Part 2

To Dr. Livingston he was a problem. There were none of us willing to turn back to earth--even there at the start--just to deliver him to the authorities. It may have been his pleading; and Dr. Livingston's gentle, kindly nature. What would ultimately have been his fate, back on earth, was something which, as events transpired, never had to be decided. Certainly on the trip up to now, he had caused us no trouble--an intelligent lad, seemingly eager to do his share of work. We had told Carruthers and Duroh now about the Xalite. And Alan had heard it also. His thin, boyish face had had a queer look, or at least it seemed so to me.

The contamination of criminality! The thought had leaped into my mind, though Heaven knows I said nothing. One crime so easily to lead to another. But I flung away the thought. With a human excuse, Alan had stained himself with blood. Somehow, knowing him through those days and nights of that awing trip, I did not think he would want to repeat the experience.

"You'll stay on watch?" Dr. Livingston said, now as we sat together in the turret. "I'm tired, John. If those clouds break, call me at once."

"Yes," I agreed.

He went down to his room. Duroh and Carruthers were sleeping; and Alan also. I was left alone in the turret. I drew the curtains to shroud the sunlight. Bathed in starlight from the other side, I sat staring out at Zura. Wild, sullen-looking little world. The sunlight shot into its gray-black clouds with turgid orange and green light. We were so close now that the huge cloudy ball was spread over much of the firmament, with the white gleaming stars prismatic in the black abyss of space around it. And with our still-rapid approach, the disc was almost visibly enlarging.

A step sounded behind me, I looked up. "Oh, you, Alan?"

"Can I sit with you?"

"Yes, sure."

* * * * *

He was a different-looking lad now. We had given him clean clothes; he was cleanly shaved; his face and his body, though still thin, had filled out a bit. A handsome, sensitive-looking young fellow. But in his eyes was the same hunted look.

"That's Zura," he said. "Looks quite a bit bigger now, doesn't it?" Then suddenly he swung on me. "I'm going to stay there, John--understand? You can't stop me--not any of you--because I won't go back."

Pathetic damn words to come from a boy--to give up his world, his people, everything to which he was born, because he had made himself, all in ten minutes, unfitted for everything.

"Zura may not be habitable," I said. "No food. Maybe you can't even breathe that air down there. We don't know."

"I don't care. I'm not going back to earth." And then he added, "I--I guess I'd rather be there even without food." He muttered it with a grim bitterness. "The only man in my world--I couldn't do anything wrong then, could I?"

For an hour after that I think we both sat almost in silence. I was busy with the electro-telescope, trying to see down into the swirling Zurian clouds. On the stool beside me, Alan Grant just sat brooding. And then suddenly, as though he had been struggling all this time to reach some momentous decision, he burst out:

"I've got to tell you, that's all. John, listen--"

I was absorbed with the telescope so that I hardly heeded him. It seemed that the clouds of Zura, in one place in the northern hemisphere, were breaking into a little rift. At Alan's words, I saw out of the tail of my eye that he had flung an apprehensive look at the little spiral staircase of alumite which wound down into the lower levels of the _Planeteer_.

"What?" I said idly.

He lowered his voice. "I can't help telling you. I don't want--again--"

What a fatuous fool I was at that moment! Queer how in life, things momentous may of actuality hang upon seeming trivialities! If only I had listened to Alan Grant then! But in that instant, as I peered into the eyepiece of the telescope, a rift in the clouds of Zura opened up. I must have muttered some exclamation.

"What is it?" Alan demanded.

"The clouds are breaking! We may be able to see the surface now. Wait, I'll swing it onto the image screen, so we can both see it."

I made the connections. The little flurescent screen glowed with an image of the atmosphere of Zura--turgid, green, yellow and black masses of clouds, whirled and tossed by giant storms.

"Good Lord!" Alan exclaimed. "Are we supposed to descend through that?"

"No. We'd have to have a rift. There's one coming there now."

Midway between the equator and the pole there was a widening opening. Then a segment of the dark surface was visible. I focused the electro-telescope, swung its controls to a smaller area with a greater magnification. The surface of Zura! What a weird, wild scene! The image gave us perhaps a square mile. There was a turgid twilight down there, through which the daylight now was slanting, broken by the haze which still remained in this clearer atmosphere.

