Dick was shocked, but he couldn’t really believe it. He had only been in the twilight belt a few times, and those had all been at North Twilight, which really lay at the pole, and wasn’t like the rest of the belt. The real belt was the section where the sun seemed to come up out of the sky and climb a ways, then turn back down. Each eighty-eight days Mercury went around the sun once. And each time she did, she wobbled, first to the right and then to the left, making these narrow bands where there was a season of dawn and dusk. On the belt, men could set up larger cities, since the expense of cooling or heating was nothing beyond what it was worth.
He studied the sun now, noting its position. He stirred uneasily, trying to remember how high it should be, and failing. But he had a feeling that Charlie was right, and that they had been led into the twilight belt, but not where they had expected to come out.
It was too late to change now. They had perhaps twelve hours of air each, if they were careful to guard it and to keep from useless exertions.
They had left the sled behind, since there was now almost nothing to carry, but they were not making any better time because of it. Their muscles were rapidly reaching the stage where they would be able to move only by lying down and waiting for a rain to wash them downhill—and it never rained on Mercury.
Johnny had gone off again. He acted as if this was all territory he had never seen before and that he needed to check up as he went along. That fitted with Charlie’s idea that they had been forced to take a big detour for some reason. Yet Johnny was also acting as if they were coming to some objective which should be reached at almost any moment.
The wispy came rushing back now, bobbing about. He was more excited than they had seen him since he had first begun the trip, but they had no way of knowing whether it was good news or bad.
They didn’t waste time trying to quiz him. They tottered to their feet and followed along. If Johnny knew where they could find help with the amount of air they had left, it would all be well. If he didn’t, they could do no better by themselves. By this time, they were quite sine that Johnny knew exactly how long they could live on the amount of air they had. His other behavior had indicated a long, profound consideration of the peculiarities of humans, and they doubted if anything so important as air had escaped his attention.
Sometimes now, things were all confused. They had cut down the trickle of air flowing into their suits. Men could live longer that way, since most breathing wasted a good percentage of the oxygen. But it meant living in air that was stuffy and thick, and they grew sleepy at the first exertion.
At the moment, Dick half thought he was Charlie, and was wondering why Charlie had fixed himself up to imitate him. It didn’t seem quite right. Charlie was carrying on a long conversation with some old acquaintance in which he assured them that he was much too old to lead the expedition to the Bronx Zoo, whatever that was. He’d seen an aardvark dancing with a dodo, and he wanted air to waltz me around again …
No, that last part was Dick, and he had been trying to sing.
“Will you lend me your comb, Vance?” Charlie asked politely, tapping Dick on the shoulder. Tm going to the aviary this afternoon, and my brother is dining with crumpets.”
Dick shook his head heavily. “Porky Williams, if you hit my sister with that stick again, I’m gonna fasten you to a filament connection, connected all wrong, and Snaith should have known better, don’t you fly well?”
They separated, and started off in opposite directions, each apparently satisfied.
Then Dick stumbled, just as Johnny was coming down to take the situation in hand with a few mild shocks—or so it seemed, from the position in which Dick suddenly saw him. He had come within an inch of Dick’s helmet, but now he backed up quickly, and jerked downward to the thing which Dick’s shoe had touched.
It was a stake with a metal flag on the top, and it said that Henry Simonoff was taking claim to this.
Dick looked up slowly, studying the landscape. Then he let out a yell, and twisted over the valve on his oxygen tank, until the musty air was whipped away, and his head was clear again. He spotted Charlie wandering on, with a smile wreathing his face, and took out after the old prospector.
But Charlie seemed to have guessed that his separation from Dick was wrong. One of his fingers had already touched his oxygen valve. Now he looked up as Dick reached him. Reason was back in his eyes as he followed Dick’s pointing finger.
Five hundred feet away, a small dome that might house fifty people stuck up from the ground.
They headed for it, without making any useless remarks, running as fast as their weary legs would carry them. But long before they reached it, they knew part of the answer.
The dome was empty. It must have been used at one time, but now it had been idle for months.
It wasn’t a hasty evacuation for the storm, with most of the supplies left behind, but a real desertion. And that meant that there might be nothing left inside.
But they couldn’t tell until they’d tried it.
Chapter 13 Hope and Despair
There was air inside, as they found when they pulled the lock shut behind them. It clanged with a sound that could be sent only through air. They exchanged glances, and began pulling their helmets off, cutting the oxygen circuits out first.
It was breathable air, sweet and rich after the stale stuff from their tanks, and they stood gulping it in. Dick began to yank off the rest of his space- suit, and stood finally in his normal street clothes, twisting about for the luxurious feeling of having
nothing to hold him in. He wanted a bath and a bed. But mostly he wanted air against his skin, and nothing else.
Charlie had stripped his suit off, too. They hung them near the airlock, and the older man nodded toward a small section in the center of the little dome. “Hydroponic garden, and still growing, though it’s in bad shape,” Dick agreed. “No wonder the air is still good. Hey, Charlie—food!”
