Short fiction collected, p.27
Short Fiction Collected, page 27
“More likely they’re not exactly in love with their job,” Carson said shrewdly. “Or else they want to take us alive, and are not sure how to go about it.”
They could see the leader of the Mercurians in the center of the group ahead of them. After giving a few directions, he retired to the rear.
“If he was human, I’d say that he was afraid,” Carson remarked. “But as these Mercurians don’t know what physical fear is, it’s more likely that he’s merely being prudent.” He was silent a moment. “They certainly appear to respect us pretty highly. And that gives me an idea.”
“I hope it’s better than most of your ideas,” Haines snorted.
“It’ll do. Our only way out is through the Mercurians, either the front group or the rear one. Why not do the unexpected, and cut through them?”
“You mean, attack first?” Nora asked.
“Exactly. They’re busy making up their minds as to the best way to get us, and it’s about the last thing they’d imagine we’d do.”
“There’s the matter of those guns,” Haines pointed out.
“We’ll have to take our chances on that score,” Carson admitted. “We have several guns of our own. But in order to use them, we’d have to be within range of theirs. I might try to confuse them by throwing something, but I’ve done that before, and I should think they’re on to that trick by now.”
He could see that Haines was thinking hard. The expedition leader seemed a little pale when he spoke.
“Your idea’s all right, Carson, except for one thing. But if you’ll let me have one of those guns, I might be able to do something about it.”
CARSON put one of the metallic rods in his hands.
“You squeeze the blunt end, and the ray is projected out the other,” he explained.
“I know that,” Haines replied impatiently, and hesitated.
Then he put the sharp end rapidly against his own arm. Before Carson could stop him, he had pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened.
“Haines, you fool, what the devil—”
“We had to find out, didn’t we?” Haines said coolly. “We’re sure to get hit by these rays later, and we’d better learn now what effect they have on us.”
“You didn’t have to try the thing out on yourself!”
“Sure, I should have tried it on you,” Haines snorted. “But I had an idea it wouldn’t be very harmful. The ray may be deadly to all kinds of Mercurian life, but that doesn’t mean it should affect anybody that comes from Earth.”
“Confound it, man, it’s energy—”
“We don’t know what kind,” Haines pointed out. “Is it ultrasonic, electromagnetic or gravitational? They don’t all act the same.”
They waited in a strained silence. “Well, you’re still alive,” Carson said with grudging tolerance. “I never thought I’d be glad about that, but I am. And it means that we don’t have to fear the Mercurians’ guns—and they do have to fear ours.”
Carson gazed at the two groups of hostile topknots.
“They’ve seen what you’ve done, and they’re puzzled about it. I don’t blame them. They don’t know what to do. We’d better attack fast.”
“Which group?” Haines asked tersely.
“The one in front. Their ruler is there, and they’ll have to keep busy protecting him. In addition, we’re more likely to catch them off guard there.
“Leave your insulated suits here,” he directed Haines and Nora. “We can’t fight inside them. And follow me as closely as you can. I’m going to create a little excitement among these Mercurians, and you should be able to get through before they can collect their wits.”
Carson began to run. He knew the danger, with the gravity so low, of hitting the roof of the passageway, so he kept his head down and took huge twenty-foot strides. The Mercurians had just time to raise their topknots in alarm and stare at him stupidly before he was among them, smashing into them as fast as his arms would move.
The Earthman knew their weakest point by now. He wasted no punches, aiming for the lung slots and paralyzing the creatures at a single blow.
In about ten seconds Carson had cleared a way through the front ranks. But behind these there were others, stretching away far down the tunnel. He knew that energy rays were hitting his body from behind as he ploughed into the Mercurians in front of him.
As they saw what had happened to the rest, they gave way before him. In a moment or so Carson had reached a side passage that was practically free of Mercurians. A path of escape lay before him.
He turned around. Neither Nora nor Haines was in sight.
They were lost behind the crowd of Mercurians that had come together again behind Carson, hopelessly separated both from him and from each other.
He plunged back into the thick of the fight, his arms flailing as before. Then he saw that both Nora and Haines had been overcome, and were being carried away faster than he could get to them. Mercurians were throwing themselves in front of him without hope of success, simply to obstruct his path for a few seconds, delay him until the other captives could be carried away.
Carson uttered a hoarse cry that went no further than his own oxygen helmet. Then he had his own gun out and was shooting to kill. The Mercurians shriveled as the rays hit them; but others, undaunted, kept coming on.
A FEW yards away from where Carson stood, the king was calmly giving directions. Carson hurled himself at the ruler, his gun mowing down the different members of the monarch’s bodyguard. If the enemy had Nora and Haines, then he would have a hostage of his own.
The king saw him approaching and tried to draw back, but not in time. Carson’s fist smashed into the Mercurian’s lung slots. As the ruler fell gasping to the ground, the Earthman picked him up and threw him over his shoulder. Then he ran.
