Secret of the Ninth Planet

by Donald A. Wollheim

  They did not travel blindly outward, for that would have been both a crude waste of power and inaccurate. Instead, the ship drove at a long slant from the Sun, moving in a gently curving orbit that would bring it onto Venus at the same time that Venus itself was moving along in its orbit. This is what they had tried to do before, but without success. Venus travels around the Sun at a speed of about 32 miles per second, and takes about 224.5 days to complete the circuit. From where the Magellan took off, it would approach and overtake Venus at a speed a little greater than the 32 miles per second.

  The days passed swiftly enough. They had developed the pictures taken in the Mercury station, and the engineers and astronomers spent long hours debating their features, matching up what they had seen with what was known about the Andes station.

  The shining face of Venus grew larger. It was a mysterious planet, the most mysterious in the system, even though it was the closest of the planets to Earth. Venus was a world whose atmosphere—of Earthly depth—was a solid mass of clouds. Never had the clouds lifted to reveal the surface. The clouds reflected the sunlight brilliantly, yet as Burl could now see with the naked eye, parts of it were hazy, as if mighty storms were raising dark particles from below.

  “We've had a couple of prober rockets shot into its surface,” said Russ, as they watched the oncoming planet. “They didn't prove much—faded out fast, but we think they established its length of day. Nobody knew how many hours it took Venus to rotate on its axis. Some even thought it always presented one face to the Sun as does Mercury. Others thought it had a quick day, shorter than Earth's. Others gave it a day almost a month long.

  “Our prober rockets, carrying unmanned instruments, rather definitely indicate that the planet has a day about twenty Earth-days long. Even though it's shielded by the clouds, it must be miserably hot near the surface.”

  “We'll soon find out.” Burl grinned. “After Mercury, it couldn't be so bad. Maybe it rains all the time.”

  Russ shrugged. “Who knows?” he said.

  Venus was a vast sea of swirling white and gray clouds beneath them when the Magellan reached it. They hung above the cloud level, while stretching below them lay the circular bowl of veiled mystery that was the fabled evening star of poem and song.

  Oberfield was probing the surface with the radiation counters for the Sun-tap distortion. None had been detected from Earth, but observation of the sunny face of Venus had always been difficult from the third planetary orbit. But quickly the dour astronomer proved the fact. A calculation of the planet's albedo—its rate of reflected sunlight—showed that in one large central section there was a dimming out. Somewhere in that spot, the light was being diverted.

  Lockhart brought the Magellan down gradually, closer, closer, and finally sank it into the soupy atmosphere of Venus. Now, from every viewplate, nothing reflected but a glare of white mist. But the ship was not operating blind. Radar pierced the clouds, and from the wide screens the crew could see that they had not yet touched the surface.

  “Watch out for mountains,” whispered Russ, hanging over Lockhart's shoulder.

  Their progress was slow but steady. The cloud bank around them did not clear, but still glowed gray. After a descent of nearly two hours, there was a flicker on the radar. It registered no features, no mountains, nothing but a seemingly flat plain.

  Above and around them the white clouds still blanketed everything. But now Burl thought he saw a pale glow. Gradually the white faded away into wisps and shreds, and in a flash the ship broke out of the clouds.

  They hung beneath a grayish-white sky. Below them, scarcely a half mile of visibility in misty, thin air, they saw the surface of Venus. They were over water. An ocean stretched below them as far as the eye could see, with neither a rock nor an island. Venus was a water world!

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Ocean Primeval

  THE MAGELLAN hung in the air while the men studied the surface of this world that had so long been a mystery. The air was not the clear air of Earth; rather, it was the kind that precedes the coming of a fog, thick, heavy with moisture, the horizons fading into gray. Below them lay a mottled expanse of water, reflecting the gray sky, and verging almost to a deep brown. The water was still, occasionally stirred by a slight wave.

  “No tides have ever moved these waters,” commented Russ quietly to Burl. “There is no moon to pull and sway them. The motion of this world, so slow in the passage of its day, hardly disturbs the water.”

