Lester del Rey - The Mysterious Planet

IT WAS A FINE MORNING on Mars, clear, crisp and cold. In a little over a hundred years the great air factories had increased the oxygen content until it could be breathed without a mask, and had added enough carbon-dioxide gas to let the air collect and hold the faint heat of the sun. Now it was like a morning high in the mountains on Earth.

Bob Griffith breathed in deeply, enjoying the piney scent of Martian cactus, and let his breath out again in a frosty whirl. After nine months at the Space Academy on Earth, it was good to be home again. He stopped at the entrance to the Space Navy port to glance back at the city of Tharsis, where the Naval Administration building rose up with elfin grace possible only on a world of light gravity. That and the port had dominated his dreams since he was old enough to know that he wanted to be a naval officer, like his father.

Still a few weeks short of seventeen, Bob was already beginning to look like a man. He was still growing, lacking two inches of six feet, and his body hadn’t fully rounded out; but the fur parka he wore now concealed his slimness. The quiet seriousness of his face seemed to add a couple of years to his age, though his gray eyes held hints of fire in them. Normally, a cowlick in his brown hair would have added a touch of humor, but the typical crew-cut of an Academy cadet had removed that, much to Bob’s satisfaction.

He started through the port entrance now, being careful of his stride. This was his first morning back from Earth, and the light gravity of Mars seemed almost strange to him, though he’d grown up there. Then the sight of the great port with its hangars and ships pointing to the stars hit him, and he forgot everything else—even the question he’d been hoping his father would answer, once the normal morning duties of a Wing Commander were over.

Bob walked down the line of ships. Cruisers like slim, needle-nosed cigars; little pursuit jobs; big battlewagons, massive with armor and bristling with guns…

He came to a sudden halt, blinking his eyes. In a corner of the field, a sleek little private ship stood proudly, glistening with newness, and completely out of place on a military field. Bob looked for a sign of naval insignia and found none. There was only the name painted on the tail—the Icarius.

“Hi, Bob.” The voice came from near the little ship, and Bob dropped his eyes to see Simon Jakes slouching out from behind a fin. “Thought it was you. How d’you like the bus? Dad gave it to me for my eighteenth birthday… sort of made up for the Academy’s kicking me out!”

Bob muttered under his breath, but he moved toward the other. Jakes was probably the richest boy in the Solar Federation, since his father owned Federal Space Shipping. But the boy looked like early caricatures of a dumb country hick—the kind probably never seen outside the movies. Coarse yellowish hair fell forward over his forehead, and his eyes seemed vacant in his flat face. His thick lips were always parted slightly, from an early case of adenoids, and a prominent Adam’s apple bobbed on his throat while he talked. His body was a good six feet tall, but his slump and drooping shoulders made him seem shorter.

Yet he was intelligent enough, Bob knew. Nobody had liked him at Space Academy, where he’d been in Bob’s platoon; but it probably wasn’t all Jakes’s fault.

Too much money, his appearance, and a delayed education by tutors had all been against his chances of winning friends. Then, when he couldn’t take discipline and his father had tried to keep him in the Academy by pulling political strings, it had increased the dislike of the other cadets. Bob felt almost sorry for Jakes, but couldn’t entirely like him, either.

Now Simon Jakes came over, trying to be too friendly, as always. “Come on in, Bob, and look her over. Hey, you look good! Don’t mind me—just got up. Flew hi last night, just getting breakfast.”

“How come you’re on naval grounds?” Bob wanted to know. He hesitated, looking at the little ship. He really should go on to see his father, but this was the first time he’d really looked at one of the super-deluxe private yachts.

Simon, obviously bursting with pride, was beaming as Bob followed him slowly into the ship.

“Icarius has the new hydrogen drive, and the regular yards can’t service her. So Dad got a special permit for me to use the Navy shops. Isn’t she a beaut?”

Bob had to admit it. Simon didn’t keep it polished up, as a Navy man would have done, but the gleaming interior was the last word in luxury. There was even real cream for the cocoa Simon poured out.

“Took just four days here from Earth,” Simon went on. “Like a dream. You come on the Mars Maid? Yeah, I thought so. Boy, I wouldn’t travel on a liner after riding this! The minute Dad got my unlimited pilot’s license fixed—took plenty of greasing to get it, too —the very minute, off I took. And here I am!”

“Yeah, here you are,” Bob agreed, without enthusiasm. He wondered if Jakes had any idea of how sickening the idea of bribing officials for an unlimited license was. The mechanical beauty of the inside of the Icarius suddenly lost its interest for him. “Well, I have to be going, Simon. See you around, I guess.”

Simon’s face fell, making him look more like a clown than ever. “Oh!” Then he shook his head. “Nope, you

won’t see me much, Bob. I’m heading out pretty soon.”

“Pirates are supposed to be operating beyond the asteroids,” Bob told him. “They’d pick you up in a hurry and hold you for ransom. At least there are rumors that pirates are operating again. The Ganymede Gal was found stripped with nobody on board. That’s why the Outfleet is getting ready here.”

The Navy was no longer maintained to fight wars. Once, a hundred years before, there had been a close call, when Mars, Venus, and Earth all began building up their private navies and starting a quarrel over rights to the moons of Jupiter. But men of good sense and good will had stopped it in time; the fleets had been united into one Space Navy under the Solar Federation. They had been used to prevent piracy, make sure there could never be another threat of space war, and do the general work of a sort of space coast guard. For years, piracy had been stamped out, but now rumors were flying thick that it was coming back.

Jakes grinned. “No pirate could catch the Icarius, Bob. This ship has legs under her! She’ll beat your best Navy cruiser! Anyhow, I hear rumors that the Outfleet’s preparing for other things. You heard about Planet X?”

Bob nodded. He’d been on his way to ask his father about that very subject. He’d caught a little of it on the radio while on the way to Mars, and everyone here was talking about it. But there seemed to be very little information. Apparently a world had been found coming in from beyond Pluto—the tenth planet that had been speculated on by astronomers since 1900.

The reporters had named it Planet X, because X stood for ten and also for unknown.

“What about it, anyhow?” he asked.

Jakes grinned, and opened a panel on the control board of the Icarius. “Ultrafrequency radio-printer,” he boasted. “Only one ever installed on a private ship. Get all the dope right from Earth as fast as Dad’s private connections get ahold of it. Neat, eh? And look what came over it.”

He passed a few sheets of paper across, and Bob studied them. They gave what he already knew, with a lot more. Planet X was estimated at about the size of Earth, and of equal density. Then he gasped. Planet X wasn’t outside the orbit of Pluto—it was between Pluto and Neptune. Its orbit was now known not to be circular, but egg-shaped, with the small end of the oval reaching a distance of less than three billion miles from the sun, and the large end estimated as reaching out to about seven billion miles, far beyond Pluto. It looked like a crazy orbit, but that was only part of it.