Planet in Peril

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The richest and most powerful Earth colony on Mercury is called Belt City. Once a lawless, rip-roaring frontier town, filled with saloons and bawdy houses and dope-dens, where a man's life wasn’t worth a plugged credit unless he was handy with his power guns, Belt City is now staid, quiet and respectable, and the center of the Colonial Government, with jurisdiction over all citizens, colonists and the queer, gold-eyed, mahogany-skinned natives themselves.

Tiny, heat-baked Mercury, smallest of the Nine Worlds, circles perilously close to the mighty sun itself, and so slowly that it always presents the same side to that cosmic furnace of intolerable blazing heat. The Sunside, as it is called, is of course uninhabitable, hotter than the interior of a blast furnace ... a strange and awesome desert of parched and crumbling rocks, savage gorges and rivers of lava, where lakes of liquid silver and pools of molten copper make inhospitable this region, where men can venture but briefly, and then only under heavy heatproof energy shields, to mine and prospect the pure metals needed to feed the insatiable maw of Earth's industries.

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