Chapter 7 FACING A MERCURIAL STORM.

That our lives were preserved and the car saved from destruction was due to two circumstances, one of them most peculiar and of far-reaching importance.

The lesser of the two circumstances was this: the car had not dropped to the plain, but had had its downward rush intercepted by an elevation, so that the force of our fall was just about half what might have been expected.

As to the other and more vital circumstance, the fall itself was not what it would have been on our own sphere. The "pull" of gravity on Mercury, as we afterward discovered, has only one-third the power it has on Terra. To this phenomenon were due many wonderful things, as the reader will discover before we have gone very far.

I was not the first of our party to open his eyes after the landing, for when I sat up and stared about me I saw the professor moving around the steel chamber and ministering to the others.

Gilhooly was creeping toward the divan on all fours, muttering something about "a great slump in the market" and chuckling over the way in which he had "got out from under."

J. Archibald Meigs was groaning and trying to lift himself on his elbow; Augustus Popham was on his knees, wobbling erratically and apparently undecided whether to say his prayers or to try and get up; Hannibal Markham was flattened out along the floor, the professor kneeling over him and chafing his temples.

"What sort of a navigator are you, Quinn?" asked Meigs crossly. "By gad, it is more dangerous to make port with you than it is to sail through space."

"Don't blame the professor for a fault of mine, Meigs," I spoke up warmly.

The broker looked at me with something like contempt.

"I blame him for placing an incompetent and irresponsible person at such an important post as the switch board," said Meigs. "He should have known that a man who holds your distorted views on the subject of personal property is not to be trusted."

"That's right," added Popham, lifting himself to the divan.

"Gilhooly made an attack on me," said I. "He bore me down and came within one of strangling me."

"Quinn is the cause of Gilhooly's abnormal condition," persisted Meigs, who was bound to have Quinn at fault for every evil that overtook us.

I got up, rather more wrathful than the situation demanded. The fall had jarred my temper no less than my body, and I was in a mood to have the business out with Meigs at close quarters.

"Softly, Mr. Munn!" cautioned the professor. "It is well to have a deaf ear for these gentlemen at times. Help me lift Mr. Markham to the divan."

The professor's words dispelled my anger. Without another word to Meigs I went over and assisted in getting the food trust magnate into a more comfortable position.

Markham was not long in recovering, and when we took stock of ourselves we found that we were not much the worse for our shaking up. Quinn called to me to go upstairs with him and see if any havoc had been wrought there.

We found that no particular damage had been done to the instruments or other material. When we descended to the lower chamber, after an absence of fifteen or twenty minutes, Meigs had the key in the steel door and was standing at the entrance with Popham and Markham on either side of him.

"Where did you get that key?" demanded the professor, one hand groping in his pocket.

Heretofore he had been careful to keep the key upon his person. Small wonder that he was now surprised to find it in the possession of Meigs.

"I found it on the floor," replied the broker with a good deal of dignity. "Probably you lost it out of your pocket when you fell from the stairs a few minutes ago."

"What are you intending to do?" asked the professor quietly.

"Professor Quinn, sir," returned Meigs with elaborate condescension, "we have reached the parting of the ways. While we were traveling through space, I and my friends could do nothing less than bear with your company, and with that of the rogue at your side; but now that we are safely moored on Mercury, and can debark, we see fit to withdraw ourselves and renounce further intercourse with you."

"Ah!" murmured Quinn, a slow smile hovering about his thin lips.

The smile caused some acerbity to manifest itself in the three gentlemen at the door. They drew themselves up haughtily.

"Quinn," went on the broker sharply, "you lured us into your castle and abducted us from our native orb, with small regard for the feelings of our relatives or friends, and no consideration whatever for the business interests with which we were engaged; so--"

"Your business interests had my every consideration," interrupted the professor.

Meigs took no notice of the remark.

"So," he continued, "remembering these wrongs, we feel that we can no longer associate with you. As for Munn"-here he turned a fastidious eye in my direction-"he is utterly impossible to men of our social standing. This planet, you tell us, is three thousand miles in diameter. May we request that you and Munn take one end of the diameter and leave the other end to us?"

The professor laughed softly and seated himself.

"Sit down, Mr. Munn," said he. "We have been ostracized by our fellow-exiles. Let us see how well they get along without us."

