Such was the situation for the three of them as they neared the precipitous walls. On arrival, they found that entry would be easier than they expected.
The Plutonian refuge had not been built to offset attack from the surface of the planet itself. It was no thick rampart of unbroken plastic as the walls of the other Sun-tap stations had been. Close up, it proved to have many doorless entryways, ramps running up to higher floors, even wiry monorail scaffolding, probably left behind by the builders.
They entered an opening in the base. Once inside, dim lights set in the ceiling lighted the path before them. They walked down this culvert like rats in a giant sewer until they came to a wall studded with several doors.
The doors were shut, but a tiny globe set on the surface of each one reacted to Burl's charged touch. Two opened upon dark airless passages. The third resisted a moment, and when it did open, there was a whoosh of air which raised a momentary cloud of dust on the stone floor of the culvert. This was obviously the entrance to the inhabited portion of the refuge.
The men closed the door behind them. They were in a small chamber. A door on the other side was opening automatically. “An air lock system,” muttered Russ as they went through.
They were now inside the vast building itself. There was air, and, after testing it, they opened their helmets. The air was almost as thick as that of Earth, and they experienced no difficulty in breathing. It was stale and somewhat metallic in flavor, probably because it had been enclosed and used over and over for thousands of years.
They saw no living beings, which seemed strange. “Apparently these people really are at their last gasp,” remarked Russ as they passed through an area that had obviously once been a large dormitory. They heard distant humming sounds somewhere in the floors above, but all that was visible on the lower level seemed to be maintenance machinery.
They walked through great storerooms which were piled high with sealed drums. They saw factories lying silent—curious lots of odd machines powered by globes that were idle. They skirted an unlighted reservoir of water in a circular chamber far in the interior. And here and there in the gloom, they spotted huge ramps leading spirally upward.
Finally they turned their steps up a sloping ramp, mounting one floor and then another, and another. They were tired, but curiously exhilarated. They felt that they were about to strike at the heart of the foe, and that his days were numbered at last.
They emerged on a higher level, lighted more brightly than the others. Here they saw globes that glowed with the same intensity as those in the Sun-tap stations had. They moved carefully now, keeping out of sight, and several times they saw shadows in the distance or heard the thump of something moving.
They worked their way by instinct to what they guessed was the center of operations. They peered, at last, through a low, wide doorway into a large chamber. Here was a mass of mighty globes and rods, some revolving as they circled the metal masts that came through the room from the ceiling above.
“It must be the base of the Sun-tap receiver line,” whispered Haines. “This should be a good enough place to set up our time bomb.”
They stole over to a cluster of globes and unpacked the powerful little atomic bomb they had carried with them. They carefully put it together, inserted the explosive fuse, and set the timer. “I'm giving it four hours,” said Haines. “Time for us to get out of here and radio the Magellan to get into action. That should take care of this station.”
They moved carefully out again, scarcely breathing for fear of some Plutonian entering and discovering them. They made their exit safely enough and started to retrace their steps.
Back down through corridors and strange chambers they moved, stopping every little while as something that sounded like footsteps passed over them. “Where,” Burl whispered, suddenly troubled, “is the stolen heat and power of the Sun going? It isn't heating up Pluto. Surely they can't simply store it.”
“Something we haven't solved,” Russ replied hurriedly. “From what I remember of the masts, it looked as if they were relaying it somewhere else again.”
“Can't imagine where,” said Haines. “Not back into space, surely?”
They fell silent, concentrating all their energies on not losing the way. “Are you sure we came through here?” Burl asked nervously. “I don't remember this at all.”
“I don't, either,” said Russ. “It looks queer. Are you sure we're on the right path?” He turned to Haines.
The explorer shook his head. “We must have made a wrong turn. I think we've lost our direction.”
They hastily conferred, and decided the best thing to do was to make their way to the lowest level and then outward—but suddenly they realized they could not tell which way was outward. There were no windows, and the wall markings and direction signs were unintelligible.
To make matters worse, they heard new noises, and, just as they dodged into a corner, five Plutonians shambled through.
These creatures were as the ancient wall sculptures had depicted them, though a bit smaller than their ancestors. They were pale, almost white in skin color, and their eyes were tiny sparks of red. They wore light harnesses around their bodies, and two of them were carrying tools. They spoke together in clacking bass voices. They shuffled loosely over the ground on their four thin legs. Burl thought of them as ugly caricatures of semi-humans.
When the creatures had passed, the three explorers darted out to where a ramp spiraled to the lower levels. They started down in single file, but it was too late.
Staring directly at them were two Plutonians who had come up from below. The men pushed past, but not before a barking voice had cracked out an order.
The Earthmen started to run down, followed by the scrabbling sounds of their pursuers. The barking calls increased in volume.
From somewhere a booming sound began, repeated over and over. As the men emerged on the floor below, they heard it repeated on every level. “The alarm's out for us,” called Haines, making no effort to keep his voice down. “We've got to run for it!”
Laden with the remaining weapons and equipment, the three human beings hurried on, but it soon became clear that four legs were better than two, for the creatures were gaining on them.
