After the fiasco with the Nerva-K, one of us had to go down and see how much damage had been done. That meant tunneling down with the flame of a jet back pack, then crawling under the landing skirt. Jerome lost the toss. I feel no guilt. I’d have done the same if I had lost.
The Nerva had spewed fused bits of the fission pile all over the bubble cavity. We were trapped for good. Rather, I was trapped. Jerome was dead, and we knew it. The bubble cavity was a hell of radiation.
He came back out, told me good-bye, strode out onto the ice and took off his helmet.
I remember I was crying, partly from grief and partly from fear. I remember that I kept my voice steady in spite of it. Jerome never knew. What he guessed is his own affair.
But all that seems infinitely remote. Jerome stands out there with his helmet clutched in his hands: a statue to himself, the first man on Pluto. The frost of recondensed moisture conceals his expression.
Sunrise. I hope the amoeba—
That was wild. The sun stood poised for an instant, a white point-source between twin peaks. Then it streaked upward—and the spinning sky jolted to a stop. No wonder I didn’t catch it before. It happened so fast.
A horrible thought. What has happened to me could have happened to Jerome! I wonder—
I stayed with the landing vehicle about thirty hours, taking soil and ice samples, talking to Sammy on the laser beam; delivering high-minded last messages, feeling sorry for myself. I kept passing Jerome’s statue. For a corpse, and one who has not been prettified by the skills of an embalmer, he looks damned good. I wondered each time how I would look when I followed his example. And an idea came.
This is what comes, of not wanting to die.
There was Sammy in the Earth-return vehicle, but he couldn’t get down to me. I couldn’t get up. The lifesystem was in good order, but sooner or later I would freeze to death or run out of air.
Sammy and I had talked of ways to keep me alive. In my exploring I had looked for strata of frozen oxygen. I hadn’t found that. But there was dirty water ice. Electrolysis would extract the oxygen.
But a rescue ship would take years. They’d have to build it from the ground up, and redesign the landing vehicle too. Electrolysis takes power, and heat takes power, and all I had was the batteries.
Sooner or later I’d run out of power.
In Nevada, three billion miles from here, half a million corpses lie frozen in vaults surrounded by liquid nitrogen. Half a million dead men wait for an earthly resurrection, on the day medical science discovers how to unfreeze them safely, how to cure what was killing each of them, how to cure the additional damage done by ice crystals breaking cell walls all through their brains and bodies.
Half a million fools? But what choice did they have? They were dying.
I was dying.
A man can stay conscious for tens of seconds in vacuum. If I moved fast, I could get out of my suit in that time. Without that insulation to protect me, Pluto’s black night would suck warmth from my body in seconds. At 50° Absolute, I’d stay in frozen storage until one version or another of the Day of Resurrection.
Sunlight—
—And stars. No sign of the big blob that found me so singularly tasteless yesterday. But I could be looking in the wrong direction.
I hope it got to cover.
I’m looking east, out over the splash plain. In my peripheral vision the ship looks unchanged and undamaged.
My suit lies beside me on the ice. I stand on a peak of black rock, poised in my silvered underwear, looking eternally out at the horizon. Before the cold touched my brain, I found a last moment in which to assume a heroic stance. Go east, young man. Wouldn’t you know I’d get my directions mixed? But it was night then.
Sammy Cross must be on his way home now. He’ll tell them where I am.
Stars pour up from behind the mountains. The mountains and the splash plain and Jerome and I sink endlessly beneath the sky.
My corpse must be the coldest in history. Even the hopeful dead of Earth are only stored at liquid nitrogen temperatures. Pluto’s night makes that look torrid, after the 50° A. heat of day seeps away into space.
A superconductor is what I am. Sunlight raises the temperature too high, switching me off like a damned machine at every dawn. But at night my nervous system becomes a superconductor. Currents flow; thoughts flow; sensations flow. Sluggishly. The one hundred and fifty-three hours of Pluto’s rotation flash by in what feels like fifteen minutes. At that rate I can wait it out.
