Then it snapped on, and he heard Charlie’s doubtful voice, “I dunno, Dick. Them lines on the map don’t mean much. The men who put ’em there mostly just made ’em look pretty. Out here, they ain’t no sure way to say where something begins and something else leaves off. She just sort of slides around. But we sure should of hit her by now.”
Dick took the shovel and began knocking at the little hummocks that stuck up. Charlie caught his arm, and held it back suddenly. “Take it easy, Dick. Don’t go pushing yourself here. Gets so cold steel is just like glass-brittle, breaks like nothing you ever seen in metal. Crack her gentle.”
At the extreme limit of the headlights, a low cliff stuck up, and they went crawling toward it. It was perhaps fifty feet high in one place, and sloped down to half that in others. Dick decided that it was probably what was meant by the line on the map.
Charlie let the machine chum along toward it, glancing down at the dial on his oxygen tank. Dick checked his own, and saw that it was good for only about fifteen minutes more. Their luck, it seemed, had about run out—either that, or it was waiting like an Earth-panther to spring after they’d gone past!
The tractor came to a stop, and the cliff lay directly ahead. Charlie turned the lights up and down and back and forth along it. But there seemed to be nothing which gave forth the color and gleam that they knew belonged with frozen oxygen.
“Might as well have a good look. Might be our last one at anything,” Charlie said. “But keep your eyes peeled sharp, Dick. Never can tell when you’ll find what you need. Lot of times things turn out all right just when you’ve up and decided you’re already a dead dog.”
His voice didn’t sound confident, though. Dick climbed off the tractor, just as the alarm bell on his tank rang. That gave him five minutes in which to change to a fresh one—and there was no fresh one to change to!
A minute later Charlie’s bell also rang. And they were standing squarely against the cliff. The old man took the shovel and struck the handle against the stuff, first lightly and then with a ringing blow that chipped off a few fragments.
Dick looked up. For a split second, he stood speechless. Then he jumped forward and grabbed Charlie, pulling him violently to the side. He’d seen fragments at the top suddenly topple and begin falling toward them, sending out more broken bits as they came tumbling down.
It fell within a few feet of them, but only a fine shower of dust actually touched them. Then it was over.
And it hadn’t helped much to pull the old man away. They had perhaps a minute left.
Chapter 14 The Silicone Beasts
Charlie seemed not to know that the time was drawing near. He moved over to the splinters J that had fallen and picked one up. For a moment he studied it and then came leaping toward the tractor, his legs suddenly pumping with the last energy reserves he had. He hit the splinter with the shovel, and yanked Dick to him.
Dick had guessed it before he felt the connection on his oxygen tank suddenly opened. Something had looked right to Charlie, and the old man was going to try it, at least, before they were dead. He felt a brief suck of air from his suit, before the automatic seal worked. Then die big splinter dropped into the tank, and Charlie was screwing the tank back on, and cutting on the little heater switch that would warm the tank.
A man could live for a couple of minutes in his suit, even without an oxygen supply, and Dick had no way of knowing at first whether it had worked or not. But Charlie wasn’t waiting. He began yanking his own tank and stuffing in splinters of the ice that had fallen—and which did have a peculiar blue color, now that Dick looked more closely.
They waited, for at least five more minutes, before the old man looked up. “Might of known it’d be way up there, Dick. And don’t you ever let me hear you say anything against luck. None of us would’ve lived here without it, when I was a kid. And I guess it ain’t changed much, at that, by golly!”
There was enough in the fragments that had fallen. They had to break them up, and Charlie warned him against handling them too carelessly, since concentrated oxygen in any form was powerful stuff. Then they began to stuff them into the tanks, filling each loosely through the mouth of the flask. As soon as two of the former empties were filled, they switched to those, and began filling their old flasks.
It took less time than Dick had expected. He had taken Charlie’s idea of the funnel for granted, and had expected to have to melt the stuff and pour it in. But the tanks had been equipped with mouths big enough to get a fair splinter through, and it had been simpler to do it the easiest way—and probably more effective.
Charlie backed up the little tractor and swung it around, while Dick hopped on behind. They made better time back, following the path they had worn smooth on the way up. But their new supply of oxygen wouldn’t be all gain. By the time they got back to the little dome, they’d have only two tanks left.
Dick suddenly yelled, and Charlie ducked, then swung around. But it had been only an idea that finally hit the boy. “Charlie, this was all waste. Why couldn’t one of us have taken both tanks before and gone on to Relay Station? That would have given one man twenty hours, which should have been plenty!”
Charlie gulped. He didn’t even answer, for at least half a minute. “Because we got too busy looking for the trees,” he said at last. “We couldn’t make out the forest, I reckon. Get a figure running around in your head, you don’t let go. I knew I was good for ten hours. So ten hours was the oxygen we had! Sure you’re right. But it ain’t any time to worry about what we might’ve done, Dick. Main thing is, we’ll get to Relay Station.”
