Sunrise on Mercury

Nine million miles to the sunward of Mercury, with the Leverrier swinging into the series of spirals that would bring it down on the solar system’s smallest world, Second Astrogator Lon Curtis decided to end his life.

Curtis had been lounging in a webfoam cradle waiting for the landing to be effected; his job in the operation was over, at least until the Leverrier’s landing jacks touched Mercury’s blistered surface. The ship’s efficient sodium-coolant system negated the efforts of the swollen sun visible through the rear screen. For Curtis and his seven shipmates, no problems presented themselves; they had only to wait while the autopilot brought the ship down for man’s second landing on Mercury.

Flight Commander Harry Ross was sitting near Curtis when he noticed the sudden momentary stiffening of the astrogator’s jaws. Curtis abruptly reached for the control nozzle. From the spinnerets that had spun the webfoam came a quick green burst of dissolving fluorochrene; the cradle vanished. Curtis stood up.

“Going somewhere?” Ross asked.

Curtis’s voice was harsh. “Just—just taking a walk.”

Ross returned his attention to his microbook for a moment as Curtis walked away. There was the ratchety sound of a bulkhead dog being manipulated, and Ross felt a momentary chill as the cooler air of the superrefrigerated reactor compartment drifted in.

He punched a stud, turning the page. Then—

What the hell is he doing in the reactor compartment?

The autopilot would be controlling the fuel flow, handling it down to the milligram, in a way no human system could. The reactor was primed for the landing, the fuel was stoked, the compartment was dogged shut. No one—least of all a second astrogator—had any business going back there.

Ross had the foam cradle dissolved in an instant, and was on his feet a moment later. He dashed down the companionway and through the open bulkhead door into the coolness of the reactor compartment.

Curbs was standing by the converter door, toying with the release-tripper. As Ross approached, he saw the astrogator get the door open and put one foot to the chute that led downship to the nuclear pile.

“Curtis, you idiot! Get away from there! You’ll kill us all!”

The astrogator turned, looked blankly at Ross for an instant, and drew up his other foot. Ross leaped.

He caught Curtis’ booted foot in his hands, and despite a barrage of kicks from the astrogator’s free boot, managed to drag Curtis off the chute. The astrogator tugged and pulled, attempting to break free. Ross saw the man’s pale cheeks quivering. Curtis had cracked, but thoroughly.

Grunting, Ross yanked Curtis away from the yawning reactor chute and slammed the door shut. He dragged him out into the main section again and slapped him, hard.

“Why’d you want to do that? Don’t you know what your mass would do to the ship if it got into the converter? You know the fuel intake’s been calibrated already; 180 extra pounds and we’d arc right into the sun. What’s wrong with you, Curtis?”

The astrogator fixed unshaking, unexpressive eyes on Ross. “I want to die,” he said simply. “Why couldn’t you let me die?”

He wanted to die. Ross shrugged, feeling a cold tremor run down his back. There was no guarding against this disease.

Just as aqualungers beneath the sea’s surface suffered from l’ivresse des grandes profondeurs—rapture of the deeps—and knew no cure for the strange, depth-induced drunkenness that caused them to remove their breathing tubes fifty fathoms below, so did spacemen run the risk of this nameless malady, this inexplicable urge to self-destruction.

It struck anywhere. A repairman wielding a torch on a recalcitrant strut of an orbiting wheel might abruptly rip open his facemask and drink vacuum; a radioman rigging an antenna on the skin of his ship might suddenly cut his line, fire his directional pistol, and send himself drifting away. Or a second astrogator might decide to climb into the converter.

Psych Officer Spangler appeared, an expression of concern fixed on his smooth pink face. “Trouble?”

Ross nodded. “Curtis. Tried to jump into the fuel chute. He’s got it, Doc.”

Spangler rubbed his cheek and said: “They always pick the best times, dammit. It’s swell having a psycho on a Mercury run.”

“That’s the way it is,” Ross said wearily. “Better put him in stasis till we get home. I’d hate to have him running loose, looking for different ways of doing himself in.”

“Why can’t you let me die?” Curbs asked. His face was bleak. “Why’d you have to stop me?”

“Because, you lunatic, you’d have killed all the rest of us by your fool dive into the converter. Go walk out the airlock if you want to die—but don’t take us with you.”