He was pursued down the side passage. But after that, when he turned down another of the connecting tunnels, none of the Mercurians dared to follow.
A half hour later, when Carson was sure that he had shaken off pursuit, he set the Mercurian down on his feet. The king had revived completely by then. As far as Carson could see, he had suffered no loss of dignity from what had happened. But there was greater hate than ever in his eyes.
“What do you want of me?” the ruler asked.
“I intend to make sure that your men have a good reason for not killing my friends,” Carson declared.
“Your friends will not be killed. We wish to discover whether they have learned anything that can help us.”
“And if they haven’t?”
“Then they will not be important, and it does not matter what happens to them.”
Carson frowned.
“In that case,” he snapped, “you will not be important to me, and I’ll see that plenty happens to you.”
He paused, regarding the monarch with intense dislike. After all, what he wanted was not revenge but freedom for Nora. If he could scare the king into a state of mind where he’d be willing to exchange her life for his own, Carson would be satisfied.
But, unfortunately, it seemed as if the king didn’t scare. Not for himself, anyway. Maybe, though, he’d be afraid for his people.
If Carson knew the solution they had been looking for all along, the ruler might be anxious to exchange the information for a pair of human lives that meant nothing to the inhabitants of Mercury.
“I know how to make part of the cold side habitable,” Carson said as his first move.
“I thought you might know. That is why we especially wanted to capture you, instead of your friends.”
Carson noticed that the king was staring down the tunnel expectantly.
He might have seen something that offered a hope of escape. Carson moved closer to him. The next moment he saw what the ruler had been looking at.
A fuzzy and brilliantly-colored animal about a foot long, much like a giant caterpillar on eight legs, had come around a corner and was slowly moving toward them.
The animal was not afraid of them. That meant that it was accustomed to the company of the topknotted Mercurians, and did not run wild. In that case, there might be other Mercurians around. Maybe that was what the king was counting on.
“We’re moving again,” Carson ordered.
The king did not object. The two followed the tunnel in the opposite direction from that by which the animal had come. It padded along with them, apparently glad of their company. There were no signs of any other Mercurians.
They came to a stop again after a few minutes. There was one of the wheelbarrowlike conveyances abandoned on its track. The sight of it suddenly aroused suspicion in Carson’s mind. He remembered what the Mercurians had tried to do with a pair of these wheelbarrows only an hour or so before.
“If my information is important,” he demanded, “why did you try to kill me and my friends a little while ago?”
THE king looked at him in surprise. “We made no effort to kill you.”
“You tried to electrocute us.” Carson indicated the wheelbarrow.
“But the charge would not have killed, only stunned you. We decided that human beings are more resistant to electricity than Mercurians. We had no idea you were in danger of death.”
“If you decided that, you made a bad mistake,” Carson snapped.
“You are still alive,” the king said. “What has happened before is no longer important. What is your plan for making the cold side habitable?” Carson took the plunge.
“My plan involves raising the temperature of part of the cold side only. Your people will have more space to live in, but the greater portion of both the cold side and the hot side will be unchanged. The crawling animals will need them for themselves.”
The king’s topknot lowered slightly in anger, almost hiding his eyes. He didn’t like to hear Carson talking of the crawlers as if they had any rights at all.
Carson went on.
“There will be huge boilers erected on the hot side, containing a suitable liquid, such as water, to absorb the sun’s heat.”
“Water is scarce on Mercury.”
“Not far down under the hot side. There are underground streams.”
“We know that. But they are inaccessible to us. That is where the crawlers live.”
“Then there will have to be friendship between your race and theirs.”
“That can not be,” the king said coldly. “They kill the plants that are important to us.”
“Those plants won’t be very important any longer, if you have another method of getting water,” Carson pointed out.
The king was silent. Waiting for the rest of the plan.
“The liquid will be transferred to the cold side without losing its heat. It will be used to warm the edge near the Twilight Zone, thus making it habitable.”
“No liquid can be transferred without losing its heat,” the ruler sneered.
“I have discovered a perfect insulating material.”
“There is no such material in the Twilight Zone,” the ruler declared.
“It exists in the tunnels inhabited by the crawlers.”
The king’s eyes burned with anger.
“They are our enemies, I tell you,” he snapped. “We can not work with them. Moreover, to transfer the liquid across the Twilight Zone will take a system of huge pipes. Building them will require many lifetimes, even of such long-lived beings as those of Earth.”
“The pipes will take a long time to build,” Carson admitted. “But there will be no need to wait for them. There is something which can be used at once, as soon as the pumps for driving the liquid are manufactured.”
The king was perversely expectant again. Perhaps, Carson thought, there was a wild scheme going on in his mind of finally exterminating the crawlers and taking the tunnels they lived in, along with the water and the insulating liquid. It would be like him to prefer that to friendship.
