"Bah! I told you why. Didn't I spend five hours figuring out the time it'd take to reach the nearest inhabited place? That's Titan near Saturn, just one billion—one billion, I said—miles from here. And at the speed we could make zigzagging, because we couldn't keep a constant acceleration, it would take us just exactly four years and three months. We've got food enough for three months, but what would we live on during the four years? Atomic energy?"
"But what can we do on Pluto?" queried old Nestor. "And why didn't we carry a spare jet?"
"Jets aren't supposed to melt off," muttered Keene disgustedly. "As for what we can do, maybe we can find a virgin deposit of some refractory metal—platinum or iridium or tungsten, or any other with a high melting point—and build up a jet long enough to keep the blast from melting our stern away. Because that's what it'll do if we try running it this way."
"There's tungsten here," observed the older man hopefully, gazing down at the black expanse. "Hervey reported it, and so did Caspari. But there isn't any atmosphere, or rather, what there is, is liquid or solid, except about half a centimeter's pressure of helium. Pluto has a diameter of about ten thousand miles, a surface gravity of about 1.2, and an albedo—"
"Not interested," grunted Keene, and then, relenting, "Listen, Solomon, I'm sorry. I guess I'm taking it out on you because we had a defective jet. But it's a hell of a mess all the same, and somebody's going to suffer for it when we get back. With all the money the institute has, you'd think they'd be able to afford respectable equipment." He glared down through the floor port. "There she comes!"
With a rasp and a jar, the Limbo came to rest. Outside, a mixed column of dirt and smoke billowed around the glasses, rose and then settled as quickly as a burst of sand, in the near vacuum that surrounded the ship.
Keene cut the blast. "Come on," he said, turning to a space suit swaying on its hook. "No use wasting time. We'll take a look around." He clambered into the heavy garment, noting irritably its greater weight on the surface of the black planet. The Plutonian gravitation added thirty-six pounds to his Terrestrial hundred and eighty.
"No gun?" asked Nestor.
"Gun? For what? This planet's dead as the brain of whoever tested that jet. How can there be organic life in no air and ten degrees absolute?" He pulled open the inner door of the air lock. “Well," he said, his voice sharply metallic through his helmet's diaphragm, "here goes the Smithsonian Expedition for the Determination of the Intensity of Cosmic Radiation in Extra-planetary Space. We determined it all right; now the only problem of the expedition is to get home with our statistics.” He flung open the outer door and stepped out on the black surface of Pluto.
So far as Keene knew, he was the fourth man and Nestor the fifth to set foot on the black planet. Atsuki, of course, was the first, if one credits his figures and photographs, the intrepid Hervey the second, and Caspari the third. Here on this lonely outpost of the solar system, high noon was hardly brighter than full moonlight on Earth, and the queer, black surface that gives Pluto its low albedo made it seem still darker.
But Keene could distinguish the outlines of fantastic mountains beyond the hollow where the Limbo rested, and innumerable mysterious crags and hillocks, unweathered by wind or water, loomed closer. Directly to his right lay a patch of glistening, snow-like white; but he knew it wasn't snow, but frozen air. One dared not step in such a drift; for the cold would bite through his insulated space suit, since frozen air was a far better conductor of heat than the rocky ground.
Overhead glittered all the stars of the galaxy, as changeless as though he stood on a pleasant green planet two billion miles sunward, for what was two billion miles to the infinite remoteness of the stars? The landscape was bleak, black, desolate and cold. This was Pluto, the planet that circled at the very edge of the System.
The two started heavily toward a ridge where something glowed faintly, something that might be virgin metal. Strangely, their own footsteps were audible, for the substance of their space suits conducted the sound; but all else was a vast and ominous silence. They did not speak, for their suits, designed only for emergency repairs in space, had no radio; and to communicate it was necessary to touch hand or arm to one's companion; over such a material bridge, sound traveled easily enough.
At the ridge Keene paused, glowering down at a vein of bright, starlighted fragments. He placed a hand against Nestor's shoulder, "Pyritic," he grunted. "We'll have to look farther."
