Battle on Mercury

by Lester del Rey (as Erik van Lhin)

  “It was Fullmark,” Dick admitted, and there was still bitterness in his voice as he thought of the days of waiting, only to find that he had been flunked without even knowing what his marks on the annual test were. “But I was too old the next year.”

  Snaith dropped the subject at that point for a moment, and then frowned. He hesitated, cleared his throat, and then looked up. “Yeah. Well, you’ll find a whole set of books in my place—brought them along because I never felt too sure about myself. They were meant to be a teach-yourself course, and they’re as good as you can get outside of a university. If I don’t come back, you tell my wife they’re yours. If I do make it, you can borrow them whenever you want them.”

  Dick gulped out a confused thanks, which the other took without really listening. If he didn’t come back, Dick thought, it wouldn’t do any good to have the books. You couldn’t learn much in two weeks. But if the rocket carried him through, a chance to study out of modern books was more than he’d ever hoped for.

  He quit thinking about the matter then, and tried to help Snaith work out all the possible maneuvers on the controls, feeling the ship in his head as best he could. It should have helped a little, since he caught several bad moves, though Snaith seemed to be doing a good job of pretending, on the whole.

  Finally he stuck out a hand awkwardly, and the other took it. There wasn’t much sense in saying good-by, since Snaith would be back in a couple of hours—or good-bys would be permanent, probably.

  Dick went out, and the lock of the rocket closed behind him. The men got into the tractor and drove it out of the way of the big tube’s blast.

  Snaith began as Charlie had suggested. A spurt of hot gasses came from under the ship, to show that the steering rocket was there, and then from the rear as the big tube warmed up. He let it run for a minute, and then must have turned full power into the little steering jet.

  Small as the jet was, it held more power than would have been thought. It couldn’t lift the ship, but it did make it tremble and seem about to rise.

  Finally there was a long blast from the rear. The ship seemed to hesitate. It began to slide forward, with the nose tilting up slowly as the steering rocket lifted it. It picked up speed. Then, with a savage blast of superhot gasses, it was jumping forward and up, twisting as it lifted.

  It swung in a great arc, heading steadily more toward the vertical. It kept going that way, while a groan came from Charlie and Rogers.

  Snaith hadn’t cut it off in time. Then the steering rocket stopped, and the opposite side shot out a gout of flame. It tipped the little rocket nose back to vertical, but again he had overshot.

  Wobbling and lifting in spurts, the ship began to climb. Snaith must have been dying a thousand deaths inside, but he was improving. The ship went upward, and now began to turn carefully toward East Twilight. It was picking up speed steadily.

  “Looks as if he’ll make it,” Charlie said. “He …”

  But he never finished. The rocket seemed to stumble in a sudden blind confusion. It tilted upward, and back down again. It jerked sideways, and then wobbled uncertainly.

  “The fool,” Dr. Holmes cried beside Dick. Rogers shook his head sharply. “No—not Snaith’s fault. It’s the fuel—it isn’t feeding evenly. Something clogged or impurities in it. I knew it was a risk—I knew it—but I didn’t know how to test it … Right! Now up! No, no!”

  It was too late then, however. The ship had twisted downward in one of its wild spurts. It was perhaps two miles away, but the country was flat, and they could follow it all the way as it tumbled down. Snaith had cut off his steering jet, and given himself a chance to get organized. Rut he had almost no time. At the last moment he jerked the nose up, and managed to get some of the force of the big tube directed downward.

  But there wasn’t time to recover.

  The rocket hit, throwing up clouds of mixed gasses and dust from the ground. It seemed to sag. Somehow, in spite of the hard fall, Snaith had almost made a tail landing. But not quite. The ship suddenly bent over, and came down, this time on its side. It bounced, hit again, bounced feebly, and lay still.

  “He got the blast off,” Rogers said. “There may be a chance. Come on!”

  The big blast had been cut after the first landing, showing that Snaith had been still alive. But it might have been a dying motion, or the second hit as it turned sideways might have finished what the first shock had only begun.

