by Earl
Von Zell, with true Germanic patience, is listing all the queer, jumbled, natural alloys of the ground beneath us, forged in Nature’s laboratory. He hopes to discover some that would benefit Earth industry.
Ling is measuring the invisible waves of electrons that shower down from the Sun spots. These Sun spot barrages disturb radio communication on Earth, and create the Aurora Borealis. On Mercury, they surround every mountain tip with incredibly beautiful color effects. These are invisible to the naked eye, in the Sun’s strong glare. But Ling is taking pictures with special color filters.
Paul Swinerton is as zealous a biologist as his brothers, Charles and Richard Swinerton, were. They gave their lives on the expeditions to Mars and Venus. But they at least had something to study, in the way of lifeforms, before the end. Here, Paul Swinerton raves bitterly, there isn’t even a microbe.
Robertson, the archeologist, is still worse off. If there aren’t even plants or insects, there were never any higher life-forms—no rational creatures, no lost civilizations. Just a while ago, as we ate together, he suddenly asked a question sharply.
“Where are the pyramids?”
We all realize what is lacking. We found pyramids on Mars and Venus, built by the ancient Martians. Records vaguely told of their presence on Mercury. We would be startled not to find them here.
Robertson begged Captain Atwell to let him explore beyond sight of our ship. Atwell pursed his lips, but gave no definite answer. In keeping with his policy of caution, he is probably not yet ready to risk an exploration to unknown parts. He wants to bring us all back to Earth alive.
Hello, Mars Expedition Two! Received your relayed message. Glad to hear you stopped an attack of the warrior ants with the light cannon you have along. Wish we had had them. We wouldn’t have lost Proosett and Cruishank. If you locate their graves, with the Earth flag painted on boulders, say a word for us. They died heroes.
FIFTY-NINTH Day.
Startling news, Earth! Two big surprises. No, just one, because after all we expected the pyramid. The other is—life.
Captain Atwell consented to an exploration this morning, at the insistence of both Robertson and Swinerton. He went along with them, to balance their inexperience with his veteran sagacity.
They went parallel to our latitude, inside the Twilight Zone, covering fifty miles in five hours. You can move on Mercury like a fast kangaroo. They found the pyramid perched on a hill, limned against the bright sky. Coming on it suddenly around a boulder, Robertson gasped and then ran for it like a demon. To his credit, he stopped when Captain Atwell sharply called him back. They approached it cautiously. One can never tell what danger lurks—our cardinal rule.
But there was no danger. The pyramid was deserted, ancient. Robertson looked at it almost reverently. It reared like a symbol out of time’s mists. The Martians have been here before us. Twenty thousand years ago, Robertson estimates.
Again the strange mystery of it brooded over the scene. Halloway and his experts, on Earth, have partially deciphered the crypt records of both Mars and Venus. We know now that the Martians colonized and roamed through the Solar System, as late as ten thousand years ago. But what happened to them? Why did they abruptly vanish from the scene, to leave only their almost eternal pyramids?
The answer might lie within this one. But Atwell pulled Robertson away. Another time for that, since they were on rationed air for their helmets. At that moment, Swinerton let out a wild yell, which I heard through connection with his helmet radio.
Walking around the pyramid, they had come on something else, beyond it—a long sunken valley, so deep that it was in full shadow. At the edges were algae. Swinerton knelt and cuddled them in his hands. The first signs of life on this incredibly barren planet! The rest of us don’t wonder that he nearly went crazy with excitement.
They looked down only long enough to see a sort of mist lying throughout the valley. Denser air, Swinerton surmises, and water vapor. A general green color promised much more plant-life below, though they could see no detail. Swinerton swears he saw something move.
Then Captain Atwell forced Swinerton away, almost at the point of a gun. He herded Robertson past the pyramid, and they returned. We are all too excited to sleep now. Indigenous life on Mercury. But what kind, on a planet whose soil can only be heavily loaded with metals? And the pyramid link to the enigmatic past.
We were proud to receive that broadcast from Polaris. We’ve never heard the song, “Hall, Men of Space!” rendered better than by the Antarctic choir. Antarctica was the last frontier on Earth, before we went into space. Thanks.
