Part 2

LeClarc strained to raise himself on his elbows against the increasing deceleration. "Sure," he said, "a hot place. After you foul up, Stedman, my vote will be to leave you on the hot side instead of giving you passage to the twilight zone."

The Frenchman was being illogical and pointlessly childish. "I didn't ask you to fight with me," Steve told him. "Why don't we forget all about it?"

"If you want to, forget. I, LeClarc, never forget."

"By space, LeClarc--" the voice came from the other side of the lounge "--then you're a spoiled little child." It was the big Exec officer who spoke, Kevin McGann.

LeClarc did not answer. Kevin winked at Steve, then set his face grimly against the bone-crushing deceleration. Fifteen minutes later, they landed at Furnacetown. The names of the new frontier settlements, Steve thought with a grin, were as picturesque as the names of the old Wild West towns.

There was a huge, priceless matrix of ruby far below the surface near Furnacetown, and the frontier settlement existed to mine from it. But the place was named aptly, for here on the hot side of Mercury, the temperature was hot enough to melt tin and lead. A community of half a thousand hearty souls, Furnacetown shielded itself from the swollen, never-setting sun with a vacuum-insulated dome and a hundred million credits worth of cooling equipment. Even so, the atmosphere within the dome was a lot like New Orleans on a sultry summer day.

The mayor of the town, a man named Powlaski, met them at the landing field. "It's hot," said Teejay, offering her hand and shaking with the plump official, man-fashion.

"It's always hot, Captain Moore. At any rate, be happy that you've beaten Barling here this time."

"Oh, did we? Good. We'll need three asbestos suits, Powlaski. I never did trust plain vac-suits on the sunward side of this boiling mess of a planet. Say, has anyone got a cool drink? I'm roasting."

Someone wheeled out a portable refrigerator and the synthetic gin-and-orange stored therein tasted to Steve's thirsty lips almost like the real thing. Then LeClarc, who had ventured into one of the squat buildings with Powlaski's lieutenant, a middle-aged woman, returned with three heavy asbestos suits draped ponderously over his arm. Their combined weight was perhaps two hundred pounds, but it became negligible under Mercury's weak gravity.

"We're ready," he said, extending one of the suits to Teejay and helping her slip it on over her shorts and halter. This was the first time that Steve had ever seen her without the black cape, which seemed a sort of affected trade-mark.

"Three suits?" Steve demanded. "What for?"

"The third one's for you, Stedman," the woman told him. "I know your job is to see that the game stays alive in our bubble-cages, but I don't think it would hurt if you had a look-see at the stone worm in its own environment."

"That's not what I meant," Steve told her. "Why LeClarc?"

Teejay shrugged, zipping up the suit. "Because I said so, that's why. Also, LeClarc's something of an expert on the inner planets and he goes wherever I do, anyway."

"Sort of a bodyguard," the Frenchman purred, strapping a neutron gun to the belt of his asbestos suit. "Hey, who's got those helmets?"

And then Steve felt them slipping the thick, clumsy helmet over his head. Kevin stood nearby and the Exec looked like he wanted to say something, but Steve's helmet had snapped into place and from that point he could only talk by radio--and over the crackling interference of the swollen sun, at that.

Moments later, he'd stepped through an airlock at the side of the Furnacetown dome and plodded out on the surface of Mercury.

* * * * *

On Venus there was the thick, soupy atmosphere and the verdant tropical jungles. On Mars, the rusty desert and the ruins of an eon-old civilization. But on Mercury you knew at once that you trod upon an alien world. At perihelion, the sun swelled to almost four times its size as seen from Earth, and because Mercury's tenuous atmosphere had boiled off into space half a billion years ago, the sky was black. The sun had lost its spherical shape, too. Great solar prominences licked out at the blackness, and the visible corona seemed to swell and pulse.

Underfoot, Steve could feel the crunchy ground powdering beneath his asbestos boots with every step. And far off toward the horizon, a jagged ridge of blood-red mountains bit at the black sky like festering, toothless gums.

Before long, Teejay's voice sang in Steve's earphones. "Over here, you boys." And Steve could see her crouching, shapeless in the loose asbestos suit, off to his left. The sun's heat had parched a long, snaking crack in the surface and Steve lumbered over to it clumsily, letting his shadow fall across the crevice. "Those stone worms are umbra-tropic," he called, and waited.

