Hell Stuff For Planet X

by Raymond Z. Gallun

  For a moment St. Claire looked puzzled and quizzical. Then his expression changed slowly, and a Satanic gleam came into his deep-set eyes. He seemed to have made a decision.

  “Knobs,” he said finally. “You’re a marvel. And I thought I was a scientist! But I’m fairly sure I’m still sane, at least. You blow up some of the caverns, and—presto—immediately this planet begins to turn faster. Just like that, eh?”

  St. Claire moved a tiny call-lever on his desk. A moment later a broad, burly man who didn’t look too bright appeared at the doorway, an ugly ray pistol dangling at his belt.

  “Ellis,” St. Claire said distastefully. “Take Knobs Hartley here, and lock him up in the brig. It is evident that some screwball, with really malicious intentions, has already been very busy here in the Trail Blazer. So perhaps you can grasp my implication. I think we’ve got our man!”

  Ellis looked dully surprised for a moment; but in addition to his ordinary good-nature, he had a childish respect for the will of his superiors. So he nodded like a good stooge and grasped Knobs’ slight shoulders none too gently,

  “Aren’t you being a little abrupt in your judgment of Knobs?” someone questioned mildly. “All of us on this ship are in a terrible position, of course. But Knobs seems so perfectly honest and sincere—”

  It was a girl’s voice, speaking from the small Records and Data Room, which opened into the Trail Blazer's office. Evelyn Farnway, secretary of the Survey Group, was a friendly, unobtrusive little lady, with about the kindest eyes and prettiest teeth that Knobs had ever seen.

  But this, sadly, was only a wistful observation, from a distance. Though companionable, the girl had kept a faint wall of reserve with everyone in the Expedition. And besides, what could a beautiful girl like her find to admire in a skinny little runt like himself—not even mentioning that everlasting gargoyle-grin of his?

  “You’ll please keep out of this matter, Evelyn,” St. Claire advised in an annoyed tone. “Hartley may seem sincere, but maniacs are often good actors. Now that I’ve heard his crazy scheme about blowing up the grottoes of Nemesis, supposedly to make the latter rotate faster, and bring warming daylight to the dark hemisphere once more, I’m sure he’s truly insane. The disabling of the atomic generators and the murder of Commander Kilmer begin to look more and more like the work of a deranged mind rather than the products of an intelligent criminal plan. Take him away, Ellis!”

  So, within a scant minute, Knobs was sitting on the metal bench of the brig, staring at the securely locked door, pondering very hard.

  ALREADY it was getting slightly colder in the little prison. The tiny circular window was partly filmed with frost. And through the unfrosted portion, the stars shone frigidly in a black, alien sky—here on the night-half of a world called Nemesis! Soon, as more heat leaked from the Trail Blazer's hull, the crew would be draining the storage batteries of their energy, to feed the heaters for a little while, and keep warm. But this would only delay the finish!

  Knobs heard scraps of conversation drifting down the corridors from men he knew: “Poor devil—Hartley. Went off the deep end, huh?” ... “But why did he have to doom us too—stripping the generators so we can’t keep the heaters going?” ... “I’d kill him if he was sane.” ...

  Listening to comments like this, and feeling the stark promise of the increasing cold, seemed to sharpen Knobs Hartley’s by-no-means dull wits. His natural suspicions began to increase.

  The story of his supposed insanity had spread faster than it should have. St. Claire, the respected scientist, had evidently speeded up the propaganda against him. This looked definitely suspicious in itself. A lunatic who didn’t know what he was doing, always made a good blind—a cover-up—a means of allaying doubts, and stopping a search for a real menace. A crook could blame almost anything on a madman, and go scot-free, himself!

  “The dirty bum—St. Claire!” Knobs thought with swift, furious insight. “He knows perfectly well I’m not crazy! I didn’t say a thing in the office, there, that a scientist with his knowledge wouldn’t listen to to the end! He’s used to the engineering wonders of the Twenty-Ninth Century, though they’re still a little unbelievable, sometimes, to the layman. He couldn’t have thought my idea so terribly wild. At least the part of it he gave me time to tell him!”

