Vulcan was a doom-world. One expedition had
mysteriously disappeared, and now another was
following in its path--searching for the unknown
menace that stalked Vulcan's shadowed gorges.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories March 1943.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
I write this narrative, not with the idea of contributing any
additional scientific data to the discovery of Vulcan, but to put upon
the record the real facts of our truly-amazing space voyage.
The newscasters have hailed me as a modern Columbus. Surely I would not
want to appear ungracious, unappreciative of all the applause that
has been heaped upon me. But I do not deserve it. I did my job for my
employers. The Society sent me to make a landing upon Vulcan--if the
little planet existed. I found that it does exist; it was exactly where
I was told it ought to be. I carried out my instructions, returned and
made my report. There is no great heroism in that.
So I am writing the facts of what happened. Just a bald, factual
account, without the imaginative trimmings. The real hero of the
discovery of Vulcan was young Jan Holden. He did his job--did it
well--and he did something just a little extra.
I'm Bob Grant, which of course you have guessed by now. Peter
Torrence--the third member of our party--is in the Federal Prison up
the Hudson. I had to turn him in.
We were given one of the smaller types of the Bentley--T-44--an alumite
cylindrical hull, double-shelled, with the Erentz pressure-current
circulating in it. It was a modern, well-equipped little spaceship.
In its thirty-foot length of double-decked interior we three were
entirely comfortable.... The voyage, past the orbit of Venus and
then Mercury as we headed directly for the Sun--using the Sun's full
attraction--was amazingly swift and devoid of incident beyond normal
space-flight routine. Much of our time was spent in the little forward
control turrent--the "green-house," where below, above and to the sides
the great glittering abyss of the firmament is spread out in all its
amazing glory.
Vulcan, if it existed, would be almost directly behind the Sun now.
We had no possible chance of sighting it, we knew, even when, heading
inward, we cut the orbit of Mercury. Torrence, almost from the start of
the trip, figured we should follow into the attraction of Mercury which
was then far to one side.
"From that angle we'll see Vulcan just that much sooner," he argued.
"They told me to head straight in, to twenty-nine million miles," I
said. "And that's what I'm doing--obeying orders."
I held our plotted course. Torrence never ceased grumbling about it,
and I must admit there was a lot of sense in his argument. He is a big
fellow--burly, heavy-set and about my own height, which is six feet
one. He had close-clipped hair and a square, heavy face. He's just
turned thirty, I understand. That's five years older than I--and I was
in charge. Perhaps that irked him. He is unquestionably a headstrong
fellow; self-confident. But he obeyed orders, though with grumbling.
And as a mechanical technician--no one could do better. He knew the
technical workings of the little ship inside out.
"We follow orders?" young Jan Holden said. "And when we reach
twenty-nine million miles from the Sun--then we're on our own?"
"Yes," I agreed.
"Then, when we head off to round the Sun, if Vulcan is where they think
it is we ought to sight it in a few days?"
"I certainly hope so, Jan."
"I wonder if it's inhabited. I wish it would be." His dark eyes were
shining. His thin cheeks, usually pale, were flushed with excitement.
He was just eighteen--only a month past the legal minimum age for
Interplanetary employment. A slim, romantic-looking boy, he was willing
and eager to help in every way. A good cook, expert in handling his
cramped quarters and preparing the many synthetic foods with which we
were equipped.
"You hope it's inhabited, Jan?" I asked.
"I sure do."
I grinned at him. "Well, if it is, you'll be disappointed to find I'll
be doing my best to keep away from whatever living creatures are there.
That's a job for a larger expedition than ours."
"Yes, I suppose it is."
* * * * *
Jan often sat with me through our long vigils up there in the
green-house. Sometimes he wouldn't speak for an hour--just sitting
there dreaming. Sometimes he would talk of the ill-fated Roberts and
King Expedition--the only exploratory flight which ever had headed in
this close to the Sun. That was five years ago. Roberts and King, with
a crew of eight, had never been heard from since.
