Read Ebook: Give Back a World by Gallun Raymond Z Vestal Herman B Illustrator

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Ebook has 195 lines and 12019 words, and 4 pages

GIVE BACK A WORLD

This would be only the second time that Terrans, surging out to colonize the planets, had reached Mercury, the Paradox World.

As he pocketed the cards, there was only a brief flicker in Fane's pale eyes, suggesting to Rick Mills that he was a bad loser at poker. But the savage glint was masked at once.

Fane's low, broad forehead crinkled. "You lucky stiff, Mills," he said with a shrug and a grin. "Well, I don't need to win money now."

Rick knew Frank Fane some after three months of journeying from Earth cooped up in a space transport with him. He seemed a fairly good Joe, some ways. He never lent or borrowed anything. That was sound policy. Or independence carried to a fault. Besides, Rick had an idea that Fane's thin face was a flexible mask, too inclined to act out the surface he wished to show, instead of revealing his honest emotions. And his sly hints, which never told very much about Mercury, seemed Satanically designed to provoke dread in less experienced listeners.

Here came Fane's great distinction. He was the sole survivor of the Martell Expedition, the one man alive who had been on the most sunward world. Six months he'd spent there. That made him an object of awe in younger eyes. It also inspired insidious doubts about him.

From his bunk across from Rick's, Fane now spoke:

"Well, here we go. Just a few more minutes. The end of book learning, eh, you guys? The beginning of experience. I wonder if all of us will still be alive inside of twenty-four hours?"

Maybe it wasn't malicious humor. Maybe it was just the brutal kind of joshing that helps to make men.

"Shut up, Fane," Rick joshed back in the tough manner that Fane seemed to like in him. "Keep on your toes yourself or you might be the first to die."

Fane chuckled. "Always the smart boy, eh, Mills? Better keep it up. Because Mercury's a crazy place. It's the planet closest to the sun. But it forgot to turn on its axis ages ago. So the dark side is colder than Pluto must be. But on the solar side your space-boots can slosh into wetness that you might believe is water. Umhm-m. Only it turns out to be a puddle of molten lead.

"Hell, you guys have always known stuff like that. So why repeat myself? When there are interesting circumstances? A push-button war fifty million years old that got put into cold storage, for instance. Dead storage. But maybe not quite dead. I wouldn't know, for sure. How about getting mixed up with that?"

Some strange jubilance seemed to possess Fane.

Still, in spite of the strains in his own stocky, muscular body, Rick Mills kept an eye cocked at the long, sinewy shape that was Fane, prone on taut canvas across the aisle. Fane's grimace remained reckless.

With the mystery of Mercury at hand, Rick was like his companions. He thought some of home. Minnesota. His folks. Anne Munson. Anne who was on Mars, at the Survey Service School. They could use girls for certain less rugged jobs, Rick thought of her picture in his pocket. Honeydew hair. Cool, pleasant eyes. And under her smile her scribbled, half-kidding challenge:

Well, it would never be hellish Mercury. No place for a girl.

Rick also thought that he would have liked to like Fane if he could. Now didn't seem the right time. His veiled bragging and shows of insolence had begun to exceed the limit, even for rough men. And there were too many questions in Rick's mind now. Was Fane struggling to keep some inner elation from showing too much? What did he want from life? Wealth, maybe? Did he have a Mercurian secret that led toward what he wished to accomplish?

Rick's cold feeling found its chief source in the Martell Expedition to Mercury of a year ago. Just Martell, Jacobs, and Fane--the pilot and mechanic--in a small, long-range rocket ship.

On his return, Fane of course couldn't be evasive in his written report to the Interplanetary Colonial Board. It had been published. Rick could remember parts of it almost word for word:

"... We had gone a hundred miles into the dark hemisphere with the tractor. Martell wandered off alone. Jacobs and I found him with a hole in the back of his oxygen helmet. Falling backward onto a sharp rock could have done it. The hole let the air out of his space suit, and the cold in....

"Jacobs ended up just about the same, two Earth weeks later. Except that it was on the hot, sunward hemisphere...."

Once again Rick thought that it was a little queer that two resourceful men should fall victims to the same accident even if roasting and freezing looked like the classic ways to die on Mercury.

Rick longed primitively just then to drive his fists into Fane's narrow jaw. Was he a liar and a murderer? If so, what was his motive?

But then Rick was almost ashamed. The Colonial Board seemed to have accepted the report. And that Fane had brought the bodies of his companions, preserved by Mercurian conditions, back to Earth, was a minor hero's deed, wasn't it?

Other of Fane's written comments came back in Rick's mind:

"There is far more frozen air and water on Mercury's dark side than there should be....

"Several times I may have imagined glimpsing movement. Once I thought I saw something small scurry into hiding under some ancient wreckage. I tried to dig it out. I don't know what it was....

Such were Fane's sketchy notes, supplemented by a few blurred photographs that had been salvaged from much film that had been obviously ruined by a small radiation leak from his rocket's A-jets. But as for the wreckage he had written of, everyone knew that Earth wasn't the first world to colonize other planets. Remembering, Rick Mills felt mingled fascination and dread.

Fifty million years ago Mars and Planet X had been rivals. On Earth, the evidence of their final war must have been trampled under foot by the last of the dinosaurs, buried by volcanoes and rusted away by the damp climate. About the same had happened on Venus.

