Burl turned away from the viewer. “Let’s find him now. I don’t think he’s very busy. He said something about catching up on his reading this period.”
Russ nodded, and the two of them got up from their seat. With a wave to Oberfield and Caton on duty at the controls, the two climbed down the ladder that led into the middle part of the living space. They looked into Haines’s quarters but he wasn’t there. So they went down the next hatchway into the lower section.
Haines and Ferrati were sitting at a table in the cooking quarters, drinking coffee. The two men, both heavy and muscular, used to the open spaces and the feel of the winds, were taking the enforced confinement in the cramped and artificially oxygenated space of the ship with ill ease. For them, it was like a stretch in jail.
They greeted the two younger men jovially and invited them to a seat. While Russ poured a cup of coffee for himself, Burl opened the subject of how much the expedition had worked out about the enemy.
Haines’s pale blue eyes gleamed. “You can know an awful lot about an enemy if you know what he didn’t do as well as what he did do. If you figure out what you yourself should have done under the same circumstances, and know he didn’t do, why, that gives you some valuable hints as to his deficiencies. As we see it, we’ve got a fighting chance of spoiling his game. Certainly of spoiling it long enough to allow Earth several more years to get a fleet of ships like this into operation and give him plenty of trouble.”
Suddenly Burl felt more cheerful. At the back of his mind there had been a carefully concealed point of cold terror—he remembered the clean efficiency of the Sun-tap station, the evidence of a science far beyond that of Earth. He pressed the point. “Just what do we really know?”
Haines leaned back and rubbed his hands together. “There were several things that gave their weaknesses away. When we put it all together, we decided that the enemy represents some sort of limited advanced force or scouting group of a civilization still too far away to count in the immediate future. We decided that the enemy isn’t too aware of our present abilities—that his intelligence service is poor as far as modern Earth is concerned. We figure he won’t be able to act with any speed to repair the damages we make.”
“Tell them how we worked that out,” said Ferrati, who had begun to grow again the short black beard that Burl remembered he had worn on his famous expeditions.
“Well,” said Haines, drawing the word out to build up suspense, “did you know that the station in the Andes, the one you cracked open, was built at least thirty years ago? And never put into operation in all that time?”
Burl was surprised. “Why…I hadn’t thought of it—but it could have been. That valley was so isolated and deserted, probably nobody would ever have spotted it.
“Right,” Haines added, “and our investigation team studied the remains, the foundations, the layout, and we’re sure it’s been there at least three decades. That’s one clue.
“The second clue was the relative flimsiness of the walls. The builders hadn’t expected us to be able to blow them up. They were some sort of quick construction—a plastic, strong, but not able to hold up against blasting powder, let alone real heavy bombs or A-bombs.
“Now why was that? And the third clue, why didn’t they have a repair system available, or at least some sort of automatic antiaircraft defense?”
Burl looked at Ferrati. The latter was watching him shrewdly to see if he could figure it out.
“The builders didn’t expect an air attack,” said Burl slowly, “because of the air disturbances. They did not know we would have a Moon base that could spot their location. Hence they figured that our civilization would remain as it was thirty years ago. We wouldn’t have been able to spot the location at that time, because it required outer-space observation. It might have taken us several years of tramping around to locate it.”
“And the lack of a strong permanent construction? After all, a concrete and steel-enforced embankment, which any military force on Earth could have put there, would have balked your dynamite attack,” probed Haines.
“That means they didn’t have the time or the means to make such a construction. They must have had a single ship with the kind of equipment that could lay out a quick base in the shortest time!” said Burl.
“Right!” snapped Haines. “The Sun-tap must have been built by a relatively small team, which probably came in a single explorer ship. The ship was equipped with automatic factory machinery that could turn out an adequate base for an uninhabited planet, an airless moon, and so on—but they didn’t have the stuff for a fortified base—and they didn’t have the manpower to build it.”
“Another indication of that is the thirty-year delay,” added Ferrati. “Obviously, they arrived in this solar system from somewhere outside it. We figure that way because otherwise they would have been prepared to do the job on all the planets in the same trip and start operations at once. They must have made some observations of this solar system from a point in space at least as far away as another star. That means not less than four and a half light-years away—Proxima Centauri being the nearest star after our Sun, and four and a half light-years from us. Their observations were imperfect. They found more planets and problems than they had supposed. So they had to make a second trip to get enough supplies to finish their Sun-tap base constructions. It took them thirty years between the first stations and the ones that completed the job.
“And that, too, suggests that only one ship was originally involved here. Of course, maybe they came back with more the second time, but it still looks as if the main force hasn’t arrived. And won’t, until after the Sun novas.”
“Then that means,” said Burl quickly, “that we are still dealing with just a small and isolated group?”
“Maybe,” said Haines. “Just what constitutes a small group may be hard to say. I rather think they’d have brought the engineers and at least an advance working party of settlers with them the second trip in. But they are still short of available ships—they’re still not aware of what we may be going to do.”
“Why is that?” asked Burl.
Haines looked thoughtful. “This is conjecture. But if they planted any spies among our Earth people, there’s been no contact, because otherwise they’d have known we could track and crack their base as soon as it started. This means that they still haven’t had scouting ships to spare for checking up on what they did the first time. No checkup means no spare personnel to do the checking. They just assumed that we hadn’t caught on, and started operations by remote control as they had originally planned.”
“And that also may mean that these people are hard up,” said Ferrati. “Wherever they came from, their civilization has been great, but it’s gone to seed. They plan to seize another solar system, start over again, and they haven’t the manpower to do an adequate job—and they haven’t the abundance of material needed to set up simple check and guard stations, such as any major Earth nation would have the sense to do.”
“Why, that means we’ve got a fighting chance to lick ‘em,” said Burl joyfully. “I kept thinking we’d run into more than we could cope with.”
“We’ve got a fighting chance, all right,” said Haines. “We may be able to rip up their Sun-tap layouts, but what if we meet the main explorer ship itself? Anybody who can cross interstellar space and warp the power of the Sun, can probably outshoot, outrun, and outfight us. Let’s hope we don’t meet them until we’ve done our work.”
On this note the little discussion broke up as the gong rang for the next watch.
It made sense to Burl. If the Magellan could just operate fast enough, keep on the jump, they’d save the day. But—and he realized that nobody had mentioned it aloud—it also followed that the enemy—however small its group—was still in the solar system somewhere and would certainly be starting to take action very soon now.
The time came when the ship was to start slowing, to prepare itself for the meeting with Venus. Burl saw t
he hour and minute approach and watched Lockhart take the controls and set the new readings. The steady hum of the generators—a vibration that had become a constant feature of the ship—altered, and for everyone it was a relief. Their minds had become attuned to the steady pitch. One didn’t realize how annoying a nuisance it was until it stopped. As the stellar generators let down on the drag on the Sun, the gravity within the ship lessened. In a few moments there was a condition of zero, and those who had forgotten to strap themselves down found that they were floating about in the air, most of them giddy.
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.
The Tom Corbett Space Cadet Megapack: 10 Classic Young Adult Sci-Fi Novels Page 154