Spangler glared warningly at him. “Harry—”

“Okay,” Ross said. “Take him away.”

The psychman led Curtis within. The astrogator would be given a tranquillizing injection and locked in an insoluble webfoam jacket for the rest of the journey. There was a chance he could be restored to sanity once they returned to Earth, but Ross knew that the astrogator would go straight for the nearest method of suicide the moment he was released aboard the ship.

Scowling, Ross turned away. A man spends his boyhood dreaming about space, he thought, spends four years at the Academy, and two more making dummy runs. Then he finally gets out where it counts and he cracks up. Curtis was an astrogation machine, not a normal human being; and he had just disqualified himself permanently from the only job he knew how to do.

Ross shivered, feeling chill despite the bloated bulk of the sun filling the rear screen. It could happen to anyone…even him. He thought of Curtis lying in a foam cradle somewhere in the back of the ship, blackly thinking over and over again, I want to die, while Doc Spangler muttered soothing things at him. A human being was really a frail form of life.

Death seemed to hang over the ship; the gloomy aura of Curtis’s suicide-wish polluted the atmosphere.

Ross shook his head and punched down savagely on the signal to prepare for deceleration. Mercury’s sharp globe bobbed up ahead. He spotted it through the front screen.

They were approaching the tiny planet middle-on. He could see the neat division now: the brightness of Sunside, that unapproachable inferno where zinc ran in rivers, and the icy blackness of Darkside, dull with its unlit plains of frozen CO₂.

Down the heart of the planet ran the Twilight Belt, that narrow area of not-cold and not-heat where Sunside and Darkside met to provide a thin band of barely tolerable territory, a ring nine thousand miles in circumference and ten or twenty miles wide.

The Leverrier plunged planetward. Ross allowed his jangled nerves to grow calm. The ship was in the hands of the autopilot; the orbit, of course, was precomputed, and the analogue banks in the drive were serenely following the taped program, bringing the ship towards its destination smack in the middle of—

My God!

Ross went cold from head to toe. The precomputed tape had been fed to the analogue banks—had been prepared by—had been entirely the work of—

Curtis.

A suicidal madman had worked out the Leverrier’s landing program.

Ross began to shake. How easy it would have been, he thought, for death-bent Curtis to work out an orbit that would plant the Leverrier in a smoking river of molten lead—or in the mortuary chill of Darkside.

His false security vanished. There was no trusting the automatic pilot; they’d have to risk a manual landing.

Ross jabbed down on the communicator button. “I want Brainerd,” he said hoarsely.

The first astrogator appeared a few seconds later, peering in curiously. “What goes, Captain?”

“We’ve just carted your assistant Curtis off to the pokey. He tried to jump into the converter.”

Ross nodded. “Attempted suicide. I got to him in time. But in view of the circumstances, I think we’d better discard the tape you had him prepare and bring the ship down manually, yes?”

The first astrogator moistened his lips. “That sounds like a good idea.”

“Damn right it is,” Ross said, glowering.

As the ship touched down Ross thought, Mercury is two hells in one.

It was the cold, ice-bound kingdom of Dante’s deepest pit—and it was also the brimstone empire of another conception. The two met, fire and frost, each hemisphere its own kind of hell.

He lifted his head and flicked a quick glance at the instrument panel above his deceleration cradle. The dials all checked: weight placement was proper, stability 100 per cent, external temperature a manageable 108°F, indicating they had made their descent a little to the sunward of the Twilight Belt’s exact middle. It had been a sound landing.

He snapped on the communicator. “Brainerd?”

“All okay, Captain.”

“Manual landing?”

“I had to,” the astrogator said. “I ran a quick check on Curtis’ tape, and it was all cockeyed. The way he had us coming in, we’d have grazed Mercury’s orbit by a whisker and kept on going straight into the sun. Nice?”

“Very sweet,” Ross said. “But don’t be too hard on the kid. He didn’t want to go psycho. Good landing, anyway. We seem to be pretty close to the center of the Twilight Belt, and that’s where I feel most comfortable.”

He broke the contact and unwebbed himself. Over the shipwide circuit he called all hands fore, double pronto.

The men got there quickly enough—Brainerd first, then Doc Spangler, followed by Accumulator Tech Krinsky and the three other crewmen. Ross waited until the entire group had assembled.

