sculptured ice.
She’d lived in alleys and cellars, hiding from the Hiltonists, because she wouldn’t be Happy. She was strong, that girl. Like an unwanted cat that simply wouldn’t die.
Avery sat in the pilot’s chair, watching through the shaded port. He swung around as Falken got up. The exhaustion was gone from his square young face, but his eyes were still veiled and strange. Falken couldn’t read them, but he sensed fear.
He asked, “How long have I slept?”
Avery shrugged. “The chronometer stopped. A long time, though. Twenty hours, perhaps.”
Falken went to the controls. “Better go back now. We’ll swing wide of Mercury, and perhaps we can get through.” He hoped their constant velocity hadn’t carried them too far for their fuel.
Relief surged over Avery’s face. “The size of that Sun,” he said jerkily. “It’s terrifying. I never felt....”
He broke off sharply. Something about his tone brought Sheila’s eyes wide open.
Suddenly, the bell of the mass-detector began to ring, a wild insistent jangle.
“Meteor!” cried Falken and leaped for the visor screen. Then he froze, staring.
It was no meteor, rushing at them out of the vast blaze of the Sun. It was a planet.
A dark planet, black as the infinity behind it, barren and cruel as starvation, touched in its jagged peaks with subtle, phosphorescent fires.
Paul Avery whispered, “Good Lord! A planet, here? But it’s impossible!”
Sheila Moore sprang up.
“No! Remember the old legends about Vulcan, the planet between Mercury and the Sun? Nobody believed in it, because they could never find it. But they could never explain Mercury’s crazy orbit, either, except by the gravitational interference of another body.”
Avery said, “Surely the Mercurian observatories would have found it?” A pulse began to beat in his strong white throat.
“It’s there,” snapped Falken impatiently. “And we’ll crash it in a minute if we...Sheila! Sheila Moore!”
The dull glare from the ports caught the proud, bleak lines of his gypsy face, the sudden fire in his blue eyes.
“This is a world, Sheila! It might be a world for us, a world where Unregenerates could live, and wait!”
She gasped and stared at him, and Paul Avery said:
“Look at it, Falken! No one, nothing could live there.”
Falken said softly, “Afraid to land and see?”
Yellow eyes burned into his, confused and wild. Then Avery turned jerkily away.
“No. But you can’t land, Falken. Look at it.”
Falken looked, using a powerful search-beam, probing. Vulcan was smaller even than Mercury. There was no atmosphere. Peaks like splinters of black glass bristled upward, revolving slowly in the Sun’s tremendous blaze.
The beam went down into the bottomless dark of the canyons. There was nothing there, but the glassy rock and the dim glints of light through it.
“All the same,” said Falken, “I’m going to land.” If there was even a tiny chance, he couldn’t let it slip.
Unregeneracy was almost dead in the inhabited worlds. Paul Avery was the only recruit in months. And it was dying in the miserable outer strongholds of independence.
Starvation, plague, cold, and darkness. Insecurity and danger, and the awful lost terror of humans torn from earth and light. Unless they could find a place of safety, with warmth and light and dirt to grow food in, where babies could be born and live, Gantry Hilton would soon have the whole Solar System for his toy.
There were no more protests. Falken set the ship down with infinite skill on a ledge on the night side. Then he turned, feeling the blood beat in his wrists and throat.
“Vac suits,” he said. “There are two and a spare.”
They got into them, shuffled through the airlock, and stood still, the first humans on an undiscovered world.
*
Lead weights in their boots held them so that they could walk. Falken thrust at the rock with a steel-shod alpenstock.
“It’s like glass,” he said. “Some unfamiliar compound, probably, fused out of raw force in the Solar disturbance that created the planets. That would explain its resistance to heat.”
Radio headphones carried Avery’s voice back to him clearly, and Falken realized that the stuff of the planet insulated against Solar waves, which would normally have blanketed communication.
“Whatever it is,” said Avery, “it sucks up light. That’s why it’s never been seen. Only little glimmers seep through, too feeble for telescopes even on Mercury to pick up against the Sun. Its mass is too tiny for its transits to be visible, and it doesn’t reflect.”
“A sort of dark stranger, hiding in space,” said Sheila, and shivered. “Look, Eric! Isn’t that a cave mouth?”
Falken’s heart gave a great leap of hope. There were caves on Pluto. Perhaps, in the hidden heart of this queer world....
They went toward the opening. It was surprisingly warm. Falken guessed that the black rock diffused the Sun’s heat instead of stopping it.
Thin ragged spires reared overhead, stabbing at the stars. Furtive glints of light came and went in ebon depths. The cave opened before them, and their torches showed glistening walls dropping sheer away into blackness.
Falken uncoiled a thousand-foot length of synthetic fiber rope from his belt. It was no larger than a spider web, and strong enough to hold Falken and Avery together. He tied it to each of their metal boots to and let it down.
It floated endlessly out, the lead weight dropping slowly in the light gravity. Eight hundred, nine hundred feet. When there were five feet of rope left in Falken’s hand it stopped.
“Well,” he said. “There is a bottom.”
Paul Avery caught his arm. “You aren’t going down?”
“Why not?” Falken scowled at him, puzzled. “Stay here, if you prefer. Sheila?”
“I’m coming with you.”
“All right,” whispered Avery. “I’ll come.” His amber eyes were momentarily those of a lion caught in a pit. Afraid, and dangerous.
Dangerous? Falken shook his head irritably. He drove his alpenstock into a crack and made the rope fast.
“Hang onto it,” he said. “We’ll float like balloons, but be careful. I’ll go first. If there’s anything wrong down there, chuck off your other boot and climb up fast.”
They
