Short Fiction · The Mercurian (1/2)

The Mercurian

We stood before the airlock, the old man and I, and watched them go out. Ellison was a granite man and I was just the lad who threw the switches.

I was new at it. They had sent me out with a pat on the back and a commission, but I didn’t feel like a Mercury run officer. Mining uranium on the Sun’s firstling was no job for a green kid of twenty-two. Outside were lakes of molten zinc and a temperature of 790 degrees Fahr.

No part of that temperature seeped into us, but just knowing it was out there was spine-chilling. I am not being facetious. To keep from thinking of the hot face we thought of the cold face, and you can’t imagine extremes of cold without feeling shivery. Out on the cold face were other miners, working under conditions I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. They had the cold of open space to contend with, and a little of that seeped in.

The Commander was passing out advice to each of the miners as they stepped into the lock.

“Murphy, it’s uranium we want. We’re not zoologists. The next time you go specimen chasing⁠—”

“But it looked like a frog, Chief. I swear it did.”

“You know damn well no froglike animal could hop around on red-hot rocks.”

“I won’t let him out of my sight this time, sir,” said the miner at Murphy’s heels.

“Thank you, Haines. He needs a nurse, but do what you can.”

Five miners stepped out, each with a glance from Ellison which said as plain as words that he would walk beside them until they came back in again. The old man had so much quiet strength that he could split off simulacra of himself, and send them out through the airlock by just passing out advice. He moved like a living presence over the semi-molten Mercurian crust beside each of his men, fretting when a coupling slipped or mysterious stirrings caused the lads to look at one another with a wild surmise.

He knew that the merciless heat beating down did something to the scarred and cracked surface rocks which made them seem to buckle and split up into little leaping ghosts, and half his warnings were directed against “heat-devils” and other optical illusions.

When the last man had passed out he turned to me with a wry smile. “Dave, speaking as a psychiatrist, and without knowing for sure, I’ve a hunch there is too much tension inside of you.”

The old man actually was a psychiatrist. You have to be pretty nearly everything to qualify as a Mercury run commander and Ellison’s knowledge started with Aasen and ended with Zwolle. There were some gaps in between, but not many, and he frequently surprised me by pulling rabbits out of those.

We went down into the cuddy and the old man brought out some real smoky Scotch, and we had at least three while a strained look came into his face. One of these days someone is going to stop putting bulkhead chronometers in the cuddies of Mercury run spaceships. Men have to go out and Commanders have to wait, and if an officer can’t get his mind off the seconds in a cuddy what chance has he of relaxing at all?

Hanging on the corrugated metal bulkhead were curios from all over the Solar System, and I tried to interest myself in the things the Commander had collected in his travels. A dried Venusian weejee head looks pretty grotesque, but so does a deep-sea fish from home, and when you’ve seen both dozens of times⁠—

A sudden vibrant humming made me spill a jigger of Scotch on my liberty uniform. The lad who was taking my place at the lock control was buzzing the old man from the “peel off” room. Ellison swung about, and barked into the auxiliary circuit audiocoil. “Well?”

“The men have returned, sir.”

“All right. Keep the inner locks closed and watch the insulators. Rawley is taking over.”

Between the outer and inner locks we had to cool off the men a little. When they stepped in from the crust the sheath couplings on their noncombustible suits had to be sprayed over with liquid air.

We went up in the jacket-lift with our knees braced and down the stern passageway to the “peel off” room, the old man striding on ahead of me. Had I stopped to reflect I might have realized there was trouble brewing. The old man wasn’t psychic exactly, but his hunches came out pat.

Before I looked through the lock port my nerves were merely jumpy, but when I actually saw Murphy standing in the freeze vault enveloped in smoke and sizzle I nearly passed out from shock.

Murphy was waving his arms up and down and the man behind him was making frantic signs to us. The frog was dangling by its long legs from the Irishman’s gloved right hand. It was about three feet in height. Every time he raised it up it tried to leap in his hand, and twisted its eyes around.

Some quirk of parallel evolution had given it a froglike face, webbed feet and long, powerful hindlimbs. But, of course, it wasn’t a frog. It was a Mercurian animal, and my stomach went tight ten seconds after I laid eyes on it.

I’ve said that I was just a green kid. The old man thought otherwise, but he was wrong and I proceeded to prove it. I turned on the freeze conduits. Liquid air poured into the vault over Murphy and he stopped gesticulating. He just stood there looking at me through the eyepiece of his helmet.