"I don't wonder," said Teejay, looking up at the sun through the smoked goggles of her helmet.

The stone worms, Steve knew, were attracted by darkness--hence they generally dwelled in the deepest crevices, although a man's shadow might bring them to the surface. He'd never seen a stone worm, but he'd read about them and seen their pictures.

"You'll see something very unlovely," Teejay predicated. "The stone worm isn't a carbon-basic animal, but a silicate creature with a sodium-silicon-nitrogen economy. It's about four feet long and kind of like some ghastly white slug. It--hey, Stedman, get on your toes!"

The worm was coming.

It poked its head up out of the crevice first, and then the slug-like body followed, curling quite instinctively until the whole thing lay in Steve's shadow. Four feet long and a foot across at the middle, it looked like the product of nightmare. The head was one huge, lidless, glassy eye--with a purple-lipped mouth where the pupil should have been! The mouth opened and shut like that of a fish, but when Steve lifted the monster by its middle and brought it out into the sun, the lips puckered completely shut and the white slug began to thrash dangerously.

But under the influence of the sun's heat it soon subsided. Trouble was, Steve thought vaguely as they made their way back toward Furnacetown with the quiescent monster, the sun's heat did not subside. Probably, it was his imagination, but the sun had seemed to become, if anything, stronger. He looked at the others, but they merely walked forward, completely unconcerned. Maybe he'd tired himself subduing the stone worm, for he knew that might seem to intensify the heat.

Inside his asbestos suit, Steve began to sweat. It did not start slowly, but all at once the perspiration streamed down his face and body.

It was then that his left leg began to burn. Down below the knee it was, a knife-edged burning sensation which became worse with each passing second. Someone had heated a knife white-hot, had applied its sharp point to the nerve-endings of his leg--and then twisted. It felt like that.

Screaming hoarsely, Steve fell, watched through burning eyes as the stone worm commenced crawling laboriously away. It was LeClarc who went after the worm and retrieved it, but Teejay knelt at Steve's side and, surprisingly, real concern was in her voice when it came over the radio.

"What's the trouble, Stedman?"

"I don't know," Steve gritted. "I'm hot all over--and my leg feels like it's on fire. Yeah, right there--ow!--go easy!"

Teejay frowned or at least Steve guessed she frowned by the way she spoke. "There's nothing much we can do about it, Stedman. Seems to be a hole--just a pinprick, but a hole--in the asbestos. It's a wonder you weren't screaming bloody murder before this. How's the air?"

It _was_ getting hard to breathe, Steve realized, but dimly, for his senses were receding into a fog of half-consciousness. Something hissed in his ears and he knew Teejay had turned the outside dial of his air-pump all the way over. It made him feel momentarily better, but the pain still cut into his leg.

"I've got the worm," said LeClarc. "But what happened to him?" He asked the question innocently--too innocently.

Teejay didn't answer. Instead: "Can you walk, Stedman?"

"I--I don't think so."

"Then I'll carry you. But remember this: if we get you back all right, you can thank the twenty-second century feminist movement. Can you picture an old-fashioned gal slinging a man over her shoulder and toting him away to safety like a sack of grain? Here we go."

And she got her arms under Steve's shoulder, tugging him upright and swinging him across her back in a fireman's carry. He felt in no mood to question her motive, but he could sense the triumph in her as if she had said, "See, I'm as strong as a man, and don't you forget it."

In spite of himself, he couldn't help responding to the unspoken challenge. "Sure," he said, "I can thank the feminist movement, but more than that I can thank Mercury's light gravity, Teejay. We're lucky I don't weigh more than fifty pounds here."

An hour later they arrived back at Furnacetown, but by then Steve was unconscious from the pain.

* * * * *

"How are you feeling, boy?" It was Kevin McGann, the battered, unlit pipe clamped tightly between his teeth as he spoke.

Steve sat propped up in a bed in the _Gordak_'s infirmary, his left leg wrapped in bandages from knee to ankle. "Pretty good, I guess. Kind of weak, but there's no pain."