  Knobs had already reached the conclusion that Arnold St. Claire was the real saboteur and murderer. This belief was startling, at first—considering the scientist’s honored position in the fields of research. But when you studied the situation more closely, the accusing facts fell together with amazing ease.

  First, the motive. It was simple to guess what any criminal would want on Nemesis—personal control of the stupendous mineral treasures that the Survey Group had uncovered in the grottoes. With the Expedition, which was financed by the Earth-Government, a lost, frozen failure in the depths of interstellar space—its exploration data unfiled in the home colonial offices—a private individual could come later to Nemesis, and claim the mines completely as his own. That was Universe Law.

  The government-backed Group, conducting a survey for later, wide-open colonization by small, competitive companies, would only be a vanished legend, then. And a crushing, greedy, one-man monopoly could move in, controlling a vast supply of important industrial resources. Fabulous riches, it meant—for somebody.

  That Arnold St. Claire was inspired by such a motive, and that he was working toward its fulfilment, Knobs had scant doubt.

  First of all, the death of Ned Kilmer had given St. Claire the dangerous advantage of command over the Survey Group. He was the one who benefited. Secondly, remembering the smooth scientist’s original high post in the Expedition, it would have been easy for him to get the keys to the engine-room, so that he could go there even during a sleep period, and disable the generators. Whereas, for a lesser individual, this would have been difficult indeed to accomplish.

  The space ship mechanic’s conviction of the scientist’s guilt was all but clinched by St. Claire’s obvious effort to pin the blame for everything on him. Of course it looked at first as though St. Claire would not destroy the Survey Group—remove the obstacle it represented to his intention of seizing the treasures of Nemesis for himself—without his being frozen with the others. But certainly he would have arranged loopholes of escape to save his own skin! Nor was it so hard to see what those loop-holes were!

  THE vital parts of the atomic generators had been removed carefully. A real saboteur would have found it simpler to damage them beyond repair in their original position, without having to remove the mechanisms.

  So St. Claire must have hidden those vitals somewhere, probably outside of the ship, where there would be no chance of anyone else finding them. It would have been easy for him to have hidden an extra supply of batteries, too, to enable him to keep warm in a space suit for a little longer than could the others.

  When his co-workers of the Group had been disposed of, he could reassemble the atomic generators, fly the Trail Blazer to some nearby colonial world, concoct a story of disaster to explain the disappearance of his comrades, renounce his connections as a government explorer, and come back to Nemesis after a short time to grab the fabulous jandrium and dorsium mines privately. Suspicions, then, would be hard to prove, in the tremendous reaches of the star-deserts.

  Yes, it was quite easy to understand the scientist’s motives. But Knobs felt bitter and helpless. He had a plan that might not only save the lives of his fellows, but might put the riches of Nemesis into the hands of liberal, competitive industry and colonization, taking them away from the control of a would-be tyrant. But what good was his idea now, when he was imprisoned and discredited?

  Near despair, Knobs let his chin sink into his cupped hands.

  “The worst of it is, most of the guys in this outfit will keep on respecting that crumby devil,” he growled. “Recognizing his superior knowledge, they’ll swallow his yarns. They’re the real dupes, and I’m only the goat!”

 
; Presently Knobs heard a gong sound a signal for the ship’s company to come to the messroom for their cold rations. A minute later, there was a soft tap at the door of his prison. Evelyn Farnway’s face was framed in the small barred window at its center.

  “Be quiet, Knobs,” she warned in a low whisper. “Nobody’d believe me except maybe you—now—but after a lot of observation and thinking, I'm convinced that St. Claire is the real blackguard! And we’ve got to try to cross him up some way, before we're all dead! Tell me about that world-turning trick of yours.”

  Knobs gasped, realizing that the girl must have followed the same line of reasoning that he had followed, in deciding St. Claire’s guilt. But there was no time to waste in surprise, now.

