The Tenth Planet

by Cooper, Edmund

“Too risky. For all we know, it could be programmed to detonate upon interference.”

  “It could also be programmed to blow any moment, sir. Torching it off the leg is going to take a couple of hours. We’d look damn silly if the thing goes pop while we are cutting through the steel.”

  “The possibility has to be accepted,” admitted Idris. “But it contains less risk. So let us not waste valuable time. You will continue the search to see if we have any more of these charming souvenirs, while I collect the laser torch. When I have the torch and am in position, you will abandon the search if incomplete and get back inboard.”

  “Sir,” expostulated Davison, “as Engineer Officer it is my duty to—”

  “Laddie,” said Idris, “I am about twice your age, I am master of this vessel, and I am backing my own hunch. Orlando is monitoring our conversation. You have your orders.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, then. On with the show.” Idris turned awkwardly and began to retrace his steps on the torus. As he moved, his lifeline automatically reeled itself in.

  He was back at the base of Number One leg and about to go back along it when Leo Davison came in once more.

  “Idris—for the record—I’m about to disobey your orders. I have tried my jemmy under one end of the bomb. It lifted a little. If I can work the jemmy a little further underneath, I’ll have the whole thing clear. When we are inboard, you can log me for mutiny but you will still owe me a bloody large whisky.”

  “Leo, don’t—”

  Idris glanced back across the torus. There was no point in completing his sentence. He saw a brilliant flash of light. The titanium cladding of the torus conducted the shock of the explosion to his boots; and the dull crump reverberated in his helmet.

  He saw something grotesque spin out from the dark side of the vessel into sunlight. It was a nightmare. It was the remains of a man in a shattered space-suit.

  Leo Davison had been eviscerated by the explosion. His entrails streamed out from his stomach like bright tattered ribbons, dripping globules of blood and fluid that froze almost instantly, glittering like crystals of red fire in the sunlight.

  Arms akimbo, the body rotated slowly, drifting astern under the force of the blast.

  Idris wanted to vomit; but to be sick in a space-suit was a certain sentence of death. He forced back the nausea, but compelled himself to watch. The rotating figure dwindled rapidly as it was propelled away into the blackness, until it seemed like a bright star, then a faint star, then no more than a pinpoint of light dissolving in a jet infinity.

  Idris became aware that Orlando was calling him frantically.

  “Captain! Captain Hamilton! Please answer! Do you hear me? Urgently request acknowledgement.”

  “Sorry, Orlando. My mind seized up. Leo is dead. He blew himself trying to get the bomb off Three leg.” He peered into the blackness, turning his head lamp to maximum power. “Three leg is deformed and the torus is ruptured. There seems little point in making a complete investigation now. I’m coming inboard. I’ve had enough.”

  There were tears in his eyes; but they wouldn’t roll down his cheeks because of zero gravity. They just filmed over his eyeballs, partially blinding him. That wouldn’t do. He had to see clearly in order to get back into the Dag. He shook his head violently in the space suit. Some of the tiny globules splattered on his visor. Some just floated about until he inhaled them, coughing a little. Well, at least it was a new sensation, he told himself grimly—to choke on one’s own tears.

  5

  THE NEWS OF the disaster had been beamed to Mars, the second internal search had been carried out with negative results, and a wake was held for Leo.

  The wake was boozy and light-hearted—or, at least, superficially light-hearted—as Leo would have wanted it to be. They did not mourn his death so much as celebrate his life. Orlando recalled how he and Leo had gone on a splendid drinking jag at the nearest bar to Goddard Field while waiting to see if they would be selected for the shoot to Earth. Almost single-handed Leo had taken on and totally routed four white Martians who had loudly proclaimed that black Martians were inferior. Leo, who was black, had not started the fight. Orlando, being white, had politely asked the offending four to calm down. One of them had thrown beer in his face and another had kicked him in the stomach. At which point Leo went into action—Leo with his Master’s Degree in Nuclear Engineering and his utter hatred of violence.

