Mission: Tomorrow - eARC (9 page)

It was a strange and forbidding planet. Humans could endure it for only a short time; it was worse than Mars, worse than the Moon. The sort of life capable of living permanently on Mercury was beyond Ross’s powers of imagination. Standing outside the
Leverrier
in his spacesuit, he nudged the chin control that lowered a sheet of optical glass. He peered first towards Darkside, where he thought he saw a thin line of encroaching black—only illusion, he knew—and then towards Sunside.

In the distance, Llewellyn and Fallbridge were erecting the spidery parabola that was the radar tower. He could see the clumsy shape outlined against the sky now—and behind it? A faint line of brightness rimming the bordering peaks? Illusion also, he knew. Brainerd had calculated that the sun’s radiance would not be visible here for a week. And in a week’s time they’d be back on Earth.

He turned to Krinsky. “The tower’s nearly up. They’ll be coming in with the crawler any minute. You’d better get ready to make your trip.”

As the accumulator tech swung up the handholds and into the ship, Ross’s thoughts turned to Curtis. The young astrogator had talked excitedly of seeing Mercury all the way out—and now that they were actually here, Curtis lay in a web of foam deep within the ship, moodily demanding the right to die.

Krinsky returned, now wearing the insulating bulk of the heatsuit over his standard rebreathing outfit. He looked more like a small tank than a man. “Is the crawler approaching, sir?”

“I’ll check.”

Ross adjusted the lensplate in his mask and narrowed his eyes. It seemed to him that the temperature had risen a little. Another illusion? He squinted into the distance.

His eyes picked out the radar tower far off towards Sunside. He gasped.

“Something the matter?” Krinsky asked.

“I’ll say!” Ross squeezed his eyes tight shut and looked again. And—yes—the newly erected radar tower was drooping soggily and beginning to melt. He saw two tiny figures racing madly over the flat, pumice-covered ground to the silvery oblong that was the crawler. And—impossibly—the first glow of an unmistakable brightness was beginning to shimmer on the mountains behind the tower.

The sun was rising—a week ahead of schedule!

Ross ran back into the ship, followed by the lumbering figure of Krinsky. In the airlock, obliging mechanical hands descended to ease him out of his spacesuit; signaling to Krinsky to keep the heatsuit on, he dashed through into the main cabin.

“Brainerd? Brainerd! Where in hell are you?”

The senior astrogator appeared, looking puzzled. “What’s up, Captain?”

“Look out the screen,” Ross said in a strangled voice. “Look at the radar tower!”

“It’s
melting,”
Brainerd said, astonished. “But that’s—that’s—”

“I know. It’s impossible.” Ross glanced at the instrument panel. External temperature had risen to 112°—a jump of four degrees. And as he watched it glided up to 114°.

It would take a heat of at least 500° to melt the radar tower that way. Ross squinted at the screen and saw the crawler come swinging dizzily towards them: Llewellyn and Fallbridge were still alive, then—though they probably had had a good cooking out there. The temperature outside the ship was up to 116°. It would probably be near 200° by the time the two men returned.

Angrily, Ross whirled to face the astrogator. “I thought you were bringing us down in the safety strip,” he snapped. “Check your figures again and find out where the hell we
really
are. Then work out a blasting orbit, fast: that’s the sun coming up over those hills.”

The temperature had reached 120°. The ship’s cooling system would be able to keep things under control and comfortable until about 250°; beyond that, there was danger of an overload. The crawler continued to draw near. It was probably hellish inside the little land car, Ross thought.

His mind weighed alternatives. If the external temperature went much over 250°, he would run the risk of wrecking the ship’s cooling system by waiting for the two in the crawler to arrive. There was some play in the system, but not much. He decided he’d give them until it hit 275° to get back. If they didn’t make it by then, he’d have to take off without them. It was foolish to try to save two lives at the risk of six. External temperature had hit 130°. Its rate of increase was jumping rapidly.

The ship’s crew knew what was going on now. Without the need of direct orders from Ross, they were readying the
Leverrier
for an emergency blastoff.

The crawler inched forward. The two men weren’t much more than ten miles away now; and at an average speed of forty miles an hour they’d be back within fifteen minutes. Outside the temperature was 133°. Long fingers of shimmering sunlight stretched towards them from the horizon.