"You're lucky the Captain got you back here in time. Four inches of your calf was cooked third degree, but she carried you back here soon enough to cut it away before deep decomposition, and spray on syntheplasm. You'll be as good as new in a week, and no scar, either. Thanks to the Captain, boy."

"Yeah," Steve admitted. "Sure. But what I want to know is this: how did it happen?"

Kevin shrugged his massive shoulders. "I won't make any accusations, boy, not without positive proof. But I took the liberty to examine your suit, and it looked to me like someone had punctured a small hole almost all the way through. The heat did the rest."

"You mean LeClarc?"

"I never said that. But LeClarc was the one who got the suits, so he--more than anyone--was in a position to do something like that. Further than that I won't carry it. This is not an accusation."

"Suits me," Steve told him. "And thanks, Kevin. But after this, Frenchie had better watch his step. Are we out in space again?"

"Yes. Passed _Brennschluss_ forty-eight hours ago."

"What?"

"Sure. They had you doped up for two days, till the syntheplasm had a chance to set."

"How soon can I get out of bed?"

"Depends. If you don't mind hobbling around on crutches, today probably. If you want to wait till you can walk, four or five days. What's your hurry, boy?"

"I've got to take care of that stone worm, remember?"

"Say, that's right! No one knew what to do, so they suspended it in a deep freeze until you could go to work. A hideous brute, I might add."

"Will you ask the doctor to give me some crutches? Swell. First, though, I'd like a good meal. And listen, Kevin--I guess Teejay saved my life, at that. Want to tell her I'd like to see her?"

"Of course," said Kevin, and left the white-walled infirmary, grinning from ear to ear.

By the time Teejay arrived, Steve was eating his first solid meal in two days. "Hello," he said. He almost found himself adding, "Captain"--but he checked the impulse just in time.

"McGann tells me you're ready to get to work today."

"That's right."

"Good. That stone worm won't stay in ice indefinitely--not when it lives on the sun-side of Mercury."

"Teejay, I want to--well, I want to thank you for saving my life."

The woman opened her cape, reached inside, took a pack of cigarettes from an inside pocket and puffed on one until it glowed. "Don't thank me," she said coolly. "It really isn't necessary. You're the only extra-zoo man aboard, Stedman, so we needed you. I'd have saved a valuable machine under the same circumstances."

"Well, thanks anyway."

"There's one thing more, Stedman. As far as I'm concerned, you haven't proven yourself yet. So the same conditions apply to our next landing point."

"Where's that?"

"Venus, of course. Do you think I want to play hop-scotch all over the Solar System? Well, you finish your meal and give that stone worm a nice comfortable bubble to live in." And Teejay departed.

* * * * *

Later, after he'd evacuated the air from one of the bubble-cages and increased the temperature to seven hundred degrees Fahrenheit, after he'd supervised a slow warming process for the worm and seen it deposited, still drowsy, in the bubble with sufficient quantities of silicon-compounds to keep it well fed, Steve hobbled with his crutches to the general lounge. Teejay sat there with half a dozen of the Venusian experts, for the hunt would be much more protracted on that teeming jungle-world. The woman stood up at once and crossed the floor to Steve. "How's the worm?"

"Fine." He always felt a little edgy and on his guard when the woman spoke to him.

"And how's the extra-zoo expert's bum leg?"

"Coming along, I think."

Teejay turned to the six men seated around the lounge, said: "This is Steve Stedman, our extra-zoo man--at least temporarily. Stedman, Phillips knows more about amphibians than any man alive, Ianello is our arboreal expert, Smith ferrets out the cave-dwelling mammals--we hope, Waneki goes floundering around after sea-monsters, St. Clair is--"

Then something buzzed shrilly on the adjacent wall, and Teejay flipped a toggle switch. "Captain here."

"Radio from Earth, Captain. Mr. Brody Carmical himself."

"Is that so?" said Teejay, her eyebrows lifting. "Give me a circuit." And, a moment later, "What's the trouble, Brody?"

The big man's voice came through faint and metallic over more than fifty million miles of space. "Plenty, T. J., Barling decided to start in the middle this year. Some of our--er, contacts told us his ship's rocketing for Ganymede, and fast. You'll have to get there first if you can, naturally."

"We'll get there," said Teejay, quite grim, and cut the connection.