  “It looks shallow to me,” said Burl. “The darker sections look as if the bottom must be close.”

  “I imagine it is. We'll take soundings,” Russ answered. “I have a feeling the whole world may be like this ...one vast, shallow, swampy sea. See the scum floating on it?”

  “See it? Now that you mention it, there's hardly a part that hasn't something on it.” was Burl's reply. “There're patches of muck all over it, like floating oil, or even drifting masses of weeds.”

  It was true. The water showed on its surface a strange filth unlike anything one would expect on the surface of a Terrestrial sea. There were wide areas of brownish-gray slime and little floating blobs of green. Shining flecks of yellow, like bright oil drops, seemed to flow through and between the masses of scum.

  At the radar, Haines began to call out figures. As Russ had guessed, it was a shallow sea. In places, the bottom was only a dozen feet beneath. For a while, all the men of the crew were quiet, watching the silent waters beneath them.

  “Unclean, the whole place looks unclean,” Lockhart said finally. “We've got work to do. Let's find the Sun-tap station.”

  The rest of the crew came to action. The spaceship began to move slowly, while Oberfield and Caton probed for the lines of force which would lead to the station.

  Now a long, low bank appeared, a ridge of mud protruding above the water. Here and there stretched other low mud bars, and once a ridge of rock.

  “I've seen no animals or birds,” said Burl. “Do you suppose there are any?”

  Russ pursed his lips. “I don't think so. From the look of this world, life probably isn't developed that far. You won't find animals until there is dry land—and I'd guess now that there's no place on all Venus where there is much dry land. There may be fish or fish life, but even that's questionable. Consider—the long, long day, the absence of violent, unshielded Sun rays, the steady damp warmth, the quiet, barely moving waters, the heavy amounts of carbon dioxide in the air...”

  He paused and went over to Lockhart's chart table to pick up a paper. “Oberfield worked out the atmosphere. It is very heavy in carbon dioxide, very low in free oxygen. There's water vapor down here, but the clouds have kept it below; it didn't show up in the outer atmosphere at all.”

  “There's the Sun-tap base,” said Burl, and added as an afterthought, “I think.”

  This one did not look at all like the other stations he had seen. There was indeed a ringed wall station, but the wall was low and slanted outward. It stood on the end of a wide mudbank, and near it veins of rock glistened as if wet.

  The interior machinery was a neat, compact mass of crystalline globes and levers. But the masts and shining discs which had characterized the stations on Mercury and Earth were missing. Instead, there floated upon the surface of the water, for a mile around, great shining bowls, like huge saucers gently rocking in the faint wavelets. Thin, flexible, shining lines of metal connected this surface layout with the station.

  “With no direct Sun to aim at, this station seems to be directed toward a nonfocused system of light diversion,” Lockhart announced. “The wrecking crew please get under way!”

  “I'm going down with you,” Russ joined in. “I've gotten permission to take some observations from the surface.”

  “Good,” said Burl, and hurried with him down to the central floor.

  They disembarked in two parties. Haines and Ferrati used the two-man rocket plane and would make a wide encirclement of the vi
cinity, mapping and finally blowing up the accumulator discs floating on the surface. Burl, Russ, and Boulton took a helicopter.

  The helicopter, under the control of the Marine captain, dropped out of the cargo port of the Magellan; Steadied by the regular whirl of its great blades and driven by tiny rocket jets in the tip of each wing, the whirlybird swung down like a huge mosquito hovering over a swamp patch.

  It moved over the water and finally hung directly over the mudbank. Maneuvering so that the helicopter was directly in the protected circle of the walls, Burl and Russ dropped a rope ladder and swung down hand over hand to be the first human beings to set foot on Venus.

