Part 2

While they were taping up a weak spot in Lattimer's armor, something spitting blue, like a rocket, arced overhead, and Rick was sure he heard a derisive chuckle in his phones. Fane.

"Damn him!" Lattimer snarled. "At the very least Fane would know how to use some of these machines after six months here. He'd know how to travel fast...."

Again, against the possibility of their conversation being overheard they were speaking directly by contact-transmitted sound.

"Keep down and tune in on camp," Rick said. "We can listen, anyway."

They heard strange noises. And then Nostrand's voice saying: "... We're under attack. A dozen war-robots. Parties afield please don't answer if there is danger of giving away your positions by radio-direction finder.... Ship already disabled...."

"It _must_ be Fane doing it," young Finden snarled.

"Maybe. Not necessarily," Lattimer answered. "The question is, what do we do? Try to get back to camp on foot?"

Rick was younger and less experienced than the middle aged Lattimer but he felt the force of leadership coming over him. Most of it, perhaps, was fury, bringing the drive out in him--and bringing out an idea.

"We'd be of small use in camp," he said, "even if we could get there. Come on--crawl!..."

Rick had spied another Martian corpse, half-buried in a blanket of frozen air and frost a little way down the ditch. They reached it, and Rick ripped open the thin, rubberlike integument that had served its kind as space armor. Among its weird equipment Rick found a pouch held close to its hardened flesh. He drew out a parchment.

"Should have thought of this before," he growled. "In war they carried maps--Martians and Xians alike. Now let's see. What looks important on the dark hemisphere? Something that a guy like Fane would go for. If that's the way it is...."

The three men huddled together, squinting at the stiffened parchment in the dim light of the solar corona. Dark lines showed highways passing between jagged markings that must be mountain ranges. Rick coordinated what he knew of Mercury from astronomical photographs taken at the great observatory on the moon, with what he saw on the map, and thus found out where he and his companions were.

His attention was drawn inevitably to a great golden circle on the parchment. All roads led to it.

"No matter how you stack it, that must be the place we want to reach," Rick said. "But it's four thousand miles away."

"I see there's a tunnel, too," Lattimer joined in. "That heavy red line. I know Martian maps. It's for a kind of jet-train. Am I cockeyed to think that some cars might still work?... If we could get to a tunnel entrance. But it's fifty miles at the nearest. Some walk!"

"We're stranded in a white hell, with a good chance of being knocked off before we die from more natural causes," Finden said. "So we've got to think boldly. How about finding something like what Fane seemed to be using? Then we could rocket to that golden circle place."

"Yeah--'_finding_'," Rick retorted. "Then there's the question of our being able to fly it in a hurry. Uh-uh--the tunnel's a long shot, too, but a better bet. If we can locate a large, flat sheet of metal, we can bend up one end for a prow and use our blasters for reaction-propulsion to improvise a toboggan that will ski over the frozen air and frost."

They crept further along the ditch to get away from the deadly little ovoids that must still lurk near. Then they arose and ran. There was a dazzling blast from behind them, and they ran faster, maybe a mile or more, stumbling through deep drifts of white.

They came to more Xian wreckage. Hurriedly they searched, as some vague bulk prowled, far off to their left. But at last they found and shaped what they wanted. They crouched on the sheet of metal, and fired continuous streams of protons rearward. Soon their arms, braced against the thrust of incandescent fire, ached furiously.

The weapons were hot in their hands. But under the rocket-like kick of the blasters they made speed even though their makeshift toboggan, unguided by runners, careened crazily. The hour it took to cover fifty miles seemed an age.

Rick thought of Anne Munson, his girl, at the Survey Service School on Mars. But such sweet ruminations had no place here. He pushed them aside angrily. He wondered if Mercury would ever be worth anything, anymore. Mines it had, yes, but with one hemisphere frozen like this, and the other a furnace, would it ever be worth the trouble to build the insulated camps that would be needed to work those mines? Even the completely airless asteroids were less forbidding. And out there, in those fragments of a world, the metal-rich core of a planet was exposed for easy exploitation.

