“The planets are just about at right angles as seen from here,” he announced at length. “We’re just about between the sun and Three, as you know; Four is in the retrograde direction, roughly twice as far from us. Still, that shouldn’t mean anything to the Karella”
“True enough. Very well, we will take off in an hour. Get any equipment you think you will need on board before then — better use engineering armor for Planet Four, even if it doesn’t have air. You’ll have to point out where they are to whomever I get to help you.”
“How about Feth?” Ken had gotten the idea that the mechanic was in disgrace for betraying the secret of their location.
“He won’t be available for some time — he’s occupied. I’ll give you a man — you can be picking out what you want in the shop; I’ll send him there. One hour.” Laj Drai turned away, intimating that the interview was at an end.
The man he sent proved to be a fellow Ken had seen around, but had never spoken to. The present occasion did little to change that; he was almost as taciturn as Feth, and Ken never did learn his name. He did all he was asked in the way of moving material to the Karella, and then disappeared. The takeoff was on schedule.
Ordon Lee, who evidently had his orders, sent the vessel around the planet so rapidly that the acceleration needed to hug the curving surfaces exceeded that produced by the planet’s gravity; the world seemed to be above them, to the inhabitants of the ship. With the sun near the horizon behind and the glowing double spark of Earth rising ahead, however, he discontinued the radial acceleration and plunged straight away from the star. Under the terrific urge of the interstellar engines, the Earth-Luna system swelled into a pair of clearly marked discs in minutes. Lee applied his forces skillfully, bringing the vessel to a halt relative to’ the planet and half a million miles sunward of it. Drai gestured to Ken, indicating a control board similar to that in the shop.
“That’s tuned in to your torpedo; the screen at the right is a radar unit you can use to help find it. There’s a compass at the top of the panel, and this switch will cause the torpedo to emit a homing signal.” Ken silently placed himself at the controls, and got the feel of them in a few minutes. The compass gave rather indefinite readings at first because of the distance involved; but Lee was quickly able to reduce that, and in a quarter of an hour the still invisible projectile was only a dozen miles away. Ken had no difficulty in handling it from that point, and presently he and Drai left the control room and repaired to a cargo chamber in the Karella’s belly, where the torpedo was warming up.
This time it was the suit still clamped to the outside that took all their interest. The whole thing had been left at the bottom of the atmosphere for a full hour, and Ken felt that any serious faults should be apparent in that time. It was a little discouraging to note that air was condensing on the suit as well as the hull; if the heaters had been working properly, some sort of equilibrium should have been reached between the inner and outer layers of the armor during the few hours in space. More accurately, since an equilibrium had undoubtedly been reached, it should have been at a much higher temperature.
The trickling of liquid air did cease much sooner on the armor, however, and Ken still had some hope when he was finally able to unclamp the garment and take it in for closer examination.
The outer surface of the metal had changed color. That was the first and most obvious fact. Instead of the silvery sheen of polished steel, there was a definitely bluish tint on certain areas, mostly near the tips of the armlike handling extensions and the inner surfaces of the legs. Ken was willing to write off the color as a corrosion film caused by the oxygen, but could not account for its unequal distribution. With some trepidation he opened the body section of the massive suit, and reached inside.
It was cold. Too cold for comfort. The heating coils might have been able to overcome that, but they were not working. The recorder showed a few inches of tape — it had been started automatically by a circuit which ran from a pressure gauge in the torpedo through one of the suit radio jacks as soon as atmospheric pressure had been detectable — and that tape showed a clear story. Temperature and pressure had held steady for a few minutes; then, somewhere about the time the torpedo must have reached the planet’s surface, or shortly thereafter, they had both started erratically downward — very erratically, indeed; there was even a brief rise above normal temperature. The recorder had been stopped when the temperature reached the freezing point of sulfur, probably by air solidifying around its moving parts. It had not resumed operation. The planet was apparently a heat trap, pure and simple.
There was no direct evidence that the suit had leaked gas either way, but Ken rather suspected it had. The bluish tint on portions of the metal might conceivably be the result of flame — flaming oxygen, ignited by jets of high-pressure sulfur coming from minute leaks in the armor. Both sulfur and oxygen support combustion, as Ken well knew, and they do combine with each other— he made a mental note to look up the heats of formation of any sulfides of oxygen that might exist.
He turned away from the debacle at last.
“We’ll let Feth look this over when we get back,” he said. “He may have better ideas about just how and why the insulation failed. We may as well go on to Planet Four and see if it has anything that might pass for soil.”
“We’ve been orbiting around it for some time, I imagine,” Drai responded. “Lee was supposed to head that way as soon as we got your suit on board, but he was not to land until I returned to the control room.” The two promptly glided forward, pulling their weightless bodies along by means of the grips set into the walls, and shot within seconds through the control room door — even Ken was getting used to non-standard gravity and even to none at all.
Drai’s assumption proved to be correct; drive power was off, and Mars hung beyond the ports. To Sarrian eyes it was even more dimly lighted than Earth, and like it obviously possessed of an atmosphere. Here, however, the atmospheric envelope was apparently less dense. They were too close to make out the so-called canals, which become river valleys when observation facilities are adequate, but even rivers were something new to the Sarrians. They were also too close to see the polar caps from their current latitude, but as the Karella drifted southward a broad expanse of white came into view. The cap was nowhere near the size it had been two months before, but again it was a completely strange phenomenon to the gazing aliens.
Or, more accurately, almost completely strange. Ken tightened a tentacle about one of Drai’s.
“There was a white patch like that on Planet Three! I remember it distinctly! There’s some resemblance between them, anyway.”
“There are two, as a matter of fact,” replied Drai. “Do you want to get your soil from there? We have no assurance that it is there that the tofacco grows on Planet Three.”
“I suppose not; but I’d like to know what the stuff is anyway. We can land at the edge of it, and get samples of everything we find. Lee?”
The pilot looked a little doubtful, but finally agreed to edge down carefully into atmosphere. He refused to commit himself to an actual landing until he had found how rapidly the air could pull heat from his hull. Neither Drai nor Ken objected to this stipulation, and presently the white, brown and greenish expanse below them began to assume the appearance of a landscape instead of a painted disc hanging in darkness.