I stand as a statue and a viewpoint. No wonder I can’t get emotional about anything. Water is a rock here, and my glands are contoured ice within me. But I feel sensations: the pull of gravity, the pain in my ears, the tug of vacuum over every square inch of my body. The vacuum will not boil my blood. But the tensions are frozen into the ice of me, and my nerves tell me so. I feel the wind whistling from my lips, like an exhalation of cigarette smoke.
This is what comes of not wanting to die. What a joke if I got my wish!
Do you suppose they’ll find me? Pluto’s small for a planet. For a place to get lost in, a small planet is all too large. But there’s the ship.
Though it seems to be covered with frost. Vaporized gases recondensed on the hull. Gray-white on gray-white, a lump on a dish of refrozen ice. I could stand here forever waiting for them to pick my ship from its surroundings.
Stop that.
Sunlight—
Stars rolling up the sky. The same patterns, endlessly rolling up from the same points. Does Jerome’s corpse live the same half-life I live now? He should have stripped, as I did. My God! I wish I’d thought to wipe the ice from his eyes!
I wish that superfluid blob would come back.
Damn. It’s cold.
Harlan Ellison said this was a New Wave story. I see his point: you don’t often see a story in which the character never moves a muscle.
It first appeared in the Future Unbounded Program Book, for Westercon 1968. I charged the Westercon Committee a fee to use it. My miser’s urge runs deep.
• • •
• • •
Renner was shaking his head. “I don’t blame Littlemead a damn bit,” he said. “The wonder is he didn’t convince everyone on the planet.”
“We’re a stubborn lot,” said Potter. “Yon squinting silhouette in the night sky may hae been too obvious, too…”
“Here I am, stupid!” Renner suggested.
“Aye. New Scots dinna like being treated as dullards, not even by Him.”
THE MOTE IN GOD’S EYE, 1974
A RELIC OF THE EMPIRE
When the ship arrived, Dr. Richard Schultz-Mann was out among the plants, flying over and around them on a lift belt. He hovered over one, inspecting with proprietary interest an anomalous patch in its yellow foliage. This one would soon be ripe.
The nature-lover was a breadstick of a man, very tall and very thin, with an aristocratic head sporting a close-cropped growth of coppery hair and an asymmetric beard. A white streak ran above his right ear, and there was a patch of white on each side of the chin, one coinciding with the waxed spike. As his head moved in the double sunlight, the patches changed color instantly.
He took a tissue sample from the grayish patch, stored it, and started to move on…
The ship came down like a daylight meteor, streaking blue-white across the vague red glare of Big Mira. It slowed and circled high overhead, weaving drunkenly across the sky, then settled toward the plain near Mann’s Explorer. Mann watched it land, then gave up his bumblebee activities and went to welcome the newcomers. He was amazed at the coincidence. As far as he knew, his had been the first ship ever to land here. The company would be good…but what could anyone possibly want here?
Little Mira set while he was skimming back. A flash of white at the far edge of the sea, and the tiny blue-white dwarf was gone. The shadows changed abruptly, turning the world red. Mann took off his pink-tinged goggles. Big Mira was still high, sixty degrees abo
ve the horizon and two hours from second sunset.
The newcomer was huge, a thick blunt-nosed cylinder twenty times the size of the Explorer. It looked old: not damaged, not even weathered, but indefinably old. Its nose was still closed tight, the living bubble retracted, if indeed it had a living bubble. Nothing moved nearby. They must be waiting for his welcome before they debarked.
Mann dropped toward the newcomer.
The stunner took him a few hundred feet up. Without pain and without sound, suddenly all Mann’s muscles turned to loose jelly. Fully conscious and completely helpless, he continued to dive toward the ground.
Three figures swarmed up at him from the newcomer’s oversized airlock. They caught him before he hit. Tossing humorous remarks at each other in a language Mann did not know, they towed him down to the plain.