Dull fury took hold of Rick. At Fane. But more at the past, here. Wasted violence, buried in drifts of frozen atmosphere. Wasted energy. Why couldn't those beings have done better?

Near the end of the journey the toboggan hit a granite outcropping, that projected an inch above the layer of white, which was deeper here, farther inside the dark hemisphere. Rick and his companions were hurled cartwheeling into the drifts. It was minutes before they were conscious enough to move again.

Only Lattimer's pistol was not yet quite burnt out. So their crude vehicle was now useless. They had to continue toward the tunnel on foot.

"Somewhere around here," Rick muttered at last. "By the map, there should be an entrance. Don't know where we're going but we've got to hurry."

Looming dark and shattered under the stars was a tower. The three men struggled toward it. A shape was following them again.

Somehow they got inside the tower. Drifted atmosphere gave way under their feet. They were sliding down a kind of chute. It felt like the end of things. But in a minute they slid into an underground chamber. They wandered for a while amid Martian apparatus. They could still recognize transmutation equipment, though its vats and grids were cast in an un-Earthly form. The walls themselves glowed softly.

The injured Lattimer was the most exhausted but he still showed interest in things.

"The silicon in rock has an atomic structure not so far from that of oxygen and nitrogen, hasn't it?" he mused. "It could be redesigned a little. And the waste protons and electrons from the process could be used to make hydrogen for water. Besides, there's a lot of oxygen in mineral oxides. And water of crystallization, locked up, but ready made.... Water and air from rock! Earthmen can do that, too. Here the Martians must have done it all the time, replenishing the air and water constantly, and building up the supply. And when Mercury stopped rotating it just froze up here on the dark hemisphere, where, in solid form, it couldn't leak away into space anymore. It was just kept forever. So that much is explained. The Martians must have had a lot of these factories."

"Yeah, sure," young Finden growled. "Let's skip that, now. We've got to find the tunnel vehicles."

"We'll find them," Rick promised with a drunken sort of confidence. "And they should work if they aren't smashed. Preservation is perfect."

They moved as in a dream. But Rick was right. They descended a ramp. The frost of air around them was unmarked by footprints other than their own. They crept into a projectile-like car on a track, and fastened the door. The marvelous simplification of controls was evidence of an advanced technology. Was it so strange after all that when Rick pressed the throttle gingerly, a blast of atomic flame burst from the stern of the car, setting it in motion after so long?

Speed mounted. Colliding with anything in that tunnel would have brought the men unknowing death. But now the throttle was limp and unresponsive. So what was there to do but rely anxiously on probable automatic guiding devices? In minutes the car covered four thousand miles, and then stopped by itself with a soft, innocuous jolt.

Finden undogged the portal of the projectile by working levers not made for human hands. Again the glowing walls gave light. Boots made grating sounds. So there was air, too. Gaseous, not frozen.

Again they wandered through passages and rooms. Here was a great underground fortress and supply depot. Metal crates and boxes were stacked high. There were hugely buttressed walls, some of them ruptured and repaired. Martian and Xian corpses, relics of a last battle, lay dried out and blackened on the floor.

At last the men came to a long vaulted hall. Near them was the breech of a colossal tube, ten yards in diameter. Beyond it was another and another, a whole bank of them, fifty in a row, slanting slightly upward and disappearing into the metal wall.

* * * * *

The men sensed it at once--in this colossal setup must be what they had come to see. Here was the mysterious center of things.

They might have spoken of this aloud. But in this age-old place they were warned to silence. And it wasn't all intuition and wariness. For along the center of that hall, the dust was almost obliterated by human bootprints.

Stepping very lightly, Rick and his companions hid behind a metal column where a mummified Martian sprawled on the pavement amid heaps of parchment. Nearby was an Xian corpse.

Then they heard a voice. A whisper, almost. It came to their ears directly as sound, penetrating easily the insulating texture of their oxygen helmets:

"Give back a world.... Me...."

It was a man's gloating mutter to himself. A vain man's promise to his ego, which the frustrations and competition of life had made swollen, like a cancer.

