From where he stood, Ross could see neither Sunside nor Darkside. The Twilight Belt was nearly a thousand miles broad, and as the little planet dipped in its orbit the sun would first slide above the horizon, then slip back. For a twenty-mile strip through the heart of the Belt, the heat of Sunside and the cold of Darkside canceled out into a fairly stable temperate climate; for five hundred miles on either side, the Twilight Belt gradually trickled towards the areas of cold and raging heat.
It was a strange and forbidding planet. Humans could endure it only for short times; the sort of life that would be able to exist permanently on Mercury was beyond his conception. Standing outside the Leverrier in his spacesuit, Ross nudged the chin control that lowered a pane 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 Falbridge 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 back with the crawler any minute. You’d better get ready to make your trip.”
Krinsky nodded. “I’ll suit up, sir.”
As the technician swung up the handholds and into the ship, Ross’ thoughts turned to Curtis. The young astrogator had prattled 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 heat-suit over his standard rebreathing outfit. He looked like a small tank rather than a man. “Is the crawler approaching, sir?”
“I’ll take a look.”
Ross adjusted the lensplate in his mask and narrowed his eyes. It seemed to him that the temperature had risen somewhat. Another illusion, he thought as he squinted into the distance.
His eyes picked out the radar tower far off toward Sunside. His mouth sagged open.
“Something the matter, sir?”
“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 gasped and ran back into the ship, followed by the lumbering figure of Krinsky. In the airlock, mechanical hands descended to ease him out of his spacesuit; he signaled to Krinsky to remain in the heat-suit, and dashed through into the main cabin.
“Brainerd! Brainerd! Where in hell are you?”
The senior astrogator appeared, looking puzzled. “Yes, 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 clicked 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 Falbridge 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. That’s the sun coming up over those hills.”
“I know,” Brainerd said.
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 landcar, he 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. He decided he’d give them until it hit 275° to get back and then clear out. It was foolish to try to save two lives at a cost of five. 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 it 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, Ross thought. This was where a captain earned his pay. “Get out of the way,” he snapped. “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—
His pencil flew over the pad—but as he worked he saw that it was all wrong. His mind felt bleary, strange; he couldn’t seem to handle the computations. Looking up, he said, “Tell Krinsky to get down there and be ready to help those men out of the crawler when it gets here. They’re probably half-cooked.”
Temperature 146°. He looked down at the pad. Damn: it shouldn’t be that hard to do simple trig, he thought.
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’ll all roast here.”
“How come you’re doing it? What’s the matter with Brainerd?”
“Choked up. Couldn’t do the figures. And come to think of it, I feel pretty funny 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 strange too. The psych officer was frowning curiously. “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’ mind that still could think clearly realized that if left unattended Curtis was capable of almost anything.
Temperature 158°. The crawler seemed nearer. On the horizon, the radar tower was becoming a crazy shambles.
There was a shriek. “It’s Curtis!” Ross yelled, his mind returning to awareness hurriedly, and peeled out from behind the desk. He ran aft, followed by Spangler, but it was too late.
Curtis lay on the floor in a bloody puddle. He had found a pair of shears somewhere.
Spangler bent. “He’s dead.”
“Of course. He’s dead.” Ross echoed. His 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 desk and glanced through the computations.
With icy clarity he determined their location. They had come down better than three hundred
miles to sunward of where they thought they had been. 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 was almost there; temperature was 167°. 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 heat-suit, Krinsky brought Llewellyn and Falbridge aboard. They peeled out of their spacesuits and wobbled around unsteadily, then collapsed. They were like a pair of just-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’ll blast off. Brainerd, that new orbit ready?”
“Yes, sir.”
The thermometer grazed 200°. The cooling system was beginning to suffer—but its agonies were to be short-lived. Within minutes, the Leverrier had lifted from Mercury’s surface—minutes ahead of the relentless advance of the sun—and swung into a temporary planet-circling orbit.
As they hung there, virtually catching their breaths, just one question rose in Ross’ mind: why? Why did Brainerd’s orbit bring them down in a danger zone instead of the safety strip? Why had both Brainerd and Ross 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 in answer.
It was 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 with it a meaningful commutation:
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 hesitantly. The expressions on the six faces surrounding him told him what he wanted to know.