The man behind the desk wore a captain’s hat and a cheerful smile. “Our supply of Verinol is limited,” he said in the trade language. “If I have to use it, I will, but I’d rather save it. You may have heard that it has unpleasant side effects.”
“I understand perfectly,” said Mann. “You’ll use it the moment you think you’ve caught me in a lie.” Since he had not yet been injected with the stuff, he decided it was a bluff. The man had no Verinol, if indeed there was such an animal as Verinol.
But he was still in a bad hole. The ancient, renovated ship held more than a dozen men, whereas Mann seriously doubted if he could have stood up. The sonic had not entirely worn off.
His captor nodded approvingly. He was huge and square, almost a cartoon of a heavy-planet man, with muscularity as smooth and solid as an elephant’s. A Jinxian, for anyone’s money. His size made the tiny shipboard office seem little more than a coffin. Among the crew his captain’s hat would not be needed to enforce orders. He looked like he could kick holes in hullmetal, or teach tact to an armed Kzin.
“You’re quick,” he said. “That’s good. I’ll be asking questions about you and about this planet. You’ll give truthful, complete answers. If some of my questions get too personal, say so; but remember, I’ll use the Verinol if I’m not satisfied. How old are you?”
“One hundred and fifty-four.”
“You look much older.”
“I was off boosterspice for a couple of decades.”
“Tough luck. Planet of origin?”
“Wunderland.”
“Thought so, with that stick-figure build. Name?”
“Doctor Richard Harvey Schultz-Mann.”
“Rich Mann, hah? Are you?”
Trust a Jinxian to spot a pun. “No. After I make my reputation, I’ll write a book on the Slaver Empire. Then I’ll be rich.”
“If you say so. Married?”
“Several times. Not at the moment.”
“Rich Mann, I can’t give you my real name, but you can call me Captain Kidd. What kind of beard is that?”
“You’ve never seen an asymmetric beard?”
“No, thank the Mist Demons. It looks like you’ve shaved off all your hair below the part, and everything on your face left of what looks like a one-tuft goatee. Is that the way it’s supposed to go?”
“Exactly so.”
“You did it on purpose then.”
“Don’t mock me, Captain Kidd.”
“Point taken. Are they popular on Wunderland?”
Dr. Mann unconsciously sat a little straighter. “Only among those willing to take the time and trouble to keep it neat.” He twisted the single waxed spike of beard at the right of his chin with unconscious complacence. This was the only straight hair on his face—the rest of the beard being close-cropped and curly—and it sprouted from one of the white patches. Mann was proud of his beard.
“Hardly seems worth it,” said the Jinxian. “I assume it’s to show you’re one of the leisure classes. What are you doing on Mira Ceti-T?”
“I’m investigating one aspect of the Slaver Empire.”
“You’re a geologist, then?”
“No, a xenobiologist.”
“I don’t understand.”
“What do you know about the Slavers?”
“A little. They used to live all through this part of the galaxy. One day the slave races decided they’d had enough, and there was a war. When it was over, everyone was dead.”
“You know quite a bit. Well, Captain, a billion and a half years is a long time. The Slavers left only two kinds of evidence of their existence. There are the stasis boxes and their contents, mostly weaponry, but records have been found too. And there are the plants and animals developed for the Slavers’ convenience by their tnuctip slaves, who were biological engineers.”
“I know about those. We have bandersnatchi on Jinx, on both sides of the ocean.”
“The bandersnatchi food animals are a special case. They can’t mutate; their chromosomes are as thick as your finger, too large to be influenced by radiation. All other relics of tnuctipun engineering have mutated almost beyond recognition. Almost. For the past twelve years I’ve been searching out and identifying the surviving species.”
“It doesn’t sound like a fun way to spend a life, Rich Mann. Are there Slaver animals on this planet?”
“Not animals, but plants. Have you been outside yet?”
“Not yet.”
“Then come out. I’ll show you.”
