The Catalyst

by John Russell Fearn, Vargo Statten

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

Synopsis

The planet Mercury. Forty million miles from the Sun, following his eccentric orbit, one side of him solid with the frost of untold cycles of time, the other molten whereon metals boiled and sizzled in the incredible heat of the sun. A world utterly dead, a terror-planet, but such is the spirit of adventure in Man that even here he was exploring...

Release date: September 30, 2015

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 83

Sample

The planet Mercury. Forty million miles from the Sun, following his eccentric orbit, one side of him solid with the frost of untold cycles of time; the other molten whereon metals boiled and sizzled in the incredible heat of the sun. A world utterly dead, a terror-planet, but such is the spirit of adventure in Man that even here he was exploring.

Two figures, clumsy in their heavy space suits with transparent hoods, their boots weighted to produce a gravity equivalent to Earth-normal, were moving slowly along the “Terminator Line”—that roughly defined area across the centre of the wobbling little world where eternal night and eternal day were divided. A division no more than a mile wide, the barrier between space-cold and solar fury. It extended before the two explorers as a zig-zag track, raised from the rest of the planet into a ridge. Upon it the shadows of towering rocks moved constantly as the planet swayed in its orbit and allowed first a little, then a lot of sunshine to spill over.

“Of all the hell-fired worlds to come to, Nan, this has them all licked!”

The foremost of the two figures paused for a moment on the ridge and looked about him. The figure to his rear also halted and surveyed. Scott Andrews and his wife Nancy had in their ten years since 1970, when they had been appointed chief investigators of the interplanetary deeps, been the pioneers of both Mars and Venus—upon which colony civilisations of Earth were already sprouting—but they had so far not encountered a world so inhospitable as this one, the nearest to the sun.

“Hell-fired it may be,” Nan answered through her audiophone, “but I can’t see it matters since we get paid for it.”

“Money down the drain,” Scott growled. “Who could ever make use of a world like this? It’s dead—scalded and frozen, without a vestige of atmosphere and a featherweight gravity. Just look at it!”

Nan was already doing so. Her gaze travelled back to the space machine in the gully at the far end of the “Terminator Line”, across the frost-white plain behind it, then over to the blinding argency of the rocks where they caught the sunlight. So far neither she nor Scott had looked at the region where the sun shone: they had formed their own opinions from the glare as to what kind of a hell was raging only a mile away.

And overhead the empty depths, the coal black abysses with their multimillions of harshly glittering stars. Infinitely far away was a green planet—Earth. There was security, peace from a terror world such as this.

“Okay,” Scott murmured presently into his transmitter. “We’ll go to the end of the ledge, take our movie record, and then get back. This place is giving me the jitters.”

He began moving once more, going higher up the slope, pausing ever and again to start up the movie camera, or else to take readings from the instruments at his waist. When he reached a higher vantage point he stopped, jerking his face away for a moment as he found himself staring unexpectedly upon the sunward side of Mercury. Nan joined him, her eyes turned away from the savage solar glare. Then, a button dropping dark shields over their helmet visors they dared to look again on Mercury’s daylit hemisphere.

It was awe-inspiring. Metal was bubbling turgidly like a sea of mud as far as they could see, and where this degree of furious heat had not been reached the rocks were split into jagged spires from the eternal blaze. The Sun itself, hanging only forty million miles away across the gulf, was enormous. His magnetic field was bending even the rays of light so that he seemed curiously oblong, the mighty flames of his prominences cascading into the depths.

It was only a brief look these two Earth beings allowed themselves, but it was quite sufficient for them to grasp the stupendous majesty of Nature; then they were on their way again, thankful for the rocks to hide them from the Sun.

It was when they were nearing the end of the Terminator Line that Scott paused and stooped, then he turned to his wife, his gloved hand extended. In his palm reposed a heaped-up pile of what seemed to be glittering glass.

“One of the consolations of space travel,” came his dry voice. “Pure crystalline carbon, produced by the fusion of heat and cold at this one particular point.”

“Diamonds!” Nan gasped, staring at them.

“Uh-huh—diamonds. And we’re up to our ankles in them. Take your pick. The Interplanetary Code says that the first people to come upon an object of wealth—or some such legal jargon—is entitled to cash in. That isn’t quite the wording, but it amounts to the same thing. Take all you like.”