They were looking around curiously for Curtis. Crisply, Ross told them, “Astrogator Curtis is going to miss this meeting. He’s aft in the psycho bin. Luckily, we can shift without him on this tour.”

He waited until the implications of that statement had sunk in. The men seemed to adjust to it well enough, he thought: momentary expressions of dismay, shock, even horror quickly faded from their faces.

“All right,” he said. “Schedule calls for us to put in some thirty-two hours of extravehicular activity on Mercury. Brainerd, how does that check with our location?”

The astrogator frowned and made some mental calculations. “Current position is a trifle to the sunward edge of the Twilight Belt; but as I figure it, the sun won’t be high enough to put the Fahrenheit much above 120 for at least a week. Our suits can handle that temperature with ease.”

“Good. Llewellyn, you and Falbridge break out the radar inflaters and get the tower set up as far to the east as you can go without getting roasted. Take the crawler, but be sure to keep an eye on the thermometer. We’ve only got one heatsuit, and that’s for Krinsky.”

Llewellyn, a thin, sunken-eyed spaceman, shifted uneasily. “How far to the east do you suggest, sir?”

“The Twilight Belt covers about a quarter of Mercury’s surface,” Ross said. “You’ve got a strip forty-seven degrees wide to move around in—but I don’t suggest you go much more than twenty-five miles or so. It starts getting hot after that. And keeps going up.”

Ross turned to Krinsky. In many ways the accumulator tech was the expedition’s key man: it was his job to check the readings on the pair of solar accumulators that had been left here by the first expedition. He was to measure the amount of stress created by solar energies here, so close to the source of radiation, study force-lines operating in the strange magnetic field of the little world, and reprime the accumulators for further testing by the next expedition.

Krinsky was a tall, powerfully built man, the sort of man who could stand up to the crushing weight of a heatsuit almost cheerfully. The heatsuit was necessary for prolonged work in the Sunside zone, where the accumulators were mounted—and even a giant like Krinsky could stand the strain for only a few hours at a time.

“When Llewellyn and Falbridge have the radar tower set up, Krinsky, get into your heatsuit and be ready to move. As soon as we’ve got the accumulator station located, Dominic will drive you as far east as possible and drop you off. The rest is up to you. Watch your step. We’ll be telemetering your readings, but we’d like to have you back alive.”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s about it,” Ross said. “Let’s get rolling.”

Ross’s own job was purely administrative—and as the men of his crew moved busily about their allotted tasks, he realized unhappily that he himself was condemned to temporary idleness. His function was that of overseer; like the conductor of a symphony orchestra, he played no instrument himself and was on hand mostly to keep the group moving in harmony towards the finish.

Everyone was in motion. Now he had only to wait.

Llewellyn and Falbridge departed, riding the segmented, thermo-resistant crawler that had traveled to Mercury in the belly of the Leverrier. Their job was simple: they were to erect the inflatable plastic radar tower out towards the sunward sector. The tower that the first expedition had left had long since librated into a Sunside zone and been liquefied; the plastic base and parabola, covered with a light reflective surface of aluminum, could hardly withstand the searing heat of Sunside.

Out there, it got up to 700° when the sun was at its closest. The eccentricities of Mercury’s orbit accounted for considerable temperature variations on Sunside, but the thermometer never showed lower than 300° out there, even during aphelion. On Darkside, there was less of a temperature range; mostly the temperature hovered not far from absolute zero, and frozen drifts of heavy gases covered the surface of the land.

From where he stood, Ross could see neither Sunside nor Darkside. The Twilight Belt was nearly a thousand miles broad, and as the little planet dipped in its orbit the sun would first slide above the horizon, then slip back. For a twenty-mile strip through the heart of the Belt, the heat of Sunside and the cold of Darkside canceled out into a fairly stable, temperate climate; for five hundred miles on either side, the Twilight Belt gradually trickled towards the areas of extreme cold and raging heat.

It was a strange and forbidding planet. Humans could endure it for only a short time; it was worse than Mars, worse than the Moon. The sort of life capable of living permanently on Mercury was beyond Ross’s powers of imagination. Standing outside the Leverrier in his spacesuit, he nudged the chin control that lowered a sheet of optical glass. He peered first towards Darkside, where he thought he saw a thin line of encroaching black—only illusion, he knew—and then towards Sunside.

