Chapter 7: Hot Spot on Mercury

It seemed strange to Burl at that moment that there wasn’t more excitement on board the Magellan. To learn so early in the game that all were doomed should have brought more reaction. It should have excited some sort of frenzy, or efforts to abandon ship, or something. But the men in the cabin, though keyed up, were anything but panicky.

Instead, there seemed to be grim concentration on their faces, an earnestness that spoke of a plan. Through a viewer which had been shielded so that the light would not blind the eyes, Burl could see the wide disc of the Sun now. A few spots were visible on its blazing surface, and great tongues of burning gases encircled it for hundreds of thousands of miles. Were they really destined to end a mere cinder--an instantaneous flicker of fire in one of those prominences?

Clyde was working with Oberfield at the calculators. Burl watched them in silence, trying to determine what it was they were getting at. Finally they pulled a figure from one of their machines and took it over to Lockhart and the engineers. There was a brief conference, and something seemed to be agreed upon.

Clyde’s face, which had been tense, was now more relaxed. “I think we’ve got the problem licked,” came the good word.

“What’s up?” asked Burl. “If we shoot past Venus, we should still be able to come to a stop, fall away from the Sun and maybe catch up with Venus again. It would take longer, but...”

“We’re altering our plans,” interrupted Russ. “Of course, we could brake--that much we found out for sure. The trouble lay in our lack of effective tests for the Magellan’s drive. We thought we knew just what it would do, but after all, the problems of space are intricate. It turned out that it did not act so effectively against the Sun as had been calculated. Either that, or the Sun’s pull was stronger at this proximity than registered on our instruments. Chasing after Venus, after coming back to its orbit, could be done, but it would prove time-consuming and difficult to plan. What we are doing instead is altering our schedule.”

“But then there’s no other place to go from here but Mercury. Is that what the new plan is?” Burl asked him.

Russ nodded. “Mercury is coming around this side of the Sun. By the time we have braked, we will be closer to its orbit than to that of Venus. So we shall proceed inward toward it and make our first planetfall there.”

Mercury, the smallest and hottest planet in the system. Burl remembered that it was one of the two worlds that they knew for sure had a Sun-tap station on it. He went down the hatch to carry the news to the landing crew.

Haines, Burl discovered, had already heard the new plan on the intercom from Lockhart. As soon as Burl joined them, the four men, including Ferrati and Boulton, went into a planning session.

The problem of Mercury was a hard one. As Ferrati remarked, “It would have been better to tackle this one last instead of taking it on first.”

“Yes, but on the other hand,” was Haines’s comment, “Mercury’s station is probably one of the most important--located as it is, so close to the Sun. With ideal conditions for steady, undiverted concentration of solar power, it must be the primary station in the system.”

“The problem boils down--and I do mean ‘boils’--to heat,” Boulton laughed. “Mercury rotates on its axis only once a year--its year being only eighty-eight of our days long. This means that just as the Moon presents only one side to the Earth, Mercury always presents the same hemisphere to the Sun. On the Sun side, therefore, there is always day. The Sun appears to be fixed in the sky. Naturally, we assume the Sun-tap station will be on that sunny side. And the heat must be terrific.”

“Matter of fact,” said Haines dryly, “the records show the heat in the center of the Sun side reaches 770° Fahrenheit. Enough to keep tin and lead molten.”

“The problem is how to reach the station over such a boiling landscape,” summed up Burl. “It seems to me that the absence of an atmosphere could answer part of the problem.”

Haines nodded. “Let’s get to work on a plan of action, men. We’ve got a few days to get our equipment laid out.”

Those few days passed quickly enough. When several possible schemes had been outlined, the men made lists of the types of equipment that might be used with each. Then, putting on pressurized space suits and carrying air tanks, they left the inner sphere and worked through the cargo space surrounding it within the outer frame of the spaceship. There had originally been air here, but now they found most of it was gone, thinned out from infinitely tiny leaks in the outer shell caused by the constant bombardment of microscopic bits of meteoric dust.

They located each piece of equipment and moved it into position for easy handling.

The ship came to its halting point, where the repulsion against the Sun finally braked it against the gravitational pull of the Sun. Then, by increasing the selective pull of the approaching planet Mercury, they moved off in that direction.

Mercury was changing in appearance. As they neared it from the outer side, its lighted half swung away from their view, and what they saw was a constantly narrowing crescent, growing larger even as it narrowed. Finally the hour came when they swung up close, coming in on the eternally sunless, night side of the little planet.

They swooped low over the dark surface, taking observations and measurements. “It’s not as cold as we might suppose,” said Oberfield after his first readings. “There’s a certain amount of heat all along the rim of the dark side. Radiation, I suppose, as well as the fact that there’s a certain amount of wobbling done by the planet.”

Burl was studying the surface. “Seems to me that much of the dark side has a gleam to it. Something reflects the stars; I see little glints of light, shifting and blinking.”

“I can guess what that is,” said Russ. “It must be covered, at least in the central portions, with a sea of frozen gases. What atmosphere Mercury had long ago must have congealed there.”

The ship moved along toward the twilight edge, then began circling the planet along that intermediate belt, where the Sun could be seen peeking over the horizon in eternal dawn. There was a cluster of men at the radiation counter, looking for evidence of the Sun-tap station. Finally, after passing over a chain of darkened mountains, eerily lighted at the peaks by the Sun, there came a yell. Distortion had been detected.

Once on it, they swung the ship outward into space again and moved along further over the sunlit side. Burl stared into the telescopic viewers as they probed the surface.

He saw an ugly and terrifying world. The planet, which had a diameter of only 3,100 miles, compared to Earth’s 7,900, was virtually without an atmosphere. Its surface was baked hard, brilliantly white, covered with long, deep cracks that cut hundreds of miles into the shriveled and burned surface. There were areas of dark mountain ranges, bare and jagged, whose metallic surfaces imparted a darker shade to the pervading glare. And there were patches here and there on the surface that gleamed balefully--probably spots of molten material.

Haines, standing next to him, was muttering, “It can’t be too far in, it can’t. How could they build it?”

Then Burl found what they were looking for.

A huge canyon tore raggedly across a plain. There was a jumble of mountains, a chain edging in from the twilight zone. And in a corner, about two hundred miles out into the hot side, at a narrow ledge where the mountains came down and the canyon came together, there was a circular structure.