Hell Planet

by E.C. Tubb

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

Between the frozen wastes of the night side and the searing inferno of the dayside, the Twilight Belt held all that was Human on the tiny world of Mercury, Hell Planet of the Solar System. A strange world, airless, subject to the alien distortions of Einsteinian mathematics, Mercury was both a promise and a challenge, for here could be found torrents of cheap power essential to the ships and men in space. Lee Correy, Commander of the Station, plunges into the frigid wastes in a desperate race against time to find and rescue both his brother and the essential component of the beam control. Fighting impossible conditions and incredible alien life he is up against the enigmatic mystery of the sand devils; a dead man who walked, and a machine that could not fail-but did. Here is a story of the future, of the planets and the men who will colonise them, of the way they will live and the problems they will face. With mystery, adventure, exciting action and scientifically correct detail. A story of what might well be in the days to come . . .

Release date: January 30, 2014

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 143

Sample

They stood on a vast, rolling plain of greyish dust, a barren desert dropping swiftly towards the near horizon of the tiny world. Three of them, three men, each dressed in heavy spacesuits, their helmets, and armour polished to a mirror so that they flashed and scintillated as they moved, looking like creatures clothed in light, resplendent with reflected brilliance.

Above their heads an enormous sun, fully nine times as large as seen from Earth, shone blue against an airless sky of midnight black. Flames shot from it, spinning into space, over a quarter of a million miles tall and seeming to move with majestic slowness and yet, as they rose they travelled at more than a hundred thousand miles a second. The sun hung motionless in the heavens, and near it, for all its searing brilliance, stars were visible, for there was no scattering or shielding air to spread its light into hazing brightness. Strange were those stars nearest to the sun, seeming to writhe and move, to be distorted and warped from normal space, for even light has mass, and the tremendous gravitational field of the sun bent the light passing through it.

On the plain, shimmering as the armoured men shimmered, as all things had to shimmer on the day side of Mercury, rested a vehicle. It was low and round like an egg cut down its long axis, and wide treads showed beneath the polished metal of the hull. It was tilted a little, dropped at one side, and sheared metal showed bright where no sheared metal should be.

Dennison stared at it, squinting even through the laminated glare-shields of his faceplate, then nudged the switch of the inter-suit radio with his chin.

“Any luck, Anders?”

“No.” A man straightened from where he crouched beside the crippled vehicle and his voice echoed thinly from the receiver, distorted even at this distance with blurring static. “The tread’s gone, sheared clean from the driving wheels, and a couple of links are broken.”

“Can we repair it?” The third man spoke, and Dennison frowned at the thin edge of hysteria in his voice.

“I don’t know. Can we, Anders?”

“No.”

“We must!” This time there was no mistaking the hysteria in the thin tones. “We’ve got to!”

“We’ll do what we can, Hendris,” snapped Dennison sharply. “Maybe you’d better get back in the shell and take a rest.”

“Yes.” There was pitiful eagerness in the thin voice. “Thank you. I feel as though I’m stifling in this suit.”

“Maybe we’d all better get inside,” suggested Anders. “Nothing we can do out here except talk, and we may as well do that in comfort.”

“Right.” Dennison nodded, a sheer habit reflex, forgetting the others couldn’t possibly see his gesture. “Hendris will go first, then you, Anders, and I’ll come last Hurry it up now and don’t lose more air than you can help.”

Patiently he waited as first the geologist, then the engineer, entered the small airlock of the vehicle, and while waiting glared irritably at several columns of writhing dust which suddenly rose all around him. Even as he stared the twisting columns, some as tall as a man, others three times as high, collapsed, falling back to the plain from which they sprang. Then they rose again, thicker and stronger than before, swirling and taking on a vague suggestion of shape.

For a moment it seemed as if a face peered at him, an idiotic visage, slack mouthed and with hollow eyes, then it was gone, changing to battlemented spires and soaring arches. Other columns shifted into fantastic suggestions of weird beasts, enigmatic machines, oddly fashioned rocks, and once, for a brief moment, something that could have been a miniature spaceship.

All around him they swirled in ever-changing clouds of spinning dust, and within his helmet tiny instruments registered the presence of surging, external energies. As usual Dennison was half-fascinated, half-annoyed at the dust columns, fascinated because of their constantly changing pattern, and annoyed because even after twenty years sojourn on Mercury men still didn't know just what they were.

Electrical, of course, the instruments showed that. A surge of electro-magnetic currents, spinning at random over the planet, born from the blasting radiations from a too-near sun and able to disturb the fine dust by a flux of opposed electrical charges. So the scientists claimed, and they even explained the vaguely familiar shapes seen in the swirling columns as due solely to the product of the imagination, much as a man will see the faces and images in the leaping flames of a fire.

But no one had explained why several people could recognize the same image in the same column at the same time.

Dennison sighed as he entered the airlock and slammed the outer door. He waited until the pumps had filled the vestibule and, opening the inner door, stepped into the body of the vehicle.

The shell was just that, a heavily-insulated body containing cramped living quarters, a mass of instruments for scientific observation, and a small but powerful electric motor. Once inside he removed the cumbersome armour and relaxed in the faint breeze from a whining fan. Anders sat leaning against the controls sucking at an unlighted cigarette, and Hendris bit at his knuckles as he stared through the dulled vision port.

“Coffee?”

“Why not?” Anders stared at the geologist. “Come on, Junior, you heard the boss. Make some coffee.”

“I—” Hendris gulped. “What are we going to do?”

“We’ll talk about it,” said Dennison, and forced himself to be gentle. “But first lets all have some coffee.” He stared at Ander’s cigarette. “May as well have a smoke too; you got any more of those, Anders?”

