The Golden Age of Science Fiction Novels Vol 03

by Anthology

  There was a shift in the pitch, and the generators applied repulsion against the pull of the Sun. Those floating in the air crashed suddenly against the ceiling, then slid violently down the walls onto the floor as the inner sphere rotated on its gymbals to meet the new center of gravitational pull--this time away from the Sun.

  The viewers flickered off and then on again as their connecting surfaces inside and outside the sphere's double layer of walls slid apart and matched up again. For an instant, as he saw the viewers blank out, Burl thought of what might happen if the sphere didn't rotate all the way. They would find themselves blind.

  Now the ship proceeded on its charted orbit, slowing to meet Venus. Several hours went by, one meal, and Burl had returned to his bunk, his rest period having arrived. Russ remained at the controls on duty, checking astronomically the new speed and deceleration.

  Burl tossed restlessly, the light out in the little cabin. Something was bothering him, and after a while he realized that Clyde should have come off duty before this. He glanced at the clock and calculated that Russ was two hours overdue. What was wrong?

  He slipped out of his bunk and climbed into his pants. Ascending into the control room, he saw Lockhart, the two astronomers, and the entire engineering crew gathered over the controls in worried concentration.

  He peered over their shoulders, but the dials meant little to him, since he did not know what they should have said. "What's happened?" he asked Russ.

  Russ took him aside. "We're not going to make our connection with Venus," he said. "Our generators didn't operate exactly as we had hoped. We haven't been able to slow down enough, the pull of the Sun is stronger than the power we can raise to stop it at our present speed. We're going to shoot past Venus' orbit way ahead of the planet, and we're still heading sunward at a faster rate than we figured on."

  "You mean--we're falling into the Sun!" gasped Burl.

  "As things stand right now," said the youthful astrogator, "that's just what is happening."

  Chapter 7.

  Hot Spot on Mercury

  It seemed strange to Burl at that moment that there wasn't more excitement on board the Magellan. To learn so early in the game that all were doomed should have brought more reaction. It should have excited some sort of frenzy, or efforts to abandon ship, or something. But the men in the cabin, though keyed up, were anything but panicky.

  Instead, there seemed to be grim concentration on their faces, an earnestness that spoke of a plan. Through a viewer which had been shielded so that the light would not blind the eyes, Burl could see the wide disc of the Sun now. A few spots were visible on its blazing surface, and great tongues of burning gases encircled it for hundreds of thousands of miles. Were they really destined to end a mere cinder--an instantaneous flicker of fire in one of those prominences?

  Clyde was working with Oberfield at the calculators. Burl watched them in silence, trying to determine what it was they were getting at. Finally they pulled a figure from one of their machines and took it over to Lockhart and the engineers. There was a brief conference, and something seemed to be agreed upon.

  Clyde's face, which had been tense, was now more relaxed. "I think we've got the problem licked," came the good word.

  "What's up?" asked Burl. "If we shoot past Venus, we should still be able to come to a stop, fall away from the Sun and maybe catch up with Venus again. It would take longer, but...."

  "We're altering our plans," interrupted Russ. "Of course, we could brake--that much we found out for sure. The trouble lay in our lack of effective tests for the Magellan's drive. We thought we knew just what it would do, but after all, the problems of space are intricate. It turned out that it did not act so effectively against the Sun as had been calculated. Either that, or the Sun's pull was stronger at this proximity than registered on our instruments. Chasing after Venus, after coming back to its orbit, could be done, but it would prove time-consuming and difficult to plan. What we are doing instead is altering our schedule."

  "But then there's no other place to go from here but Mercury. Is that what the new plan is?" Burl asked him.

  Russ nodded. "Mercury is coming around this side of the Sun. By the time we have braked, we will be closer to its orbit than to that of Venus. So we shall proceed inward toward it and make our first planetfall there."

  Mercury, the smallest and hottest planet in the system. Burl remembered that it was one of the two worlds that they knew for sure had a Sun-tap station on it. He went down the hatch to carry the news to the landing crew.