Then they saw his blurred shadow on the wall. Thin, hunched over, working at something. Fane all right. He had arrived here ahead of them, by rocket vehicle. No chance could be taken, questioning him. That could be done when and if he was overpowered.

Rick Mills raced around the column and leaped. But the scrape of his space-boots was a small warning. Fane was almost able to meet him with the muzzle of a blaster. But Rick, hurtling into him with his shoulder, grabbed his wrist, and the weapon skittered across the floor. Yet though his face-window was open, Fane wore a space armor, too. It protected him from the onslaught. Besides, he was not near exhaustion. And his thin muscles were like wire cables. Moreover, he fought as if for all he had ever hoped for. Some terrific prize. He was like a silent maniac.

Even so, Rick almost pinned him down. Lattimer recovered the blaster. Finden was leaping. But Fane touched controls on a square box at his belt. A strange old box.

In obvious response, an Xian colossus of metal dashed forward from a far corner, its gleaming thumbs poised. Rick, dodging to one side, was forced to loosen his hold a little. Fane tore free.

Lattimer used the blaster. With a dazing glare its neutron stream cut the legs from the robot. The latter clanked to the floor.

"You found a remote control device, Fane," Rick accused. "The war robots are largely automatic, but you are directing them. Why?"

Fane made no denial. His face was a grimace of fury. He lunged behind another pillar.

"Get him before he really brings hell down on us!" Rick yelled.

Lattimer blazed away. Finden, who still had his original blaster, did likewise, discharging the weapon's last energy.

Incandescent chunks were torn from the walls and columns. Rick, Finden, and Lattimer ran after Fane but he managed always to keep some obstacle between them and himself. Twice, metal giants lunged at his pursuers and were cut down.

One victory the three loyal Survey Service men had. They drove Fane from that hall, with its row of the breech-ends of great tubes. Had he been able to stay a minute longer, calling more ancient battle forces to his aid, they would have been killed without further delay.

But there was defeat, too, in his escape from the hall. Considering what forces he must wield outside that was far from good.

Rick and his companions chased Fane up a spiral ramp, where the horny tendrils of Martians must once have scurried, and where, at the last, Xians must have fought them. Up and up the spiral went--it was hard to say how far. At last it seemed to be ascending inside a tower, for there were windows glazed with some clear substance. But beyond these panes, and close against them, there was nothing but whiteness. The tower was all but buried.

The climb ended in a round chamber fitted with an airlock. But when the men reached the latter, Fane had already passed through it to the outside.

Rick rubbed the rime of frozen atmosphere from a window, and they all peered out at a level waste, pale under the stars. Here at the center of the dark hemisphere, the deposit of congealed oxygen and nitrogen and water was so deep that it seemed even to have buried the mountains utterly. Perhaps the tower itself was on a mountain top. Even so, only its cupola projected above the desolation.

That and a row of gigantic pipe ends slanting upward from the super-frigid drifts. Their maws yawned black in the still bleakness.

For a moment the men almost forgot Fane, as they wondered what it was that they looked upon.

"Space ship launching tubes?" Finden suggested.

"I'm thinking of something else," Lattimer answered, his voice hollow and awed, yet somehow less tired.

"So am I," Rick put in. "I'm thinking of the breech-ends of these same tubes down below. And of an ordinary Fourth-of-July pinwheel made to spin by the tangential reaction of the gases of old fashioned gunpowder. And of what that screwball, Fane, muttered to himself. 'Give back a world.' Yeah. What was it that killed Mercury as a reasonably habitable planet?"

"I see what you mean," Finden growled. "Mercury stopped rotating. But about the rest you're absolutely nuts."

"Are we?" Lattimer challenged. "Does making a world rotate again, seem too big a job for a bank of atomic jets the size of these aimed just above the horizon? Those old Martians could have done it. And maybe our people could, too, allowing years of work and vast expenditure."

At that moment Rick Mills understood Frank Fane as never before.

