Len nodded, twisted and turned the vessel round, crossing and re-crossing the dome at a lower altitude each time, until at last he brought the machine down gently on the black plain immediately under the towering rock on which the dome was perched.
The engines stopped. Tense, still-quiet descended.
“Okay?” Rex questioned, and hurried over to get spacesuits.
In a few minutes they were provisioned and armed, left a single guiding beam on their vessel; then stepped outside. Above them over the airlock the beacon light glowed with a solitary splendour in the dreadful darkness.
Here, indeed, was a world of eternal night, so distant from the sun that the primary was but an over-bright Venus in the infinite remoteness, blazing a little brighter than the hosts of other stars and nebulae;.
The feet of the two men, encased in heavy tinium waders, crunched through powdered substance, which was half crumbled rock mixed with ice javelins and crystallised air. That there was air at all surprised them; they had always thought Pluto to be utterly devoid of it. Certainly, it was at an extremely low density, for even through their spacesuits they could feel the merciless cold trickling into their beings—cold which had the sting of instant death if the slightest flaw developed in their coverings.
They didn’t bother to talk through their intercoms as they trudged to the foothills of the giant rock needle. Indeed, speech was something which had become a needless faculty. Dead silence was the thing: silence to match up with the weighted oppressive tomb into which they had come.
Finally Len untied the wire rope from his tackle, handed one end of it to Rex. They linked their waist belts together, then began the slow, tedious climb up the frozen rock face. It was dangerous work, with death as the reward for miscalculation. Up above their heads, three hundred feet and more, loomed the summit they were determined to reach.
The higher they went the more complete became their view of the terrain, and it was something certainly never vouchsafed to the most ambitious Earth mountaineer.
Being a small planet, though its density produced a substantial gravity, Pluto’s horizon was correspondingly nearer and the range of vision from a height far greater. Halfway up the Needle the two could see that the plain ended in a deep valley. In the base of it, couched under the stars, was the dense Plutonian mist and immovable mounds of crystallised air. Then, beyond this valley, the plain continued until it was chopped off clean by the backdrop of the stars. For wild, deadly beauty it had no equal.
Rex switched on his intercom and said laconically, “Say, whoever built this dome here must have been nuts! Unless it was a crazy astronomer who wanted a nearer view of the stars than he could get from any other planet.”
“Talking of being nuts…” Len’s voice came back to him in an awed whisper, “I think I’m that myself! What’s that?”
He nodded towards the valley and Rex turned to look, then he frowned. Either it was a mirage or he was— My God, but there were figures moving down in the valley! Glowing figures indeed, as though soaked in phosphorescence. Nor were they the fantastic forms one might have expected to see on an alien world, but very human looking men!
Now and again the dense mists hid them from sight, then again they would emerge, walking rhythmically like robots up the valley side. In the airless expanse distance was deceptive. Possibly they were still a mile distant.
“They—they’re alive all right!” Rex gasped at last, and sensed his spine crawling. “But what in hell are they?”
“Search me,” Len said nervously—for he was nervous and made no pretence of being otherwise. The occurrence was positively mind-shattering on a supposedly dead world. Finally, he pulled forth his night glasses and held them to the glassite eyepieces of his helmet. A long whistle came through Rex’s intercom.
“They’re men sure enough—and Earth men, to judge from their looks! They’re glowing and they’re stark naked! Who’d start a nudist colony on a world like this, I wonder?”
Something of Len’s natural dry humour came to his rescue, but both of them looked at each other soberly in the starlight. It was utterly impossible, as they knew, for anything human to exist in such a temperature and near-vacuum.
Then suddenly, as they watched, the men vanished again in the mist. Rex glanced up at the frowning summit of the Needle.
“What do we do, Len? Forget the story and push on?”
Len thought of an editor slow burning back on Earth and then set his jaw.
“Like hell! With all this gathered around us we might get a yarn which will stand the Cosmisheet on its ear…Those men were perhaps light delusions…or something.”
Rex knew he was only saying that to console himself. That the men were no longer apparent was the fault of the mist. They did exist…
“What are we waiting for?” Len snapped suddenly, and with that they resumed their climb but now with increased energy. Their spines were tingling at the thought of those ghostly beings coming inexorably after them. Better to fight them—at the pinnacle top if they had to, than on these treacherous slopes.
Higher they went up the smooth-faced glaciers, managing it somehow with rope and toe-and-finger-hold, staggering finally to the narrow table-like summit on which the dome was perched. Indeed, it occupied most of the summit: there was precious little room to walk around it.
For a moment they looked back. Far below near the base of the pinnacle the six shapes were visible again, still marching with implacable resolve. In the other direction the orange beam of the spaceship’s guide-light shone.
“Let’s get busy,” Len growled. “We’ve got flame guns for these walking Roman Candles if they start any trouble.”
They chambered over the rocks separating them from the dome, finally reached a point where they could gaze down through it. Its entire hemisphere was covered with a film of perfectly pellucid ice—had probably remained there ever since its erection in this frigidly cold waste.
