Vulcan's Workshop Read online

guard,and his thick neck muscles were taut gnarled ridges under the strain.

  "Damn your hide!" he howled. "It's a trick. I'll break you in two forthis, you slob!"

  His huge biceps tensed and his fists came up. But they came up slowlyand ineffectually, ponderous things he could scarcely lift. A greatroaring of rocket tubes was in his ears then, and the ethership screamedoff through the red mists while he dabbed futilely at the leering yellowface. And vile curses rasped from between his set teeth at the laughterof the guards.

  * * * * *

  Luke Fenton never had taken the trouble to learn or he would have knownsomething about this planet Vulcan on which he was a prisoner. As farback as 1859, by Earth chronology, its existence within the orbit ofMercury had been reported by one Lescarbault, a French physician. Butother astronomers had failed to confirm, in fact had ridiculed hisdiscovery, and it was not until some years after the establishing ofinterplanetary travel in the first decade of the twenty-first centurythat the body was definitely located.

  Vulcan, the smallest and innermost of the planets, circles the sun withgreat rapidity at a mean distance of twenty million miles. Its periodsof rotation and revolution are equal, so that it always presents thesame face toward the solar system's great center of heat and light--forwhich reason one side is terrifically hot and the other, that facinginto outer space, unbearably cold.

  There is no life native to the body, and mankind has found it possibleto exist only in the narrow belt immediately on the dark side of theterminator, the line of demarcation between night and day. Here thereare the dense vapors, illuminated perpetually by refracted light fromthe daylight side and by the internal fires of the planet itself, fireswhich erupt at regular intervals through many fissures and craters. Andit is only under greatest hardship that man can exist even here, whatwith the noxious gases and the extremes of heat and cold to which hisbody it subjected. There is no natural source of water or of food, sothese essentials must of necessity be conveyed from Mars or Earth byethership.

  In spite of all this, man has persisted in establishing himself in thevapor belt of Vulcan for the sake of wresting from the rocky soil itsvast deposits of rare ores, and a great number of mining operations arecontinually in progress. All of these are commercial projects and areworked by adventurous seekers of fortune, save only the penal colonyknown as Vulcan's Workshop: But no Terrestrial or Martian, howevergreedy for riches, would dare to remain longer than two lunar months,which is the average time limit of human endurance. Only the condemnedremain, and these remain to die.

  * * * * *

  Though hardly more than two hundred miles in diameter, Vulcan ispossessed of a surface gravity almost six times greater than that onEarth. This is due to the planet's core of neutronium, the densest knownsubstance of the universe, a little understood concentration of matterwhose atoms comprise only nuclei from which all negative electrons havebeen stripped by some stupendous cataclysm of nature.

  And so it was that Luke Fenton, uninsulated from the tremendous gravitypull when he stepped from the charged metal of the runway, wasstruggling against his own bodily weight, suddenly increased to morethan twelve hundred pounds.

  Doggedly, the Earthman pitted his mighty sinews against the force hecould not understand. Here was an intangible thing, yet it was a powerthat challenged his own brute strength, and he exerted himself to thelimit in accepting the challenge. With legs spread wide and with sweatoozing from every pore, he heaved himself erect, straightening knees andspine and standing there firmly on his two feet.

  "He's carrying it!" came the husky whisper of a guard. "This bird _is_tough."

  Craftily, Luke bared his white, even teeth in a good-humored grin. Hehad seen what they were doing with the other prisoners, fitting them oneby one with the strange bulky breeches--garments that gave forth a faintgreenish glow like that of the runway. And each of the men, so attired,was enabled somehow to get to his feet easily and walk about as ifunhampered by the force which had flattened him to the rocks and whichstill held Luke's straining body in its grip.

  * * * * *

  The yellow-skinned guard, a Terrestrial of Asiatic origin, was solemnlyengaged now in lacing the slitted legs of a similar garment to Luke'srigid nether limbs. Yet there was no cessation of that awful weight whenthe thing was done. The guard stepped back and leered wickedly. He hadslung his dart gun over his shoulder and now produced a slender blacktube which he leveled at Luke's midsection.

