Battle on Mercury

by Lester del Rey (as Erik van Lhin)

  Something hit Dick across the back then, and he went down in a sprawl, while one of the old man’s hands began clawing over him, hunting for metal in the ground that could make the metal of the suit a ground for the electricity in the demon. They seemed to have picked the worst possible spot for it, though. There was no sign of metal, and the rock they were on was enough insulation for the creature. It hovered over them, as if gloating. Before they could roll toward other spots, it began to swoop down.

  At the same time, another ball of lightning darted toward them.

  Chapter 9 Stranded

  The second ball of blue light came glancing in, and something about it was suddenly familiar. “Johnny!” Dick cried. At the same time he heard Charlie’s voice echo his words. Johnny came in low and fast, with none of his usual fooling around. Static suddenly burst in their phones as they began to try to get up. Dick found his feet first, and helped to pull Charlie up. He realized now that all that had saved them before was the presence of the tiny little transmitter in the tractor, and that the only safe place was back beside it.

  But now, above them, an obvious battle was going on, Johnny had come in before the other had spotted him, and had gotten in what seemed to be a single stroke—a hissling pop of electricity. Now he was moving back, as if trying to lead the demon away from the two men.

  They backed toward the tractor, watching the battle going on. They had no way of knowing which was a telling blow and which was only wasted effort. At first it seemed that Johnny was winning, since the other creature was being led away. Then it seemed less certain. Twice Johnny had ducked, and twice the other had seemed to make a point.

  The demon was bigger than Johnny, and even bluer, which would indicate that he was in fairly compact form. It wasn’t too surprising that he might be stronger, since he’d probably spent his time feeding on the fire along the rocks, while Johnny had been wasting his energy leading them.

  Now there could be no question about it. Johnny was losing. He was taking the evasive action, while the demon was plunging in. And Johnny was shrinking, without growing brighter. What energy he had was obviously being sucked out of him.

  He swooped back for the tractor now. But the other no longer seemed to avoid the field of the little transmitter; if it was like a stench to the demon, it was a stench that could be tolerated when more urgent business called the creature to draw close.

  Johnny swooped around the tractor twice, ducking each time. Then he drew himself down to his smallest size and made a sudden dart for the robot. Pete had been standing motionlessly. Now he erupted into action. He picked up the metal shovel that had been fastened to the back of the tractor and jumped to the ground, running rapidly toward the demon.

  In his hand he brandished the metal tool. His actions were not quite smooth, as if he were trying too hard to control the robot. But his intentions were plain enough. He’d met his match at the purely electrical form of battle they knew, but he had picked up new abilities, and he intended to try them out.

  “Hell lose,” Charlie said roughly. “He ain’t familiar enough with it, and he’s forgot how slow that robot is compared to himself. By golly, now I wish I had brought a blaster. I’d plumb enjoy seeing that thing frizzle. Hey, wait a minute.”

  But Dick had already figured it out, and was up on the tractor before him. He ripped out a section of wiring with a savage jerk, and bounded down, handing one strand to the old man and taking the other himself. With long leaps, he began moving out to where Johnny was taking his stand. Dick was stripping off the insulation as he went, and Charlie was right at his heels.

  The demon was apparently willing to take on all contenders. It darted in toward the robot, and away doubtfully as Johnny managed to get Pete’s arms up with the shovel. Then it touched the metal of the shovel in a quick brush, and drew back. It had found that the metal wasn’t grounded, and it was no longer afraid of this strange metamorphosis of its enemy.

  Dick let out a scream as it darted down. But Johnny had also seen the error of his attempt He snapped out of Pete at once, leaving the robot to slump quickly. The demon hesitated again, apparently puzzled by this constant change of form of Johnny.

  Then Dick and Charlie were on the scene. Dick tossed the wire down onto the only outcropping of metal ore he could see, and stepped on it, forcing it down and kicking a piece of rock over it. The flexible wire coiled back over his head, its end bare, though there was still insulation where he held it.

  Charlie had taken a stand beside him, imitating his actions.

  “Get between us, Johnny,” Dick cried. “Stick to us, and don’t try anything.”

  Johnny hesitated as the demon seemed about to swoop, but he had no choice but to obey. The battle had gone out of his control. He slipped between the two men, holding himself to a small, tight ball of force.

  The demon came swooping in, sure of itself at last. It might have feared a pole of metal, but it couldn’t see anything menacing in the thin wires that didn’t even stick up into the air.

  Charlie and Dick struck together. Dick suddenly whipped his arms out and down, and the wire snapped up over his head, describing a sharp arc. There was a flash from Charlie’s wire at the same time, while Johnny huddled closer to the ground, but trusted them enough to remain.

  Then a lance of fire lashed down the wire. It had struck the demon dead center and formed a perfect path to the ground. The electrons that gave the creature life suddenly decided to go home to Mother Mercury. They singed the insulation off the wire as they passed, and Dick felt something like a hammer hitting his hands. But the wire carried most of it, and his feet were on rock.

  He caught himself before he fell and turned to Charlie, but the old man was shaking his head. “I was about a millionth of a second behind you, Dick,” he admitted. “You got practically all of it. Doggone, I’m sure a-getting old. Slowing up, turning to dry rot They’ll be putting me out to pasture any day now, I betcha.”