SIXTIETH Day.
This morning a party of five made the trip again. The lure of mystery—both of life and the pyramid—was there. Robertson and Parletti examined the pyramid. Captain Atwell went on with Swinerton and Ling, down into the valley.
To report briefly on the pyramid, Robertson and Parletti found no immediate entrance. So they contented themselves with taking measurements. Also, they, took photos of the inscriptions around the base.
Captain Atwell and his party cautiously descended the slope of the valley, guns ready. The lower they went, the more life appeared, from algae, to moss, to rudimentary ferns and clumps of bushes. Finally, toward the center ten miles along, grew a forest of reeds fully two hundred feet high. In Mercury’s light gravity, the thin stems can support a tremendous height of foliage.
Swinerton, kept up a running fire of disjointed conjecture. Ages ago, Mercury rotated, he said, and supported a flowering life in what would correspond to our arctic and antarctic, here equatorial. When the rotation finally ceased, this withered away. Only a remnant survives now in the narrow strip of the Twilight Zone. Sunken valleys protect it from the blistering Day Side and from the deathly cold of the Night Side.
Swinerton wondered how much of the animal life had survived. Watching and wandering, they saw. Insects buzzed about, amazingly large ones, the size of song birds. Birds, in turn, were all bigger than eagles, snapping up the huge insects as Earth birds snap up gnats. Mammals were winged. Flying wolflike creatures lumbered by, seeking prey in the universal rule of life.
One great bearlike creature, with a membranous wing spread of thirty feet, hovered over them as though contemplating attack. Then it flapped away grotesquely. It pounced on a turkey-sized bird, rended it with its claws, and savagely gobbled it down—all in mid-air. As on Mars, despite thin air, life had adopted the skies because of the light gravity! And the lifeforms are big because of one rule. The smaller the planet, the bigger is its life. Gravity is the sole yardstick of size.
It was strange and pathetic. These monsters represented the last of a planet’s evolution, bound to a tiny strip of territory circling Mercury. That ring of stubborn life is eternally menaced by extremes of heat and cold on both sides.
Markers just made a remarkable discovery, back here at camp. He found no sign of the mythical planet Vulcan. But he did spot a new body. Mercury has a moon!
Earth telescopes could never resolve it, because Mercury is unfavorably situated for observation, so close to the Sun’s glare. Markers estimates it as only a few miles in diameter, smaller even than Mars’ two tiny moons. But still it is a moon.
It revolves rapidly, within five thousand miles, hugging Mercury closely lest the Sun’s enormous gravitation pull it away. Markers suggests Phaeton as its name, the chariot driver of the Sun. Obviously no planetary body wheels closer to the Sun, except now and then a comet.
To continue the valley exploration—Sput—
SIXTY-FIRST Day.
Continuing today. My ether-damping unit burned out yesterday. Von Zell, when I told him,-said it is probably a new Sun spot that suddenly deluged my unit with a barrage of electrons. I repaired it and added a shield.
Atwell, Swinerton and Ling saw something still more amazing, before they returned. In an open patch among the huge reeds, they suddenly came face to face with a truly monstrous creature. Scaly and. winged, large as a dinosaur, it s
eemed curiously familiar. When a steamy breath came from its nostrils, Ling recognized it.
“It’s a dragon!” he yelled. “Run!”
Ling himself ran. But Swinerton, paralyzed, just stared. When he did turn to run, he stumbled and fell. Captain Atwell stood over him as the monster charged, and pumped shot at it. It swerved, ran past them, gaining speed. It launched itself into the air. Ponderously it flapped its mighty wings. Rising like a great airplane, it soared out of the valley and turned toward the Sun.
Atwell and Swinerton watched, amazed. Their bullets had merely scared it away. And it vanished in the distance, over the Day Side. Did it live somewhere out in that inferno?
On their return, we speculated about this incredible creature. Swinerton displayed chips that the bullets had knocked off the scales. They were flinty horn, and Von Zell labeled them as silicic in composition.