"I just think they found Vulcan," Jan said once, out of one of his long
silences.
"They were told to return after a routine landing," Torrence put in.
"Well then, suppose they crashed their ship," Jan said. "Suppose they
can't get back--"
"What we ought to do is sight Vulcan, round it and go home," Torrence
said. "To the devil with orders to land. I'd go back and tell them that
in my judgment--"
"We'll land," I said. "Determine gravity--meteorological
conditions--secure samples of soil, vegetation--what-nots--you know the
specifications, Torrence."
If indeed there was any Vulcan. If a landing upon what might be a fiery
surface were physically possible....
Another day passed. And then another and another. We were all three
tense, expectant. There was little apparent motion in the great starry
cyclorama spread around us--just the slow dwindling of Earth and Venus,
the monstrous Sun shifting slowly to the right with the starfield
behind it progressively becoming visible.
"We're chasing a phantom," Torrence said, on the fourth day, with
the Sun now almost abreast of us and some twenty-four million miles
distant. "This damned heat! They sent us out for a salary that's a mere
pittance--and give us inadequate equipment. No wonder there's been no
exploration so close in here."
Bathed in the full, direct Sun-rays our interior air had heated into a
torrid swelter. Stripped to the waist, with the sweat glistening on us,
we sat in the shrouded green-house.... And then at last I saw Vulcan! A
little round, lead-colored blur. Just a dot, but in a few hours it was
clear of the intervening Sun. No question of its identity. Vulcan. The
new world.
"We did it!" Jan murmured. "Oh, we did it."
* * * * *
It was a busy time, for me especially, those next ninety-six hours.
I was soon enabled to calculate, at least roughly, that Vulcan was a
world of some eight hundred miles diameter, with an orbit approximately
eighteen million miles from the Sun.
"It has an atmosphere?" Jan murmured anxiously.
"Yes, I think so." We kept away from the Sun for a time; and then at
last we were able to head directly for Vulcan.
The atmosphere presently was visible. No need for us to use the
pressure-suits. I envisaged at first that upon such a little world
gravity would be very slight. But now the heavy, metallic quality of
its rock-surface was apparent. A world, doubtless much denser than
igneous Earth.
It was my plan to land on the side away from the Sun.
We rounded Vulcan at some two million miles out. The clouds were
fairly dense in many places; sluggish, slow-moving. There were fires
on the Sun side--a temperature there which would make it certainly
uninhabitable to any creatures resembling humans....
It was the ninth day after the sighting of Vulcan that quite by chance
I discovered its _allurite_. We were now fairly close over the dark
hemisphere, with the Sun occulted behind it. At a thousand miles of
altitude, we were dropping slowly down upon the spreading dark disc
which now occupied most of our lower firmament. I had been making a
series of routine spectro-color-graphs to file with my reports.
Jan heard my muttered exclamation and came crowding to gaze over my
shoulder at the dripping little color spectrograph.
"What is it, Bob? Something important?"
"That bond-line there--see it? That's a metal on Vulcan--shining of its
own light--radioactive type-A."
That much, I could determine. Then Jan and I looked it up in the
Hughson list of Identified Spectrae. It was _allurite_.
"That's valuable?" Torrence murmured. "Pure _allurite_--"
I laughed. "It certainly would be, if we could find any sizable
deposits here. On Earth, it takes some seventeen tons of the very
richest _allurium_ to get maybe a grain of pure _allurite_. We'll take
a look around, try and get a sample of the ore here. If it pans out
rich enough, they can send a well-equipped mining expedition."
"We ought to get a bonus for this," Torrence said. "If you don't tell
'em so, I will."
* * * * *
The descent upon Vulcan took another twenty-four hours. Then at last we
had passed through a cloud-bank and, at some twenty thousand feet, the
new world stretched dark and bleak beneath us. It certainly looked--to
Jan's intense disappointment--wholly uninhabited. It was a tumbled,
rocky landscape, barren and forbidding. Beneath us there were black
ravines and canyons, little jagged peaks and hill-top spires, some of
them sharp as needle-points. Off at one of the distant horizons the
tiered land, rising up, stretched into the foothills of serrated ranks
of mountain peaks which loomed over the jagged dark horizon line.
