More Adventures On Other Planets Page 4

  Falken took her and buried his gypsy face in the raw gold of her hair.

  "How did you know?" he whispered. "How did you know I loved you?" "I just—knew." "And Hilton?"

  "He doesn't love me, Eric. He loves what I stand for. And anyway ... I can say this now, because we're going to die. I've loved you since I first saw you. I love you more than Tom, and I'd have died for him."

  Hungry tree branches reached for them, barely too short. .Buds were shooting up underfoot. But Falken forgot them, the alien life and the wheeling suns that were only a mon-sLrous dream, and the Sun-child who dreamed them.

  For that single instant he was happy, as he had not been since Kitty was lost.

  Presently he turned and smiled at Hilton, and the wolf look was gone from his face. Hilton said quietly.

  "Maybe she's right, about me. I don't know. There's so much I don't know. I'm sorry I'm not going to live to find out."

  "We're all sorry," said Falken, "about not living." A sudden sharp flare lighted his eyes. "Wait a minute!" he whispered. "There may be a chance. . . ."

  He was taut and quivering with terrible urgency, and the buds grew and yearned upward around their feet.

  "You said we could only attack it through its mind. But there may be another way. Its memories, its pride. . . ."

  He raised his scarred gypsy face to the green sky and shouted,

  "You, Child of the Sun! Listen to me! You have beaten us. Go ahead and kill us. But remember this. You're a child of the Sun, and we're only puny humans, little ground-crawlers, shackled with weakness and fear.

  "But we're greater than you! Always and forever, greater than you!"

  The writhing trees paused, the buds faltered in their hungry growth. Faintly, very faintly, the landscape flickered. Falken's voice rose to a ring shout.

  "You were a child of the Sun. You had the galaxy for a toy, all the vast depths of space to play in. And what did you do? You sealed yourself like a craven into a black tomb, and lost all your greatness in the whimsies of a wicked child.

  "You were afraid of your destiny. You were too weak for your own strength. We fought you, we little humans, and our strength was so great that you had to beat us by a lying trick.

  "You can read our minds, Sun-child. Read them. See whether we fear you. And see whether we respect you, you who boast of your parentage and dream dreams of lost glory, and hide in a dark hole like a frightened rat!"

  For one terrible moment the alien world was suffused with a glare of scarlet—anger so great that it was almost tangible. Then it greyed and faded, and Falked could see Sheila's face, calm and smiling, and Hilton's fingers locked in hers.

  The ground dropped suddenly. Blurred trees writhed against a fading sky, and the suns went out in ebon shadow. Falken felt clean earth under him. The rotting stench was gone.

  He looked up. The Sun-child floated overhead, under the rocky vault. They were back in the cavern world.

  The Sun-child's voice spoke in his brain, and its fires were a smoldering, dusky crimson.

  "What was that you said, human?"

  "Look into my mind and read it. You've thrown away your greatness. We had little, compared to you, but we kept it. You've won, but your very winning is a shame to you, that a child of the Sun should stoop to fight with little men."

  The smoldering crimson burned and grew, into glorious wicked fire that was sheer fury made visible. Falken felt death coiling to strike him out of that fire. But he faced it with bitter, mocking eyes, and he was surprised, even then, that he wasn't afraid.

  And the raging crimson fire faded and greyed, was quenched to a trembling mist of sad, dim mauves.

  "You are right," whispered the Sun-child. "And I am shamed."

  The ashes of burned-out flame stirred briefly. "I think I began to realize that when you fought me so well. You, Falken, who let your love betray you, and then shook your fist at me. I could kill you, but I couldn't break you. You made me remember. . . ."

  Deep in the core of the Sun-child there was a flash of the old proud scarlet.

  "I am a child of the Sun, with the galaxy to play with. I have so nearly forgotten. I have tried to forget, because I

  knew that what I did was weak and shameful and craven. But you haven't let me forget, Falken. You've forced me to see, and know.

  "You have made me remember. Rememberl I am very old. I shall die soon, in open space. But I wish to see the Sun unveiled, and play again among the stars. The hunger has torn me for eons, but I was afraid. Afraid of death!