Silicic life, Swinerton surmises from that—carbonaceous tissue, replaced by the analogous silicaceous tissue. It would be able to withstand terrific temperatures. He wildly assumes that it forages mainly out on the blazing Day Side, among other silicon life-forms. He pictures it wading through pools of molten metal, perching on mountain-tops, exposed to incandescent heat.
Fantastic? Swinerton went a step further. He says its metabolism must be chemically fierce, perhaps actual combustion, with live steam powering its muscles. In brief, a living steam engine! He hardly knows whether to take himself seriously or not. Ling does.
“The fire-breathing dragon of Chinese mythology,” he said moodily. “Either the Martians once brought some to Earth, or told stories of it to aboriginal man, as a threat.”
“Is that why you ran from it?” von Zell asked cuttingly. “Race memory, eh?” He laughed as though Ling had presented a poor excuse for cowardice.
Ling said nothing, but the rest of us felt von Zell had spoken out of turn. There is probably just a trace of chauvinism left in von Zell, from his Germanic ancestry of the previous century. He should remember that the wars of the white race on the yellow are over. There had been a little bad feeling between Ling and von Zell before, on the space trip.
Hello, Mars Expedition Two! Just received your signal, that you’ve found our clay house. We lived two years in it. Almost like home to us. Parletti says to look around for a dime he lost. What he was hoping to buy with a dime on Mars, I don’t know.
SIXTY-SECOND Day.
Captain Atwell is worried. Mars was quiet and menacing. Venus was tempestuous and menacing. Mercury is unexpected and menacing.
Last night a storm broke, waking us all. First a violent wind roared from the Day Side, so hot that we had to turn on the refrigeration unit. Then came a counter-blow from the Night Side, with peltings of metal hail. Our outside thermometer swung from two hundred degrees above to one hundred below, in the space of an hour. The metallic rain churned against our hull till we thought it would be sandpapered thin. It lasted ten hours. Suddenly all was calm and serene again.
Libration effects, of course, Parletti and Markers explained. Periodically the heat drafts and cold drafts clashed, from their respective hemispheres. Where they met, not ten miles from us, hot metallic vapors cooled and dropped their brushing rain. Luckily, in our overlapping zone, full day and night never come. So only the tailings of these storms are ever felt.
“The unexpected,” Captain Atwell muttered. “That’s our danger. Life when we didn’t expect it. Mountains melting down. Storms without warning. We’ve escaped so far. Forewarned, we can guard against what we’ve encountered. But watch for the unexpected, men. We don’t want to lose a life to that.”
Suddenly we didn’t feel so secure. What lurks around the next corner? This is the question we face during our four months on Mercury.
Our morale is high, however. Karsen noted that hours before the storm came, the thermometer fluctuated from its mean of one-seventy-seven. We can anticipate other storms, so no one will be caught out in one. Tarnay kept watch of the molten metal flows from the Day Side, and says no tongue of them has reached closer than five miles. Swinerton says the giant dragon probably wouldn’t consider us food, and will leave us alone if we don’t annoy it. We have only the unexpected to deal with.
In the meantime, our scientific work is going on. Markers is observing his moon constantly, like a loving father. Parletti and Robertson, at the pyramid, are methodically circling and climbing, step by step, looking for an entrance. Tarnay is measuring the height of the atmosphere. Von Zell is still listing the metals. He finds that some, rare on Earth, like gallium and iridium, are more plentiful than iron. Karsen is cheerfully mapping the Sun spots, though at this close range they are numberless.
Swinerton, examining specimens of the plant-iife he brought back, finds them loaded with metallo-organic compounds, poisonous to us. Ling, we’re a little troubled about. He is moody, doing little. Perhaps he feels there is race discrimination against him because of von Zell’s remark. Captain Atwell slapped Ling on the back once.
“Buck up, kid. We know your skin is yellow, nothing else.” We wonder if Atwell meant it.
We’ve just had dinner and Would like some music. Can you send us some?
SIXTY-THIRD Day.
Trouble has come—not from an unexpected quarter, but from the dragon. Four men are trapped by it, at the top of the pyramid. This morning, the four went together. Parletti and Robertson as usual stopped at the pyramid. Tarnay and Swinerton descended into the valley. Swinerton was in search of more data about the valley life. Tarnay went along for safety’s sake. No man goes anywhere alone.