The terrain was rocky--a bleak, desolate waste, barren and empty. Tumbled rocks, buttes and spires, all slate-gray, sleek and glistening like marble. A tumbled terrain, with fissures and cave-mouths everywhere; rifts, gullies and huge canyons. Was it rock, or metal? Extremely dense--it had that obvious aspect; a compressed little world, with its surface broken, mangled as though by some titanic cataclysm.

* * * * *

It was a frigid little world. White patches of snow and sleek blue ice everywhere were apparent. But it was melting ice now. Weirdly in places it drooped, grotesquely leprous where it had melted away. And in the hollows, there was water. Off to one side, a big bowl-like depression was a lake of water, scattered with melting ice. Frigid world, but now approaching the sun, warmth was striking down, melting the congealed surface. Masses of ice turning rotten. As I stared, a great frozen mass which hung like a white veil over a hundred-foot cliff abruptly broke away. Sunlight chanced to strike it as it came splintering down, so that it looked like fractured spun glass, a riot of prismatic color.

"John! Look! There, down at the lower corner!" Alan was tensely pointing to a corner of the image screen. What was this? I stared and caught my breath. It seemed that against a distant ice-spire which stood like a stalagmite on the weird melting landscape, a white figure was poised. It seemed to move a little.

"Someone alive down there!" Alan murmured. "Look--that figure moved!"

Zura inhabited! We had never given a thought to that, save to assume that it was not. My fingers were shaking as I fumbled at the telescope, shortening the focus still further, giving a greater magnification of a much smaller area. Our fluroscope screen blurred; then slowly clarified, with an area of only a hundred feet or so.

Numbed, we stared at a white figure which was against the ice-spire. A girl! A human girl? Heaven knows, it seemed so. Pale white in the weird Zurian daylight, she stood motionless, seemingly gazing out over the melting landscape. A girl the size of a girl on earth. A white garment, white fur perhaps, draped her breasts and thighs. Her long hair, white as a veil of frozen falling water, was tumbled over her shoulders.

Woman carved in white marble. Woman molded of sleek ice. If we had not seen her move, she could have been a strange statue of a beautiful earthgirl, frozen there. Then suddenly as the swirling clouds shifted, a shaft of sunlight fell upon her. There was a pink-whiteness, like a delicate flush, on her limbs, neck and face.

For that second Alan and I breathlessly stared. And then, as though the sunlight were something horribly frightening, her little body seemed to shudder. She turned, plunged into the shadows of a rock-rift and was gone!

IV

Within another day, we were close over it. Of necessity our velocity was much less now. We had tilted so that the asteroid was under us, with our base gravity plates in negation. Zura for twenty-four earth-hours had been repulsing us, retarding us, as we dropped upon it. Dr. Livingston had made careful calculations. The total mass of Zura, small as the asteroid was in size, he had figured to be nearly that of the earth. We confirmed it now, by the repulsing effect it had upon us.

Gradually we slowed, poised now midway in the northern hemisphere, Zura had a rotation on its axis of almost exactly four hours. That we had been able to check now--there had been six rotations in the span of an earth-day, as measured by our chronometer. A thousand miles up? It seemed now that we were no more than that. The Benson curve-rays, here in the turret, showed us on our tilted mirrors the full image of the little world directly under us. Its convexity long since had been apparent. It spread now like a huge cloud-enveloped ball, covering almost all the lower firmament.

"The clouds are lessening," Dr. Livingston said, as again he and I were alone in the turret. "We'll be able to descend easily through this atmosphere."

"Yes," I agreed.

There had been faint, though unmistakable, evidences of Xalite in many places. We had decided that our best course was to descend before the storms came back. Most of the moisture-masses seemed clustered over the southern hemisphere now. Here in the north, for six Zurian days it had been fairly clear. Swift alternation of day and night--days of gray, hazy light, with the sunlight often striking through. And nights of glittering stars. We had seen all the surface of the northern hemisphere now. Everywhere it was the same--bleak, metallic-looking gray rocks, wildly tumbled; huge, fantastic ice and snow formations; strewn pools of water, choked with melting ice.