  Haines, Burl discovered, had already heard the new plan on the intercom from Lockhart. As soon as Burl joined them, the four men, including Ferrati and Boulton, went into a planning session.

  The problem of Mercury was a hard one. As Ferrati remarked, "It would have been better to tackle this one last instead of taking it on first."

  "Yes, but on the other hand," was Haines's comment, "Mercury's station is probably one of the most important--located as it is, so close to the Sun. With ideal conditions for steady, undiverted concentration of solar power, it must be the primary station in the system."

  "The problem boils down--and I do mean 'boils'--to heat," Boulton laughed. "Mercury rotates on its axis only once a year--its year being only eighty-eight of our days long. This means that just as the Moon presents only one side to the Earth, Mercury always presents the same hemisphere to the Sun. On the Sun side, therefore, there is always day. The Sun appears to be fixed in the sky. Naturally, we assume the Sun-tap station will be on that sunny side. And the heat must be terrific."

  "Matter of fact," said Haines dryly, "the records show the heat in the center of the Sun side reaches 770° Fahrenheit. Enough to keep tin and lead molten."

  "The problem is how to reach the station over such a boiling landscape," summed up Burl. "It seems to me that the absence of an atmosphere could answer part of the problem."

  Haines nodded. "Let's get to work on a plan of action, men. We've got a few days to get our equipment laid out."

  Those few days passed quickly enough. When several possible schemes had been outlined, the men made lists of the types of equipment that might be used with each. Then, putting on pressurized space suits and carrying air tanks, they left the inner sphere and worked through the cargo space surrounding it within the outer frame of the spaceship. There had originally been air here, but now they found most of it was gone, thinned out from infinitely tiny leaks in the outer shell caused by the constant bombardment of microscopic bits of meteoric dust.

  They located each piece of equipment and moved it into position for easy handling.

  The ship came to its halting point, where the repulsion against the Sun finally braked it against the gravitational pull of the Sun. Then, by increasing the selective pull of the approaching planet Mercury, they moved off in that direction.

  Mercury was changing in appearance. As they neared it from the outer side, its lighted half swung away from their view, and what they saw was a constantly narrowing crescent, growing larger even as it narrowed. Finally the hour came when they swung up close, coming in on the eternally sunless, night side of the little planet.

  They swooped low over the dark surface, taking observations and measurements. "It's not as cold as we might suppose," said Oberfield after his first readings. "There's a certain amount of heat all along the rim of the dark side. Radiation, I suppose, as well as the fact that there's a certain amount of wobbling done by the planet."

  Burl was studying the surface. "Seems to me that much of the dark side has a gleam to it. Something reflects the stars; I see little glints of light, shifting and blinking."

  "I can guess what that is," said Russ. "It must be covered, at least in the central portions, with a sea of frozen gases. What atmosphere Mercury had long ago must have congealed there."

  The ship moved along toward the twilight edge, then began circling the planet along that intermediate belt, where the Sun could be seen peeking over the horizon in eternal
dawn. There was a cluster of men at the radiation counter, looking for evidence of the Sun-tap station. Finally, after passing over a chain of darkened mountains, eerily lighted at the peaks by the Sun, there came a yell. Distortion had been detected.

  Once on it, they swung the ship outward into space again and moved along further over the sunlit side. Burl stared into the telescopic viewers as they probed the surface.

  He saw an ugly and terrifying world. The planet, which had a diameter of only 3,100 miles, compared to Earth's 7,900, was virtually without an atmosphere. Its surface was baked hard, brilliantly white, covered with long, deep cracks that cut hundreds of miles into the shriveled and burned surface. There were areas of dark mountain ranges, bare and jagged, whose metallic surfaces imparted a darker shade to the pervading glare. And there were patches here and there on the surface that gleamed balefully--probably spots of molten material.

  Haines, standing next to him, was muttering, "It can't be too far in, it can't. How could they build it?"

