Planet in Peril

1. Flaming Doom!

The richest and most powerful Earth colony on Mercury is called Belt City. Once a lawless, rip-roaring frontier town, filled with saloons and bawdy houses and dope-dens, where a man's life wasn’t worth a plugged credit unless he was handy with his power guns, Belt City is now staid, quiet and respectable, and the center of the Colonial Government, with jurisdiction over all citizens, colonists and the queer, gold-eyed, mahogany-skinned natives themselves.

Tiny, heat-baked Mercury, smallest of the Nine Worlds, circles perilously close to the mighty sun itself, and so slowly that it always presents the same side to that cosmic furnace of intolerable blazing heat. The Sunside, as it is called, is of course uninhabitable, hotter than the interior of a blast furnace ... a strange and awesome desert of parched and crumbling rocks, savage gorges and rivers of lava, where lakes of liquid silver and pools of molten copper make inhospitable this region, where men can venture but briefly, and then only under heavy heatproof energy shields, to mine and prospect the pure metals needed to feed the insatiable maw of Earth's industries.

A weird contrast is the second hemisphere of this diminutive world— the Darkside, whose face is ever turned to the cold, uncaring stars ... a frozen tundra region of crawling glaciers, whose soil is eternally locked under a thick sheath of mile-deep ice. The only hospitable region on Mercury is that thin zone of temperate climate which exists between the two extremes: the Twilight Belt, it is called, and it is there in the Belt that the first explorers and colonists and prospectors from Earth reared Belt City.

While, as already stated, most of Belt City has long outlived its scarlet past and its reputation for murder, iniquity and greed, the last lingering remnants of the old days cluster in the rotting slums down near the spaceport, where decaying sheds and hovels of sheet-plastic and corrugated tin slump into ruin from decades of neglect. There, narrow, garbage-choked alleys of raw muddy dirt meander between rows of gambling dens, flophouses, wineshops, cheat hotels, and even less reputable establishments.

It was from one of these, the Golden Horseshoe, that the first recorded victim of the Fire Troll emerged into the fresh evening breeze. His name was Wild Bill Borden, and he was pure Texan American, all six feet and five inches of him—beefy, crafty, strong as a bull, and dangerous as a rattler who has just been stepped on.

Wild Bill was never more dangerous than when he had taken aboard a bellyful of his favorite beverage, a potent brew of what purported to be genuine Kentucky sourmash bourbon, and went under the label of "01’ Space Ranger" ... although it was greatly to be doubted if the powerful liquor had ever seen Kentucky, or, for that matter, Earth itself.

He was a rare metals prospector, was Wild Bill, and one of the best. With his iron strength and granite endurance, he could toil under the blistering blaze of the gigantic Sun—which filled nearly the entire sky of the Sunside, from horizon to horizon—longer than most Earthling miners could manage, even with triple-strength heat-shields.

Slipping a little in a puddle of rancid mud as he came off the porch of the saloon and stepped down to the crooked alley of beaten earth that served as a "street," Wild Bill cursed and regained his balance with some little difficulty. He leaned against the porch rail for a few moments, until the scenery stopped revolving around and around him like a merry-go-round run out of control, then went lurching up the street towards The Nine Worlds, where he had booked a room for the night.

Along the way he paused to aim a kick and a cringing cur gnawing some semi-edible snack from amidst a heap of rotting garbage. The creature hissed and snapped at him, but scuttled aside and darted into an inky-black walk-through between the buildings on its six scaly legs. What he had mistaken for an Earthly mutt thus proved to be one of the large lizard-things which the native Mercurians tamed as house-pets.

Wild Bill cursed again, damning all the slinking, crafty, vindictive natives, with their teakwood hides, eyes like gold coins, and dour, humorless ways. The Earthlings and the native Mercurians lived together under an uneasy, ramshackle truce, and old suspicions and distrusts—deep-rooted and of long standing—still caused a lot of tension between the races. However, the Earthside colonists needed servants to tidy their bungalows over in the more fashionable quarter of Belt City, the cafes and hotel kitchens needed busboys, dish-washers, and cheap help to carry out the garbage, scrub the floors, and perform such menial tasks as most Earthlings would not care to soil their hands with ... so the Mercurians swallowed their ancient pride, concealed their cold contempt for these outworlders, and accepted their money.

These thoughts were perhaps drifting hazily through Wild Bill's whiskey-soaked brain as he turned around a corner into the black mouth of a side-alley which led to the sleazy little hotel which he had honored that night with his patronage, when he stepped out of the waking world and directly into nightmare—

Something taller than a man, with a huge, bulging bald pate crowned with lyre-covered horns, its snarling face all blazing red eyes and curved beak like a parrot's, stepped into his path and lifted hideous, smoking, white-hot four-clawed paws to clutch him by neck and shoulder. As the awful heat of those burning paws seared Bill's dingy, faded coveralls black and smouldering, the hapless Earthling screamed like a stallion under the gelding wire.

But such was his superhuman strength and endurance, that Wild Bill clung to consciousness just long enough to whisper an enigmatic phrase to the ear of the first medic to reach his side ... a weird, uncanny phrase which soon adorned the headlines of the front page of every newsfax in the Nine Worlds:

"... A Fire Troll got me! ... Gawd in heaven, it was a Fire Troll ..."