The Secret of the Ninth Planet Part 13

As they pushed their way with great difficulty toward the jeep, the crowd began to sway, as if in anger. Now, for the first time, they heard the creatures make a noise--a sort of humming and buzzing like angered bees.

"They see us now," muttered Haines. "I don't like it."

"The Sun-tap builders did it," said Burl. "They must have b.o.o.by-trapped the place against intruders. The globe that got Boulton must have set off some sort of vibration that enrages these creatures. And it looks as if we're the victims."

As they reached their jeep, the encircling ma.s.s of Martians moved forward. The humming rose to a higher pitch, and then the mob, with the berserk ferocity of a swarm of bees, lunged toward them.

Chapter 12. _At Rope's End_

With Boulton lying across the back seat, the four men acted simultaneously. Thinking only of self-defense, they drew their pistols and fired point-blank into the monsters attacking them. As the men emptied their guns, the Martians in front stumbled, fell, rolled over, or began to run aimlessly as the heavy slugs tore through them.

They were not easy to kill--which was to be expected of creatures without much of a central consciousness--but on the other hand, once struck or injured, they seemed to lose contact with their fellows and to act wholly without direction. They plunged wildly into each other, and before the men in the jeep had finished their barrage, the clearing was a milling, confused mob. Body clashed against body, legs scrambled under legs, and the angry buzz was now lost amid the clattering and banging of sh.e.l.l against sh.e.l.l.

Haines slid into the front seat behind the steering wheel, stepped on the gas, and drove toward a momentary gap in the mob. The jeep tore through, raced around the corner, and headed down an empty street.

Crouching in the back, Burl, Russ, and Ferrati hastily reloaded.

"We can't let ourselves get stopped, or even hole up. That A-bomb's going to go off in about twenty minutes, and we'd better be back at the ship before then," cried Russ.

As they b.u.mped along, they noticed that the Martians who came within fifty feet of their jeep suddenly stopped whatever they were doing and turned toward them, hostile. They were like a stick drawn along among bees--as they traveled they left fury in their wake.

"It must be Boulton," Russ yelled to Burl above the roar of their pa.s.sage. "He must be charged with the irritating vibration."

Burl nodded as he looked back. The Martians had started after them on foot, and could lope fast when they wanted to. "They've got some sort of organized action going," he called to Haines. "I think it's steam carts!"

"The ma.s.s mind caught on fast," said Russ. "And look! They're warned in advance now!"

They were nearing the edge of the city, and looming before them, blocking their right-of-way, were two steam carts--big ones carrying a large number of Martians. They were holding metallic rods and instruments in their hand-members.

Ferrati opened a chest built against the back of the seat and took out a light machine gun. Climbing into the front, next to Haines, he kneeled down behind the windshield, raised the gun, and blazed away.

The steam carts suddenly swerved, one after the other, ran wildly into the side of a building, and turned over. The jeep roared past them, raced across the last hundred feet of city paving and out onto the desert. Haines had to slow down to navigate safely the uneven layers of barren soil, rock and sand. Burl holstered his gun and reached across for one of the abandoned walkie-talkies.

In the excitement of their exit, none had noticed the change in the Martian scenery. But now it occurred to Burl that the day was distinctly lighter, and he fancied the Sun--small though it was--felt warmer. The Sun-tap demolished, this was to be expected, and by the same token, radio communication should now be practical.

Sure enough, he got Lockhart's voice at once. Hastily, he warned the commander of what had happened.

As they drew nearer the _Magellan_, the great s.p.a.ceship lowered toward the ground and let down its grapples and ladders. Burl saw that there was no time to be lost. A stream of Martians and steam carts was pouring out of the city on their trail.

They reached the s.p.a.ceship and slammed to a halt. The men leaped out.

Burl and Russ lifted Boulton's unconscious body from the jeep and, between them, managed to hoist him awkwardly up the dangling rope ladder.

The others hooked grapples onto the jeep, and when it was secure, leaped for safety themselves.

As the first of the Martian steam carts was almost on them, the _Magellan_ lifted into the air. It rose high above the surface and swung off into the desert. The Martians drew to a halt. Burl, looking down from the doorway of the cargo hatch, could see them milling aimlessly around. None, he noticed, ever glanced up. Air flight, apparently, was an inconceivable phenomenon to them.

After the jeep had been pulled into the cargo hold and secured, the outer ports were sealed. When everyone was safely in the inner sphere, the _Magellan_ drew away from Mars and started on the next lap of its long mission.

Boulton was carefully examined. Nothing could be made of his condition.

He seemed to bear no physical hurt, although he slept on. He was placed in his bunk, and there he rested, breathing slowly, temperature normal, dormant.

The life of the s.p.a.ceship resumed, for the time being, without him. The next port of call was Jupiter, and that presented problems of its own.

Between Mars and Jupiter was the great asteroid belt, a region of many thousands of tiny planetoids, ranging in size from worldlets of two or three hundred miles in diameter down to rocks the size of footb.a.l.l.s.

"The debris of an exploded planet," was the comment Russ made to Burl.

"That's the most likely explanation. Anyway," he added, "there seems to be no Sun-tap station on any of them. The next one is beyond the asteroids, in Jupiter's...o...b..t."

