“Earth years,” the whiskers explained. “Three Earth years. Not Pluto years.”
A thing that chattered came out of the shadows in one corner of the hut and leaped upon the bed. It hunched itself beside the man and stared leeringly at West, its mouth a slit that drooled across its face, its puckered hide a horror in the sickly light.
“Meet Annabelle,” said the man. He whistled at the thing and it clambered to his shoulder, cuddling against his cheek.
West shivered at the sight.
“Just passing through?” the man inquired.
“My name is West,” West told him. “Heading for Pluto.”
“Ask them to show you the painting,” said the man. “Yes, you must see the painting.”
“The painting?”
“You deaf?” asked the man, belligerently. “I said a painting. You understand—a picture.”
“I understand,” said West. “But I didn’t know there were any paintings there. Didn’t even know there was anybody there.”
“Sure there is,” said the man. “There’s Louis and—”
He lifted the bottle and took a snort.
“I got alcoholism,” said the man. “Good thing, alcoholism. Keeps colds away. Can’t catch a cold when you got alcoholism. Kills you quicker than a cold, though. Why, you might go on for years having colds—”
“Look” urged West, “you have to tell me about Pluto. About who’s there. And the painting. How come you know about them?”
The eyes regarded him with drunken cunning.
“You’d have to do something for me. Couldn’t give you information like that out of the goodness of my heart.”
“Of course,” agreed West. “Anything that you would like. You just name it.”
“You got to take Annabelle out of here,” the man told him. “Take her back where she belongs. It isn’t any place for a girl like her. No fit life for her to lead. Living with a sodden wreck like me. Used to be a great man once … yes, sir, a great man. It all came of looking for a bottle. One particular bottle. Had to sample all of them. Every last one. And when I sampled them, there was nothing else to do but drink them up. They’d spoil for sure if you let them stand around. And who wants a lot of spoiled liquor cluttering up the place?”
He took another shot.
“Been at it ever since,” he explained. “Almost got them now. Ain’t many of them left. Used to think that I’d find the right bottle before it was too late and then everything would be all right. Wouldn’t do me no good to find it now, because I’m going to die. Enough left to last me, though. Aim to die plastered. Happy way to die.”
“But what about those people on Pluto?” demanded West.
The whiskers snickered. “I fooled them. They gave me my choice. Take anything you want, they said. Big-hearted, you understand. Pals to the very last. So I took the whisky. Cases of it. They didn’t know, you see. I tricked them.”
“I’m sure you did,” said West. Tiny, icy feet ran up and down his spine. For there was madness here, he knew, but madness with a pattern. Somewhere, somehow, this twisted talk would fall into a pattern that would make sense.
“But something went wrong,” the man declared. “Something went wrong.”
Silence whistled in the room.
“You see, Mr. Best,” the man declared. “I—”
“West,” said West. “Not Best. West.”
The man did not seem to notice. “I’m going to die, you understand. Any minute, maybe. Got a liver and heart and either one could kill me. Drinking does that to you. Never used to drink. Got into the habit when I was sampling all these bottles. Got a taste for it. Then there wasn’t anything to do—”
He hunched forward.
“Promise you will take Annabelle,” he croaked.
Annabelle tittered at West, slobber drooling from her mouth.
“But I can’t take her back,” West protested, “unless I know where she came from. You have to tell me that.”
The man waggled a finger. “From far away,” he croaked, “and yet not so very far. Not so very far if you know the way.”
West eyed Annabelle with the gorge rising in his throat.
“I will take her,” he said. “But you have to tell me where.”
“Thank you, Guest,” said the man. He lifted the bottle and let it gurgle.
“Not Guest,” said West, patiently. “My name is—”
The man toppled forward off the bed, sprawled across the floor. The bottle rolled crazily, spilling liquor in sporadic gushes.
West leaped forward, knelt beside the man and lifted him. The whiskers moved and a whisper came from their tangled depths, a gasping whisper that was scarcely more than a waning breath.
“Tell Louis that his painting—”
“Louis?” yelled West. “Louis who? What about—”
The whisper came again. “Tell him … someday … he’ll paint a wrong place and then …”
Gently West laid the man back on the floor and stepped away. The whisky bottle still rocked to and fro beneath a chair where it had come to rest.
Something glinted at the head of the cot and West walked to where it hung. It was a watch, a shining watch, polished with years of care. It swung slowly from a leather thong tied to the rod that formed the cot’s head, where a man could reach out in the dark and read it.
West took it in his hand and turned it over, saw the engraving that ran across its back. Bending low, he read the inscription in the feeble light.
To Walter J. Darling, from class of ’16,
Mars Polytech.
West straightened, understanding and disbelief stirring in his mind.
Walter J. Darling, that huddle on the floor? Walter J. Darling, one of the solar system’s greatest biologists, dead in this filthy hut? Darling, teacher for years at Mars Polytechnical Institute, that shrunken, liquor-sodden corpse in shoddy underwear?
