Chapter 15. _Ice Cold on Oberon_

Nevertheless, from that point on, a different spirit seemed to animate

everyone aboard the _Magellan_. There was the feeling that they had

closed with the enemy and found themselves not wanting. There was the

feeling that they possessed powers not inferior to those of their

unknown enemies. The thought had been haunting them all along that they

were in the position of a backward people facing an advanced

invader--something like the problem of the Aztecs when faced with the

gunpowder and armor of the conquistadors.

Now they knew that though the Sun-tappers' weapons were different and

indeed advanced beyond Earthly technology, they themselves were not

without resources equally deadly to the foe.

After the memory of the H-bomb's powers had been finally absorbed, the

crew's activities began to indicate that the ship was coming into the

crucial phase of its journey. Haines and Boulton were going over the

list of military supplies with sharp, calculating eyes and slight grins

at the thought of retribution to come. Ferrati was overhauling the

rocket planes and land traveling devices, making them shipshape.

Russell Clyde and Burl surveyed the sky, anxious to be the first to spot

what they hoped would be the limping body of the battered and fleeing

dumbbell ship, a little atingle at the hope of spotting another such

ship--feeling now almost like the hunting dog that has finally spotted

the fox.

Lockhart himself reflected this mood of growing excitement. He prowled

the ship, examining the mighty purring engines, querying Caton, Shea and

Detmar as to how it could better its performance, how fast it could be

made to shift speed and directions. He studied the orbits and locations

of the remaining planets.

"Uranus is not too far off our path to Pluto," he announced one day.

"We'll make it in time to wipe out their plant there. But Neptune, whose

orbit is between those of Uranus and Pluto, is away off our track, a

third of the way around the Sun. We're going to skip it, hit directly

for Pluto and their main base--the end of their line. I don't want to

give them too much time to make repairs or to get any reinforcements. I

think they're limited in numbers--and we ought to slam them while they

still are."

There was no dissent at this. And as the days rolled past, the men of

the _Magellan_ began to chafe in their repressed desire to finish the

matter. At last Uranus came into sight--a large globe, very much like

Saturn and Jupiter in that it was of low density and great dimensions.

Roughly, sixty-four times the size of Earth, its density was barely

above that of water and it probably had no solid surface to speak of. An

inhospitable mass of unbreathable gases, at temperatures fantastically

lower than the freezing point of water.

As they drew close to the planet, they could see that it also was

banded, pale green bands alternating with lighter ones--indicating that

some sections of its atmospheric belt moved faster than others. It had

five moons which rotated in the opposite direction from those of any

other satellite system.

It was on the farthest moon, Oberon, a sphere six hundred miles in

diameter, that the Sun-tap station revealed itself. They swung down to

observe it and to place their bomb. Not an H-bomb though--they

recognized that they had erred in thinking they needed such a powerful

explosive.

Oberon was without an atmosphere, a rocky world with streaks of frozen

gases, and here and there the sheen of a lake of ice--ice that would

never melt--that on this world would be a permanent, hard-as-metal

material. There was, nonetheless, something about the surface that

seemed to bother Russ.

"Do you notice what seems to be a sort of shifting movement?" he asked

Burl. Burl looked, and sure enough, he saw that in places there seemed a

flickering of lights.

"Yes," he said, "I see it. What do you suppose it is?"

"I don't know," said Russ, "But I'm going to ask Lockhart to put the

ship down and let me take a look."

Lockhart at first demurred, but finally decided that they could afford

the brief halt. The _Magellan_ approached the surface, safely distant

from the Sun-tap station.

Burl and Russ descended in the two-man rocket plane, while the

teardrop-shaped ship hung half a mile above them. They landed on a

narrow plain, bordered by low ridges of mountains shining with streaks

of frozen hydrogen. A layer of cosmic dust hung over the rocks.

Wearing insulated space suits, they left the rocket plane. It was Burl

who made the first discovery. He pointed dramatically at the ground.

"Look, Russ. This dust is full of streaks and marks. It hasn't been

lying here undisturbed. Something has crossed over it!"

Russ kneeled in order to look more carefully. The layer of dust, the

consequences of an airless world exposed without protection to the

endless fall of cosmic particles, was indeed not the level, undisturbed

surface it should have been. Here and there were light, low depressions,

as if something had moved across it--like a small snake crawling on its

belly. In one place lay a series of depressions, like the footprints of

some light-bodied creature.

"Impossible," muttered Russ. "Life can't exist here."

