Chapter III

The Mercurian was sitting up, wagging its head from side to side as if waiting for approbation. But Lamoureux, quite sure now that it wouldn't or couldn't talk, wouldn't have given a damn if it had beaten every champion on Earth. In addition, he was bothered by the fact that it was snowing again.

The flakes had just begun to fall, large and feathery, and Lamoureux himself soon had a powdered look. Most of the other men were still gathered around the Mercurian. But one of them, Sprott, came over to Lamoureux and glanced up at the sky as if puzzled.

"It's following us around, Captain."

"What is?"

"The snow, sir."

"Don't be silly, Sprott. We just happen to have run into a streak of bad weather."

Sprott went on stubbornly, "It looks funny to me. First it rains and snows for ten days around the ship. But it doesn't rain, or at least it doesn't snow, here. An hour after we get to this place, though, it starts coming down."

Lamoureux brushed some of the white flakes off his shoulders. "All right, Sprott, suppose you are right. It _is_ following us around. That's no reason to alarm the other men, is it?"

"I guess not, sir.... I won't say a word. But there's something else I wanted to speak to you about, sir. It's McCracken."

"You believe he's responsible for the snow?"

Sprott looked astonished. "I don't mean that, sir. I don't see how he could be."

"I do. He shot a Mercurian. I have an idea that they're the ones who are causing the peculiar weather we've been having."

"Why would they do that, sir?"

"Well, Kalinoff didn't mention seeing any weapons among them, so we've always assumed they had none. But suppose the weather was their weapon. It's a very effective one, Sprott. They've made things damnably unpleasant for us."

"How can they make rain where there isn't any, Captain? I know that rainmakers on Earth have had some success. But all they do is get the rain to fall near where it would have fallen anyway. They may make it precipitate a few hours before it would have otherwise, but that's all. Here there weren't any clouds to start with."

Lamoureux admitted, "I don't know how the trick is done, Sprott. But I agree with you that the snow is following us around, and I'm sure that the trick _is_ done."

* * * * *

Sprott was silent a moment. Then he said, "And you think, sir, it's all because McCracken shot one of them?"

"They evidently believe in the principle of the rain falling on the just and unjust alike. And the same thing goes for the snow."

Sprott said doubtfully, "I'm not sure about that, sir. But I do know that McCracken is up to something. He's been getting some queer noises on his receiver."

"Such as Haskell singing lullabies from the ship?"

"Nothing as unpleasant as that, Captain. They're just a series of sounds, some a little longer than others. Da, da, da-a-a, da--that sort of thing."

Lamoureux asked, "When did you hear them?"

"About ten minutes ago. McCracken doesn't know anything about chess, and neither do I, so we both wandered away after the first ten minutes. McCracken said he had an idea where those mountains were."

Lamoureux's eyes narrowed. "Those noises are undoubtedly a message. I seem to remember that some centuries back there was a code invented by a man named Morris. That's it, the Morris code. But where could such a message have come from?"

Sprott shook his head. "I couldn't say, sir. There's supposed to be no one but Kalinoff on Mercury, and his radio set doesn't work. Could the message have been sent from Earth?"

"Impossible, Sprott. That set will hardly get more than twelve thousand miles."

Sprott looked uncomfortable. "Then maybe what I heard wasn't a message at all, sir."

"I think it was. Does McCracken know you overheard him?"

"I don't think so, sir."

"Then don't let him know that we suspect anything wrong. Come to think of it, McCracken never seems to act quite as stupid as he pretends to be. I shouldn't be surprised if, when he shot that Mercurian, he understood very well what he was doing."

"You believe, sir, that he deliberately tried to cause trouble? Why would he do that?"

"I don't know," said Lamoureux slowly.

That wasn't the whole truth. He didn't know, but he certainly could make a shrewd guess. All along, his chief reason for fearing delay on this expedition had been that Kalinoff might die before he could get to him. Now there was another reason for fearing delay. Suppose there were another expedition on the way to rescue Kalinoff. And suppose McCracken was secretly in the pay of the people behind that expedition, and doing everything possible to sabotage this one.

Lamoureux nodded to himself. That was probably it. The first thing, then, was to get the radio set from McCracken.

* * * * *

Big Muscles, as the other men had nicknamed McCracken, was a few hundred feet away, staring off into the distance. What else he could see besides snow, Lamoureux couldn't guess. He yelled, "Hey, McCracken!"

"Coming, Captain."

McCracken took a few tentative steps, broke into a short run, and then made a leap that carried him seventy-five feet through the air, past where Lamoureux was standing. He ended up at attention, his hand raised in a military salute.

Lamoureux frowned. Knowing what he did about McCracken, this attempt to seem carefree, childish, and perhaps a little stupid impressed him unfavorably. He said, "McCracken, I'm taking you out of Carvalho's group and putting you into my own. I may need some strong-arm work and you're just the man for it."

"I sure am, Captain."

"Seeing as I already have a radio, you may as well turn yours over to Carvalho."

McCracken seemed a trifle less eager. "It's rather heavy, Captain. If you'd like, I'd carry it for you just the same."

"I prefer to have my own where I can get at it whenever the need arises. Turn yours over to Carvalho, McCracken."

"Yes, sir. Meanwhile, I want to report, sir, that from where I was standing when you called to me, I think I could see those mountains."

Lamoureux had his doubts, but he kept them to himself. "Good," he said briefly. "We'll get going."

He called the men together again and gave them their marching orders. Whether the Mercurian understood what he said, Lamoureux didn't know. At any rate, it went along willingly.