  "You walk now, Fenton," he snarled.

  The Earthman rose upward as if he would leave the ground. Two or threeinches seemed added to his stature, and his muscles trembled from thesudden release. He stepped a pace forward.

  Then a light beam flashed forth from the black tube and Luke sagged downwith an astonished oath squeezed grunting from his throat. The swiftrenewal of the inexplicable force had caught him off balance and hedropped ignominiously to his knees.

  "Ha!" gloated the Oriental. "It is thus we control the tough ones,Fenton. I've given you a warning; now get up--and march!"

  On the last word came blessed release and the return of Luke's strength.He marched, meekly falling in with the file of new prisoners. He evensmiled through the red stubble of his beard. But black hatred was in hisheart, and renewed determination that he'd get away from this placesomehow--alive.

  Time would show him the way.

  * * * * *

  Fenton's slow but retentive mind absorbed many things during thesucceeding few days. There was neither day nor night in this hellishplace--only the flame-lit mists; but they had clocks like those ofEarth, and you worked fourteen hours on the slope or in the smelter andhad the rest of each so-called day of twenty-four hours in which to eatand sleep.

  The food was coarse, but there was plenty of it. There was only water todrink, lukewarm stinking stuff, doled out sparingly in rusty tin cups.And, during the sleeping periods, you were required to take off thegravity-insulated garments and sleep in huts with insulated floorcoverings. The charged floor, of course, allowed you to sleep withoutbeing smashed flat on the uncomfortable cots. But they had you safe inthese sleeping huts; they took away your clothes and you couldn't stepout of the door without taking on the weight of a half a dozen men.

  The Workshop itself was in a vast excavation from whose slopes asilvery-veined ore was being removed. There were the blast furnace andreduction plant on the one side and the convicts' huts and morepretentious houses of the guards on the other. And the choking mists,and the lurid flame behind. The stifling heat, Luke learned, too, thatevery ninth day, with what they called the libration of Vulcan, therecame an equal period of raw and biting cold to replace the heat. As bador worse, that would be.

  There were perhaps three hundred prisoners here, Luke guessed, and aguard allotted to each squad of fifteen men. Not many guards for solarge a number of convicts--but enough. The weird gravity of Vulcan hadtaken care of that, and the flashlight things they always carried--queerlights that would instantly neutralize the insulating property of hisclothing and render a man helpless.

  * * * * *

  Luke was working high up on the slope, with rock drill and pick. Thegroup to which he had been assigned was composed entirely of newprisoners, mostly white men, but with a few blacks and onecoppery-skinned drylander of Mars. Whimpering, hopeless creatures, allof them; not worth his notice. All day he labored without speaking toany of them and the quantities of ore he removed gave mute evidence ofhis tireless vigor. If Kulan, the giant Martian guard, took any noticeof it he gave no sign.

  During the sleeping period, which they persisted in calling night,things were different. No guards were needed in the escape-proof hutsand there was some surreptitious fraternizing among the prisoners. Aslong as they made no undue noise, they were left to their own devices.But for the most part they went to sleep heavily
and wordlessly as soonas they flung into their bunks. A broken-spirited lot.

  Luke saw men suffering from some horrible malady that made them coughand scream and bleed from nose and mouth. Old-timers, these were, menwho had survived for as many as three of four months. He saw them, intheir agony, beg the guards for merciful death; heard the brutallaughter of their tormentors. Only when they were no longer able to risefrom their bunks were they put out of their misery by one of the singingdarts from the senior guard's gun.

  Novak had it, this malady known as X.C.--Novak, the scar-faced,yellow-fanged rat who occupied the bunk beneath Luke's and who talked tohim in hoarse whispers long after the others had gone to sleep. It wasfrom Novak that Luke was learning, and the knowledge he gained bylistening to the doomed man served only to intensify the flame of hatethat smoldered deep in his barrel-like chest.

  After three red-lit days of grueling labor and three similarly