Alan and I had mentioned that weird vision we had had of a living girl, so strangely fashioned in human mold. Was she real--or had our fancy tricked us? Dr. Livingston had blankly stared. From the big, handsome Peter Duroh had come a laugh and a ribald expression of hope that we were right. James Carruthers had merely stared incredulously, with his thin lips smiling and a look in his alert eyes that somehow seemed predatory.

But whether we had seen something animal or human, assuredly it had been alive. This atmosphere then, doubtless would be breatheable to us; and the temperature down there, by daylight at least, must be around 40F.

Dr. Livingston was checking his instruments. Another hour had passed. "Only five hundred miles of altitude now," he said. "I think we may use a little less repulsion for a time, and then the final retardation must begin."

Awesome descent. It took us another eighteen earth-hours while the weird convex surface of little Zura came up at us. I was often in the turret alone. Queerly an ominous sense of disaster was upon me. I could not tell why. Fear that we might not land safely? Surely it was not that. Rather was it as though, here in the little _Planeteer_ which had been our world, something was impending. Somehow I had grown to dislike Pete Duroh and Jim Carruthers. Just little things. That ribald laugh. A way they had seemingly of watching me, whispering together while I was at the spectroscope, checking what evidence I could find of the presence of Xalite on the asteroid's surface.

And young Grant, boyish multiple murderer, whom now I had come somehow to like--what was it that he had wanted to tell me? I had tried several times to see him alone to ask him; but obviously he was avoiding me now. Whatever it was, he had repented the impulse.

We were all five in the turret during the descent through the Zurian atmosphere. Only fifty thousand feet up now. It was night, with glittering stars above us, and below, that wild, tumbled, fantastic landscape spreading now off to the horizon, bleak and grim in the starlight....

* * * * *

Twenty thousand feet. Sudden daylight had come and then night again. We were moving with Zura now in her swift axial rotation, dropping almost vertically down, slowly now with a constant retardation. I did not mention it, but I realized that we were poised very nearly over where Alan and I had seen--or thought we had seen--that strange vision of a girl. She had not reappeared. Were there others like her here? A race of people so much like earth humans that one of them could be a beautiful young girl, so like a girl of earth that I had resented the ribald attitude of Carruthers and Duroh?

My thoughts seemed totally impossible, according to scientific logic. Yet Alan and I surely had seen her....

"This damn heat," Duroh said. He sat slumped on the control room floor, his lanky body in trousers and shirt. His black wavy hair was plastered on his forehead with sweat. He mopped it with his big handkerchief.

"You'll get it cold enough pretty soon," Carruthers laughed. "Take your time, Pete."

Carruthers was alertly watching Dr. Livingston as he shifted the gravity plates for a still greater retardation. "Going to slow us some more, Doc?"

"Yes. Yes, I don't want to take any chances."

Five thousand feet.... Then two thousand. Off to the right the great cauldron depression was like a mile-wide lake--black water choked with floating ice on which the starlight glistened prismatic. A great ramp of the gray metallic rock went up like a glacier to the left. Beside it, the foothills of distant mountains went up in great terraced tiers. Everywhere there were ice-filled gullies, with water pouring down out of many of them. Gullies, ravines and crevices; pits yawning with inky blackness....

And then I noticed that, weirdly, there seemed light inherent to these Zurian rock-masses. Some of the cave-mouths were not quite black--a little light appeared in them, glowing with a prismatic sheen.

A thousand feet. I was at the gravity control-board now, executing Dr. Livingston's swift murmured orders. Without our modern rocket-streams, the little _Planeteer_, I must admit, was unwieldy. We were dropping slowly, with a side drift. In a corner Alan sat staring at us, with his hands gripped between his knees, his fingers working nervously. Duroh and Carruthers were standing tense beside me.