But on Earth's moon there still were gigantic bomb craters. And a few bright new weapons and engines of war, preserved perfectly by the vacuum. And two kinds of grotesque, dried-out corpses. In Mars' thin air and dryness, there still had been much weathering. But the fused-down, glassy remains of its cities, still slightly radioactive, lingered to show how the Martians had been wiped out.

The end of Planet X had been even more spectacular. Some colossal projectile must have drilled to its center to blow it apart, and form the thousands of fragments that were the asteroids. Drifting among them were the shattered cornices and columns of buildings, broken and cindered instruments and machines, art works, whatnot. So, two splendid technologies had perished with their creators.

Till on Earth science had risen again to challenge the primitive solar system. There were rich metals to be dug, new cities to be built for growing populations, adventures to be had, and knowledge to be gained and regained.

Mercury, too, had certainly been mixed up with that violent past. And now it hovered, a disturbing enigma, in both the immediate and the farther future. In only moments, now, that past would blend with the present. His--Rick Mills' present. Fane would be in it, too. With the brassy taste of worry before the nameless in his mouth, Rick realized how easy it might be to be unjustly suspicious. So he tried to fight off his tension, which most of his companions must share in some degree. He tried to substitute an adventurous eagerness.

Everything was done now with swift precision. Like establishing a beachhead in some Earth-conflict of years ago. These five hundred men of the Survey Service, though civilians, functioned like a small army. They were the vanguard of research workers that must spearhead the occupation of yet another world. Bookish and academic they might seem, but they were trained for great ruggedness, too.

Working in space suits, they strung a security perimeter of electrified barbed wire around the ship. Breastworks were built and weapons were mounted against the unknown. Air tight tents to house testing instruments were set up and inflated. Everyone--Rick Mills, Lattimer, Turino, Finden, Schmidt, Horton, and the hundreds of others--toiled hard.

Then there was time to really look around. The dry rusty plain bore patches of low vegetation, with crinkly, silver-gray whorls. Lichen, it looked like. A sad remnant of life. In the all but airless sky stars blazed, even though a white-hot silver of the sun peeped above the brooding horizon, beyond which, for all one knew, great metal shapes might hide, waiting, preparing an ambush.

Nostrand, the leader of this expedition, held an aneroid barometer in his gloved hand. He was gray as iron, square-built of face and body, with widely separated teeth. He grinned, now, and spoke through his helmet radiophone:

"Funny. There's a wisp of air left. Small as it is, and with a gravity only one-fourth that of Earth, Mercury shouldn't have been able to hold down much of an atmosphere for more than a few thousand years. It should be as dead as our moon by now. A minor riddle, eh?"

Nostrand's tones fell, almost unnoticed, into a hollow stillness. Fane was standing near. He said nothing, but Rick Mills saw him grinning like a Cheshire cat.

Eyes continued to grope all around--at newness to them which was eons old. In the near distance was what seemed a highway. It ran east and west. One end vanished among the gloomy hills, at the fringe of the frigid hemisphere of eternal night. The other end reached straight across the plain toward where the top edge of the sun blazed supernally. In that direction the Twilight Belt turned gradually into unequalled desert.

Sunward along that highway, several ruined domes were visible, like scattered castles. They looked ancient Martian. Beyond them, out of sight, there must be others--buildings never made to offer shelter from the continuous, blazing radiation to which they were now exposed.

"Jeez!" some young guy muttered.

Then Nostrand spoke again, expressing most everyone's mood:

"Mercury was different when it rotated on its axis. Torrid, yes. But solar heat was nowhere continuous. Nor was darkness and cold. There were nights to cool off the heat of day. But the tidal drag of the too-near sun slowed the rotation. It must have stopped rather suddenly, as a wheel spinning against considerable friction stops. Then everything on Mercury changed, became extreme. It must have happened just about when the Martians and Xians were fighting each other. Maybe both sides held part of the planet at first...."

Nostrand's tone was musing and remote, hinting at pictures of ancient history. In his mind Rick Mills saw those dim pictures. His hide tingled. And his eyes combed the surrounding hills and plain warily. Was he looking for strange movement? This thought was tied up with the knowledge that, as on the moon, automatic machines could be perfectly preserved for millions of years here on weatherless Mercury, and that in some of them power might still be triggered into action by the disturbance of something penetrating a radio aura around them.

Rick gasped. He glanced around and then cursed. At once he had thought of Fane. Fane had been present moments ago. Now he was gone. Somehow Rick wished mightily that he had not lost sight of him for an instant.

"There goes Fane!" Rick yelled, pointing.

But while others took up the cry, Rick spied a piece of white notepaper at his feet. He picked it up and read:

"I'll drop this where you'll find it, Mills. So long. Thanks for the interest in me. It's flattering. I feel something is going to happen. I'm a lone wolf, unused to schoolbook greenhorns. I'm playing it single, and taking French leave. It's safer. I know you're supposed to go with a bunch into the dark hemisphere. Maybe I'll see you--if you live. Fane...."

Others read the note over Rick's shoulders. And other voices expressed some of Rick's scattered thoughts.

"Damn Fane! Something screwy about him. I always knew...."

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