He turned right, treading heavily under nearly sixty pounds mom than his Earth weight. Surely, he mused, old Solomon Nester wouldn't be capable of an extended search in such circumstances. He frowned; Caspari had reported great quantities of heavy metals here, and they shouldn't need such a lengthy search. He stopped sharply; a stone came sliding past him on the rocky surface. A signal.
Off in the dusk Nestor was gesturing. Keene turned and hurried back, clambering along the uneven terrains with such haste that his breath shortened and his visor began to cloud. He clapped his hand on the old man's arm. "What is it?" he asked. "Metal?"
"Metal? Oh, no." Nestor's voice was triumphant. "What did you say about no organic life on Pluto, eh? Well, what about inorganic life? Look there!"
Keene looked. Out of a narrow chasm or cleft in the ridge something moved. For a moment Keene thought he saw a brook flowing, but a brook—liquid water—was an impossibility on Pluto. He squinted sharply. Crystals! Masses of crystals, gray-white in the dusk, crawling in a slow parade.
"I'll be damned!" he said. "Caspari didn't say anything about this."
"Don't forget," said Nestor, "that Pluto has thirty-six per cent more surface than the whole Earth. Not a ten-thousandth part of it has been explored—probably never will be, because it's such a task to get a rocket here. If Atsuki—"
"I know. I know," interrupted Keene impatiently. "But these things aren't tungsten or platinum. Let's move on." But he still stared at the crawling, faintly radiant mass. In the silence he heard infinitely faint rustlings, cracklings, and susurrations, transmitted through the ground to his feet, and thence to his helmet. "What makes them move?" he asked. "Are they alive?"
"Alive? I don't know. Crystals arc as close as inorganic matter comes to life. They feed; they grow."
"But they don't live!"
Old Solomon Nestor was in his element now. "Well," he proceeded in professorial tones, "what is the criterion of life? Is it movement? No; for wind, water, and fire move, while many living forms do not. Is it growth? No; for fire grows, and so do crystals. Is it reproduction? Again no; for again fire and crystals reproduce themselves, if their proper food supply is present. Then just what differentiates dead matter from living?"
"That's what I'm asking you!" snapped Keene.
"And I'm telling you. There's just one, or perhaps two criteria. First, living things show irritation. And second, and more important, they show adaptation."
"Eh?"
"Listen," continued Nestor. "Fire moves, grows, feeds, and reproduces, doesn't it? But it doesn't run away from water. It doesn't betray the irritation life shows in the presence of a poison, though water's poison to it. Any living thing that encounters poison makes an attempt to throw it off; it develops antibodies or fever, or it ejects the poisonous matter. Sometimes it dies, of course, but it tries to survive. Fire doesn't.
"As for adaptation, does fire ever make a voluntary attempt to reach its food? Does it deliberately flee from its enemies? Even the lowest form of life known does that; even the miserable amoeba makes positive gestures of adaptation to its environment."
Keene stared more closely at the sluggish crystalline stream, which was now impinging on the black plain at his feet. He bent over it, and suddenly perceived a fact that had hitherto escaped him.
"Look here," he said, touching old Solomon's arm. "These things are organisms. They're not loose crystals, but masses of them."
It was true. The rustling crystals moved in glittering chunks from thumbnail size to aggregations as large as dogs. They
crackled and rustled along, apparently moving by a slow shifting of the lower crystals, much as a snake moves on its scaly belly, but far stiffer and slower. Abruptly Keene sent his metal boot crashing into one. It shattered with a blue flash of released static electricity, and the pieces passively resumed their progress. "They certainly don't show irritation," he remarked.
"But look!" shrilled Nestor. "They do show adaptation. There's one feeding!"
He pulled Keene a few feet down the ridge. There was a small bluish deposit of something that looked like frozen clay, a product, perhaps, of the infinitely remote past when Pluto's own heat had maintained liquid water and gaseous air to grind its rocks to powder. A crystalline mass had paused at the edge, and before their gaze it was growing, gray-white crystals springing out of it as frost spreads over a winter-chilled windowpane.
"It's an aluminum-eater!" shrieked Nestor. "The crystals are alums; it's eating the clay!"
Keene was far less excited than old Solomon, perhaps because he was considerably more practical.
