Star was impressed, and said as much. "Terrific job, Doc! It'll put you right up there next to Herschel and Tombaugh and the rest, but ..."
"But what do we have to do with all this?" muttered Phath, virtually stealing the very words from Star's mouth.
"Tut, isn't it obvious?" purred the green dwarf in self-satisfied tones. "Having discovered the tenth planet, do you dare to dream I would leave the glory of actually exploring it to someone else? I need your help, lad, in getting to Persephone in your little craft, the Jolly Roger!"
They looked at each other blankly, then turned to regard the little savant, who sat there smiling a smug little smile and sipping his mellow brandy contentedly.
"But, Doc, the Roger's no expeditionary craft—just a scout—a speedster! We—" began Star Pirate, but then his Venusian comrade interrupted with an ejaculation.
"Yakdar's tungsten tonsils! Just how far away is this-here Persephone, anyway?"
Still smiling smugly, Dr. Zoar named a distance so staggering that it made them gasp.
"B-but, Doc," said Star Pirate helplessly, "that's nearly as far from Pluto as Pluto itself is from the sun! The Jolly Roger would take many many weeks—months—why, even if we reprocessed every atom of air, every molecule of water through the purifiers, we still couldn’t possibly carry enough food for the three of us to last for a voyage as long as the one you contemplate. We'd starve to death before we even got there!"
"Not if you flew fast enough," said Zoar cunningly.
Once again the two adventurers exchanged a blank look, one with the other.
"Listen, Mars-man," snapped Phath huffily. "The Roger's just about the fastest thing in space as it is—how could we make ’er any faster than she is?"
"There are, ah, certain techniques," chuckled Zoar. He was in a rare good humor, and it was obvious that he hugged some secret to his bosom. "Now," Zoar said, "let me put a question to you. To both of you—if there were a way by which your little craft could attain to a velocity enormously superior to that which she can now attain—to a velocity still, of course, below light speed, but only fractionally so—which would mean that your voyage to Persephone would take not a year or so, not even months, but days or merely a couple of weeks—which is well within your ship's capacity to carry food supplies—would you make the trip?"
The challenge hung there in the dim air of the huge, dusty stone room. A chemical fire crawled and crackled on the grate. Huge shadows slithered overhead to the serpentine writhings of the eerie green flames. Phath methodically downed the last scrap of sandcat sausage and bit into one of the queer, spicy Dryland fruits that stood in a bowl of polished stone on the tabouret.
His weird pink eyes swivelled sideways to fix on Star's bronzed face. The adventurer's expression was rapt, his eyes filled with hazy dreams.
"Well, chief?" drawled the Venusian around another mouthful of the Martian fruit. "What do you say?"
"A brand new world," Star Pirate whispered, caught in a net of dreams. "To go where no other man has ever set foot before you ... a whole world of wonders unguessed at, marvels unknown ..."
No further words were needed. Phath sighed, shook his head philosophically, and poured another slug of the superb old Martian brandy into a small goblet hewn from rock-crystal .
Zoar smiled his wrinkled, froggish smile, hooded cold black eyes unblinking.
Star Pirate dreamed ... the same dream that once stirred the hearts of the Vikings, of Marco Polo, of Columbus, Scott, Amundsen, and Neil Armstrong.
A brand new world ...
3. "Into the Unknown—!"
Deep in that whirling wilderness choked with shattered moonlets and meteors known as the Asteroid Belt, lies a hidden little world that serves Star Pirate and his Venusian comrade as their secret hideout. Haven they call it, and a safer haven would be hard to imagine. While its core of heavy metals provides mass enough to afford a gravity field strong enough to hold breathable atmosphere and moisture to the surface of the miniature world, it is protected from chance discovery or the invasion of enemies by its peculiar location. For it lies at the heart of a swirling vortex of meteor swarms which would be swift and sudden death to any ship of space ignorant of the secret of safe passage through the storm of frozen, flying stone—a passage Star has charted and which he and Phath alone can follow.
The odd-shaped, lopsided little worldlet lies warm and humid, bathed in faint ochre Jupiter-light, dim and filled with shadows. Great shelves of stone lift against the glittering stars, mantled with strange pale tree-like growths, their rock surfaces sheathed with satiny moss. Small beetle-like creatures scuttle between the crumbling ruins of a time-lost people—the enigmatic monuments of Aster, the planet-culture destroyed when the Lost Planet itself was torn asunder in time's dawn as the last act of an ancient tug-of-war between the gravitational fields of the sun and the giant planet Jupiter. Which resultant destruction of the lost planet, Aster, gave birth to the scattered fragments and moonlets which comprise the Asteroid Belt ... or so went the theory current in Star Pirate's day.
Here rose the low, shallow dome of transparent metal that was house and home, laboratory and workshop, to Star and his Venusian sidekick. Their home was one vast, dome-roofed room, with folding screens and draw-curtains affording privacy. Galley and pantry and stores were here; bath facilities over there; Star's bunk and bureau to the side; the laboratory beyond the living area, where (anachronism of all anachronisms!) a fireplace built of rugged fieldstone towered, with a wood-fire roaring on the grate, and thick, overstuffed chairs drawn up before the hearth.
"An expensive luxury," murmured Zoar, craning his neck and trying to see how Star and Phath got rid of the smoke.
"Never mind that, right now," said the redheaded adventurer, grimly, "you said you needed our robot workshop facilities to install this new super-drive of yours in our ship, so let me show you what we've got."
"That was why you couldn't tell us all this stuff over the televisor, right?" guessed Phath shrewdly. "Even our multiwave set could be tapped, right? You didn't want others to know about this superdrive of yours, because the military types, the governments, the fanatical political groups, revolutionaries—?"
Zoar eyed the Venusian with a strange respect in his eyes. It was there for only a flicker of time, then veiled behind a forced sneer—but while it had lasted, it had been sincere enough.
"A lucky guess, mud-eater," he growled in his hoarse, bullfrog voice. "But there is something to what you say, yes. The political, economic and military implications of my super-drive (as you persist in calling it) are indeed such as to make it worth our while keeping it undercover. And, as your swamp-lizard friend says, lad, any communication system can be cracked, any code deciphered. And while nobody very much cares about the discovery of a new trans-Plutonian planet (what's one more ball of methane ice, after all, washed by sluggish seas of half-gelid ammonia and whipped by merciless hurricanes of hydrogen-snow?), a spacedrive that is only a fraction from the velocity of light is very interesting, no? Now, I’d like to see this robot workshop of yours."
Later, after one of Phath's finest culinary efforts (he had deliberately concocted a dinner from the haute cuisine of his native world, by way of politely thumbing his nose at their Martian guest—a meal which began with swamp-cucumber soup, toasted ground-nuts, mud-lizard chopped liver pate, topped with flank of tree-dwelling snake in snail sauce) , they dawdled over coffee and liqueurs before the roaring hearth of Star's determinedly anachronistic fireplace, studying the plans of the super-drive.