Rick thought of Anne Munson, his girl, at the Survey Service School on Mars. But such sweet ruminations had no place here. He pushed them aside angrily. He wondered if Mercury would ever be worth anything, anymore. Mines it had, yes, but with one hemisphere frozen like this, and the other a furnace, would it ever be worth the trouble to build the insulated camps that would be needed to work those mines? Even the completely airless asteroids were less forbidding. And out there, in those fragments of a world, the metal-rich core of a planet was exposed for easy exploitation.
Dull fury took hold of Rick. At Fane. But more at the past, here. Wasted violence, buried in drifts of frozen atmosphere. Wasted energy. Why couldn't those beings have done better?
Near the end of the journey the toboggan hit a granite outcropping, that projected an inch above the layer of white, which was deeper here, farther inside the dark hemisphere. Rick and his companions were hurled cartwheeling into the drifts. It was minutes before they were conscious enough to move again.
Only Lattimer's pistol was not yet quite burnt out. So their crude vehicle was now useless. They had to continue toward the tunnel on foot.
"Somewhere around here," Rick muttered at last. "By the map, there should be an entrance. Don't know where we're going but we've got to hurry."
Looming dark and shattered under the stars was a tower. The three men struggled toward it. A shape was following them again.
Somehow they got inside the tower. Drifted atmosphere gave way under their feet. They were sliding down a kind of chute. It felt like the end of things. But in a minute they slid into an underground chamber. They wandered for a while amid Martian apparatus. They could still recognize transmutation equipment, though its vats and grids were cast in an un-Earthly form. The walls themselves glowed softly.
The injured Lattimer was the most exhausted but he still showed interest in things.
"The silicon in rock has an atomic structure not so far from that of oxygen and nitrogen, hasn't it?" he mused. "It could be redesigned a little. And the waste protons and electrons from the process could be used to make hydrogen for water. Besides, there's a lot of oxygen in mineral oxides. And water of crystallization, locked up, but ready made.... Water and air from rock! Earthmen can do that, too. Here the Martians must have done it all the time, replenishing the air and water constantly, and building up the supply. And when Mercury stopped rotating it just froze up here on the dark hemisphere, where, in solid form, it couldn't leak away into space anymore. It was just kept forever. So that much is explained. The Martians must have had a lot of these factories."
"Yeah, sure," young Finden growled. "Let's skip that, now. We've got to find the tunnel vehicles."