It was a touchy few minutes. We were some two hundred feet above a broken ice-strewn plateau, with a side drift that was carrying us toward a small cliff. I could see where Dr. Livingston intended to land now--a little shallow bowl-depression near the cliff, where the bottom seemed flat, with soft snow. The _Planeteer_ was hovering upright, with a very slow, vertical axis rotation, so that as I used the cliff's repulsion to check our drift, I was shifting the current constantly in our side gravity plates.

Queer how one may think of two things at once! I was seated at the control table, with my fingers roving its gravity-plate shifting keys. Dr. Livingston was tensely peering through the side bull's-eyes, gauging our position, our downward and sidewise drift; calling out to me his orders. Certainly my mind had never been more alertly on anything than it now was on those gravity keys. But nevertheless, suddenly I was aware of an electric feeling here in the control room. Carruthers and Duroh exchanging glances. And over in the corner young Alan, with his hands between his knees, his fingers writhing, his dark gaze brooding on me.

"Base negation! Full--quickly now!" Dr. Livingston called.

We were almost over the snowy depression--hardly the height of the _Planeteer_ above it. I flung on the base repulsion; held it only some ten seconds. Then gave attraction for an instant.

That may have been the first landing of any space-ship in the history of the Universe. I do not know, of course; but I will say we eased the little _Planeteer_ down as light as a falling snowdrop. There was hardly a bump as we landed, with the base flat in the melting snow, and the globe of the _Planeteer_ almost exactly upright.

"Good enough, John. We did it!" Dr. Livingston was triumphant. He swung toward me, his face flushed with pleasure. Jim Carruthers was close beside him. "Good work, wasn't it, Jim?"

"Yes," Carruthers said, with his thin smile. "You did nicely, Doctor." He was partly behind Dr. Livingston; I saw his arm raised behind Livingston's back. I had no more warning than that. The knife Carruthers was clutching stabbed deeply. I saw the smile fade off poor Dr. Livingston's face, with a dazed look of wonderment spreading there as he tossed up his arms and sprawled forward. He dropped in a crumpled heap almost at my feet, with the alumite knife-handle sticking from his back where a ghastly crimson stain already was spreading on his white shirt.

"Why--why, good Lord--" I gasped. I was on my feet; mind blurred, numbed with horror. My fists clenched as I whirled at Carruthers. "Why--why, you damned--"

"Easy there!" It was Peter Duroh's growling voice behind me. I swung to face him. His big lanky figure leaned nonchalantly against one of the side bull's-eye windows. Both his hands were at his hips--his hands gripping an old-fashioned bullet-projector and a Banning heat-gun, with muzzles leveled at my chest!

V

"So what are you going to do with me?" I demanded.

"Take it easy. Sit where you are." They had shoved me back into my chair at the instrument board. Over in a corner Alan still sat with his hands clasped between his knees, and his fingers working. Just a boy. He could not meet the glance I flung at him.

"Is Dr. Livingston dead?" I said. "If he isn't--Good Lord, are you going to let him just lie there?"

"Oh, he's dead all right," Duroh growled.

"You have no objection if I see, have you?"

"No. Go ahead."

"We'll go out by the lower door," Carruthers said impassively. "Keep your muzzle on him, Pete--I'm going down. Livingston said we'll use a portable spectroscope to locate the Xalite. It's in the base; I'll go rig it up."

"You better not open that base door too quickly," I warned. "If this atmosphere is wrong, in chemical content or pressure--kill us all here like rats in a trap."

"Don't you worry, Taine." From the head of the little incline stairway Carruthers grinned at me with his tight-lipped, ironic smile. "That's why you're alive. We realize you know more about a lot of things in this than we do."

Damnable cold-blooded villain. He waved his hand with jaunty irony at me as he vanished down the staircase. With Duroh's weapons alertly on me, I bent over the crumpled Dr. Livingston. He was dead, beyond question. For years he had been my best, almost my only, friend. There was a lump in my throat as I went back to my seat at the table.

"About this Xalite," Duroh said pleasantly. "In what form do we expect to find it? Pretty pure? Can you tell how pure it is with your instruments? If it's in a pretty pure state, we won't need so much, will we? Fifty pounds or so--to deal out to a panting world for all our lifetime and make us rich enough for any man's dreams."