West wiped his forehead with the back of his space-gloved hand. Darling had been a member of that mysterious government commission assigned to the cold laboratories on Pluto, sent there to develop artificial hormones aimed at controlled mutation of the human race. A mission that had been veiled in secrecy from the first because it was feared, and rightly so, that revelation of its purpose might lead to outraged protests from a humanity that could not imagine why it should be improved biologically.
A mission, thought West, that had set out in mystery and ended in mystery, mystery that had sent whispers winging through the solar system. Shuddery whispers.
Louis? That would be Louis Nevin, another member of the Pluto commission. He was the man Darling had tried to tell about just before he died.
And Nevin must still be out here on Pluto, must still be alive despite the message that had come to Earth.
But the painting didn’t fit. Nevin wasn’t an artist. He was a biologist, scarcely second to Darling.
The message of three years before had been a phony, then. There were men still on the planet.
And that meant, West told himself bitterly, that his own plan had gone awry. For Pluto was the only place in the Solar System where there would be food and shelter and to which no one would ever come.
He remembered how he had planned it all so carefully … how it had seemed a perfect answer. There would be many years’ supply of food stacked in the storerooms, there would be comfortable living quarters, and there would be tools and equipment should he ever need them. And, of course, the Thing, whatever it might be. The horror that had closed the planet, that had set the space patrol to guard the planet’s loneliness.
But West had never been too concerned with what he might find on Pluto, for whatever it might be, it could be no worse than the bitterness that was his on Earth.
There was something going on at the Pluto laboratories. Something that the government didn’t know
about or that the government had suppressed along with that now infamous report of three years before.
Something that Darling could have told him had he wanted to … or had he been able. But now Walter J. Darling was past all telling. West would have to find out by himself.
West stepped to where he lay, lifted him to the cot and covered him with a tattered blanket.
Perched on the cot head, Annabelle chattered and giggled and drooled.
“Come here, you,” said West. “Come on over here.”
Annabelle came, slowly and coyly. West lifted her squeamishly, thrust her into an outer pocket and zipped it shut. He started toward the doorway.
On the way out he picked the empty bottle from the floor, added it to the pyramid outside.
CHAPTER TWO
The White Singer
West’s craft fled like a silvery shadow between the towering mountain peaks shielding the only valley on Pluto that had ever known the tread of Man.
Coasting in on silent motors in the shadow of the planet, he had eluded the patrol. Beyond the mountains he had thrown in the motors, had braked the plunging ship almost to a crawl, taking the chance the flare of the rockets might be seen by any of the patrol far out in space.
And now, speed reduced, dropping in a long slant toward the glass-smooth landing field, he huddled over the controls, keyed to a free-fall landing, always dangerous at best. But it would be as dangerous, he sensed, to advertise his coming with another rocket blast. The field was long and smooth. If he hit it right and not too far out, there would be plenty of room.
The almost nonexistent atmosphere was a point in favor. There were no eddies, no currents of air to deflect the ship, send it into a spin or a dangerous wobble.
Off to the right he caught a flash of light and his mind clicked the split-second answer that it must be the laboratory.
Then the ship was down, pancaking, hissing along the landing strip, friction gripping the hull. It stopped just short of a jumbled pile of rock and West let out his breath, felt his heart take up the beat again. A few feet more …
Locking the controls, he hung the key around his neck, pulled down the visor of his space gear and let himself out of the ship.
Across the field glowed the lights of the laboratory. He had not been mistaken, then. He had seen the lights … and men were here. Or could he be mistaken? Those lights would have continued to function even without attention. The fact that they were shining in the building was no reason to conclude that men also were there.
At the far end of the field loomed a massive structure and West knew that it was the shops of the Alpha Centauri expedition, where men had labored for two years to make the Henderson space drive work. Somewhere, he knew, in the shadow of the star-lighted shops, was the ship itself, the Alpha Centauri, left behind when the crew had given up in despair and gone back to Earth. A ship designed to fly out to the stars, to quit the Solar System and go into the void, spanning light years as easily as an ordinary ship went from Earth to Mars.
It hadn’t gone, of course, but that didn’t matter.
“A symbol,” West said to himself.
That was what it was … a symbol and a dream.
And something, too, now that he was here, now that he could admit it, that had lain in the back of his mind all the way from Earth.
West shucked his belt around so that the pistol hung handy to his fist.
If men were here … or worse, if that message hadn’t been a phony, he might need the pistol. Although it was unlikely that the sort of thing that he then would face would be vulnerable to a pistol.
Shivering, he remembered that terse, secret report reposing in the confidential archives back on Earth … the transcription of the tense, rasping voice that had come over the radio from Pluto, a voice that told of dreadful things, of dying men and something that was loose. A voice that had screamed a warning, then had gurgled and died out.
