by Earl
The giant planet, sixty earths in volume, loomed in eerie grandeur, and swept to one side as Winton arrowed for its Mercury-sized moon. Back of them the sun had shrunk to star-like proportions, with no more disc than Venus shows to Earth.
Able to look directly at the sun without being blinded, Boswell seemed to be searching for something, “That must be earth there—that greenish star. Good old earth!”
Winton laughed sarcastically.
“That green star is more light-years away than you are old. Archie, you can’t see earth from here at all! Stop to realize how far out we are, and how narrow those puny orbits of the inner planets have become. They are so close to the sun that its glare hides them. The Neptunians, if any, could only know there are four inner planets if they had A-l photos taken while the sun was eclipsed by their satellite. If you aren’t properly amazed at that, here’s more. Neptune’s orbit is so tremendous that since its discovery in 1846, it hasn’t yet made one revolution around the sun. It hasn’t completed one of its ‘years’ yet. Yet every second since 1846 it has moved three and one-third miles!”
“That’s the record for getting nowhere fast,” Boswell grunted. “It is a little removed from the haunts of earth at that.” He squinted at the huge planet. “Looks like an anemic tomato. Plenty of atmosphere around it but the Lord knows of what.” He shifted his gaze to the satellite, now rapidly nearing. “An atmosphere there too, judging by the fuzzy profile.”
“Don’t construct any high hopes, Archie. It’s probably thinner than the veneer of civilization, and mostly hydrogen. And cold enough to freeze an electric furnace at full blast. And you won’t find the biological disease of life on its pristine purity of rock. Br-r-r! Turn up the heater a bit. I’m freezing just to think of it.”
BUT Winton proved wrong on every count.
He landed the ship with his usual skill, on Neptune’s moon, turned off the powerful engine, then sat stunned, staring out of the ports. Boswell bustled around the cabin. He made readings of the instruments hung outside the hull.
“Air-pressure of 298 millimeters!” he announced excitedly. He had set up his portable Fraunhofer Analyzer. “Temperature fifty degrees—but Fahrenheit, my lad! Humidity 50%, like an air-conditioned room in earth’s swankiest hotel.”
His voice trailed away as he watched ghostly lines sharpen in the analyzer. “Looks like breathable air too, Wade! Has less nitrogen and more rare-gases than earth’s air, but that makes no difference. Oxygen percentage high, about 30%, and that neatly offsets the low pressure. No harmful ingredients that I can discover. Isn’t it unbelievable?”
“That too!” Winton pointed through the high nose-port. Across the dark heavens they saw a small, glowing shape swiftly streak toward the horizon. The shadow of its oncoming quarter-phase visibly broadened over its face.
“Another moon of Neptune!” Boswell gurgled.
“Look at that changing phase for another minute,” suggested Winton cryptically. “See—it’s changing in reference to this moon’s motion, not its own.”
“I’m a little deaf,” Boswell vouched.
“Sap! That’s a moon, all right. But not of Neptune.”
Boswell stared. “Wait—don’t tell me. On second thought, tell me.”
“It’s this moon’s moon! Too small to be seen from earth in even the largest telescopes.”
“Seventy little blue devils,” Boswell said. “A moon of a moon! And maybe that little moon has another, and that another, and so ad infinitum.”
“The landscape outside,” Winton said abruptly, “is pretty weird.”
“Weird?” grunted Boswell, rummaging in the food stores. “Why, it’s so much like earth’s, you’d think we were back there.”
Winton nodded. “That’s the weird part of it. The whole blessed set-up isn’t natural. It just isn’t right for a body so far removed from earthly regions to practically duplicate its conditions. Next we’ll be seeing a deer come out of that forest as nice as you please and—”
Winton choked, eyes popping. “There it is!” he wailed. “It isn’t quite a deer, smaller and daintier, but still a hooved animal. Do you see it? Tell me I’m sane, Archie, please!”
“I see it. You’re as sane as I am, Wade.”
“I’m still in doubt!”
