"I know. At perihelion, Mercury's not much more than thirty million
miles from the sun." If the Frenchman wanted to bury the hatchet, fine.
LeClarc strained to raise himself on his elbows against the increasing
deceleration. "Sure," he said, "a hot place. After you foul up,
Stedman, my vote will be to leave you on the hot side instead of giving
you passage to the twilight zone."
The Frenchman was being illogical and pointlessly childish. "I didn't
ask you to fight with me," Steve told him. "Why don't we forget all
about it?"
"If you want to, forget. I, LeClarc, never forget."
"By space, LeClarc--" the voice came from the other side of the lounge
"--then you're a spoiled little child." It was the big Exec officer who
spoke, Kevin McGann.
LeClarc did not answer. Kevin winked at Steve, then set his face grimly
against the bone-crushing deceleration. Fifteen minutes later, they
landed at Furnacetown. The names of the new frontier settlements,
Steve thought with a grin, were as picturesque as the names of the old
Wild West towns.
There was a huge, priceless matrix of ruby far below the surface near
Furnacetown, and the frontier settlement existed to mine from it. But
the place was named aptly, for here on the hot side of Mercury, the
temperature was hot enough to melt tin and lead. A community of half a
thousand hearty souls, Furnacetown shielded itself from the swollen,
never-setting sun with a vacuum-insulated dome and a hundred million
credits worth of cooling equipment. Even so, the atmosphere within the
dome was a lot like New Orleans on a sultry summer day.
The mayor of the town, a man named Powlaski, met them at the landing
field. "It's hot," said Teejay, offering her hand and shaking with the
plump official, man-fashion.
"It's always hot, Captain Moore. At any rate, be happy that you've
beaten Barling here this time."
"Oh, did we? Good. We'll need three asbestos suits, Powlaski. I never
did trust plain vac-suits on the sunward side of this boiling mess of a
planet. Say, has anyone got a cool drink? I'm roasting."
Someone wheeled out a portable refrigerator and the synthetic
gin-and-orange stored therein tasted to Steve's thirsty lips almost
like the real thing. Then LeClarc, who had ventured into one of the
squat buildings with Powlaski's lieutenant, a middle-aged woman,
returned with three heavy asbestos suits draped ponderously over his
arm. Their combined weight was perhaps two hundred pounds, but it
became negligible under Mercury's weak gravity.
"We're ready," he said, extending one of the suits to Teejay and
helping her slip it on over her shorts and halter. This was the first
time that Steve had ever seen her without the black cape, which seemed
a sort of affected trade-mark.
"Three suits?" Steve demanded. "What for?"
"The third one's for you, Stedman," the woman told him. "I know your
job is to see that the game stays alive in our bubble-cages, but I
don't think it would hurt if you had a look-see at the stone worm in
its own environment."
"That's not what I meant," Steve told her. "Why LeClarc?"
Teejay shrugged, zipping up the suit. "Because I said so, that's why.
Also, LeClarc's something of an expert on the inner planets and he goes
wherever I do, anyway."
"Sort of a bodyguard," the Frenchman purred, strapping a neutron gun to
the belt of his asbestos suit. "Hey, who's got those helmets?"
And then Steve felt them slipping the thick, clumsy helmet over his
head. Kevin stood nearby and the Exec looked like he wanted to say
something, but Steve's helmet had snapped into place and from that
point he could only talk by radio--and over the crackling interference
of the swollen sun, at that.
Moments later, he'd stepped through an airlock at the side of the
Furnacetown dome and plodded out on the surface of Mercury.
* * * * *
On Venus there was the thick, soupy atmosphere and the verdant tropical
jungles. On Mars, the rusty desert and the ruins of an eon-old
civilization. But on Mercury you knew at once that you trod upon an
alien world. At perihelion, the sun swelled to almost four times its
size as seen from Earth, and because Mercury's tenuous atmosphere had
boiled off into space half a billion years ago, the sky was black. The
sun had lost its spherical shape, too. Great solar prominences licked
out at the blackness, and the visible corona seemed to swell and pulse.
Underfoot, Steve could feel the crunchy ground powdering beneath
his asbestos boots with every step. And far off toward the horizon,
a jagged ridge of blood-red mountains bit at the black sky like
festering, toothless gums.
Before long, Teejay's voice sang in Steve's earphones. "Over here,
you boys." And Steve could see her crouching, shapeless in the loose
asbestos suit, off to his left. The sun's heat had parched a long,
snaking crack in the surface and Steve lumbered over to it clumsily,
letting his shadow fall across the crevice. "Those stone worms are
umbra-tropic," he called, and waited.
"I don't wonder," said Teejay, looking up at the sun through the smoked
goggles of her helmet.
The stone worms, Steve knew, were attracted by darkness--hence they
generally dwelled in the deepest crevices, although a man's shadow
might bring them to the surface. He'd never seen a stone worm, but he'd
read about them and seen their pictures.
"You'll see something very unlovely," Teejay predicated. "The stone
worm isn't a carbon-basic animal, but a silicate creature with a
sodium-silicon-nitrogen economy. It's about four feet long and kind of
like some ghastly white slug. It--hey, Stedman, get on your toes!"
The worm was coming.
It poked its head up out of the crevice first, and then the slug-like
body followed, curling quite instinctively until the whole thing lay
in Steve's shadow. Four feet long and a foot across at the middle, it
looked like the product of nightmare. The head was one huge, lidless,
glassy eye--with a purple-lipped mouth where the pupil should have
been! The mouth opened and shut like that of a fish, but when Steve
lifted the monster by its middle and brought it out into the sun,
the lips puckered completely shut and the white slug began to thrash
dangerously.
But under the influence of the sun's heat it soon subsided. Trouble
was, Steve thought vaguely as they made their way back toward
Furnacetown with the quiescent monster, the sun's heat did not subside.
Probably, it was his imagination, but the sun had seemed to become, if
anything, stronger. He looked at the others, but they merely walked
forward, completely unconcerned. Maybe he'd tired himself subduing the
stone worm, for he knew that might seem to intensify the heat.
Inside his asbestos suit, Steve began to sweat. It did not start
slowly, but all at once the perspiration streamed down his face and
body.
It was then that his left leg began to burn. Down below the knee it
was, a knife-edged burning sensation which became worse with each
passing second. Someone had heated a knife white-hot, had applied its
sharp point to the nerve-endings of his leg--and then twisted. It felt
like that.
Screaming hoarsely, Steve fell, watched through burning eyes as the
stone worm commenced crawling laboriously away. It was LeClarc who went
after the worm and retrieved it, but Teejay knelt at Steve's side and,
surprisingly, real concern was in her voice when it came over the radio.
"What's the trouble, Stedman?"
"I don't know," Steve gritted. "I'm hot all over--and my leg feels like
it's on fire. Yeah, right there--ow!--go easy!"
Teejay frowned or at least Steve guessed she frowned by the way she
spoke. "There's nothing much we can do about it, Stedman. Seems to be a
hole--just a pinprick, but a hole--in the asbestos. It's a wonder you
weren't screaming bloody murder before this. How's the air?"
It _was_ getting hard to breathe, Steve realized, but dimly, for his
senses were receding into a fog of half-consciousness. Something hissed
in his ears and he knew Teejay had turned the outside dial of his
air-pump all the way over. It made him feel momentarily better, but the
pain still cut into his leg.
"I've got the worm," said LeClarc. "But what happened to him?" He
asked the question innocently--too innocently.