"We bid you farewell," finished Meigs loftily.

Thereupon he turned the key, threw open the door-and dropped on the threshold as though he had been shot! Markham and Popham cried aloud, threw their arms across their faces and reeled back.

A blast as from a furnace drove in at the opening, filling the chamber like a draft from Hades. I could scarcely breathe in the stifling atmosphere.

"Hurry, Munn!" cried Quinn. "Drag Meigs away from the door or he'll be burned to a crisp!"

The broker was already smoking when I caught his ankles and jerked him inside. The professor slammed the door.

Presently the air within the car readjusted itself to normal conditions. Meigs, red as a beet and breathing heavily, was little the worse for his warm experience.

"I fancy, Mr. Meigs," cooed the professor, "that you will wish to avail yourself of one of my anti-temperature baths before cutting loose from myself and Mr. Munn. There is plenty of water left for all of us, and I will go aloft, set up the collapsible tub, and make the bath ready. We have alighted in the tropics, evidently, and at the period of mid-summer. The temperature is about five hundred degrees, fahrenheit."

With that the professor took the key from the door to keep Gilhooly from making a dash outside, and started for the storeroom. I followed him, the three disgruntled gentlemen gazing after us mutely.

The professor and I were the first to fortify ourselves with the anti-temperature bath. After dipping our bodies, we rinsed our clothing in the liquid.

Aside from a pleasant, cooling sensation the bath gave no evidence of its potent qualities. There was no hardening of the skin, as I fancied there might be, no change in its ruddy color, no inconvenience.

When we went down again we sent the other three gentlemen aloft, the professor instructing them as to the necessity of making their clothing as well as their bodies proof against the climate. In due course, Popham, Meigs, and Markham once more showed themselves.

Gilhooly, of course, had also to be made immune; and he struggled against it so fiercely that we were obliged to hold him in the tub while the professor poured three buckets of the mixture over him.

He was not disrobed, and when sufficiently drenched he leaped from the tub and fled, raving, to the lower chamber.

"Now," said the professor, "we are prepared to fare forth. You gentlemen"-he addressed himself to Markham, Meigs, and Popham-"may go with Mr. Munn and me, or keep by yourselves, as you may elect. But it will be well to make this car our headquarters. Here we have food and drink, also a stronghold in case of attack by the Mercurials-if there happen to be any."

"How can there be any life in such an over-heated atmosphere?" inquired Markham.

"Nature is a great leveler of barriers," replied Quinn. "She is able to adjust life to its environment, you may be sure, just as easily as she can bridge the social chasm that separates a thief from a trust magnate."

His eyes twinkled.

"Such a bridge," he added, "would not prove much of a tax on her resources. For my own part, I do not think the chasm either so wide or so deep as you gentlemen appear to imagine."

I chuckled at that, and Meigs and his two companions grew duly resentful.

"As for Mr. Gilhooly," continued Quinn, "we cannot take him with us on our tour of observation. It will be best to leave him locked in the car. I will close the trap leading into the store-room and I do not think it will be possible for him to work much damage in the room below."

"I don't know what good it will do me to go out with your exploring expedition," said Popham dejectedly; "in a country as hot as this there can be no earthly use for coal."

"Or wearing apparel," added Meigs listlessly. "Cotton couldn't grow in such a temperature. And as for wheat!" He shook his head wearily.

Cotton and wheat were the abc of his Wall Street experience. Beyond those commodities he groped in the dark.

"What sort of food can be grown on such a sun-baked planet?" grumbled Markham.

The railway man was shouting something about watered stock, and his babbling was wafted up to us.

"Gilhooly," added Markham, "is the only fortunate man in the party. Realization will blast the hopes and mayhap prove the death of the rest of us, while he-he cannot realize!"

"You gentlemen lose courage too quickly," said the professor. "In my lectures on Venus I told you how that planet was inclined to the plane of its orbit. The axis of Mercury has a still greater inclination; in fact, the orb leans on itself as though about to fall. Its days are of about the same length as the days of Terra-only three minutes longer-but its years, owing to its contracted orbit, are much shorter. In eighty-eight days Mercury makes its round, so that each season is only twenty-two days in length.

