“Murphy, it’s uranium we want. We’re not zoologists. The next time you go specimen chasing—”
“But it looked like a frog, Chief. I swear it did.”
“You know damn well no froglike animal could hop around on red-hot rocks.”
“I won’t let him out of my sight this time, sir,” said the miner at Murphy’s heels.
“Thank you, Haines. He needs a nurse, but do what you can.”
Five miners stepped out, each with a glance from Ellison which said as plain as words that he would walk beside them until they came back in again. The old man had so much quiet strength that he could split off simulacra of himself, and send them out through the airlock by just passing out advice. He moved like a living presence over the semi-molten Mercurian crust beside each of his men, fretting when a coupling slipped or mysterious stirrings caused the lads to look at one another with a wild surmise.
He knew that the merciless heat beating down did something to the scarred and cracked surface rocks which made them seem to buckle and split up into little leaping ghosts, and half his warnings were directed against “heat-devils” and other optical illusions.
When the last man had passed out he turned to me with a wry smile. “Dave, speaking as a psychiatrist, and without knowing for sure, I’ve a hunch there is too much tension inside of you.”
The old man actually was a psychiatrist. You have to be pretty nearly everything to qualify as a Mercury run commander and Ellison’s knowledge started with Aasen and ended with Zwolle. There were some gaps in between, but not many, and he frequently surprised me by pulling rabbits out of those.
We went down into the cuddy and the old man brought out some real smoky Scotch, and we had at least three while a strained look came into his face. One of these days someone is going to stop putting bulkhead chronometers in the cuddies of Mercury run spaceships. Men have to go out and Commanders have to wait, and if an officer can’t get his mind off the seconds in a cuddy what chance has he of relaxing at all?
Hanging on the corrugated metal bulkhead were curios from all over the Solar System, and I tried to interest myself in the things the Commander had collected in his travels. A dried Venusian weejee head looks pretty grotesque, but so does a deep-sea fish from home, and when you’ve seen both dozens of times—
A sudden vibrant humming made me spill a jigger of Scotch on my liberty uniform. The lad who was taking my place at the lock control was buzzing the old man from the “peel off” room. Ellison swung about, and barked into the auxiliary circuit audiocoil. “Well?”
“The men have returned, sir.”
“All right. Keep the inner locks closed and watch the insulators. Rawley is taking over.”
Between the outer and inner locks we had to cool off the men a little. When they stepped in from the crust the sheath couplings on their noncombustible suits had to be sprayed over with liquid air.
We went up in the jacket-lift with our knees braced and down the stern passageway to the “peel off” room, the old man striding on ahead of me. Had I stopped to reflect I might have realized there was trouble brewing. The old man wasn’t psychic exactly, but his hunches came out pat.
Before I looked through the lock port my nerves were merely jumpy, but when I actually saw Murphy standing in the freeze vault enveloped in smoke and sizzle I nearly passed out from shock.
Murphy was waving his arms up and down and the man behind him was making frantic signs to us. The frog was dangling by its long legs from the Irishman’s gloved right hand. It was about three feet in height. Every time he raised it up it tried to leap in his hand, and twisted its eyes around.
Some quirk of parallel evolution had given it a froglike face, webbed feet and long, powerful hindlimbs. But, of course, it wasn’t a frog. It was a Mercurian animal, and my stomach went tight ten seconds after I laid eyes on it.
I’ve said that I was just a green kid. The old man thought otherwise, but he was wrong and I proceeded to prove it. I turned on the freeze conduits. Liquid air poured into the vault over Murphy and he stopped gesticulating. He just stood there looking at me through the eyepiece of his helmet.
Murphy had gone out at the risk of his life and brought back a living Mercurian animal. When he perceived that I had frozen that frog to a crisp something must have gone dead inside him. When he came in through the inner locks his couplings were coated with frost and there was a look of anguish on the upper part of his face. Behind the eyepiece his features seemed all wrenched apart. From his gloved right hand the frog still dangled, but its squirmings had ceased. Its limbs were rigid, its stalked eyes frozen shut.
With shaking fingers Murphy removed his helmet and started peeling off his suit, his gaze riveted on my face. The other miners stood watching him as though fearful of what he might do.
The old man laid a hand on my arm. “You’d better go below, Dave.”
Murphy shook his head. “No, no, let the lad stay.”
He had laid the frog on the deck and was pushing his suit down below his knees. I noticed that his features were twitching, but I thought he was making an effort to control his anger until he came up out of that crouch with all his strength riding on his fists.
He clipped me on the side of the head, and delivered a blow to my midriff which sent me reeling back against the bulkhead.
The old man leapt between us. “Watch yourself, Murphy,” he thundered. “I’m still in command here.”
Murphy spat on the deck, a slow flush