"Well," he said decisively, "we can't waste any more time here. We need refractory metal, and we need it bad. You try along the ridge, and I'll cross over."
He broke off suddenly, staring appalled at the foot with which he had shattered the moving crystals. On its surface glittered a spreading mass of tiny, sparkling points!
A break in the surface of his space suit meant death, for the oxygen generator could certainly never maintain its pressure against any appreciable leakage. He bent over, scraping desperately at the aluminum feeders, and then realized that the infection would spread—had spread to his gauntlets. While Nestor babbled futilely and inaudibly behind his visor, Keene rubbed his hands in the gritty, pyritic soil on which he stood.
That seemed to work. The rough substance scoured away the growing crystals, and with frantic vigor he rasped a handful along his shoe. If only no hole, no tiniest pin prick had opened! He scoured furiously, and at last the metal surface showed scratched and pitted, but free of the growths.
He stood up unsteadily, and placed his hand against the gesturing Nestor's side.
"Keep away from them!" he gasped. "They eat—"
Keene never finished his sentence. Something hard jarred against the back of his armor. A metallic voice clicked, "Stand still—both of you!"
II
"What the devil!" gulped Keene. He twisted his head within his immovable helmet, peering through the rear visor glasses. Five—no, six figures in blue metal space suits were ranged behind him; they must have approached in the inaudibility of a vacuum while he had been scouring his suit free of the crystals. For a moment be had an eerie sensation of wonder, fearful that he faced some grotesque denizens of the mysterious black planet, but a glance revealed that the forms were human. So were the faces dim in the dusk behind the visors; so had been the voice he had heard.
Keene hesitated. "Listen," he said. "We're not interfering with you. All we want is some tungsten in order to fix our—"
"Move!" snapped the voice, whose tones traveled through the weapon hard against Keener back. "And remember that I'm two thirds inclined to kill you anyway. Now move!"
Keene moved. There was little else he could do, considering the appearance of the threatening automatics in the hands of their captors. He tramped heavily along, feeling the thrust of the muzzle against his back, and beside him Solomon Nestor trudged with pace already showing the drag of weariness. The old man touched his arm.
"What's this about?" he quavered.
"How do I know?" snorted Keene.
"Shut up!" admonished the voice behind him.
They walked past the looming shape of the Limbo—five hundred feet past it, a thousand. Directly ahead was the other rim of the cup-shaped depression in which they had landed, high, black cliffs in fantastic shapes. Suddenly Keene started; what had seemed but a smaller cliff showed now as a skeleton, tetrahedral frame of metal, three webbed shafts rising to a point from a tubular triangle below.
"The Red Peri!" he gasped. "The Red Peri!"
"Yeah. Why the surprise?" queried the sardonic voice. "You found what you were looking for, didn't you?"
Keene said nothing. The appearance of the pirate ship had amazed him. No one had ever dreamed that the swift marauder could operate from a base as infinitely remote as the black planet. How could even the agile vessel scour the traffic lanes of the minor planets from dusky Pluto, two billion miles out in the empty cosmos?
To his knowledge only two ships—three, if Atsuki hadn't lied—had ever reached those vast depths before their own Limbo, and he knew what endless travail and painful labor each of those journeys had cost. In his mind echoed Captain Ten Eyck's words of a year and a half before. "What a ship!" he muttered. "Lord, what a ship!"
There was an opening in the cliff wall as they rounded the bulk of the Red Peri. Yellow light streamed out, and he glimpsed an ordinary fluorolux bulb in the roof of the cavern. He was shoved forward into the opening, and suddenly his visor was clouded with moisture. That meant air and warmth, though he had seen no air lock, nor heard one operate. He suppressed the impulse to brush a metal-sheathed hand across the glass, knowing that he couldn't wipe the condensation away in that fashion.
The voice again, still queerly sardonic, yet somehow soft. "You can open your helmets. There's air."
Keene did so. He stared at the figures surrounding himself and Nestor, some still helmeted, others already removing the uncomfortable space suits. Before him stood a figure shorter than the rest, and he recalled the red-haired pirate on the Aardkin. The short one was twisting the cumbersome helmet.
