The Secret of the Ninth Planet Part 9

Just as they made their first flying leaps toward the shielded rocket plane, the globes within the Sun-tap station started to go off. One after another, like a chain reaction, they blew up, and within seconds the interior of the walled station was a turmoil of falling metals, beams, wires, and sharp transparent shards.

Haines and Ferrati were ready for take-off and puffs of smoke were coming from the exhaust. Without bothering to take down the plastic Sun-shield, Burl and Boulton tumbled into the cabin. Before the door was even closed, Haines lifted the ship and headed for the dark depths of the canyon.

The inside of the plane was perilously hot. The shield had been a temporary protection, but even the ground radiated heat like an oven.

They had to seek the cold of the sunless canyon to allow some of the heat to escape. To have flown directly to the _Magellan_ without cooling the plane would have been disastrous.

The _Magellan_ emerged from the cold side to meet them. From the heights of s.p.a.ce, they saw that they would not need to bomb the mountain relayer masts--for the same alarm that had triggered the station had shattered them.

After the _Magellan_ had scuttled back to the cold side, there was a council of war in the control room. Burl and Boulton described very carefully what had happened.

"This must have been their primary station," said Russ thoughtfully. "No matter what they seek to channel from the Sun on other planets, it is from here that the first and strongest diversion of solar energy must have been coming. This station may have been the last constructed--the final link put into place. And for that reason, they installed an alarm."

"Ah," said Lockhart, "even if they did, would it necessarily have destroyed the station? After all, they would normally have figured on repairing whatever went wrong."

"It seems to me," said Burl, "that the red flash itself didn't start the destruction. There was a delay--must have been several minutes--before it started. Could it be, that what was alerted was a watcher?"

"Where?" said Boulton. "There was no place for a watcher to be in that station. We saw no sign of it."

"Maybe deep underground?" suggested the engineer, Caton. "They might have living quarters a few miles underneath."

"Highly unlikely," said Russ Clyde. "It would still be too hot, and, remember, these people plan to incinerate Mercury and the inner planets.

They must be from the edge of the system. The delay may be a valuable clue to that. It would take time for a remote control station on another planet to see what was happening and take steps. If you can figure out exactly how many minutes and seconds elapsed between the flashing of the red bulb and the blowup, we could work out the approximate distance."

But, unfortunately, the time could not be judged that accurately.

Neither Burl nor Boulton had had time to look at his watch.

They hung over the cold side of Mercury for several hours more while the two astronomers figured their next move. When the orbits had been determined, the _Magellan_ turned its ma.s.sive wide nose away from the Sun toward a gleaming white disc that dominated the dark skies of outer s.p.a.ce. With full power on, they pushed away from the littlest planet and began the long fall toward the Sun's second planet, that which some had considered to be Earth's veiled twin, Venus.

There was a matter of thirty million miles to cross, and the crossing would be made fighting the pull of the Sun all the way.

Caton and his men had spent the wait on Mercury working on the great generators in the powerhouse nose. They recalibrated the output and corrected it from the records kept during the flight inward. Now they were confident of its ability to drive the ship away from the Sun.

Coming in, they had not been sure what their A-G drive would do and could do. Going outward they knew just what to expect.

They did not travel blindly outward, for that would have been both a crude waste of power and inaccurate. Instead, the ship drove at a long slant from the Sun, moving in a gently curving orbit that would bring it onto Venus at the same time that Venus itself was moving along in its...o...b..t. This is what they had tried to do before, but without success.

Venus travels around the Sun at a speed of about 32 miles per second, and takes about 224.5 days to complete the circuit. From where the _Magellan_ took off, it would approach and overtake Venus at a speed a little greater than the 32 miles per second.

The days pa.s.sed swiftly enough. They had developed the pictures taken in the Mercury station, and the engineers and astronomers spent long hours debating their features, matching up what they had seen with what was known about the Andes station.

The shining face of Venus grew larger. It was a mysterious planet, the most mysterious in the system, even though it was the closest of the planets to Earth. Venus was a world whose atmosphere--of Earthly depth--was a solid ma.s.s of clouds. Never had the clouds lifted to reveal the surface. The clouds reflected the sunlight brilliantly, yet as Burl could now see with the naked eye, parts of it were hazy, as if mighty storms were raising dark particles from below.

"We've had a couple of prober rockets shot into its surface," said Russ, as they watched the oncoming planet. "They didn't prove much--faded out fast, but we think they established its length of day. n.o.body knew how many hours it took Venus to rotate on its axis. Some even thought it always presented one face to the Sun as does Mercury. Others thought it had a quick day, shorter than Earth's. Others gave it a day almost a month long.

"Our prober rockets, carrying unmanned instruments, rather definitely indicate that the planet has a day about twenty Earth-days long. Even though it's shielded by the clouds, it must be miserably hot near the surface."

"We'll soon find out." Burl grinned. "After Mercury, it couldn't be so bad. Maybe it rains all the time."