Murphy had gone out at the risk of his life and brought back a living Mercurian animal. When he perceived that I had frozen that frog to a crisp something must have gone dead inside him. When he came in through the inner locks his couplings were coated with frost and there was a look of anguish on the upper part of his face. Behind the eyepiece his features seemed all wrenched apart. From his gloved right hand the frog still dangled, but its squirmings had ceased. Its limbs were rigid, its stalked eyes frozen shut.

With shaking fingers Murphy removed his helmet and started peeling off his suit, his gaze riveted on my face. The other miners stood watching him as though fearful of what he might do.

The old man laid a hand on my arm. “You’d better go below, Dave.”

Murphy shook his head. “No, no, let the lad stay.”

He had laid the frog on the deck and was pushing his suit down below his knees. I noticed that his features were twitching, but I thought he was making an effort to control his anger until he came up out of that crouch with all his strength riding on his fists.

He clipped me on the side of the head, and delivered a blow to my midriff which sent me reeling back against the bulkhead.

The old man leapt between us. “Watch yourself, Murphy,” he thundered. “I’m still in command here.”

Murphy spat on the deck, a slow flush creeping up over his face. “I just can’t figure it,” he muttered. “I saw an infant once without one, but its skull tapered and it had to be fed through a tube.”

I had always liked Murphy, but suddenly I saw red. I jumped him, and for a minute it was touch and go. We rolled over on the deck, exchanging hammer blows. He was hampered by the tangle his legs were in, but he made good use of his fists.

The old man had to intervene again. He accomplished it by backing up his tuggings with profanity. He cast aspersions on our ancestry, and threatened us with the psycho-lash.

I’m hot-tempered, but I cool off quickly. The instant I realized I was making it tough for the old man I struggled to my feet, and held out my hand.

“Any time you’re ready, Murphy,” I said.

The Irishman rose groggily, shaking his head to clear it. He stood for a minute staring incredulously at my extended palm, his eyebrows twitching. Then his own hand went out and locked with mine.

“I guess I was a bit hasty, lad,” he said.

Ten minutes later Sylvia was placing cool pads on my face, one on each cheek, and shaking her head over my blackened eye. “I’m not really sorry for you, Dave,” she said. “You apparently enjoy lashing out with your fists. You just used that frog as an excuse.”

Perhaps I should have mentioned sooner that there was a woman on board. A slim and attractive girl with coppery hair named Sylvia Varner was visiting us for five days consecutively. But she had come out on the crew-shift cruiser Aquila which was berthed right alongside of us on the semi-molten crust.

Women are out of place on Mercury run ships, and if I were taking fictional liberties with this record I’d leave her out. But facts are facts, and the feminine zigzag had a lot to do with the way the frog brought us all to the brink of despair. Without her it would have been less though, but less exciting, too, and, of course, for romantic reasons I was glad she had come. She happened to be Ellison’s niece, and my fiancée, and had a kid brother working on the metallurgical staff.

“But it isn’t a frog,” I said, irritably. “It’s a Mercurian animal. And I don’t blame Murphy for sailing into me.”

“You’re being very charitable,” she said. “He tried to kill you.”

“All right,” I said. “For a minute he went berserk. But what would you do if you bagged the first Mercurian animal ever seen and a dumb kid turned it into a museum piece? If Murphy could have brought that frog back to Earth alive the National Geographic Society would have smothered him with medals.”

“But won’t it thaw out, Dave?”

“It’s limper than a rag right now,” I said. “But it is also dead as a doornail.”

Sylvia’s brow crinkled. “I should think a Mercurian animal would have to be plated like an armadillo. I should think it would need some sort of air-cooling system and a⁠—”

“Hold on,” I said. “You’re jumping to a priori conclusions. We’ll start with the animal. It is froglike, so conditions on Mercury must favor the development of slender, agile quadrupeds with powerful hindlimbs. Since Mercury is flecked with semi-molten ‘marsh patches’ its froglike appearance does not surprise me. We can only speculate as to its habits, but it’s probably oviparous, and has a brief life-cycle.

“Now, in hot baths with carefully regulated approaches human beings have been able to stand degrees of heat above the boiling point of water. Back in the eighteenth century a Frenchman named Chamouni the Incombustible entered an oven containing a raw leg of mutton, and remained there until the meat was completely cooked. Medical history records hundreds of similar cases.”

“But what has that to do with Murphy’s frog?”

“Don’t you see? If human beings can build up all that resistance in a few minutes what’s to stop a rapidly breeding Mercurian animal from acquiring ten times as much immunity in fifty thousand generations? With already immune invertebrates to start with natural selection could give even a highly evolved, meaty-fleshed animal plenty of resistance.”