  “Okay, Evelyn,” he whispered tensely. “Listen,” he outlined his idea in as few words as possible, explaining what blasting some of the underground caverns here, near Nemesis’ equator, would accomplish, and just how he believed physical laws would work to turn the planet more rapidly, and bring the dark hemisphere into the rays of Olympia. Knobs wished he had his dumb-bells. They would have helped him to illustrate his point.

  “I'm not enough of a physicist to know whether your idea is any good or not,” the girl breathed doubtfully when he had finished. “But it’s the only chance of beating his nibs. St. Claire has been hinting that the men should retreat to the caverns. Oh, sure—it’s considerably warmer there, we know by our tests. Traces of volcanic heat.

  “But according to our tests, too, those grottoes are full of volcanic-acid vapors, which eventually would eat through the metal of space suits, killing whomever was inside. St. Claire isn’t satisfied with just freezing us—he wants a quicker way to get rid of us all, so he can go ahead with his crooked work. But the men will probably fall for his gag—when the situation does get desperate enough!”

  “Sure they will!” Knobs agreed grimly. “Anybody would with death from cold staring him in the face! If I could only get out of the brig!”

  THE girl smiled at him. She reached a slim hand between the bars of the door. A little piece of metal gleamed in her palm—a key.

  “I got this duplicate from the ship’s safe,” she whispered. “I've been around the office too much not to know the combination. You can let yourself out, all right. I got another key the same way—to the Special Supplies Room, where the radite explosive is. I’ll meet you with it at the seldom-used freight airlock in five minutes.”

  Then Evelyn Farnway was gone, leaving Knobs Hartley with a stronger realization of her quiet beauty and charm—for it was all aureated now with a halo of sharp cleverness and reckless courage. He found it all a little dizzying. Because Evelyn was a girl, St. Claire had underestimated her resourceful nerve, and that had been her big advantage.

  In a moment Knobs was out of the brig. There was no one about, for most of the ship’s company were in the mess room. Within ten seconds more, Knobs had climbed a short ladder into a dusty, yard-high inspection-tunnel, used only on the rarest of occasions to examine the structure of the Trail Blazer's hull for signs of developing weakness. Thus, by a roundabout way, he reached the deserted freight room and airlock.

  Evelyn arrived on schedule, through another inspection tunnel, lugging the long metal box of fearfully powerful radite capsules under one smooth little arm.

  He took the box from her, and then helped her into a space-suit, of which there were several in the cabinet beside the lock.

  “Well, here goes!” Knobs said through his communicator phones, when both of them were rigged out in vacuum armor, and had strapped levitator packs about their shoulders. “Here’s to the coming dawn on Nemesis—I hope!”

  The inner valves of the airlock opened ponderously at his touch of their control levers. Then the girl and he were out in the still, star-shot cold of eternal night. They were marching across crusted drifts of frozen air, faintly visible as ghostly presences in the lights from the ports of the Trail Blazer receding behind them.

  There was no wind, here. There was scant gaseous atmosphere. There was only a mood of rigid, changeless death, locked in a spell of all but absolute zero. It held even the molecules of oxygen and water, which might have meant life to this world, chained and moveless in the silence of spectral drifts and hills and mountains.

  The entrance to the caverns, previously blasted out by exploring space men, was reached at last. Evelyn and Knobs advanced into the completer darkness of that black maw, climbing down over rough rocks.

  The electric heaters of their suits, operated by highly efficient batteries, had kept them warm, so far, in their venture, though already, here in the grottoes, the temperature around them must be higher. Their flashlights lit a path before them, through one black cave after another.

  Colossal volcanic bubble-cavities, these grottoes seemed to be. They had been formed by the shrinkage of materials within Nemesis’ once-fiery heart, molten with inner heat in the era before the powerful gravity of a fearfully heavy midget sun, named Olympia, had slowed the planet’s rotation to a stasis in which alternate night and day no longer happened.

  Down and down the two Terrestrials climbed, past gigantic masses of un-Earthly ores—fabulous food for Terra’s teeming industries. Down and down, with the murk of volcanic acids beginning to blur and gnaw at the bright metal of the intruders’ space-suits.

