Dick had sat in on the council, since it was at his fathers home, and since Charlie had snorted and bucked at the idea of excluding the boy. But he’d been as empty of ideas as any of them.
It had been his father who had proposed the weak solution that had finally been adopted. The mines, of course, would be closed at once, and Sigma would go on emergency rationing of everything. The chief need was for power, since the uranium slugs they were using in their atomic piles were all due for replacement and needed to have the waste products removed from them. There would be some power from the solar-oven, which could be converted to run one of the boilers and generators, but that would be only a slight help.
As soon as the decision was made, all useless fights were turned off—and that meant everything more than a single small bulb in each home. They couldn’t cut power for the hydroponic tanks—that was needed if they were to have food and fresh air. But everything else would be kept to a minimum, and even the cooling units would be cut down, until the temperature rose to ninety.
But all that was only a half-measure. They still had to get word either to East Twilight where they were supposed to go or to North Twilight, from which the rocket had been sent. But that was a poor hope, and they knew it. The storm was already building up, creating so much static that radio transmission was almost impossible.
“There’s still the ship,” Rogers had said. “According to Charlie, it has been pretty badly battered up, but we might be able to get it working enough to reach East Twilight. Not with us aboard, but with one man who could tell them we need help.”
The repairman, Snaith, protested. “How are we going to get to the rocket? You expect us to walk a hundred miles through the hotlands and carry it back on our shoulders, Rogers?”
Charlie had taken as much dislike to the man as Dick, who felt that Snaith only repaired machines because he knew of nothing better to do, not because he really liked them. Now the old man snorted in disgust.
“Its been done, sonny. I mind a time when I was young and not such a fool I figgered I had to fool around with a busted tractor. ‘Course, I didn’t have my power all burned out, either. But I walked six hundred miles through the hotlands, pulling my supplies on a sled. Anyhow, the hot- lead fact is you only got to go out to my tractor. Fix that, and you don’t have to walk.”
It had been the first suggestion that offered any hope, and the men seemed to feel that it should have been thought of before. But they were unused to thinking in terms of the tractors, since the domes had no need for such things. The plan was passed
No Answer from Twilight at once, and Rogers, Dick and Charlie were selected to go out and fix it. Snaith had acted angry at the selection of Dick instead of himself, but the repairing of Pete by Dick, after he was junked, had convinced most of them that he would be better for the job.
Now the three were halfway to the tractor, this time with a rough sled containing repair parts, oxygen, tools, and fresh batteries, which Pete was pulling behind them. Charlie seemed to be as strong as ever, and kept up a continual stream of chatter about the surface around them.
Suddenly he paused and looked up. “Bet it’s your pet spook, Dick,” he said. “Call him down, and let’s invite him along.”
Rogers frowned, and shook his head. “Better leave well enough alone, Charlie. Those batteries would make a nice meal for a wispy. I think Johnny may be friendly, but I don’t know how smart he is.”
Charlie grinned. “Trouble with you, Bart, is that you think living in the domes is living on Mercury. You should ask a prospector some time. We get around. We run into both kinds of spooks—the wispies and the demons. This one is a wispy, sure enough, hot-lead all the way through. Call him down, Dick.”
Dick put in a call, and Johnny came darting down, circling around at a safe distance until he seemed to decide that the other two men were harmless. Then he set about hunting out the best road for them, seeming to make allowances for the sled behind them.
“Two kinds of spooks?” Dick asked Charlie, not sure that he had heard right.
“Two kinds, at least. Of course, not all us prospectors will tell you that. A lot of young fools came in after this planet got civilized. But you take it from a man who’s spent forty years a-chasing around, some of it back when nobody worried about spooks eating their power, because they didn’t have that much fancy equipment. Some spooks are natural enemies. They’ll eat electricity anywhere, and they don’t care how they get it. Downright mean. Can’t trust ‘em. But they ain’t all like that.”
He shook his head. “I mind me of a time when I was still green here. Thought I knew it all. Got out in the middle of the hotlands and got lost. ’S true, so help me. Got plumb lost. Sun overhead, and no way to tell east from west. Started out fine, but spent a whole day getting nowhere. Then I seen a spook a-following me. So I offered him a chance to show me the way and I’d give him all my spare batteries. Just a fool kid, a-talking like you might talk to a dog back on Earth. But he come down, quick as you please, and started jumping off one way, coming back, and doing it again. Took me along for three days, till I found I could find my own way. I paid him off, and we left each other to mind our own business.”
“I never heard of spooks being friendly,” Rogers said.
“How could you? You miners take a shot at every spook that comes along. Young squirts who come out now and call themselves prospectors, they do the same. Naturally, the spooks don’t go for that. They got men pegged as enemies now. The smart ones, that is. T’others don’t care.”
“Then Johnny isn’t like some of the others?” Dick asked.
