only St. Elmo’s fire. We’ve had similar displays along the tape during thunderstorms. They can make your hair stand on end aboard the Mark I. But you won’t feel anything; you’re too well shielded.”
“I’d no idea it could happen at this altitude.”
“Neither did we. You’d better take it up with the Professor.”
“Oh—it’s fading out—getting bigger and fainter. Now it’s gone. I suppose the air’s too thin for it…. I’m sorry to see it go—”
“That’s only a curtain raiser,” said Kingsley. “Look what’s happening directly above you.”
A rectangular section of the star field flashed by as Morgan tilted the mirror toward the zenith. At first he could see nothing unusual so he switched off all the indicators on his control panel and waited in total darkness.
Slowly, his eyes adapted, and in the depths of the mirror a faint red glow began to burn, and spread, and consume the stars. It grew brighter and brighter and flowed beyond the limits of the mirror. Now he could see it directly, for it extended halfway down the sky. A cage of light, with flickering, moving bars, was descending upon the Earth. Seeing it, Morgan could understand how a man like Sessui could devote his life to unraveling its secrets.
On one of its rare visits to the equator, the aurora had come marching down from the poles.
47. Beyond the Aurora
Morgan doubted if even Professor Sessui, five hundred kilometers above, had so spectacular a view. The storm was developing rapidly. Short-wave radio, still used for many nonessential services, would by now have been disrupted all over the world. Morgan was not sure if he heard, or felt, a faint rustling, like the whisper of falling sand or the crackle of dry twigs. Unlike the static of the fireball, it certainly did not come from the speaker system, because it was still there when he switched off the circuit.
Curtains of pale-green fire, edged with crimson, were being drawn across the sky, and shaken slowly back and forth as if by an invisible hand. They were trembling before the gusts of the solar wind, the million-kilometer-an-hour gale blowing from sun to Earth, and far beyond. Even above Mars, a feeble auroral ghost was flickering now; and sunward, the poisonous skies of Venus were ablaze.
Above the pleated curtains, long rays like the ribs of a half-opened fan were sweeping around the horizon. Sometimes they shone straight into Morgan’s eyes like the beams of a giant searchlight, leaving him dazzled for minutes. There was no need, any longer, to turn off the capsule illumination to prevent it from blinding him; the celestial fireworks outside were brilliant enough to read by.
Two hundred kilometers. Spider was climbing silently, effortlessly. It was hard to believe that he had left Earth exactly an hour ago. Hard even to believe that Earth still existed, for he was now rising between the walls of a canyon fire.
The illusion lasted only for seconds. Then the momentary unstable balance between magnetic fields and incoming electric clouds was destroyed. But for that brief instant, Morgan could truly believe that he was ascending out of a chasm that would dwarf even Valles Marineris, the Grand Canyon of Mars. Then the shining cliffs, at least a hundred kilometers high, became translucent and were pierced by stars. He could see them for what they really were—mere phantoms of fluorescence.
And now, like an airplane breaking through a ceiling of low-lying clouds, Spider was climbing above the display. Morgan was emerging from a fiery mist, which was twisting and turning beneath him. Many years ago he had been aboard a tourist liner cruising through the tropical night, and he remembered how he had joined the other passengers on the stern, entranced by the beauty and wonder of the bioluminescent wake. Some of the greens and blues flickering below him now matched the plankton-generated colors he had seen then, and he could easily imagine that he was again watching the by-products of life—the play of giant, invisible beasts, denizens of the upper atmosphere….
He had almost forgotten his mission, and it was a distinct shock when he was recalled to duty.
“How’s power holding up?” Kingsley asked. “You’ve only another twenty minutes on that battery.”
Morgan glanced at his instrument panel.
“It’s dropped to ninety-five percent—but my rate of climb has increased by five percent. I’m doing two hundred ten klicks.”
“That’s about right. Spider’s feeling the lower gravity. It’s already down by ten percent at your altitude.”
That was not enough to be noticeable, particularly if one was strapped in