The Secret of the Ninth Planet Part 8

"Getting the transmitters will be easy," said Haines. "After we shut off the station, we'll just bomb the mountain masts out of action."

Burl choked. "Why, it never occurred to me, but why can't we bomb the station from the air? One atomic bomb should finish it off." He almost added, And you wouldn't have needed me after all, but squashed the thought. He wouldn't have given up coming along for anything, he now realized.

"There's a distortion, as there was at the Andes station, that would make it hard to hit. But I imagine we could do it if we tried hard enough. But that isn't what we want at first. It's important, very important, that we get pictures and details of this station from inside.

We can't just break up the enemy installations--we've got to learn from them, we must find out how they do it and how we can use it." This was Lockhart speaking. "You'd better start the job," he added to Haines.

"Are you ready?"

Haines nodded reluctantly. "Yep," and turning to the three who would accompany him, he ordered, "let's go."

The four explorers gathered near the exit port. They had put on s.p.a.ce suits and strapped on various items of equipment, weapons and work tools. They pa.s.sed through the airlock into the cargo section of the ship. Communicating through the helmet radios, Haines directed each what to do, and also directed Lockhart where to bring the ship for the landing.

Burl heard Lockhart's voice warn them that he did not want to hold the ship too long over the sunny hot side. "We've already noticed a buildup of heat from the solar radiation on the skin. And the heat radiating from Mercury is acc.u.mulating too fast. We can't get rid of it if _both_ sides of this ship are going to be heated up. As soon as you make your landing, I'm taking the ship back to the cold side."

"Uh huh," came Haines's voice. "We don't want to hang around here any too long, either."

Then the four, as prearranged, unlimbered the work rocket they had picked. There were several sizes of small exploration craft. They had at first thought of the tractor--an enclosed, airtight truck on tractor wheels which could crawl up to the station while the men inside it were protected by air conditioning. But a quick survey showed that it would overheat too fast and might easily bog down in one of the many soft spots. So they took the four-man, rocket-propelled cargo plane instead.

The ship was airtight and pressurized. They had taken every precaution.

The four piled in with their supplies. Then, as the _Magellan_ swooped momentarily lower, the escape hatch opened and, with Ferrati at the controls, the rocket plane shot out with a roar of its exhausts.

They raced low over the burning landscape, and before them the wide, dark, forbidding canyon cut its way through the plain. It was into this canyon that the rocket plunged.

The precipitous rocky sides rose above them, and suddenly they were in darkness. Immediately, the plane's cooling system became more effective as Ferrati guided the rocket through the shadowy depths away from the blazing sunbeams. Burl saw, by means of the radar, that the bottom of the heat crack was many miles down.

They raced along the crevice until they reached the mountain chain.

Here, Ferrati abruptly raised the nose of the plane and they shot upward, popping out of the shadow into the sunlight.

Before them loomed the hard unbroken walls of the Sun-tap station. The rocket plane came to a stop a hundred feet away.

As soon as it had halted, Burl and Ferrati leaped out, with white sheets thrown over their suits to afford some extra protection from the Sun's rays. Between them they carried a long, awkward affair of poles and plastic.

Burl's feet touched the ground; through the cushioned leather of his thick boots he felt the heat just as if he had stepped on a hot stove.

He moved quickly, and as they had rehea.r.s.ed, he and the explorer slapped the rig together and set up a gleaming plastic skin sunbreak to shield the rocket plane. The plastic sheets reflected the Sun's heat and cut off a fair portion of the direct radiation which would otherwise have rendered the rocket plane inoperable and uninhabitable in short order.

While they were a.s.sembling the sunbreak, Haines and Boulton unloaded a portable ant.i.tank rocket launcher. With no wasted motion, Boulton aimed the launcher at the wall, and Haines thrust a long, wicked-looking rocket projectile into the tube. There was a flash of soundless fire and a line of dissipating white smoke. Nothing could be heard in the airlessness.

Burl felt the shock through the ground as the sh.e.l.l hit. A chunk of the wall ripped apart and collapsed.

As quickly as he saw it, Burl acted. Haines's voice rang in his ear, but already Burl was in action. Back into the rocket plane, out again with--an umbrella!