  Then Burl found what they were looking for.

  A huge canyon tore raggedly across a plain. There was a jumble of mountains, a chain edging in from the twilight zone. And in a corner, about two hundred miles out into the hot side, at a narrow ledge where the mountains came down and the canyon came together, there was a circular structure.

  They could see, as soon as the telescopic sight had been adjusted, that it was a large station. It was encircled by a featureless wall. It had no roof. Rising on masts above it was a whole forest of gleaming discs pointing at the Sun low in the sky.

  On the tops of the mountain peaks, a half mile from the station, was another series of masts. These were aimed away from the Sun into the dark airless sky and toward the other planets.

  "The accumulators and the transmitters," said Burl. "We'll have to get them both."

  "Getting the transmitters will be easy," said Haines. "After we shut off the station, we'll just bomb the mountain masts out of action."

  Burl choked. "Why, it never occurred to me, but why can't we bomb the station from the air? One atomic bomb should finish it off." He almost added, And you wouldn't have needed me after all, but squashed the thought. He wouldn't have given up coming along for anything, he now realized.

  "There's a distortion, as there was at the Andes station, that would make it hard to hit. But I imagine we could do it if we tried hard enough. But that isn't what we want at first. It's important, very important, that we get pictures and details of this station from inside. We can't just break up the enemy installations--we've got to learn from them, we must find out how they do it and how we can use it." This was Lockhart speaking. "You'd better start the job," he added to Haines. "Are you ready?"

  Haines nodded reluctantly. "Yep," and turning to the three who would accompany him, he ordered, "let's go."

  The four explorers gathered near the exit port. They had put on space suits and strapped on various items of equipment, weapons and work tools. They passed through the airlock into the cargo section of the ship. Communicating through the helmet radios, Haines directed each what to do, and also directed Lockhart where to bring the ship for the landing.

  Burl heard Lockhart's voice warn them that he did not want to hold the ship too long over the sunny hot side. "We've already noticed a buildup of heat from the solar radiation on the skin. And the heat radiating from Mercury is accumulating too fast. We can't get rid of it if both sides of this ship are going to be heated up. As soon as you make your landing, I'm taking the ship back to the cold side."

  "Uh huh," came Haines's voice. "We don't want to hang around here any too long, either."

  Then the four, as prearranged, unlimbered the work rocket they had picked. There were several sizes of small exploration craft. They had at first thought of the tractor--an enclosed, airtight truck on tractor wheels which could crawl up to the station while the men inside it were protected by air conditioning. But a quick survey showed that it would overheat too fast and might easily bog down in one of the many soft spots. So they took the four-man, rocket-propelled cargo plane instead.

  The ship was airtight and pressurized. They had taken every precaution. The four piled in with their supplies. Then, as the Magellan swooped momentarily lower, the escape hatch opened and, with Ferrati at the controls, the rocket plane shot out with a roar of its exhausts.

  They raced low over the burning landscape, and before them the wide, dark, forbidding canyon cut its way through the plain. It was into this canyon that the rocket plunged.

  The precipitous rocky sides rose above them, and suddenly they were in darkness. Immediately, the plane's cooling system became more effective as Ferrati guided the rocket through the shadowy depths away from the blazing sunbeams. Burl saw, by means of the radar, that the bottom of the heat crack was many miles down.

  They raced along the crevice until they reached the mountain chain. Here, Ferrati abruptly raised the nose of the plane and they shot upward, popping out of the shadow into the sunlight.

  Before them loomed the hard unbroken walls of the Sun-tap station. The rocket plane came to a stop a hundred feet away.

  As soon as it had halted, Burl and Ferrati leaped out, with white sheets thrown over their suits to afford some extra protection from the Sun's rays. Between them they carried a long, awkward affair of poles and plastic.