And through this barrier the two men stared down on to the unbelievable. Below them, dimly lit by the pitiless stars, was some kind of observation room. They could catch the faint reflection from numberless instruments, all of them indeterminable in their outlines. This, though in itself amazing enough, was by no means as remarkable as the sight of an Earthman sitting at a bench, head fallen on his pillowed arm, the other arm stretched outwards to end at some kind of notepad under his motionless hand.
“Suffering comets, is this a story!” Rex whispered.
Len fumbled in his belt and dragged out his torch. The white beam he directed below brought the man into clear relief, showed that he was still young apparently—or had been when death had caught up on him. He had strongly set shoulders, a black haired head and powerful neck.
Len mumbled his mystification. “What in hell do you make of it? An Earthman here? There is nothing in the archives of space to match up with it!”
“Dead—or just asleep?” Rex mused; then he glanced back anxiously towards the edge of the plateau. “No sign of those walking ghosts yet, so how about trying to get inside this dome? We might get better protection, too, if it comes to a spot of slugging.”
This started them investigating, but all their searching drew a blank. The dome was solidly sunken into the rocks without the least sign of anything to suggest an opening or airlock. Finally Len tugged out his raygun and fired it at the glass experimentally. Immediately there was a fissuring, splitting impact as a gap of some three foot width was shattered in the curved wall.
“Big enough to get through anyway,” Len murmured. “I figured that sudden intense heat after years of eternal frost might do the trick. Let’s go.”
He eased himself down through the rent, dropped lightly into the long-forgotten observation room. In a second or two Rex had alighted beside him. Their torches blazing they stared about them in bewilderment.
They could see now that the smashing of the dome had made no appreciable difference to the interior temperature of the place. Everything was covered
with a film of ice, and the air pressure gauges, when Rex scraped the frost from their faces, showed a pressure pretty close to the external vacuum. In any case, the man himself was proof positive. He was frozen into a half lying position, as hard as granite.
“Frozen to death and completely preserved,” Len muttered. “He just couldn’t decompose…”
He stared at him thoughtfully, at the strong, though hopeless looking face and glazed eyes. Then his gaze travelled along the frozen, outthrust arm to the hand still holding a queer stylo pen between immovable fingers. Under the hand was an ice-glazed mass of metal foil, and upon it a number of notes.
Struck with a thought, Len used his raygun on quarter power and thawed the ice round the notepad, dragging it free. It looked like some kind of log—twenty-six metal sheets of it—and ending in the middle of a line. But, damnably, the language was utterly foreign to him. Even the hieroglyphics made no sense.
“Guess this isn’t going to tell us much,” he growled, thrusting it in his suit pocket. “Keep it, just the same.”
“I suppose,” Rex asked dubiously, “he is an Earthman?”
“Seems little doubt about it, but don’t ask me what period of time, he belongs to. Looks as though he was an astronomer, to judge from this tackle—but the stuff is way ahead of anything we’ve got even today, and the Twenty-Second Century ain’t exactly backward, either.”
Rex looked about him thoughtfully. “I don’t see how he could live here alone, without anybody else. There must be an exit from this chamber, surely?”
He turned, intending to look more thoroughly, but at the identical moment a vibration and rattling overhead, vaguely transmitted by the thinnest of air, caused him and Len to glance up sharply. They fell back, watching.
It was not, as they had fully expected, the six ghost men, but instead an object like a monstrous icicle, slowly extending itself, investigating, creeping down through the crack in the dome. At first it seemed to be stealing down like a frigid finger, but gradually it was forced on the two men that this was but an illusion. Actually the stuff was elongating itself by adding more crystals to its main mass with a speed which was positively magical.
“What—what is it?” Rex gulped. “It’s nothing like those six men we saw—” He broke off in alarm as the stuff suddenly thickened and increased its speed tremendously.
Like a mass of living ice, hurling back a multitude of lights from the torches trained on it, the substance creaked and swelled through the fissure, obviously alive, searching for something.
And gradually it became apparent to the awe-stuck Earthmen what it was looking for—
It was heading for the frozen man at the bench!
“Say,” Rex whispered, forcing himself to be calm, “it looks like—like frozen protoplasm. If there is such a thing! Frozen life…Living stuff at zero!”
Len’s only response through the intercom was a fascinated grunt. Then he and Rex gave a startled jump as the stuff at last contacted the motionless man.
There was something horrifying about the way it branched out into a myriad fine, stretched tendrils, enveloped the man in a cocoon of ice strands. Firmly, slowly, the stuff got a hold on him, then, by some inexplicable process, seemed to sink into him. In a similar strange manner the stuff broke away from the main bulk in the dome fissure. This mass promptly withdrew into the Plutonian dark and left the gap clear: the remainder simply oozed into the man at the bench until there was not a trace left.
“Suffering hell, what sort of a planet is this, anyway?”
Rex’s voice was shocked beyond belief. He could feel himself sweating with fear inside his heavy suit.
Len frowned over formulating an answer, but before he could get it the man at the bench suddenly jerked—moved—and came to life! With a huge and oddly mechanical effort, he reeled to his feet, just like a manikin jerked by wires. Frost shards splintered from his board-stiff clothing, left gaping rents. His eyes, blank and staring, turned to the two men with an absent glare.