He made a flying leap toward the Sun-tap station. He felt terrifically strong in the slight gravity, and the leap carried him thirty feet forward. As he slid through the s.p.a.ce above the surface, he opened the umbrella. Its outer side had been painted white, and partly shielded him from the direct heat. He made the station in five leaps and climbed through the broken wall. Boulton followed him with another umbrella and a pack under his arm.

Inside the station it was cool--the walls had been high enough to create shade within. It was like the station in the Andes, but bigger, much bigger.

Boulton joined him, folded his umbrella calmly, and yanked an air-compression pistol from his belt. "See anyone?" he asked.

"No."

Burl remembered then that there could possibly be a living guard at this station. They searched carefully, but there was no sign of life. Boulton was doing a soldier's job, that was all.

While Boulton set up his photographic equipment, Burl made his way around the shining globes and strange tubes that were the nerve center of the station. He finally found the same type of control panel that he had found in the Andes station.

He hesitated before it, wondering if, after all, this, the original charge, would work. He hoped that there might be another charger globe available, but saw none. It would be up to him.

He put a gloved hand on the control. Perhaps, he worried, the charge would not conduct through the insulated, cooled material of his suit. He pushed the levers, and knew then that it did.

The pulsing of the spheres halted. There was a sharp dip in the faint vibration he had been feeling in his feet. He shoved the levers all the way, and suddenly the station went dead. Above him, one of the great discs atop its mast snapped and burst apart under what must have become an impossible concentration of power without a channel for outlet.

"Sun-tap Station Mercury is dead," Burl said quietly into his helmet phone.

At that very instant a distant globe, perched on a pedestal against the wall away from the rest of the equipment, flared a brilliant red.

Chapter 8. _The Veil of Venus_

In an artificially constructed chamber somewhere in the solar system, an intelligent being sat before a bank of instruments that was designed to bring to his attention various factors concerning the things that mattered to his species. This being had been on duty for the average length of time such a duty entailed and had been paying little conscious attention to the routine--for there had been nothing to report for some time.

The drop in channeling from Planet III that had occurred some time ago had thus far not caused too much concern. It was a.s.sumed by the other intelligent beings involved that the matter was possibly a weather condition, a volcanic discharge or quite simply that the planet was in unfavorable orbit. Not all the stations ever worked simultaneously.

There were always some behind the Sun, or blocked in some other manner.

But the main channels were at work, and the different lines and shifts continued to build up satisfactorily.

But now something occurred that focused the attention of the watcher more closely on his instruments. A facet of his panel had flashed a color at the lowest end of his visible spectrum. How the being registered that color cannot be said; the inhabitants of Planet III would have termed it red.

With trained reaction, the watcher activated the full signal. Instantly there appeared before his eyes a vision of a scene. There was the interior of the major station on Planet I. It was non-functioning, and there were two strange creatures turning now to look directly at him.

They were bipeds with two armlike extensions, lumpy objects, clad in bulky white folds. They wore c.u.mbersome helmets and he could see two eyes shielded beneath thick transparencies over the face.

One of these creatures raised his arm and there was a puff of steam.

Then the vision flashed off, but not before the trained watcher had activated the crash mechanism.

If the watcher had been closer in s.p.a.ce to the station, the destruction would have come quicker. Unfortunately for him, the speed of light and radio impulses is limited, so that it was several minutes before the destruction impulse reached Planet I.

A short while later, after the guiding beings had digested the news, preparations were made for a vessel to go sunward to investigate--and remove--the interference.

Burl twisted on his heel sharply as he whirled around to look at the flash of red. Boulton drew his hand weapon, aimed and fired.

There was a jet of steam as the compressed air blasted the dart from the gun. The glowing globe was pierced, there was a small explosion, and then the globe and its pedestal vanished.

"What was that?" cried Burl.

Boulton holstered his gun. "A signal of some kind--a warning probably.

My guess is that it was an alarm tipping off the remote control masters of this place that it was out of commission. Help me with the photo stuff; I think we'd better get out of here quick!"

Without wasting more time, the two men snapped the scene as fast as the shutters would click. Then they picked up the cameras, grabbed their umbrellas and ran for the break in the wall.