A mission, thought West, that had set out in mystery and ended in mystery, mystery that had sent whispers winging through the solar system. Shuddery whispers.
Louis? That would be Louis Nevin, another member of the Pluto commission. He was the man Darling had tried to tell about just before he died.
And Nevin must still be out here on Pluto, must still be alive despite the message that had come to Earth.
But the painting didn’t fit. Nevin wasn’t an artist. He was a biologist, scarcely second to Darling.
The message of three years before had been a phony, then. There were men still on the planet.
And that meant, West told himself bitterly, that his own plan had gone awry. For Pluto was the only place in the Solar System where there would be food and shelter and to which no one would ever come.
He remembered how he had planned it all so carefully … how it had seemed a perfect answer. There would be many years’ supply of food stacked in the storerooms, there would be comfortable living quarters, and there would be tools and equipment should he ever need them. And, of course, the Thing, whatever it might be. The horror that had closed the planet, that had set the space patrol to guard the planet’s loneliness.
But West had never been too concerned with what he might find on Pluto, for whatever it might be, it could be no worse than the bitterness that was his on Earth.
There was something going on at the Pluto laboratories. Something that the government didn’t know about or that the government had suppressed along with that now infamous report of three years before.
Something that Darling could have told him had he wanted to … or had he been able. But now Walter J. Darling was past all telling. West would have to find out by himself.
West stepped to where he lay, lifted him to the cot and covered him with a tattered blanket.
Perched on the cot head, Annabelle chattered and giggled and drooled.
“Come here, you,” said West. “Come on over here.”
Annabelle came, slowly and coyly. West lifted her squeamishly, thrust her into an outer pocket and zipped it shut. He started toward the doorway.
On the way out he picked the empty bottle from the floor, added it to the pyramid outside.
CHAPTER TWO
The White Singer
West’s craft fled like a silvery shadow between the towering mountain peaks shielding the only valley on Pluto that had ever known the tread of Man.
Coasting in on silent motors in the shadow of the planet, he had eluded the patrol. Beyond the mountains he had thrown in the motors, had braked the plunging ship almost to a crawl, taking the chance the flare of the rockets might be seen by any of the patrol far out in space.
And now, speed reduced, dropping in a long slant toward the glass-smooth landing field, he huddled over the controls, keyed to a free-fall landing, always dangerous at best. But it would be as dangerous, he sensed, to advertise his coming with another rocket blast. The field was long and smooth. If he hit it right and not too far out, there would be plenty of room.
The almost nonexistent atmosphere was a point in favor. There were no eddies, no currents of air to deflect the ship, send it into a spin or a dangerous wobble.
Off to the right he caught a flash of light and his mind clicked the split-second answer that it must be the laboratory.
Then the ship was down, pancaking, hissing along the landing strip, friction gripping the hull. It stopped just short of a jumbled pile of rock and West let out his breath, felt his heart take up the beat again. A few feet more …
Locking the controls, he hung the key around his neck, pulled down the visor of his space gear and let himself out of the ship.
Across the field glowed the lights of the laboratory. He had not been mistaken, then. He had seen the lights … and men were here. Or could he be mistaken? Those lights would have continued to function even without attention. The fact that they were shining in the building was no reason to conclude that men also were there.
At the far end of the field loomed a massive structure and West knew that it was the shops of the Alpha Centauri expedition, where men had labored for two years to make the Henderson space drive work. Somewhere, he knew, in the shadow of the star-lighted shops, was the ship itself, the Alpha Centauri, left behind when the crew had given up in despair and gone back to Earth. A ship designed to fly out to the stars, to quit the Solar System and go into the void, spanning light years as easily as an ordinary ship went from Earth to Mars.
It hadn’t gone, of course, but that didn’t matter.
“A symbol,” West said to himself.
That was what it was … a symbol and a dream.
And something, too, now that he was here, now that he could admit it, that had lain in the back of his mind all the way from Earth.
West shucked his belt around so that the pistol hung handy to his fist.
If men were here … or worse, if that message hadn’t been a phony, he might need the pistol. Although it was unlikely that the sort of thing that he then would face would be vulnerable to a pistol.
Shivering, he remembered that terse, secret report reposing in the confidential archives back on Earth … the transcription of the tense, rasping voice that had come over the radio from Pluto, a voice that told of dreadful things, of dying men and something that was loose. A voice that had screamed a warning, then had gurgled and died out.
It was after that that the ban had been put on the planet and the space patrol sent out to quarantine the place.
Mystery from the first, he thought … beginning and the end. First because the commission was seeking a hormone to effect controlled mutations in the human race. And the race would resent such a thing, of course, so it had to be a mystery.
The human race, West thought bitterly, resents anything that deviates from the norm. It used to stone the leper from the towns and it smothered its madmen in deep featherbeds and it stares at a crippled thing and its pity is a burning insult. And its fear … oh, yes, its fear!
Slowly, carefully, West made his way across the landing strip. The surface was smooth, so smooth that his space boots had little grip upon it.
On the rocky height above the field stood the laboratory, but West turned back and stared out into space, as if he might be taking final leave of someone that he knew.
Earth, he said. Earth, can you hear me now?
You need no longer fear me and you need not worry, for I shall not come back.
But the day will come when there are others like me. And there may be even now.
For you can’t tell a mutant by the way he combs his hair, nor the way he walks or talks. He sprouts no horns and he grows no tail and there’s no mark upon his forehead.
But when you spot one, you must watch him carefully. You must spy against him and set double-checks about him. And you must find a place to put him where you’ll be safe from anything he does … but you must not let him know. You must try him and sentence him and send him into exile without his ever knowing it.
Like, said West, you tried to do with me.
But, said West, talking to the Earth, I didn’t like your exile, so I chose one of my own. Because I knew, you see. I knew when you began to watch me and about the double-checks and the conferences and the plan of action and there were times when I could hardly keep from laughing in your face.
He stood for a long moment, staring into space, out where the Earth swam somewhere in darkness around the star-like Sun.