Secret of the Ninth Planet

by Donald A. Wollheim

  “I'm okay,” Burl called. “Let's get this port open. Maybe we can hit back at least once.”

  Together, they turned the bolts and pushed the thick outer shell door open. Without the aid of telescopic sights they could see the shape of the Sun-tapper vessel plainly, outlined against the curtain of distant stars. Struggling not to think of what might be going on within the Magellan—their earphones registered nothing except each other—they unlimbered the long tube of the rocket launcher and aimed point-blank at the foe. Haines reached into the ammunition locker vault alongside the passageway and selected the biggest and wickedest of the available shells. He twisted the dial in the warhead and, while Burl held the aim, shoved in the rocket shell. With a press of the button, the missile roared out of the tube, racing in an arc of fire directly toward the faint vision of the other ship.

  They watched with bated breath, counting the seconds, hoping not to see another blast of electrical fire. But apparently the foe had exhausted its limited resources, for the thin spidery line of rocket sparks reached out, farther and farther, until it seemed to touch the surface of the golden globe.

  There was a great flare in the sky now, an outpouring of fire and hot metal. When it cleared away, the sky was empty.

  Haines wearily drew the outer port shut. “Now, let's see if we're goners, too,” he said quietly. They sealed the outer shell and made their way along the dark passage.

  Even as they were unlocking the toggles of the inner hatch, the corridor lights started to flicker. They would light up dimly, and then flicker out, light up again, flare for an instant, then die down. Someone was alive within the ship.

  They got the hatch open. In the central section of the living sphere, the lights were also dim and in a few places they were completely out. They emerged and closed the hatch behind them. Only after Haines had tested the inner atmosphere and found it still pressurized, did they open their helmets and climb stiffly out of the space suits, wincing at bruises they had sustained but had not noticed until then.

  The air pressure was all right, but, there was a smell of burned rubber and insulation in the air. Now that their helmets were off, they could hear voices somewhere above. They found Oberfield lying unconscious, thrown to the floor by the sudden shift of the ship. They climbed into the control room. Lockhart was floating in the air near the open hatchway leading to the engine room overhead. He was calling out orders to someone who was within.

  Russ was working over the navigation desk, a bandage around his head, trying to figure out where they would be and where they were heading, without having access to the still dark viewplates.

  Lockhart twisted in the weightless air when he saw them. He seemed both relieved and distressed. “I'm glad you're okay, but I had hoped you'd be able to put in a blow for us.”

  Burl realized that inside the ship they had no way of knowing that vengeance had been served. Hastily, he explained. His word cheered everyone. Russ and Lockhart shouted joyously. Detmar poked his head down the hatch and called the news back to his two fellows who were struggling to get the A-G generators functioning.

  The bolt of energy, whatever it may have been designed to do to a ship of the Sun-tapper build, did not have the totally disastrous effect on the Magellan that it was intended to have. It had knocked out their electrical system temporarily, burned out some of its parts and caused the A-G system to fail, although the atomic piles were impervious to such currents. Oberfield, Ferrati and Shea were badly hurt.

  There now followed an anxious period during which more and more of the electrical system began to function as the men labored to rig up emergency wires, and to replace burned out bulbs and lines. There was a general cheer when the viewplates flickered into life again, though not all functioned. They again had access to the sky about them—even though not all sectors were covered.

  The humming in the engine room started up, rose and fell uneasily a couple of times, and then they felt a surge of force. Lockhart fell gently to the floor as the ship began to drive ahead, and then in a few minutes the A-G drive was back on, and the Magellan was again under control.

  “We took what they had to give, and it wasn't enough,” exulted Haines. “Now wait till we reach their main works. We'll show them!”

  Lockhart shook his head wearily as he and Russ worked over the controls. “Let's hope we don't have to show them soon. Our ship is running on emergency rigging. Caton says he's going to have to rest the ship and rewire a good part of the system. Meanwhile, we will be able to reach Pluto safely enough.”

  Pluto was visible in the forward viewplates. They could see lighter and darker patches on it, almost like the markings of continents and oceans, but there was no evidence of an atmosphere, nor had they expected any.

  Readings showed that the average surface temperature was about 200° Fahrenheit below zero, even lower in many places. They searched the surface for signs of their foe.

  They found what they wanted on the north polar depression, a basin in the oblate sphere of Pluto. There was no ringed station. There rose a vast pile of dark masonry—a mighty structure covering at least a square mile, a fortress building whose roofs bristled with an array of masts and reflectors. And hanging on patrol over this polar basin were two more of the dumbbell ships.

  “We're in no position to come to grips with them,” said Lockhart. “I'm going to take the Magellan into a low orbit around Pluto's equator. We'll be out of their sight yet near enough to do some probing and exploring while we're making repairs.”

  This they proceeded to do, swinging the ship down to within a few hundred miles of the Plutonian surface, setting on a fixed orbit around the equator, exactly as the sputniks of years past had first circled the bulk of the Earth. Staying far enough up to maintain orbit, they were close enough to be below the planet's radiation belt.

