Give Back a World

What did Fane know about Mercury that he never told? For instance, a push-button war, fifty million years old, that had been put into cold storage ... dead storage ... but maybe not quite dead?
Red signal lights winked on, on the white walls that surrounded the tiers of bunks there in the belly of the Sun Child . Tension sharpened. Crap and card games broke up. Last-minute checking of gear and weapons was dropped, as five hundred men of the Survey Service climbed into their bunks for the deceleration.
This would be only the second time that Terrans, surging out to colonize the planets, had reached Mercury, the Paradox World.
As he pocketed the cards, there was only a brief flicker in Fane's pale eyes, suggesting to Rick Mills that he was a bad loser at poker. But the savage glint was masked at once.
Fane's low, broad forehead crinkled. You lucky stiff, Mills, he said with a shrug and a grin. Well, I don't need to win money now.
Rick knew Frank Fane some after three months of journeying from Earth cooped up in a space transport with him. He seemed a fairly good Joe, some ways. He never lent or borrowed anything. That was sound policy. Or independence carried to a fault. Besides, Rick had an idea that Fane's thin face was a flexible mask, too inclined to act out the surface he wished to show, instead of revealing his honest emotions. And his sly hints, which never told very much about Mercury, seemed Satanically designed to provoke dread in less experienced listeners.
Here came Fane's great distinction. He was the sole survivor of the Martell Expedition, the one man alive who had been on the most sunward world. Six months he'd spent there. That made him an object of awe in younger eyes. It also inspired insidious doubts about him.
And the one thing that set Rick Mills a little apart from other hard young experts that had recently graduated from the Survey Service School on Mars, and who now formed most of the five hundred aboard the Sun Child , was that he had almost made friends with Fane. Curiosity, and warmth toward people had prompted the effort. And wariness before suspicion.