No day and night—unless one passed the shadow line into the night side, which was too freezingly cold to sustain life. No seasons. A uniform, never-changing temperature, no wind, no storms.
He thought for the thousandth, or the millionth, time that it wouldn’t be a bad planet to live on, if only it were green like Earth, if only there was something green upon it besides the occasional flash of his sol-gun. It had breathable atmosphere, moderate temperature ranging from about forty Fahrenheit near the shadow line to about ninety at the point directly under the red sun, where its rays were straight down instead of slanting. Plenty of food, and he’d learned long ago which plants and animals were, for him, edible and which made him ill. Nothing he’d ever tried was outright poisonous.
Yes, a wonderful world. He’d even got used, by now, to being the only intelligent creature on it. Dorothy was helpful, there. Something to talk to, even if she didn’t talk back.
Except—Oh, God—he wanted to see a green world again.
Earth, the only planet in the known universe where green was the predominant color, where plant life was based on chlorophyll.
Other planets, even in the solar system, Earth’s neighbors, had no more to offer than greenish streaks in rare rocks, an occasional tiny life-form of a shade that might be called brownish green if you wanted to call it that. Why, you could live years on any planet but Earth, anywhere in the cosmos, and never see green.
McGarry sighed. He’d been thinking to himself, but now he thought out loud, to Dorothy, continuing his thoughts without a break. It didn’t matter to Dorothy. “Yes, Dorothy,” he said, “it’s the only planet worth living on—Earth! Green fields, grassy lawns, green trees. Dorothy, I’ll never leave it again, once I get back there. I’ll build me a shack out in the woods, in the middle of trees, but not trees so thick that the grass doesn’t grow under them. Green grass. And I’ll paint the shack green, Dorothy. We’ve even got green pigments back on Earth.”
He sighed and looked at the red jungle ahead of him.
“What’s that you asked, Dorothy?” She hadn’t asked anything, but it was a game to pretend that she talked back, a game to keep him sane. “Will I get married when I get back? Is that what you asked?”
He gave it consideration. “Well, it’s like this, Dorothy. Maybe and maybe not. You were named after a woman back on Earth, you know. A woman I was going to marry. But five years is a long time, Dorothy. I’ve been reported missing and presumably dead. I doubt if she’s waited this long. If she has, well, I’ll marry her, Dorothy.”
“Did you ask, what if she hasn’t? Well, I don’t know. Let’s not worry about that till I get back, huh? Of course, if I could find a woman who was green, or even one with green hair, I’d love her to pieces. But on Earth almost everything is green except the women.”
He chuckled at that and, sol-gun ready, went on into the jungle, the red jangle that had nothing green except the occasional flash of his sol-gun.
Funny about that. Back on Earth, a sol-gun flashed violet. Here under a red sun, it flashed green when he fired it. But the explanation was simple enough. A sol-gun drew energy from a nearby star and the flash it made when fired was the complementary color of its source of energy. Drawing energy from Sol, a yellow sun, it flashed violet. From Kruger, a red sun, green.
Maybe that, he thought, had been the one thing that, aside from Dorothy’s company, had kept him sane. A flash of green several times a day. Something green to remind him what the color was. To keep his eyes attuned to it, if he ever saw it again.
It turned out to be a small patch of jungle, as patches of jungle went on Kruger III. One of what seemed countless millions of such patches. And maybe it really was millions; Kruger III was larger than Jupiter. But less dense, so the gravity was easily bearable. Actually it might take him more than a lifetime to cover it all. He knew that, but did not let himself think about it. No more than he let himself think that the ship might have crashed on the dark side, the cold side. Or than he let himself doubt that, once he found the ship, he would find the transistors he needed to make his own spacer operative again.
The patch of jungle was less than a mile square, but he had to sleep once and eat several times before he had finished it. He killed two more lions and one tiger. And when he finished it, he walked around the circumference of it, blazing each of the larger trees along the outer rim so he wouldn’t repeat by searching this particular jungle again. The trees were soft; his pocketknife took off the red bark down to the pink core as easily as it would have taken the skin off a potato.
Then out across the dull brown plain again, this time holding his sol-gun in the open to recharge it.
“Not that one, Dorothy. Maybe the next. The one over there near the horizon. Maybe it’s there.”
Violet sky, red sun, brown plain.
“The green hills of Earth, Dorothy. Oh, how you’ll love them.”
The brown never-ending plain.
The never-changing violet sky.
Was there a sound up there? There couldn’t be. There never had been. But he looked up. And saw it.
A tiny black speck high in the violet, moving. A spacer. It had to be a spacer. There were no birds on Kruger III. And birds don’t trail jets of fire behind them—
He knew what to do; he’d thought of it a million times, how he could signal a spacer if one ever came in sight. He raised his sol-gun, aimed it straight into the violet air and pulled the trigger. It didn’t make a big flash, from the distance of the spacer, but it made a green flash. If the pilot were only looking or if he would only look before he got out of sight, he couldn’t miss a green flash on a world with no other green.
He pulled the trigger again.
And the pilot of the spacer saw. He cut and fired his jets three times—the standard answer to a signal of distress—and began to circle.
McGarry stood there trembling. So long a wait, and so sudden an end to it. He touched his left shoulder and touched the five-legged pet that felt to his fingers as well as to his naked shoulder so like a woman’s hand.
“Dorothy,” he said, “it’s—” He ran out of words.
The spacer was closing in for a landing now. McGarry looked down at himself, suddenly aware and ashamed of himself, as he would look to a rescuer. His body was naked except for the belt that held his holster and from which dangled his knife and a few other tools. He was dirty and probably smelled, although he could not smell himself. And under the dirt his body looked thin and wasted, almost old, but that was due of course to diet deficiencies; a few months of proper food, Earth food, would take care of that.
Earth! The green hills of Earth!
He ran now, stumbling sometimes in his eagerness, toward the point where the spacer was landing. He could see now that it was a one-man job, like his own had been. But that was all right; it could carry two in an emergency, at least as far as the nearest planet where he could get other transportation back to Earth. To the green hills, the green fields, the green valleys.
He prayed a little and swore a little as he ran. There were tears running down his cheeks.
He was there, waiting, as the door opened and a tall slender young man in the uniform of the Space Patrol stepped out.
“You’ll take me back?” he shouted.
“Of course,” said the young man calmly. “Been here long?”
“Five years!” McGarry knew that he was crying, but he couldn’t stop.