“Did they stop for us?” Bart bit out. “It’s probably only a trick to lure us down so that Dennis can make a quick getaway!”

But Steve knew that his brother was not as cold-hearted as he pretended to be. Bart proved it in the next few minutes when he reluctantly turned the Comet’s nose downward with a savage thrust of the upper tail jets.

“You’ll never regret this,” Steve said.

“I wonder,” Bart grunted, without satisfaction.

As the ship moved strongly into Mercury’s gravitation field, Bart lined the automatic pilot up with the tiny speck on the rocky world below that was the Dennis Meteor. Then he and Steve strapped down on their protective couches for the grueling landing.

Steve felt as though his chest were crushed under the rapid deceleration. It was the effect of a swiftly dropping elevator multiplied hundreds of times as the Comet’s forward jets thrust against Mercury’s crust to brake the hurtling speed. Steve finally blacked out; he always did. When he came to, they had landed, and through blurry eyes Steve saw his brother struggling to release himself from his straps.

They went to the port. The Dennis Meteor was in bad shape, its prow crumpled into a huge face of rock. Its occupants could have been killed by the concussion, although there was a good chance that they were still alive if they had had time to strap down.

Steve noted their rugged surroundings, where strange rock pillars thrust into the black sky from a shimmering, white-hot plain. Snaky rifts of incalculable depth split the torrid landscape.

“The ship landed on its side,” Bart observed, speaking over his short-range helmet radio. “The escape port is underneath!”

There was no point of exit from the ship for the trapped occupants if they were still alive, Steve observed. Even the rocket tubes had been crushed flat. Actually the Dennis Meteor was a complete ruin, its entire glossy surface warped and corrugated.

“You can see the ship broke down under the heat,” Bart said. “That’s why they had to crash-land.”

“Look here on the other side!” Steve’s voice suddenly crackled in alarm over his helmet radio.

Bart joined him. Only now did they see that the craft had nearly rolled down a precipitous incline into a canyon stream 

 Prev. P 29/145 next