The food wasn’t as vital as the air had been, but they had been fasting long enough and living light before then. They moved back to the gardens, to find tomatoes ripe and some melons that were almost ready. It wasn’t the richest meal in their lives, but it was satisfactory enough. The melons were rich in sugar, and the tomatoes in minerals and vitamins. What more could they want?
Charlie investigated carefully as they went along, but they could see no sign of the reason the place had been deserted. “Must have been some scientific work with the silicone beasts,” he decided. “At one time, Earth went crazy about that, so they probably sent a staff out. Plenty of money behind it.”
Dick nodded. The place was tiny, and built with a single house and garden center sort of plan, rather than the separate dwellings to be found in the larger domes. But it had been as well equipped as a place of this size could be.
They found beds made up in one room, though most of the sheets had been taken away. Dick thought again about a bath, but he was too tired. After the worry, he couldn’t even think about such necessary things as air any more. All he wanted to do was to lie down with no suit over him, and sleep like a human being.
They explored the place more thoroughly in the morning, when their heads were clearer and they could concentrate on the real reason for their trip. They began by looking for some means of communication, but there was none. That wasn’t surprising, of course, since many scientific studies were done here without radio communication.
Their main interest was in finding a few tanks of oxygen and a couple of spare batteries with which they could resume the trip to Relay Station. But both of these were missing. The air inside the dome was all there was—and when that leaked away, there would be no more. Tanks had been connected once, by the looks of things, but had been taken away. And there wasn’t a trace of a battery in the place.
“Must of come from Earth, all right,” Charlie said hotly. “Pull up and leave a dome—and no supplies in case a man gets stranded here, like us! You don’t find any Mercury men acting up
like that, Dick.”
Dick had to agree. It was customary to leave air and power in anything that was big enough to contain it, in case of emergencies. Men never completely abandoned a dome—except men from Earth, as Charlie had indicated.
But they did find a map, on which they located themselves, and also Relay Station. The station was to the south of them by a distance that would take about fifteen to twenty hours of hard hiking— and they had air enough for perhaps ten safe hours in their tanks.
“Looks like Johnny slipped on this one,” Charlie said. “Gotta give him credit for trying, but he missed it.”
“Maybe not,” Dick protested. But he could find no reason for his arguing, except that he couldn’t blame Johnny for not knowing the exact contents of all the domes on the planet.
After an hour more of searching Dick had discovered four empty oxygen flasks, hidden under a workbench and a tiny electric tractor that used huge, useless batteries, and which would go about as fast as a man walking. The batteries were still charged, and the machine was usable—but at no more than four miles an hour, which still wouldn’t take them to Relay Station before they ran out of air.
They were staring at it in disgust when Johnny came in—or rather, staggered in. He looked sick now, and nearly all of the pattern was missing from his surface. The domes here were not coated with metal, since it was too far from spooks and the heat was never that high. But he seemed to make an effort to come through the wall. He settled over the top of one of the several bulky batteries. At Dick’s nod, he dropped down, but sucked out the electricity slowly, as if trying to make sure that none was wasted.
It was a help, obviously, but he still needed a lot of building up, and he knew it. He darted forward several times and came back to circle their heads. Then he gathered speed and went sailing out through the wall of the dome, heading toward the center of the hotside.
His work had been done, though, and Dick knew that he’d already come much further than he should have. He’d wasted his strength to the limit, and had somehow found them a place where he thought they could accomplish their purpose. It was no fault of Johnny’s that they were as much failures as ever.
Charlie had been staring at the map he still carried with him, with this place and Relay Station marked in red. Now he spread it out on the little tractor that Dick had been studying. “Can you get more speed out of that thing, Dick?”
Dick shook his head, and the other nodded. “I thought so. Then there’s only one chance. And it isn’t too nice a one. It’ll depend on luck. What we short of, anyhow? Oxygen. Power enough, at least here in Twilight. We can get along without a lot of it. But we can’t get along without stuff to breathe.”
Dick nodded. Charlie pointed to the map, and drew a line straight out into the section that was always facing away from the sun. “Then there’s where you can find oxygen—iffen you’re lucky. It’s frozen out there. Every bit that this planet ever had went drifting over there and froze solid.”
Dick began to see what he was driving at. They had the four empty tanks, and there was the tractor—useless for any speed, but capable of carrying them along with a fair load. He measured the distance to the line that was marked “Frozen Waste,” and compared it to the scale below. It came out to about fifty miles, which would take a good twelve hours of traveling.
“I’ve been there,” Charlie interrupted his thoughts. “It ain’t that far—you come to scattered bits first, then this stuff where they got the line marked off. Iffen we’re lucky, we hit oxygen right after we get out of the twilight belt. T’otherwise ..
Otherwise, Dick thought, they would freeze to death, which would be better than dying of lack of oxygen. Out there all they had to do was open their suits, and the bitter cold would creep in …
He shook his head, knowing that they were still only half functioning. They were so poisoned by the fatigue of the trip and the complete hopelessness that had suddenly come to an end, without any real solution, that their minds were unable to focus on anything. Charlie kept knitting his brows and trying to work something out, but it was obvious the vague ideas in his head were as thick as those that Dick had.