Steve had time to think one thought before he was swept along in the general rush, crutches and all, after the woman galvanized into activity. She might take orders from Brody Carmical, but she even had a way with the big man, making him cow to her--perhaps unconsciously.

Teejay was yelling and pointing, it seemed, in all directions at once. "Hey you, Ianello, shake a leg down to the fission-room and tell 'em to start straining. Smith, get me Kevin McGann on the intercom. Waneki, you can forget all about those Venusian sea-monsters and tell the docs to be ready for plenty of acceleration cases. You better bed down right now, Phillips, you're not as strong as the rest of us, not with sixty years of junketing behind you. Hello, McGann? Listen, Mac, I want the entire crew assembled in General inside of ten minutes. Yeah, expedition too. Everyone but those boys down in fission. And tell your orbit-man to figure a way to get us off this trajectory and on a quick ellipse from here to the Jovian moons. Yes, that's what I said--the Jovian moons."

She paused long enough to take a breath and turn to Steve. "Well, Stedman, we'll be dropping down over your brother's grave on Ganymede before you know it. Maybe then you'll be able to remove that chip from your shoulder."

"Me? From _my_ shoulder? Sister, you've got things backwards."

But the woman pivoted away, and Kevin's voice bleated over the intercom: "Crew and expedition--all to general lounge on the double! You boys in fission stay put, Captain's orders. This is urgent."

Almost before Kevin's voice had stopped echoing through the corridors, LeClarc popped into the lounge. "You wanted me, Captain? May I help?"

"I wanted everyone. Everyone can help. Just sit still till the rest of 'em get here."

LeClarc appeared hurt, but he took a seat in glum silence. In twos and threes the members of the crew began to drift in, wild rumors circulating among them in whispers. Finally, LeClarc counted noses and told his Captain that everyone except the fission crew was present.

Teejay nodded, stepped to the center of the floor. She removed her cape and dropped it, discarding it so suddenly and yet with such a polished flourish that a complete silence fell upon the large room almost at once.

She paced back and forth, her bare, lithe limbs flashing under the green-glowing wall panels. "You've all come to know that cape," she said, her voice strident and alive. "It's a sort of affectation I have. But it's not necessary. Like everything that's not necessary, it must be discarded, at least temporarily. Men, we're in serious trouble."

Just like that, inside of a few seconds, she had them eating out of the palm of her hand. She went on to say that Barling's ship had already blasted off from the Earth for Ganymede, how, unless their efforts here on the _Gordak_ were Herculean and then some, Barling's ship would reach Ganymede first. "And you all know what that would mean," she continued. "Like the elephant of two centuries ago, the Ganymeden anthrovac is the one solid necessity for any circus sideshow. But the anthrovacs have a way of going into hiding when they're disturbed. So, if Barling gets to Ganymede first, we've had it. We can all start looking for jobs after that, do you understand? I want full acceleration from here to Ganymede, as soon as we can get the new orbit plotted. Nothing but the immediate problem--to reach the Jovian moons before Barling--nothing else matters. If I tell you to work two shifts and go without sleep one night, you will do that. If I decide that a man must go beyond the shieldings in fission, he'll climb into a vac-suit and hope for the best. It's going to be like that, men, and I can't help it. I crack the whip and you jump. Any questions?"

She stood dramatically, hands on hips, somehow poised on tip-toes without straining, a tall, impressive and quite beautiful figure.

"Yes," said one of the orbiteers. "I have a question. Can I get to work on the new orbit at once?"

There were hoarse shouts of approval, some applause and a scattering of deep-throated laughter. Steve watched Teejay walk off her improvised stage, complete master of the situation. If it were humanly possible for the _Gordak_ to reach Ganymede before Barling, they'd do it.

* * * * *

In the weeks which followed, Steve learned something of what the big Exec officer had meant that first day he had spoken about Teejay. She drove her men relentlessly and some of them may have resented it. But she drove herself as well, and once when a crewman had gone beyond the shieldings to repair the mechanical arms which regulated the flow of powdered plutonium fuel from the bunkers and had emerged with a serious case of radiation sickness, Teejay donned a vac-suit and went in herself to finish the job.

