Steve Gordon stared out of the forward port of the _Condon Comet_, which
was streaking toward the sun. A dense filter protected his eyes from the
searing brilliance of the star, looming ever larger by the day and hour
as the rocket devoured the miles at a speed never before equaled by a
space flyer.
“We’ll whip Dennis easily if we can keep up this pace!” exclaimed
Steve’s older brother, Bart, in his clipped way.
Steve saw a gloating, almost fanatical, expression on Bart’s face.
Bart’s one passion in life was to beat a Dennis ship with a Condon
craft. The rivalry extended back eighteen years to 2003, when the
youths’ fathers had first started their competing light-space-craft
companies.
“Take a look out back, Steve, and see if we’re still gaining,” Bart
said.
Steve left his seat and at the rear of the compartment searched the TV
screen, which showed the star-filled darkness behind the ship. A small
silvery mote, the _Dennis Meteor_, moved against the immobile stars.
“We’re well ahead,” Steve reported, turning back. “Why don’t you let up,
Bart? We’ll burn out our jets at this speed!”
Bart’s expression was grimly set. “This is the moment Dad wished for all
his life, Steve. A Condon ship has always played second best to a
Dennis. Now that we seem to have broken through, do you think I’m going
to let up?”
Steve realized that an eventual victory for Bart would not settle
anything, for then Jim Dennis would strike back with an even better ship
next year, and the fight would continue. On and on it would go until one
of them took a foolhardy chance. Then disaster would be the final victor
in the feud.
“We’re going a hundred miles a second!” Steve protested. “We’re already
ahead of Jim’s last year’s record!”
“I’m going to set a record around the sun that no Dennis ship will ever
top!” Bart asserted stubbornly.
Steve had come along as Bart’s assistant mainly in the hope of somehow
calming his brother’s hotly competitive spirit and restraining him from
over-stepping the bounds of common caution in this race that held the
interest of the entire world.
Steve looked over the strain dials on the control panel. The needle was
wavering toward the danger point.
“Bart, slow down!” Steve burst out. “We’ll shake ourselves to pieces!
This refrigerator gauge has been acting funny too!”
Bart checked the panel dials. “I guess we can afford to coast a little,”
he admitted.
They pushed levers, and Steve felt the little ship bucking gently as her
forward jets braked to slower speed.
“Why do you and Jim have to keep going on like this year after year?”
Steve asked. “A Dennis-Condon merger would make for a terrific space
ship.”
Bart grinned tolerantly. “Still trying, aren’t you, Steve?” Then he
frowned. “If Jim Dennis wants peace, let him come to us. Then we’ll
incorporate his best points in our machines and call them Condons.”
“It would have to be a fifty-fifty proposition, Bart,” Steve reminded
him. “Jim has as much pride as we do.”
The younger man studied the slowly enlarging yolk of Sol in front of
them. In spite of the heavy filter over the port, it seemed as though
the terrific light and heat were burning through his eyes.
This was Steve’s first trip, but he had been told by Bart that the
celestial furnace had an aura about it that seemed to penetrate clear to
one’s bones. Their refrigerating unit and heat-repulsing hull would be
taxed hard to keep them from bursting into flame.
“Better check on Jim again,” Bart said impatiently.
“He’s holding back; I know he is. He won’t try to overtake us yet,”
Steve replied. Nevertheless, he got up to take another look at the
screen. He was glad to see that his assumption was correct.
He returned to his seat at the panel and carefully kept tab on the
readings, covering first one dial and then another. Some minutes later
the refrigerator-gauge needle unexpectedly soared above the subzero
mark. Almost at the same moment, Steve felt encroaching heat pressing in
on him from all sides. The sweat popped out. The heat filled his
nostrils, burned his lungs.
“The refrigerator has broken down!” Steve gasped.
His gaze shifted to Bart, who was rubbing a moist hand over his
crimsoning face. Bart’s fingers jerked instinctively from the levers
that had quickly grown too hot to handle. In the motion, Bart’s arm
carelessly brushed against one of the side jet levers. The ship veered
on its gyroscopic balance and plunged out of control.
Steve bumped against the far corner of the compartment, feeling bruises
all over him, but he was not really hurt, although it seemed as though
he were breathing fire. Bart’s head had struck the fire drill, a big
welding machine for repairing breaks in the hull, stupefying him.