The ship was very large. It did not seem to be furnished with a living bubble, hence the entire lifesystem must be enclosed within the metal walls. Mann walked ahead of the Jinxian down a long unpainted corridor to the airlock, waited inside while the pressure dropped slightly, then rode the escalator to the ground. He would not try to escape yet, though the sonic had worn off. The Jinxian was affable but alert, he carried a flashlight-laser dangling from his belt, his men were all around them, and Mann’s lift belt had been removed. Richard Mann was not quixotic.
It was a red, red world. They stood on a dusty plain sparsely scattered with strange yellow-headed bushes. A breeze blew things like tumbleweeds across the plain, things which on second glance were the dried heads of former bushes. No other life-forms were visible. Big Mira sat on the horizon, a vague, fiery semicircular cloud, just dim enough to look at without squinting. Outlined in sharp black silhouette against the red giant’s bloody disk were three slender, improbably tall spires, unnaturally straight and regular, each with a vivid patch of yellow vegetation surrounding its base. Members of the Jinxian’s crew ran, walked, or floated outside, some playing an improvised variant of baseball, others at work, still others merely enjoying themselves. None were Jinxian, and none had Mann’s light-planet build. Mann noticed that a few were using the thin wire blades of variable-knives to cut down some of the straight bushes.
“Those,” he said.
“The bushes?”
“Yes. They used to be tnuctip stage trees. We don’t know what they looked like originally, but the old records say the Slavers stopped using them some decades before the rebellion. May I ask what those men are doing in my ship?”
Expanded from its clamshell nose, the Explorer’s living bubble was bigger than the Explorer. Held taut by air pressure, isolated from the surrounding environment, proof against any atmospheric chemistry found in nature, the clear fabric hemisphere was a standard feature of all camper-model spacecraft. Mann could see biped shadows moving purposefully about inside and going between the clamshell doors into the ship proper.
“They’re not stealing anything, Rich Mann. I sent them in to remove a few components from the drives and the comm systems.”
“One hopes they won’t damage what they remove.”
“They won’t. They have their orders.”
“I assume you don’t want me to call someone,” said Mann. He noticed that the men were preparing a bonfire, using stage bushes. The bushes were like miniature trees, four to six feet tall, slender and straight, and the brilliant yellow foliage at the top was flattened like the head of a dandelion. From the low, rounded eastern mountains to the western sea, the red land
was sprinkled with the yellow dots of their heads. Men were cutting off the heads and roots, then dragging the logs away to pile them in conical formation over a stack of death-dry tumbleweed heads.
“We don’t want you to call the Wunderland police, who happen to be somewhere out there looking for us.”
“I hate to pry—”
“No, no, you’re entitled to your curiosity. We’re pirates.”
“Surely you jest. Captain Kidd, if you’ve figured out a way to make piracy pay off, you must be bright enough to make ten times the money on the stock-market.”
“Why?”
By the tone of his voice, by his gleeful smile, the Jinxian was baiting him. Fine; it would keep his mind off stage trees. Mann said, “Because you can’t catch a ship in hyperspace. The only way you can match courses with a ship is to wait until it’s in an inhabited system. Then the police come calling.”
“I know an inhabited system where there aren’t any police.”
“The hell you do.”
They had walked more or less aimlessly to the Explorer’s airlock. Now the Jinxian turned and gazed out over the red plain, toward the dwindling crescent of Big Mira, which now looked like a bad forest fire. “I’m curious about those spires.”
“Fine, keep your little secret. I’ve wondered about them myself, but I haven’t had a chance to look at them yet.”
“I’d think they’d interest you. They look definitely artificial to me.”
“But they’re a billion years too young to be Slaver artifacts.”
“Rich Mann, are those bushes the only life on this planet?”
“I haven’t seen anything else,” Mann lied.
“Then it couldn’t have been a native race that put those spires up. I never heard of a space-traveling race that builds such big things for mere monuments.”