“Soup’s on!” Boswell, unconcerned with the phenomenon, passed out a large cup of gelatinous porridge. “It may all be unnatural, but my appetite isn’t.”
After they had eaten, they felt sleepy, as two normal, healthy human beings should feel, whether on Neptune’s satellite or earth. Winton set the outer alarm system that would operate if anything touched the hull, and they retired to their bunks with gusty yawns. Their inner minds, when their eyes closed, pictured the hollow immensity of star-spattered space as the picture had been before them for two long months.
THREE days passed, as measured on earth.
When they awoke the third morning it was still light, as it would be forever on this face of the satellite turned eternally toward its primary. But a new sharpness had come into the light with the rising of the blazing sun-star, still equal to more than 500 full-moons on earth. Sunlight on this little world would last for seventy hours. Then there would be “night” for seventy hours. But day or night, the magnificent striated bulk of Neptune hung in the sky, shedding a ruddy silver glow of reflected sunlight.
“On this globe is a menace that destroyed two other expeditions,” Winton mused soberly. “No use to look for them. The last one was three years ago. They’re dead, and something did it—but what on this pleasant world?”
“Well, if the menace shows up in any form short of fourth-dimensional soup,” Boswell promised grimly, “we’ll give it a rousing welcome.”
They were equipped as thoroughly as every other interplanetary expedition, but as an added feature had a turret nest from which could be sprayed lethal death in three forms—poison gas, shock-beams, and bullets. No conceivable enemy could storm this stronghold.
But there seemed no answer to the challenge. They had landed in a clearing of what seemed an ordinary forest. A few eyes gleamed from the trees, but no formidable creatures appeared in the three earth-days they had rested from their space journey. That was as far as caution held them.
It was the morning they had elected to sally forth from the ship for the first time. Both were achingly impatient to tread on this amazing second earth. Boswell whistled and drew an answering note from Pete, their canary. He took the cage down and put it in the air-lock.
“Sorry, old fellow,” he muttered, “but it has to be done.”
Closing the inner seal, he pulled the lever that opened the outer plate. Fifteen minutes later he reversed the process and whistled to the frightened but unharmed bird. It was a sure test for alien atmospheres, as as well as the mine depths of earth.
The next process was to adjust their lungs to the outside pressure. Boswell gradually valved air out of their cabin through a pipe that pierced the hull. Their respiration rate automatically increased as the pressure lowered. A period of dizziness came and went. Finally the barometers, inner and outer, were equalized.
They donned light garments and strapped belts around their middles each with a knife, gas-mask, and pistol with fifty rounds of ammunition. They stepped out in a gravity that allowed them to leap twenty feet up without effort. Boswell immediately tried it a dozen times, yelling in pure exuberance after the close confinement of the ship.
“Whoopee! I’m going to like this place.”
“Stop it, you infernal chump! A fine representative you are of earthly manhood, jumping around like a rubber ball.” Winton was doing it himself a moment later. “Just to test the gravity,” he alibied.
A few minutes later, sucking in huge lung-fulls of the fresh air and liking its tang, they strode forward in the odd wash of light from three sources. Under their feet was a smooth carpet of clipped grasses, almost park-like in appearance. Winton stooped to dig up a handful of soil, letting it run through h
is fingers.
“Fine-grained stuff, weathered by ages and bacteria. The top-soil of a planet indicates its surface evolution as much as the life-forms. It’s good dirt.”
“But not pay-dirt.” Boswell had planted his portable mass-atom analyzer on the ground and was reading its cryptic message. “The usual iron, calcium, aluminum, silicates, carbon—but no radium! Inside the ship, for three days, my electroscope discharged like seven hells. There has to be radium in this soil, yet there isn’t. Is MacKinzie, in behalf of Solar Metals Incorporation, going to be sore! His private theory, or hunch, is that Neptune and Pluto both should have lots of radium, since earth has more than Venus, Mars has more than earth, Jupiter has more than Mars, and so on. Greedy old optimist! Reckon he expected us to come back with a ton of pure metal.”