Most of the men liked her. Some, frankly, did not. But all of them knew they served under a captain as good as any.

Two days before landing on Ganymede, Teejay gathered her chief lieutenants for a final planning session. Kevin was there, and LeClarc, and a tall, wraith-thin man with a bushy head of white hair named Simonson, and Steve. Teejay spread a chart out and peered down at it intently. "This is Ganymede Northeast," she said, indicating the circled, central area of the map. "It is here that, for some reason, the anthrovacs gather. And here inside the circle is an area of one thousand square miles which Mr. Simonson has marked off--yes, Stedman, the red square. We'll be operating there. If the Barling ship has landed ahead of us, we can assume the same for them."

Teejay paused to light a cigarette, then crushed it out after her first puff. "The darn smoke gets in my way when I try to think," she smiled, and went on, "Anyway, here's the square. We'll be using the crew and the expedition--everyone aboard ship--because we're in a hurry. Simply put, we'll be a bunch of beaters to drive the anthrovacs together at the center of the square. Then, well, then it's up to Mr. Simonson and Stedman. Any questions?"

"Yes, Captain," said LeClarc. "Just how do we get the anthrovacs aboard ship?"

"Don't ask me. But you might ask Mr. Simonson."

The bushy-haired man named Simonson grunted. "Umm-mm. There are several ways. We could set up elaborate traps, such as Thorndyke employed two years ago, and--"

"Can't," Teejay objected. "No time."

"Why don't we just clobber them?" LeClarc suggested. "A few might die, but we'll get the specimens we want."

Steve shook his head. "You don't know your anthrovacs. Chase them and they'll try to run away. But hurt them--just hurt one of them so the rest of them can see--and they'll swarm all over you until either all the men or all the anthrovacs are dead, or both. No, there's another way."

"What's that?" Teejay leaned forward, chin cupped in hands, definitely interested.

"Anthrovacs are non-breathers. Most gasses won't hurt them, but you can give them a good, old-fashioned oxygen jag with the slightest whiff of pure oxygen."

"I've heard of that," Simonson said.

"Sort of like getting them drunk, isn't it, boy?" Kevin wanted to know.

But LeClarc wasn't satisfied. "I still say we ought to clobber them. We can't waste time experimenting with any crazy jags."

"It's no experiment," Steve told him coldly. "It works."

"I still say we ought to--"

"Clobber them, I know," Teejay finished for him. "If there's any clobbering to be done, LeClarc, I'll let you know. Meanwhile, we're trying Stedman's plan. Any further questions?"

And, when no one spoke: "Good. Mac, I want you to let Mr. Simonson and Stedman pick three men to help 'em. You're to divide the rest of us into groups of half a dozen each, with each group serving under a leader. I'll give each leader a designated area in that square, so there won't be a lot of bumbling around when we land on Ganymede. LeClarc!"

"Yes, Captain?"

"Take yourself a group of three idle technicians and check all the vac-suits. If there's any trouble, make sure it's repaired before we land. What are you gawking at me like that for?"

"I only thought--"

"What? What did you think? Speak up, man!"

"I thought you would have a job of more import for me. Had you, for example, decided that we ought to clobber--"

"Clobber, clobber, clobber! Will you shut up and get to work?"

"Yes, Captain." And more than a little stooped of shoulder, LeClarc left the lounge.

Teejay didn't pause for breath. "You, Stedman! What's so funny? What are you laughing about?"

"Nothing. It's just the way LeClarc--"

"Forget it, before _you_ get clobbered."

* * * * *

Ganymede.

After the landing, an unreasoning fear gripped Steve tightly. It wasn't anything he could put his finger on, but he felt it gnawing at the fringes of his mind, probing, seeking, thrusting for a way in. There was nothing to be afraid of, and Steve smoked one cigarette after another while the six-man parties disembarked to take up their beater-stations on the edges of the square.

Ganymede, he recited to himself, is the largest satellite in the Solar System. 664,200 miles from Jupiter, it has a diameter of thirty two hundred and six miles, or bigger than the planet Mercury and almost as large as Pluto. It swings around Jupiter in a little over seven Earth days and in appearance the moonscape's enough like Luna to be a twin-brother, except for fat, bloated Jupiter hanging in the sky.