Nan did not need telling twice. Her woman’s soul was more stirred by the vision of diamonds for the picking up than was Scott’s. Nevertheless, between them, they filled their specimen box nearly to the top with the uncut gems, leaving just enough room for whatever other specimens they might yet need to take away for examination back to Earth.

“Always come for more diamonds if we need them,” Scott said, as the girl looked longingly about her. “We’ve enough here to make us the richest people on Earth—after the usual Government percentage which is likely to be heavy. As for ordinary specimens, there just don’t seem to be any.”

In this he was correct. The total sterility of Mercury was more than apparent when they had come to the end of their investigation. Nothing could grow on a world devoid of air and split into such vastly contrasting hemispheres.

“All we can do is take a sample of the rock of which the planet is composed,” Scott said at length, and with a pair of clamps he lifted up a piece of rock, rather like a cinder, and dropped it in the specimen box on top of the diamonds. This done, he and the girl returned to their space machine and closed the airlock.

Once their space suits were removed they both heaved sighs of relief—as indeed they always did after an exploration of a strange world. Every time they went with their lives in their hands—and loved it.

They now stood revealed as two young people of the highly civilised Earth of 1980, neither of them yet thirty and with all the courage and energy that is the natural heritage of youth. Scott was tall, craggy-faced, and good humoured, with black hair and grey eyes. Nancy was only a trifle over five feet, but well built with auburn hair and green eyes. The surprising thing to them was that they had ever found time to get married considering the nature of their professions. It had in fact been exploration which had brought them together in the first instance—close to the shores of one of Venus’s chlorine oceans.

“Probably the shortest exploration trip we’ve yet made,” Scott said, turning to the specimen box and putting it away in the locker. “And it also seems to me that when we get back to Earth we’re due for a holiday. Does it occur to you, Nan, that we’ve never even had time for a honeymoon? We’ve been on these confounded assignments from the day we got married.”

“It’s occurred to me, yes,” Nan admitted, looking through the porthole, “but I’ve enjoyed every minute of exploration. Never knowing what’s going to happen. Where do you suppose we’ll be sent next?”

“No idea. Probably the Interplanetary Council will think up the bright idea of sending us to the outer depths. Jupiter, Uranus, Saturn——Who knows?”

Moving to the control panel he switched on the short-wave radio and waited the necessary lapse of time whilst his signal fled across the void to the far distant Earth. Then at length came the answer, warped with the magnetic fields created by the Sun’s extreme nearness.

“Come in, Red 79, you are being received, over.”

“Mercutian expedition complete,” Scott announced. “Please report to the Interplanetary Council that we have found little of interest. Am making out a full dossier on our findings which will be ready by the time we reach Earth.”

“We found tons of diamonds anyway!” Nan exclaimed excitedly. “Beauties—just for the asking and——”

Scott cut off the microphone and frowned at her. Then in a few seconds the reply came through.

“Message received, Red 79, and will be handed on to the correct quarter. Best of luck. Out.”

Scott switched off and gave a glare as the girl still looked at him in surprise.

“You fathead!” he reproved her. “I know those diamonds have got you all excited, but that’s no reason to go chattering about them over the ether. Don’t you realise that there are criminals all over the System these days who tap these radio wave-bands in the hope of learning something. Mentioning diamonds for the asking is just sticking your chin out a mile.”

“Oh!” Nan looked under her eyes. “Sorry, Scott—I’d forgotten for the moment.”

“Okay, forget it. The radio operator is trustworthy enough and he won’t pass that news on in his official report. We can only hope that nobody else was listening in somewhere.”

Nan gave a nod and, still looking contrite, crossed to the pressure-rack as Scott motioned towards it. Strapping herself down she waited for the moment when the projectile would start to take off into the void, always the most sickening and nerve-straining ordeal of all.

“Right!” Scott muttered, deep down in the air cushions of the driving seat. “Back home we go.”

He closed the switches and the jets immediately came into action. Swiftly the projectile lifted from Mercury’s inhospitable surface and began to climb swiftly towards the stars.

Calvin T. Munro was in his library when the visitor was shown in by the manservant. Calvin T. Munro was known personally by all the financiers and big-shots in the country, and photographically by millions of everyday men and women. His activities rang. . .