  Dick shook his hands, but was surprised to find that he had not been hurt. It had been a shock, but not one strong enough to injure him. ‘‘Hope you’ve got more wire,” he said.

  Charlie nodded. “Plenty of this light stuff. Leave it here. No good with the insulation like that, anyhow.”

  Johnny moved ahead of them back to the tractor, and then seemed to remember the robot. He went back for it, and made sure it was in its proper position and the shovel back in place before coming away again. Dick looked at him, worrying about the loss of energy. But Johnny seemed less worried. He moved outward, and began grazing about, hunting for the fires that danced up from the rocks. In a few minutes he seemed to be his old self again.

  “Johnny must like us, Charlie,” Dick said. “He could have stayed by the tractor and been safe. But he came out all set to fight as soon as he saw us in danger.”

  “I figgered out he liked you a long time ago,” Charlie told him. “Hadda like you, if he was willing to go through all these blamed demons, just to see you got to where you wanted to go. He ain’t a fool—he knew what he was getting into before he ever drew that map. Now where in tarnation did I put that box of welding rods? Oh, sure. Here.”

  The repair wasn’t as bad as Dick had expected, though it took the better part of another hour. They couldn’t be sure of it, of course—there was no way, even, of knowing that there had been no other flaws. But the repair seemed to be satisfactory, since the tractor ran smoothly again.

  It was growing cooler outside now. Lead was solid most of the time. The sun had seemed to drop in the sky, going further and further west as they went east. And since the rays from it were now at a slant, so that the full force couldn’t hit, the rocks were no longer over seven hundred degrees in temperature. They were probably down to less than five hundred, which was cool compared with what Dick was used to.

  Another day went by, and now Dick began to have hopes. They were drawing close to Twilight, when considered against the distance they had originally had to come. And he began to think tha
t another two days of travel would bring them there.

  Then the tractor began to act up. There was a smell of ozone, and a faint hissing that told of something wrong with the motor.

  They stopped the tractor, and Dick tossed back the cover and began examining it. He straightened up, with a relieved look on his face. “Just the brushes worn down until the copper contact is beginning to hit,” he told Charlie. “We’ll be fine as soon as we put in new brushes.”

  Charlie nodded reluctantly. “You mean iffen we put ’em in, Dick. I ain’t been back where I could get them kind of supplies for quite a spell. I put in my last set—the ones right in there—quite a spell back. Well, we can always walk.”

  “Maybe not,” Dick decided. “They used to make brushes that were just that—tiny brushes of copper- before they got around to finding solid graphite worked as well. We could try making some.” Charlie wasn’t too sure of the idea—nor was Dick, for that matter. But they dug up pieces of silicone plastic and began boring tiny holes and pushing staples made out of their smallest wire through them. Finally, when the bristles were all in, they trimmed them off and installed them.

  For a little while, everything went on as if the motor had just been shipped out from Earth. It purred on sweetly, and the scorched plains of Mercury went sweeping by behind them. Then it began to misbehave. The power fell off, though the meter showed as great a drain as ever. Dick thought it over, trying to see how the trouble could come. Suddenly he sat up sharply, and grabbed for the switch.

  He was a few seconds too late. There was a sudden hissing spit from the motor, and then it went dead.

  ‘‘It chewed off the wire, and the blower couldn’t get rid of it, the way it could blow out the graphite dust. It must have gotten into the works and shorted the whole thing,” he told Charlie. “I guess I really pulled a blooper.”

  “Got us further n we’d have gone without it, I reckon,” Charlie said. “It ain’t what I’d call a real blooper. Got any other ideas?”

  Dick considered disconnecting the motor completely and trying to run a belt from the generator back to the power take-off, but he couldn’t see any way to do it. And it would have been a makeshift that might have lasted no more than minutes.

  He gave up. “I guess we walk.”

  “Well,” Charlie said slowly, “then we walk. And I guess we can feel lucky we got this far. Anyhow, it’s about time we put that no-good robot of yours to work. Come on, let’s get going.”

  They piled out, and began cutting off the dome of the tank. Charlie’s face looked as sad as if he’d been cutting off his own leg, but it was his idea. They had to have a sled to pull their supplies in, and a section of the dome over the tractor would be as nearly perfect a sled as they could get—provided they didn’t load it too heavy. The plastic was as tough as metal, and considerably lighter.

  Next they began sorting out what they could take. The first requirement was for oxygen. Fortunately, the beryllium-steel bottles in which it came were lighter and stronger than the steel monstrosities the first men in space had carried. But it wasn’t easy to carry enough of the vital gas, even when compressed to a liquid. After that they packed up the tiny little batteries which would keep their suits cooled and power Pete from now on. Dick frowned at that. There hadn’t been too many of the right kind of batteries for that, even when they started the journey.

  Charlie threw in an air-tent—a thin plastic bag that was big enough to hold a man while he crawled in and loaded his suit with fresh supplies of food, or was forced to take it off for any reason. And finally, they loaded on a bare minimum of food and enough water to make up for what the units in their suits couldn’t reclaim.

