Battle on Mercury Read online

  Table of Contents

  Battle on Mercury

  Life in a Dome

  Chapter 1 Blame Johnny Quicksilver

  Chapter 2 New Life for Pete

  Chapter 3 Abandoned!

  Chapter 4 No Answer from Twilight

  Chapter 5 Only Two Weeks

  Chapter 6 Crack-Up

  Chapter 7 A Map from Johnny

  Chapter 8 Into the Hotlands

  Chapter 9 Stranded

  Chapter 10 The Wispies

  Chapter 11 River of Lead

  Chapter 12 The Impossible Trek

  Chapter 13 Hope and Despair

  Chapter 14 The Silicone Beasts

  Chapter 15 Battle of Monsters

  Chapter 16 Demon Power

  A Science Fiction Novel

  Battle on Mercury

  ERIK VAN LHIN

  Jacket Design by Kenneth Fagg

  Endpaper Design by Alex Schomburg

  Cecile Matschat, Editor Carl Carmer, Consulting Editor

  THE JOHN C WINSTON COMPANY

  Philadelphia • Toronto

  Copyright, 1953 By Erik van Lhin

  Copyright in Great Britain and in the British Dominions and Possessions

  Copyright in the Republic of the Philippines

  Life in a Dome

  Mercury is an unpleasant little world. Long after men have learned to live on Mars and Venus they will find it dangerous and nearly impossible on Mercury.

  The planet is even smaller than Mars, and it circles around the sun at a distance of only 36,000,000 miles, just a little more than one-third as far out as Earth. That means that it receives about seven times as much light and heat as we do on Earth from the sun’s radiation.

  There is no air on Mercury to screen out even part of this blazing fury. The light and heat we normally feel are only part of the energy it receives. There are ultraviolet rays so intense they would burn out unshielded eyes in minutes, and there are even X-rays and other savage radiation hitting the unprotected surface.

  To make matters worse, Mercury always turns the same side toward the sun, just as the Moon does to the Earth. There is no night on this burning half of the planet and no chance to cool off. The temperature there rises to nearly eight hundred degrees Fahrenheit—hot enough to melt lead and tin!

  On the cold side there is no day, and no light or heat are received. Here the temperature is so low that even the gasses of the air would be frozen solid. Mercury must have had some air once, but it has all drifted to this cold side and frozen, until none is left on the rest of the planet.

  But between the two sides there is a very narrow strip where men might first build domes to house a few people. Mercury wobbles a little as it circles the sun each eighty-eight days. Because of this, the twilight belt, as the zone between hot and cold sides is called, tilts gradually toward the sun and then away. It is as if the sun just rose over the horizon and then sank again, giving a day and night cycle equal to one circling of the planet around the sun. Here the temperature would be neither too hot nor too cold for life, though men could never live outside their little domes or spacesuits. It would still be a forbidding, uncomfortable place.

  No life as we know it could exist on Mercury. The extremes of temperature and the lack of air would make this impossible. But we cannot say that there is no life there. Probably none will be found. But life might take different forms. The very extreme of solar radiation would make it possible for life which could not exist on Earth, since it would provide a terrific amount of energy—and with sufficient energy less efficient forms of life could exist.

  Creatures made of silicones might develop near the twilight belt. The silicones are compounds of silicon, which are quite similar in many ways to the compounds of carbon that form the basis for our life. But unlike the carbon compounds, they can stand a temperature range of hundreds of degrees with very little change—which is why airplanes use silicone oils now in very hot or very cold climates. On Earth such life would be too sluggish and inefficient to compete with us, but Mercury could provide enough energy to make such creatures quite active.

  Life might even find existence in forms which were not normal matter at all. We have accounts on Earth of fireballs—lightning, or electricity, which has taken spherical form and somehow doesn’t break down easily. On Mercury, with its high energy and almost certain discharges of electricity from solar radiation, such things might be more common. We know very little about what life is, and we cannot say such things might not form a strange type of life. It could never do the things we can do— but then neither can we do what it would probably find easy. And given life, there is always the chance of intelligence evolving.

  These creatures may be only possibilities. We don’t know that they exist and can’t know until we reach Mercury. But we have no way of knowing that some such forms of life do not inhabit Mercury, and all we can say is that they might.

  Men, of course, can learn to live anywhere in time—because they carry their normal living conditions with them. The domes would hold back the heat and keep air around them. And ways could be found for men to move out into the hottest of the sunward side, if there was any reason for them to go there. The shipping and main centers would have to be at the twilight belt, but mining domes might stretch over the whole hot side of the planet.

  Metals on Mercury would probably be different from those on Earth, since many would occur free instead of in ores. Lead and tin could be piped, since they would be liquid; but all kinds of other valuable metals must be available to encourage developing the planet. With the domes and suits heavily insulated, men would work the mines, though they might need some kind of robot machines for the heaviest work.