  Taking stock of the ship's condition showed that they dearly needed this delay. Repairs would not be completed for several days. Practically everyone had been bruised or shaken up; Oberfield had a fractured skull and was in serious condition; Ferrati had broken his leg and pelvis; Shea had a couple of cracked ribs. The men were given emergency medical treatment and confined to quarters.

  The Magellan quietly circled Pluto once every hour and a half and the ship tried to resume its normal life. Russ studied the surface beneath them, Haines and Burl at his elbow. Then, after conferring, the three approached Lockhart.

  “We want permission to make a landing,” Russ said. “If we take the four-man rocket plane we can make the ground safely. We've got to reconnoiter before we can figure out how to put this master Sun-tap station out of business.”

  Lockhart agreed. “I was planning as much. Now that we're here, we can't delay just because we're injured. Go ahead.”

  The three got ready quickly. They donned their space suits, loaded the larger rocket plane with equipment, arms, and plenty of extra fuel. Just before they left, Lockhart gave them a word of caution. “Do not attempt to communicate with the Magellan by radio. If Pluto is the Sun-tappers' home world, you may find yourselves surrounded by enemies, and overheard. Don't reveal our existence or position. If you have to talk to us, do not expect a reply unless it's an absolute emergency.”

  Burl strapped himself into his seat within the rocket plane and glanced through the thick window. Below them was a world the size of Earth—a world which, if it had air and warmth, could most nearly be Earth's twin of all the planets in the system. This rocket plane had touched on the hot surface of Mercury, the first planet. In a little while it would set down on the frigid surface of the last planet. They had come a long way.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Stronghold of the Lost Planet

  WITH A jolt that shoved the three men back in their seats, the rocket plane pushed out the cargo hatch, and slid into the dark of space on its own power. Behind them, the metallic surface of the Magellan gleamed briefly, and then swung away on its orbit. Riding the red fire of their rockets,
they headed on a long low dive for the mysterious surface below.

  Pluto was a vast hemisphere, half lighted in the faint, dim glow of the tiny Sun, half in the total darkness of outer space. Here and there wound a silent, frozen river of glistening white. They passed over a gulf of some frigid sea of liquid gases, from which islands of subzero rock projected, and moved inland over a continent of lifeless grays and blacks. Haines gently drew the ship lower and lower, and at last the rocket plane bumped to the ground.

  It rolled a few yards and stopped. The three men crowded to the door, tightened their face plates, and forced open the exit. There was a rush of air as the ship exhausted its atmosphere. Then, one by one, they stepped onto the bleak surface of the Sun's farthest planet.

  “I feel peculiar,” whispered Burl. “This planet reminds me of something.”

  “I have the feeling I've been here before,” Russ said slowly.

  Burl felt an odd chill. “Yes, that's it.”

  Haines grumbled. “I know what you mean. I can make a guess. We've never really been the right weight since we left Earth. Even under acceleration there were differences one way or the other. But I feel now exactly as I did on Earth. That's what gives you the odd sensation of return.”

  The two younger men realized Haines was right. For the first time since they had left their home world, they were on a planet whose gravity was normal to them. It felt good and yet it felt—in these fearful surroundings—disconcerting.

  Above them was the familiar black, unyielding sky of outer space. No breath of air moved. Yet somehow the scene resembled Earth. “It's like a black-and-white photo of a Terrestrial landscape,” said Burl.

  There was a field, some hills, a tiny frozen creek and the dark shapes of rounded mountains in the distance. All without color except for the cold, faint glow of the star that was the Sun.

  A thin layer of cosmic dust lay over the surface, such as would be found on any airless world. Russ scooped beneath it and came up with a hard chip.

  He squeezed it between his gauntleted fingers. It cracked and broke into powder. He whistled softly. “You know what this feels and looks like” he said as they came close to the frozen creek on the little hillside. “It feels like dirt—common, Earthly dirt. Like soil. And you know what... I can already tell you one of Pluto's secrets.”

  They stopped at the creek. It was a layer of frozen crystalline gases. Haines pushed the alpenstock he was carrying into it and scraped away the gas crystals. “I think I can guess,” he said, “and I'll bet there is ice under this gas.”

  “Pluto was once a warm world with a thick atmosphere,” said Russ. “Notice the rounded hills and the worn away peaks of the mountains. Those are old mountains—weather-beaten. This hill is round—weather-beaten. This creek, those rivers of frozen gas—they follow beds that could only be made by real rivers of warm water. The soil that lies beneath this dust—it could only happen on a world that knew night and day, warmth and light, and rain and wind. Pluto was once a living world, a place we'd have called homelike.”

  Burl shivered a bit. “Out here? So far from the Sun? How and when?”

  Russ shrugged. “We'll find that out. But the evidence is unmistakable.” They walked on.

  There was a low, cracked wall on the other side of the hill, and beyond the wall stood the roofless ruins of a stone house, silent and gray in the airless scene.

  They waited with surprise and uncertainty. Haines drew his compressed air pistol, but there was no movement. The scene remained dead and still—the windows of the house were dark.

  They advanced on it and flashed a light inside. It was an empty shell. There was no glass within the wide and low window openings, and no door.

