Chapter 10: The Dying Planet

Russell Clyde was confined to his bunk during the next four days, his feet wrapped in bandages and ointment. Fortunately the digestive juices of the Venusian amoeba had only just begun their attack upon the skin after eating through the footgear. Except for some painful blisters and rawness, his condition was not serious.

The little stateroom was cramped, containing as it did two bunks, one above the other, like the cabin of a liner. What with a couple of built-in lockers for clothes, and a bolted-down chair and a reading lamp, it was not a place to spend any more time than necessary. The lack of a window added to the inhospitality of the room. But Burl had accepted long ago the fact that a spaceship could not yet be considered a luxury liner. In time, the A-G drive would permit such things, but the Magellan was an experimental vessel turned by emergency into a warship.

During those four days, Burl spent most of his time with Russ, getting to know him better, and talking about the trip. The young astronomer was not at all chagrined by his misadventure. In fact, the whole experience had him quite buoyed up.

“What a wonderful place for biologists to study! Venus will be a Mecca for scientific learning!”

“But not for anything else, I don’t think,” said Burl. “Anyway, we’re in for another experience now. Mars is our next goal. What’s it like?”

Russ put his hands behind his head and looked up at the bottom of the bunk above him. “We can see Mars well enough; there’s no cloud blanket and the atmosphere is thin but clear. You’ve seen the photos and the colored sketches?”

“I’ve seen it from our viewplates, but so far it’s just a tiny, red disc. We’re about at Earth’s orbit now, even though Earth is many millions of miles away from us. Mars is still about fifty million miles further, but we’re gaining speed quite rapidly and Lockhart thinks we’ll make it soon enough.” Burl picked up one of the books from the ship’s library and started to thumb through it to locate a color chart of the planet.

Russ waved a hand. “You don’t have to show me. I’ve studied Mars by telescope so often I know it by heart. It’s mostly a sort of light, reddish-tan, a kind of pale russet. We think that’s desert. There are some fairly large sections that are bluish-green--at least in the Martian summers. In their winters these sections fade very greatly.”

“That’s vegetation,” Burl broke in. “It must be! Everybody agrees it acts like it. And there are the white polar caps, too.”

“You can tell which season is which by the size of the polar ice caps. When one is big, the other is almost gone. Then there’s the problem of the canals...”

“Do you believe in them?” asked Burl. “The books disagree. Some think they’re real--even say they look as if they had been built by intelligent beings as irrigation channels to take the melting waters of the poles down to the fertile lands. But other astronomers claim they can’t see them--or that they’re illusions, series of cracks, or lines of dark dust blown by winds.”

“Personally, I’ve come to believe in them,” Russ argued. “They’ve been photographed--something is there. They’re very faint, spidery lines, but they certainly are straight and regular. We’ll find out soon enough.”

Find out they did. Russ was up and about and the normal life of the ship resumed. During their passage of Earth’s orbit, they had managed to raise the United States on the ship’s radio. For three days they were able to converse with their home base. They exchanged news and data, transmitted back all they had learned and eagerly asked for news.

The men of the crew had the chance to send messages home, and Burl even talked briefly with his father. There had been an important discovery made on Earth.

The lines of force had finally been traced. The distortions visible on Mars, as well as the one from Mercury before its cutoff, had been worked out directionally. There was no doubt that a line of force had been channeled outward to a point in space that now proved to be that of a planet. The planet was Pluto.

“Pluto!” That was the shocked word uttered by everyone within hearing distance when the radio voice said it.

“Pluto! Why, that’s the end of the line! The most distant planet,” said Oberfield, shocked. “We’ll have to go there--all the way!”

That fact sobered everyone. It meant the trip must last many times longer than anyone had expected. But they were a band of men who had achieved great things--they had managed so far to work together in harmony, and they felt that since they had conquered two planets--what were a few more?

Mars gradually grew larger on their telescopic viewers as the Magellan fell onward through space, riding the beam of gravity that was like a pulling rope to them. The slow down and reverse was made in good order--the sphere swinging around, readjusting, and the great, driving Zeta-ring generators now pushing and braking.

Then one wake period, Russ and Burl went to the telescope and trained it again on the oncoming planet. The now large disc of the ruddy world swung onto the screen. It looked strange, not at all like the drawings.

Burl had never seen it through Terrestrial telescopes, but he sensed something was wrong. He realized suddenly, “Both poles are enlarged! It’s winter on both hemispheres! And that’s impossible!”

Yet it was so. Both the Martian ice caps were present and both extended down the northern and southern hemispheres of the world. The men stared in silence.

Slowly Russ tried to figure it out, “The greenish-blue areas can scarcely be seen. Where they should be, there’re darker patches of brown, against the yellowish-red that now seems to be the desert areas. It seems to be winter on both sides and it looks bad. It looks to me as if Mars were a fast-dying world.”

Burl squinted his eyes. “Yet I see the canals. The straight lines are still visible--see?”

Russ nodded. “They’re real. But what’s happened?”

Indeed, the planet seemed blighted. “It’s the Sun-tap,” Burl decided. “We should have realized what it would do.”