“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 life—or as close to it as Mercury can come.” Ross’ hands shook; 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’ 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 damndest to help Curtis’ wish come true.”
“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.”
Ross shook his head. “It knew that the rest of us didn’t want to die. The thing down there must be a multi-valued thinker. It took the conflicting emanations of Curtis and the rest of us, and fixed 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 all thought and moved 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’re not afraid, are you? I was counting on you to go out and scout for it in the heat-suit.”
“Not me!” Krinsky said hastily.
Ross scowled. “But this is the first intelligent life-form we’ve hit in the Solar System yet. We can’t simply 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. “I believe the safety of the crew will be best served by returning to Earth at once.”
Facing the group of them, Ross glanced quickly from one to the next. There was fear evident on the faces of all of them. 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’ 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.
This is mutiny, he thought, but somehow he did not care to speak the thought aloud. Here was a case where a superior officer might legitimately be removed from command for the common good, and he knew it.
The creature below was ready to offer its services. But, multi-valued as it might be, there was still only one spaceship, and one of the two parties—either he or the rest of them—would have to be denied its wishes.
Yet, he thought, the pool had contrived to satisfy both the man who wished to die and those who wished to stay alive. Now, six wanted to return—but could the voice of the seventh be ignored? You’re not being fair to me, Ross thought, directing his angry outburst towards the planet below. I want to see you. I want to study you. Don’t let them drag me back to Earth.
When the Leverrier returned to Earth, a week later, the six survivors of the Second Mercury Expedition could all describe in detail how a fierce death-wish had overtaken Second Astrogator Curtis and caused his suicide. But not one of them could recall what had happened to Flight Commander Ross, or why the heat-suit had been left behind on Mercury.
WORLD OF A THOUSAND COLORS
As I said in the introduction to “The Silent Colony,” many times in the early years of my career I would try on the style or technical approach of a writer I greatly admired, in order to find out, word by word, what the process of writing a story that I admired was like. Not that I ever matched the level of the writers whose modes I was adopting, of course—how could I have, back then? But it was a useful finger exercise all the same.
So here I am in my Jack Vance mode, back in November, 1956—a story written especially for W. W. Scott’s new magazine, Super-Science Fiction. I don’t mean that I’m rewriting some particular Vance story—editors don’t like you to do that—but that I’m dealing with my material in the manner of Vance, to get the hang of his remarkable flair for color and texture. I found it a voluptuous experience. W. W. Scott liked it, too, and gave me a nifty $120, which covered about three weeks’ rent on my five-room apartment overlooking Manhattan’s West End Avenue. (Try and rent a Manhattan apartment no
w, not just on West End Avenue but anywhere, for $150 a month!) Scottie ran the story in the June, 1957 Super Science.
——————
When Jolvar Hollinrede discovered that the slim, pale young man opposite him was journeying to the World of a Thousand Colors to undergo the Test, he spied a glittering opportunity for himself. And in that moment was the slim, pale young man’s fate set.
Hollinrede’s lean fingers closed on the spun-fiber drinkflask. He peered across the burnished tabletop. “The Test, you say?”
The young man smiled diffidently. “Yes. I think I’m ready. I’ve waited years—and now’s my big chance.” He had had a little too much of the cloying liqueur he had been drinking; his eyes shone glassily, and his tongue was looser than it had any right to be.
“Few are called and fewer are chosen,” Hollinrede mused. “Let me buy you another drink.”
“No, I—”
“It will be an honor. Really. It’s not every day I have a chance to buy a Testee a drink.”
Hollinrede waved a jeweled hand and the servomech brought them two more drinkflasks. Lightly Hollinrede punctured one, slid it along the tabletop, kept the other in his hand unopened. “I don’t believe I know your name,” he said.
“Derveran Marti. I’m from Earth. You?”
“Jolvar Hollinrede. Likewise. I travel from world to world on business, which is what brings me to Niprion this day.”
“What sort of business?”
“I trade in jewels,” Hollinrede said, displaying the bright collection studding his fingers. They were all morphosims, not the originals, but only careful chemical analysis would reveal that. Hollinrede did not believe in exposing millions of credits’ worth of merchandise to anyone who cared to lop off his hand.
To Be Continued - 1953–58 - The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg Volume One Page 23
