SATELLITE OF FEAR

By FRED A. KUMMER, Jr.

Inside the crippled Comet, a hard-bitten crew watched the life-giving oxygen run low. Outside, on Ceres' fabled Darkside, stalked death in awful, spectral form.

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1941. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

The Comet's control-room was silent except for the monotonous beat of Ken Grant's restless pacing. Six months on Ceres' frigid, shadowy Darkside had driven the tan from his face, etched lines of worry about his mouth. Darkside had a way of doing that to people. A temperature of five above absolute zero, the grim, eternal darkness, the insane landscape, combined to give an impression of unreality that made one feel he was living some terrible nightmare.

From time to time Grant glanced at the sidereal chronometer, shook his head. Sixteen hours! Sixteen hours since Kennerly had left ... and the heating unit of his space-suit had been good for three! Kennerly had vanished, just as Allers had vanished before him! Two men had left the disabled ship to try and reach Bowman's Crater, that last tiny outpost only twenty miles away, and both men had disappeared. Had either Allers or Kennerly been successful, a rescue ship from Bowman's Crater must have come by now. But instead, the two spacemen had been swallowed up by the gloom, vanished, leaving no trace. The bitter silent darkness outside was like some yawning limitless void into which men went, and did not return. Their position was bad enough in any case, but with a woman in command....

Grant shot a glance at the stack of big lead chests in a corner of the cabin. Pitchblend—radium ore with an amazingly high metal content. The ore in those big chests, when refined, would yield over a million in the rare element. Not that a million would do them much good if they couldn't get it away. With the main fuel intake valve cracked, the motors, the radio, the air-regenerator, were all shut off. Death from lack of oxygen faced them unless word got through.

A click of the cabin's door broke Grant's thoughts. He turned; a slender girl wearing riding breeches and leather jacket appeared in the doorway. Pale, with deep smoke-gray eyes and auburn hair, she had a fragile transcendental beauty that was very appealing, but her chin was firm, determined.

"Any news, Mr. Grant?" she asked quietly, stepping into the control room.

"None." He shook a gloomy head. "I don't like it! There's something strange going on, Miss Conway! The trail's perfectly clear, there's no life on Ceres that we know of. One man might conceivably meet with some sort of accident, but not two! They tell stories about Darkside; queer stories! About alien, unknown creatures."

"I ... I know," the girl said tightly. "Dad used to hear those stories, too, when he and Allers were prospecting here. When Dad died he left me enough money to charter this ship, told me to come here to Ceres for my legacy. Gave me the chart showing where this pocket of pitchblend was located." She glanced at the lead chests. "Now Allers, Dad's closest friend, is gone. And Kennerly. And we're trapped, made virtual prisoners in this ship by something unknown—out there. We've got to get word through, Mr. Grant! It's death to stay here until our oxygen is gone. Death, maybe worse, waiting for us out there in the darkness...." She broke off, suddenly, swaying.

"Steady!" Grant gripped the girl's shoulder. "It's the bad air! I'll go tell Harris to crack open one of the emergency oxygen flasks. You'd better lie down."

Like a flash the girl's red head snapped up. "You're a romanticist, Mr. Grant," she said. "You seem to think I ought to be a languishing heroine. Well, I'm not. I'm in command of this expedition and if there're any risks to be taken, I'm taking them! Have Harris open an oxygen flask and then check over my space-suit! As soon as I get my breath, I'm going out and look for Allers and Kennerly!" She waved aside Grant's remonstrances. "Orders, Mr. Grant!"

Face stony, Grant left the control room, strode along the companionway to the fo'castle. The Comet's crew, perhaps half a dozen men all told, were stretched upon their bunks, faces drawn as they fought against the stale air. Grant motioned to Harris, the squat, ugly mate.

"Air's getting thick," he said. "Better crack an emergency tube."

"Aye, aye, sir!" Harris lifted a steel plate in the floor, swung down the iron ladder. Some moments later he emerged from the storehold, carrying an oxygen flask.

"Funny!" The mate rubbed his stubbly chin. "I coulda swore we had twenty emergency flasks below. But there's only five more down there."

"Five!" Grant's eyes narrowed. "There were twenty when we left earth! I counted 'em!"