"So this is supposed to be Fane's glory," Finden mused hoarsely, his eyes wide. "To give a ruined world back to civilization. Restore it. Not bad for an unknown pug-ugly even if the bug in his head says he has to kill everybody around and blame it on old war machines running amok by themselves so that there will be no division of triumph; so that, with all of us dopes dead, he'll look even bigger."

Lattimer's lips twisted. They were about to utter curses. But then, beyond the window, there was a dazzling flare of light. The men didn't ask what kind of missile had been launched against them. That they fairly tumbled down the spiral was all that saved their lives.

The terrible roar of sound itself seemed enough to kill. Automatic portals clanged above them to shut off the outrush of air and the influx of vaporized metal and radioactivity.

"We've got to block all entrances to the jet room!" Rick shrieked. "And we've got to see that there are no tin soldiers running around loose. Then...." Rick's voice trailed away.

With the blaster that had been Fane's, Lattimer brought down tunnel-roofs, barricading himself and his companions in the hall where the bases of the tubes were, behind tons of wreckage. It might help.

* * * * *

"Fane will try to dig us out, but now it should take a little time, I hope," Rick said. "We're buried deep in rock and snow and congealed atmosphere. And he probably hasn't enough war engines assembled around here to really try to blast through to us."

"So what do we do?" Finden demanded.

"Look around to see what we _can_ do," Lattimer shot back at him.

They went down the row of great jet-tubes. To Rick's and Lattimer's trained eyes basic principles of function of these jets were not too hard to trace out. Regardless of what monsters on what world invented a thing, natural law remained the same. And so the shaping of metal and the directing of forces in any device had to remain the same everywhere.

"The setup isn't quite finished," Rick said. "Certain breech details aren't hooked together yet. But you can see where they go. Say, Fane must have spent most of his first six months on Mercury here in this vault trying to put what was left to do in order! A lot of these final touches must be his. He thought he could complete everything alone."

The evidence was clear. Empty food containers of Earthly origin were scattered about the floor. There were tools from the same source. And boxes of parts, made so long ago on Mars, were fairly free of dust, showing that they had been opened and their contents fastened into place quite recently in the gigantic assembly. And in one corner of this chamber a small Terran tent had been set up.

Fane had been working on something here when these three men had first found him. So now they went to see just what it was. They found a spread parchment on a work bench. It was blueprint stuff. Red lines traced the structure of the tube breeches. There were the fuel ducts in which an air blast fed the dust of uranium, and the exciter grids needed for firing. And there was the hookup of cables and bus-bars, needed to bind the whole bank of jets into a unit.

On the work bench there was even a book of advanced engineering brought from Earth. It lay open to a page on space ship motors.

Rick Mills saw more of the twisted soul of a man in the presence of that volume. "Poor Fane," he growled with bitter sarcasm. "Always making cracks about being bookish. Yet he found that he didn't have quite the knowledge to finish the assembly when he came here with Martell. He had to go home, study, get books."

"Given time, we can do what he can do," Finden said. "The still missing parts must be here somewhere."

"The Martians were close to completing the job themselves," Lattimer mused. "The Xians might have done it, too. I wonder just how it happened that Mercury was not reclaimed."

"Failure was also near," Rick said. "You can see that the Xians broke in through the underground fortifications with their robots. Meanwhile, on the hills outside, the snow of air was falling after the cold which followed the last sunset. There was a fight in these chambers at close quarters. The Xians had wanted to seize the setup intact, so they must have tried hard not to damage the main machinery here. But when they won, they lost. Maybe the news came that X was blown to pieces by Martian atomic science. Panic took hold, I'll bet. They fled Mercury, perhaps hardly believing that home was gone."

Rick's voice had become almost a harsh whisper. A savage bitterness smoldered in him. Around him, in the disorder of this chamber, and in the mummies of the two kinds of beings who had died, he saw how violence had blocked a great public work of peaceful constructiveness, and for fifty million years had robbed Mercury of a better destiny. For all of those ages it might have been a living, useful world instead of a half frozen, half sun-blasted tomb.

