We were still half a mile in the air, when we located the gleaming metal ovoid that was the Phobos, and when we finally thumped softly on to the green stubble of vegetation, we were scarcely five hundred yards from the unfortunate craft.
“Strange,” muttered the Captain, after we had all congregated in the control room, waiting for further orders, “there seems to be no evidence of any violence at all.”
It was true! The Phobos lay quietly, seemingly unharmed. Its old-fashioned steel hull glistened brightly in the yellow light of a gibbous Jupiter, for the scant oxygen of the atmosphere could make no rusty inroads upon its resistant exterior.
The Captain came out of a brown study and turned to Charney at the radio.
“Ganymede has answered?”
“Yes, sir. They wish us luck.” He said it simply, but a cold shiver ran down my spine.
Not a muscle of the Captain’s face flickered. “Have you tried to communicate with the Phobos?”
“No answer, sir.”
“Three of us will investigate the Phobos. Some of the answers, at least, should be there.”
“Matchstickst” grunted Brock, stolidly.
The Captain nodded gravely.
He palmed eight matches, breaking three in half, and extended his arm towards us, without saying a word.
Charney stepped forward and drew first. It was broken and he stepped quietly towards the space-suit rack. Tuley followed and after him Harrigan and Whitefield. Then I, and I drew the second broken match. I grinned and followed Charney, and in thirty seconds, old Steeden himself joined us.
“The ship will be backing you fellows,” said the Captain quietly, as he shook our hands. “If anything dangerous turns up, run for it No heroics now, for we can’t afford to lose men.”
We inspected our pocket Lectronics and left. We didn’t know exactly what to expect and weren’t sure but that our first steps on Callistan soil might not be our last, but none of us hesitated an instant. In the “Dime Spacers,” courage is a very cheap commodity, but it is rather more expensive in real life. And it is with considerable pride that I recall the firm steps with which we three left the protection of the Ceres .
I looked back only once and caught a glimpse of Stanley’s face pressed white against the thick glass of the porthole. Even from a distance, his excitement was only too apparent. Poor kid! For the last two days he had been convinced we were on our way to clean up a pirate stronghold and was almost dying with impatience for the fighting to begin. Of course, none of us cared to disillusion him.
The outer hull of the Phobos rose before us and overshadowed us with its might. The giant vessel lay in the dark green stubble, silent as death. One of the seven that had attempted and failed. And we were the eighth.
Charney broke the uneasy silence, “What are these white smears on the hull?”
He put up a metal-encased finger and rubbed it along the steel plate. He withdrew it and gazed at the soft white pulp upon it. With an involuntary shudder of disgust, he scraped it off upon the coarse grass beneath.
“What do you think it is?”
The entire ship as far as we could see-except for that portion immediately next the ground-was besmeared by a thin layer of the pulpy substance. It looked like dried foam-like-
I said: “It looks like slime left after a giant slug had come out of the lake and slithered over the ship.”
I wasn’t serious in my statement, of course, but the other two cast hasty looks at the mirror-smooth lake in which Jupiter’s image lay unruffled. Charney drew his hand Lectronic.
“Here!” cried Steeden, suddenly, his voice harsh and metallic as it came over the radio, “that’s no way to be talking. We’ve got to find some way of getting into the ship; there must be some break in its hull somewhere. You go around to the right, Charney, and you, Jenkins, to the left. I’ll see if I can’t get atop of this thing somehow.”
Eyeing the smoothly-round hull carefully, he drew back and jumped. On Callisto; of course, he weighed only twenty pounds or less, suit and all, so he rose upwards some thirty or forty feet. He slammed against the hull lightly, and as he started sliding downwards, he grabbed a rivet-head and scrambled to the top.
Waving a parting to Charney at this point, I left.
“Everything all right?” the Captain’s voice sounded thinly in my ear.
“All O.K.,” I replied gruffly, “so far.” And as I said so, the Ceres disappeared behind the convex bulge of the dead Phobos and I was entirely alone upon the mysterious moon.
I pursued my round silently thereafter. The spaceship’s “skin” was entirely unbroken except for the dark, staring portholes, the lowest of which were still well above my head. Once or twice I thought I could see Steeden scrambling monkey-like on top of the smooth hulk, but perhaps that was only fancy.
I reached the prow at last which was bathed in the full light of Jupiter. There, the lowest row of portholes were low enough to see into and as I passed from one to the other, I felt as if I were gazing into a shipful of spectres, for in the ghostly light all objects appeared only as flickering shadows.
It was the last window in the line that proved to be of sudden, overpowering interest. In the yellow rectangle of Jupiter-light stamped upon the floor, there sprawled what remained of a man. His clothes were draped about him loosely and his shirt was ridged as if the ribs below had moulded it into position. In the space between the open shirt collar and engineer’s cap, there showed a grinning, eyeless skull. The cap, resting askew upon the smooth skullcase, seemed to add the last refinement of horror to the sight.
A shout in my ears caused my heart to leap. It was Steeden, exclaiming profanely somewhere above the ship. Almost at once, I caught sight of his ungainly steel-clad body slipping and sliding down the side of the ship.
We raced towards him in long, floating leaps and he waved us on, running ahead of us, towards the lake. At its very shores, he stopped and bent over some half-buried object Two bounds brought us to him, and we saw that the object was a space-suited human, lying face downward. Over it was a thick layer of the same slimy smear that covered the Phobos.
“I caught sight of it from the heights of the ship,” said Steeden, somewhat breathlessly, as he turned the suited figure over.
What we saw caused all three of us to explode in a simultaneous cry. Through the glassy visor, there appeared a leprous countenance. The features were putrescent, fallen apart, as if decay had set in and ceased because of the limited air supply. Here and there a bit of gray bone showed through. It was the most repulsive sight I have ever witnessed, though I have seen many almost as bad.
“My God!” Charney’s voice was half a sob. ‘They simply die and decay.” I told Steeden of the clothed skeleton I had seen through the porthole.
“Damn it, it’s a puzzle,” growled Steeden, “and the answer must be inside the Phobos.” There was a momentary silence, “I tell you what. One of us can go back and get the Captain to dismount the Disintegrator. It ought to be light enough to handle on Callisto, and at low power, we can draw it fine enough to cut a hole without blowing the entire ship to kingdom come. You go, Jenkins. Charney and I will see if we can’t find any more of the poor devils.”
I set off for the Ceres without further urging, covering the ground in space-devouring leaps. Three-quarters of the distance had been covered when a loud shout, ringing metallically in my ear, brought me to a skidding halt. I wheeled. in dismay and remained petrified at the sight before my eyes.
The surface of the lake was broken into boiling foam, and from it there reared the fore-parts of what appeared to be giant caterpillars. They squirmed out upon land, dirty-grey bodies dripping slime and water. They were some four feet long, about one foot in thickness, and their method of locomotion was the slowest of oxygen-conserving crawls. Except for one stalky growth upon their forward end, the tip of which glowed a faint red, they were absolutely featureless.