He shook his head at the stupidity they had shown again, but he wasn’t letting it get him down. And after a few seconds Dick followed his example. What was done was done—and maybe it might even work out better, somehow.
They didn’t spend much time in the little dome, this time. They went in, ate quickly without taking off their spacesuits, and switched to a fresh battery for the tractor. It could make no more speed than their maximum, but at least it was more comfortable than walking.
They were out again in half an hour, and heading for Relay Station. Dick looked up at the sun, which was now apparently up again, though still close to the horizon. Relay Station lay south and west, and there was no route shown on the map as being the best. He put it away, and went to take over the control of the tractor, to let Charlie catch a nap.
Then they rolled along at a fair speed, with the ground more level than Dick had expected. He hunched over the controls, his eyes on the course ahead, only glancing back once in a while to see that Charlie hadn’t thrown himself off in his sleep.
It was on one of these occasions that he spotted something behind, slinking out of sight as his head turned back. It disappeared too quickly for him to make out any specific shape, but he knew it had been real, and not a trick of his eyes.
The next time, he jerked his head back suddenly. This time there was a brief glimpse of something that was a dull gray, smooth and slippery, and about the size of a small horse, judging by the pictures he had seen of horses. But it slipped out of sight almost instantly, flattening out and sliding toward the side, where a bunch of rocks gave it cover.
Then there were two of the creatures. And after that they began increasing steadily in numbers. There was no longer any doubt but what they were following the tractor.
Dick had heard of such monsters, but had put them down mostly as tall tales told by travelers and prospectors, since no one he knew had actually seen the things. They were natives of the twilight belt, according to the legends, and never strayed far from it. Their basic structure was made up of silicones, like the plastic of the robots. On most worlds that would have been a poor second to the regular carbon compounds, but Mercury was a special case.
Men had discovered the silicones quite a while before. They had found that they could build up compounds like the carbon compounds by using silicon and oxygen—the so-called silicone combination—to replace the carbo
n. The result had been a group of chemicals from very thin oils to heavy plastics, not too much unlike the carbon chemicals they resembled. But where carbon gave substances that could stand only a little temperature change, silicone compounds seemed to remain the same through the widest general extremes of temperature. And these limits had been improved through the years.
Yet nature apparently had found the same ability to stand sudden changes in temperature an asset here, and had built one of the two types of life on Mercury on the basis of silicones, instead of the usual carbon-compound flesh.
Or he was about willing to believe it was an actual truth, instead of a mere fable. Certainly the things back there had no resemblance to any of the Earth forms of life, and they were even further from the will-o’-the-wisps like Johnny.
Now they were gaining a little on the tractor. Dick argued with himself for a few minutes, but he wound up by waking Charlie.
The old man turned his head around in answer to Dick’s pointing finger. He nodded slowly, as he collected his wits.
“Silicone beasts,” he acknowledged. “And they’re nasty things, at this time of the year. On the other cycle, for some reason, they’re completely harmless. Makes it kind of hard for most people to believe the stories they hear. Probably most of ‘em are true.”
“And what do we do about it?” Dick wanted to know.
Charlie shrugged. “Hope you can outrun ’em, which means that they ain’t too curious about you. Sometimes they just seem to stay like that, not moseying any closer. If that’s no good, then you do anything you can to chase ’em off. Might slip into a bunch of rocks with one of the batteries. Give ’em a good scare with a jolt or two when they stick their snouts into our business. Might work. Might not.”
For a while longer the beasts followed along at the same distance. They were ugly things, almost formless. If they had bones, they were strange bones that could bend at will. And they seemed to put out feet at will, or to flow across the ground without moving a muscle.
“Best you catch a wink of sleep,” Charlie decided. “I can watch ‘em. Been chased by ’em before. You betcha.”
Dick tried it, but he found himself unable to get to sleep. He kept lifting his head to catch the creatures in their change from one form of locomotion to another or to see if he could count them. Since some of them were usually sliding sideways out of sight, while others more bold ran over their fellows, it was a hard thing to do. He finally estimated that there might have been twenty of the tilings, some no better than a foot in length, others ten times that size.
Then the creatures began to gain. They seemed to move no more rapidly or consistently than before, but the distance shortened. Even as they drew close, it was hard to decide whether they had some basic form or not.
Now Charlie began to worry. The creatures wouldn’t eat a human being or even deliberately kill him. But they were filled with a slinking kind of curiosity and were perfectly capable of mashing a man to a pulp while sniffing him over to see why he acted as he did. They were fairly unintelligent, as far as could be determined.
They were within fifty feet when Charlie gave up. “Keep an eye out for a good place to hole up,” he told Dick, and he was following his own orders already. “Place too narrow for ’em, just wide enough for us. When you see it, shout.”
They were hugging the edge of a rocky section now, and Dick swept his eyes along it as they passed, but most of it seemed to be open, and of no use as a hiding place.
Then he clutched the old man’s arm. “Over there,” he said. A bunch of sharp rocks stood up on end, forming an outline that suggested there might be a circle inside. Outside, the entrance was narrow—almost too narrow. It was open to the sky, probably, but that wouldn’t matter.