“Nope. I never heard it, so maybe nobody else saw it. But I seen one of the demons, the mean spook-kind, get beaten and chased away when he tried to ruin me once. I’d been sort of carrying on a conversation, you might say, with a wispy that was following me, and the wispy really lit into that demon. You betcha. Demons don’t have much brains. They’re mean. They eat wispies, too, I heard. Tough on wispies, them demons. And men come along, a-taking over Mercury and killing off both kinds, not caring which is which. There used to be a lot more like Johnny when I was a young man.”
“That’s all fine,” Rogers told him, and Dick could see that his father was half convinced, but not willing to accept the old man’s words as final proof. “But how do you tell a wispy from a demon?”
“You don’t, until he acts like a wispy,” Charlie admitted.
“Then we have to shoot first. We can’t take chances,” Rogers reminded him. “One mistake could ruin a dome.”
Charlie nodded glumly. “Yep. Guess you’re right. Might be a good thing, too, get back the way things used to be. But I guess you can’t do much different from what you do.”
They had reached the tractor by then, and the three men fell to work at once. Pete was little help. He could carry things, but it was harder to tell him what to do than to go ahead and fix them. They sealed the crack first, making the dome airtight again, and coupled up the tanks of air. Dick’s father went in to work on the little atomic pile; as an engineer, he knew how to do it without getting radiation bum, and Dick knew better than to fool with such things until he knew more theory. He came back after a few minutes to announce the trouble was simply a broken power line.
They coupled in the new batteries as he fixed it, and the cooling motors started at once. In a half-hour the dome of the tractor would be livable again. And with the power line fixed, the big driving motor could run.
The treads proved to be more trouble. Dick found that several of them had been scraped by a big hunk of something like carborundum. The dome had had no replacements for the treads, and Charlie had meant to buy a new track set when he next reached civilization, so he had none. Dick fussed and fumed over it as he began welding the broken bits together and trying to plate on hunks of steel to replace the worst worn spots. It was a fair job when he finished. The tractor might run for months, with luck—or it might hit something and go bad the next minute. He could only
hope, as they worked the track back on its rollers.
But at last it was done, and they climbed inside the tractor, sending Pete back to Sigma dome with the sled. Johnny seemed to guess where they were going, and set out, hovering close to the tractor, but pointing die way.
It got rougher as they went along, but the repair job Dick had done seemed to stand up, and he began to breathe more easily. He had to admit to himself that he would have hated to try to go over this section of Mercury on foot. Maybe Charlie had done so years before, but it wasn’t something that could be done as a matter of course.
They were making good time now, averaging better than thirty miles an hour. The tractor could have gone faster, but Charlie was taking it easy this time.
Dick spotted the rocket when the old man pointed it out, and his heart sank. It had come down on its side and had smashed in whole sections of its hull. The cargo cases were all around, but there was no use examining them. The ground here was thinly coated with a layer of liquid lead, and the precious cases of new uranium rods would have been contaminated beyond any hope of salvaging them.
“Don’t have to fix it too good,” Charlie tried to comfort him. “So the hull leaks. Let it. Get a man in there in a spacesuit, and don’t bother with the hull. All he’s got to do is make East Twilight.”
It was some help, but it didn’t make repairing the damaged driving units any easier. Fortunately, the big rocket tubes hadn’t been hurt. But automatic dumps had gone into effect at the impact. They were designed to keep the pile from reaching too high a level in an emergency, and they had thrown out some of the uranium that powered the motors. There wasn’t enough left to get the machine into the space above the ground.
Dick’s father had no idea of repairing it then. All he could do was to look it over and see whether there was any chance of getting it to work again, using whatever the dome could provide. He began taking inventory, and his frown was indication enough to Dick that it wasn’t going to be easy.
“I don’t know,” he reported finally. “Some of the controls are pretty badly ruined. That might be all right, if we had one of the pilots who can fly a ship by the feel of it. But nobody in Sigma is more than an amateur. To get it up and keep it up is going to be a problem. Besides, we can’t get enough power to make it work the way it should. If we get the main drive working enough to lift it and handle three of the steering tubes, we’ll be lucky.”
“Thought you could fix anything, Bart,” Charlie protested. “You’re an engineer, doggone it.”
“But only a mining engineer, Charlie. I’m not a rocket expert. Only time I ever saw a rocket motor working was when I came here from Earth. Then we all had a brief look at it. I know the theory to some extent, and I can figure a lot of this out, but I can’t guarantee any results. How about you, Dick? Think you can fix the controls?”
Dick studied them, and shook his head. “Not in time, Dad. I never found a book on them, and I’d have to spend at least a month working over some of those things to get the feel of them in my head. That’s the way I fixed Pete.”
“Yeah.” Rogers shrugged. “Wish I could have sent you back to Earth for a real engineering degree. Well, we don’t have a month, so I’ll have to do what I can.”
He went down into the engine hold, to see what he could find, and came up looking unhappy about it. The list in his mitten had grown longer.
“We might as well go back to Sigma,” he told them. “I think we can find everything we need, but I still don’t know. But there’s one chance, if it works at all. They’ve got a couple of the new super-power transistors in the radio here. With them in place of our old tubes, we might get out enough power to signal Twilight. If we can’t—well, then we’ll just have to see what we can do here.”
