by Earl
“Sorry, Captain,” Von Zell murmured for all of us.
Morale is a strange thing, for you either have it or you don’t. We had it from then on—or rather, we had Captain Atwell. His name will go down in history as a world-conquerer, alongside those of Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon, and with far more meaning. I’m saying this unofficially. If Atwell saw it, he’d probably put Ling in my place as radio operator.
Now to switch to Omega. Not long after we landed on the mercury lake, Swinerton suddenly let out a whoop. The next moment, in his air-helmet, he dashed from the lock and made his way across the mercury. Like a clumsy skater on ice, or like a man in a nightmare, he ran for all he was worth, yet he barely moved.
He struggled a hundred feet, picked up something, and returned. Panting, he showed it to us. It was one of the brain-plants, or vegetable-minds, the first we had seen. A pulpy white mass, it was convoluted like a naked brain, set in a chalice of thick greenish leaves. Its stem and root had been torn away. Swinerton’s sharp eyes had seen it bobbing on the mercury surface.
How had it survived the deluge of crushing, roaring liquid metal that had poured through its underground cavern? Swinerton tried to find out, asking it questions aloud. He claimed he had conversed with them mentally that way. They had absorbed the thoughts accompanying his voice, and returned telepathic answers that registered as a voice to Swinerton.
That was his story, anyway. But now no slightest sign came from this plant-brain, no slightest mental whisper, though we all held our breaths in anticipation.
“It’s dead,” Swinerton said mournfully. “Omega, the ultimate in intelligent life!”
The rest of us smiled. Somehow, on second thought, it seemed ridiculous to expect a plant to be a rational being. It looked more like cauliflower, on close examination. Swinerton had imagined his underground episode of talking to them, we thought.
“Dead or alive,” scoffed Markers, “you never talked with them telepathically.”
Swinerton was about to make an angry retort, but Captain Atwell interposed.
“Expedition to locate liquid air will start in an hour. Parletti, Tarnay, Robertson, von Zell and myself. Get ready, men.”
To switch to the present, thanks for the musical broadcast, Earth. We’ve about worn out the few phonograph records we have here. And thanks, World President Mason, for your speech in behalf of the planet, saying you’re overjoyed that we’ve survived. We can hardly believe that Earth, from pole to pole, went wild when we resumed contact yesterday, and that for a whole night, every radio, newspaper, and telecast celebrated the event. We’re so deeply moved that we can’t even talk about it.
TWO Hundred Forty-Fourth Day.
It doesn’t take long to tell how we replenished our stores of air and water, though it amounted to weeks of labor and planning.
Captain Atwell’s expedition to the Night Side, in heated seal-suits, found a pool of liquid air within three days. It was fed by some underground spring, from the bitter wastelands beyond, where Absolute Zero reigned.
Ages ago, Parletti explained, when Mercury finally ceased rotating, most of its atmosphere froze on the Night Side. At the edges of this hemisphere, where it touches the warmer Twilight Zone, the gases liquefy and flow.
I call the pool we used “liquid air,” but it’s not Earth air. That would be too much to expect. Actually it was only seventeen per cent oxygen. The rest was mainly nitrogen, but with a high five per cent content of inert gases—neon, argon and krypton. But it had life-giving oxygen, and that was the main thing.
By teamwork, we filled all our empty tanks in two weeks. Parletti and Robertson drained the liquid from the pool into an open round-bottomed vat, made of sheet metal. This they dragged five miles into the Twilight Zone, where Tarnay and Ling were stationed with their tanking apparatus.
It was simply a pipe that sucked up the liquid, let it evaporate en route, and pumped the gas into the tanks under pressure. The pump was our gyroscope motor system, temporarily removed from the ship. Power came from my radio batteries, charged constantly by seleno-cells under the Sun’s constant rays.
Markers and myself carried the tanks back and forth, from the ship to the spot. The strategic spot was chosen because it was out of the Sun’s direct glare, in the latitude where its rim was just below the horizon. Any farther “south” and the liquid air would have boiled away too fast.