In the distance, Llewellyn and Falbridge were erecting the spidery parabola that was the radar tower. He could see the clumsy shape outlined against the sky now—and behind it? A faint line of brightness rimming the bordering peaks? Illusion also, he knew. Brainerd had calculated that the sun’s radiance would not be visible here for a week. And in a week’s time they’d be back on Earth.

He turned to Krinsky. “The tower’s nearly up. They’ll be coming in with the crawler any minute. You’d better get ready to make your trip.”

As the accumulator tech swung up the handholds and into the ship, Ross’s thoughts turned to Curtis. The young astrogator had talked excitedly of seeing Mercury all the way out—and now that they were actually here, Curtis lay in a web of foam deep within the ship, moodily demanding the right to die.

Krinsky returned, now wearing the insulating bulk of the heatsuit over his standard rebreathing outfit. He looked more like a small tank than a man. “Is the crawler approaching, sir?”

“I’ll check.”

Ross adjusted the lensplate in his mask and narrowed his eyes. It seemed to him that the temperature had risen a little. Another illusion? He squinted into the distance.

His eyes picked out the radar tower far off towards Sunside. He gasped.

“Something the matter?” Krinsky asked.

“I’ll say!” Ross squeezed his eyes tight shut and looked again. And—yes—the newly erected radar tower was drooping soggily and beginning to melt. He saw two tiny figures racing madly over the flat, pumice-covered ground to the silvery oblong that was the crawler. And—impossibly—the first glow of an unmistakable brightness was beginning to shimmer on the mountains behind the tower.

The sun was rising—a week ahead of schedule!

Ross ran back into the ship, followed by the lumbering figure of Krinsky. In the airlock, obliging mechanical hands descended to ease him out of his spacesuit; signaling to Krinsky to keep the heatsuit on, he dashed through into the main cabin.

“Brainerd? Brainerd! Where in hell are you?”

The senior astrogator appeared, looking puzzled. “What’s up, Captain?”

“Look out the screen,” Ross said in a strangled voice. “Look at the radar tower!”

“It’s melting,” Brainerd said, astonished. “But that’s—that’s—”

“I know. It’s impossible.” Ross glanced at the instrument panel. External temperature had risen to 112°—a jump of four degrees. And as he watched it glided up to 114°.

It would take a heat of at least 500° to melt the radar tower that way. Ross squinted at the screen and saw the crawler come swinging dizzily towards them: Llewellyn and Falbridge were still alive, then—though they probably had had a good cooking out there. The temperature outside the ship was up to 116°. It would probably be near 200° by the time the two men returned.

Angrily, Ross whirled to face the astrogator. “I thought you were bringing us down in the safety strip,” he snapped. “Check your figures again and find out where the hell we really are. Then work out a blasting orbit, fast: That’s the sun coming up over those hills.”

The temperature had reached 120°. The ship’s cooling system would be able to keep things under control and comfortable until about 250°; beyond that, there was danger of an overload. The crawler continued to draw near. It was probably hellish inside the little land car, Ross thought.

His mind weighed alternatives. If the external temperature went much over 250°, he would run the risk of wrecking the ship’s cooling system by waiting for the two in the crawler to arrive. There was some play in the system, but not much. He decided he’d give them until it hit 275° to get back. If they didn’t make it by then, he’d have to take off without them. It was foolish to try to save two lives at the risk of six. External temperature had hit 130°. Its rate of increase was jumping rapidly.

The ship’s crew knew what was going on now. Without the need of direct orders from Ross, they were readying the Leverrier for an emergency blastoff.

The crawler inched forward. The two men weren’t much more than ten miles away now; and at an average speed of forty miles an hour they’d be back within fifteen minutes. Outside the temperature was 133°. Long fingers of shimmering sunlight stretched towards them from the horizon.

Brainerd looked up from his calculation. “I can’t work it. The damned figures don’t come out.”

“Huh?”

“I’m trying to compute our location—and I can’t do the arithmetic. My head’s all foggy.”

What the hell. This was where a captain earned his pay, Ross thought. “Get out of the way,” he said brusquely. “Let me do it.”

He sat down at the desk and started figuring. He saw Brainerd’s hasty notations scratched out everywhere. It was as if the astrogator had totally forgotten how to do his job.