He frowned. “But still, I don’t understand—”
“Wouldn’t a large deposit at a distance work your electroscope?” Winton suggested thoughtfully.
“Ye-es, except that I put a lead shield around it, which localizes the ionizing gamma-rays as coming from below, or above. Since above is ridiculous it must have come from the ground.” He waved his arm helplessly. “But Wade, the ground is almost virginically pure of radium contamination. Something’s crazy, and it may be me—soon.”
“Or me.” Winton thumped his head with his knuckles. “I wish we hadn’t come here, for our peace of mind.
Archie, there’s only one possible way to explain this tremendously abnormal surface temperature. The sun is out of the question. Neptune is cold; radiates nothing but reflected light. Radio-activity—that’s the only answer. And you say—”
“—there isn’t any radium!”
They grinned at one another humorlessly, more puzzled than they cared to admit. Winton dragged Boswell on to make tests of underlying soil at spot after spot.
“No use,” summarized the latter mournfully. “The radio-active deposits that we know must be here aren’t here, Wade.”
“How sensitive is your pop-gun there, Archie?”
Boswell rolled his eyes eloquently.
“It will detect the 0.4341 Angstrom radium-line straight down through anything but solid lead for two miles. It will spot a millionth of a milligram equal to a mole on a filterable virus’ left cheek—at a distance of five hundred feet. That’s sensitivity, my boy! If a wind blew over a pinhead of radium, and then blew the other way, it would still burn out my detector. Do I make myself disgustingly clear?”
Winton moved on, shaking his head as though to clear it.
“Why should we stir our cranial matter over it? Let the official men of science, when they get here some day, lose sleep. And now don’t get rattled, Archie, over what just walked out of the woods. Sure, I know it’s a man. So what?”
Winton was trembling all over like a leaf.
They had gone a half mile from their ship, in search of the radium phantom, and were close now to the edge of a forest. The trees looked disturbingly earthlike. It would have surprised them less to see bizarre freaks with roots in the air and leaves that smoked. One does not expect, or even like, an utterly alien world to flaunt a copy of earth’s typical environment. It is not comprehensible.
Worse, to see a native creature built in the image of man was a blow to their neural systems. For man it was, in every detail, except that its face was half-human and half something indefinable. It moved slowly along, head up, plucking ripe fruits from the laden trees.
“See?” gasped Boswell. “I told you I saw some manlike beings in the field-glasses from the ship, yesterday. You told me to stop being a ninny.” He jerked his gun out suddenly. “It—or he—looks half-way intelligent. Those other two expeditions; nothing like being on the alert.”
Winton sneered.
“Intelligent—bah! It’s purely an animal in freak human guise. Trick of evolution here. No adornments, no clothing, stark naked. Doesn’t even comb its hair. And it doesn’t recognize us as fellow creatures, though it sees us.”
“But look at those eyes!” They had warily approached the creature, afraid of scaring it away. Instead it looked up at them with an almost disdainful expression in its quasi-human face. Boswell said again, “Just look at those eyes! Like bright jewels, glinting with intelligence. And a merry twinkle in them too.”
“Bah!”
“I’ll prove it.” Boswell smiled at the man-being. It promptly smiled back. In fact, its lips opened wider and a whistling laugh issued. Boswell looked foolish.
“How impolite of it,” Winton said dryly. “I’ve always managed to restrain my merriment when I looked at you, Archie. Look at the darn thing now—it’s gone back to its feeding, ignoring us completely. It’s just an animal, with little instinct of fear. This must be a peaceful world.”
The man-creature looked up as Winton stroked its shaggy mane of hair.
“Not intelligent—peaceful world,” it said calmly.
Winton jumped backward ten feet, almost knocking Boswell over en route.
“Not intelligent, eh? But it talks,” grinned Boswell, grabbing his friend’s arm in time to save him a fall.
“You talk too,” Winton growled. “And so does a parrot.” He approached the creature again, equanimity unruffled. “Look here, buddy,” he demanded, “how much do you know?”