  The way Orlando told it, Leo, the self-declared pacifist, became transformed instantly into a machine of destruction. He had used his hard negro skull like a hammer of vengeance, butting the face of the man who had kicked Orlando so that he fell back with a broken nose and blood streaming from a smashed mouth. While Orlando was still on the deck, another of the rough-house boys came at Leo with a broken bottle. He never arrived. A one-foot reverse drop-kick caught him in the throat. He gurgled briefly, then went down like a felled tree. By which time the remaining two were making for the door. By which time also, Orlando had recovered enough to grab one, while Leo locked the other in a terrible bear-hug.

  “This inferior black Martian,” he said softly, “resents the way you spilled beer over my white friend. It was a terrible waste of beer, to say nothing of the mild indignity suffered by my friend. Go to sleep, little man. Go to sleep.” Then Leo’s muscles had tightened. The man he held gave a despairing cry, a strangled cough. His face became red, then slowly turned blue. His head lolled, and Leo released the hold, letting him slide down unconscious.

  Leo looked at Orlando, who still held his man but had not inflicted any damage.

  “You going to put him to sleep, Orlando?”

  “I don’t think so, Leo. He’s had a bad time watching what you did to his friends.”

  Leo had smiled. “Orlando, that is your pleasure. It is my pleasure to speak him a few words.” He gazed into the terrified face of the survivor. “Boy, you have comment to make on the colour of my skin?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You think black is beautiful?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Leo laughed. “Boy, you are the most god-awful shit. Kindly remove your sleeping friends. Only one, I fear, needs hospital treatment. Unfortunately, they will all survive.”

  Orlando had looked at Leo with awe. “I thought you were a pacifist.”

  Oddly Leo had begun to shake. He glanced at the three devastated men. “That is why I am a pacifist. Now, for Christ’s sake, get me a large brandy.”

  When Orlando had finished telling the story, Idris laughed, knowing that Leo would have wanted him to laugh.

  But Suzy did not laugh. She raised her glass. “Black was indeed beautiful, was it not?”

  They responded to her toast.

  “He was a damn-awful engineer and a lousy, insubordinate Martian lay-about,” said Idris. “He was our brother. He tried to do for us and the Dag what he did for Orlando in the bar at Goddard Field … Rest you, Leo, in the deeps of space, where black is always beautiful.”

  “Our brother was a poet,” said Suzy. “Did you know that?”

  Neither of them did.

  She held a piece of paper. “Listen to something he wrote on this last trip to Earth. He called it Thieves in the Night:

  “We have such pride. We do not hide

  our arrogance. We, the new world-builders claim

  that any Martian man is worth

  ten of those who caused the death of Earth.

  But now, hanging between two worlds

  on a rope of darkness there is time to think,

  to reflect on pride, on life and other transient things,

  to know that we are only grave-robbers

  approaching the tomb of kings.”

  Idris raised his glass once more. “Salud, Leo. You were also a lousy poet. But we get the message … And having successfully robbed the tomb of kings, we must ensure that we get the loot safely down to Mars. We shall have to park in orbit, that is painfully clear. And, Orlando, we may have to bring
those children and their teachers back to room temperature. I don’t think there is much joy in trying to transfer their life-support systems to the ferry rockets. Too hazardous. Also, we had better look at the manifest and work out a system of transfer priorities. The people first; but after them we will have to schedule the electron microscopes, the ingot platinum, the telescope lenses, the antibiotic cultures and what have you.”

  “If we have to resuscitate,” said Orlando, “and the very thought gives me nightmares, it will have to be delayed until the last moment. You know the Dag’s recycling capacity. With that lot breathing, we could have an oxygen crisis in less than thirty hours.”

  “I know. But, somehow, we are going to have to cope with the problem. And I want another internal search.”

  “Why?” demanded Suzy. “We have done two already. You are getting neurotic, Idris.”

