To Be Continued: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume One by Silverberg Robert

Author:Silverberg, Robert [Silverberg, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science Fiction
Publisher: Subterranean Press
Published: 2011-01-16T16:00:00+00:00

Gigantic in his heatsuit, Krinsky brought Llewellyn and Falbridge aboard. They peeled out of their spacesuits and wobbled around unsteadily for a moment before they collapsed. They were as red as newly boiled lobsters.

“Heat prostration,” Ross said. “Krinsky, get them into takeoff cradles. Dominic, you in your suit yet?”

The spaceman appeared at the airlock entrance and nodded.

“Good. Get down there and drive the crawler into the hold. We can’t afford to leave it here. Double-quick, and then we’re blasting off. Brainerd, that new orbit ready?”

“Yes, sir.”

The thermometer grazed 200. The cooling system was beginning to suffer—but it would not have to endure much more agony. Within minutes the Leverrier was lifting from Mercury’s surface—minutes ahead of the relentless advance of the sun. The ship swung into a parking orbit not far above the planet’s surface.

As they hung there, catching their breaths, just one thing occupied Ross’s mind: why? Why had Brainerd’s orbit brought them down in a danger zone instead of the safety strip? Why had both he and Brainerd been unable to compute a blasting pattern, the simplest of elementary astrogation techniques? And why had Spangler’s wits utterly failed him—just long enough to let the unhappy Curtis kill himself?

Ross could see the same question reflected on everyone’s face: why?

He felt an itchy feeling at the base of his skull. And suddenly an image forced its way across his mind and he had the answer.

He saw a great pool of molten zinc, lying shimmering between two jagged crests somewhere on Sunside. It had been there thousands of years; it would be there thousands, perhaps millions, of years from now.

Its surface quivered. The sun’s brightness upon the pool was intolerable even to the mind’s eye.

Radiation beat down on the pool of zinc—the sun’s radiation, hard and unending. And then a new radiation, an electromagnetic emanation in a different part of the spectrum, carrying a meaningful message:

I want to die.

The pool of zinc stirred fretfully with sudden impulses of helpfulness.

The vision passed as quickly as it came. Stunned, Ross looked up. The expressions on the six faces surrounding him confirmed what he could guess.

“You all felt it too,” he said.

Spangler nodded, then Krinsky and the rest of them.

“Yes,” Krinsky said. “What the devil was it?”

Brainerd turned to Spangler. “Are we all nuts, Doc?”

The psych officer shrugged. “Mass hallucination…collective hypnosis…”

“No, Doc.” Ross leaned forward. “You know it as well as I do. That thing was real. It’s down there, out on Sunside.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that wasn’t any hallucination we had. That’s something alive down there—or as close to alive as anything on Mercury can be.” Ross’s hands were shaking. He forced them to subside. “We’ve stumbled over something very big,” he said.

Spangler stirred uneasily. “Harry—”

“No, I’m not out of my head! Don’t you see—that thing down there, whatever it is, is sensitive to our thoughts! It picked up Curtis’ godawful caterwauling the way a radar set grabs electromagnetic waves. His were the strongest thoughts coming through; so it acted on them and did its damnedest to help Curtis get what he wanted.

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