During the next few days, Lockhart and the two astrogators were busy working out a rather complex maneuver, which consisted of having the ship jump over the asteroid belt rather than travel directly through it.

While the orbits of thousands of the larger asteroids had been charted, there were thousands more that consisted of just chunks of rock too small to notice. They could not chance a collision with one of these--yet to work out the whereabouts of all of them was impossibly time-consuming.

What the _Magellan_ did was to depart from the plane of the ecliptic, that level around the Sun to which all the planets generally adhere, and to draw outward so as to avoid the path of the asteroids, then to come back in onto the orbit and plane of Jupiter. This involved some tricky work with the various gravitational lines, using Mars and the Sun for repulsion and certain stars for attraction.

There were quite a number of gravity shifts, and during this period no one could be quite sure what his weight would be from one moment to another. There were several periods of zero gravity, when the crew members would float and face the complex annoyances of a steady feeling of free fall. Burl, after a couple of such sessions, got the hang of it rather comfortably.

Lockhart looked at him oddly and smiled. "Glad to know it. I may have a task for you soon, then."

Others found the weightless conditions not so bearable. One of the engineering crew, Detmar, had to be hospitalized. What he had resembled severe seasickness. Oberfield also experienced moments of acute upset.

Boulton's condition did not change. Once or twice he stirred slightly in his sleep, and seemed to murmur something, but then he would lapse back into his coma. Fortunately he did not resist food, and did swallow liquids forced into his mouth.

Except for one or two rare intervals, communication with Earth had ceased. Besides, the mother world was now moving away from them and would pa.s.s behind the Sun. Efforts to obtain medical advice for Boulton proved futile.

After they had pa.s.sed the orbital line of the asteroids and had rearranged their drive so that they were falling freely toward Jupiter, Lockhart called the exploring crew together. "I've got a job for you men," he announced.

Haines, Ferrati, and Burl gathered about the control board to listen.

They were restless for something to do--plans for the Jupiter landing could not be made until they knew what the situation was going to be, for it would be one thing if the station were located on that giant planet itself, another if on one of its satellites.

The colonel wasted no time. "While you were on Mars and we were waiting for you, I took the opportunity to examine the outer sh.e.l.l of this ship. You know, of course, that we are constantly being bombarded by cosmic dust, the micrometeorites that always prove troublesome to the Earth satellites and s.p.a.ce platforms. The ship has been fortunate in that it has not been struck by any meteoric matter of size, but we have been peppered heavily by dust particles. As a result, the outer sh.e.l.l of our ship is pitted in some spots, and in several places worn perhaps dangerously thin. I don't mean to imply that there are going to be any holes very soon, but I think that there are some parts which we should reinforce or patch."

When he stopped for breath, Burl broke in. "You mean you want us to work on the outer sh.e.l.l?"

Lockhart nodded. "Someone has to do it, and during flights you men are the deck crew. So it's going to be your baby. I am going to keep the ship on free fall for the next several periods and this should make it simpler for you to go outside, in s.p.a.ce suits, and do the job."

The next hour saw all three hard at work. Dressed in heavy, sealed, warmed outer-s.p.a.ce outfits, wearing metal bowl-like helmets with sealed gla.s.s fronts, and drawing oxygen from tanks strapped on their backs, the three men left the inner sphere and emerged on the outer surface of the _Magellan_.

Burl found it a weird and awesome experience. There was no gravitational drag, so that even as he stepped through the exit port, the scene shifted until he seemed to be standing on metal ground, looking upward at thousands and tens of thousands of silent white stars. Nothing moved--except, of course, the s.p.a.ce-suited bodies of the two men already half out of sight and looking not quite human. There was no sound save that of his own breath and the faint hum of the radio phone tucked in his helmet.

He was firmly attached to the ship by a long nylon rope which he hooked to rings set on the outer sh.e.l.l. He made his way toward the wide rounded nose of the ship. In one hand he carried a bucket of a liquid plastic resembling tar in thickness and consistency. With a brush in the other hand he would stop--held to the surface by magnetic soles--and smear the plastic protective surfacing over the little pits and pockmarks that now marred the surface of the once spotless ship. The work was not hard, and shortly became a routine which he found did not require much concentration.

It was dip and smear, in a steady rhythmic motion. Haines was working out of sight on a more complex repair job which involved welding a sheet of metal over a badly beaten and sprung section. Ferrati was on the opposite side of the ship.

As he worked, Burl watched the stars, and every now and then was rewarded by the sight of a moving spark of light--an asteroid or meteor.

He could see mighty Jupiter ahead--a wide disc of white and yellow, faintly belted with gray and pale blue bands. The famous red spot was not visible. Four of the planet's twelve attendant satellites strung out alongside it, and he recognized them as the big ones discovered by Galileo with his first telescope: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.

The other eight were tiny, and probably would not be visible until they were right on top of Jupiter, though he supposed that Russell Clyde could probably pick them out now by telescopic sightings.

Burl could hear in his radio the sound of someone whistling softly, and supposed it was Ferrati. There was a short cut-in as Lockhart called a time-shift on the general intercom. A brief exchange followed between Caton in the Zeta-ring chamber of the ship's nose and the colonel, with the information that Caton was coming down into the living section.