  Charlie was urging the tractor over the ground at its top speed, bouncing along, leaping wildly when they hit a small boulder, but no longer worrying about the treads. They were at the rocket in less than two minutes. Rogers and Dr. Holmes were already through the airlock and clinging grimly to the little outside rail. Dick jumped after them as they slewed to a stop, and was beside them as they dashed through the airlock, which had been ripped open in the crash.

  Snaith lay on his side, crumpled around the pilot’s chair. His legs were bent into a position totally impossible for any normal legs, and one of his arms seemed to be in the wrong position.

  Holmes watched. “Breathing. Must have caught the first shock on his legs, braced himself with his arm for the second.”

  There was nothing they could do there. Holmes dashed back to the tractor, while Dick and his father picked up Snaith and moved along carefully, trying not to shake the man too badly. Inside the little tractor, they began pulling him out of his suit. The legs looked horrible, and one side of his body was a mass of bruises. But Holmes grew somewhat more cheerful as he saw the man pulled from the suit.

  He made a careful examination as quickly as he could. Then he reached into his bag and came out with a hypo, which he injected. “Not too bad. I think there is no serious internal injury, and his head escaped damage. If I’m right, he’ll be all right in six weeks, once the bones knit. Right now, about all I can do is put him out of pain with this.”

  Charlie eased the tractor into motion, trying not to jar the injured man. But Snaith looked up. His eyes rested on Rogers, “Sorry,” he said thickly. “Sorry. Guess I let you down. Guess . .

  He passed out again before he could finish, or before Rogers could assure him that it hadn’t been his fault.

  They rode back as slowly as they could, though the drug kept Snaith from feeling anything from the moment he lost consciousness again. Charlie clung to the wheel, staring at the road he was following.

  “Never liked that guy,” he said at last. “Just proves a man never gets too old to be a fool. Never saw any pilot could of done better’n he done. Hey!”

  Dick looked out where his finger was pointing, and frowned. Along one of the ridges to the left a thin strip of blue fire seemed to run. It leaped up, and bounced back, to run on further.

  “Another spook?” Dick asked.

  “No,” Rogers told him. “No, and I wish it were. Though that may be the way the spooks got started, from something like that that just accidentally hit on a pattern that had some degree of life. No, that’s just radiation from the sun hitting hard enough to break away free electrons from the rock— and maybe it has some electrons in it that are shot here all the way from the sun. That’s the way a storm starts out, when it is really going to be a storm.”

  “Worst I ever saw, with the spots up there no further around old Sol’s face,” Charlie said. “Right now, I’d even like to be a’heading back for Earth. You betcha!”

  Dick watched the fire flicker over the ridge again. From somewhere, one of the ball lightning things shot into view, and streaked down toward the dancing flame. It moved back and forth, apparently sucking up the energy that was being released. Those creatures were meant to live on Mercury, Dick realized. To them, the worst the sun could do was only a chance for more food.

  Men were foolish to try to compete with them here!

  Chapter 7 A Map from Johnny

  The dome had known by the way the tractor was moving that things had gone wrong, and they drove into a crowd that was completely silent. Almost instantly, those ah
ead drew out of the way, giving them room to drive on to Dr. Holmes’s place.

  Dick had seen enough, and he had no desire to witness the setting of the bones that began at once. His father and Charlie finally came out, with the doctor behind them.

  “Let me know if you ever want to be a nurse,” the doctor was telling Charlie. “I could use you.”

  “Not me,” Charlie denied. “Out there when I was young, we used to have to do things ourselves. Set my own leg once—and I did a good job of it. But I don’t like it, and I never will like it.”

  “How is he?” Dick asked his father.

  Rogers tried to smile. “He’ll be all right. Doc says he’ll live as long as any of us. He’s shaken up, and those bones are pretty bad, but they’ll all heal, if given time.”

