The ship was being controlled skillfully by its pilot-navigator. The equipment was talking nervously to itself — cycling, whirring, clicking, buzzing. It was sensing and avoiding hazards to the sides, seeking an ideal landing place below.
The designers of the pilot-navigator had purposely obsessed the equipment with one idea — and that idea was to seek shelter for the precious troops and materiel it was supposed to be carrying. The pilot-navigator was to set the precious troops and materiel down in the deepest hole it could find. The assumption was that the landing would be in the face of hostile fire.
Twenty Earthling minutes later, the pilot-navigator was still talking to itself — finding as much to talk about as ever.
And the ship was still falling, and falling fast.
The seeming searchlights and skyscrapers outside were no longer to be seen. There was only inky blackness.
Inside the ship, there was silence of a hardly lighter shade. Unk and Boaz sensed what was happening to them — found what was happening unspeakable.
They sensed correctly that they were being buried alive.
The ship lurched suddenly, throwing Boaz and Unk to the floor.
The violence brought violent relief.
“Home at last,” yelled Boaz. “Welcome home!”
Then the ghastly feeling of the leaf-like fall began again.
Twenty Earthling minutes later, the ship was still falling gently.
Its lurches were more frequent.
To protect themselves against the lurches, Boaz and Unk had gone to bed. They lay face down, their hands gripping the steel pipe supports of their bunks.
To make their misery complete, the pilot-navigator decreed that night should fall in the cabin.
A grinding noise passed over the dome of the ship, forced Unk and Boaz to turn their eyes from their pillows to the portholes. There was a pale yellow light outside now.
Unk and Boaz shouted for joy, ran to the portholes. They reached them just in time to be thrown to the floor again as the ship freed itself from an obstruction, began its fall again.
One Earthling minute later, the fall stopped.
There was a modest click from the pilot-navigator. Having delivered its cargo safely from Mars to Mercury, as instructed, it had shut itself off.
It had delivered its cargo to the floor of a cave one hundred and sixteen miles below the surface of Mercury. It had threaded its way down through a tortuous system of chimneys until it could go no deeper.
Boaz was the first to reach a porthole, to look out and see the gay welcome of yellow and aquamarine diamonds the harmoniums had made on the walls.
“Unk!” said Boaz. “God damn if it didn’t go and set us down right in the middle of a Hollywood night club!”
A recapitulation of Schliemann breathing techniques is in order at this point, in order that what happened next can be fully understood. Unk and Boaz, in their pressurized cabin, had been getting their oxygen from goofballs in their small intestines. But, living in an atmosphere under pressure, there was no need for them to plug their ears and nostrils, and keep their mouths shut tight. This sealing off was necessary only in a vacuum or in a poisonous atmosphere.
Boaz was under the impression that outside the space ship was the wholesome atmosphere of his native Earth.
Actually, there was nothing out there but a vacuum. Boaz threw open both the inner and outer doors of the airlock with a grand carelessness predicated on a friendly atmosphere outside.
He was rewarded with the explosion of the small atmosphere of the cabin into the vacuum outside.
He slammed shut the inner door, but not before he and Unk had hemorrhaged in the act of shouting for joy.
They collapsed, their respiratory systems bleeding profusely.
All that saved them from death was a fully automatic emergency system that answered the explosion with another, bringing the pressure of the cabin up to normal again.
“Mama,” said Boaz, as he came to. “God damn, Mama — this sure as hell ain’t Earth.”
Unk and Boaz did not panic.
They restored their strength with food, rest, drink, and goofballs.
And they then plugged their ears and nostrils, shut their mouths, and explored the neighborhood of the ship. They determined that their tomb was deep, tortuous, endless — airless, uninhabited by anything remotely human, and uninhabitable by anything remotely human.