Steve shook his head to clear it and scrambled to his seat, righting the
ship again and putting it on automatic pilot. Then he got up and hurried
down the corridor to the garb room. His magnetic shoes clacked along the
metal floor. Hurriedly, Steve donned space suit, oxygen tank, and
helmet.
The insulated gear momentarily cut out the oppressive heat. But in
another few minutes he and Bart would be sizzling like steaks on a
griddle, for even the insulation of their suits could not withstand raw
heat for long. The only way out, as Steve saw it, was to call on Jim
Dennis.
Steve carried another set of gear down the corridor and shook Bart. “Put
this on, Bart,” he said. “It’ll protect you from the heat.”
Bart was gasping in the hot air of the compartment, his face scarlet and
shining, but he took the gear. Next, Steve went outside onto the skin of
the _Condon Comet_. The vault of starlight closed in all about him, and
the deep web of midnight space seemed to extend endlessly. There was the
sweeping veil of the Milky Way galaxy and here closer the pulsing,
blinding sphere of Sol. There was another startling light, a driving
streak of firestreams and silvery glow—the _Dennis Meteor_.
Jim and his co-pilot, Pete Rogers, could hardly miss seeing them.
Quickly the _Dennis Meteor_ drew abreast of the _Condon Comet_, but then
it swept on past overhead!
Steve felt bitterness and disappointment well up in him. He had always
thought Jim to be a “right guy.” Could it be that the winning of the
race was more important to him than two persons’ lives?
The only hope now was a hasty repair of the refrigerator unit. Steve
hustled back into the ship and made his way to the rear where the
cooling machinery was located. He found Bart working there, his helmet
off. Steve removed his own helmet, for apparently Bart had repaired the
trouble. The customary blandness of the atmosphere had been restored.
“What happened to it?” Steve asked.
“The dynamo burned out,” Bart answered. “I just coupled in the spare
one. Where have you been?”
“Out on the skin,” Steve said. “I was trying to signal Jim Dennis.”
Bart’s face went red again, and he muttered to himself.
“I didn’t think there was any chance of repairing the trouble,” Steve
went on.
“I’d rather burn than take help from Jim Dennis!” Bart snapped. “Did
Dennis see you?”
“He must have. He went right overhead.”
“Obviously he didn’t stop, though.”
“No, he didn’t,” Steve said frankly.
“I wouldn’t have believed that of Dennis,” Bart murmured. “I thought he
was a better man than that.”
“He may not have seen me, Bart. Let’s give him the benefit of the
doubt.”
“I’ll give him nothing!” Bart rapped. “If Jim Dennis wants a fight to
the finish, we’ll give it to him!”
Bart began immediately to battle to regain their lead. It was a
frenzied, closely fought contest for many hours, the lead seesawing back
and forth. It took the top speed Bart’s craft was capable of to gain the
lead he was finally able to maintain.
Only when Jim Dennis appeared content to linger behind again did Bart
cut their driving velocity. Once more Steve felt he could breathe
easier—for a while at least.
In the days that followed, there were no changes in position. Steve and
Bart took turns at the controls during the sleeping periods. They could
see the planet Venus at a distance. Their flight had been planned to
avoid close proximity with Earth’s twin because of the retarding effect
of her gravity.
The sun steadily dominated the sky, an enormous cottony ball of atomic
fury with a surface temperature of 6000 degrees centigrade and an
interior heat around 20,000,000 degrees. The red leaping flames of the
chromosphere were like the mountainous waves of a gigantic cosmic ocean
as they lapped millions of miles out into surrounding space. Magnetic
storms—sunspots—all of them large enough to swallow the Earth, were seen
as whirling dark cyclones in the sea of gas.
As the _Condon Comet_ moved around and behind the star, it began to
close in on the planet Mercury. The ship was actually overtaking the
miniature world even though it was circling the sun at a rapid thirty
miles a second.
On the fifth day away from Earth, the _Condon Comet_ reached its apogee,
the farthest point of its orbit from the mother planet. It was “behind”
the sun now, the dominant ball eclipsing the Earth. By now Mercury had
grown hugely, a big pebbly world that literally shimmered with the
frightening heat that poured down upon it. It was a startling sight,
halved into hemispheres of darkness and extreme brilliance. The closer
side was so hot that streams of molten tin and lead flowed, while that
side away from the sun approached the arctic cold of absolute zero.