  They were lightly dressed, for the temperature was hot, around 110°, and it was humid. No breezes blew here. They wore shorts and shirts and high-laced leather boots. Each carried two small tanks of oxygen on his back. A leather mouth nozzle strapped across the shoulders guaranteed a steady flow of breathable air. In their belts were strapped knives and army pistols. Russ carried recording equipment, and Burl a hatchet.

  They dropped off the swaying ladder inside the station. The ground was hard-packed as if the builders had beaten it down and smoothed it off. The globes were familiar to Burl—he had studied the pictures of the two he had already visited and he realized that they followed the same general system. Where the mast towers would have been, there were leads running through the plastic walls out across the sea. He wondered briefly why the walls were curled outward.

  As the helicopter moved away, the metal weight on the end of the dangling ladder brushed the top of the wall. There was a crackling noise, and a spark jumped between them.

  “The wall is electrically charged,” said Burl. “I wonder why?”

  Russ shook his head. “From the looks of it, to keep off something. Perhaps some kind of native life. But what? I'm sure there's nothing of a highly organized physical structure here.”

  Burl found the controls of the station, but before touching them, he remembered the alarm on Mercury. “I'd better try to smash the alarm first,” he called out to Russ.

  Finally, Burl located an isolated globe perched on a post, which resembled the one he had briefly glimpsed on Mercury. He ran his hands over it, feeling a mild vibration within. Then, at its base, he found the levers. He moved them and the vibration died out. “I think I've turned it off,” he announced. “But stand by with a gun, just in case.”

  Russ drew his pistol, and Burl switched off the main controls of the Sun-tap. A globe or two burst; there was a sort of settling down in the station. Abruptly they felt the heat intensify and knew that the sky was shining more brilliantly than before. The diversion of the Sun was over for Venus.

  The alarm globe remained quiet, but Burl took his hatchet and smashed it. Russ was carefully photographing the station, measuring the distances, and tracing the lines. Overhead, the wide blades of the helicopter flapped around and around, accompanied by little hissing puffs of rocket smoke. They could see Boulton looking down at them from the tiny cabin.

  Russ was scooping up bits of soil to bring back for analysis when he saw what seemed to be a wet patch on top of the wall. As he watched, it spread until it reached the bottom. In a remarkably short time a whole section of wall was gleaming wet. A patch of damp oiliness spread over the floor.

  “This I've got to get a sample of,” said the rusty-haired astronomer. He reached for a sampling bottle in his pocket, and at the same time the patch of wetness spread to his shoes.

  As Russ stepped forward, there was a sucking sound, and he lifted a thick gummy mass that was stuck to his sole. He shook his foot, set it down, and lifted the other, but it, too, was imbedded in thick slime. The stuff now was running up his ankle.

  “Hey!” he called out, and swung one foot vigorously to free it. More swiftly that he could move, the whole patch slid down the wall and swept around him. It was moving up his legs, as if trying to envelope him.

  “It's alive!” he shouted, and grabbed for the knife in his belt. In vain he tried to slash out. “It's like a giant amoeba that engulfs its food! Get it off me!”

  But the knife was ineffective. He fired his pistol, but the thing was just a vast wide puddle of slime, without brain, heart or organ that could be harmed. The soles of Russ's boots were already half eaten away and his socks were going fast. Some of it was touching the skin of his knees.

  He screamed as the stuff burned him.

  Burl had joined the attack with his knife, but leaped back when that proved useless. His mind raced for a way to help. Above them, Boulton was swinging the helicopter down so Russ could hoist himself out of harms' way, but time would not permit it. In another instant the mass would have Russ.

  Burl grabbed at the straps crossing his shoulder and swung the two oxygen tanks from his back. He snatched one from its leather holster, and pointed its nozzle at the mass of slime. He turned the stream of oxygen on, and then, taking his pistol, held its muzzle in the jet of oxygen and fired it.

  The roar of the gun was matched by the roar of a stream of fire that shot from the tank. Wherever the burning jet of oxygen touched, the mass shriveled and blackened. Yards and yards of amoeba seemed to writhe, hump upward in agony, and pull away.