“Instead of pipes,” Carson said, “the plants you now use to bring water from the interior of the planet can be used. The heating liquid will flow in them very well.”
“The high temperatures will mean death to them.”
“Sure it will,” Carson agreed. “But as I have already said, you won’t need them any longer.”
“Your plan is entirely useless,” the king said coldly. “We do not intend to kill the plants we need. We will not establish friendship with the crawlers.”
That sort of reception might have been expected, Carson thought. His idea was good, he had no doubt of that. The distance necessary to transport the hot liquid would be only a few hundred miles at most, in order to double the habitable area of the planet and make it useful to the topknotted Mercurians.
IT might even be feasible to heat up the whole cold side later on, if there was a sufficient supply of the insulating liquid. But Carson hadn’t intended to tell the king that, for fear of seeming to promise too much.
Now he decided that no matter how much or how little he promised, it wouldn’t have made any difference. The king would have been against the plan anyway if it meant friendship with the crawlers.
The other ruling-caste Mercurians would probably feel the same way about it, if they learned. And that would mean the end of any hope for Nora. Carson realized now that it was more important than ever for him not to permit the Mercurian monarch to escape with what he knew.
The caterpillar animal had been moving around restlessly. The king scratched its back and then, turning to Carson, asked an unexpected question. “Where do you intend to take me?”
“Never mind that. You just come along where I tell you to.”
“But the tunnels form a labyrinth,” the king smirked. “It is impossible for you to find your way out.”
Carson hesitated.
“I’ll find my way, all right,” he said, with a confidence he didn’t feel. “Leave me to worry about that.”
There was the equivalent of a smile in the ruler’s eyes. But he said nothing more.
The caterpillar animal had stopped before something that resembled an outcropping of black crystals on one of the walls, and begun to eat. The seeming crystals were alive, squirming slowly as the small animal pursued them and gobbled them down.
Carson wondered for a moment whether the animated crystals could possibly afford nourishment for him.
e would begin to need food soon. More important than that, he would need air.
Near the living crystals was a small brown amorphous growth. He noticed that the king shied away from this, as well as from the crystals, although the animal paid the brown growth no attention. Instead of food, Carson decided, the crystals would probably be dangerous both to him and to the top-knotted Mercurians.
He started on the path that he figured would lead downward, ordering the king to follow. The ruler moved as he directed, with the animal trailing after.
CHAPTER XVIII
The Search
CARSON might have known that it would happen. As they moved further down, they left the lighted tunnels of the topknotted Mercurians, to enter one of the dark tunnels of the crawlers. The darkness gave the king his chance. He was gone even before Carson suspected the ruler was trying to escape.
The caterpillar animal remained, however, and Carson was glad of its presence. It gave him a feeling of companionship in the darkness of the tunnels. And it would aid him to detect the presence of strangers. It appeared to be entirely at home in the dark, which was more than he could say for himself.
At the end of two or three hours, Carson admitted to himself that he was lost. He began to have a growing feeling of despair. The animal on whose sense of direction he had foolishly counted seemed to be doing nothing more than wandering aimlessly about. It was not until he came across one of the huge killer plants, however, that he finally felt he had reason to hope.
He began immediately to slash through the hard bark toward the core of the plant. The streams of water under the hot side were under the control of the crawlers, and inaccessible to the other Mercurians. But the flow of water inside the pipe was from the depths of the cold side toward the hot side.
Carson put his hand into the moving liquid, felt the slow pressure on his palm. Then he began to follow the plant in the direction toward which the water was flowing.
By the time he had been walking three or four more hours, he noticed a perceptible increase in temperature. He was on the right track. He kept going confidently.
The caterpillar animal was still with him, walking more rapidly as its body warmed up. Now it stopped abruptly, its eyes fixed on something moving m the distance.
Carson saw a light, dancing slowly up and down. One of the living winged lights! Then another came to join it, and the two lights began to recede gradually in the distance.
They were off to one side of the killer plant by which he had been traveling; but wherever they were, the crawlers would be nearby. He turned resolutely aside from the killer plant, and followed them.
Carson came close, and then they disappeared. They had turned into a side passage. He raced forward clumsily in the dark, caught sight of them again and ran after them. He couldn’t afford to lose them at this stage of the game.
He was within a few yards of them when they seemed to go out. They hadn’t turned around another corner, Carson could have sworn to that. There had been no corner to turn. They had simply extinguished themselves, making it impossible for him to follow them.
Carson cursed softly to himself, and the muscles of his jaws tightened. In those few hours that were left to him, he would go forward. There was a chance, just a faint chance, that he would come across something—
He felt a series of taps on his right foot.
Safe!
Carson couldn’t understand the crawlers, but they could understand him. Immediately he flashed an image of a spaceship on the walls of the tunnel. He pictured them leading him to the ship, and himself entering it.
One of the crawlers tapped again on his foot. The answer was “no.” They didn’t know where the ship was.
