Chapter 12

The Ancient Mariner hung high in the air, poised twenty-five miles above the surface of the little lake. Wade, as chemist, tested the air while the others readied the distillation and air condensation apparatus. By the time they had finished, Wade was ready with his report.

“Air pressure about 20 psi at the surface; temperature around ninety-five Fahrenheit. Composition: eighteen percent oxygen, seventy-five percent nitrogen, four-tenths of one percent carbon dioxide, residue--inert gasses. That’s not including water vapor, of which there is a fair amount.

“I put a canary into the air, and the bird liked it, so I imagine it’s quite safe except for bacteria, perhaps. Naturally, at this altitude the air is germ-free.”

“Good,” said Morey, “then we can take our swim and work without worrying about spacesuits.”

“Just a minute!” Fuller objected. “What about those germs Wade mentioned? If you think I’m going out in my shorts where some flock of bacteria can get at my tender anatomy, you’ve got another think coming!”

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Wade said. “The chances of organisms developing along the same evolutionary line is quite slim. We may find the inhabitants of the same shape as those of another world, because the human body is fairly well constructed anatomically. The head is in a place where it will be able to see over a wide area and it’s in a safe place. The hand is very useful and can be improved upon but little. True, the Venerians have a second thumb, but the principle is the same.

“But chemically, the bodies are probably very different. The people of Venus are widely different chemically; the bacteria that can make a Venerian deathly ill is killed the instant it enters our body, or else it starves to death because it can’t find the kind of chemical food it needs to live. And the same thing happens when a Venerian is attacked by an Earthly microorganism.

“Even on Earth, evolution has produced such widely varying types of life that an organism that can feed on one is totally incapable of feeding on another. You, for instance, couldn’t catch tobacco mosaic virus, and the tobacco plant can’t catch the measles virus.

“You couldn’t expect a microorganism to evolve here that was capable of feeding on Earth-type tissues; they would have starved to death long ago.”

“What about bigger animals?” Fuller asked cautiously.

“That’s different. You would probably be indigestible to an alien carnivore, but he’d probably kill you first to find out. If he ate you, it might kill him in the end, but that would be small consolation. That’s why we’re going to go out armed.”

Arcot dropped the ship swiftly until they were hovering a bare hundred feet over the waters of the lake. There was a little stream winding its way down the mountainside, and another which led the clear overflow away.

“I doubt if there’s anything of great size in that lake,” Arcot said slowly and thoughtfully. “Still, even small fish might be deadly. Let’s play safe and remove all forms of life, bacterial and otherwise. A little touch of the molecular motion ray, greatly diffused, will do the trick.”

Since the molecular ray directed the motion of the molecules of matter, it prevented chemical reactions from taking place, even when greatly diffused; all the molecules tend to go in the same direction to such an extent that the delicate balance of chemical reactions that is life is upset. It is too delicate a thing to stand any power that upsets the reactions so violently. All things are killed instantly.

As the light haze of the ionized air below them glowed out in a huge cone, the water of the lake heaved and seemed to move in its depths, but there was no great movement of the waters; they lost only a fraction of their weight. But every living thing in that lake died instantly.

Arcot turned the ship, and the shining hull glided softly over to one side of the lake where a little sandy beach invited them. There seemed no indication of intelligent life about.

Each of them took a load of the supplies they had brought, and carried them out under the shade of an immense pine-like tree--a gigantic column of wood that stretched far into the sky to lose its green leaves in a waving sea of foliage. The mottled sunlight of the bright star above them made them feel very much at home. Its color, intensity, and warmth were all exactly the same as on Earth.

Each of the men wore his power suit to aid in carrying the things they had brought, for the gravity here was a bit higher than that of Earth. The difference in air pressure was so little as to be scarcely noticeable; they even adjusted the interior of the ship to it.

They had every intention of staying here for awhile. It was pleasant to lie in the warm sun once more; so pleasant that it became difficult to remember that they were countless trillions of long miles from their own home planet. It was hard to realize that the warm, blazing star above them was not Old Sol.

Arcot was carrying a load of food in a box. He had neutralized his weight until, load and all, he weighed about a hundred pounds. This was necessary in order to permit him to drag a length of hose behind him toward the water, so it could be used as an intake for the pumps.

Morey, meanwhile, was having trouble. He had been carrying a load of assorted things to use--a few pneumatic pillows, a heavy iron pot for boiling the water, and a number of other things.

He reached his destination, having floated the hundred or so feet from the ship by using his power suit. He forgot, momentarily, and dropped his load. Immediately, he too began to “drop”--upward! He had a buoyancy of around three hundred pounds, and a weight of only two fifty. In dropping the load, the sudden release had caused the power unit to jerk him upward, and somehow the controlling knob on the power pack was torn loose.

Morey shot up into the air, showing a fair rate of progress toward his late abode--space! And he had no way to stop himself. His hand power unit was far too weak to overcome the pull of his power-pack, and he was rising faster and faster!

He realized that his friends could catch him, and laughingly called down: “Arcot! Help! I’m being kidnapped by my power suit! To the rescue!”

Arcot looked up quickly at Morey’s call and realized immediately that his power control had come off. He knew there was twenty miles or so of breathable air above, and long before Morey rose that far, he could catch him in the Ancient Mariner, if necessary.

He turned on his own power suit, using a lift of a hundred pounds, which gave him double Morey’s acceleration. Quickly he gathered speed that shot him up toward his helpless friend, and a moment later, he had caught up with him and passed him. Then he shut off his power and drifted to a halt before he began to drop again. As Morey rose toward him, Arcot adjusted the power in his own suit to match Morey’s velocity.

Arcot grabbed Morey’s leg and turned his power down until he had a weight of fifty pounds. Soon they were both falling again, and when their rate of fall amounted to approximately twenty miles per hour, Arcot cut their weight to zero and they continued down through their momentum. Just short of the ground, he leaped free of Morey, who, carried on by momentum, touched the ground a moment later. Wade at once jumped in and held him down.

“Now, now! Calm yourself,” said Wade solicitously. “Don’t go up in the air like that over the least little thing.”

“I won’t, if you’ll get busy and take this damned thing off--or fasten some lead to my feet!” replied Morey, starting to unstrap the mechanism.

“You’d better hold your horses there,” said Arcot. “If you take that off now, we sure will need the Ancient Mariner to catch up with it. It will produce an acceleration that no man could ever stand--something on the order of five thousand gravities, if the tubes could stand it. And since that one is equipped with the invisibility apparatus, you’d be out one good invisibility suit. Restrain yourself, boy, and I’ll go get a new knob control.

“Wade, get the boy a rock to hold him down. Better tie it around his neck so he won’t forget it and fly off into space again. It’s a nuisance locating so small an object in space and I promised his father I’d bring the body back if there was anything left of it.” He released Morey as Wade handed him a large stone.

A few minutes later, he returned with a new adjustment dial and repaired Morey’s apparatus. The strain was released when he turned it, and Morey parted with the rock with relief.