Caught in the sun! The young pilot stared
at the mass of angry flame—wondering why
his training wouldn't let him give up.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Summer 1949.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Across the blazing face of the sun moved a round dark speck, a tiny,one-man space ship. It was very small, very close, and utterlyhelpless. The side facing the sun glowed dull red.
Inside, Jim MacDonald stood glumly regarding the thermometer on thepilot compartment bulkhead. Sweat made dark patches on the light blueof his uniform and ran in beads down his forehead. He rubbed his armacross his face. The thermometer read over two hundred. He shook hishead slowly. It couldn't be that hot, heat must be conducting along themagnesium bulkhead to the instrument.
Jim ran his fingers through his hair to brush back the damp strandsthat clung to his forehead. The hand came away with little dropletsclinging to his fingertips. He wiped it across his pants, and tappedthe thermometer again. The pointer stayed where it was, stuck againstthe peg.
"About one forty-five," he guessed aloud, and turned to walk with aslow, dragging step across to the pilot's seat. Weakly he slumped downwith his arms dangling loose over the chair arms, knuckles almosttouching the deck. He sat very still trying to ignore the temperaturein the compartment, but the hot stifle wrapped around him and hischest heaved in a sigh.
Jim MacDonald was done for and he knew it. The thermo-couple to theoutside skin showed three thousand degrees. The inside cooling systemhad not been built for this and had long since ceased to cope with theheat. There seemed to be no use continuing his grim little existence,or facing the worse smother of heat to come.
Yet, driven by the dull automatism of training and habit, he listlesslyswung the stand with the ship's log over before him and noted histemperature readings. Then he critically reread what he had alreadywritten.
A few days ago, he had been using the gravitational field of the sunas a booster to help fling the little ship from Earth to Venus. In themighty field, a space warp had funneled out, caught him, and sucked theship toward the blazing maw.
The struggle to escape was a masterpiece of calculation. He had figuredwith such a nicety that his fuel had run out just at the moment thejet tubes at the rear became molten lumps on the ship's skin. He hadescaped the warp. But it was a futile thing now, for the ship swungaround the sun fuelless, inoperative, in a tight orbit that had alittle initial inward momentum.
He had tried to radio for help, but radioing from where he was, waslike trying to signal from the heart of an atomic bomb; if a signal gotthrough, it would be only a part of the meaningless jabber of staticthat always came from here. And if the little black speck were seen,it would only be taken for a stray meteorite moving across the sun'sincandescent face.
The ship was a little spherical world. It turned on its own axis oncein an hour and twenty minutes. That was its little day. The orbitspiralled now a mere quarter million miles from the sun, one littleyear to two earth days. It moved closer at a rate that accelerated afew feet per second every second.
Eventually, said the impassive rows of equations in the log, the inwardmovement would stop, as keeping the same speed in a smaller circle, theship's centrifugal force increased to set up an equilibrium. But thatpoint would be three thousand miles below the sun's surface. The shipwould never reach it. Jim MacDonald inhabited a doomed little world.