  Burl's feet touched the ground; through the cushioned leather of his thick boots he felt the heat just as if he had stepped on a hot stove. He moved quickly, and as they had rehearsed, he and the explorer slapped the rig together and set up a gleaming plastic skin sunbreak to shield the rocket plane. The plastic sheets reflected the Sun's heat and cut off a fair portion of the direct radiation which would otherwise have rendered the rocket plane inoperable and uninhabitable in short order.

  While they were assembling the sunbreak, Haines and Boulton unloaded a portable antitank rocket launcher. With no wasted motion, Boulton aimed the launcher at the wall, and Haines thrust a long, wicked-looking rocket projectile into the tube. There was a flash of soundless fire and a line of dissipating white smoke. Nothing could be heard in the airlessness.

  Burl felt the shock through the ground as the shell hit. A chunk of the wall ripped apart and collapsed.

  As quickly as he saw it, Burl acted. Haines's voice rang in his ear, but already Burl was in action. Back into the rocket plane, out again with--an umbrella!

  He made a flying leap toward the Sun-tap station. He felt terrifically strong in the slight gravity, and the leap carried him thirty feet forward. As he slid through the space above the surface, he opened the umbrella. Its outer side had been painted white, and partly shielded him from the direct heat. He made the station in five leaps and climbed through the broken wall. Boulton followed him with another umbrella and a pack under his arm.

  Inside the station it was cool--the walls had been high enough to create shade within. It was like the station in the Andes, but bigger, much bigger.

  Boulton joined him, folded his umbrella calmly, and yanked an air-compression pistol from his belt. "See anyone?" he asked.

  "No."

  Burl remembered then that there could possibly be a living guard at this station. They searched carefully, but there was no sign of life. Boulton was doing a soldier's job, that was all.

  While Boulton set up his photographic equipment, Burl made his way around the shining globes and strange tubes that were the nerve center of the station. He finally found the same type of control panel that he had found in the Andes station.

  He hesitated before it, wondering if, after all, this, the original charge, would work. He hoped that there might be another charger globe available, but saw none. It would be up to him.

  He put a gloved hand on the control. Perhaps, he worried, the charge would not conduct through the insulated, cooled material of his suit. He pushed the levers, and knew then that it did.

  The pulsing of the spheres halted. There was a sharp dip in the faint vibration he had be
en feeling in his feet. He shoved the levers all the way, and suddenly the station went dead. Above him, one of the great discs atop its mast snapped and burst apart under what must have become an impossible concentration of power without a channel for outlet.

  "Sun-tap Station Mercury is dead," Burl said quietly into his helmet phone.

  At that very instant a distant globe, perched on a pedestal against the wall away from the rest of the equipment, flared a brilliant red.

  Chapter 8.

  The Veil of Venus

  In an artificially constructed chamber somewhere in the solar system, an intelligent being sat before a bank of instruments that was designed to bring to his attention various factors concerning the things that mattered to his species. This being had been on duty for the average length of time such a duty entailed and had been paying little conscious attention to the routine--for there had been nothing to report for some time.

  The drop in channeling from Planet III that had occurred some time ago had thus far not caused too much concern. It was assumed by the other intelligent beings involved that the matter was possibly a weather condition, a volcanic discharge or quite simply that the planet was in unfavorable orbit. Not all the stations ever worked simultaneously. There were always some behind the Sun, or blocked in some other manner. But the main channels were at work, and the different lines and shifts continued to build up satisfactorily.

  But now something occurred that focused the attention of the watcher more closely on his instruments. A facet of his panel had flashed a color at the lowest end of his visible spectrum. How the being registered that color cannot be said; the inhabitants of Planet III would have termed it red.

  With trained reaction, the watcher activated the full signal. Instantly there appeared before his eyes a vision of a scene. There was the interior of the major station on Planet I. It was non-functioning, and there were two strange creatures turning now to look directly at him. They were bipeds with two armlike extensions, lumpy objects, clad in bulky white folds. They wore cumbersome helmets and he could see two eyes shielded beneath thick transparencies over the face.