Let’s see, now. If we’re—

He tapped out figures on the little calculator. But as he worked he saw that what he was doing made no sense. His mind felt bleary and strange; he couldn’t seem to handle the elementary computations at all. Looking up, he said, “Tell Krinsky to get down there and make himself ready to help those men out of the crawler when they show up. They’re probably half cooked.”

Temperature 146°. He looked down at the calculator. Damn: it shouldn’t be that hard to do simple trigonometry, should it?

Doc Spangler appeared. “I cut Curtis free,” he announced. “He isn’t safe during takeoff in that cradle.”

From within came a steady mutter. “Just let me die…just let me die…”

“Tell him he’s likely to get his wish,” Ross murmured. “If I can’t manage to work out a blastoff orbit we’re all going to fry right here.”

“How come you’re doing it? What’s the matter with Brainerd?”

“Choked up. Couldn’t make sense of his own figures. And come to think of it, I’m not doing so well myself.”

Fingers of fog seemed to wrap around his mind. He glanced at the dial. Temperature 152° outside. That gave the boys in the crawler 123° to get back here…or was it 321°? He was confused, utterly bewildered.

Doc Spangler looked peculiar too. The psych officer wore an odd frown. “I feel very lethargic suddenly,” Spangler declared. “I know I really should get back to Curtis, but—”

The madman was keeping up a steady babble inside. The part of Ross’s mind that still could think clearly realized that if left unattended Curtis was capable of doing almost anything.

Temperature 158°.

The crawler seemed to be getting nearer. On the horizon the radar tower was melting into a crazy shambles.

There was a shriek. “Curtis!” Ross yelled, his mind hurriedly returning to awareness. He ran aft, with Spangler close behind.

Too late.

Curtis lay on the floor in a bloody puddle. He had found a pair of shears somewhere.

Spangler bent. “He’s dead.”

“Dead. Of course.” Ross’s brain felt totally clear now. At the moment of Curtis’ death the fog had lifted. Leaving Spangler to attend to the body, he returned to the astrogation desk and glanced through the calculations he had been doing. Worthless. An idiotic mess.

With icy clarity he started again, and this time succeeded in determining their location. They had come down better than three hundred miles sunward of where they had thought they were landing. The instruments hadn’t lied—but someone’s eyes had. The orbit that Brainerd had so solemnly assured him was a “safe” one was actually almost as deadly as the one Curtis had computed.

He looked outside. The crawler had almost reached the ship. Temperature 167° out there. There was plenty of time. They would make it with a few minutes to spare, thanks to the warning they had received from the melting radar tower.

But why had it happened? There was no answer to that.

Gigantic in his heatsuit, Krinsky brought Llewellyn and Falbridge aboard. They peeled out of their spacesuits and wobbled around unsteadily for a moment before they collapsed. They were as red as newly boiled lobsters.

“Heat prostration,” Ross said. “Krinsky, get them into takeoff cradles. Dominic, you in your suit yet?”

The spaceman appeared at the airlock entrance and nodded.

“Good. Get down there and drive the crawler into the hold. We can’t afford to leave it here. Double-quick, and then we’re blasting off. Brainerd, that new orbit ready?”

“Yes, sir.”

The thermometer grazed 200. The cooling system was beginning to suffer—but it would not have to endure much more agony. Within minutes the Leverrier was lifting from Mercury’s surface—minutes ahead of the relentless advance of the sun. The ship swung into a parking orbit not far above the planet’s surface.

As they hung there, catching their breaths, just one thing occupied Ross’s mind: why? Why had Brainerd’s orbit brought them down in a danger zone instead of the safety strip? Why had both he and Brainerd been unable to compute a blasting pattern, the simplest of elementary astrogation techniques? And why had Spangler’s wits utterly failed him—just long enough to let the unhappy Curtis kill himself?

Ross could see the same question reflected on everyone’s face: why?

He felt an itchy feeling at the base of his skull. And suddenly an image forced its way across his mind and he had the answer.

He saw a great pool of molten zinc, lying shimmering between two jagged crests somewhere on Sunside. It had been there thousands of years; it would be there thousands, perhaps millions, of years from now.

Its surface quivered. The sun’s brightness upon the pool was intolerable even to the mind’s eye.