Brainerd looked up from his calculation. “I can’t work it. The damned figures don’t come out.”

“Huh?”

“I’m trying to compute our location—and I can’t do the arithmetic. My head’s all foggy.”

What the hell.
This was where a captain earned his pay, Ross thought. “Get out of the way,” he said brusquely. “Let me do it.”

He sat down at the desk and started figuring. He saw Brainerd’s hasty notations scratched out everywhere. It was as if the astrogator had totally forgotten how to do his job.

Let’s see, now. If we’re—

He tapped out figures on the little calculator. But as he worked he saw that what he was doing made no sense. His mind felt fuzzy and strange; he couldn’t seem to handle the elementary computations at all. Looking up, he said, “Tell Krinsky to get down there and make himself ready to help those men out of the crawler when they show up. They’re probably half cooked.”

Temperature 146°. He looked down at the calculator. Damn: it shouldn’t be that hard to do simple trigonometry, should it?

Doc Spangler appeared. “I cut Curtis free,” he announced. “He isn’t safe during takeoff in that cradle.”

From within came a steady mutter. “Just let me die . . .just let me die . . .”

“Tell him he’s likely to get his wish,” Ross murmured. “If I can’t manage to work out a blastoff orbit, we’re all going to fry right here.”

“How come you’re doing it? What’s the matter with Brainerd?”

“Choked up. Couldn’t make sense of his own figures. And come to think of it, I’m not doing so well myself.”

Fingers of fog seemed to wrap around his mind. He glanced at the dial. Temperature 152° outside. That gave the boys in the crawler 123° to get back here . . .or was it 321°? He was confused, utterly bewildered.

Doc Spangler looked peculiar too. The psych officer wore an odd frown. “I feel very lethargic suddenly,” Spangler declared. “I know I really should get back to Curtis, but—”

The madman was keeping up a steady babble inside. The part of Ross’s mind that still could think clearly realized that if left unattended Curtis was capable of doing almost anything.

Temperature 158°.

The crawler seemed to be getting nearer. On the horizon the radar tower was melting into a crazy shambles.

There was a shriek. “Curtis!” Ross yelled, his mind hurriedly returning to awareness. He ran aft, with Spangler close behind.

Too late.

Curtis lay on the floor in a bloody puddle. He had found a pair of shears somewhere.

Spangler bent. “He’s dead.”

“Dead. Of course.” Ross’s brain felt totally clear now. At the moment of Curtis’ death the fog had lifted. Leaving Spangler to attend to the body, he returned to the astrogation desk and glanced through the calculations he had been doing. Worthless. An idiotic mess.

With icy clarity he started again, and this time succeeded in determining their location. They had come down better than three hundred miles sunward of where they had thought they were landing. The instruments hadn’t lied—but someone’s eyes had. The orbit that Brainerd had so solemnly assured him was a “safe” one was actually almost as deadly as the one Curtis had computed.

He looked outside. The crawler had almost reached the ship. Temperature 167° out there. There was plenty of time. They would make it with a few minutes to spare, thanks to the warning they had received from the melting radar tower.

But why had it happened? There was no answer to that.

Gigantic in his heatsuit, Krinsky brought Llewellyn and Fallbridge aboard. They peeled out of their spacesuits and wobbled around unsteadily for a moment before they collapsed. They were as red as newly boiled lobsters.

“Heat prostration,” Ross said. “Krinsky, get them into takeoff cradles. Dominic, you in your suit yet?”

The spaceman appeared at the airlock entrance and nodded.

“Good. Get down there and drive the crawler into the hold. We can’t afford to leave it here. Double-quick, and then we’re blasting off. Brainerd, that new orbit ready?”

“Yes, sir.”

The thermometer grazed 200. The cooling system was beginning to suffer—but it would not have to endure much more agony. Within minutes the
Leverrier
was lifting from Mercury’s surface—minutes ahead of the relentless advance of the sun. The ship swung into a parking orbit not far above the planet’s surface.

As they hung there, catching their breaths, just one thing occupied Ross’s mind:
why?
Why had Brainerd’s orbit brought them down in a danger zone instead of the safety strip? Why had both he and Brainerd been unable to compute a blasting pattern, the simplest of elementary astrogation techniques? And why had Spangler’s wits utterly failed him—just long enough to let the unhappy Curtis kill himself?

