MENACE UNSEEN
Dorothy clasped Nick’s hand as firmly as hands can be clasped when
swathed in space-mitts. “If the photo didn’t deceive us, the ship should
be over this ridge.”
Nick nodded, shot an impatient glance at the others straggling up the
slight incline. Together he and Dorothy mounted the acclivity, peered
anxiously at the sweep below.
A little scream of delight came from Dorothy’s lips, “There, Nick!”
No doubt about it. The lost Orion lay, partly concealed by upcroppings
of rock, less than a mile away. Hastily they made their way down the
decline, ran in awkward, elephantine steps toward it. As they approached
they could see how beaten and scarred it looked.
They bounded to the port and breathlessly clanged upon it. It was shut
tightly. Impatiently they beat upon it until finally it swooshed open
and they filed into the airlock. Imperturbably the outer door snapped
close behind them, clamlike, and painfully slow the inner port dragged
itself open.
The lost Orion!
The air was pure—that they noticed first of all when they had doffed
cautiously their helmets. Pure and warm. Quickly they took off the
clumsy suits and looked about them. No one was in sight; no greeting
came to them.
“Hello!” yelled Nick.
No answer.
It was not as large as the _Columbia_, this ill-fated craft, but a big
ship nonetheless. Hearts beating out ill omens, they searched room after
room, finding no one.
“Hello! Hello!” cried Dorothy. Edgar grasped her arm. “Wait,” he
murmured. “I think I heard an answer.”
Silently they followed him, as he led, to a small room. There was a bed,
a set of controls—from this point the mechanisms for opening the double
doors had been set in motion—a small heating unit, and a large
armchair. As their eyes roved about the room, a figure arose unsteadily
from the chair and faced them—a tall, gaunt man, white-haired, his eyes
looking as if he had been lost for a thousand years.
Wordlessly he stared at them, as Nick stepped forward, his voice husky.
“Steve!”
* * * * *
The older man looked at him, a sort of dull bewilderment spreading
across his face. “Hello, Nick,” he said softly. “I was sort of wondering
when you’d come. Who are your friends?”
“I’m Dorothy Gilbert,” spoke up that person coming forward, “and I think
I’d better fix something for you right away, Steve. You look as if you
haven’t had a square meal since Sinbad went sailing.”
The older man grinned wanly. “Guess I haven’t been eating any too
regularly. Haven’t had much company, you see since—”
“Tell us about it later,” interrupted Dorothy. “Edgar, break out the
rations and help me with this thing. Looks like an old model.”
“Nothing to it,” murmured Vickers. “I’m Edgar Vickers,” he added in
Hartnett’s direction; “my brother, Bob, is the slack-mouthed individual
you see behind me. There’s three other fellows in the party, but they
stayed back in the ship.”
Hartnett sat down on the bed, his eyes wandering from one to another.
“Nice girl you have there, Nick,” he whispered. “You’re not letting any
of these other lads get the jump on you, eh?”
“Not a chance,” replied Dorothy without looking up, “I’m after the
Hartnett fortune because there’s no one else I know who is worth
marrying, even for the kind of lab I want.”
“Did you write the book you always said you would if you were ever
marooned, Steve?” asked Nick.
Hartnett nodded. “Guess that’s all that kept me from going nuts. All
alone here—not strong enough to do much more than take care of myself,
write, and send signals out. Didn’t go outside much after—”
Dorothy faced him, her eyes misty. “Don’t try to soften it Steve—I knew
as soon as I came in the ship. Harry’s dead, isn’t he? Like all the
others?”
Hartnett nodded. “Yes—like all the others.”
* * * * *
“There’s not much to tell,” said Hartnett slowly, after the meal had
been finished. “We started out in the Orion much the same as you did in
the _Columbia_, tested the contracels and decided everything was all
right. We noticed this little world here and landed to investigate.
“Only we couldn’t get off.
“We’d been going virtually at the speed of light and that warped the
fourth dimensional fields which were a basic part of the contracels. We
found that the only way we had of getting off this planetoid was by
rockets, and rockets weren’t enough. We just slid along the surface,
battered up the ship, then stopped.
“Then we began to find out things about this world. Some of them were
interesting, and some—” he broke off suddenly. “Nick, you or none of
your party have been out without full suits have you?”
Nick shook his head.
“Good. Don’t. This little world is full of radiations, a good deal of
which are undetectable, but nasty nonetheless. Seven of our party
succumbed before we suspected anything was wrong, and five more died
within the next fortnight from perfectly innocent things which must have
acted as catalysts.
“So far as we know, an ordinary suit is protection, but we can’t be
sure.”
“What happened to the others?” asked Bob Vickers.
Hartnett was silent for a moment. “When we landed, one of the rocket
fuel tanks was ruptured. Not broken open, just cracked enough to let the
stuff vaporize and escape. It started to flood the ship gradually,
before we found out. We drew lots to see who would seal off the rooms
where it had already penetrated, knowing that the chances were a hundred
to one that everyone who went would be blown up. It was a suicide job,
but those suicides could keep the entire ship from being blasted to free
electrons.
