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.”
Ross nodded. “Attempted suicide. I got to 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. “That sounds like a good idea.”
“Damn right it is,” Ross said, glowering.
As the ship touched down Ross thought, Mercury is two hells in one.
It was the cold, ice-bound 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 per cent, external temperature a manageable 108°F, indicating they had made their descent 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 okay, Captain.”
“Manual landing?”
“I had to,” the astrogator said. “I ran a quick check on Curtis’ tape, and it was all cockeyed. The way he had us coming in, we’d have grazed Mercury’s orbit by a whisker and kept on going straight into the sun. Nice?”
“Very sweet,” Ross said. “But don’t be too hard on the kid. He didn’t want to go psycho. Good landing, anyway. We seem to be pretty close to the center of the Twilight Belt, and that’s where I feel most comfortable.”
He broke the contact and unwebbed himself. Over the shipwide circuit he called all hands fore, double pronto.
The men got there quickly enough—Brainerd first, then Doc Spangler, followed by Accumulator Tech Krinsky and the three other crewmen. Ross waited until the entire group had assembled.
They were looking around curiously for Curtis. Crisply, Ross told them, “Astrogator Curtis is going to miss this meeting. He’s aft in the psycho bin. Luckily, we can shift without him on this tour.”
He waited until the implications of that statement had sunk in. The men seemed to adjust to it well enough, he thought: momentary expressions of dismay, shock, even horror quickly faded from their faces.
“All right,” he said. “Schedule calls for us to put in some thirty-two hours of extravehicular activity on Mercury. 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 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 getting roasted. Take the crawler, but be sure to keep an eye on the thermometer. We’ve only got one heatsuit, 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 forty-seven 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.”
Ross turned to Krinsky. In many ways the accumulator tech was the expedition’s key man: 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 reprime the accumulators for further testing by the next expedition.
Krinsky was a tall, powerfully built man, the sort of man who could stand up to the crushing weight of a heatsuit almost cheerfully. The heatsuit was necessary for prolonged work in the Sunside zone, where the accumulators were mounted—and even a giant like Krinsky could stand the strain for only a few hours at a time.
“When Llewellyn and Falbridge have the radar tower set up, Krinsky, get into your heatsuit and be ready to move. As soon as we’ve got the accumulator station located, Dominic will drive you as far east as possible and drop you off. The rest is up to you. Watch your step. We’ll be telemetering your readings, but we’d like to have you back alive.”
“Yes, sir.”
“That’s about it,” Ross said. “Let’s get rolling.”
Ross’s own job was purely administrative—and as the men of his crew moved busily about their allotted tasks, he realized unhappily that he himself was condemned to temporary idleness. His function was that of overseer; like the conductor of a symphony orchestra, he played no instrument himself and was on hand mostly to keep the group moving in harmony towards the finish.
Everyone was in motion. Now he had only to wait.
Llewellyn and Falbridge departed, riding the segmented, thermo-resistant crawler that had traveled to Mercury in the belly of the Leverrier. Their job was simple: they were to erect the inflatable plastic radar tower out towards the sunward sector. The tower that the first expedition had left had long since librated into a Sunside zone and been liquefied; the plastic base and parabola, covered with a light reflective surface of aluminum, could hardly withstand the searing heat of Sunside.
Out there, it got up to 700° when the sun was at its closest. The eccentricities of Mercury’s orbit accounted for considerable temperature variations on Sunside, but the thermometer never showed lower than 300° out there, even during aphelion. On Darkside, there was less of a temperature range; mostly the temperature hovered not far from absolute zero, and frozen drifts of heavy gases covered the surface of the land.
From where he stood, Ross could see neither Sunside nor Darkside. The Twilight Belt was nearly a thousand miles broad, and as the little planet dipped in its orbit the sun would first slide above the horizon, then slip back. For a twenty-mile strip through the heart of the Belt, the heat of Sunside and the cold of Darkside canceled out into a fairly stable, temperate climate; for five hundred miles on either side, the Twilight Belt gradually trickled towards the areas of extreme cold and raging heat.
It was a strange and forbidding planet. Humans could endure it for only a short time; it was worse than Mars, worse than the Moon. The sort of life capable of living permanently on Mercury was beyond Ross’s powers of imagination. Standing outside the Leverrier in his spacesuit, he nudged the chin control that lowered a sheet of optical glass. He peered first towards Darkside, where he thought he saw a thin line of encroaching black—only illusion, he knew—and then towards Sunside.
In the distance, Llewellyn and Falbridge were erecting the spidery parabola that was the radar tower. He could see the clumsy shape outlined against the sky now—and behind it? A faint line of brightness rimming the bordering peaks? Illusion also, he knew. Brainerd had calculated that the sun’s radiance would not be visible here for a week. And in a week’s time they’d be back on Earth.
He turned to Krinsky. “The tower’s nearly up. They’ll be coming in with the crawler any minute. You’d better get ready to make your trip.”
As the accumulator tech swung up the handholds and into the ship, Ross’s thoughts turned to Curtis. The young astrogator had talked excitedly of seeing Mercury all the way out—and now that they were actually here, Curtis lay in a web of foam deep within the ship, moodily demanding the right to die.