As Swinerton just reported it via helmet radio, they came on one of the dragon-creatures, apparently dozing. Why it should be in the valley—arctic to it—was a puzzle. It might have been driven by food scarcity in its normal haunts. At any rate, Swinerton conceived the idea of putting a bullet through one eye into its brain. Later he meant to dissect this amazing new kind of life. Tarnay’s protests to the contrary, he tried it. He should have asked Captain Atwell first, by radio.
Swinerton didn’t miss. The eye shattered, almost with a crystalline sound. But the brain behind it seemed unaffected by the slug. Perhaps a flintlike bone turned it aside. Enraged, the beast came after them. Further bullets had no effect.
Running desperately, slipping among the vast reeds, Swinerton and Tarnay managed to keep out of the blundering behemoth’s reach. It was handicapped by the loss of one eye. Using the power of their Earth muscles to the full, the two men got out of the valley. They scrambled up the pyramid, helped by Robertson and Parletti.
And there they are now, all four. The dragon sits at the base, waiting’, bellowing its anger. It clumsily tried to climb the pyramid, but gave up. Once it lumbered into the air, trying to peck at them from above. But the men crouched against the stone safely. Thereafter it waited below.
They emptied their guns at it, without effect. Its chitonous scales are bullet-proof. The other eye was too small a target to hit at that distance. When they try to sneak down the other side of the pyramid, it spies them and moves to meet them. No Earth bear could be more tenacious with a treed victim.
All this was reported by Swinerton through his helmet radio an hour ago. Captain Atwell first grabbed up our sub-machine-gun, and then lowered it helplessly. Even if he could get within range, it still would not destroy that armored colossus.
The situation of the trapped men is frankly grim. In a few hours their individual air-tanks will be exhausted. They can’t breathe the rarefied air of Mercury loaded with metallic vapors.
Captain Atwell and the rest of us are discussing all possibilities of driving the monster away. We even think of charging it with the space ship. But von Zell reminds us that if it can live out in the fiery Day Side, it can withstand our rocket blasts. Besides, with its steam-driven muscles, it might actually batter our ship and damage it! We can’t afford to underestimate this formidable form of life that turns away bullets and breathes fire.
Thanks for your musical broadcast
. I rebroadcast it through my set to the helmet radios of the four trapped men. It helped keep up their spirits. We’ve promised to rescue them. We don’t know how.
SIXTY-FOURTH Day.
The four men are safe! They are returning now. We owe a vote of thanks to the men on Mars Expedition Two. Their suggestion worked, or a variation of it. It’s strange to think of four men on Mercury being saved by advice from men on Mars, across a hundred million miles of space.
We had been about to run the ship over there, and take our chances of damaging it. Then their suggestion came—to make bombs of our fuel. We made three, packing pints of fuel in thermos containers with fulminate caps that von Zell quickly made with his chemical kit.
Captain Atwell, Markers and von Zell went out with them. Karsen, Ling and I were to stay with the ship. Karsen has only one hand. I had to keep three-way radio communication open through the ship’s relay system. Ling—Well, I could see he took it hard, being told to stay back. He had run once from the dragon.
It wasn’t till an hour later that Karsen and I noticed Ling wasn’t with us. He had quietly sneaked out, waving his air helmet. When Captain Atwell reported being within sight of the pyramid, he gasped suddenly.
“Ling, you here? But—” After a moment he finished tersely: “All right. Keep close to us.”
Captain Atwell reported his moves. The four of them crept up from the opposite side of. the pyramid, out of sight of the beast. The men above, to keep its attention, waved their arms and yelled. Clambering up, Atwell and his men worked their way high enough to be out of reach of sudden attack. At last they came around to the beast’s side. The crucial moment had arrived.
As the beast reared up suspiciously, they threw down the first bomb, under its feet. The impact of landing touched off the fulminate and fuel. The beast rocked back, but when the smoke cleared, it bellowed angrily and scrambled at the base of the pyramid, as though to climb. Captain Atwell hastily yet carefully tossed the second bomb. It exploded against the side of the pyramid, chipping, off rock and hurling the beast back by concussion.