“They did. If you’d come from the other side, you’d have seen the great
gaping crater and the hole in the ship.”
“I don’t understand....” started Dorothy.
“I do,” spoke up Nick. “When the Orion left, the only rocket fuel which
was any good was HZ 7. It had one fault, however. Let any atmosphere get
at it and it would vaporize and seep through practically every known
substance, except wax. And that vapor was about ten times as touchy as
nitro. When it went off you had a terrific explosion.
“What these fellows did, I take it, Steve, was to seal off the sections
from the outside, leaving plenty of room for the vapor to explode,
perhaps calculating on its drawing closer while they were at work. Then,
they went to work on padding so that the concussion wouldn’t completely
wreck the ship. Their only chance of escape was completing the job and
getting off before the stuff lit up. And working around it was almost a
positive guarantee of setting it off.”
Hartnett nodded. “That’s just about what happened. Three men were on the
job of sealing off. That was the sure death assignment, because they
would have to be practically entombed inside. Five others were on the
padding job; they had a chance of not being smashed to pieces by the
concussion if the blow held off long enough.
“But it didn’t—not quite long enough. They managed to get their work
almost finished. It was just the sheerest luck that the thing didn’t
fill the entire ship, or go off before some of us were out of the way.
That was when we didn’t all wait to put on full suits—and it seemed all
right outside. Well, the radiation got the ones who survived the blast.”
He buried his face in his hands. “It seems as if it happened ten years
ago at times, then I feel, sometimes, as if it had happened yesterday.”
* * * * *
Dorothy slipped her arm around him. “It wasn’t your fault. Come, tell us
more—about the things you found out about this planetoid.”
He raised his head, brow wrinkled in concentration. “There’s an odd
effect at the horizon—maybe you haven’t noticed it yet, eh? The equator
of the world seems to be moving, flowing along the ground.”
“Yow!” exclaimed Edgar. “Lorentz-Fitzgerald stuff!”
“Huh?”
“Simple,” he went on. “The speed of rotation of this planetoid at the
equator approaches the speed of light, believe it or not. So the equator
contracts. Its diameter remains the same, mind you, since it isn’t
moving along the line of the diameter, but the circumference grows
smaller. And that my friends,” he concluded, “makes the mathematical
‘pi’ a variable so far as Hastur is concerned. Geometry on this planet
must be hot stuff—a veritable purgatory for mathematicians.”
“How the devil did you figure all that out?” exclaimed Hartnett, a note
of awed admiration in his voice.
Edgar grinned. “I’m not staking my life on it,” he said, “but it’s the
only explanation I can think of for the phenomenon you described.”
“Well, you may be right, and then again.... The important thing, now,
is to get off Hastur. These radiations are what got most of us—doesn’t
make too much difference with me, because I’m old. But I’m assuming,” he
looked at Dorothy and Nick, “that you two will be wanting to pair off
pretty soon. And I don’t think Dorothy would care to start knitting
little sweaters with holes for three heads in them after she’d had
x-rays taken.”
“We’ll get off,” declared Nick. “Our rockets are powerful enough, I
think. We’ll take what we can from the Orion—and I suspect that you and
your book, Steve, will be all—then scram away from here fast.”
He clasped Dorothy’s hand. “I only want a hole for one head in that
little sweater.”
* * * * *
Joe Timbie turned to Hartnett and Nick with a despairing gesture. “See?
All we do is slide along the ground. I’ve given her the best blasts we
have and there’s the result.”
“A good thing they’ve found a new kind of rocket fuel in these last
years.”
When Dorothy came in, Nick gripped her hands and clung to her. There was
no need for words. Silently they looked out of the port onto the scene
of their prison, grey twilight world with its sky of starlit black.
Finally he straightened up, reached out and pressed the call-button
which would summon all hands to the control room.
“There is nothing wrong with the rocket tubes, or the fuel,” he said
softly when all had come. “Everything is working as it should work. Our
rockets just aren’t strong enough to get us off.”
“But the contracels?” burst out Marquis bewilderedly.
Hartnett shook his head. “No good here.”
Bob Vickers went over to the window and looked out, staring at the
landscape as if there lay an answer to their problem. “Edgar,” he called
after a moment, “are you sure about what you said about the equator?”
“No guarantees, but it could very easily be that way.”
“Then mightn’t an object at the equator be thrown off the planet by
centrifugal force?”
Edgar turned to Nick. “It might—matter of fact, it should.”
Hartnett bit his lips. “It’s a long chance,” he said, “but still a
chance. If the ship will hold together under the terrific punishment it
would have to take, sliding along the ground on our rocket blasts, then
we may be able to do it.”
“Okay,” declared Nick. “Everybody get into space suits, make sure the
air-making apparatus is in order, and take your stations. We’ve got to
have lookouts covering all sectors to spot any possible punctures of the
hull. As soon as everybody’s checked from their posts, Joe, let her
rip.”