They had forgotten they were lost. Now they sought only to get out of sight and hide. They dropped their equipment as they ran down halls, through tunnels, skittering along sloping ramps, heading for what they hoped would prove to be an exit.
Behind them an increasing crowd of Plutonians had collected, and several times a spark of electronic power crackled and blazed against the wall over their heads. The pursuers were armed.
Burl's lungs began to ache painfully. Close on the heels of his companions he dashed into one room only to find a group of Plutonians coming at him from the other side. His ears were deafened by the barking noises and alarm boomings. He jumped to one side to avoid a Plutonian standing directly in his path, and ran into a narrow tunnel. There was an excited barking as the creatures followed him.
With a sinking heart, he realized that he was now alone. Haines and Russ must have been cut off. He gasped for breath. Running in a tight space suit, carrying his oxygen tanks, was hot and hard work. He did not dare drop the tanks, for his only chance was to escape outside.
He ran wildly on, hoping to reach an outer door. But he seemed now to be in a maze, for nothing was familiar to him. He could no longer remember how many times he had run into groups of Plutonians, nor could he guess how many followed on his heels.
Then he stumbled into a small, round chamber out of which led three tunnels. As he looked around quickly to select his next means of escape, barking Plutonians erupted from each opening. Burl backed up against the wall, knowing that this time he was trapped.
A blaze of sparks broke over his head as a blast banged across the room. The red-eyed, scrabbling figures charged, their chinless mouths opening to emit barking calls of bestial anger. One aimed a r
odlike contrivance at him, and there was another flare of light.
The room dissolved around him in a glare of brilliant green. As he slipped helplessly to the floor, he lost consciousness.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Sacrifice on the Sacred Moon
“BURL DENNING! Can you hear me, Burl Denning?” A thin, tinny voice somewhere was calling him. But the darkness was all around, and Burl felt a great sleepiness and a desire only to sink deeper into the cottony nothing in which he seemed to be cradled.
“Burl Denning! If you can hear me, speak up!” Again the faint, scratchy voice nagged at Burl's mind. He really ought to answer. He tried to open his mouth. Something hard and cold was pressing against his back. He tossed and squirmed.
Once more the voice called, and this time he decided that he must be asleep. He struggled to open his eyes, then finally blinked them wide in an effort to adjust himself to his surroundings.
He was apparently out in the open, and it was night. The sky was dark, not black, but almost so—a deep, blue-black. There was a pale blue saucer hanging in the sky. It blotted out most of the view. Gradually, he became aware of a shiny barrier between him and that sky—he was not out of doors. Something like a glass dome seemed to be overhead.
Burl raised his head. There was no one in sight. He felt dizzy and confused. He lifted a hand to his brow, and felt the cold glass of his space helmet. He was still wearing his space suit then. The voice—it must be in his helmet phone.
“Hello,” he ventured weakly. “Who's calling?”
Quickly the faint voice replied, growing stronger. “Burl, are you all right? Where are you?”
Burl looked around. He was sitting on the floor of an isolated enclosure with a transparent dome. There were no walls, just the rounded dome like a fishbowl turned upside down on him. The flooring beneath his feet was plastic.
“I'm all right, I think,” said Burl. “Is that you, Russ? Sounds a little like you, but you must be far away.”
“Yes, it's me, Russell Clyde,” confirmed the voice. “You're coming in weak, too. Where are you?”
Burl described his surroundings. There was a silence for a moment, then Russ's voice again. “I kind of suspected it, but what you say confirms it. We must be on the only planet we haven't visited... or rather, not on it, but near it. I mean Neptune. I knew from the gravity I wasn't on Pluto any more. Judging from our weight, and your description of the bluish planet in the sky, we must be on Triton, Neptune's bigger moon.”
Burl found that his dizziness was disappearing. “I feel light,” he commented, as he got to his feet. “Should Neptune look sort of like Uranus, only more bluish in color?” he asked.
“That's it,” said Russ. “Neptune is pretty much of a twin for Uranus, only it's denser, a little bit smaller, and perhaps more substantial than the other giant worlds in our system. It should have a second moon, smaller and way out.”
Burl walked around the little enclosed space. “I guess I'm a prisoner here,” he said. “This dome is on the surface. Most of the area is just a sort of rocky plain with patches of liquid gases, but there are a couple of big buildings nearby. Funny sort of structures—they have fancy tops with symbols on them that look like the phases of the moon.”
“I think I'm inside one of those buildings,” Russ guessed. “I'm in a big hall with a lot of exhibits in glass cases. And they've got the-strangest creatures I've ever seen in them. There are lunar markings here, too—they remind me of the ones we saw on Pluto. You know what I suspect?”
Burl paced around, regaining his senses as he walked. It was obvious that, after he'd been knocked out by the Plutonians, he had been taken by them to this moon of Neptune. For what purpose?
Russ continued to murmur his thoughts, his voice ringing tinnily in Burl's earphones. “I think that Triton was originally Pluto's moon. When Pluto wandered into the solar system, it crossed Neptune's orbit and was held. Its moon came closer to Neptune and was captured completely. But Pluto, having a greater mass, didn't stick. It established an eccentric orbit of its own . which took it far out from Neptune for hundreds of years at a stretch and brought it back only rarely. Pluto lost its moon. And that moon was the spiritual home of the Sun-tappers' religion.”