  There was a ring of burned white along the ground, a sickening smell in the air, but the thing was dead.

  Russell Clyde grabbed the ladder as it swung toward him, and climbed up. The soles of his boots were gone and the sides were strings of raw, half-eaten leather. His legs and knees bore ugly patches of red where the slime had touched.

  “Well done!” called Boulton to Burl from the cabin. “Come on up before something else comes along!”

  Burl grabbed the ladder. He took two steps on the swaying, swinging rope as the helicopter started to climb and suddenly he felt himself losing strength. He become dizzy and tried to hold on, but began to lose consciousness. Dimly he heard Boulton yell at him, “The oxygen, the other tank, turn it on!”

  The second tank was still dangling from his chest.

  Fighting for consciousness, Burl twisted the nozzle. There was a hiss and he felt air blow against him. Miraculously, his senses cleared, and holding the oxygen tank tight against him, he climbed up the ladder and into the safety of the helicopter.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Dying Planet

  RUSSELL CLYDE was confined to his bunk during the next four days, his feet wrapped in bandages and ointment. Fortunately the digestive juices of the Venusian amoeba had only just begun their attack upon the skin after eating through the footgear. Except for some painful blisters and rawness, his condition was not serious.

  The little stateroom was cramped, containing as it did two bunks, one above the other, like the cabin of a liner. What with a couple of built-in lockers for clothes, and a bolted-down chair and a reading lamp, it was not a place to spend any more time than necessary. The lack of a window added to the inhospitality of the room. But Burl had accepted long ago the fact that a spaceship could not yet be considered a luxury liner. In time, the A-G drive would permit such things, but the Magellan was an experimental vessel turned by emergency into a warship.

  During those four days, Burl spent most of his time with Russ, getting to know him better, and talking about the trip. The young astronomer was not at all chagrined by his misadventure. In fact, the whole experience had him quite buoyed up.

  “What a wonderful place for biologists to study! Venus will be a Mecca for scientific learning!”

  “But not for anything else, I don't think,” said Burl. “Anyway, we're in for another experience now. Mars is our next goal. What's it like?”

  Russ put his hands behind his head and looked up at the bottom of the bunk above him. “We can see Mars well enough; there's no cloud blanket and the atmosphere is thin but clear. You've seen the photos and the colored sketches?”

  “I've seen it from our viewplates, but so far it's just a tiny, red disc. We're about at Earth's orbit now, even though Earth is
many millions of miles away from us. Mars is still about fifty million miles further, but we're gaining speed quite rapidly and Lockhart thinks we'll make it soon enough.” Burl picked up one of the books from the ship's library and started to thumb through it to locate a color chart of the planet.

  Russ waved a hand. “You don't have to show me. I've studied Mars by telescope so often I know it by heart. It's mostly a sort of light, reddish-tan, a kind of pale russet. We think that's desert. There are some fairly large sections that are bluish-green—at least in the Martian summers. In their winters these sections fade very greatly.”

  “That's vegetation,” Burl broke in. “It must be! Everybody agrees it acts like it. And there are the white polar caps, too.”

  “You can tell which season is which by the size of the polar ice caps. When one is big, the other is almost gone. Then there's the problem of the canals...”

  “Do you believe in them?” asked Burl. “The books disagree. Some think they're real—even say they look as if they had been built by intelligent beings as irrigation channels to take the melting waters of the poles down to the fertile lands. But other astronomers claim they can't see them—or that they're illusions, series of cracks, or lines of dark dust blown by winds.”

  “Personally, I've come to believe in them,” Russ argued. “They've been photographed—something is there. They're very faint, spidery lines, but they certainly are straight and regular. We'll find out soon enough.”

  Find out they did. Russ was up and about and the normal life of the ship resumed. During their passage of Earth's orbit, they had managed to raise the United States on the ship's radio. For three days they were able to converse with their home base. They exchanged news and data, transmitted back all they had learned and eagerly asked for news.