"That's not all," Harris muttered. "There's other stores missing! Wire, tools, batteries, spare plates for repairing the hull!" His eyes flicked toward the darkness beyond the portholes. "There were plenty of times we were all down at the mine working when whatever it was that got Allers and Kennerly might have entered the ship, taken those things. I've seen shadows out there sometimes. Shadows that weren't just right, sliding among the rocks. And ... and it's bad luck to have a woman aboard ship."

A silence fell over the cabin. Grant frowned. Five flasks of oxygen ... and the air-regenerator useless without power! Nothing could save them unless word got through to Bowman's Crater, on the edge of the Cerean Darkside. Two men had tried to get through, and those two men had vanished. To permit Joan Conway to attempt the trip was unthinkable. Grant reached for one of the bulky space-suits that hung on the wall.

"All right, men," he grated. "We're going to get to the bottom of this! Here's the plan! I'll take the trail to Bowman's Crater; the same trail Allers and Kennerly took! If there's anything lying in wait out there, it ought to attack me, and I'll be armed! At the same time I want you, Harris, and you, Miller, to go out also, to climb the other side of the crater and circle about, picking up the trail to Bowman's a mile or so from here. I'll draw It's attention, while you try to get through and take word to the outpost. Got it?"

The three men nodded, climbed into the heavily insulated space-suits. Electric heating wires ran through the lining, from portable batteries good for several hours, enabling the men within them to maintain comfortable warmth even though the soles of their thick lead gravity shoes, in contact with the icy ground, were within a few degrees of absolute zero. Gloves of heavy lead, a part of every radium miner's equipment as protection against the highly concentrated ore he was forced to handle, covered the asbestoid "hands" of the space-suits. Grant paused before snapping his transparent plastic helmet into place, turned to the men who were to remain aboard the Comet.

"Miss Conway's feeling a little ragged because of the air," he said, unsmilingly. "When she's better, tell her where we've gone."

The men grinned understandingly. They knew that the girl, in spite of her frail form, felt that command of the expedition required her to share in all its dangers. And Grant, like most men who had spent their lives on far-flung frontiers, seeking adventure in the woman-less outposts of terrestial civilization, had curiously archaic ideas of chivalry, to say nothing of deep-rooted convictions that a woman's place was on earth. Disregarding the grins of the men, he closed his helmet, opened the valve of his oxygen tank.

"Ready?" he barked into the mouthpiece of his radio communications set.

Two space-suited figures nodded grimly behind their helmets, followed Grant through the airlock. In the clean, airless void the stars shone like white beacons, shedding a thin eerie light over the barren plain. A dark inferno worthy of a Dore's brush, it seemed, malevolent, intangibly evil. Tortured pinnacles of rock, jagged spires stabbing at the sable sky; deep craters, dug by countless meteors, pock-marking the bleak terrain; yawning crevasses, towering cliffs, jagged, sharp-angled blocks of stone, for Darkside had neither sun, air, nor rain to round them, soften their weird outlines.

Grant loosened his heat-gun in its holster, glanced about. Up the side of the big crater, in which the mine-shaft and the space-ship lay, was a poorly defined trail, winding in and out among the towering rocks. This was the way to Bowman's, the little mining town situated in the twilight zone between Ceres' bitter Darkside and its blazing Sunside. Allers and Kennerly had taken that rude trail. Grant waved Harris and Miller to the right.

"You'll make a long half-circle," he announced. "It'll be tough going, but with my following the trail, I should draw any attack and enable you to pick up the trail further along, and reach Bowman's. Okay, now. Let's go!"

Harris and Miller disappeared among the up-thrust monoliths, Grant swung along the trail. In spite of his heavy space-suit and his thick lead-soled gravity shoes, he was able to move at a brisk pace, hand on his gun, eyes probing the gloom to right and left. Onward he went, steadily, skirting craters, leaping narrow crevasses, squeezing through rocky defiles whose overhanging ledges often met to form a dark passageway. For all the heating wires within his suit, he could feel the cold; the utter silence was maddening.

Grant stared at the murky shadows with narrowed eyes. What was it that had spirited away Allers and Kennerly, two brave men, well armed? Some unknown force of nature, or something more tangible? Superstitious spacemen whispered of monstrous reptilian beasts, of space-pirates' hide-outs, of strange, spectral Shapes. Drink-inspired hallucinations, Grant had said scornfully. Now he was not so sure. So little was known of Darkside.