“I hope we don’t have to land there, Bart,” Steve spoke uncomfortably,
looking out the port.
They began to feel the gravitational attraction of the miniature world,
and they had to bolster rocket fire to combat it. Unlike Venus, Mercury
could not be avoided in this flight.
Steve watched the gauges, especially the refrigerator dial. The latter
was holding up well under this maximum barrage of heat from Sol, but
there was still an oppressive hotness that reached through the laboring
artificial coolness and penetrated Steve’s pores like insidious rays.
“If the _Comet_ isn’t superior to Dennis’s in any other way, it’s made
of better heat-resistant alloy,” Bart had said with self-assurance
before leaving Earth. Steve wondered now if the proof of this assertion
would be settled before both ships were beyond the sun’s reach.
Hours later, when the _Condon Comet_ had passed Mercury, Steve was
impelled to check on their rivals behind. For a moment he couldn’t find
the ship on the TV screen. When he spotted it at last, by changing the
direction of the movable screen, he was amazed to find the craft far
below, hovering over the planet.
“Bart!” Steve called. “It looks as if Jim and Pete are in trouble!
They’re diving for Mercury and seem to be heading for the terminator
line between the dark half and the light!”
Steve wished there were some kind of radio communication between the
ships, but electrical interference from the sun made radio impossible on
these round-the-sun races.
“We’ve got to go down there, Bart,” Steve said.
“We haven’t won yet, Steve. There’s still the record to beat.”
“Will you stop thinking about records!” Steve retorted. “There are a
couple of men down there in trouble!”
“Did they stop for us?” Bart bit out. “It’s probably only a trick to
lure us down so that Dennis can make a quick getaway!”
But Steve knew that his brother was not as cold-hearted as he pretended
to be. Bart proved it in the next few minutes when he reluctantly turned
the _Comet’s_ nose downward with a savage thrust of the upper tail jets.
“You’ll never regret this,” Steve said.
“I wonder,” Bart grunted, without satisfaction.
As the ship moved strongly into Mercury’s gravitation field, Bart lined
the automatic pilot up with the tiny speck on the rocky world below that
was the _Dennis Meteor_. Then he and Steve strapped down on their
protective couches for the grueling landing.
Steve felt as though his chest were crushed under the rapid
deceleration. It was the effect of a swiftly dropping elevator
multiplied hundreds of times as the _Comet’s_ forward jets thrust
against Mercury’s crust to brake the hurtling speed. Steve finally
blacked out; he always did. When he came to, they had landed, and
through blurry eyes Steve saw his brother struggling to release himself
from his straps.
They went to the port. The _Dennis Meteor_ was in bad shape, its prow
crumpled into a huge face of rock. Its occupants could have been killed
by the concussion, although there was a good chance that they were still
alive if they had had time to strap down.
Steve noted their rugged surroundings, where strange rock pillars thrust
into the black sky from a shimmering, white-hot plain. Snaky rifts of
incalculable depth split the torrid landscape.
“The ship landed on its side,” Bart observed, speaking over his
short-range helmet radio. “The escape port is underneath!”
There was no point of exit from the ship for the trapped occupants if
they were still alive, Steve observed. Even the rocket tubes had been
crushed flat. Actually the _Dennis Meteor_ was a complete ruin, its
entire glossy surface warped and corrugated.
“You can see the ship broke down under the heat,” Bart said. “That’s why
they had to crash-land.”
“Look here on the other side!” Steve’s voice suddenly crackled in alarm
over his helmet radio.
Bart joined him. Only now did they see that the craft had nearly rolled
down a precipitous incline into a canyon stream of molten lead far
below. The ship was balanced precariously on the ledge. It seemed as if
the slightest jar would send it hurtling down the slope.
“We’ve got to get them out of there before the ship falls!” Steve said.
“The precipice looks so crumbly it may give way at any minute!”
“I don’t see how we can get them out,” Bart commented.
Steve thought a moment. “The fire drill! We can cut a hole in the top of
the ship!”
Bart frowned. “The force of the drill or even our weight on top of it
may cause the ship to go. But if you’re game, I am.”
They brought the fire drill out of the _Condon Comet_, and as they
climbed up onto the warped hull of the other ship with it, Bart smiled
wryly. “I never thought I’d see the day that I’d risk my neck for a
Dennis,” he remarked.