  He didn’t mention that there wouldn’t be time, and Dick let it drop. It was easier not to put it into words. It was pleasanter to pretend that everything was going to be normal, and that their last hope of living beyond the end of then power hadn’t just failed.

  Neither he nor his father wanted to go home at once. They knew that Dick’s mother would take it without flinching, but somehow, that only made it worse. “Should have stayed on Earth, I guess,” Rogers said somberly. “This coming here was all my fault.”

  There was nothing Dick could say to that. They moved along the little street toward the big port, and then began to turn back, no longer able to put off what must be done.

  Then a commotion at the gate caught their attention, and they swung back. The old watchman was still there, and he was struggling violently with another of the men—-one of the miners who had gone out with them to repair the ship. It didn’t take much to spot the cause. Hanging just in front of the port, as if trying to come in, was the round ball shape of Johnny Quicksilver.

  The younger man finally wrested the blaster away from the watchman. “I told you not to shoot,” he said hotly. “Doggone, right now it won’t matter if the thing does ruin the dome. And if Charlie and young Dick want the thing left alive, you aren’t going to kill it! After what they’ve done, they have some rights around here!”

  “Thanks,” Dick told him. He’d been one of those who had wanted to shoot Johnny from the sled, but he seemed to have switched sides. Then Dick turned to the port, where the metal screen had been shoved aside for the watchman to look out.

  “Come on in, Johnny, if you want to. But I warn you, somebody’s going to take a shot at you. You’re not going to be popular with everybody.”

  The wispy moved up to the transparent plastic, seeming to test it for the presence of metal. Then, finding that some of it was unshielded, he shrank to a small sphere, and came through it, landing in the air near Dick’s face.

  “Better keep him in your room, if you want him,” Rogers said. “But he cant have any power, and he’s going to get pretty hungry here away from the sun.”

  “You’d better go back, Johnny,” Dick told him. He’d forgotten for the moment that the energy from the sun was necessary to Johnny’s life. “Go on, scram.”

  The creature paid no attention. It began moving about carefully, looking into this and that as it went. Dick didn’t know whether it could really see or not, but it must have had some way of sensing things. It moved on down the street while he tried to keep up with it. Then it shot toward the entrance of the central store, where all the usual needs of the people were handed out.

  The storekeeper was slowly reaching for his blaster when Dick and his father caught up, but he made no strong protest at their orders to let Johnny alone. He watched the wispy with suspicious eyes, but made no comment.

  Johnny settled down then, coming into position over a small tablet of thin plastic sheets that the children used in school for drawing. He hung there, and then seemed to strain himself. The sheet moved very slightly upward, probably drawn by electrostatic force, just as a hair is drawn to a comb that has been rubbed with wool.

  Dick tried picking up several of the sheets, and Johnny bobbed up and down quickly, as he sometimes did to indicate that was right. While Rogers signed for the tablet, Dick spread out one of the sheets on the counter.

  Johnny dropped downward at once, and a tiny stream of sparks began to come out of him, running against the plastic and into the counter below. The plastic smoked and began to melt where they touched, but the sparks came in such a thin stream that they left only lines on the sheet, not harming most of it.

  Then, as if realizing that he was risking too much by sticking around, Johnny suddenly pulled himself back into his smallest form and shot down the street like a bullet. The old watchman was just starting to close the metal sheet over the plastic window in the port when Johnny hit the clear section and was gone.

  “Makes no sense to me,” Rogers said. “I thought he was supposed to be intelligent.”

  “Anything that can draw a map is intelligent,” Dick said quietly. He handed over the sheet he had been examining.

  Rogers looked at him strangely, and then at the sheet with the odd little lines and rough spots all over it. “Does look a little like a map,” he admitted. Then he turned as Charlie entered the store, obviously following them. “Hey, Charlie, take a look at this. Dick thinks it’s a map Johnny has drawn for him.”

  Charlie studied it slowly. “Sure could be. And could be just nonsense. I’d have to study this a mite more. Dunno what good a map would do, though.”