It was after that that the ban had been put on the planet and the space patrol sent out to quarantine the place.
Mystery from the first, he thought … beginning and the end. First because the commission was seeking a hormone to effect controlled mutations in the human race. And the race would resent such a thing, of course, so it had to be a mystery.
The human race, West thought bitterly, resents anything that deviates from the norm. It used to stone the leper from the towns and it smothered its madmen in deep featherbeds and it stares at a crippled thing and its pity is a burning insult. And its fear … oh, yes, its fear!
Slowly, carefully, West made his way across the landing strip. The surface was smooth, so smooth that his space boots had little grip upon it.
On the rocky height above the field stood the laboratory, but West turned back and stared out into space, as if he might be taking final leave of someone that he knew.
Earth, he said. Earth, can you hear me now?
You need no longer fear me and you need not worry, for I shall not come back.
But the day will come when there are others like me. And there may be even now.
For you can’t tell a mutant by the way he combs his hair, nor the way he walks or talks. He sprouts no horns and he grows no tail and there’s no mark upon his forehead.
But when you spot one, you must watch him carefully. You must spy against him and set double-checks about him. And you must find a place to put him where you’ll be safe from anything he does … but you must not let him know. You must try him and sentence him and send him into exile without his ever knowing it.
Like, said West, you tried to do with me.
But, said West, talking to the Earth, I didn’t like your exile, so I chose one of my own. Because I knew, you see. I knew when you began to watch me and about the double-checks and the conferences and the plan of action and there were times when I could hardly keep from laughing in your face.
He stood for a long moment, staring into space, out where the Earth swam somewhere in darkness around the star-like Sun.
Bitter? he asked himself. And answered: No, not bitter. Not exactly bitter.
For you must understand, he said, still talking to the Earth, that a man is human first and mutant after that. He is not a monster simply because he is a mutant … he is just a little different. He is human in every way that you are human and it may be that he is human in more ways than you are. For the human race as it stands today is the history of long mutancy … of men who were a little different, who thought a little clearer, who felt a deeper compassion, who held an attribute that was more human than the rest of their fellow men. And they passed that clearer thinking and that deeper compassion on to sons and daughters and the sons and daughters passed it on to some—not all—but some of their sons and daughters. Thus the race grew up from savagery, thus the human concept grew.
Perhaps, he thought, my father was a mutant, a mutant that no one suspected. Or it may have been my mother. And neither of them would have been suspected. For my father was a farmer and if his mutancy had made the crops grow a little better through his better understanding of the soil or through a deeper feeling for the art of growing things, who would there be to know that he was a mutant? He would simply have been a better farmer than his neighbors. And if at night, when he read the well-worn books that stood on the shelf in the dining room, he understood those books and the things they meant to say better than most other men, who was there to know?
But I, he said, I was noticed. That is the crime of mutancy, to be noticed. Like the Spartan boy whose crime of stealing a fox was no crime at all, but whose cries when the fox ripped out his guts were a crime indeed.
I rose too fast, he thought. I cut through too much red tape. I understood too well. And in governmental office you cannot rise too fast nor cut red tape nor understand too well. You must be as mediocre as your fellow office-holders. You cannot point to a blueprint of a rocke
t motor and say, “There is the trouble,” when men who are better trained than you cannot see the trouble. And you cannot devise a system of production that will turn out two rocket motors for the price of one in half the time. For that is not only being too efficient; it’s downright blasphemy.
But most of all you cannot stand up in open meeting of government policy makers and point out that mutancy is no crime in itself … that it only is a crime when it is wrongly used. Nor say that the world would be better off if it used its mutants instead of being frightened of them.
Of course, if one knew one was a mutant, one would never say a thing like that. And a mutant, knowing himself a mutant, never would point out a thing that was wrong with a rocket engine. For a mutant has to keep his mouth shut, has to act the mediocre man and arrive at the ends he wishes by complex indirection.
If I had only known, thought West. If I had only known in time. I could have fooled them, as I hope many others even now are fooling them.
But now he knew it was too late, too late to turn back to the life that he had rejected, to go back and accept the dead-end trap that had been fashioned for him … a trap that would catch and hold him, where he would be safe. And where the human race would be safe from him.
West turned around and found the path that led up the rocky decline toward the laboratory.
A hulking figure stepped out of the shadows and challenged him.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
West halted. “Just got in,” he said. “Looking for a friend of mine. By the name of Nevin.”
Inside the pocket of his suit, he felt Annabelle stirring restlessly. Probably she was getting cold.
“Nevin?” asked the man, a note of alarm chilling his voice. “What do you want of Nevin?”
“He’s got a painting,” West declared.
The man’s voice turned silky and dangerous. “How much do you know about Nevin and his painting?”
“Not much,” said West. “That’s why I’m here. Wanted to talk with him about it.”