"So you all three have decided to be murderers?" I retorted. "One of us I should have thought was enough--contaminating damn business--"

My bitter words brought a burst from Alan. "So what can I do?" he flung at me; but still he did not look at me. "You think I want to live here on this God-forsaken little world--and die maybe in a day? Or go back to Earth? Dr. Livingston would have turned me over--you know he would--"

One crime with such ghastly fecundity begets another! Heaven knows I could hardly blame the boy. He was only sixteen; pushed into desperation.

"What will he do?" Duroh grinned. "Why, that's easy, isn't it, Alan? He'll go back to earth--rich. When you're rich--you can bribe officials. Or, at worst, you can't be hunted like a sewer rat as he was before. Money buys hiding places, clothes and food. Easy to hide out, when you've got the decimars."

"And me?" I persisted. "You need my help now? All right--let's say I'll give it. And then what?"

"When we get back to earth we'll turn you loose," he smiled. "Why not? You can hunt us all you like. We'll be gone."

Was that their plan for me? I doubted it a great deal. But I could see no reason now to balk them. Certainly it was to my interest to find the Xalite, get it aboard and start back. With Alan to help me--or possibly even alone, for that matter--I could navigate back to earth. The landing there, on one of the big flying fields, would be far less difficult than here. Meanwhile, I would watch my chance. And get a word alone with Alan if I could. I was still convinced that he wasn't the same stripe as these other two cold-blooded villains.

* * * * *

Duroh was questioning me now, and I answered him freely. A fairly rich deposit of the Xalite should be somewhere near here where we had landed. It would exist, probably as a strata in the metallic rock--not recognizable perhaps with the naked eye, but identifiable with the portable spectroscope.

"And with a pick and shovel we dig it out?" Duroh said. "You damn sure better find it, Taine, if you know what's good for you."

"I will if I can," I agreed.

Carruthers came back. "Come on down and rig up this gadget, Taine. Then we'll get on some heavy clothes and make a start."

Docilely I let them shove me down past our dim living quarters, into the base storeroom. I saw now that Carruthers had a heat-gun clipped to his belt with his knife. Alan apparently was unarmed. Dr. Livingston, I knew, had brought some weapons. They were in his sleeping room--more than these cut-throats had taken--but I had no way of getting to them now.

In the base-room I rigged the small spectroscope, with its lenses, prisms and batteries. Duroh brought us heavy trousers, boots, mackinaws and heavy caps.

"Now," he said, "we're about ready, aren't we? If that air out there is no good, we'll have to go through the midsection air-lock, with air-helmets. That the idea, Taine?"

"That's it," I agreed. "And maybe with pressure suits, for all I know."

But none of that was necessary. Cautiously I admitted the air. It was at once apparent that there was no great difference of pressure. It came slowly hissing in, stopping our ears for a moment. It was cold and dank, heavy to breathe and momentarily oppressive. But the feeling soon passed.

"Very good," Carruthers said. "Open wide, Taine."

I swung the bull's-eye inward ... Zura. As my foot crunched into the moist, wet snow, a pang shot through me. Perhaps I was the first living thing ever to set foot upon an alien world. How different this landing was from what I had anticipated! Dr. Livingston dead; myself a captive in the hands of these cut-throats.

We had cut off the _Planeteer's_ interior gravity, and had found that Zura was little different. As I walked now out into the raw, bleak night, a sense of physical lightness was upon me. I was conscious that if I took a leap it would be prodigious. Gravity perhaps was a quarter less; but the difference certainly was no greater than that.

"We're leaving everything to you," Duroh growled at my elbow. "Make it quick now, Taine, if you know what's good for you. All we want is a supply of the Xalite, and get back and get away in a hurry."

Duroh and I were leading. He kept his little bullet-projector with its muzzle rammed into my side. Behind us came Alan and Carruthers. I carried the small electro-spectroscope, with its batteries slung across my back.

"I have no idea which way to go," I said. "It's all a chance. Suppose we go a little way; then stop and make a test."

"Suit yourself," Carruthers agreed from behind me. "We're cut off, down here in this depression. Once we get up on the level, almost anywhere should do for a start."