He began yanking out the three-inch cubes that were the transistors—crystals that could amplify a signal. They had been used since the middle of the twentieth century, but had only been perfected to handle real power within the last ten years. “Why not use them here?” Dick asked. “Because the radio blew out on landing, and the only thing that isn’t ruined by high voltage is this transistor hookup,” his father told him. “Take a look!”
He had thrown back the cover of the set, and Dick took a glance inside. It was enough to see that his father had been right beyond any shadow of doubt.
Johnny was waiting outside the ship, and Charlie turned to Rogers quickly. “Power left in anything here?”
“Nothing he can damage,” Rogers answered. “The air-conditioning batteries are still charged, but they’re no good for anything else—another new model that won’t fit. Charlie, sometimes I agree with you. Specialization can be carried too far.” Charlie nodded emphatically. Then he grinned. “I don’t worry about Dick’s pet ruining things. He knows what will cause trouble and what won’t, and you can bet he only jinxed your mine motors a little because he figured Dick had to find me—must have known about your rocket crashing. They are smart, Bart. What I was a-thinking was that maybe he could use a square meal. He looks a mite peaked with all this running after us.”
For once Rogers laughed. Johnny looked like any other wispy, and they were all exactly alike, as far as men could see—any peakedness he felt would show only to others of his kind. But he dragged out two of the batteries. Johnny jumped for them, and there was a brief flash as he sucked out the energy in them. Then he went dancing ahead of them, and settled down to the job of guiding the tractor back to Sigma.
In the dome, Rogers and Dick wasted no time in reporting. It took half an hour to adjust the radio there to use the big transistors, and new power leads to carry enough current for them. Outside the little radio shack, the whole city stood waiting, while Rogers himself warmed up the set and adjusted it to its highest efficiency.
He sat pounding on the key, which could send Morse code that went through static better than a voice communication. For two hours he kept it up, alternating between sending and listening. But all he got was static, and he finally left it to another man while the three went home and to bed.
In the morning they were awakened by wild cries. But it wasn’t success. During the night a spook had somehow gotten into the dome. Probably the nerves and worry had made someone careless about one of the smaller locks. But in any event, it had then gotten into the radio shack and had managed to ruin all the important parts of the set in sucking out power. Nobody knew whether it had escaped or was still in the dome.
“It wasn’t Johnny,” Dick protested.
His father nodded, a little doubtfully. “Better keep him away, anyhow,” he said unhappily.
“They’ll shoot first and worry later. Besides, it doesn’t matter.”
Twilight hadn’t answered—and now there would be no answer. Probably North Twilight thought that the rocket had already carried Sigma to East Twilight, and East Twilight thought the plans had been changed. Because of the solar storm, the two cities were almost certainly cut off from each other now.
There would be no relief rocket. And the only hope now was to get the ruined ship repaired.
Chapter 5 Only Two Weeks
The emergency rations were cut still further. From now on, no power could be used in any of the homes, and the dome itself would be kept in a sort of half-bright condition. Fuel would have to be conserved to the limit.
To make matters worse, some of their precious supply of partly exhausted uranium slugs would have to be taken to the ship. They had debated over it for hours, while trying to make sure that every possible bit of uranium was taken that could be spared, but Rogers was still uncertain as to whether it was enough. His final answer was the only possible one—it had to be.
Men were busy making a thorough survey of the situation as Dick, Charlie and Rogers left, taking three other men with them, and carrying a load of supplies on a rough sled that had been rigged up behind the tractor. Meantime, the only two who knew anything about flying a rocket were busily comparing notes, trying to fill in on theory, and devouring the f
ew scraps of information that were to be found in the dome. Neither felt confident of his ability as a pilot, but the one who seemed to know the most—after they had decided that—would take his chance.
The treads on the tractor had been gone over and put in better condition while the three slept, and now they churned along at a rapid pace, taking it easy only on the roughest sections where the sled might be hurt at too much speed.
Johnny hadn’t appeared, and Dick was worried. He felt sure that the wispy had not been guilty of ruining the radio, but the sudden absence of his pet looked suspicious. On the other hand, he was hoping that the creature wouldn’t show up. Two of the men were riding outside on the sled, and they would almost surely fire at the first sight of a wispy. They didn’t care to hear about the difference between spooks of one kind and those of another. To them, a spook was a spook, and they had a score to settle, even beyond their usual hatred of the creatures.
It looked as if Johnny would stay away, Dick decided, and relaxed a little. Then the creature appeared, coming in from the north at full speed, and braking to an instant stop in front of the tractor.
“Spook!” the radio in the tractor said in a voice that belonged to one of the two men,
“Dick’s pet,” Rogers answered over the set. “Take it easy. We don’t know he killed the radio, and he’s done us a few favors.”
“Don’t care, we haven’t time to fool around. Swing the tractor a bit, Bart, and give us a good shot at him!”
Battle on Mercury Page 4