"At the poles of Mercury, in what answers to the polar regions of our own earth, there must be a more tempered climate--"

"Then let us get there, by all means," cut in Popham.

"In whatever we do," answered Quinn, "we must make haste slowly."

"Let's get out and look around, anyhow," cried Meigs. "It may happen, after all, that we have a world to conquer here, and I have not the patience to remain longer in this steel cell of yours."

"Very good," returned the professor. "We will make our preparations and go forth."

He shut off the flow of oxygen from the tank and then followed the rest of us to the under apartment, closing a steel door over the trap at the head of the stairs and locking it. Gilhooly, imagining himself a conductor, was walking around the edge of the circular divan collecting tickets from imaginary passengers.

"Sing Sing!" he called out as the professor unlocked the door at the entrance and pulled it open.

"Here's where you get off, Munn," said Meigs maliciously.

"Here's where we all get off," returned the professor, smiling.

Thereupon we passed hastily into the blinding glare of the Mercurial day. For several minutes our eyes rebelled at the brightness; when finally they became inured to it, we looked around us upon a desolation that struck dismay to our hearts.

We saw then that our car had alighted upon an elevation which was nothing less than the rim of an extinct volcano of vast proportions. From ridge to ridge across the abysmal crater at least half a mile could be measured.

It was beyond the power of our eyes to penetrate to the black depths of the great pit.

"Listen!" cried the professor, his voice resounding so thunderously as almost to deafen us-some trick of the atmosphere.

We stood silently, our ears alert, and heard a confused babel of sound proceeding apparently out of the very core of the volcano.

"Sub-Mercurial fires may be at work down there," whispered the professor, nodding toward the crater.

Even the whisper sounded unpleasantly loud to us.

"What a world!" came from Augustus Popham in bellowing tones. "With fire within and without, what chance is there for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?"

Some of Meigs' peevishness had got into the coal man, and he rent the air with it. We remained mule after this outburst, I with my gaze hopefully on the professor and the professor blinking at the sun.

In a little time I allowed my own eyes to falter zenithward, and the glory of the sun in Mercury's mid-heaven has ever since been one of the treasured memories of my life. Its disk was six times its diameter as viewed from Earth, and the grandeur of its flaming surface is beyond the powers of my feeble pen to make known.

I was oppressed and held captive by a feeling of awe and wonder. There was a red tinge to the atmosphere, caused by a reflection from the red of the planet's brick-like crust; through this warm color pulsed the golden streamers-yellow and scarlet overhead, fading to faintest orange on the horizon.

"Think you, Mr. Popham," murmured the professor, his voice awakening us as from a trance, "that all yon splendor, which has been in these skies for ages upon ages, was created for the enjoyment of no living thing? If so, you are wrong. There are now, as there have always been, beings with an intelligence capable of appreciating all this magnificent profusion of light and color. But enough. We have looked down into the crater and up into the heavens; suppose we turn our eyes another way and see what there is to offer."

He faced about as he spoke, and gazed down the bare rocky slope of the volcano and off across an equally bare and forbidding plain.

"No trees, no water, no life of any kind," muttered Meigs querulously.

"There is a bright spot over there," said Quinn, shading his eyes and pointing.

Our eyes followed his finger and encountered a glittering object on a slight elevation. As we gazed, the object, whatever it was, slowly vanished.

"We might investigate that," suggested Popham excitedly. "Perhaps it was a Mercurial wearing a sort of armor to protect him from the heat. It may be that there are people here, and that they live underground."

He would have started forthwith, but the professor stretched out a hand and detained him.

"Just a moment," said Quinn. "Before we get too far from the car, let me make sure that all of you are sufficiently immune from the heat. Do you feel that you are fully protected in that respect, gentlemen?"

So far as I was personally concerned, I had not felt the slightest inconvenience from the sun's rays. I declared as much, and the others likewise so expressed themselves.

"There's another one of the things!" spoke up Meigs, pointing in another direction.

We were just able to detect a glow on another low elevation when it also flashed into thin air. Then we began looking for the little hills, and counted no less than a dozen within our range of vision.

Some of the hills were capped with the mysterious gleam, which dazzled for a time and then twinkled out.

The professor was perplexed, as I could see plainly.

"We'll examine one of those hills," said Meigs, "and find out what this means."

