Secret of the Ninth Planet

by Donald A. Wollheim

  “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 surface 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 been 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 EIGHT

  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.

  One of these creatures raised his arm and there was a puff of steam. Then the vision flashed off, but not before the trained watcher had activated the crash mechanism.

  If the watcher had been closer in space to the station, the destruction would have come quicker. Unfortunately for him, the speed of light and radio impulses is limited, so that it was several minutes before the destruction impulse reached Planet I.

  A short while later, after the guiding beings had digested the news, preparations were made for a vessel to go sunward to investigate—and remove—the interference.

  * * *

  Burl twisted on his heel sharply as he whirled around to look at the flash of red. Boulton drew his hand weapon, aimed and fired.

  There was a jet of steam as the compressed air blasted the dart from the gun. The glowing globe was pierced, there was a small explosion, and then the globe and its pedestal vanished.

  “What was that?” cried Burl.

  Boulton holstered his gun. “A signal of some kind—a warning probably. My guess is that it was an alarm tipping off the remote control masters of this place that it was out of commission. Help me with the photo stuff; I think we'd better get out of here quick!”

  Without wasting more time, the two men snapped the scene as fast as the shutters would click. Then they picked up the cameras, grabbed their umbrellas and ran for the break in the wall.

  Just as they made their first flying leaps toward the shielded rocket plane, the globes within the Sun-tap station started to go off. One after another, like a chain reaction, they blew up, and within seconds the interior of the walled station was a turmoil of falling metals, beams, wires, and sharp transparent shards.

  Haines and Ferrati were ready for take-off and puffs of smoke were coming from the exhaust. Without bothering to take down the plastic Sun-shield, Burl and Boulton tumbled into the cabin. Before the door was even closed, Haines lifted the ship and headed for the dark depths of the canyon.

  The inside of the plane was perilously hot. The shield had been a temporary protection, but even the ground radiated heat like an oven. They had to seek the cold of the sunless canyon to allow some of the heat to escape. To have flown directly to the Magellan without cooling the plane would have been disastrous.

  The Magellan emerged from the cold side to meet them. From the heights of space, they saw that they would not need to bomb the mountain relayer masts—for the same alarm that had triggered the station had shattered them.

  After the Magellan had scuttled back to the cold side, there was a council of war in the control room. Burl and Boulton described very carefully what had happened.

  “This must have been their primary station,” said Russ thoughtfully. “No matter what they seek to channel from the Sun on other planets, it is from here that the first and strongest diversion of solar energy must have been coming. This station may have been the last constructed—the final link put into place. And for that reason, they installed an alarm.”

  “Ah,” said Lockhart, “even if they did, would it necessarily have destroyed that station? After all, they would normally have figured on repairing whatever went wrong.”

  “It seems to me,” said Burl, “that the red flash itself didn't start the destruction. There was a delay—must have been several minu
tes—before it started. Could it be, that what was alerted was a watcher?”

  “Where?” said Boulton. “There was no place for a watcher to be in that station. We saw no sign of it.”

  “Maybe deep underground?” suggested the engineer, Caton. “They might have living quarters a few miles underneath.”

  “Highly unlikely,” said Russ Clyde. “It would still be too hot, and, remember, these people plan to incinerate Mercury and the inner planets. They must be from the edge of the system. The delay may be a valuable clue to that. It would take time for a remote control station or another planet to see what was happening and take steps. If you can figure out exactly how many minutes and seconds elapsed between the flashing of the red bulb and the blowup, we could work out the approximate distance.”

  But, unfortunately, the time could not be judged that accurately. Neither Burl nor Boulton had had time to look at his watch.

  They hung over the cold side of Mercury for several hours more while the two astronomers figured their next move. When the orbits had been determined, the Magellan turned its massive wide nose away from the Sun toward a gleaming white disc that dominated the dark skies of outer space. With full power on, they pushed away from the littlest planet and began the long fall toward the Sun's second planet, that which some had considered to be Earth's veiled twin, Venus.

  There was a matter of thirty million miles to cross, and the crossing would be made fighting the pull of the Sun all the way.

  Caton and his men had spent the wait on Mercury working on the great generators in the powerhouse nose. They recalibrated the output and corrected it from the records kept during the flight inward. Now they were confident of its ability to drive the ship away from the Sun. Coming in, they had not been sure what their A-G drive would do and could do. Going outward they knew just what to expect.