Chapter 15: Ice Cold on Oberon

Nevertheless, from that point on, a different spirit seemed to animate everyone aboard the Magellan. There was the feeling that they had closed with the enemy and found themselves not wanting. There was the feeling that they possessed powers not inferior to those of their unknown enemies. The thought had been haunting them all along that they were in the position of a backward people facing an advanced invader--something like the problem of the Aztecs when faced with the gunpowder and armor of the conquistadors.

Now they knew that though the Sun-tappers’ weapons were different and indeed advanced beyond Earthly technology, they themselves were not without resources equally deadly to the foe.

After the memory of the H-bomb’s powers had been finally absorbed, the crew’s activities began to indicate that the ship was coming into the crucial phase of its journey. Haines and Boulton were going over the list of military supplies with sharp, calculating eyes and slight grins at the thought of retribution to come. Ferrati was overhauling the rocket planes and land traveling devices, making them shipshape.

Russell Clyde and Burl surveyed the sky, anxious to be the first to spot what they hoped would be the limping body of the battered and fleeing dumbbell ship, a little atingle at the hope of spotting another such ship--feeling now almost like the hunting dog that has finally spotted the fox.

Lockhart himself reflected this mood of growing excitement. He prowled the ship, examining the mighty purring engines, querying Caton, Shea and Detmar as to how it could better its performance, how fast it could be made to shift speed and directions. He studied the orbits and locations of the remaining planets.

“Uranus is not too far off our path to Pluto,” he announced one day. “We’ll make it in time to wipe out their plant there. But Neptune, whose orbit is between those of Uranus and Pluto, is away off our track, a third of the way around the Sun. We’re going to skip it, hit directly for Pluto and their main base--the end of their line. I don’t want to give them too much time to make repairs or to get any reinforcements. I think they’re limited in numbers--and we ought to slam them while they still are.”

There was no dissent at this. And as the days rolled past, the men of the Magellan began to chafe in their repressed desire to finish the matter. At last Uranus came into sight--a large globe, very much like Saturn and Jupiter in that it was of low density and great dimensions. Roughly, sixty-four times the size of Earth, its density was barely above that of water and it probably had no solid surface to speak of. An inhospitable mass of unbreathable gases, at temperatures fantastically lower than the freezing point of water.

As they drew close to the planet, they could see that it also was banded, pale green bands alternating with lighter ones--indicating that some sections of its atmospheric belt moved faster than others. It had five moons which rotated in the opposite direction from those of any other satellite system.

It was on the farthest moon, Oberon, a sphere six hundred miles in diameter, that the Sun-tap station revealed itself. They swung down to observe it and to place their bomb. Not an H-bomb though--they recognized that they had erred in thinking they needed such a powerful explosive.

Oberon was without an atmosphere, a rocky world with streaks of frozen gases, and here and there the sheen of a lake of ice--ice that would never melt--that on this world would be a permanent, hard-as-metal material. There was, nonetheless, something about the surface that seemed to bother Russ.

“Do you notice what seems to be a sort of shifting movement?” he asked Burl. Burl looked, and sure enough, he saw that in places there seemed a flickering of lights.

“Yes,” he said, “I see it. What do you suppose it is?”

“I don’t know,” said Russ, “But I’m going to ask Lockhart to put the ship down and let me take a look.”

Lockhart at first demurred, but finally decided that they could afford the brief halt. The Magellan approached the surface, safely distant from the Sun-tap station.

Burl and Russ descended in the two-man rocket plane, while the teardrop-shaped ship hung half a mile above them. They landed on a narrow plain, bordered by low ridges of mountains shining with streaks of frozen hydrogen. A layer of cosmic dust hung over the rocks.

Wearing insulated space suits, they left the rocket plane. It was Burl who made the first discovery. He pointed dramatically at the ground. “Look, Russ. This dust is full of streaks and marks. It hasn’t been lying here undisturbed. Something has crossed over it!”

Russ kneeled in order to look more carefully. The layer of dust, the consequences of an airless world exposed without protection to the endless fall of cosmic particles, was indeed not the level, undisturbed surface it should have been. Here and there were light, low depressions, as if something had moved across it--like a small snake crawling on its belly. In one place lay a series of depressions, like the footprints of some light-bodied creature.

“Impossible,” muttered Russ. “Life can’t exist here.”