  It was a sad load when they finished. There wasn’t enough of anything, and yet there was too much of everything. It would make a heavy load for Pete. As they went on, it would grow lighter, of course, but it might grow so light that there would be nothing left. They had no exact idea of how far from the beginnings of the twilight belt they were, but they were certain it was a good deal further than they liked.

  Pete bent against the load obediently. It moved, though it was obvious that it took nearly all his strength.

  Charlie went back and found more cord. With that, he added two loops to the sled, stretching ahead so that he and Dick could add their strength to that of the robot.

  The old man stood for a long minute, staring at the wreck of his tractor. “Twenty years in the old machine,” he said slowly. “Traded my first one for her. Well, maybe if we get where we want, I can rent me another and come out for her. She’s a good tractor, Dick—better’n any they make nowadays. And if I’d treated her right and kept her fed, she’d be taking us along as smooth as a clipper, right this second.”

  Then he turned his back on the wreck, and bent against the cord. The sled began to move behind them, and Johnny went ahead, hovering slowly as he began to try the difficult job of finding a trail they could follow with the load.

  “Well, here’s where we make a real Mercury man out of you, Dick,” he said. “And I got a feeling I’m going to hope I’m as good before we’re through with this. I’m getting old, son—downright old and useless. But we got work to do.”

  He set the pace, stepping along briskly in spite of the load and the age he complained of.

  Dick looked out over the landscape, and fear began to gnaw at his stomach. Inside the tractor, or within a few miles of his home dome, Mercury had been nothing terrible, in spite of all the wild tales. He’d grown up with it. But here, stranded and with an unknown distance ahead of him, it was another matter.

  The hard, rough surface under his heavy feet pounded back at him with every step. The blazing sun beat down, still too hot for any living thing except the wispies. And the cracks and pits ahead became ravines and little hills and jagged rocks as he reached them.

  Dick had no idea as to how fast they could travel now. Not as fast as with the tractor at its slowest, he knew.

  And from now on, they’d be traveling only half the time. In the tractor, he and Charlie had taken turns sleeping, and had kept going steadily. There was no way to do that on foot. They’d have to hole up somehow each night, and strike out only during the hours they called day.

  He tried counting his steps, but the number became meaningless. And finally he discovered what every prospector had said over and over, but what everyone had had to learn for himself—that the best way to keep going was just to keep going. Any trick a man tried to make it seem like less distance only called his attention to how much distance really was.

  Dick stopped thinking after a while and just plodded on, his feet rising and falling in time to Charlie’s even pace.

  Chapter 10 The Wispies

  Johnny seemed to sense their need for rest at the end of their day. He had hesitated several times as he went along, picking out the smoothest roads for them. But now he suddenly ducked aside, to come back and indicate they were to follow him. They no longer protested anything he did. And they were both glad that he had taken the decision out of their hands when they came to the little cavern he had picked out.

  It wasn’t much of a shelter, but it did get them out of the direct glare of the sun. Here the heat all came through the rocks, and since Johnny had picked a place almost free from metals, the heat was conducted fairly slowly. It meant a saving for their precious batteries, since the suits would have less work to do.

  They ate slowly, too tired to push the food up to their mouths. Charlie was still apparently the same as ever, but he was making more cracks about being old. Dick wondered what he would do when he reached Charlie’s age; even now he was having a hard time holding his own with the older man.

  Dick had slept once or twice before in his suit, but then it had been as a lark. Now it was serious business; there was no way to take it off for any length of time. And he had the disadvantage of being tired, and of having his shoulders ache from the load of the sled.

  He tried to stretch out and relax, but found
that the suit simply wasn’t adapted for that. Charlie apparently knew more about it. The old prospector hunted around until he found a spot where he could recline in a half-sitting position, and settled down.

  “Keep your radio on,” he warned Dick. “My snores may bother you a mite, but we can’t lose track of each other.”

  He fell asleep almost at once. Dick hunted around, trying several spots, before he realized the first one was the best. Then he began to itch. He had thought he was over that stage of getting along in a spacesuit. It always happened at first, when a man was just learning to wear one, but he hadn’t been bothered for months. Now he found he had to pull his arms out of the sleeves to scratch. Once out, they had a tendency to go to sleep, since the suit pressed against them too tightly.

  But finally sleep hit him. If Charlie snored, he didn’t know it. And he wouldn’t have cared.

  Charlie woke him in the morning. And for the first time, he began to understand that the man was old. Charlie’s will was as strong as ever, and he could do as much in any day as a young man could. But his body recovered more slowly. Dick felt almost normal, but it was easy to see that Charlie hadn’t gotten back all his strength and spirit, by any means. His face was still lined more deeply than normal, and his eyes showed a touch of red. But he made a joke of it, and began loading the sled again, to give it balance.

  This time Pete could handle it alone most of the time. The robot had been cut off completely during the night, to save power. But Pete was lucky. He couldn’t feel tired, nor could he grow weaker as the day wore on.

  They trudged on, striking a long section of hilly territory, where even Johnny couldn’t find a good path. They had to go back and pick up the tow- ropes again, to give the robot a helping hand.