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--
There was Sammy in the Earth-return vehicle, but he couldn't get down to me. I couldn't get up. The life system was in good order, but sooner or later I would freeze to death or run out of air.
I stayed with the landing vehicle about thirty hours, taking ice and soil samples, analyzing them, delivering the data to Sammy via laser beam; delivering also high- minded last messages, and feeling sorry for myself. On my trips outside I kept passing Jerome's statue. For a corpse, and one which has not been prettified by the post surgical skills of an embalmer, he looks damn good. His frost-dusted skin is indistinguishable from marble, and his eyes are lifted toward the stars in poignant yearning. Each time I passed him I wondered how I would look when my turn came.
"You've got to find an oxygen layer," Sammy kept saying.
"Why?"
"To keep you alive! Sooner or later they'll send a rescue ship. You can't give up now!"
I'd already given up. There was oxygen, but there was no such layer as Sammy kept hoping for. There were veins of oxygen mixed with other things, like veins of gold ore in rock. Too little, too finely distributed.
"Then use the water ice! That's only poetic justice, isn't it? You can get the oxygen out by electrolysis!"
But a rescue ship would take years. They'd have to build it from scratch, and redesign the landing vehicle too. Electrolysis takes power, and heat takes power. I had only the batteries.
Sooner or later I'd run out of power. Sammy couldn't see this. He was more desperate than I was. I didn't run out of last messages; I stopped sending them because they were driving Sammy crazy.
I passed Jerome's statue one time too many, and an idea came.
This is what comes, of not wanting to die.
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 earthy resurrection, on the day medical science discovers how to unfreeze them safely, how to cure what was killing each one 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 got 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 degrees 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 the fog of my breathing-air hid everything, and I was moving in terrible haste.
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 degrees Absolute 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.
Eye of an Octopus
IT WAS A well.
Henry Bedrosian and Christopher Luden bent over the lip, peering down into the jet darkness. Their balloon-tired motorcycle lay forgotten on the talcum sand, fine pink sand that stretched endlessly away to the flat horizon, borrowing its color from the sky. The sky was the color of blood. It might have been a flaming Kansas sunset, but the tiny sun was still at the zenith. The translucent hewn stone of the well-mouth stood like a blasphemy in the poisonous wilderness that was Mars.
It stood four feet above the sand, roughly circular, perhaps three yards across. The weathered stones were upright blocks, a foot tall by five inches wide by perhaps a foot thick. Whatever the material of those stones, they seemed to glow with a faintly blue inner light.
"It's so human!" said Henry Bedrosian. His voice held a touch of bewildered frustration, echoed by his dark, chisel-nosed face.
Chris Luden knew what he meant.
"It's natural. A well's like a lever or a wheel. There aren't many changes you can make, because it's too simple. Did you notice the shape of the bricks?"