It came off. Keene gulped again at the face revealed, for it was that of a woman. A woman? A girl, rather, for she seemed no more than seventeen. But Keene's gasp was not entirely surprise; mostly, it was sheer admiration.
Her hair was red, true enough, if one could call red a lovely and subtle shade between copper and mahogany. Her eves were bright green, and her skin was the silken, soft, and pale skin of one whose flesh is but seldom exposed to the sunlight, yet gently tanned by the violet-rich rays of the fluorolux.
She let the cumbrous metal suit clank away from her, and stepped out in the quite civilized garb of shirt, shorts, and dainty, laced buskins, such as one had to wear in a space suit. Her figure—well, Keene was only twenty-six, but even old Nestor's pallid eyes were fixed on her as she turned toward them. She was slim, curved, firm; despite her slimness, there was a litheness and sturdiness to her limbs, the result, perhaps, of a lifetime under the supernormal gravitation of Pluto.
"Take off your suits," she ordered coldly, and as they complied, "Marco, lock these up with the rest."
A tall, dark individual gathered up the clanking garments. "Yes, commander," he said, taking a key she held out and moving away into the cavern.
"Commander, eh?" said Keene. "So you're the Red Peri!”
Her green eyes flickered over him: She surveyed his own figure, which was still hard and brown and powerful from his swimming days at the university. "You," she said impassively. "I've seen you before."
"You have a good memory," he grunted. "I was on the Aardkin."
She gave him a momentary smile of amused remembrance. "Yes. Did your nose scar?" She glanced at the organ. "I'm afraid not."
People—two or three of them—came hurrying up the long corridor of the cave to stand staring curiously at Keene and Nestor. Two were men; the third was a pale, pretty, flaxen-haired girl. The Red Peri glanced briefly at them and seated herself on a boulder against the rocky wall.
"Cigarette, Elza," she said, and took one from the pale girl.
The scent of tobacco tantalized Keene, for such indulgences were impossible in the precious air of a space ship. It had been four months since he had smoked, in the frigid little town of Nivia, the city of snow on Titan.
"May I have one?" he asked.
The green eyes turned an icy glance on him. "No," said the Red Peri briefly.
"Well, I'll be—
Why not?" He was angered.
"I don't think you'll live long enough to finish it," responded the girl coolly, "and our supply is limited here."
"Yeah, limited to what you find on looted freighters!" he snapped.
"Yes," she agreed. She blew a tormenting plume of smoke toward him. "I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll trade you a cigarette for the information as to how you managed to trace us here."
"Trace you?" he echoed, puzzled.
"That's what I said. It's a generous offer, too, because I'm quite capable of torturing the knowledge out of you."
Staring into her lovely, glittering green eyes, Keene was not disposed to doubt her capability. He said mildly, "But we didn't trace you here."
"I suppose," she retorted, "that you came to Pluto looking for a good business corner. Or perhaps on a little camping trip. Is that your story?"
He flushed under her cool insolence. "We came here by accident," he growled. "One of our afterjets melted off, and if you don't believe it, go look at it."
"Jets don't melt unless they're planned to," said the Red Peri coldly. "And what were you doing in the neighborhood of Pluto anyway? And I suppose that out of all the millions of square miles of surface, you just accidentally picked this valley as a landing place. Well, it won't do you any good to lie, because you're going to die regardless, but you might die a little less painfully if you tell the truth."
"It just happens that I'm telling the truth!" he blazed. "Whether you believe it or not, we landed in this valley by pure chance. We're the Smithsonian's expedition to study cosmic rays in outer space, and you can verify that by our clearance papers from Nivia."
"A good disguise for the secret service," she sneered. "You could get any sort of government papers you want, couldn't you?"
"Disguise! Listen, if we were hunting the Red Peri, do you think we'd come armed with cameras, interferometers, electroscopes, polariscopes, and fly-wing bolometers? Search our ship; you'll find one gun in it—one measly automatic. I'll tell you where it is. It's in the upper right-hand drawer of the navigation table. And we landed here because Pluto was the nearest solid place to where we burned off our jet—and that's the truth!"
The Lost Master - The Collected Works Page 135