  It would be a strange life in these little domes, and a lonely one. Each little colony would be cut off from the others most of the time, since radio waves would normally reach only to the horizon; they would have no air to carry them all around the planet. And even when radio was possible, the terrific static from the near-by sun would make reception very difficult.

  Consequently, it would be a dangerous life. If anything went wrong and men were cut off from their supplies, they would be helplessly stranded in a world that seems designed to make human life almost impossible.

  But men have faced danger before, and nothing has ever kept the human race back forever. Men will come to Mercury in the future, to build their domes, work their mines, and even to have families. This is an attempt to show what might happen to one of those little mining domes during an emergency.

  It is far in the future, of course—but probably not as far as we might think.

  E. v. L.

  Chapter 1 Blame Johnny Quicksilver

  There was no air in the tunnel, and the temperature was high, even for Mercury—a little over eight hundred degrees Fahrenheit. But the big mining robot had been built for work there, and it knew its business. Its four feet were planted firmly near the end of the little tunnel, and its big manlike body and featureless head were bent forward intently.

  In its metal arms the heavy hose moved carefully, squirting out liquid lead mixed with sharp crystals of quartz. On the surface above there was a whole lake of the stuff, which was made even hotter in a sun-mirror oven and pumped down under pressure. It cut through the softer material at the end of the tunnel, gradually freeing a big block of solid beryllium—the light, hard metal which could be found in a pure state only here.

  Everything seemed to be going as it should. But there was a frown on Dick Rogers’ face as he sat watching the robot through the darkened glass of his spacesuit helmet.

  “Cut over to the left a little more,” he said into the little radio in the suit.

  The robot moved
the hose a trifle. “More left,” its answer came expressionlessly through the phones.

  At seventeen, Dick was already fully grown—tall and thin, like all the men who grew up on a planet of low gravity, but with muscles already well hardened, as shown by the ease with which he wore the heavy metal and insulation of the suit. On Earth it would have weighed over four hundred pounds, but here Dick and the suit together came to no more than one hundred and sixty. It was still no easy job to move around in it for hours.

  His face was narrow and sensitive, but his mouth was firm and there was determination in his slate- blue eyes, which stared out of a face tanned to nearly as dark a color as his black hair. There were no pale faces under the hot sun of Mercury.

  Now he nodded as the robot went on with its work. Maybe things were going to work out all right, after all. But he didn’t believe it. He felt trouble coming. It had been one of those days when everything went wrong, and he couldn’t believe his bad luck had run out yet.

  Johnny Quicksilver had started it. Johnny was one of the native balls of pure electricity that somehow were alive. The spooks, or wispies—from will-o’-the-wisp—as they were called, had caused nothing but trouble for the miners, until they were finally chased from the domes. But Dick had found Johnny almost dying out in the hotlands and had revived him with electricity from a storage battery. Since then, Johnny had been something of a pet, and fairly well behaved.

  This morning, though, Johnny had insisted on following Dick from the big dome across the mile of hotlands to the mine, acting very strangely. He’d finally disappeared, but by then Dick had been late, and had been thoroughly bawled out for it. As punishment, he’d been taken out of the pumping department, ordered into a suit, and sent down to supervise this big mining robot. It was the dirtiest work in the mine, but he hadn’t dared to complain.

  Lately, everyone had seemed worried and nervous, and it was no time to kick about the job.

  Besides, he was still on probation. When his father, who was head engineer of the mine, had let him begin working on his seventeenth birthday, the miners had claimed nobody who fooled around with spooks could be responsible. As a result, he was on trial for six months—and he’d been on the job only three weeks.

  If he failed, he’d have to go back to tending the hydroponic tanks with the women and old men. Of course, someone had to take care of the plants that supplied most of their food and kept the air fresh and breathable—but Dick wanted to be an engineer, not a farmer! He’d spent most of his life fooling with machinery, and could think of no better way to spend the rest of it.

  Suddenly the robot stopped. It shook its head from side to side, lumbered backward on its four feet, and dropped the hose. Then it stood frozen, making no further move.

  Dick leaped for the hose before it could twist back at him. Under full pressure it was more than he could hold, but he managed to find the shut-off and stop the stream of lead. Then he swung to the robot. “What’s the trouble?’’

  “No trouble,” the message came back over his radio. Sometimes the automatic testers in the big machines could locate the fault, but this had to be one of the cases where they didn’t work, of course.

  Dick snapped open the silicone plastic cover on the robot’s chest and began testing it quickly. There was power enough in its batteries. He began snapping the little levers in the proper testing sequence, but everything seemed to be in order. Still, the robot refused to work.

  Dick gave up after a final inspection. There was nothing to do now but report it and wait—and that meant he wouldn’t get credit for loosening the big chunk of beryllium before quitting time. It might even mean having to stay late while he helped the repair crew with the robot.

  Dick tuned the dial on the front of his suit to the general call band. “Dick Rogers, tunnel 3-MO,” he reported. “Robot out of order. No sign of trouble, but it won’t work.”

  “Okay, Dick,” his father’s voice answered in the phones. “I’m coming down in a few minutes, anyhow. Wait around. Hows the cutting?”