There was one idea which might work. And right now they had to try it. With ten hours of oxygen apiece and with enough power for the little tractor, it was worth die gamble. If they made it, they could ride on in fair comfort to Relay Station, and even exist there until help came if they found it deserted and with no air.
He nodded slowly, and Charlie carefully put the map away. Dick was still thinking of a bath as he followed the older man out to make another meal on tomatoes and melons, but he knew that there wasn’t water enough here in free form—and there wasn’t time, either. How many days had it been since they left?
He asked Charlie, and received a startled look. “Why, it’s … by golly, how long ago was it? I can’t recollect rightly. About ten days, I reckon.”
It seemed to agree with the vague time sense in Dick’s head, but it might be wrong by a day or so. And Sigma dome had given a maximum of two weeks before they left! For a moment Dick felt guilty about the sleeping and loafing they had done here in the tiny dome; yet he knew that they might even save time by relaxing another day. Then the urgency that lay behind this long trip hit him, and he rushed through the simple food and got up quickly.
Charlie seemed to catch the feeling, and they wasted no more time. The little tractor rolled out. It was nothing but a platform with two simple caterpillar tracks under it, without a dome built over it. They could only ride it in their suits. But it would carry the empty oxygen tanks out, and— with luck—the full ones back.
They took another look at the map, but found nothing that was useful. The simplest method was to cut straight east, directly into the darkside. According to the map, there was no really rough going that way to slow them up.
They dug out the tanks and put them on behind. Then Charlie made Dick stop while they found a shovel among the tank-farming tools, and something like a big funnel. “Wouldn’t do a mite of good to go trying to pick up oxygen with your hands, Dick,” he said. “We can get into enough trouble without that, by jingo.”
They climbed into their suits, feeling almost at once the stuffiness they had associated with the last. But it was only the heavy scent of their own bodies, too long inside the suits, Dick knew. And after a few minutes, it didn’t bother them much.
Then the tractor rolled slowly through the lock and headed west, toward the section of Mercury which had never seen the sun and which was as cold as the other side was hot.
They would find no life there, Dick knew. All life operated on the use of energy, and there simply wasn’t enough energy in any form on that side for even the most crude and primitive living thing.
Twilight belt was only a narrow strip, and they were already well inside it. Now the sun sank lower and lower on the horizon, until it touched the surface of Mercury, and began to dip below it. They were leaving Twilight. A little later, Dick had to switch on the head lamps of the little tractor. The sun was gone from sight, and they were in deep darkness, with only the stars shining down. He’d been shown the stars first when he was ten, and he’d been afraid of them. But now they no longer bothered him. He glanced up … and jerked back to his driving as the little machine slipped one track into a gully, and lurched, almost throwing them off.
They had their radios off now, to save energy, though Charlie thought there was enough of that. But taking precautions did no harm.
There was something white under the treads, and Dick looked down in surprise. He guessed what it was—frosty crystals that must be the first bit of ice or frozen air. But there was no time to waste on that. They had to get further in, where the chances of finding oxygen frozen solid for their use would be improved.
Driving was getting harder, and Charlie came up to relieve him. The old man set a straight course, and followed it with only a few slight variations. The ground seemed to be smoother here than it was on the hotland
s.
Dick had time to study this queer half of the world now, but there was very little to see. As they went further in, the crust of white deepened and became solid, like the ice Dick had seen before only in the refrigerating units. He’d read about it, but it still seemed strange to think of ice that was measured in feet of thickness and spread over half the world.
Charlie leaned back to touch his helmet to that of Dick. “Should of found some by now. How much time you got left on that there dial?”
Dick glanced down, and studied it, moving around where a bit of leakage from the back of the headlights would illuminate the oxygen dial. “Two hours,” he finally said.
He hadn’t realized that they had been traveling that long.
“Then we better find it soon, or our luck runs out,” Charlie said. “Guess we’ll just have to keep a-looking.”
They rolled on. Oxygen would have a bluish color, quite unlike ordinary ice. Dick had seen the laboratory product, since they sometimes had to freeze a specimen from the mines to determine all they wanted to know about the way the crystals were formed. But the solid oxygen he had seen had been in tiny amounts. He wasn’t sure he could recognize it if he saw it lying right in front of him.
An hour later they were still further inside the darkside country, but the terrain had changed only a little. Now they came on clumps and hillocks in the ice, and Charlie began to knock bits loose with the shovel. They went on, the tractor slowing a bit as it found rough going.
“We’ll be hitting the section where it begins officially soon, won’t we?” Dick asked.
Charlie switched on his radio, apparently changing his mind and tired of bumping helmets. Dick reached down to turn on his set, and found that it was stiff. He’d forgotten that the suits, while designed to be universal for either extreme heat or bitter cold, had been serviced for use in the hotlands. The greases used had never been meant for the darkside conditions.
Battle on Mercury Page 11