I had always liked Murphy, but suddenly I saw red. I jumped him, and for a minute it was touch and go. We rolled over on the deck, exchanging hammer blows. He was hampered by the tangle his legs were in, but he made good use of his fists.
The old man had to intervene again. He accomplished it by backing up his tuggings with profanity. He cast aspersions on our ancestry, and threatened us with the psycho-lash.
I’m hot-tempered, but I cool off quickly. The instant I realized I was making it tough for the old man I struggled to my feet, and held out my hand.
“Any time you’re ready, Murphy,” I said.
The Irishman rose groggily, shaking his head to clear it. He stood for a minute staring incredulously at my extended palm, his eyebrows twitching. Then his own hand went out and locked with mine.
“I guess I was a bit hasty, lad,” he said.
Ten minutes later Sylvia was placing cool pads on my face, one on each cheek, and shaking her head over my blackened eye. “I’m not really sorry for you, Dave,” she said. “You apparently enjoy lashing out with your fists. You just used that frog as an excuse.”
Perhaps I should have mentioned sooner that there was a woman on board. A slim and attractive girl with coppery hair named Sylvia Varner was visiting us for five days consecutively. But she had come out on the crew-shift cruiser Aquila which was berthed right alongside of us on the semi-molten crust.
Women are out of place on Mercury run ships, and if I were taking fictional liberties with this record I’d leave her out. But facts are facts, and the feminine zigzag had a lot to do with the way the frog brought us all to the brink of despair. Without her it would have been less though, but less exciting, too, and, of course, for romantic reasons I was glad she had come. She happened to be Ellison’s niece, and my fiancée, and had a kid brother working on the metallurgical staff.
“But it isn’t a frog,” I said, irritably. “It’s a Mercurian animal. And I don’t blame Murphy for sailing into me.”
“You’re being very charitable,” she said. “He tried to kill you.”
“All right,” I said. “For a minute he went berserk. But what would you do if you bagged the first Mercurian animal ever seen and a dumb kid turned it into a museum piece? If Murphy could have brought that frog back to Earth alive the National Geographic Society would have smothered him with medals.”
“But won’t it thaw out, Dave?”
“It’s limper than a rag right now,” I said. “But it is also dead as a doornail.”
Sylvia’s brow crinkled. “I should think a Mercurian animal would have to be plated like an armadillo. I should think it would need some sort of air-cooling system and a—”
“Hold on,” I said. “You’re jumping to a priori conclusions. We’ll start with the animal. It is froglike, so conditions on Mercury must favor the development of slender, agile quadrupeds with powerful hindlimbs. Since Mercury is flecked with semi-molten ‘marsh patches’ its froglike appearance does not surprise me. We can only speculate as to its habits, but it’s probably oviparous, and has a brief life-cycle.
“Now, in hot baths with carefully regulated approaches human beings have been able to stand degrees of heat above the boiling point of water. Back in the eighteenth century a Frenchman named Chamouni the Incombustible entered an oven containing a raw leg of mutton, and remained there until the meat was completely cooked. Medical history records hundreds of similar cases.”
“But what has that to do with Murphy’s frog?”
“Don’t you see? If human beings can build up all that resistance in a few minutes what’s to stop a rapidly breeding Mercurian animal from acquiring ten times as much immunity in fifty thousand generations? With already immune invertebrates to start with natural selection could give even a highly evolved, meaty-fleshed animal plenty of resistance.”
I was feeling distinctly proud of myself when Sylvia countered with: “You said the sides of its body and its hindlimbs were covered with fine, reddish hairs. Villosities was the term you used. How could natural selection build up immunity in hair?”
I could have brought up another player, but I wanted her to smooth my forehead instead. So I leaned back with a sigh and refrained from pointing out that chitin was slow-burning at best, and that the only hairy frog on Earth—Trichobatatrachus robustus from West Africa—lived up to its name.
She sat on the arm of my chair and leaned forward and for a minute I thought I was going to get my wish. But all she did was kiss me. She leaned her lips against mine and for about three minutes a pleasant tingling surged through me. Then I began to grow restless. I couldn’t breathe and her lips were no longer warm and vibrant.
I had to move her face to one side in order to inhale, and the instant I did so she swayed and her elbows descended on my chest.
A chill coursed through me. Her arms were rigid and she seemed almost weightless. Alarmed, I rose, grasped her wrists and eased her gently down into the chair.
She just sat there staring up at me, her face a petrified mask and her body so utterly still that it did something to sound. In place of the faint susurrous which occupied space gives forth the chair seemed to be enveloped in a kind of auditory vacuum which chilled me to the core of my being.
I can’t remember how long I stood there with horror slapping at my brain like the tides of some cold, dead moon. I only know that I turned at last and went stumbling from her presence with one thought
