The Secret of the Ninth Planet | Page 2

rays would force them to cover up as they climbed along the high mountain passes.
The sky was cloudless as usual. Burl assumed that the dimness was due to volcanic dust,
or some unseen high cloud far away. And, indeed, as the expedition came to life, and the
day began in earnest, nobody paid any attention to the fact that the Sun was not quite so
warm as it should have been.

The Denning expedition, questing among the untracked and forgotten byways of the lost
Inca ruins in the vast, jagged mountains of inland Peru, was not alone in failing to notice
the subtle channeling away of the Sun's warmth and brilliance. They were, in this respect,
one with virtually the entire population of Earth.
In New York, in San Francisco, in Philadelphia and Kansas City, people going about
their day's chores simply assumed that there must be clouds somewhere the temperature
only slightly less than normal for a July day. A few men shaded their eyes and looked
about, noticing that the heat was not too intense and thought it a blessing.
In some places in Europe, there were clouds and a little rain, and the dimness was
ascribed to this. It was raining in much of Asia, and there were scattered afternoon
showers throughout Latin America, which were standard for the season. There was a
flurry of snow in Melbourne and a cold blow in Santiago de Chile.
The men in the weather bureaus noted on their day's charts that temperatures were a few
degrees lower than had been predicted, but that was nothing unusual. Weather was still
not entirely predictable, even with the advances of meteorology that were to be expected
of the latter years of the twentieth century.
The world was reading about other things than the vagaries of the weather. In the United
States, baseball occupied the headlines, and the nonathletic-minded could find some
speculative interest in the completion of another manned space platform racing along in
its eternal orbit twelve thousand miles away from Earth's surface. The U.S. Moon Base in
the center of the Crater Ptolemaeus had described the appearance of this platform in an
interesting radio dispatch which appeared on the first pages of most newspapers. The
third prober rocket sent to Venus had been unreported for the tenth day after penetrating
the clouds that hid that planet's surface from human eyes. It was, like its two predecessors,
a minimum-sized, unmanned instrument device designed to penetrate the clouds and
radio back data on the nature of the Venusian atmosphere and the surface. But after its
first report, nothing more had been heard.
Some discussion was going on in science circles about what had happened. Speculation
centered on the possible success of other types of prober rockets, but it was universally
agreed that the time had not come when a manned rocket could safely undertake the
difficult trip to Venus and return.
The years of space flight since the orbiting of Sputnik I back in 1957 had produced many
fascinating results, but they had also brought a realization of the many problems that
surrounded the use of rockets for space flight. It was generally believed that no one
should risk a manned flight until absolutely everything possible that could be learned by
robot and radio-controlled missiles had been learned. It now looked as if Venus and Mars
trips were still a dozen years away.
Burl Denning was keenly interested in all of this. As a senior in high school, the newly
expanding frontiers of the universe represented something special to his generation. It
would be men of his own age who would eventually man those first full-scale expeditions

to neighbor worlds. By the time he was out of college, with an engineering degree, he
might himself hope to be among those adventurers of space.
Burl was torn between two interests. Archaeology was both a profession and a hobby in
the Denning family. His grandfather had been among the first to explore the jungle ruins
of Indochina. His father, although a businessman and industrial engineer, made annual
vacation pilgrimages to the ruins of the old Indian civilizations of the Americas. Burl had
been with him once before, when they had trekked through the chicle forests of
Guatemala in search of a lost Mayan city. And now they were again on a quest, this time
for the long-forgotten treasure of the Incas.
Burl was thoroughly familiar with the techniques of tracking down the ancient records of
mankind. He got along well with natives and primitive people; he knew the arts of
wilderness survival; he knew the delicate techniques of sifting sand and dirt to turn up
those priceless bits of pottery and chipped stone that could supply pages of the forgotten
epics of human history.
However, later