Sensing danger, Len whipped his flame gun forward, but to his amazement, the revived man worked with even greater speed, whipped up a frosty weapon from the bench and fired it, Len felt his gun whizz from his stinging fingers. He was unhurt, but certainly stupefied with amazement.
“Nice going!” he panted into his external mike. “What happens now?”
The man motioned significantly to the gap in the dome.
“I think he wants us to leave,” Rex muttered. “And in his present mood I’m quite agreeable. First time I ever figured I’d be given orders by a lot of ice water anyway. I suppose that stuff is completely in control of him?”
They moved across the chamber until they were under the dome, then, clambering on the bench, they eased their way through the crack to the exterior. Here they got another shock. Grouped about the spot were the frozen six they had seen in the valley—and behind them again a palpitating mass of luminous crystal life which surged, ebbed, spawned and flowed over the utter dark of the plain.
“Seems to me that they are not really luminous,” Len muttered. “It’s the crystal life in possession of them that makes ’em look that way. Guess this gets curioser and curioser, to quote one Alice.”
“Wonder where we go from here?” Len said. “Better hang on to your gun, fellow. With mine gone we may need it—”
The words were hardly spoken before that gun went too! One of the frozen men had stolen up from behind and snatched it from its holster, hurled it far away.
“What the hell!” Rex exploded, his fury getting the better of him—and he dived for the gun frantically. It was too late though. Before he could reach it he was seized by three of the men, whirled round, and then lifted on high. Though protected by his spacesuit, he could feel the icy grip of those hands, sending the flowing cold of the void into his being.
He struggled and fought like a demon as he saw Len being similarly treated, but for both of them the effort was useless. It was three to one in any case, and the man with the gun was in charge.
“Stop struggling,” Len called suddenly, as they were carried swiftly to the plateau’s edge. “One rip on our suits with these icicle hands of theirs and we’re finished.”
He was right there, Rex realised, so he relaxed and resigned himself to the uncomfortable, bumping, dangerous journey at the hands of the captors as they began to descend the side of the Needle.
In surprisingly quick time they completed the descent, crossed the plain and made for the valley. The two men had long since given up trying to imagine where they were being taken, but finally they realised that they were underground, being carried through a short tunnel of densest darkness.
Then light began to grow upon them. They noticed that they passed three mighty airlocks, each swinging wide open—and these gave not on to a cavern, but a complete underground city, its most dominant feature being four Cyclopean pillars of rock reaching upward to support the curving roof rock.
Set on their feet again, they stared about them wonderingly.
The light was provided by glowing tubes in various parts of the city, so arranged that they threw all the squat, many-windowed buildings into a grouping of silhouettes. It seemed evident that the city had been planned originally with streamlining, but had had to stop short because of the limitations of the cavern. The final result was a squat, powerful looking metropolis with orderly streets, parks, resting places and flat roofs.
But nothing vehicular moved anywhere. And the trees that should have been green were petrified grey images of cold. Indeed, nothing was moving except frozen grey men here and there, going about tasks known only to themselves.
Len glanced back finally to the open locks leading to the outer tunnel and Plutonian dark.
“There is no more density of air here than there is outside,” he murmured. “Nothing human could live in this—not even vegetation, either, if those trees are any guide.”
He stopped talking as he found himself nudged. Perforce he and Rex had to
move on again, walking slowly and curiously along the main street of the city. It was about the most extraordinary experience they had ever had.
From what they could make out, the buildings on either side of them had been designed in the first place as human habitations. Everything connected with them suggested earthly comforts—but, like everything else, these comforts were frozen into a common pattern of grey and gleaming ice-film.
Even the huge hall into which they were finally conducted was little better. It was vast in proportions, had obviously once been a place of assembly. Right now it seemed too fantastic for words as the grey men came into it with their blank eyes staring ahead of them…Slowly, mechanically, they formed into a circle round the baffled Earthmen.
“You—you are men from Earth?” It was the man with the gun, the last to be “converted” from death to life, who spoke. He had come to the forefront of his fellows.
“Right,” Len acknowledged through his external mike.
“You removed a notepad from the watchtower. Hand it over!”
Len’s jaw set obstinately, then as his eyes settled on the thing’s steadily levelled gun he thought better of it, tugged the metal foils from his pocket and tossed them over. The man studied them, frowning. Finally, he looked up with his dead, lifeless eyes.
“So that is the explanation!” he breathed in wonder. “Long indeed have we puzzled over it—”
He broke off and looked at the two Earthmen directly.
“In case you have not already grasped the fact, my friends, we of this world are highly intelligent, but Nature has endowed us with a crystalline physical form, the only form of life indeed which can evolve in a temperature nearly space-zero and an atmosphere nearly non-existent.
“We began to wonder about the strange manlike life living under the surface of our world. We wondered about the dome that projected on to the surface— And one day we found all these queer men were dead and so decided to make an effort to take over their bodies. To our delight our crystalline forms were able to pass into these frozen human frames. For the first time in our history we had hands and feet, a method of moving ourselves!
Lunar Vengeance: A Collection of Science Fiction Stories Page 15