And so our ship was soon aerated by the new mixture. By increasing the pressure, we offset the low oxygen value. The bends and other symptoms were avoided by increasing the pressure gradually, over a period of twenty-four hours. Now we have lived three months with this high-pressure, low-oxygen air, without ill effects. The human mechanism is an adaptable one. However, over a period of years, the mixture would probably be harmful.
Water was a simple problem. Large ice blocks are frozen eternally on the Night Side, where the Sun hasn’t shone for incredible ages. Water in its crystal form is always pure, free from saline impurities. We merely carted the ice-blocks to our ship and let them melt into our tanks.
But food was a harder nut to crack. That was where Omega helped us.
Hello, Venus Expedition Two! Glad to get your greetings. You say you’d give your right arms for a glimpse of the Sun or stars through Venus’ solid cloud-packs? You wouldn’t want our Sun, even the half we have above the horizon in our Twilight Zone. It’s blazingly hot. We’re all burned black.
TWO Hundred Forty-Fifth Day.
A While the others had been storing fresh air and water supplies, Captain Atwell, von Zell and Swinerton had been struggling with the food problem.
First they made a hundred-mile trek along the Twilight Zone, finding another sunken valley with its indigenous life. There must be a string of such valleys around Mercury, harboring the remnants of its fauna and flora that probably flourished before rotation ceased.
Shooting down several samples of the winged animals that prey on one another, they brought these back for examination. Von Zell’s chemical tests showed their flesh to be impregnated with metallo-organic compounds.
Venus, Earth and Mars have evolved life-forms that are mutually edible. But Mercury, loaded with heavier metals, has evolved a unique branch of life. Copper, zinc, lead—even platinum—run through all Mercurian protoplasm. It is the in-between stage of strictly carbon life on Earth, and silicic life, which Mercury also has.
Swinerton shook his head and shrugged unhappily. The flesh of Mercurian animals would be deadly poison to us.
Desperately, with our stored food running low, he boiled the stuff for hours, hoping to precipitate the metals. Von Zell found enough left for the meat to be left still poison. Acids were tried, and alkalis, but the metals stubbornly refused to precipitate. In organic chain-compounds, metals tend to stay firmly.
A month later, we were forced to break into our food reserves. What would we eat in space, if and when we took off? Air and water we had, but no food.
We all became moody, Swinerton particularly. He would sometimes stand before Omega and stare for hours. Omega wasn’t dead, by the way. Swinerton had set the broken stem in a water solution of sugar and phosphate. The brain-plant grew rootlets and seemed to take on new freshness.
“Omega,” Swinerton would often mutter, “listen to me! Talk to me! How did you escape the mercury flood?”
Von Zell and Swinerton tried one last desperate resort. They fried the Mercurian flesh in hot lard, but of course the metals did not precipitate.
“Still poison!” von Zell groaned. “All right, I admit there’s no way of making that flesh edible.”
“Have you tried to precipitate the metals electrically?” someone asked.
Von Zell froze erect, stunned.
“That’s it!” he almost screamed. “The metals will take the ion form readily, and then can be thrown out of solution. Tarnay, you have saved us!”
“Don’t give me credit,” Tarnay denied. “Karsen said it.”
“No, I didn’t,” Karsen sai
d. “You did, didn’t you, Parletti?”
Suddenly we were all looking at one another bewilderedly. Who had said that?
“Omega was the one,” Swinerton announced quietly. “That is, he said it by telepathy.”
HE looked around at us triumphantly, for we had practically called him crazy. We had all heard it, though not those exact words. I’ve freely translated. It was more of a subtle impression that stole into our minds, like a sound just at the edge of hearing.
Tarnay claimed he heard the words “stupid fools” first.
At any rate, it was the solution. Under von Zell’s eager orders, I rigged all my batteries together. He immersed a sample of Mercurian flesh in salt solution, as an electrolyte, and ran current through the set-up.