“Much know,” responded the being. Then it broke out in an infectious laugh. After a moment the two earthmen found themselves joining in. This seemed to inspire the creature more, and its peels rang out lustily. Boswell began to stagger and hold his sides, tears streaming down his cheeks.
“What are we laughing about?” demanded Winton suddenly, stopping with a choke.
“Nothing, I guess,” Boswell said ruefully, also stopping.
“That is funny, but I won’t laugh.” Winton eyed the now quiet pseudoman calculatingly. “There’s something phoney about you, Mack. But I don’t know what it is.”
“Something phoney, Mack,” said the being. A grin came over its face, so vapid and guileless that the two men couldn’t resist grinning back. Thereupon it burst out in a whinny-laugh that touched off the two humans as though they had been tuned sound-boxes.
It was harder to stop this time, for their risibilities had been thoroughly aroused. Winton turned away, shook himself like a dog, and clamped his teeth together. Then he took Boswell by the shoulders and shook him with determined violence till he too sobered. When they stopped, the manbeing stopped.
“When this chap hits your funny-bone,” Boswell gasped, “he uses a mallet.”
“I don’t like this,” Winton snarled, glaring at the creature. “Begone, you laughing hyena.”
“Like this laughing,” said the man-being with perfect inflections of voice.
It reached out suddenly with one of its fruit-stained hands. Boswell’s pistol glinted in the light. The creature stepped back with it, turning it over and over in apparent delight.
“Hey! Give that back!” Boswell tried to retrieve the gun, but the manbeing kept out of reach. “Please! That’s a dangerous toy. You might blow somebody’s head off—preferably your own. Now be a nice little whatever-you-are and—”
Speaking soothingly, Boswell tried to approach again, but the pseudoman nimbly kept out of reach. Boswell winced as the long bright barrel swung toward him and one of the being’s fingers fumbled at the trig, ger.
Winton stood paralyzed. “Watch out, Archie—”
“Drat you, anyway!” Boswell leaped explosively at the man-being, but his stretching hands touched nothing as the creature agilely pranced away. Boswell stubbornly jumped again, anger in his face. With a smooth swiftness, the manbeing raced away, Boswell following like a huge bounding frog.
In the light gravitation, they retreated rapidly.
“Archie, you blasted boob!” Winton roared out. “Come back here—”
But Boswell raced on. Winton hastily jerked a metal whistle out of his belt and blew on it tempestuously. The clear, shrill tone, designed to penetrate much further than th
e human voice, brought the flying earthman short. He came back at a lope, cursing bitterly. The pseudo-man, as though it had all been a game of tag, came trotting after him, still clutching the pistol.
“Idiot!” greeted Winton scathingly. “Might as well try to run down earth’s best miler. Only way to get your gun back is wait till he’s tired of it. Watch now; when his ape-like nature is satisfied, he’ll drop it.”
Boswell fidgeted nervously. “Or he’ll drop one of us.”
“One of us,” said the man-being, setting off the fuse of laughter with a delirious trilling.
THE two earthmen could no more resist it than rib-tickling. Boswell’s hearty guffaws and Winton’s high-pitched ululation, together with the man-being’s empty warbling, rang in a garbled trio over the greenery of Neptune’s moon. Overhead, the giant mother planet seemed to look on mockingly—ominously.
There was a hysterical edge to their laughter before Winton could command himself. He had to kick Boswell in the shin three times before it wasn’t funny to him.
“Ouch!” Boswell said weakly. “But thanks, Wade. My lungs are sore from that damnable fit. It’s not funny to have to laugh when there isn’t anything funny to laugh at—if you know what I mean.”
“It wasn’t really laughing,” Winton groaned dismally. “It was merely the expulsion of air from our lungs in intermittent peristalsis of the throat. Like hiccoughs. People have been known to start like that and—” He grabbed his companion’s arm. “Something tells me we’d better get while the getting’s good.”
“Wait. One more try at retrieving my gun.”
Boswell turned to the man-being. “I hate to think of an amiable, merry soul like that carrying around a handful of sudden death. Maybe I can trade him. That usually works with children of nature.”