  "Take this world, in payment for the pain I caused you. My creature will return here in Falken's ship and vanish on the instant of landing. And now. . . ."

  The scarlet fire burned and writhed. Shafts of joyous gold pierced through it. The Sun-child trembled, and its little foaming flames, were sheer glory, the hearts of Sun-born opals.

  It rose in the rainbow air, higher and higher, rushing in a cloud of living light toward the black crystal of the vault.

  Once more there was a blinding flash and a quick sharp rush of air. Faintly, in Falken's mind, a voice said.

  "Thank you, human! Thank you for waking me from a dying sleep!"

  A last wild shout of color on the air. And then it was gone, into open space and the naked fire of the Sun, and the rocky roof was whole.

  Three silent people stood on the raw red earth of a new world.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The smallest world in the solar system, tiny Mercury is certain to he among the first worlds mankind will explore. Talk has already been heard around todays spaceflight centers of a robotic Ranger rocket to head for the little sunlit planet in the next decade. But whether Mercury will ever prove safe for man to go in person, only the imagination must consider—for the problems are great and Robert Silverberg makes full use of them in this authentic presentation.

  SUNRISE ON MERCURY

  by Robert Silverberg ♦ ♦♦♦♦♦

  Nine million miles to the sunward of Mercury, with the Leverrier swinging into the series of spirals that would bring it down on the Solar System's smallest world, Second As-trogator Lon Curtis decided to end his life.

  Curtis had been lounging in a webform cradle waiting for the landing to be effected; his job in the operation was over, at least until the Leverrier s landing-jacks touched Mercury's blistered surface. The ship's efficient sodium-coolant system negated the efforts of the swollen sun visible through the rear screen. For Curtis and his seven shipmates, no problems

  presented themselves; they had only to wait while the autopilot brought the ship down for Man's second landing on Mercury.

  Flight Commander Harry Ross was sitting near Curtis when he noticed the sudden momentary stiffening of the astroga-tor's jaws. Curtis abruptly reached for the control nozzle. From the spinnerets that had spun the webfoam, came a quick green burst of dissolving fluorochrene; the cradle vanished. Curtis stood up.

  "Going somewhere?" Ross asked.

  Curtis* voice was harsh. "Just—taking a walk."

  Ross returned his attention to his microbook for a moment as Curtis walked away. There was the ratchety sound of a bulkhead dog being manipulated, and Ross felt a momentary chill as the cooler air of the superrefrigerated reactor-compartment drifted in.

  He punched a stud, turning the page. Then—

  What the hell is he doing in the reactor compartment?

  The autopilot would be controlling the fuel flow, handling it down to the milligram, in a way no human system could. The reactor was primed for the landing, the fuel was stoked, the compartment was dogged shut. No one—least of all a Second Astrogator—had any business going back there.

  Ross had the foam cradle dissolved in an instant, and was on his feet in another. He dashed down the companionway and through the open bulkhead door into the coolness of the reactor compartment.

  Curtis was standing by the converter door, toying with the release-tripper. As Ross approached, he saw the astrogator get the door open and put one foot to the c
hute that led downship to the nuclear pile.

  "Curtis, you idiot! Get away from there! You'll kill us all!"

  The astrogator turned, looked blankly at Ross for an instant, and drew up* his other foot. Ross leaped.

  He caught Curtis' booted foot in his hands and, despite

  a barrage of kicks from the astrogator's free boot, managed to drag Curtis off the chute. The astrogator tugged and pulled, attempting to break free. Ross saw the man's pale cheeks quivering; Curtis had cracked, but thoroughly.

  Grunting, Ross yanked Curtis away from the yawning reactor chute and slammed the door shut. He dragged him out into the main section again, and slapped him, hard.

  "Why'd you want to do that? Don't you know what your mass would do to the ship if it got into the converter? You know the fuel intake's been calibrated already; a hundred eighty extra pounds and we'd arc right into the sun. What's wrong with you, Curtis?"

  The astrogator fixed unshaking, unexpressive eyes on Ross. "I want to die," he said simply. "Why couldn't you let me die?"