  FINALLY they came to a tremendous vertical abyss, beyond the brink of which no human being had ever yet dared explore. Its depths were lost in utter blackness. Only instruments, depending on reflected radio beams, had told that it dropped almost halfway to the core of Nemesis.

  “I’m scared, Knobs,” the girl stammered, staring into that Sheol-like pit, her eyes wide in the reflected glow of their flashlights.

  “Of course you’re scared, Ev,” Knobs returned with a perfectly natural unthinking familiarity that had a deep gentleness in it—a gentleness the girl needed. This was no occasion to pretend—it was too grim for that—and the little space-ship mechanic had lost the shyness which the accidental deformity of his sinister grin had always given him.

  “I’m scared too, Ev,” he went on. “But placing the explosives is a one-man job. Besides, you’ve done more than your share already. Get out of sight in a side-tunnel, so if St. Claire or anybody comes, you won’t be discovered.”

  As he talked, Knobs opened the box of explosives. The hundred radite capsules within were one-inch spheres, each fitted with a button by means of which their fuses could be started. Each had a dial, too, to set those fuses for a certain period of time. Rapidly Knobs fixed each dial for a three-hour interval. Thus, all the capsules would blast at once, when the time came.

  He closed the box again, picked it up.

  “I’ll be back here as soon as I can, Evelyn,” he said.

  Before she could protest his intrusion into that black abyss before them, alone, he had leaped over its brink. He had pressed a button on the levitator pack strapped to his shoulders. The powerful electric batteries there, much lighter in weight than any small atomic-generator unit could ever have been, fed current to a series of complicated coils that fought gravity. Thus, his rate of descent was completely under his control. His flashlight showed him where he was going.

  Almost two hours later, he returned to the brink of the abyss, lifted there by his levitator. Its power was all but spent, now. His space-suit was tarnished and corroded with acid fumes, but his voice was happy as he spoke.

  “Evelyn, where are you?” he questioned through his phones.

  “Here, Knobs,” she responded from out of a dark niche nearby. “St. Claire came with some of the men, looking for us. But I was in another cavern, hidden. His nibs found us both missing on board the ship—as well as the radite. Of course he guessed what we were up to. He went away at last, but I overheard some of his conversation through my communicators. He was hopping mad.”

  “I suppose he was,” Knobs chuckled. “Well—I've got the explosive set, anyhow. I went down about twenty-five miles, placing radite
capsules on rock ledges along the way. Then I dumped those I had left down into the deeper part of the pit. They’re tough-shelled, you know, and can stand the shock of a fall without blowing up or breaking. Some of them must have bounced all the way to the bottom of this hole, hundreds of miles down.”

  “What do we do now? Go back to the Trail Blazer?” the girl asked.

  “Yeah, I guess so,” Knobs returned ruefully. “We can’t very well stick around here in the caverns, or outside, either, with radite getting ready to blast. When that happens, we’d better have a stout space ship hull around us for protection!”

  The prospect of returning to the star cruiser now was unpleasant and dangerous to say the least, with St. Claire in control there. They’d spoiled one of his plans already—that of getting rid of the crew by sending them to the caverns. The men certainly wouldn’t take that hint—leaving St. Claire on the ship to continue his dirty work alone—now that they knew that the grottoes were mined!

  EVELYN and Knobs reached the Trail Blazer without trouble. St. Claire and most of the Survey Group met them at the main airlock. St. Claire glared at them as they removed their vacuum armor, but there was something worried in his look, too. Perhaps he realized now that he’d neglected something in not listening to all of Knob’s plan to make Nemesis turn faster. It was an unknown quantity that might trip him up somewhere.

  “A woman and a madman,” he sneered. “Neither can be trusted. I suppose you’ve carried out your scheme, Hartley—setting the radite bombs in the caverns—making certain that our last possible refuge from the cold is destroyed presently. Well, maybe you aren’t just a maniac after all, Hartley. You can’t both be crazy, and the girl is with you, obviously. So it begins to look as though you’re both criminals, working together to hog the deposits of jandrium and dorsium ores here on Nemesis.”