Russ shrugged. "Who knows?" he said.

Venus was a vast sea of swirling white and gray clouds beneath them when the _Magellan_ reached it. They hung above the cloud level, while stretching below them lay the circular bowl of veiled mystery that was the fabled evening star of poem and song.

Oberfield was probing the surface with the radiation counters for the Sun-tap distortion. None had been detected from Earth, but observation of the sunny face of Venus had always been difficult from the third planetary orbit. But quickly the dour astronomer proved the fact. A calculation of the planet's albedo--its rate of reflected sunlight--showed that in one large central section there was a dimming out. Somewhere in that spot, the light was being diverted.

Lockhart brought the _Magellan_ down gradually, closer, closer, and finally sank it into the soupy atmosphere of Venus. Now, from every viewplate, nothing reflected but a glare of white mist. But the ship was not operating blind. Radar pierced the clouds, and from the wide screens the crew could see that they had not yet touched the surface.

"Watch out for mountains," whispered Russ, hanging over Lockhart's shoulder.

Their progress was slow but steady. The cloud bank around them did not clear, but still glowed gray. After a descent of nearly two hours, there was a flicker on the radar. It registered no features, no mountains, nothing but a seemingly flat plain.

Above and around them the white clouds still blanketed everything. But now Burl thought he saw a pale glow. Gradually the white faded away into wisps and shreds, and in a flash the ship broke out of the clouds.

They hung beneath a grayish-white sky. Below them, scarcely a half mile of visibility in misty, thin air, they saw the surface of Venus. They were over water. An ocean stretched below them as far as the eye could see, with neither a rock nor an island. Venus was a water world!

Chapter 9. _The Ocean Primeval_

The _Magellan_ hung in the air while the men studied the surface of this world that had so long been a mystery. The air was not the clear air of Earth; rather, it was the kind that precedes the coming of a fog, thick, heavy with moisture, the horizons fading into gray. Below them lay a mottled expanse of water, reflecting the gray sky, and verging almost to a deep brown. The water was still, occasionally stirred by a slight wave. "No tides have ever moved these waters," commented Russ quietly to Burl. "There is no moon to pull and sway them. The motion of this world, so slow in the pa.s.sage of its day, hardly disturbs the water."

"It looks shallow to me," said Burl. "The darker sections look as if the bottom must be close."

"I imagine it is. We'll take soundings," Russ answered. "I have a feeling the whole world may be like this ... one vast, shallow, swampy sea. See the sc.u.m floating on it?"

"See it? Now that you mention it, there's hardly a part that hasn't something on it," was Burl's reply. "There're patches of muck all over it, like floating oil, or even drifting ma.s.ses of weeds."

It was true. The water showed on its surface a strange filth unlike anything one would expect on the surface of a Terrestrial sea. There were wide areas of brownish-gray slime and little floating blobs of green. Shining flecks of yellow, like bright oil drops, seemed to flow through and between the ma.s.ses of sc.u.m.

At the radar, Haines began to call out figures. As Russ had guessed, it was a shallow sea. In places, the bottom was only a dozen feet beneath.

For a while, all the men of the crew were quiet, watching the silent waters beneath them.

"Unclean, the whole place looks unclean," Lockhart said finally. "We've got work to do. Let's find the Sun-tap station."

The rest of the crew came to action. The s.p.a.ceship began to move slowly, while Oberfield and Caton probed for the lines of force which would lead to the station.

Now a long, low bank appeared, a ridge of mud protruding above the water. Here and there stretched other low mud bars, and once a ridge of rock.

"I've seen no animals or birds," said Burl. "Do you suppose there are any?"

Russ pursed his lips. "I don't think so. From the look of this world, life probably isn't developed that far. You won't find animals until there is dry land--and I'd guess now that there's no place on all Venus where there is much dry land. There may be fish or fish life, but even that's questionable. Consider--the long, long day, the absence of violent, unshielded Sun rays, the steady damp warmth, the quiet, barely moving waters, the heavy amounts of carbon dioxide in the air...."

He paused and went over to Lockhart's chart table to pick up a paper.

"Oberfield worked out the atmosphere. It is very heavy in carbon dioxide, very low in free oxygen. There's water vapor down here, but the clouds have kept it below; it didn't show up in the outer atmosphere at all."

"There's the Sun-tap base," said Burl, and added as an afterthought, "I think."

This one did not look at all like the other stations he had seen. There was indeed a ringed wall station, but the wall was low and slanted outward. It stood on the end of a wide mudbank, and near it veins of rock glistened as if wet.

The interior machinery was a neat, compact ma.s.s of crystalline globes and levers. But the masts and shining discs which had characterized the stations on Mercury and Earth were missing. Instead, there floated upon the surface of the water, for a mile around, great shining bowls, like huge saucers gently rocking in the faint wavelets. Thin, flexible, shining lines of metal connected this surface layout with the station.