  He wanted to die. Ross shrugged, feeling a cold tremor run down his back. There was no guarding against this disease.

  Just as acqualungers beneath the sea's surface suffered from Vivresse des grandes profondeurs—rapture of the deeps—and knew no cure for the strange, depth-induced drunkenness that induced them to remove their breathing-tubes fifty fathoms below, so did spacemen run the risk of this nameless malady, this inexplicable urge to self-destruction.

  It struck anywhere. A repairman wielding a torch on a recalcitrant strut of an orbiting wheel might abruptly rip open his face mask and drink vacuum; a radioman rigging an antenna on the skin of his ship might suddenly cut his line, fire his directional-piston, and send himself drifting away sunward. Or a Second Astrogator might decide to climb into the converter.

  Psych Officer Spangler appeared, an expression of concern fixed on his smooth pink face. "Trouble?"

  Ross nodded. "Curtis. Tried to jump into the fuelchute. He's got it, Doc."

  Scowling, Spangler rubbed his cheek, then said: "They always pick the best times, dammit. It's swell having a psycho on a Mercury run."

  "That's the way it is," Ross said wearily. "Better put him in statis till we get home. I'd hate to have him running loose looking for different ways of doing himself in.

  "Why can't you let me die?" Curtis asked. His face was bleak. "Why'd you have to stop me?"

  "Because, you lunatic, you'd have killed all the rest of us by your fool dive into the converter. Go walk out the airlock if you want to die—but don't take us with you."

  Spangler glared warningly at him. "Harry—"

  "Okay," Ross said. "Take him away."

  The psychman led Curtis within. The astrogator would be given a tranquilizing injection, and locked in an insoluble webfoam jacket for the rest of the journey. There was a chance he could be restored to sanity, once they returned to Earth, but Ross knew that the astrogator would make a beeline for the nearest method of suicide the moment he was let loose in space.

  Brooding, Ross turned away. A man spends his boyhood dreaming about space, he thought, spends four years at the Academy and two more making dummy runs. Then he finally gets up where it counts, and he cracks up. Curtis was an astrolgation machine, not a normal human being; and he had just disqualified himself permanently from the only job he knew how to do.

  Ross shivered, feeling chill despite the bloated bulk of the sun filling the rear screen. It could happen to anyone . . . even him. He thought of Curtis, lying in a foam cradle somewhere in the back of the ship, blackly thinking over and over again I want to die, while Doc Spangler muttered soothing things at him. A human being was really a frail form of life, Ross reflected.

  Death seemed to hang over the ship; the gloomy aura of Curtis* suicide-wish polluted the atmosphere.

  Ross shook his head and punched down savagely on the signal to prepare for deceleration. The unspinning globe that was Mercury bobbed up ahead. He spotted it through the front screen.

  They were approaching the tiny planet middle-on. He could see the neat division now: the brightness of Sunside, the unapproachable inferno where zinc ran in rivers, and the icy blackness of Darkside, dull with its unlit plains of frozen CO2.

  Down the heart of the planet ran the Twilight Belt, that narrow area of not-cold and not-heat where Sunside and Darkside met to provide a thin band of barely-tolerable territory, a ring nine thousand miles in circumference and ten or twenty miles wide.

  The Leverrier plunged downward. "Downward" was actually a misnomer—space has no ups or downs—but it was the simplest way for Ross to visualize the approach. He allowed his jangled nerves to calm. The ship was in the hands of the autopilot; the orbit was precomputed and the analog banks in the drive were happily following the taped program, bringing the ship to rest smack in the middle of—

  My God!

  Ross went cold from head to toe. The precomputed tape had been fed to the analog banks—had been prepared by-had been the work of—

  Curtis.

  A suicidal madman had worked out the Leverrier s landing program.

  Ross' hands began to shake. How easy it would have been, he thought, for death-bent Curtis to work out an orbit that would plant the Leverrier in a smoking river of molten lead— or in the mortuary chill of Darkside.

  His false security vanished. There was no trusting the automatic pilot; they'd have to risk a manual landing.

  Ross jabbed down on the communicator button. "I want Brainerd," he said hoarsely.

