Contents
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION 4
CHAPTER I 5
CHAPTER II 12
CHAPTER III 18
CHAPTER IV 25
CHAPTER V 31
CHAPTER VI 38
CHAPTER VII 46
CHAPTER V 51
CHAPTER IX 56
CHAPTER X 62
CHAPTER XI 69
CHAPTER XII 77
CHAPTER XIII 83
CHAPTER XIV 90
CHAPTER XV 97
CHAPTER XVI 102
CHAPTER XVII 110
CHAPTER XVIII 117
CHAPTER XIX 124
CHAPTER XX 130
CHAPTER XXI 137
CHAPTER XXII 145
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copryight © 1938 by Better Publications, renewed 1967 by Otto O. Binder.
All rights reserved.
Cover art © James Thew / Fotolia.
CHAPTER I
Saturn’s Satellite
The space ship Tycho, of the Planetary Survey Bureau, came down bouncingly on its retractable landing wheels of thick, spongy neo-rubber that even the cold of space could not harden. A blast of the retarding rockets prevented it from rolling too far over jagged, crystalline rocks strewn along the narrow valley between two cliffs, picked as the most promising landing field.
Pilot Mark Traft cursed. There hadn’t been much choice in the matter, what with the whole blasted satellite as torn up in appearance as a battlefield. It had almost been a matter of closing your eyes and lowering away with your fingers crossed, hoping for the best. Yet he hadn’t done that. He had applied all of his skill as a class-A pilot. The ship came to rest, safely.
Unhooking the broad seat-straps, he came to his feet and rose to his full height of six-feet-five. He was proportionately as broad-shouldered, with great hands and powerful arms. Muscles bulged beneath his natty uniform.
Blond-haired, he was a reincarnated Viking in all aspects save one—his face. That, incongruously, had been stamped by Nature in a kindly, good-natured mold, and his complexion was as smoothly fair as a girl’s, much to his secret disgust. Nor had he ever been able to raise a camouflaging mustache or, when he left off shaving for a time, more than a scraggly reddish beard.
He pressed his face against a flawless port plate of artificial diamond, looking out.
This was Iapetus, eighth moon of Saturn, revolving at a distance of 2,200,000 miles from its ringed primary. A bitter, isolated little world it obviously was, whose dawn was lit only by the feeble rays of a sun nine hundred million miles away.
Its atmosphere, he knew, was thin, frigid. Its gloomy surface, as much as he could see of it, was a jumbled, scaly waste of barren mineral plains and some few ageless, frozen lakes. It was a desolate scene; one to chill the eye and heart of a living observer.
Yet Earthmen were about to carry their interplanetary exploits to this wayward member of the Solar System, in the year 2050 A.D., less than a hundred years after the advent of space travel. There was a thriving colony on Titan, largest moon of Saturn, two million miles away, and a fueling outpost on Rhea. Exploring ships had already touched on Iapetus and noted its rich beds of beryllium ore.
“Pretty deserted-looking place,” commented Greeley, the co-pilot, also unstrapping himself. He stood six feet, but was dwarfed by the gigantic Traft. He went on, his eyes rather bleak: “Not much of the disease of life, as the poets put it, here. Not even insects.”
“There’s some plant life—looks like moss,” commented Traft. “Evolution barely got a start here.”
Back of them, the rest of the ship’s list of ten men were making similar observations. Somehow, the less of life a world displayed, the more inhospitable it appeared. Even a hotbed of horrible monsters would have been preferable to this stony, barren stretch.
“However, we’ll go out armed,” said Captain Harvey, commander of the expedition.
As a wise and experienced leader in the Survey Service, he knew that on alien worlds unknown dangers oftentimes lurked just beyond one’s nose.
“Men”—he addressed the whole group—“you know what we’re here for. Survey of mineral deposits. All previous expeditions, in the past few years, reported extensive beryllium ores. That makes this satellite a sort of treasure-chest.”
He waved his arms as though indicating mountainous heaps of wealth. True, in a sense, for beryllium, forming the lightest and strongest of alloys, had become the most useful metal in that age of interplanetary travel.
“The Mineral Exploitation Bureau,” he went on, “would have come around to it sooner, except that this satellite is so damnably far out of the way. As it stands, Saturn is the practical outpost of present-day earthly traffic in the Solar System. And Iapetus here, being so remote from the primary, is about the farthest frontier so far achieved. But now that Titan and Rhea have good fueling stations and docks for ore freighters, Iapetus is ripe for the plucking. Man is bringing another world to his doorstep.”
He glanced around, knowing that all the men felt the inner glow that comes to the explorer who realizes he is the first of a cavalcade of settlers, workers and builders, who will come later on.
“For the survey work,” the captain went on, “you are all under the orders of Hugh Benning, our mineralogist. And now we’ll get into vac-suits and venture out. All except Traft and Greeley. You two will remain within the ship, as guard.”
The rest of the men struggled into their vac-suits of neo-rubber. The two pilots helped them clamp the neck fittings of their helmets and clipped oxygen bottles to their belts.
“By the way, Captain Harvey,” Hugh Benning said, “this atmosphere has always been reported breathable, by other expeditions. Cold and thin, of course, but fresh and pleasant. No harmful effects after an hour.”
“I know,” the captain nodded. “We’ll try it later, but only after a volunteer has breathed it for fifteen minutes before the rest do. Get that, men? Keep your helmets closed until I give the word.”
Finally the eight vac-suited figures clumped out with their lead-weighted shoes and the air-lock hissed shut behind them. Traft and Greeley watched half enviously as their companions wandered about outside, enjoying the feeling of freedom, after the cramped quarters of the cabin. That was always a thrill to space voyagers.
A few minutes later Benning, evidently having volunteered to try the air, was seen to unfasten the slit covering that allowed the outside air to reach his lungs. His suit promptly deflated, as the outside pressure was greatly lower. He turned off his oxygen bottle, subsisting entirely by the satellite’s atmosphere. A normal man, avoiding exertion, could breathe such stratosphere-thin air for a limited period of time without ill effects.
“Bet the air has a bite to it,” Traft shivered, glancing at the thermo-scale that showed the outside temperature at minus 102 degrees. The overhead, midget sun did little to dispel such cold. “But of course he has the nose tube warming coils taking most of the chill out.”
“Lucky guy!” sighed Greeley. “Bottled air always tastes so stale after a few hours.”
A click sounded in the stillness of the ship. Traft was training a small, compact camera—a marvel of perfection that took colored pictures under almost any conditions—out of the port, snapping the outside scenery.
“A candid camera fiend, if there ever was one,” Greeley said, grinning. “The breed hasn’t died out