I was feeling distinctly proud of myself when Sylvia countered with: “You said the sides of its body and its hindlimbs were covered with fine, reddish hairs. Villosities was the term you used. How could natural selection build up immunity in hair?”

I could have brought up another player, but I wanted her to smooth my forehead instead. So I leaned back with a sigh and refrained from pointing out that chitin was slow-burning at best, and that the only hairy frog on Earth⁠—Trichobatatrachus robustus from West Africa⁠—lived up to its name.

She sat on the arm of my chair and leaned forward and for a minute I thought I was going to get my wish. But all she did was kiss me. She leaned her lips against mine and for about three minutes a pleasant tingling surged through me. Then I began to grow restless. I couldn’t breathe and her lips were no longer warm and vibrant.

I had to move her face to one side in order to inhale, and the instant I did so she swayed and her elbows descended on my chest.

A chill coursed through me. Her arms were rigid and she seemed almost weightless. Alarmed, I rose, grasped her wrists and eased her gently down into the chair.

She just sat there staring up at me, her face a petrified mask and her body so utterly still that it did something to sound. In place of the faint susurrous which occupied space gives forth the chair seemed to be enveloped in a kind of auditory vacuum which chilled me to the core of my being.

I can’t remember how long I stood there with horror slapping at my brain like the tides of some cold, dead moon. I only know that I turned at last and went stumbling from her presence with one thought uppermost in my mind.

I must get medical aid to her quickly, before that trance could deepen, before it could endanger her life.

Going up in the jacket-lift to the sick bay I kept visualizing Ned Dawson’s face. Dawson was a strong-jawed, competent physician with years of experience behind him and I was sure he would know what to do.

He was usually in the sick bay attending to the many little sprains and bruises the men brought in with them from the crust. There was a flicker of violet light as the jacket-lift hummed to a stop. I stepped out and raced down a cold-lighted passageway to the “drug shop,” my breath coming fast.

On meta-glass chairs amidst a faint odor of antiseptics two men sat frozen, but I thought they were asleep. I went straight through the waiting space with scarcely a glance at them, and burst into the sick bay unannounced.

Dawson was there all right, but he was bent nearly double, frozen in the act of applying a gauze bandage to the badly cut ankle of a miner who stood contemplating his navel like a schizophrene, his head sunken on his chest.

For an instant I just stood there gasping, too stunned to realize that I was staring at a physician who could no longer heal. It wasn’t until I went up to him and discovered that his body was cold and his face a frozen mask that my brain started to soak up horror.

I went reeling out into the passageway like a drunken man and tried to locate the commander, and found him at last in the control room with his body glinting in light-silvered dust.

He was standing before one of the Lyra’s translucent windows staring out upon the steamy Mercurian landscape, his arms folded on his chest. When I touched him he swayed and when I looked into his eyes I perceived that the pupils were set in a fixed stare, and covered with a dull, grayish film.

Murphy was standing beside him. The Irishman had evidently come in for orders and stiffened to immobility with a pipe in his mouth and a slightly provoked look on his face, as though my stupidity still riled him.

A nightmare unreality lengthened the minutes which followed into unevenly-spaced eternities filled with a steadily mounting dread. In the more crowded parts of the ship frozen men clustered in little queues. Every member of the atomotor crew stood frozen at his post. The starboard watch looked like statues carved in bronze and in the chain locker room were three crewmen whose muscular contortions conveyed an illusion of motion as they tugged at windlasses which had ceased to turn.

My palms were wet and I was trembling in every limb when I completed my inspection of the ship. It was especially bad going back in the jacket-lift to the commander’s cabin. In the dark fore-hold I had glimpsed obscure, rigid shadows which had unnerved me more than all the frozen, brittle men illumed by cold light in the crew spaces fore and aft.

When I stepped from the jacket-lift a voice said: “They only seem brittle, Rawley. Actually they are still soft and flabby, like all the inhabitants of the third planet.”

It was a telepathic voice, but I didn’t know that. I thought it was a human voice speaking close to my ear. Appalled, I swung about.

The frog was peering around a bend in the passageway, its stalked eyes pointing toward the lift. I fought a desire to scream as it leapt agilely toward me. It seemed to be grinning up at me. Its wet, yellowish lips were split in a grimace which gave it the appearance of being convulsed with mirth.

“Why are you trembling, Rawley?” it said. “Surely you expected to find intelligent life on at least one of the planets.”

“You mean you are⁠—”