Radiation beat down on the pool of zinc—the sun’s radiation, hard and unending. And then a new radiation, an electromagnetic emanation in a different part of the spectrum, carrying a meaningful message:

I want to die.

The pool of zinc stirred fretfully with sudden impulses of helpfulness.

The vision passed as quickly as it came. Stunned, Ross looked up. The expressions on the six faces surrounding him confirmed what he could guess.

“You all felt it too,” he said.

Spangler nodded, then Krinsky and the rest of them.

“Yes,” Krinsky said. “What the devil was it?”

Brainerd turned to Spangler. “Are we all nuts, Doc?”

The psych officer shrugged. “Mass hallucination…collective hypnosis…”

“No, Doc.” Ross leaned forward. “You know it as well as I do. That thing was real. It’s down there, out on Sunside.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that wasn’t any hallucination we had. That’s something alive down there—or as close to alive as anything on Mercury can be.” Ross’s hands were shaking. He forced them to subside. “We’ve stumbled over something very big,” he said.

Spangler stirred uneasily. “Harry—”

“No, I’m not out of my head! Don’t you see—that thing down there, whatever it is, is sensitive to our thoughts! It picked up Curtis’ godawful caterwauling the way a radar set grabs electromagnetic waves. His were the strongest thoughts coming through; so it acted on them and did its damnedest to help Curtis get what he wanted.”

“You mean by fogging our minds and deluding us into thinking we were in safe territory, when actually we were right near sunrise territory?”

“But why would it go to all that trouble?” Krinsky objected. “If it wanted to help poor Curtis kill himself, why didn’t it just fix things so we came down right in Sunside. We’d cook a lot quicker that way.”

“Originally it did,” Ross said. “It helped Curtis set up a landing orbit that would have dumped us into the sun. But then it realized that the rest of us didn’t want to die. It picked up the conflicting mental emanations of Curtis and the rest of us, and arranged things so that he’d die and we wouldn’t.” He shivered. “Once Curtis was out of the way, it acted to help the surviving crew members reach safety. If you’ll remember, we were all thinking and moving a lot quicker the instant Curtis was dead.”

“Damned if that’s not so,” Spangler said. “But—”

“What I want to know is, do we go back down?” Krinsky asked. “If that thing is what you say it is, I’m not so sure I want to go within reach of it again. Who knows what it might make us do this time?”

“It wants to help us,” Ross said stubbornly. “It’s not hostile. You aren’t afraid of it, are you, Krinsky? I was counting on you to go out in the heatsuit and try to find it.”

“Not me!”

Ross scowled. “But this is the first intelligent life-form man has ever found in the solar system. We can’t just run away and hide.” To Brainerd he said, “Set up an orbit that’ll take us back down again—and this time put us down where we won’t melt.”

“I can’t do it, sir,” Brainerd said flatly.

“Can’t?”

“Won’t. I think the safest thing is for us to return to Earth at once.”

“I’m ordering you.”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

Ross looked at Spangler. Llewellyn. Falbridge. Right around the circle. Fear was evident on every face. He knew what each of the men was thinking.

I don’t want to go back to Mercury.

Six of them. One of him. And the helpful thing below.

They had outnumbered Curtis seven to one—but Curtis’ mind had radiated an unmixed death-wish. Ross knew he could never generate enough strength of thought to counteract the fear-driven thoughts of the other six.

Mutiny.

Somehow he did not care to speak the word aloud. Sometimes there were cases where a superior officer might legitimately be removed from command for the common good, and this might be one. of them, he knew. But yet—

The thought of fleeing without even pausing to examine the creature below was intolerable to him. But there was only one ship, and either he or the six others would have to be denied.

Yet the pool had contrived to satisfy both the man who wished to die and those who wished to stay alive. Now, six wanted to return—but must the voice of the seventh be ignored?

You’re not being fair to me, Ross thought, directing his angry outburst towards the planet below. I want to see you. I want to study you. Don’t let them drag me back to Earth so soon.

When the Leverrier returned to Earth a week later, the six survivors of the Second Mercury Expedition all were able to describe in detail how a fierce death-wish had overtaken Second Astrogator Curtis and driven him to suicide. But not one of them could recall what had happened to Flight Commander Ross, or why the heatsuit had been left behind on Mercury.