An hour later, a smudge of metals had precipitated at the bottom of the jar. The remaining tissue von Zell found to be free of heavy metals! He tried it and ate it, serving as our guinea-pig. Someone had to do it, and he insisted on himself, confident of his purifying process.
“Tastes like good steak,” he informed.
Three hours later he felt no ill effects and we all breathed again. So our food problem was solved. A daily hunting party brought back game. My seleno-cells were set up permanently, beside the precipitation vat, to feed current and purify the Mercurian flesh of heavy, poisonous metals.
But von Zell lied, in his enthusiasm. It is remarkably tough, unappetizing, rather blubbery flesh, yet we’re grateful for it. It satisfies our stomachs, if not our palates. We’ve varied our diet with Mercurian grasses and roots, also electrically treated.
WO Hundred Forty-sixth Day. We are assured of continued existence, with air, water and food at hand—the three main essentials of life. Our first meal of purified Mercurian meat was a joyous occasion. We toasted Omega with glasses of water.
No one wanted to spoil the fun and mention the rocket tubes. That hanging sword still remained, however. It loomed like a mountain before us, though we had conquered the foothills of air, water and food.
But to get back to Omega—
Swinerton naturally was excited that his charge had finally broken its long silence. He was also angry with it.
“Omega,” he demanded, “why have you kept silent so long?”
“I was thinking,” came back in what I’ll describe as a phlegmatic “tone.”
The conversation I report will be the consensus among all of us. We all “heard” slightly different versions of Omega’s startling telepathic speech.
“Of what?” Swinerton pursued.
“You would not understand.”
“Weren’t you aware of our food predicament all the time? Why didn’t you give your suggestion before?”
“What did it matter whether you solved the problem or not?” Omega asked tranquilly. “I spoke only because of your sheer stupidity in not seeing the answer.”
Omega was blunt, if nothing else. Swinerton colored for all of us, and changed the subject.
“How did you escape the mercury flood?” he queried.
“By willing around myself a shield of force. I was barely in time, for the flood tore my roots away. Surrounded by the protective shield, I bobbed to the surface.”
Swinerton asked about the shield of force, but the answer was incomprehensible. Tarnay murmured something about “a controlled vibratory shell” and then gave up.
“We had to release that mercury flood to save ourselves,” Swinerton said, by way of apology. “Or we thought we did. We’re sorry it uprooted you.”
“It matters not,” Omega returned indifferently.
“Were the others saved, too?”
“No.”
“Why didn’t they surround themselves with force-shields?”
“They did not wish to.”
“You mean,” Swinerton gasped, “that they made no move to avoid death, when they easily could have?”
“Avoid death? Why? We would all long ago have committed suicide, except that doing so involves an effort which we did not choose to make.”
WE stared blankly at one another.
Trying to understand that dangerous, maddening philosophy, our minds rocked.
“But wouldn’t you rather be alive than dead?” Swinerton insisted, sweating.
“What is the difference?”
We didn’t know whether to take that reply as idiom, or literally. Somehow, Omega seemed to be laughing at us quite mirthlessly.
“But you saved yourself,” Swinerton declared. “You must have had a reason, a desire to live.”
“No, I had no reason, nor was it instinct to save myself. I did it because I did it.”
“But why?” roared Swinerton. “There is no ‘why’ for anything. There is no reason for anything. A million years ago, our race stopped asking that futile question.”
Swinerton shook his head dazedly and got back to firmer ground.
“How long have you existed?”
“A million of what you call years.”
“I mean you personally, as an entity. Not your race.”
“I mean myself, personally. I was in that cavern alone ten thousand years.”
“Impossible,” Swinerton mumbled uncertainly. “How do you feed? Why, there’s not enough nutriment in acres and acres of ground to have supported you that long.”
“I am not a plant, so I do not feed from chemicals. I extract pure energy from matter. A cubic foot of any sort of matter will last me a thousand years. The chemicals you put in this water are unnecessary. The water alone is all I need. Or, lacking that, air, vapor, or just cosmic rays will do as well.”