But they trudged on, across the barren flat to a ridge of rock. Here

they found what they had thought to be impossible. Clustered along the

side of the ridge, in the faint light of the distant and tiny Sun, was a

series of thin, blue stalks, about half a foot in height. On each stalk

was a flat scalloped top like a little umbrella. It was sometimes bright

blue, and sometimes violet. As they drew nearer, these little stalks

began to sway, and turned their tops toward them.

"They look like plants," said Burl. "Plants made of something glassy and

plastic."

As Russ studied the strange growths, something moved across the dusty

tract behind them. It was long and thin and wiggly, with a ridge of tiny

crystalline hairs along its back. It was like a snake perhaps, but one

made of some unbelievably delicate glasswork.

It slid among the plants and wrapped itself around one. The growth

snapped suddenly, and then was absorbed by the creature.

Russ shook his head in amazement. "This is a great discovery," he said

incredulously. "This is life! It's life of a chemical type utterly

different from the protoplasm of Earth and Mars and Venus. It's life

designed to exist among liquid gases and frozen air--life which can't

have anything in common with protoplasm. Apparently it couldn't exist

even on Saturn's moons--they were too _hot_ for it!"

Russ was carried away with the possibilities. "This hints at great

things, Burl. Out near Pluto, where the system is even colder, there may

be other forms of this frigi-plasmic life, if I may coin a word. This

means a whole new science!"

They returned to the ship with their astonishing news. The _Magellan_

slowly skimmed over the surface of Oberon. They found whole forests of

this glassy frigid vegetation, but not much evidence of any animal life

larger than the creature the two explorers had seen.

Over the Sun-tap station--a ringed layout like the others, whose cluster

of masts caught the emanations of the distant Sun on the one hand and

directed them outward to the still unseen planet Pluto on the other--the

ship halted. It drew up fifty miles, pointed its tail and blasted forth

a rocket-driven, tactical atomic bomb.

The blast on Oberon was tiny compared to the one which had devastated

Iapetus, but it still left a deep indentation in the surface for future

space fliers to see.

They left it and the Uranian orbit behind them and headed outward once

again. Behind them now lay the worlds of the Sun's family, while far off

to one side lay the tiny light of Neptune. Ahead, between them and the

vast gulf of interstellar space, lay only the dark, mysterious ninth

planet, the enigmatic world named after the lord of the underworld,

Pluto.

The _Magellan_ plunged on, in constant acceleration, moving outward to

the farthest limit of the solar system. They had traveled almost one

billion, eight hundred million miles from the Sun--and yet they still

had two billion miles more to go. This was the longest stretch--and

during it, they would reach speeds greater than any they had touched

before. They shot outward, faster and faster, eating up the infinite

emptiness of space, driving the vast stretch that divided Pluto from its

neighbors.

The Sun, already small, dwindled steadily. It was still the brightest

star in their sky--of all the stars, it alone retained a disclike shape,

and the faint flicker of its coronal flames could occasionally be made

out--but it no longer dominated the heavens. To find the Sun, they now

had to look for it as they would for any other star.

As for Earth, it could not be seen. So close to the tiny Sun it lay that

only their sharpest telescopes could bring it out. Even Jupiter showed

up only as a thin, tiny crescent near the solar point of light.

"Pluto's a mysterious world," said Burl as he and Russ scanned the

heavens for a first glimpse of it. "The accounts in your astronomy books

give very little real information on it--but what they give is strange.

They say it's the only planet beyond Mars that is a small solid world

like the inner ones. It seems to be the same size as Earth--not at all

like the big outer worlds. And they say it seems to be the same mass as

Earth--a solid world whose surface gravity would be the same as our own

planet's."

Russ nodded. "It's an odd one, all right. There's now even some belief

that it's not a true planet, but one that was once a satellite of

Neptune. Its orbit is peculiar; it apparently may cut into that of

Neptune. In fact, everything hints at Pluto not being a true child of

our Sun. It may be a world captured from afar--a lonely wanderer cast

off from some other star, captured by the Sun after millions of years of

drifting lightless through space."

Beyond them, in their vision, lay only the stars of outer space, the

void that did not belong to our system. And then, finally, they found

Pluto--a tiny point of light shining among the blazing stars. They saw

the disc, dimly reflected in the light of the far-away Sun.

Even as they were taking their first long look at the dark planet, the

general alarm rang. They had caught up with the fleeing wreck of the

Sun-tapper's scout cruiser.