"But you might have told me what you wanted to back at the Dome. Why bring me here?"
"For two reasons," said the engineer. His breathing continued rapid and difficult. "In the first place, they all think it's my fault. They think I can't pull the project through, that I'm wasting tax money. I wanted to get you away from them. Understand? I wanted to keep you from listening to them first."
"Why should they think it's your fault?"
"They think I'm too young."
"How old are you?"
"Twenty-two."
Lucky Starr, who wasn't very much older, said, "And your second reason?"
"I wanted you to get the feeling of Mercury. I wanted you to absorb the-the-- " He fell silent.
Lucky's suited figure stood straight and tall on Mercury's forbidding surface, and the metal of one shoulder caught and reflected the milky light of the corona, "the white ghost of the Sun."
He said, "Very well, Mindes, suppose I accept your statement that you are not responsible for failures in the project. Who is?"
The engineer's voice was a vague mutter at first. It coalesced gradually into words. "I don't know- At least… "
"I don't understand you," said Lucky.
"Look," said Mindes desperately, "I've investigated. I spent waking and sleeping periods trying to pinpoint the blame. I watched everybody's movements. I noted times when accidents took place, when there were breaks in the cables or when conversion plates were smashed. And one thing I'm sure of-- "
"Which is?"
"That nobody at the Dome can be directly responsible. Nobody. There are only about fifty people in the Dome, fifty-two to be exact, and the last six times something has gone wrong I've been able to account for each one. Nobody was anywhere near the scenes of the accidents." His voice had gone high-pitched.
Lucky said, "Then how do you account for the accidents? Mercury-quakes? Action of the Sun?"
"Ghosts!" cried the engineer wildly, flinging his arms about. "There's a white ghost and a red ghost. You've seen those. But there are two-legged ghosts too. I've seen them, but will anyone believe me?" He was almost incoherent. "I tell you… I tell you… "
Bigman said, "Ghosts! Are you nuts?"
At once Mindes screamed, "You don't believe me either. But I'll prove it. I'll blast the ghost. I'll blast the fools who won't believe me. I'll blast everyone. Everyone!"
With a harsh screech of laughter he had drawn his blaster, and with frenzied speed, before Bigman could move to stop him, he had aimed it at Lucky at point-blank range and squeezed its trigger. Its invisible field of disruption lashed out…
2. Mad or Sane?
It would have been the end of Lucky if he and Mindes had been on Earth.
Lucky had not missed the gathering madness in Mindes's voice. He had been waiting carefully for some break, some action to suit the violence of the engineer's hard-breathed sentences. Yet he had not entirely expected an outright assault with the blaster.
When Mindes's hand flashed to his holster, Lucky leaped to one side. On Earth, that movement would have come too late.
On Mercury, however, matters were different. Mercury's gravity was two fifths that of Earth, and Lucky's contracting muscles threw his abnormally light body (even including the suit he wore) farther to one side. Mindes, unaccustomed to low gravity, stumbled as he turned too quickly in order that his blaster might follow Lucky's motion.
The blaster's energy, therefore, struck bare ground, inches from Lucky's sinking body. It gouged a foot-deeo hole into the frigid rock.
Before Mindes could recover and aim again, Bigman had struck him at the end of a long, iow tackle carried through with the natural grace of a born Martian accustomed to low gravity.
Mindes went down. He shrieked wordlessly and then was silent, whether unconscious as the result of the fall or as the climax of his fevered emotions could not be told.
Bigman did not believe either possibility. "He's shamming," he cried passionately. "The dirty cobber is playing dead." He had wrenched the blaster from the fallen engineer's unresisting grip, and now he pointed it at the man's head.
Lucky said sharply, "None of that, Bigman."
Bigman hesitated. "He tried to kill you, Lucky." It was obvious that the little Martian would not have been half as angry if it had merely been himself who had been in danger of death. Yet he backed away.
Lucky was on his knees examining Mindes's face through the face-plate, shining his helmet light onto the other's pale, drawn features. He checked the pressure gauge of Mindes's suit, making sure the shock, of the fall had not loosened any of its joints. Then, seizing the fallen figure by a wrist and ankle, he slung it across his shoulders and rose to his feet.
"Back to the Dome," he said, "and, I'm afraid, to a' problem that's a little more complicated than the Chief thinks."
Bigman granted and followed Lucky's long stride closely, his own smaller build forcing him into a gravity-lengthened half trot. He kept his blaster ready, maneuvering his position to enable him, in case of need, to strike at Mindes without blasting down Lucky.
The "Chief was Hector Conway, head of the Council of Science. At more informal times he was called Uncle Hector by Lucky, since it was Hector Conway, along with Augustus Henree, who were the guardians of the young Lucky after the death of Lucky's parents as the result of a pirate attack near the orbit of Venus.
A week earlier Conway had said to Lucky with a casual air, almost as though he were offering him a vacation, "How would you like to go to Mercury, Lucky?"
"What's up, Uncle Hector?" asked Lucky.
"Nothing really," said Conway, frowning, "except some cheap politics. We're supporting a rather expensive project up at Mercury, one of those basic research things that may come to nothing, you know, and, on the other hand, may turn out to be quite revolutionary. It's a gamble. All those things are."
Lucky said, "Is it anything I know about?"
"I don't think so. It's quite recent. Anyway, Senator Swenson has pounced on it as an example of how the Council wastes taxpayers' money. You know the line. He's pressing for an investigation, and one of his boys went out to Mercury some months ago."
"Senator Swenson? I see." Lucky nodded. This was nothing new. The Council of Science over the past decades had slowly come to the fore of the fight against the dangers to Earth from both within and without the Solar System. In this age of Galactic civilization, with humanity spread through all the planets of all the stars in the Milky Way, only scientists could properly cope with mankind's problems. In fact, only the specially trained scientists of the Council were adequate.