The Secret of the Ninth Planet by Donald A. Wollheim (large ebook reader TXT) 📖

into the rounded door of a building. Its architecture was not like that of the other buildings. Inside the chambers were dark.

"These creatures have no lights," remarked Boulton. "They must use their feelers indoors."

"Ah, but look," said Burl, reaching out a hand to a little globe set on a pole in the floor. He touched it and the globe lighted up. "The Sun-tap builders needed light and put in their own fixtures here. I recognize their style."

The five men followed a hallway that sloped down into the ground, and came out into a large underground cellar—several hundred feet wide. It was the Sun-tap station. There were the now-familiar globes and rods, the force fields, the controls, the pedestals and the ends of the rotating masts.

They made their recordings, and Burl got ready to turn off the station. Ferrati and Haines uncrated a small, tactical atomic bomb they had carried with them—one of the smallest perfected by the Army during the past half dozen years. They laid it down in the center of the equipment and set the timer for a half hour away.

Boulton found the alarm globe and prepared to blow it up. Then Burl took the control panel and switched off the station. They heard the thud of a crumbling mast. Boulton fired a shot into the alarm globe which had begun to turn red. It smashed.

"All right, men," snapped Haines, "let's go!"

As they moved toward the exit, Boulton hesitated. "Hey," he said, "there's one globe still in action!"

The others turned in time to see Boulton stride over to a very small globe which was glowing pale yellow against the wall near the doorway.

The Marine captain drew his pistol, aimed and fired. The globe burst, but as it did so, a level bolt of yellow light shot back along the path of the bullet. For a split second, Boulton was outlined in yellow fire. There was a flash like lightning.

Each man reached for his weapons, but the underground station remained dark and dead. Their flashlights turned on Boulton. The stocky Marine was lying on the ground.

They ran to him. "He's alive!" cried Haines, as he saw that Boulton was still breathing, his breath whistling back and forth through the oxygen mask. Quickly Haines examined him. "His heart's all right. He's just been knocked unconscious."

Ferrati and Haines picked up the captain by his arms and legs. Though he would have been heavy on Earth, his weight on Mars was very slight, and each man knew he was capable of carrying great loads with his Earth-attuned muscles. Then, in single file, they left the cellar and came out of the doorway of the building.

As they emerged they were stopped short. Surrounding them was a tremendous and growing crowd of Martians. A solid wall of shell-like faces stared at them, and a small forest of short antennae waved and flickered in great agitation.

As they pushed their way with great difficulty toward the jeep, the crowd began to sway, as if in anger. Now, for the first time, they heard the creatures make a noise—a sort of humming and buzzing like angered bees.

"They see us now," muttered Haines. "I don't like it."

"The Sun-tap builders did it," said Burl. "They must have booby-trapped the place against intruders. The globe that got Boulton must have set off some sort of vibration that enrages these creatures. And it looks as if we're the victims."

As they reached their jeep, the encircling mass of Martians moved forward. The humming rose to a higher pitch, and then the mob, with the berserk ferocity of a swarm of bees, lunged toward them.

Chapter 12.
At Rope's End

With Boulton lying across the back seat, the four men acted simultaneously. Thinking only of self-defense, they drew their pistols and fired point-blank into the monsters attacking them. As the men emptied their guns, the Martians in front stumbled, fell, rolled over, or began to run aimlessly as the heavy slugs tore through them.

They were not easy to kill—which was to be expected of creatures without much of a central consciousness—but on the other hand, once struck or injured, they seemed to lose contact with their fellows and to act wholly without direction. They plunged wildly into each other, and before the men in the jeep had finished their barrage, the clearing was a milling, confused mob. Body clashed against body, legs scrambled under legs, and the angry buzz was now lost amid the clattering and banging of shell against shell.

Haines slid into the front seat behind the steering wheel, stepped on the gas, and drove toward a momentary gap in the mob. The jeep tore through, raced around the corner, and headed down an empty street. Crouching in the back, Burl, Russ, and Ferrati hastily reloaded.

"We can't let ourselves get stopped, or even hole up. That A-bomb's going to go off in about twenty minutes, and we'd better be back at the ship before then," cried Russ.

As they bumped along, they noticed that the Martians who came within fifty feet of their jeep suddenly stopped whatever they were doing and turned toward them, hostile. They were like a stick drawn along among bees—as they traveled they left fury in their wake.

"It must be Boulton," Russ yelled to Burl above the roar of their passage. "He must be charged with the irritating vibration."

Burl nodded as he looked back. The Martians had started after them on foot, and could lope fast when they wanted to. "They've got some sort of organized action going," he called to Haines. "I think it's steam carts!"

"The mass mind caught on fast," said Russ. "And look! They're warned in advance now!"

They were nearing the edge of the city, and looming before them, blocking their right-of-way, were two steam carts—big ones carrying a large number of Martians. They were holding metallic rods and instruments in their hand-members.

Ferrati opened a chest built against the back of the seat and took out a light machine gun. Climbing into the front, next to Haines, he kneeled down behind the windshield, raised the gun, and blazed away.