A great metal desert here. In the fitful starlight, and the mellow
light of little crescent Mercury which hung over the mountains like a
falling, new moon, the metallic quality of the rock was obvious--sleek,
bronzed metal ore, in places polished by erosion so that it shone
mirror-like. In other places it was mottled with a greenish cast.
"Well," Jan murmured, "not very hospitable-looking, is it? Don't you
suppose there's any moisture, or any vegetation?"
There was no sign of any living creatures beneath us as we drifted
diagonally downward. But presently, at lower altitude, I could see
gleaming pools of water in the rock-hollows. The remains of a rainstorm
here. Then we saw what looked like a great fissure--an open scar
rifted in a glistening, polished metallic plateau. Grey-black steam
was rising, condensing in the humid night-air. The hidden fires of
the bowels of the little planet seemed close at this one point. As
we stared, a red glow for a moment tinged the steam with a red and
greenish reflection of some subterranean glare, far down.
Nothing but metal desert. But presently, as we slid forward, no more
than a few thousand feet above the rocky surface now, Jan murmured
suddenly,
"Look off there. Like a little oasis, isn't it?"
There was a patch of what seemed to be rocky soil. Just a few hundred
acres in extent, set in a cup-like depression with little buttes and
needle-spires and the strewn boulders of the metal waste surrounding
it. A clump of tangled vegetation covered it--a fantastic miniature
jungle of interlaced, queerly shaped little trees, solid with air-vines
and pods and clumps of monstrous, vivid-colored flowers. It was an
amazing contrast to the bleakness of the bronze desert.
"Well, that's more like it," Jan exclaimed. "Not all desert, Bob. See
that?"
Torrence, with his usual efficient practicality, had been busy
getting our landing equipment in order. He paused beside me in the
green-house, where I sat at the rocket-stream controls which now were
in operation for this atmospheric flight.
"Where you figure on landing?" he asked. "Somewhere about here? You
want to locate that _allurite_?"
"Yes," I agreed.
* * * * *
It is not altogether safe, handling even so small a space-flight ship
as ours, in atmosphere at low altitudes. Especially over unknown
terrain. It seemed my best course now to make the landing here, secure
my rock-samples and make my routine observations. I did not need
Torrence to tell me that we were not equipped for extensive exploration
of an unknown world. A trip on foot of perhaps a day or two, using the
spaceship as a base, would suffice for my records.
"There's a better chance of finding sizable deposits of allurium here
than anywhere else?" Torrence suggested. "Don't you think so?"
With that, too, I agreed. He prepared us for a night and a few meals of
camping--a huge pack for himself, which with a grin he declared himself
amply able to carry; a smaller one for Jan; and my instruments and
electro-mining drills for me.
We dropped down within an hour or two, landing with a circular swing
into a dim, cauldron-like depression of the desert where the polished
ground was nearly level and free of boulders.
That was a thrill to me--my first step into the new world--even though
I have experienced it several times before. Laden with our packs, we
opened the lower-exit pressure porte. The night air, under heavier
pressure than we were maintaining inside, oozed in with a little
hiss--moist, queer-smelling air. It seemed at first heavy, oppressive.
The acrid smell of chemicals was in it.
The night-temperature was hot--sultry as a summer tropic night on
Earth. With the interior gravity shut off as we opened the porte, at
once I felt a sense of lightness. But it was not extreme. Despite
Vulcan's small size, its great density gives it a gravity comparable to
Earth's.
In a little group we stood on the rocky ground with a dark, immense
heavy silence around us--a silence that you could seem to hear--and
yet a silence which seemed pregnant with the mystery of the
unknown. Somehow it made me suddenly think of weapons. Besides our
utility-knives, we each had a small, short-range electro-flash gun. I
saw that Torrence had his in his hand.
