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.

They could see, as soon as the telescopic sight had been adjusted, that

it was a large station. It was encircled by a featureless wall. It had

no roof. Rising on masts above it was a whole forest of gleaming discs

pointing at the Sun low in the sky.

On the tops of the mountain peaks, a half mile from the station, was

another series of masts. These were aimed away from the Sun into the

dark airless sky and toward the other planets.

"The accumulators and the transmitters," said Burl. "We'll have to get

them both."

"Getting the transmitters will be easy," said Haines. "After we shut off

the station, we'll just bomb the mountain masts out of action."

Burl choked. "Why, it never occurred to me, but why can't we bomb the

station from the air? One atomic bomb should finish it off." He almost

added, And you wouldn't have needed me after all, but squashed the

thought. He wouldn't have given up coming along for anything, he now

realized.

"There's a distortion, as there was at the Andes station, that would

make it hard to hit. But I imagine we could do it if we tried hard

enough. But that isn't what we want at first. It's important, very

important, that we get pictures and details of this station from inside.

We can't just break up the enemy installations--we've got to learn from

them, we must find out how they do it and how we can use it." This was

Lockhart speaking. "You'd better start the job," he added to Haines.

"Are you ready?"

Haines nodded reluctantly. "Yep," and turning to the three who would

accompany him, he ordered, "let's go."

The four explorers gathered near the exit port. They had put on space

suits and strapped on various items of equipment, weapons and work

tools. They passed through the airlock into the cargo section of the

ship. Communicating through the helmet radios, Haines directed each what

to do, and also directed Lockhart where to bring the ship for the

landing.

Burl heard Lockhart's voice warn them that he did not want to hold the

ship too long over the sunny hot side. "We've already noticed a buildup

of heat from the solar radiation on the skin. And the heat radiating

from Mercury is accumulating too fast. We can't get rid of it if _both_

sides of this ship are going to be heated up. As soon as you make your

landing, I'm taking the ship back to the cold side."

"Uh huh," came Haines's voice. "We don't want to hang around here any

too long, either."

Then the four, as prearranged, unlimbered the work rocket they had

picked. There were several sizes of small exploration craft. They had at

first thought of the tractor--an enclosed, airtight truck on tractor

wheels which could crawl up to the station while the men inside it were

protected by air conditioning. But a quick survey showed that it would

overheat too fast and might easily bog down in one of the many soft

spots. So they took the four-man, rocket-propelled cargo plane instead.

The ship was airtight and pressurized. They had taken every precaution.

The four piled in with their supplies. Then, as the _Magellan_ swooped

momentarily lower, the escape hatch opened and, with Ferrati at the

controls, the rocket plane shot out with a roar of its exhausts.

They raced low over the burning landscape, and before them the wide,

dark, forbidding canyon cut its way through the plain. It was into this

canyon that the rocket plunged.

The precipitous rocky sides rose above them, and suddenly they were in

darkness. Immediately, the plane's cooling system became more effective

as Ferrati guided the rocket through the shadowy depths away from the

blazing sunbeams. Burl saw, by means of the radar, that the bottom of

the heat crack was many miles down.

They raced along the crevice until they reached the mountain chain.

Here, Ferrati abruptly raised the nose of the plane and they shot

upward, popping out of the shadow into the sunlight.

Before them loomed the hard unbroken walls of the Sun-tap station. The

rocket plane came to a stop a hundred feet away.

As soon as it had halted, Burl and Ferrati leaped out, with white sheets

thrown over their suits to afford some extra protection from the Sun's

rays. Between them they carried a long, awkward affair of poles and

plastic.

Burl's feet touched the ground; through the cushioned leather of his

thick boots he felt the heat just as if he had stepped on a hot stove.

He moved quickly, and as they had rehearsed, he and the explorer slapped

the rig together and set up a gleaming plastic skin sunbreak to shield

the rocket plane. The plastic sheets reflected the Sun's heat and cut

off a fair portion of the direct radiation which would otherwise have

rendered the rocket plane inoperable and uninhabitable in short order.

While they were assembling the sunbreak, Haines and Boulton unloaded a

portable antitank rocket launcher. With no wasted motion, Boulton aimed

the launcher at the wall, and Haines thrust a long, wicked-looking

rocket projectile into the tube. There was a flash of soundless fire and

a line of dissipating white smoke. Nothing could be heard in the

airlessness.

Burl felt the shock through the ground as the shell hit. A chunk of the

wall ripped apart and collapsed.

As quickly as he saw it, Burl acted. Haines's voice rang in his ear, but

already Burl was in action. Back into the rocket plane, out again

with--an umbrella!

He made a flying leap toward the Sun-tap station. He felt terrifically

strong in the slight gravity, and the leap carried him thirty feet

forward. As he slid through the space above the surface, he opened the

umbrella. Its outer side had been painted white, and partly shielded him

from the direct heat. He made the station in five leaps and climbed

through the broken wall. Boulton followed him with another umbrella and

a pack under his arm.

Inside the station it was cool--the walls had been high enough to create

shade within. It was like the station in the Andes, but bigger, much

bigger.

Boulton joined him, folded his umbrella calmly, and yanked an

air-compression pistol from his belt. "See anyone?" he asked.

"No."

Burl remembered then that there could possibly be a living guard at this

station. They searched carefully, but there was no sign of life. Boulton

was doing a soldier's job, that was all.

While Boulton set up his photographic equipment, Burl made his way

around the shining globes and strange tubes that were the nerve center

of the station. He finally found the same type of control panel that he

had found in the Andes station.

He hesitated before it, wondering if, after all, this, the original

charge, would work. He hoped that there might be another charger globe

available, but saw none. It would be up to him.

He put a gloved hand on the control. Perhaps, he worried, the charge

would not conduct through the insulated, cooled material of his suit. He

pushed the levers, and knew then that it did.

The pulsing of the spheres halted. There was a sharp dip in the faint

vibration he had been feeling in his feet. He shoved the levers all the

way, and suddenly the station went dead. Above him, one of the great

discs atop its mast snapped and burst apart under what must have become

an impossible concentration of power without a channel for outlet.

"Sun-tap Station Mercury is dead," Burl said quietly into his helmet

phone.

At that very instant a distant globe, perched on a pedestal against the

wall away from the rest of the equipment, flared a brilliant red.