Heart in his mouth, thumb hooked close to the butt of his pistol, West stepped quickly across the threshold of the lock.
A man, clad in motheaten underwear, sat on the edge of the cot. His hair was long and untrimmed, his whiskers sprouted in black ferocity. From the mat of beard two eyes stared out, like animals brought to bay in caves. A bony hand thrust out a whisky bottle in a gesture of invitation.
The whiskers moved and a croak came from them. “Have a snort,” it said.
West shook his head. “I don’t drink.”
“I do,” the whiskers said. The hand tilted the bottle and the bottle gurgled.
West glanced swiftly around the room. No radio. That made it simpler. If there had been a radio he would have had to smash it. For, he realized now, it had been a silly thing to do, stopping on this moon. No one knew where he was … and that was the way it should have stood.
West snapped his visor up.
“Drinking myself to death,” the whiskers told him.
West stared, astounded at the utter poverty, at the absolute squalor of the place.
“Three years,” said the man. “Not a single sober breath in three solid years.” He hiccoughed. “Getting me,” he said. His left hand came up and thumped his shrunken chest. Lint flew from the ragged underwear. The right hand still clutched the bottle.
“Earth years,” the whiskers explained. “Three Earth years. Not Pluto years.”
A thing that chattered came out of the shadows in one corner of the hut and leaped upon the bed. It hunched itself beside the man and stared leeringly at West, its mouth a slit that drooled across its face, its puckered hide a horror in the sickly light.
“Meet Annabelle,” said the man. He whistled at the thing and it clambered to his shoulder, cuddling against his cheek.
West shivered at the sight.
“Just passing through?” the man inquired.
“My name is West,” West told him. “Heading for Pluto.”
“Ask them to show you the painting,” said the man. “Yes, you must see the painting.”
“The painting?”
“You deaf?” asked the man, belligerently. “I said a painting. You understand—a picture.”
“I understand,” said West. “But I didn’t know there were any paintings there. Didn’t even know there was anybody there.”
“Sure there is,” said the man. “There’s Louis and—”
He lifted the bottle and took a snort.
“I got alcoholism,” said the man. “Good thing, alcoholism. Keeps colds away. Can’t catch a cold when you got alcoholism. Kills you quicker than a cold, though. Why, you might go on for years having colds—”
“Look” urged West, “you have to tell me about Pluto. About who’s there. And the painting. How come you know about them?”
The eyes regarded him with drunken cunning.
“You’d have to do something for me. Couldn’t give you information like that out of the goodness of my heart.”
“Of course,” agreed West. “Anything that you would like. You just name it.”
“You got to take Annabelle out of here,” the man told him. “Take her back where she belongs. It isn’t any place for a girl like her. No fit life for her to lead. Living with a sodden wreck like me. Used to be a great man once … yes, sir, a great man. It all came of looking for a bottle. One particular bottle. Had to sample all of them. Every last one. And when I sampled them, there was nothing else to do but drink them up. They’d spoil for sure if you let them stand around. And who wants a lot of spoiled liquor cluttering up the place?”
He took another shot.
“Been at it ever since,” he explained. “Almost got them now. Ain’t many of them left. Used to think that I’d find the right bottle before it was too late and then everything would be all right. Wouldn’t do me no good to find it now, because I’m going to die. Enough left to last me, though. Aim to die plastered. Happy way to die.”
“But what about those people on Pluto?” demanded West.
The whiskers snickered. “I fooled them. They gave me my choice. Take anything you want, they said. Big-hearted, you understand. Pals to the very last. So I took the whisky. Cases of it. They didn’t know, you see. I tricked them.”
“I’m sure you did,” said West. Tiny, icy feet ran up and down his spine. For there was madness here, he knew, but madness with a pattern. Somewhere, somehow, this twisted talk would fall into a pattern that would make sense.
“But something went wrong,” the man declared. “Something went wrong.”
Silence whistled in the room.
“You see, Mr. Best,” the man declared. “I—”
“West,” said West. “Not Best. West.”
The man did not seem to notice. “I’m going to die, you understand. Any minute, maybe. Got a liver and heart and either one could kill me. Drinking does that to you. Never used to drink. Got into the habit when I was sampling all these bottles. Got a taste for it. Then there wasn’t anything to do—”
He hunched forward.
“Promise you will take Annabelle,” he croaked.
Annabelle tittered at West, slobber drooling from her mouth.
“But I can’t take her back,” West protested, “unless I know where she came from. You have to tell me that.”
The man waggled a finger. “From far away,” he croaked, “and yet not so very far. Not so very far if you know the way.”
West eyed Annabelle with the gorge rising in his throat.
“I will take her,” he said. “But you have to tell me where.”
“Thank you, Guest,” said the man. He lifted the bottle and let it gurgle.
“Not Guest,” said West, patiently. “My name is—”
The man toppled forward off the bed, sprawled across the floor. The bottle rolled crazily, spilling liquor in sporadic gushes.
West leaped forward, knelt beside the man and lifted him. The whiskers moved and a whisper came from their tangled depths, a gasping whisper that was scarcely more than a waning breath.
“Tell Louis that his painting—”
“Louis?” yelled West. “Louis who? What about—”
The whisper came again. “Tell him … someday … he’ll paint a wrong place and then …”
Gently West laid the man back on the floor and stepped away. The whisky bottle still rocked to and fro beneath a chair where it had come to rest.
Something glinted at the head of the cot and West walked to where it hung. It was a watch, a shining watch, polished with years of care. It swung slowly from a leather thong tied to the rod that formed the cot’s head, where a man could reach out in the dark and read it.
West took it in his hand and turned it over, saw the engraving that ran across its back. Bending low, he read the inscription in the feeble light.
To Walter J. Darling, from class of ’16,
Mars Polytech.
West straightened, understanding and disbelief stirring in his mind.
Walter J. Darling, that huddle on the floor? Walter J. Darling, one of the solar system’s greatest biologists, dead in this filthy hut? Darling, teacher for years at Mars Polytechnical Institute, that shrunken, liquor-sodden corpse in shoddy underwear?
West wiped his forehead with the back of his space-gloved hand. Darling had been a member of that mysterious government commission assigned to the cold laboratories on Pluto, sent there to develop artificial hormones aimed at controlled mutation of the human race. A mission that had been veiled in secrecy from the first because it was feared, and rightly so, that revelation of its purpose might lead to outraged protests from a humanity that could not imagine why it should be improved biologically.