And was the same misfortune going to be repeated now because Fane was a childish damn fool?

From far above there came a thudding vibration. Fane was beginning his attack and Rick was by no means sure that his companions and he could finish the job in time. Fury in him mounted against the self-centered Fane and his inferiority.

"I'll raise the power in my helmet radio and try to contact camp!" Finden said. A moment later he was busy at it:

"CQ--CQ--CQ.... Calling Survey Camp. Finden speaking. Do you hear me? Fane is responsible for all of our troubles. The attack of the war machines. It is all because he has found a Martian jet-system to make Mercury rotate again. He wants to use it for personal glory. Do you hear me? Fane is guilty."

A sudden realization gripped Rick. He grabbed Finden's shoulders. "Stop!" he snapped. "Stop sending such a message! Don't you see? If Fane overheard...."

Both Finden and Lattimer stared at Rick.

"What difference does it make who sets Mercury spinning and makes it a useful, habitable world again as long as it's done?" Rick growled. "But if Fane felt that his goose was cooked, he'd wreck the whole works."

Rick gave his own helmet radio full power, and then spoke:

"Fane! I'm calling to you. This is Mills. We've seen what you found. We understand your purpose. It's your discovery, all yours. Come on, make peace. We'll help you put the stuff together."

No one knew how much will it took for Rick to be so unreasonably reasonable.

There was a minute's pause. Then a choked growl of rage. Fane's heavy breathing was audible before his hissing words: "You've talked too much already, smart guys! Tune in on camp and see!"

Rick and the others did so, and heard Nostrand's voice:

"Calling Finden. Your message received. Can you explain further? Camp still under attack."

They switched back to Fane, heard him snarl: "By now Nostrand will have relayed Finden's blabbing to Earth. Any investigation will be much too close. But if I'm finished, so are you. And Nostrand and all the others. Yeah, like Martell and Jacobs. And these jets. I'm playing for keeps, smart guys! If I can't use them, nobody's going to. You'll reach hell before I do."

Young Finden's eyes looked haunted. "Damn me!" he said. "If I'd only kept still."

"Forget it," Rick snapped. "You probably did as right as anybody could. Even if we had patched things up with Fane he probably would have found a way to finish us in the end."

"So let's get to work," Lattimer said briskly.

They examined the parchment plans. They tore through Martian crates and boxes searching for the proper parts. They used tools made for tentacles instead of hands. They toiled like demons. A dream not begun in human minds gripped them. It was only a hope, now, for they were sure that they did not have enough time. Give back a world. Give Mercury a day and night. Spread out the terrible sunlight and darkness. Balance the two to temper each other. Let the frozen air turn to warm wind, and the snow and frost melt. Let the fierce sunlight be filtered by clouds and atmosphere. Let vegetation grow again in tropic lushness. Let the mines be reopened.

And if it was possible, too, let the attack on the camp be lifted, and those still alive there, survive. There was even a wish among these three men that they themselves might not be destroyed.

* * * * *

Again Rick Mills had to shove the thought of Anne Munson almost angrily from his mind. It was a mere frivolity, useless and aching in these grim circumstances. A futile wistfulness, worse than the rest.

Time passed. One by one the tasks were finished. Now the men had a Martian generator going, a queer, flat device to produce electric power and to free neutrons from beryllium. Exciter neutrons for those great jet tubes.

Could it be believed that at last they had won nineteen hours of toil in their race to finish the job here, before Fane managed to kill them? They had fed huge quantities of familiar powder of uranium into the fuel blowers. They had set cables and grids into place. And still they continued to line things up, getting ready. During all this time there was only ominous, intermittent thudding, as from far away.

"Fane's gathering his robot forces," Finden said anxiously. "And now he can at least tear at the vents of the tubes, up above."

"I hope it won't matter," Rick answered.

They couldn't search out and understand everything that was here. The instruments that might have warned, or the weapons that might have defended them. But optimism came at last. Though it wavered some when they heard a faint grinding sound which seemed deep beyond the walls, but came closer. They hurried to hook up the last cable.