  “Almost done, Dad,” Dick reported. “Another hour should finish it.”

  The older man’s voice sounded worried—much more worried than it should have been because of a routine delay such as this. But his words were normal enough. “Okay. Maybe we can get it going. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  There was nothing more for Dick to do. He dropped back on his stool and began to eat his lunch. Eating was a complicated business. Food was stored inside the suit, but he had to work for it. He wriggled his arms carefully out of the bulging sleeves and reached into the supply compartment built over his chest. He had just enough room where the helmet met the neck of the suit for him to reach his mouth. It took practice, but he managed.

  Then he reached for the heavily insulated plastic box of his personal belongings, where he kept an engineering text he was studying. The book was actually a device that projected words from a film onto a tiny screen, and would work in the heat of the tunnel. Dick’s fingers threw up the cover of the box—and stopped. Lying inside the box was a tiny, blue-white ball of fire!

  It snapped out before he could jerk his hand back, and leaped into the air, five feet away. Suddenly it swelled out into a globe about two feet in diameter, like a ball of lightning, speckled with little swirling patterns. Johnny Quicksilver hung in the air, dancing up and down busily.

  Somehow he must have pulled himself into the tiny globe form in which he seemed to sleep and had slipped into the box when Dick had thought he was already gone. Now he was inside the mine, the one place where he had no business to be.

  Johnny was pure electricity, somehow alive and held together in a way nobody could understand. The wispies had been all over the hotlands when men first reached Mercury. They absorbed energy from the blazing fury of the sun and moved about by tiny discharges of electricity. Men paid no attention to them at first, but they began to creep into the machines and suck electricity from batteries and wires, frequently short-circuiting a machine and ruining it.

  Normally, nothing could hurt them except coming in contact with grounded metal, which sometimes would completely drain away their energy. But the miners had taken to wearing ion blasters. These discharged a stream of atoms which had been stripped of their electrons and given a positive charge—and were pure poison to the spooks. The creatures had been chased out of the domes, and things had settled down to a quiet war, each side seeming to hate the other, until Dick had tried to tame Johnny.

  “Johnny,” Dick yelled at him. “Johnny, do you want to be killed? Get back in that box before someone sees you. And don’t start any funny business here, or I’ll have to shoot you myself. Get back, now!”

  Dick wasn’t sure whether the creature got his words over the radio or read his mind telepathically.

  But he knew it could understand some of what he said.

  Johnny paid no attention. He began darting toward the end of the tunnel, then back to Dick, trying to tease him to follow. It was the same trick he’d tried that morning, but this was no time for playing games. Dick’s father would be along soon— and that would be the end of Johnny!

  Johnny suddenly seemed to tire of the game, just as Dick moved toward him with the box. He cut his size in half and darted up the tunnel, to disappear. Dick started after him and then slumped back. He couldn’t catch the wispy now; all he could hope was that Johnny was tame enough to let the machinery alone.

  Then he remembered his father was coming, and groaned. If Johnny came back while the older man was here, it would be tragic. And with the robot out of order, his father might be here for at least an hour. Somehow Dick would have to get the robot working—maybe in time to keep his father from coming down at all.

  Dick finally gave up the testing tricks and began to go over the robot inch by inch, while the minutes rolled by slowly. It seemed hopeless. Then he grunted. On one of the eye lenses there was a tiny speck of lead, hardly the size of a period. He flicked it off with his finger—the r
obot moved forward, picked up the hose, and began working stolidly again, just as Bart Rogers came down the tunnel.

  The older man was rounder of face than Dick, and heavier, but the resemblance was close. He nodded as he saw the robot go back to work. “Nice work, kid. What was wrong?”

  Dick told him quickly, and his father nodded, but the worry never left his face. “Fine. Must have thrown off the machines sight a little, but not enough to show up on the meters. Sometimes these robots act almost intelligent, but mostly they make a good dog look like a genius beside them.” He dismissed it, and swung to face Dick sharply. “Dick!”

  Dick didn’t like the sound of it, but he tried to respond normally. “Yes, sir?”

  “Dick, I just got a call over emergency circuit- one of the men thinks he saw a spook! If it’s yours, you’d better get it back before it wrecks anything.

  I didn’t mind your fooling with your pet out in the hotlands, but you know better than to bring one in here! They’re dangerous, and you know it!”

  “But Johnny wouldn’t…” Dick began.

  Then he stopped, following his father’s eyes. The big hose in the robot’s hands had gone limp, with only a few trickling drops falling from it. Abruptly the lights flickered and went out.

  Dick cut on the torch in his helmet, just as his father switched over to the emergency band. He flipped the tuning dial on his chest in time to hear the last of a report coming in.

  “. . pumps and lighting motors are shorted. The spook only took a sideswipe at them, though. Fused the main leads. We can get it fixed in an hour or so, maybe. Never saw a wispy act like that before- seemed to know what it was doing, and I didn’t even have time to draw my blaster.”