The top of the volcano, where we were standing, was perhaps five hundred feet from the plain. As Meigs spoke, he leaped for a rock a yard or so below him.

To the astonishment of all of us, he rose in the air like a human balloon, soared over the rock by a score of feet, and alighted several rods down the slope.

It was a titanic jump, but Meigs had regained a foothold with the lightness of a piece of down. He was a large man, was Meigs, his ponderosity exceeding two hundred pounds, Fairbanks.

He was as much surprised at his agility as we were, and began to essay various feats. He leaped straight upward, gaining a maximum height of a dozen yards and returning lightly and easily to his original position.

Next he coupled his leap with an aerial somersault, and carried on with an abandon much beneath the dignity of a Wall Street broker, as it struck me. In fact, he acted like a schoolboy out for a holiday, and so full of animal spirits he hardly knew what to do with himself.

"You'd think he belonged to a circus," observed the disgusted Popham. "I'll go down there and put a stop to the performance."

"And I'll go along and help," added Markham, visibly distracted because of the broker's folly.

They started down the steep with rod-long steps; and presently one would have thought they wore seven-league boots from the amount of speed they developed.

Instead of putting a stop to the broker's performance they joined in. By and by they were playing leapfrog, every bound taking them forward half a hundred feet.

"Gravity here is far from having the force it has on Terra," remarked the professor. "Exertion comes easy and gives most astonishing results. Those men, Mr. Munn, are not used to such activity, yet their marvelous gymnastics do not seem to tire them in the least. Suppose that we ourselves make a test of the Mercurial gravity?"

I needed no second bidding, and Quinn and I took the descent as buoyantly as thistle-down before the wind. Somehow the lightness of our heels got into our heads, and the staid professor and myself began cavorting like a pair of ten-year-olds.

The delightful freedom of movement, was as novel as it was exhilarating. Liberty of muscle bred license of mind; had we been smoking opium we could not have acted more outrageously.

Nor was there any fatigue apparent. I felt that I could have run a hundred miles in as many minutes and never paused for breath.

Carried away by the wonderful effects of diminished gravity, we forgot all about our projected investigation of the little hills. In the midst of a game of tag we were suddenly brought to our senses with a round turn.

A pall had fallen over the landscape. The sun was blotted out by inky clouds, and a tremendous wind began to blow.

"We must get back to the car!" cried Quinn.

His voice, great in volume though it was, was all but drowned in the shriek and roar of the blast. The lightness that had afforded us so much enjoyment in still air now became a source of grave danger, for we could not keep our feet in the fury of the tempest.

"Merciful powers!" roared Popham, as he and Meigs were driven against each other with a terrific impact.

Although sorely put to it to keep myself from being blown away, I managed to cling to a rock and watch the weird gyrations of the two millionaires. Their collision had caused them to lose their footing, and, clinging desperately to each other, they were hurled back and forth, touching the ground now and then, only to rebound from it like rubber balls. And all the time this ground-and-lofty tumbling was going on both men were whooping frantically for some one to come to their aid.

I was too hard beset to think of leaving my place of temporary refuge, and it was only when I saw the professor and Markham, their right hands clasped, staggering toward the two men, that I made up my mind to join them. Three of us, in a chain, might be able to do something toward rescuing Popham and Meigs.

Breathing deep, like a swimmer about to plunge through a whirlpool, I cast myself adrift and allowed the wind to drive me in the direction of the professor and Markham. No matter how strongly I braced backward against the blast, every time I lifted a foot I was hurled onward and almost overturned. Finally, more by good luck than anything else, I came close enough to catch the professor's hand.

"Popham and Meigs will be killed if we can't get to them!" shouted Markham.

There were eddies in the wind, like those in the swift current of a stream, and Popham and Meigs had become entangled in them. Had they been blown off on a straightaway course, they would long since have been too far away for us to do anything toward laying hands on them and getting them upright.

The professor had taken note of the gyratory movements of our hapless companions, and he called upon Markham and me to plant ourselves as firmly as possible and remain in our present positions. This was easier said than done; yet, by calling upon every ounce of our reserve strength, we contrived, after a fashion, to keep our places.

Popham and Meigs were bounding and leaping through the arc of a great circle. All we had to do was to remain where we were and wait for them.

