Page, too. The damn fool probably would try to sneak out and capture some Candles and then there’d be all hell to pay.
Funny, too, how Knut’s radios, both in his suit and in the jumper, had gone dead. Blasted out, as if they had been raked by a surge of energy. Knut couldn’t explain it, wouldn’t try. Just shrugged his shoulders. Funny things always were happening on Mercury.
Craig gave up trying to sleep, slid his feet into slippers and walked across the room to the port. With a flip of his hand he raised the shutter and stared out.
Candles were rolling around. Suddenly one of them materialized into a monstrous whisky bottle, lifted in the air, tilted, liquid pouring to the ground.
Craig chuckled. That would be either Old Creepy bemoaning the loss of that last bottle or Rastus sneaking off to where he’d hid it to take another nip.
A furtive tap came on the door, and Craig wheeled. For a tense moment he crouched, listening, as if expecting an attack. Then he laughed softly to himself. He was jumpy, and no fooling. Maybe what he needed was a drink.
Again the tap, more insistent, but still furtive.
«Come in,» Craig called.
Old Creepy sidled into the room. «I hoped you wasn’t asleep,» he said.
«What is it, Creepy?» And even as he spoke, Craig felt himself going tense again. Nerves all shot to hell.
Creepy hitched forward.
«Knut,» he whispered. «Knut beat me at checkers. Six times hand running! I didn’t have a chance!»
Craig’s laugh exploded in the room.
«But I could always beat him before,» the old man insisted. «I even let him beat me every so often to keep him interested so he would play with me. And tonight I was all set to take him to a cleaning—»
Creepy’s face twisted, his mustache quivering.
«And that ain’t all, by cracky. I felt, somehow, that Knut had changed and—»
Craig walked close to the old man, grasped him by the shoulder. «I know,» he said. «I know just how you felt.» Again he was remembering how the hair had crawled upon his skull as he talked to Knut just a while ago.
Creepy nodded, pale eyes blinking, Adam’s apple bobbing.
Craig spun on his heel, snatched up his shirt, started peeling off his pajama coat.
«Creepy,» he rasped, «you go down to that control room. Get a gun and lock yourself in. Stay there until I get back. And don’t let anyone come in!»
He fixed the old man with a stare. «You understand. Don’t let anyone get in! Use your gun if you are forced to use it. But see no one touches those controls!»
Creepy’s eyes bugged and he gulped. «Is there going to be trouble?» he quavered.
«I don’t know,» snapped Craig, «but I’m going to find out.»
Down in the garage, Craig stared angrily at the empty stall.
Page’s jumper was gone!
Grumbling with rage, Craig walked to the oxygen-tank rack. The lock was undamaged, and he inserted the key. The top snapped up and revealed the tanks—all of them, nestling in rows, still attached to the recharger lines.
Almost unbelieving, Craig stood there, looking at the tanks.
All of them were there. That meant Page had started out in the jumper with insufficient oxygen. It meant the man would die out on the blistering wastes of Mercury. That he might go mad and leave his jumper and wander into the desert, a raving maniac, like the man they’d found out near the Twilight station.
Craig swung about, away from the tanks, and then stopped, thoughts spinning in his brain. There wasn’t any use of hunting Page. The damn fool probably was dead by now. Sheer suicide, that was what it was. Sheer lunacy. And he had warned him, too!
And he, Craig, had work to do. Something had happened out there at the space warp. He had to lay those tantalizing suspicions that rummaged through his mind. There were some things he had to be sure about. He didn’t have time to go hunting a man who was already dead, a damn fool who had committed suicide. The man was nuts to start with. Anyone who thought he could capture Candles—
Savagely, Craig closed one of the line valves, screwed shut the tank valve, disconnected the coupling and lifted the tank out of the rack. The tank was heavy. It had to be heavy to stand a pressure of two hundred atmospheres.
As he started for the jumper, Mathilde, the cat, strolled down the ramp from the floor above and walked between his legs. Craig stumbled and almost fell, recovered his balance with a mighty effort and cursed Mathilde with a fluency born of practice.
«Me-ow-ow-ow,» said Mathilde conversationally.
There is something unreal about the Sunward side of Mercury, an abnormality that is sensed rather than seen.
There the Sun is nine times larger than seen from Earth, and the thermometer never registers under six hundred fifty degrees Fahrenheit.
Under that terrific heat, accompanied by blasting radiations hurled out by the Sun, men must wear photocell space suits, must ride photocell cars and live in the power center which in itself is little more than a mighty photocell. For electric power can be disposed of, while heat and radiation often cannot be.
There the rock and soil have been crumbled into dust under the lashing of heat and radiations. There the horizon is near, always looming just ahead, like an ever-present brink.
But it is not these things that make the planet so alien. Rather, it is the strange distortion of lines, a distortion that one sometimes thinks he can see, but is never sure. Perhaps the very root of that alien sense is the fact that the Sun’s mass makes a straight line an impossibility, a stress that bends magnetic fields and stirs up the very structure of space itself.
Curt Craig felt that strangeness of Mercury as he zoomed across the dusty plain. The puddle jumper splashed through a small molten pool, spraying it out in sizzling sheets. A pool of lead, or maybe tin.
But Craig scarcely noticed. At the back of his brain pounded a thousand half-formed questions. His eyes, edged by crow’s-feet, squinted through the filter shield, following the trail left by Knut’s returning machine. The oxygen tank hissed softly and the atmosphere mixer chuckled. But all else was quiet.
A howl of terror and dismay shattered the quiet. Craig jerked the jumper to a stop, leaped from his seat, hand streaking to his gun.
Crawling from under the metal bunk bolted at the rear of the car was Rastus, the whites of his eyes showing like bull’s-eyes.
«Good Lawd,» he bellowed, «Where is I?»
«You’re in a jumper, sixty miles from the Center,» snapped Craig. «What I want to know is how the hell you got here.»
Rastus gulped and rose to his knees. «You see, it was like this, boss,» he stammered. «I was lookin’ for Mathilde. Dat cat, she run me wild. She sneaks into the refrigerator all the time. I jus’ can’t trust her no place. So when she turned up missin’—»
He struggled to his feet, and as he did so a bottle slipped from his pocket, smashed to bits on the metal floor. Pale-amber liquor ran among the fragments.
Craig eyed the shattered glass. «So you were hunting Mathilde, eh?»
Rastus slumped on the bunk, put his head in his hands. «Ain’t no use lying’ to you, boss,» he acknowledged. «Never gets away with it. I was havin’ me a drink. Just a little nip. And I fell asleep.»
«You hid the bottle you swiped from Creepy in the jumper,» declared Craig flatly, «and you drank yourself to sleep.»
«Can’t seem to help it,» Rastus moaned. «‘Ol’ debbil’s got me. Can’t keep my hands off of a bottle, somehow. Ol’ Mercury, he done dat to me. Ol’ debbil planet. Nothin’ as it should be. Ol’ Man Sun pullin’ the innards out of space. Playin’ around with things until they ain’t the same—»
Craig nodded, almost sympathetically. That was the hell of it. Nothing ever was the same on Mercury. Because of the Sun’s tremendous mass, light was bent, space was warped and eternally threatening to shift, basic laws required modification. The power of two magnets would not always be the same, the attraction between two electrical charges would be changed.