The steam carts suddenly swerved, one after the other, ran wildly into the side of a building, and turned over. The jeep roared past them, raced across the last hundred feet of city paving and out onto the desert. Haines had to slow down to navigate safely the uneven layers of barren soil, rock and sand. Burl holstered his gun and reached across for one of the abandoned walkie-talkies.

In the excitement of their exit, none had noticed the change in the Martian scenery. But now it occurred to Burl that the day was distinctly lighter, and he fancied the Sun—small though it was—felt warmer. The Sun-tap demolished, this was to be expected, and by the same token, radio communication should now be practical.

Sure enough, he got Lockhart's voice at once. Hastily, he warned the commander of what had happened.

As they drew nearer the Magellan, the great spaceship lowered toward the ground and let down its grapples and ladders. Burl saw that there was no time to be lost. A stream of Martians and steam carts was pouring out of the city on their trail.

They reached the spaceship and slammed to a halt. The men leaped out. Burl and Russ lifted Boulton's unconscious body from the jeep and, between them, managed to hoist him awkwardly up the dangling rope ladder.

The others hooked grapples onto the jeep, and when it was secure, leaped for safety themselves.

As the first of the Martian steam carts was almost on them, the Magellan lifted into the air. It rose high above the surface and swung off into the desert. The Martians drew to a halt. Burl, looking down from the doorway of the cargo hatch, could see them milling aimlessly around. None, he noticed, ever glanced up. Air flight, apparently, was an inconceivable phenomenon to them.

After the jeep had been pulled into the cargo hold and secured, the outer ports were sealed. When everyone was safely in the inner sphere, the Magellan drew away from Mars and started on the next lap of its long mission.

Boulton was carefully examined. Nothing could be made of his condition. He seemed to bear no physical hurt, although he slept on. He was placed in his bunk, and there he rested, breathing slowly, temperature normal, dormant.

The life of the spaceship resumed, for the time being, without him. The next port of call was Jupiter, and that presented problems of its own. Between Mars and Jupiter was the great asteroid belt, a region of many thousands of tiny planetoids, ranging in size from worldlets of two or three hundred miles in diameter down to rocks the size of footballs. "The debris of an exploded planet," was the comment Russ made to Burl. "That's the most likely explanation. Anyway," he added, "there seems to be no Sun-tap station on any of them. The next one is beyond the asteroids, in Jupiter's orbit."

During the next few days, Lockhart and the two astrogators were busy working out a rather complex maneuver, which consisted of having the ship jump over the asteroid belt rather than travel directly through it. While the orbits of thousands of the larger asteroids had been charted, there were thousands more that consisted of just chunks of rock too small to notice. They could not chance a collision with one of these—yet to work out the whereabouts of all of them was impossibly time-consuming.

What the Magellan did was to depart from the plane of the ecliptic, that level around the Sun to which all the planets generally adhere, and to draw outward so as to avoid the path of the asteroids, then to come back in onto the orbit and plane of Jupiter. This involved some tricky work with the various gravitational lines, using Mars and the Sun for repulsion and certain stars for attraction.

There were quite a number of gravity shifts, and during this period no one could be quite sure what his weight would be from one moment to another. There were several periods of zero gravity, when the crew members would float and face the complex annoyances of a steady feeling of free fall. Burl, after a couple of such sessions, got the hang of it rather comfortably.

Lockhart looked at him oddly and smiled. "Glad to know it. I may have a task for you soon, then."

Others found the weightless conditions not so bearable. One of the engineering crew, Detmar, had to be hospitalized. What he had resembled severe seasickness. Oberfield also experienced moments of acute upset.

Boulton's condition did not change. Once or twice he stirred slightly in his sleep, and seemed to murmur something, but then he would lapse back into his coma. Fortunately he did not resist food, and did swallow liquids forced into his mouth.

Except for one or two rare intervals, communication with Earth had ceased. Besides, the mother world was now moving away from them and would pass behind the Sun. Efforts to obtain medical advice for Boulton proved futile.

After they had passed the orbital line of the asteroids and had rearranged their drive so that they were falling freely toward Jupiter, Lockhart called the exploring crew together. "I've got a job for you men," he announced.

Haines, Ferrati, and Burl gathered about the control board to listen. They were restless for something to do—plans for the Jupiter landing could not be made until they knew what the situation was going to be, for it would be one thing if the station were located on that giant planet itself, another if on one of its satellites.

The colonel wasted no time. "While you were on Mars and we were waiting for you, I took the opportunity to examine the outer shell of this ship. You know, of course, that we are constantly being bombarded by cosmic dust, the micrometeorites that always prove troublesome to the Earth satellites and space platforms. The ship has been fortunate in that it has not been struck by any meteoric matter of size, but we have been peppered heavily by dust particles. As a result, the outer shell of our ship is pitted in some spots, and in several places worn perhaps dangerously thin. I don't mean to imply that there are going to be any holes very soon, but I think that there are some parts which we should reinforce or patch."

When he stopped for breath, Burl broke in. "You mean you want us to work on the outer shell?"

Lockhart nodded. "Someone has to do it, and during flights you men are the deck crew. So it's going to be your baby. I am going to keep the ship on free fall for the next several periods and this should make it simpler for you to go outside, in space suits, and do the job."

The next hour saw all three hard at work. Dressed in heavy, sealed, warmed outer-space