  He shrugged. “I can’t tell you why. I don’t know why. I just know something is wrong. Prove to me that there isn’t, and I will be pathetically grateful. Meanwhile, we have about sixty hours before the first power manoeuvre. During that time there is a lot of talking to be done to Mars control, a lot of searching to be done and the resuscitation programme to be organised. Those kids are our most valuable cargo. They all have I.Q’s of two hundred plus. Mars needs them. Leo died for them. Let’s do every damn thing we can to ensure they touch down all in one piece.”

  “Captain, may I say something?” Orlando’s voice was hard, determined. “None of us has had any sleep for nearly twenty-five hours; and during that time you have been exhausting yourself tramping about outside. You know as well as I do that pep pills don’t pay off for ever. You are driving yourself into the deck. Sure, we can all take more pills and go on another twenty-five hours. But we’ll be out on our feet, and you know it. And that’s when we start to make mistakes. In this business, little errors have a habit of turning into big ones.”

  Idris gave a sigh and rubbed at his bloodshot eyes. “Orlando, you are bloody right. We’ll take three hours sleep, then back to business. We are no good as walking zombies … The trouble is, I know something is wrong, but I don’t know how I know. Just too damned tired to remember.”

  Suzy yawned. “Three hours. That’s a real vacation.”

  They were the last words Idris Hamilton ever heard her say.

  6

  IDRIS WOKE UP sweating, shaking. He switched on his cabin light. The keys on the magnetic panel over his bunk were in the wrong order. There were ten keys altogether; but the only keys that had been replaced in the wrong position were the ones to the engine room and the navigation deck.

  He cursed himself for a fool. He must have noticed the different sequence subconsciously many hours ago. That would account for his persistent conviction that something was wrong. But how could anyone have got at the keys? He had kept his cabin door locked, whenever he was not occupying it, all the time the Dag had been grounded at Woomera.

  There had been the sleep-walking incident; and he had been too disturbed to notice how long he had been out of his cabin. Someone could have seized the opportunity—yes, someone could! But this was no time for a post-mortem.

  He pressed the intercom button, held the speaker to his mouth and woke Orlando.

  “Have a heart, skipper,” complained Orlando. “I have only just got my head down. What’s the problem?”

  “No time for explanations. Emergency. Be on the navigation deck in ten seconds.”

  “Shall I wake Suzy?”

  Idris thought for a moment. “No. She’s not familiar with instrumentation. If she pulled the wrong lever, we’d be in trouble. Hurry!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  On the navigation deck, Idris said: “Get the sleep out of your eyes. We are looking for something that shouldn’t be here. You check panels, floor, lockers, furniture, manual scopes. I’ll take the computer lay-out, control console, radio-communications. Let’s move … No matter what it looks like, if it shouldn’t be here, don’t touch it.”

  They moved. Orlando looked all over the bond-fuzz first. It was clean. Then he rolled back the shutters and inspected the observation panel frames. Meanwhile, Idris began unclipping the inspection panels from the command computer.

  “Why the panic, Idris? Neither of us are in good shape. Wouldn’t it have waited till we’d had our rest?”

  “Maybe, maybe not. The keys in my cabin were in the wrong order—the nav deck key and the engine-room key. I’m very particular about the order in which I hang them on the panel. Somebody used them.”

  “How could they?” Orlando was now methodically going over the chart table and its shallow drawers.

  “I don’t know, but I can guess. Maybe some bright boy seized his opportunity when I did my sleep-walking act.” He replaced the computer inspection panels and turned his attention to the control console.

  Orlando was now working on the contour-berths. “You think some groundling was clairvoyant and knew you were going to step out to pick up non-existent daisies?”

  Idris went to work on the control console. “It doesn’t have to be like that. He, she or they could have had a surprise present ready, just waiting for a chance to deliver … And it doesn’t have to look like the thing Leo found on the torus. In fact, it probably won’t look like that at all.”

  “Now you are being really helpful.”