  “None,” Rogers said. “Johnny has probably seen men writing, and he thinks it has some value to them. So he came in here and made marks about something. But we can’t tell what it really is about.”

  “Could be you’re right,” Charlie said. But he motioned Dick to fall back with him. “And could be your father is wrong, Dick. You hang onto that until we can get together in your room. Maybe I can make something of it.”

  In the room, though, Charlie had a hard time of it. He turned it and twisted it about, trying to see it from different angles. He shook his head, and then stopped. “Now … hmm … it’d be about there, at that. Wait a minute.”

  He yanked down the map of Mercury that Dick had been using, and began marking on it, using a pencil that had twelve different colored leads in it. When he finished, he compared the two.

  “It’s a map, all right.” He nodded positively. “Only Johnny ain’t seen much of maps. He’s put it down by the way the ores and metals are put on the surface; reckon he figgers since we’re all the time hunting metals, that’s what we’ll recognize. See, the big lead lake, then Big Lead River, and over here copper. Deeper he dug into the sheet, heavier the metal. Say, that’s right smart when you think of it! Yep. And I know what it is. It’s a map of how we can get to Twilight—not East Twilight, but the last Relay Station. Never thought of that, but it’s nearer.”

  Dick gasped. He’d forgotten the Relay Station, too. It had been set up originally as a link between East Twilight and North Twilight, but with the coming of more powerful radios it had been abandoned. Then, because it had to be justified as long as it was up, they’d fixed it so that it would serve for a group of scientists who had wanted to study the silicone life that wandered along the Twilight Zone.

  “We could reach that, and send a signal right into East Twilight, or get a lift from some of the scientists,” he said. “Charlie, can it be done?”

  The old man frowned. “If I was twenty, I’d do it for you, boy. But I dunno. I’m getting old. Maybe some of the young blades here might take the tractor, though.”

  They went down to hunt up Rogers, and show it to him. But he shook his head. “No, I’m afraid I can’t go along. It isn’t exact; you admit it’s only a rough map. And there are ore deposits all over Mercury. No wonder you found something to it— it’s like a man looking at clouds on Earth and seeing animals in them. I couldn’t send a man out in a worn-out tractor on a trip like that, even if it was ten times as plain a map. Dick, face it— Johnny’s done some clever things, but that doesn’t mean everything he does has a purpose we can understand
/’

  “But . . Dick began.

  Rogers shook his head firmly. “No, And I don’t want any more talk about it, Dick. If I thought there was any chance you were right, I’d be in that tractor myself. But we can’t go on believing in fairies—and that’s what this amounts to.”

  The old man and Dick went back to Dick’s room. Dick took the map and again compared it. “You’re sure you marked out the metal deposits right on this, Uncle Charlie?”

  “After over forty years out there, you think I wouldn’t know ’em better’n the back of my hand? You betcha they’re right, Dick.”

  Dick picked up the sheet and compared it again. “Then Dad’s wrong, Charlie. And even if he might be right, we can’t turn this down. We don’t know a good way to the Relay Station—but Johnny has it marked down. With seven hundred people maybe dying here, we can’t turn this down!”

  “Blamed right we can’t,” the old man agreed. “And don’t you worry. I don’t have to take orders from Bart Rogers—I’m a free prospector, my own boss. And out there a-waiting is my own tractor. Hot-lead, I may be old, but I ain’t that old. Don’t you worry, I’ll make it.”

  “We’ll make it,” Dick corrected him. “I’ve got something we need, too. I’ve got a chance to get help from Johnny, and I’ve got a robot, which might be handy.”

  “Would be,” Charlie admitted. “Too bad I can’t take you, son, but I ain’t kidnapping you, and that’s what they’d accuse me of. Besides, I’ve been a-wandering out there most of my life, and you’re a dome boy. You stay here, like your father ordered you.”

  Dick thought it over, studying the old man, and seeing that he was serious. “You need supplies, I suppose?” he asked at last.