Ross could see the same question reflected on everyone’s face: why?

He felt an itchy feeling at the base of his skull. And suddenly an image forced its way across his mind and he had the answer.

He saw a great pool of molten zinc, lying shimmering between two jagged crests somewhere on Sunside. It had been there thousands of years; it would be there thousands, perhaps millions, of years from now.

Its surface quivered. The sun’s brightness upon the pool was intolerable even to the mind’s eye.

Radiation beat down on the pool of zinc—the sun’s radiation, hard and unending. And then a new radiation, an electromagnetic emanation in a different part of the spectrum, carrying a meaningful message:

I want to die.

The pool of zinc stirred fretfully with sudden impulses of helpfulness.

The vision passed as quickly as it came. Stunned, Ross looked up. The expressions on the six faces surrounding him confirmed what he could guess.

“You all felt it too,” he said.

Spangler nodded, then Krinsky and the rest of them.

“Yes,” Krinsky said. “What the devil was it?”

Brainerd turned to Spangler. “Are we all nuts, Doc?”

The psych officer shrugged. “Mass hallucination . . .collective hypnosis . . .”

“No, Doc.” Ross leaned forward. “You know it as well as I do. That thing was real. It’s down there, out on Sunside.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that wasn’t any hallucination we had. That’s something alive down there—or as close to alive as anything on Mercury can be.” Ross’s hands were shaking. He forced them to subside. “We’ve stumbled over something very big,” he said.

Spangler stirred uneasily. “Harry—”

“No, I’m not out of my head! Don’t you see—that thing down there, whatever it is, is sensitive to our thoughts! It picked up Curtis’s godawful caterwauling the way a radar set grabs electromagnetic waves. His were the strongest thoughts coming through; so it acted on them and did its damnedest to help Curtis get what he wanted.”

“You mean by fogging our minds and deluding us into thinking we were in safe territory, when actually we were right near sunrise territory?”

“But why would it go to all that trouble?” Krinsky objected. “If it wanted to help poor Curtis kill himself, why didn’t it just fix things so we came down right
in
Sunside. We’d cook a lot quicker that way.”

“Originally it did,” Ross said. “It helped Curtis set up a landing orbit that would have dumped us into the sun. But then it realized that the rest of us
didn’t
want to die. It picked up the conflicting mental emanations of Curtis and the rest of us, and arranged things so that he’d die and we wouldn’t.” He shivered. “Once Curtis was out of the way, it acted to help the surviving crew members reach safety. If you’ll remember, we were all thinking and moving a lot quicker the instant Curtis was dead.”

“Damned if that’s not so,” Spangler said. “But—”

“What I want to know is, do we go back down?” Krinsky asked. “If that thing is what you say it is, I’m not so sure I want to go within reach of it again. Who knows what it might make us do this time?”

“It wants to help us,” Ross said stubbornly. “It’s not hostile. You aren’t afraid of it, are you, Krinsky? I was counting on you to go out in the heatsuit and try to find it.”

“Not me!”

Ross scowled. “But this is the first intelligent life-form man has ever found in the solar system. We can’t just run away and hide.” To Brainerd he said, “Set up an orbit that’ll take us back down again—and this time put us down where we won’t melt.”

“I can’t do it, sir,” Brainerd said flatly.

“Can’t?”

“Won’t. I think the safest thing is for us to return to Earth at once.”

“I’m ordering you.”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

Ross looked at Spangler. Llewellyn. Fallbridge. Right around the circle. Fear was evident on every face. He knew what each of the men was thinking.

I don’t want to go back to Mercury.

Six of them. One of him. And the helpful thing below.

They had outnumbered Curtis seven to one—but Curtis’s mind had radiated an unmixed death wish. Ross knew he could never generate enough strength of thought to counteract the fear-driven thoughts of the other six.

Mutiny.

Somehow he did not care to speak the word aloud. Sometimes there were cases where a superior officer might legitimately be removed from command for the common good, and this might be one of them, he knew. But yet—

The thought of fleeing without even pausing to examine the creature below was intolerable to him. But there was only one ship, and either he or the six others would have to be denied.