They reached the place where McCracken had been standing, and Lamoureux stared where Big Muscles pointed. There were two mountains rising off in the distance, barely visible through the snow, and there was certainly a saddleback ridge between them. The only trouble was that one of the mountains was almost twice the height of the other. Kalinoff had reported them as approximately the same height.

"That doesn't fit Kalinoff's description."

McCracken said, "Maybe he looked at them from a different angle, sir. Then they might have seemed the same height."

"If he looked at them from a different angle, the ridge would no longer seem saddlebacked."

"That's true, sir. But then you know, sir, Kalinoff is a screwball--"

Lamoureux found this a little hard to take from a man he suspected of quietly trying to stab him in the back. But he continued to hide his feelings. "That's as may be, McCracken, but he's not cockeyed. These aren't the mountains he described. Still, we may as well approach them. We may be able to get a good view from the top of the taller one."

* * * * *

They moved onward again. A quarter of an hour's marching took them to the edge of the falling snow. As they walked further, the air became completely clear, and Lamoureux could see the mountains without straining his eyes. There was no doubt about it. They were _not_ the mountains Kalinoff had described.

The Mercurian horizon was not so far away as the more familiar horizon of Earth, and it was a little difficult for Lamoureux to estimate distances. Still, the foothills of the mountains could not be more than twenty miles away. For the past day, little more than the rim of the Sun had been visible above the horizon, and while the peaks were ablaze with scarlet and golden colors, only the higher one was out of the shadow to any considerable extent. The saddlebacked ridge itself was a vague outline of dull black.

The snow did not catch up with them until four or five hours later, when they stopped to prepare a meal and rest. Then it began to fall gently after they had been in the same place for three-quarters of an hour. By now, Lamoureux was sure that it was the Mercurians who were to blame. He still wondered how they did it.

The one they had come across had remained with them, and Lamoureux found it harder than ever to regard the creature as intelligent. All the thing had done was walk and play chess. Lamoureux had a low opinion of chess players, even when they were fairly human. He had an even lower opinion of trained animals. This Mercurian fell, in his estimation, somewhere between.

They were no more than a mile or two from the foothills of the larger mountain by now, and the saddlebacked ridge loomed several hundred feet into the air. Unfortunately, the snow was between it and them, and prevented them from gaining too clear a view. Lamoureux wondered if the snow would keep up even at the top of the mountain, and damned McCracken again for shooting that Mercurian. And then he discovered that McCracken's feats of arms were not yet ended. McCracken was at that very moment aiming at some target that Lamoureux could not see.

Lamoureux sprang to his feet. "Don't shoot, you fool!"

He was a little too late. The noise of the explosion rang out. McCracken said, "Sorry, sir, I didn't hear you until my finger had already squeezed the trigger. But I wasn't trying to hit anything that was alive. There was something that looked like a rock on that ridge--"

The words died away in his throat. Lamoureux lifted his eyes and saw something hovering in front of them, high in the air. It had eyes and a mouth and, from these features, he knew that it was a huge head, as large as a fair-sized house. There was a long, interminable stretch of neck behind it, and somewhere in the rear he felt sure was a monstrous body. But he wasted no time searching for that.

The eyes were staring at the men unblinkingly. These eyes alone were bigger than the men were. Then the neck stretched out and the head came poking down.

* * * * *

Lamoureux turned and ran. It had been years since he had done much physical exercise, but he made up for them now. Then, too, as the captain of the expedition, he felt that the men might expect a certain amount of leadership from him; it was with some dismay that he discovered that all the rest were ahead of him. Picking up speed, he passed Sprott, then Marsden, and then Gronski. Ahead of him someone stumbled, and Lamoureux wasted a precious second helping the man to his feet.

The huge head opened, and a roar that almost knocked out his eardrums vibrated through Lamoureux's body. The ground shook under him. That meant that the whole creature, whatever it was, was coming after them. Gronski and Sprott passed him as if someone had stuck a needle into them, and Lamoureux, sobbing for breath, tripped over a rock and plunged headlong.

The ground beside him trembled as if it were being rocked by a series of quakes. A deep shadow fell over him, and Lamoureux tried to dig his prone body into the ground and not breathe. From far ahead, a scream of terror split the air.

Then the quakes and the shadow had passed, and Lamoureux dared to lift his head. Far ahead, he could make out the gigantic neck stretching into the air, its outline already vague through the falling snow. A few feet away from him lay Gronski, and a little further on McCracken.

None of the other men were in sight.

The valiant McCracken, his rifle still clutched to him, was aiming at the vanishing figure. Lamoureux said, "Don't bother, McCracken. You've already done enough harm."

"I just thought I'd get a shot at him, sir, while he was excited. He wouldn't know where it came from."

"He knew the first time. Don't bother, I say. You can't hurt him, and he can do plenty to you."

"All right, Captain."

Lamoureux brushed some of the snow off him and tried to catch his breath. "McCracken, if you're really anxious to play with your gun, you may fire into the air. Five times."

"Yes, sir."

McCracken fired, and they waited. Lamoureux said, "I hope nobody was hurt. I don't think any of them, if they're alive, are too far away to hear those shots. We'll wait for them to assemble here and then start out for those mountains again."

"Yes, sir. Except, Captain, that it may be a little difficult--"

"What'll be difficult?"

"Finding those mountains. They just don't look the same."

Lamoureux stared. The mountains stretched into the air exactly the same as before, the same scarlet and gold colors glowing on their peaks, the same shadows on their sides. But the saddlebacked ridge between them--

Lamoureux looked again. The entire ridge was gone.