“You’re eternal!” Swinerton said, awed.
“If I choose.”
“Do you reproduce?”
“No.”
“Then your race is dying out, if you never avoid accidental death?”
“It is,” Omega stated unemotionally. “How many of you are left? Do you know?”
“Yes. I’m in telepathic rapport with all my fellows. One hundred and twenty-nine are left.” A pause. “No—one hundred and twenty-eight,” he amended. “A thousand miles from here, in a cave, one was just crushed by a falling rock. He did not choose to live.”
Swinerton asked more questions, but Omega fell silent. He didn’t speak again till three days later. Omega was like that, in the following time, speaking for a few minutes, then shutting his mind to us as if we didn’t exist.
That probably seems like a collective hallucination to you. Perhaps it is. We have no proof. Von Zell might have thought of the electrical precipitation himself.
Hello, Mars Expedition Two! Your winter has set in, you say, confining you to your barracks. It’s a long, bitter one. It’ll last six months. Luckily, besides cards and chess, you have books. We didn’t. If you get tired of those, try the roundelay story game, each person continuing the adventures of a mythical hero. Give him a super space ship and all the Universe to roam in. It’s great fun.
TWO Hundred Forty-seventh Day. The necessities of life were taken care of, so we concentrated on the rocket tube problem.
Of our sixty-four drive rockets, nine had blown out in the previous take-off. We had twelve replacements. It had not been thought, on Earth, that more would ever be needed. The margin of three replacements left is not enough, Tarnay says. At least ten to twenty others would blow out if we took off again.
The action of the mercury vapors had greatly softened the tubes. Mercury tends to amalgamate with any and all metals, and the result is an alloy that can readily be manipulated. But the first blasts of rocket flame had burned out this amalgam, leaving the surface badly pitted. Our only hope was to recoat the weakened tubes with harder metal again, and only platinum-iridium alloy would do.
We have the metal. Parletti discovered nuggets of almost chemically pure platinum and iridium. They lie around on unweathered Mercury like so many acorns. It was much harder to find the clay we needed.
We can melt them, even though they are two of the most refractory metals known, wi
th melting points of eighteen hundred, and twenty-three hundred degrees Centigrade. Tarnay, Markers and I devised an electric-arc unit for the purpose.
But we can’t melt enough of it at once. Our unit melts a few grams at a time, at the point of arc. We somehow have to melt and keep molten several pounds in our clay vessel. The rocket tubes must be dipped in one after another, for their full length, to become coated all over with new platinum-iridium alloy. To make an electric-arc furnace that size and capacity would take ten times the equipment we have. We came to that inexorable conclusion six weeks ago.
Another set-back dispirited us. Karsen fell ill for three days and Parletti has diagnosed it as arsenic poisoning! It is impossible for the electrical method to eliminate all metals in our Mercurian food. Traces of arsenic remain, but even worse than that is the minute amount of lead. Lead is a cumulative poison. It stores up in the body until it causes death.
Parletti estimated that two or three months of the Mercurian food would bring us all down with lead and arsenic poisoning. And eventually bad enough to kill us. Karsen was nursed back to health with our precious Earth food.
The hunting parties are often caught in the short but terrible storms that rage between the Night Side and Day Side temperatures, precipitating metal hail. Once Robertson and Ling came in battered and bleeding, and were laid up for three days.
It was as though Mercury had gathered all its sullen wrath and was warning the alien invaders to be gone. Somehow, we have to leave at the next conjunction. It is two weeks off, and we still haven’t repaired our rockets.
Hello, Venus! Keep your chin up. The food-mold destroyed half our food supplies, too. But you’ll find the Venusian animals good eating. Wish we could say the same for Mercury. . . .
TWO Hundred Forty-eighth day.
Swinerton carried on several more “conversations” with Omega—when Omega was disposed to converse. We blessed Omega at times for keeping our minds off our troubles. We also cursed him, for his insidious philosophy was more dangerous to our morale than anything we had to battle.