  “They went in and out the windows,” commented Burl, ducking through one of the openings. “And they weren't built like us.”

  “No,” said Russ, “there's no reason to suppose the inhabitants would have been built like human beings.”

  Inside there was nothing to see, and they left. Beyond, they found a straight depression in the ground filled with flat swirls of cosmic dust. “This looks like a road,” said Haines.

  They returned to the rocket plane in order to follow the dead roadway more easily. Passing between the low, dark cliffs of rocky mountains, they came to a plain marked by thousands of columns of rock, pieces of crumbling walls, and many straight depressions that must have been streets. It was the remains of a world that had died.

  They found, as they traveled northward and made intermittent landings, that there had been many cities. Now all lay in ruins. There had been great roadways, now covered with the debris of outer space. There had been mighty forests, now miles of petrified black stumps. It was a gloomy sight.

  In their landings, they had found inscriptions on walls and bas-reliefs carved on mountains. They knew from these what the Plutonians had looked like, and they had a suspicion of what had happened.

  The Plutonians had been vaguely like men and vaguely like spiders. They had stood upright on four thin, wide-spread legs and had two short arms. Their bodies were wide and squat, and they seemed to have been mammalian and probably warm-blooded. They breathed air out of flat, thin nostrils and their heads joined their bodies without necks. Two oval eyes were set below a jutting bald brow. They had worn clothes, they had driven vehicles, they had flown planes.

  Their vehicles had globe-shaped power plants. Their airplanes had globes where wings should have been. Their cities and their engines—which existed now only on wall pictures that were probably once advertisements—were built along globe-and-rod principles.

  “There's no doubt,” said Russ, “that the Sun-tapper culture and the Plutonian culture are the same. It's the descendants of the Plutonians that we are fighting.”

  “But how could they have survived?” Burl asked. “This world was never part of the solar system when it was warm.”

  “We'll soon know,” said Russ. “Tomorrow we're going to see how far we can get into their polar redoubt. Somehow we've got to blow up that last station.”

  “And I think we three are going to do it,” said Haines. “The Magellan will never take the place from the sky. We'll have to do it from the ground.”

  Now they were reminded of Earth again. For the first time since they had departed from the United States, night fell. They had not been on any other planet long enough for such an experience. But the effect here on Pluto was mild.

  Day was like a bright, moonlight night. Night then meant that the dim Sun had set and, in effect, it merely made the landscape slightly darker.

  They compared notes late into the night in the rocket plane. By dawn, when again the dim glow shone, they had come to some very definite conclusions about the planet.

  A number of the drawings on the walls seemed to have some religious significance. They focused on the phases of a moon. There were symbolic representations of this moon, passing through its phases; presumably Plutonian religious and social practices were related to it.

  “But where is this moon?” Burl had asked.

  “I think,” Russ answered, “that what some astronomers had suspected about Pluto was right. It did not originate in the solar system, but was captured from outer space. Originally it revolved around another sun, some star which was light-years away. How it tore loose from that star we'll probably never know—the star might have simply become too dim, their planet might have been on a shaky orbit, an experiment of theirs might have jarred it loose, many things could have happened.

  “Once beyond the gravitational grip of its parent sun, the planet wandered through the darkness of interstellar space until it came within the influence of our own Sun. How long this took would again be a guess. Possibly not more than a few thousand years, I'd say, since somehow a remnant of the population managed to survive. This suggests that they had some warning. Enough time passed for them to build the big structure we noticed at the north pole, probably to store food, build undergro
und greenhouses and make sealed homes for a few families. Inside this giant building the last of the Plutonian people kept going.

  “Then came the moment when their planet fell into an orbit around our Sun. I'd guess they emerged to find that the new Sun was too far away ever to heat up Pluto again, or to permit the rebuilding of an atmosphere. So they worked out a new scheme. This was to blow up the sun into a nova—make it a giant and thereby bring its heat all the way out to Pluto—warming this world again, lighting it again, unfreezing its gases and waters. So they set up the Sun-tap stations.”

  “That also accounts,” added Haines, “for their limited number of spaceships and their need for secret operations.”

  “Yes,” said Burl, “but there are two things that don't fit in. What happened to their moon—surely it would have gone along with Pluto since it revolved around it? And second, why the thirty-year delay between the first Sun-tap stations and the completion and operation of them?”

  There was no answer to these questions yet. The three began the morning's expedition.

  As they neared the pole, they stayed close to the surface, for, any moment, they expected to see the dumbbell ships that patrolled the sky above it.

  At last they set down the rocket plane on the edge of the polar plateau and got out. Not more than a mile away, the black ramparts of the building—a wall running miles across the horizon—rose hundreds of feet into the sky.

  Above it, they caught a flicker from the forests of masts and the glint from a dumbbell ship. They moved silently forward carrying the rocket launcher on their backs and a small load of shells and several hand bombs. These made heavy baggage, but the distance was not far, and the purpose great.

  Burl felt like an ant about to creep into a human house. But he reflected that no ant ever had such dangerous intentions. An ant enters a house to steal a crumb of food. But if an ant had intelligence and evil intentions, it could cripple such a house.