Burl glanced across the landscape. There were some funny things growing nearby. They looked a little like thin, glassy trees with big, blue coconuts on top.
“What happened to you and Haines after we got separated?” he asked, still talking through his helmet phone.
“I don't know what happened to Haines,” said Russ. “I hope he got away. But they trapped me. I was taken aboard one of their dumbell ships, and brought here. The trip took days. I guess you were unconscious for all that time. If it's any comfort to you, the Pluto building was destroyed. Our atomic bomb went off. I saw the flare from a window in the ship. I think this moon is the last stronghold of the Sun-tappers, and I think it is our final objective.”
The strange crystalline vegetation seemed to be moving closer to Burl. He watched it carefully. It was moving! There were living beings out there!
They glided oddly over the ground, and he saw that their bases were a mass of crystalline fringes, moving feelers which crawled over the surface bearing the upper structures with them. They had thin, trunklike bodies with two long, pencil-like branches that were used as arms. And the coconut objects were heads!
They circled the dome now, and Burl could see that each round blue knob had a central black spot that apparently served as an eye. There was no sign of nostrils or mouth. Burl stared at the creatures in wonder.
The beings were clearly gesturing to him, trying to signal with their odd arms. He waved back, wondering how he could establish communication. As he did so, he described the creatures to Russ.
Russ's voice was excited. “Say! I think I've figured out what sort of place I'm in. This is a museum of galactic life! Each of these glass cases contains a specimen of the highest form of life of its particular world. In one of the cases, opposite me, there's one of the Martian creatures—a big, antlike fellow. He's standing there, looking perfectly alive, but absolutely motionless. Next to him is something else that looks like an intelligent form. It's sort of a man, covered with short red hair. Around its waist it's got a belt, and there are pouches on it, and something like a short sword. It must be a humanoid type from some world out among the stars. Some of the others look like intelligent forms, too, because they are wearing clothing.
“I think that collecting these specimens and setting them up here is part of the religion of the Sun-tappers.”
While Russ was talking, Burl thought of a way he might communicate with the stick-men. He wanted to draw a diagram of the solar system on the floor of his enclosure. He gestured futilely with his hand, but there was nothing with which to make a marking. The stick-men outside watched his hand, then one of them reached around to something hanging across its back and withdrew a thin table and a wedge of red. Holding the table up to that Burl could see, the creature quickly sketched a recognizable map of the Sun and its planets!
Burl realized then that he was dealing with highly intelligent beings—no savages, these, but the products of a high civilization. He indicated the third world as his own. The stick-man drew back as if surprised, then pointed upward.
They came from Neptune!
During the next few hours, a most curious three-way discussion went on—Burl signaling to the Neptunians outside and describing his discoveries to Russ over the phone of his space suit; Russ suggesting answers to some of the more difficult diagrams. It was a curious experience. Gradually, by means of simple drawings and gestures, and even charadelike playlets acted out by the weird vegetable-crystal beings, there emerged the general story of the Neptunians and the invaders from Pluto.
On Neptune there had been a great civilization covering the entire world, a hard surface lying deep beneath its thick methane atmosphere. There were forests and there were animals and in
telligent beings. They did not breathe, but absorbed both their food and liquid gas through rootlike feelers on which they stood and moved.
Then one day, about thirty years ago, they had been invaded by creatures that came in dumbbell-shaped spaceships, and which had destroyed their cities, and attempted to conquer the planet. They learned that these ships had come from Triton, the strange new moon that Neptune had acquired about a thousand years earlier, and from the new planet, Pluto, their astronomers had observed at that time.
For thirty years the Neptunians had fought against the invaders. For a while they almost succeeded, but then something new had developed. Their world grew hotter. Great structures had been erected on the poles, the areas first conquered by the Plutonians and still held by them. From these spots, vast amounts of heat surged over the planet and changed it.
Heat meant death and doom to every living frigi-plasmic thing on Neptune. Desperately, they increased their warfare, but the heat sapped their strength, destroying them, until now they knew it was but a matter of time before the Neptunians, beast and vegetable alike, would vanish totally.
“So that's it,” breathed Burl. “That's where the Sun-tap energy is going. The Plutonians want Neptune because it's near their old moon, and they have to warm it up to live on it. Of course! And Neptune's too far from the Sun to explode when it novas, it will just get comfortable for the Plutonians!”
The Neptunians continued their strange tale. They had built a crude spaceship and manned it with a suicide battalion of the most desperate warriors of their race. They had journeyed to Triton in hopes of seizing it and destroying the foe from there. The stick-men had attacked and had been beaten back.
Now there were only a few dozen of them left—the last soldiers of their invasion and ignored by the enemy. And here they were, explaining this to Burl, whom they recognized as an ally.
Russ's voice suddenly broke into Burl's thoughts, “There's some sort of ceremony beginning here. There's a procession of Plutonians dressed in golden robes marching down the center of the hall, carrying staffs with moon pictures on them... They're chanting in unison, though it sounds like barking. Can you hear it?”
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