  “Wait!” Idris, who had been looking under the control console, backed out and stood up. “I remember something else. God rot me for a fool. I remember something else. Have you checked the emergency supplies locker?”

  “No.”

  “How many bulbs of booze should it contain?”

  “Eight half-litres.”

  “You remember we drank one each?”

  “Yes.”

  “Orlando, open the door very carefully. Count the bulbs.”

  Every compartment of a space vessel that could be made airtight in an emergency had, by regulation, to contain enough emergency food, water and medical supplies to sustain four people for two hundred hours. The regulation had been drawn up towards the end of the twentieth century when a vessel bound for Mars had been punctured amidships by a meteor. No one had been amidships at the time. Engine room personnel had been about their duties, and the navigation officers had all been on the nav deck. The automatic air-seals had functioned instantly upon impact. The air recycling systems in the engine room and on the navigation deck had continued to function. But before the stricken vessel could be reached, its crew had died of dehydration and starvation.

  “Seven bulbs, sir.”

  “There should now be six.”

  “I know.”

  “Don’t touch any of them, for Christ’s sake.”

  Idris went to the emergency locker, stood by Orlando, and regarded the bulbs.

  “They all look the same.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Now that the thing had been discovered, Idris felt extraordinarily calm, almost relieved.

  “The point is,” he said, “it didn’t matter what the bomb on the torus looked like. There was no reason for them to suppose we would need to inspect the legs. But anything planted inside had to blend with the scenery. When we have disposed of this device—whichever one it is—we shall then have to look for something that we would normally expect to find in the engine-room. But something extra … Now, which booze bulb contains the big kick, and what is its mechanism? Any suggestions, Orlando? Timing device, or disturbance device?”

  Orlando gazed at the row of harmless-looking bulbs clipped in a plastic support rack. “Both, I imagine. As you say, there was no reason for them to think that we would give the torus a going-over, so that one must have combined both systems. Chances are the fake bulb is the same. There is no hope of discovering which it is, because they all look alike. It probably contains a liquid explosive—maybe even good old-fashioned nitro-glycerine.”

  “My thinking, also.” Idris gave a grim laugh. “We were lucky. That would have been one hell of a drink to
swallow … Now, let’s move quickly, but carefully. We don’t know which is the fatal bulb, so you are going to unscrew the support rack while I get into a space-suit. Then I will take the entire rack to the main air-lock and ease it out. O.K.?”

  “Yes, sir.” Orlando was already opening the tool locker. “The operation is going to take about fifteen minutes. Do you think—”

  “I don’t want to think. If you are religious start praying. Who knows—it may help.” Idris took one of the space-suits that, like emergency supplies, were regulation equipment for all compartments of the vessel. He tested the life-support system, then took off his trousers and shirt and began to encase himself in the cumbersome suit. Finally he locked the helmet on. Then Orlando had to talk to him by radio.

  “I have taken the bottom screws out and left the top screws very loose. You can remove them manually. I’ll check the air-lock and flood the compartment. Should I alert Suzy?”

  Through the visor of his space helmet, Idris could see Orlando’s lips moving. But the words he uttered seemed very far away. Maybe the suit’s battery was low.

  “No. Let Suzy sleep through it. I think—”

  Idris Hamilton did not complete his sentence. As he went towards the emergency supplies locker, there was an enormous blast that flung him back against the bulkhead, momentarily stunning him.

  As he regained consciousness, he saw Orlando, face distorted, blood vessels bursting, tongue protruding, clutching at his throat, sucked towards a long narrow fracture in the hull through which could be glimpsed the dreadful brilliance of stars.

  Orlando was squeezed by internal pressure through the jagged gap. Diminishing air pressure was behind him, the vacuum of space was ahead of him. His body was reduced to mince-meat as he was thrust through the narrow gap into the void.

  Idris was sucked after him. He hurtled across the navigation deck like a bullet and slammed against the fractured bulkhead. But his space suit held—for a time. Then it ruptured. Then he died. But by that time, most of the air had leaked out through the gap caused by the explosion.