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He touched the drawing of the one in the air and pointed toward our port hole and looked questioningly at the beetle. The insect inspected the flyer in space and nodded. "Good!" cried Jim. "That's the third of the trio who came ahead as scouts. Get your gun ready, First Mortgage: we're going to pick him off." Our ship approached the doomed Mercurian.
No certain signs of a Mercurian atmosphere are visible. The globe is seamed and furrowed with long narrow markings, explicable as cracks in cooling. It is, and always was, a dead world.
We reached the outer surface in another ten minutes and we were none too soon. Hardly had we debouched from the hole than ahead of us we saw another Mercurian flyer. It was a lone one, and Jim bent over the captive and held a hastily made sketch before him. The sketch showed three Mercurian flyers, one on the ground, one wrecked and the third one in the air.
In particular, he watched Astro. "I warned you, sir," whispered Tom, as the Venusian went to work on his second steak. "I wouldn't have missed this for anything," said Bernard. He smiled, lit a cigar of fine Mercurian leaf tobacco and settled back comfortably. "And now," he said, "let me explain why I was so anxious to have dinner with you. I'm in the import-export business. Ship to Mars, mostly.
The Mercurian Planeteer base was in the twilight zone, but the Planeteers always worked on the sun side, wearing special alloy suits to mine the precious nuclite that only the hot planet provided. At some time during its first years, Mercury had been so close to the sun that its temperature was driven high enough to permit a subatomic thermonuclear reaction.
As the Mercurian fleet came nearer he started a slow retreat toward the earth. The Mercurians overtook us rapidly; Jim locked his controls at slow speed down and hurried to the bow gun. "Start shooting as soon as you can," he said. "I'll keep the magazine filled." I swung the gun until the cross-hairs of the screen rested full on the leading ship and pressed the button.
Practical assurance was gained from them that the innermost planet has a rough rind of dusky rock, absorbing all but 17 per cent. of the light poured upon it by the fierce adjacent sun. Its "albedo," in other words, is 0·17, which is precisely that ascribed to the moon. The absence of any appreciable Mercurian atmosphere followed almost necessarily from these results.
Ten minutes later it rested on the ground beside the ship in which we had first taken the air. Following Jim's pictured orders the beetle opened the door of the Mercurian ship and followed Jim into the Hadley. As we emerged from the Mercurian ship I looked back. It had vanished completely. "The children, Jim!" I gasped.
We’ve hung it on a line behind the landing boat. The blast won’t hurt it, and it’s too big to get inside the boat." "Fine, Koa. Well, Captain, that does it." The Mercurian Planeteers got into their craft and blasted off, trailing the block of thorium in their exhaust.
"Now, old fellow," he said grimly, "either you run this ship as I want you to, or you're a dead Indian. Savvy?" He took his pencil and notebook from his pocket and drew a sketch of our Hadley space ship. On the other end of the sheet he drew a picture of the Mercurian ship, and then drew a line connecting the two. The insect looked at the sketch but made no movement.
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