Charlie swung the little tractor at once and picked up one of the tanks of oxygen. Dick followed his example and got ready to jump. The tractor came alongside the place, and Charlie stopped it. He got off and waited for Dick to squeeze through the narrow passage. Then he managed to squeeze through himself. He reached out and shoved the tractor out of the way, and sat watching.
The beasts drew up in a circle. Some of the smaller ones could have slipped through the spaces between the rocks around the two men, but they seemed as baffled as the others.
Charlie shrugged. “Dunno. They just act that way. Seem to figger they’re all the same size, and that’s the same as the biggest one among ‘em. Until the big one goes through, none of the rest will try.”
Dick considered their oxygen supply thoughtfully. There was no reason to worry yet, but they didn’t have enough to permit them to wait out these beasts if the things decided to make a siege of it. Charlie had no idea of how long they would wait. They’d been known to leave in a few minutes, and there was one case where they waited for over three weeks.
The old man found a fragment of rock and settled back against it to try to sleep. Dick waited to be sure that it was real sleep, and not an act to get him to stay back while Charlie did some fool thing to the beasts. Then he found another rock for himself and managed to fall asleep after half an hour’s worrying.
Once he woke up to see something that looked like a bad attempt to squeeze a face out of putty stuck against the rocks. It was a naturally ugly head, and the way the creature was wobbling something that might have been its lips made it even uglier. He shuddered, before he saw that it was much too wide to squeeze through. And the picture of the thing in his mind didn’t help his next attempt to sleep.
The next time he snapped out of his nap was when one of them suddenly slapped a tail against the earth and charged angrily at the stones. They stood up under the assault, by some miracle, even when it kept repeating it. But the ground shook each time the tail slapped down.
The strange part of it was that any one of them could have come through by turning sideways and flowing through, as they had flowed across the ground behind the tractor. But this seemed to be against the rules, for some reason.
Dick got up and moved around, working off the numbness. At his first movement the creatures drew back out of the way. He noticed that when he moved toward them, they started going around to the side. When he stood still, they moved away. But at any other movement, they tried to come through the rocks toward him. It all fitted the legends he had heard, and it was no easier to believe in person than it had been when it was nothing but an idle story.
He saw Charlie watching him, and went back. “I don’t get it,” he admitted.
“Why should you?” Charlie asked. “You think of ’em as animals. But they ain’t—they’re just a bunch of walking plants.”
“Plants?”
“Yep. Move to the darkside, get themselves some water. Move to the hotside, grow a while. Then wander around in Twilight, giving anyone a hard time. Had a motion up before the Governor once to get rid of ’em, lock, stock and barrel. But he hemmed and hawed around until it got dropped.” “Do they ever kill anyone?” Dick asked, eying their huge bulks.
Charlie nodded. “Now and then. You best get some sleep, boy. We may have to break through ’em, after all.”
The more he heard of the things, the more cockeyed they seemed, and the less likable. Dick hunted a corner out of sight of most of the beasts and turned his back on them. He could still feel their tails thumping the ground once in a while, but he refused to look at them.
Then, to his surprise, he fell soundly asleep, without any dreams.
This time it was Charlie who woke him. The old man put up a hand, as if to his lips. “Shh. Something funny going on, I seen something sneaking up behind, over there. And I never heard tell of silicone beasts climbing up a rock. Watch.”
Behind them there seemed to be a flicker of movement, but Dick couldn’t be sure. He moved forward cautiously, with Charlie at his side. Again, a bit of movement caught his eye. It was a dark object, dangling around a rock, and seeming to be clinging on firmly.
Side by side, they moved toward it.
Now suddenly, it mo
ved again, and the two men gasped. It looked like a hand, or the arm of a spacesuit thinner than any they had seen before. And as they looked, the top of a head groped up above the rock for a brief second, and then collapsed again.
Dick jumped forward. As long as it wasn’t a silicone beast, he was willing to take a chance at this stage. He moved over the rocks. The object had disappeared now, but he went on, sliding in among the boulders along that side. Finally he was standing between the two rocks where he had seen the hand.
He looked down, and his voice caught sharply in his throat. He heard a mutter of questioning from Charlie, but he was too stunned to answer. Instead, he reached down his arm.
It was real, all right. His space mitten was caught at once. Dick heaved, and there was a scramble on the other side.
Then, finally, the robot was coming over and into the enclosure with the two men. And the robot was the same Pete they had left burned out back in the hotlands!
Chapter 15 Battle of Monsters
Charlie stared at Pete, but the robot suddenly | seemed unimpressed with his reception. He sat down slowly on the rocks, and then slumped over completely, falling over on his back. Dick bent to pick him up. Then a bluish glow came out of his head, and a wispy shot out. Dick let out a sharp cry. “Johnny!”
But the wispy behaved wrong for that. It simply hung in the air, waiting, making none of the bobbing motions that Dick had come to associate with his pet.
Battle on Mercury Page 12