepathy? Bah!” said von Zell. “All caves are full of murmurs.”
“Telepathy,” Swinerton insisted. “What’s fantastic about that? Way back in 1933, Rhine first proved its existence. Not much progress has been made, but I think it was only last year, on Earth, that two men actually exchanged conversation for an hour, in separate sealed rooms.”
We could accept that.
“But those—those brain-plants!” said Ling. “Preposterous! Did you bring one back?”
SWINERTON recoiled as though the suggestion were in extremely bad taste.
“No. I had no right to touch them. They are living minds, far more intelligent than we are!”
Swinerton went on. He had sat before the plants—whatever they are—for three days. Trying to communicate with them, of course. At first, he says, they seemed to ignore or resent his presence. Then finally, they had answered his mental questions.
They are the end-product of Mercurian evolution. Mercury, smallest planet, had cooled first, and spawned life. They had reached their peak perhaps a billion years ago. They had colonized the Solar System long before the Martians. So long ago that no stick or stone was left of their doings.
But it didn’t matter, the brain-plants intimated—according to Swinerton. They had evolved further, given up interplanetary exploits as frivolous and puerile, and passed into a vegetative stage. When Mercury’s rotation ceased, they took root in the catacombs of the
Twilight Zone. They had been there for at least a million years!
We were as dazed as Swinerton when he finished. The appalling sweep of that story chills the blood, with its suggestion of futility. There was silence among us for quite awhile. We didn’t know whether to believe.
Karsen aroused himself first.
“Our deadline is here. We’ve got to leave today.”
“Set the time-detonator,” nodded Captain Atwell. “Thank the Lord you’re back, Swinerton. I swore I’d bring all you men back, and by heaven I will after all!”
When Swinerton found out what we were doing, he let out a wild cry.
“You can’t do it!” he almost screamed. “You can’t flood the valley with mercury. It’ll plunge through all those caves and crush the brain-plants.”
“It’s they or us,” Atwell said.
“You say you don’t want to sacrifice life,” Swinerton said with a strange bitterness. “But you are. You’re destroying plant-minds that are infinitely finer and live a far more beautiful mental life than we coarse brutes that think we’re civilized.”
“But what good are they? We’re not killing them wantonly. This is part of space pioneering—”
“Meaningless! It’s all meaningless. They went through this stage and it means nothing. It’s all futile, senseless—”
Swinerton’s eyes went wild and he began to run back into the valley. Pityingly Captain Atwell ordered him caught and locked in the ship. We don’t hold it against Swinerton. He’ll get over it.
We’re ready to set off the blast. Will resume after it’s done.
I can hear Swinerton pounding against the door, yelling. He’s still madly insisting that we must not drain the mercury into the valley and kill those odd plant-creatures.
We’re not losing a life, as we set our hearts on. But we hope we’re not losing a mind—Swinerton’s.