A moment later, when Bart was about to start the drill, he asked, “Ever
try swimming through molten metal, Steve? You’d better think about it.
We may be doing it in a second.”
Steve felt weak in the knees as he looked down into the plunging gulf
where the metallic river tossed against blackened rocks. A person flung
into that stream would be a cinder in scant moments.
Steve gritted his teeth. “Start it up, Bart.”
The machine whined into action, pouring a thin stream of blue-hot biting
energy against the heat-resistant alloy. The rocket shuddered under the
drill’s action, and Steve felt waves of fear course through him. The
drill moved in an arc that was to be a circle barely large enough for
the two men inside to squeeze through in their space suits.
When the job was halfway done, the ship ground forward several feet.
Steve saw Bart’s face drain whitely. Steve could almost feel the
scorching bite of liquid metal against his body. Yet the ship somehow
clung stubbornly to its precarious support.
They renewed their efforts, and the arc grew. Finally the circle was
full round. Bart stood up and jammed a foot against the isolated ring,
and it dropped inside. Steve held his breath as he looked in, afraid of
what he might see. He felt immeasurable relief as Jim and Pete came up
to the opening attired in space gear. They shoved a ladder into place
and started up. Steve gave Pete a hand, for he seemed to be shaken up.
Suddenly the ship rumbled a foot or two. It was going any instant. The
four of them carefully walked the length of the craft and made their way
down the flattened rocket tubes.
Bart was the last to jump to the ground. His movement affected the
delicate balance of the ship, and it slid forward, its stern arching
straight up as it dipped over the gulf. The ground shook, and a moment
later the _Dennis Meteor_ had thundered to oblivion into the river of
lead.
After Jim and Pete had expressed gratitude for their rescue, the four
fell into silence as they trooped back to the _Condon Comet_. Although
no one spoke, Steve felt that the others, like himself, must be thinking
many things. Would this mark the end of the long feud, or would it be
only a temporary truce?
Jim Dennis walking with a limp, studied the Condon ship. He circled the
rocket completely and closely examined the smooth hull, still undamaged
by the abnormal heat bombardment it was taking.
When they were inside, Jim was the first to speak. “This ship is
terrific,” he said simply.
“You admit that?” Bart asked incredulously.
“I’ve never seen a craft stand up so perfectly under extreme heat,” Jim
continued. “I think you’ve done it, Bart. It’s the finest light space
ship ever built.”
“An engineer who started out with Dad made this alloy,” Bart declared.
“He told me he thought he had finally come up with the ideal metal.”
“The _Meteor_ rattled like an old freighter the whole way!” Jim
complained. “We spent a lot of time in the rear checking on the rocket
tubes. We were afraid they’d shake loose. I guess we must have been back
there when we passed you, for the last time I looked out you were ahead
of us.”
That explained why they hadn’t seen his wave, Steve thought.
“It sure was a lucky break for us that you brought your drill along,”
Jim went on. “I had so much confidence in the _Meteor_ I was sure we
wouldn’t need it.”
“I felt the same way,” Bart admitted, “but Steve insisted we bring it.
That kid brother of mine always did have more practical sense than I.”
“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking since we crash-landed, Bart,” Jim
said. “I’ve been thinking that maybe this feud has gone on long enough
and that you must be as sick of it as I am. Together, we could turn out
ships that would be just about perfect. What do you say, Bart?”
Bart’s face grew stern and thoughtful. Finally he answered, “I’ll have
to think it over first, Dennis.”
“While you’re thinking, we may as well have a look-see,” Jim said. He
went over to the panel and checked the readings. “You seem to be way
ahead of my old record, Bart. You’re still going to try to beat it,
aren’t you?”
Steve knew this remark had broken down the last of Bart’s stubborn pride
and reserve. His brother smiled and thrust out his hand to Jim Dennis.
“You’re a good loser, Jim,” he said.
“I’m no loser,” Jim answered, grinning. “I’m a winner—we both are.”
Young Steve Condon sighed contentedly. He glanced at Pete Rogers, who
winked at him. Jim and Bart sat down side by side at the control panel
of the _Condon Comet_. Steve didn’t doubt for a moment that the long
feud was finally at an end. He was satisfied that his father would have
liked it this way.