“Sure.” The engineer threw a crumpled package towards the commander, “Help yourself.”

Dennison nodded, shaking one of the little white cylinders from the packet and puffing hard until the treated tip glowed into life. Gratefully he inhaled the smoke and offered the packet to Hendris as he passed out the steaming mugs of coffee.

“It’s a funny thing,” said the engineer thoughtfully. “No matter how hot it gets I still like my coffee the same way.”

“Habit probably.” Dennison alternated between sips at his mug and drags on the cigarette. “I remember one time at Tycho Station, must have been ten years ago now, during the time of the old Mark 15s, remember them?”

“I remember them,” said Anders grimly, and touched a scar on his check. “I was servicing one when I got this.”

“Well, as I was saying, I—”

“For God’s sake!” Hendris jerked to his feet from where he sat against the inner hull. “Do you have to talk such rubbish at a time like this?” He gestured towards the vision port. “What’s going to happen to us?”

“Steady, Hendris,” warned the engineer. “No sense in flying off the handle.”

“You—” Anger twisted the face of the geologist. “If you’d done your job properly we wouldn’t be in this mess. Instead of f servicing the shell you were probably playing cards or drinking or something. I’ll report you for this you incompetent fool! I’ll—”

“Shut up!” Dennison’s voice cracked like a pistol shot in the confines of the cabin. “Shut up and sit down!” He glared at Anders. “That goes for you too!”

“But he said—”

“I heard what he said. Now forget it.”

“Forget it!” Hendris shook his head. “I don’t intend to forget it. Anders is to blame for this and I want him punished for it.” He stared at Dennison. “You’re the commander here, aren’t you? Well, then, do something.”

“I told you to shut up,” gritted Dennison, and something in his eyes, or it may have been the way his big hands clenched into fists, reduced the geologist to stuttering silence. “Now, since you’ve mentioned the matter, and incidentally spoiled the first rest period we’ve had in more than twenty hours, we’ll talk about it.” He looked at Anders. “Report.”

“Right-hand tread sheared and broken. No possibility of repair.” The engineer shrugged. “I’d say that the links broke through metal fatigue. There’s still a lot we don’t know about the effects of this radiation on unshielded metal. Or it may have been the temperature variation, or a combination of both, or we may have passed through a patch of chemicals.” He glowered at the geologist. “What didn’t happen is that I fell down on the servicing. It’s my neck too, you know.”

“I know that; Anders, and no one is blaming you.” Dennison shrugged. “The position is simple. The shell has broken down and we can’t repair it, and so we must get back the best way we can.”

“How?” Hendris didn’t seem to be able to keep his eyes away from the vision port. “On foot?”

“Exactly.”

“Are you insane?” The geologist turned and glared at the commander. “Do you know what conditions are like out there? Do you know what you’re asking?”

“I know.”

“But the temperature! It’s over 650 degrees Fahrenheit three times the boiling point of water, even lead and tin lie in molten puddles. And then there’s the radiation! You don’t know what you’re saying!”

“I know what I’m saying,” said Dennison quietly. “I’ve been on Mercury a little longer than you have, Hendris, about five years longer to be exact, which makes my stay here ten times longer than your own. I know all about the temperature, but the suits will enable us to stand it for a while, and as for the radiation—” He shrugged. “As we can’t do anything about it, it’s not much good worrying about it.”

“A fool’s philosophy,” sneered the geologist. “Anyway, why can’t we radio?”

“How?” Anders jerked his thumb towards the heavens. “With that static machine going full blast? And even without it we could only radio along line-of-sight. No Heavyside layer here, you know, to bounce back the radio waves.”

“Then why can’t we just stay here until send help out from the Station?”

“How long do you think that will be, Hendris?” Dennison shook his head “We’ve been moving on an erratic path—along five degrees of arc. Even if they send out a search party now, and there’s no reason why they should, it would take weeks to locate us.” He nodded towards the air tanks and stores. “We’ve just about supplies to last us for another five days.”

“They will find us before then.”

“You think so?” He shrugged. “Personally I doubt it.”

“But they must get worried about us,” insisted Hendris. “They just can’t send out a party and forget all about them. Someone must know what happened and do something about it.”

“Look, Hendris,” said Anders with exaggerated patience, “Mercury isn’t Earth, you know. We can’t keep in contact by radio, and yet the planet must be explored and charted. Normally there isn’t any danger out on the day side, except from heat and radiation, that is, and the shell insulates us against those. It was sheer bad luck that the tread broke; just one of those things. I’ve been here nearly six years now and I’ve only known of one shell that failed to return within three days of scheduled time. Accidents normally just don’t happen.”

“What happened to them?” Hendris licked his lips with a nervous gesture. “The men in the missing shell, I mean.”

Anders shrugged.

“They were never seen again,” said Dennison quietly. “Their shell either. Vehicle and crew simply vanished.” He rose. “But we won’t vanish. We’re going to get back to the Station.”

“By walking?” Hendris didn’t trouble to hide his sneer.

“Yes,” said Dennison sharply. “Or do you know of a better way?”

“Not all of us need go,” whispered the geologist. “One of us could stay behind, the supplies would last one man fifteen days, long enough for help to arrive from the Station.” He looked pleadingly at the commander. “That makes sense, doesn’t it?”

“It does.”

“I suppose that you want to be the one to stay behind,” sneered Anders. “Live it out in luxury while we sweat to get help. You yellow swine! Who the hell do you think you are?”

“Take it easy, Anders!” Dennison stared at the geologist. “Are you scared, Hendris?”

“Yes. Yes, I’m scared and I don’t mind admitting it. The plain out there, worn to dust by countless years of heat and radiation. That sun, all swolle. . .