  The First Astrogator appeared a few seconds later, peering in curiously. "What goes, Captain?"

  "We've just carted your assistant Curtis off to the pokey. He tried to jump into the converter."

  "He-?"

  Ross nodded. "Attempted suicide; I nabbed him in time. But in view of the circumstances, I think we'd better discard the tape you had him prepare and bring the ship down manually, yes?"

  The First Astrogator moistened his lips. "Maybe that's a good idea," he said.

  "Damn right it is," Ross said, glowering.

  As the ship touched down, Ross thought, Mercury is two hells in one.

  It was the cold, icebound kingdom of Dante's deepest pit—and it was also the brimstone empire of another conception. The two met, fire and frost, each hemisphere its own kind of hell.

  He lifted his head and flicked a quick glance at the instrument panel above his deceleration cradle. The dials all checked: weight placement was proper, stability 100%, external temperature a manageable 108F., indicating they had made their landing a little to the sunward of the Twilight Belt's exact middle. It had been a sound landing.

  He snapped on the communicator. "Brainerd?"

  "All OK, Captain."

  "How was the landing? You used manual, didn't you?" "I had to," the astrogator said. "I ran a quick check on Curtis' tape and it was all cockeyed. We'd have grazed

  Mercury's orbit by a whisker and kept going—straight for the sun. Nice?"

  "Sweet," Ross said. "But don't be too hard on the Idd; it's not his fault he went psycho. Good landing, anyway. We seem to be pretty close to the center of the Twilight Belt, give or take a mile or two."

  He broke the contact and unwebbed himself. "We're here," he announced over the shipwide circuit. "All hands to fore double pronto."

  The men got there quickly enough—Brainerd first, then Doc Spangler, followed by Accumulator Tech Krinsky and the three crewmen. Ross waited until the entire group had assembled.

  They were looking around curiously for Curtis, all but Brainerd and Spangler. Crisply, Ross said, "Astrogator Curtis won't be with us. He's aft in the psycho bin; luckily, we can shift without him on this tour."

  He waited till the implications of that statement had sunk in. The men adjusted to it well, he thought, judging from the swiftness with which the horror faded from their faces.

  "All right," he said. "Schedule calls for us to spend a maximum of thirty-two hours on Mercury before d
eparture. Brainerd, how does that check with our location?"

  The astrogator frowned and made some mental calculations. "Current position is a trifle to the sunward edge of the Twilight Belt; but as I figure it, the sun won't be high enough to put the Fahrenheit much above 120 for at least a week. Our suits can handle that sort of temperature with ease."

  "Good. Llewellyn, you and Falbridge break out the radar inflaters and get the tower set up as far to the east as you can go without roasting. Take the crawler, but be sure to keep an eye on the thermometer. We've only got one heat-suit and that's for Krinsky."

  Llewellyn, a thin, sunken-eyed spaceman, shifted uneasily., "How far to the east do you suggest, sir?"

  "The Twilight Belt covers about a quarter of Mercury's surface," Ross said. "You've got a strip 47 degrees wide to move around in—but I don't suggest you go much more than twenty-five miles or so. It starts getting hot after that, and keeps going up."

  "Yes, sir."

  Ross turned to Krinsky. The Accumulator Tech was the key man of the expedition; it was his job to check the readings on the pair of Solar Accumulators that had been left here by the first expedition. He was to measure the amount of stress created by solar energies here, so close to the source of radiation, study force-lines operating in the strange magnetic field of the little world, and re-prime the Accumulators for further testing at a later date.

  Krinsky was a tall, powerfully-built man, the sort of man who could stand up to the crushing weight of a heat-suit almost cheerfully. The heat-suit was necessary for prolonged work in the Sunside zone, where the Accumulators were— and even a giant like Krinsky could stand the strain only for a few hours at a time.

  "When Llewellyn and Falbridge have the radar tower set up, Krinsky, get into your heat-suit and be ready to move. As soon as we've got the Accumulator Station located, Comi-nic will drive you as far east as possible and drop you off. The rest is up to you. We'll be telemetering your readings, but we'd like to have you back alive." Yes, sir.