"Put it away," I said. "There's nothing here."
With a grin, he shoved it back into his belt. "Which way?" he demanded.
"What will the ore of _allurium_ look like? Green and red spots in
sand-colored streaks of rock, that Hughson book says."
I figured that I could recognize it, though I am far from a skilled
geologist. Certainly I agreed with Torrence that our most important
job was to find some sizable lodes of _allurium_, measure its probable
extent, and take average samples of it back with us.
* * * * *
We climbed out of the little cauldron. In the tumbled darkness we
picked our way among the crags. An Earth-mile, then another. Little
Jan, like an eager hound was generally ahead of us, with his tiny
search-glare sweeping the jagged rocks. We crossed a narrow winding
canyon, inspected a slashed cliff-face. It was arduous going. Despite
the sense of lightness and our tropic black-drill clothes of short
trousers, thin jackets and shirts, we were panting, bathed in sweat
within an hour. Silently, Torrence plodded at my side. It was my
first trip with him; and I could see he did not altogether trust my
efficiency.
"You can find the way back to the ship?" he demanded once. "To get lost
in a place like this--"
I had marked it; little twin spires above the cauldron. They were
visible now, looming against the dark sky behind us.
I showed him. "I saw them," he said. "I could lead us back. My idea is,
if we cover about ten miles and then camp--"
A cry from Jan interrupted us. He was standing on a little ridge of
rock like a bronze metal wave frozen into solidity. Against the deep
purple sky his slim figure was a silhouette of solid black. He was
staring off into the distance; his arm waved with a gesture as he
called to us.
"Something off there! Something lying on the rocks--come look!"
We ran to join him. About a quarter mile distant there was a broad
gully. A dark blob was visible lying at the bottom of it--a sizable
blob, something forty or fifty feet long. We picked our way there;
climbed down into the ragged, thirty-foot ravine. It was a spaceship
lying here--with its sleek alumite hull resting on its side with one of
its rocket-stream fins bent and smashed under it.
"The Roberts-King ship," Torrence exclaimed. "So they got here. Cracked
up in the landing."
There seemed no doubt of it. This was unquestionably the Roberts-King
vehicle--an older version of our own vessel. We stood staring at it
blankly--at its little bow pressure port which was wide open, a narrow
rectangle with the interior blackness behind it.
Then I saw that here on the rocks near the doorway, a litter of tools
and mechanisms were strewn; and a section of one of the gravity plates
which had been disconnected and brought out here.
"Trying to repair it," I said to the silently staring, awed Torrence.
"Five years ago. Now what do you suppose--"
A startled cry from Jan interrupted me.
The body was lying on the rocks, just beyond the bow of the ship. It
was Jonathan Roberts--stocky, middle-aged leader of the expedition.
Clad in a strange costume of thin brown material, seemingly animal
skin, he lay crumpled. I had never met him, but from his published
portraits I could recognize him at once. In the starlight here his dead
face with staring eyes goggled up at us.
"Why--why--" Torrence gasped. "Five years--"
There was no great look of decay about the body. Roberts had died
here, certainly not five years ago. I was bending down over the body;
I shoved at one of the shoulders and turned it over. Stricken Jan,
Torrence and I stared numbed. A thin bronze sliver of metal--fin-tipped
like a metal arrow--was buried in Roberts' back!
Again the alert Jan was gazing at the dim, fantastic night-scene around
us. Abruptly his hand gripped my arm as he gasped,
"Why--good Lord--what's that? Over there--"
In the blackness down the gully, perhaps a hundred feet from us, a
little spiral of fire had appeared. A tiny wisp of red-green flame. It
seemed to hover in the air a few feet above the rocky gully floor. Like
a phantom wraith of fire, it silently leaped and twisted.
"My God--it's coming toward us!" Torrence suddenly gasped.
In the darkness the silent wisp of fire had swayed sidewise, and then
came along the edge of the gully, a disembodied conflagration in
mid-air, as though wafted by a rush of wind we could not feel.