They came to us in mid-air, and we had literally to reach up and pull them down. For a space the five of us were tangled in an indiscriminate heap, our united weight offering greater resistance to the wind and giving us an opportunity to rest and collect our scattered wits.

"Join hands," cried the professor, "and we'll get under the lee of that rock. Careful, now! We must not get separated again."

By desperate work we succeeded in getting to our feet and clasping hands; then, hurled and buffeted, we gained the rock and fell breathless under the leeward side of it.

"What a place, what a place!" groaned Popham.

"I wish Venus hadn't been out of our course," wailed Meigs. "Certainly we couldn't have been any worse off there than here."

"No wonder nothing can grow on this sun-scorched world," growled Markham. "Even if plants could stand the heat such a wind would pull them up by the roots."

"What are we to do now?" demanded Popham. "You got us into this, Quinn, and you've got to get us out of it."

"Now's a good time for you three to go off to the other side of the planet," I remarked. "Whenever there's danger, you suddenly realize that you can't get along without the professor. Oh, you're a fine lot of nabobs, you are."

"Peace, Mr. Munn," called the professor. "We have enough to occupy our minds without wasting time in useless bickering. I was at fault, for I knew what terrible gales visit this planet, and that they come suddenly. It was a mistake to venture so far from the car."

"A mistake," breathed Meigs, with some heat, "that came near having tragic consequences. Popham and I were knocked about like a couple of footballs."

"What's to be done, what's to be done?" cried Popham impatiently. "The gale is increasing, and who knows but this rock may be plucked up bodily and rolled over us? We can't stay here."

"That is true," said the professor. "We must get back to the car."

"There's no telling what will become of us if we try that," called Markham.

"And there's no telling what will become of us if we remain here," answered the professor. "If we form a chain, it is quite possible that we may succeed in getting back to our refuge."

"Even the car may not be able to stand up against this wind," clamored Meigs.

"We shall have to take our chances with it, nevertheless," went on Quinn. "If we should get separated, each of us must make the best preparations he can to weather the gale, and then, when it has blown itself out, hunt for the car. That must be our rendezvous during the time we are here."

The professor got up slowly, bracing himself against the fierce swirl that came around the side of the rock.

"Come," he called; "it is now or never."

I could see that the gale had increased alarmingly. Its force seemed irresistible, and yet I knew that we could not remain where we were.

We clasped hands again, but were unable to cling together, being lifted high and thrown helter-skelter in all directions. Lightning flashed-such lightning as I have never seen before or since.

It snapped and crackled overhead and ran like trailing serpents over the rocks. We were in a sea of flame.

And the thunder! It seemed to split the heavens and crack open the lava-like hills. Rain came; yet not rain, for it turned to damp vapor in the red-hot atmosphere. The Mercurial elements were at war-wind, steam, thunder, and lightning all marshaling their hosts and charging to conflict.

To regain the steel car was impossible. We were lost in the fearsome fury of darkness and storm, driven helplessly and with smashing force across the vast plain.

I was hurled against something which I gripped with convulsive energy. The something gripped me in return.

"Help!" I cried, bereft of my wits and eager only for rescue.

"Munn!" shouted a voice. "Is this you?"

"Quinn!" I exclaimed.

"We must hang together." said Quinn.

And then, tightly locked in each other's arms, we were lifted high on a billow of fog and driven relentlessly I know not how far.

When the blast released us, we fell to the rocks and rolled over and over; then the surface beneath us gave way and we dropped.

The distance we fell could be only a matter of guesswork, and even guesswork was out of the question in the disordered state of our minds at that moment. Suffice to say the fall did not render us unconscious, and we struck on something that vibrated under the impact of our bodies. We were still in blank darkness, and the turmoil of the tempest no longer beat about us, but could be heard crashing somewhere overhead.

"Thank Heaven!" murmured the professor, withdrawing himself from me. "Are you alive, Mr. Munn?"

"I believe so," I answered. "What has happened to us, professor?"

"We have been flung into some sort of a shelter, it seems to me," he replied.

"But we are not on stable ground," he added. "We are sitting on an object that is descending with us, descending rapidly and-ah, wonder of wonders!"

Abruptly we fell into broad day, surrounded by such sights and sounds that I thought myself dealing with the mysteries of a disordered dream.