We went out ten miles and took a boring sample and came back, following the thin tracks the buggy made in the dust, taking samples every mile. We got the answer that I think all of us expected we would get, but couldn’t bring ourselves to talk about. The samples all were steel.
It didn’t seem possible, of course, and it took us a while to digest the fact, but finally we admitted that on the basis of best evidence Pluto was no planet, but a fabricated metal ball, small-planet size. But Godawful big for anyone to build.
Anyone?
That was the question that now haunted us. Who had built it? Perhaps more important—why had they built it? For some purpose, surely, but why, once that purpose had been fulfilled (if, in fact, it had been fulfilled) had Pluto been left out here at the solar system’s rim?
“No one from the system,” Tyler said. “There’s no one but us. Mars has life, of course, but primitive life. It got a start there and hung on and that was all. Venus is too hot. Mercury is too close to the sun. The big gas giants? Maybe, but not the kind of life that would build a thing like this. It had to be something from outside.”
“How about the fifth planet?” suggested Orson.
“There probably never was a fifth planet,” I said. “The material for it may have been there, but the planet never formed. By all the rules of celestial mechanics there should have been a planet between Mars and Jupiter, but something went haywire.”
“The tenth planet, then,” said Orson.
“No one is really positive there is a tenth,” said Tyler.
“Yeah, you’re right,” said Orson. “Even if there were it would be a poor bet for life, let alone intelligence.”
“So that leaves us with outsiders,” said Tyler.
“And a long time ago,” said Orson.
“Why do you say that?”
“The dust. There isn’t much dust in the universe.”
“And no one knows what it is. There is the dirty ice theory.”
“I see what you’re getting at. But it needn’t be ice. Nor graphite nor any of the other things that have been—”
“You mean it’s that stuff out there.”
“It could be. What do you think, Howard?”
“I can’t be sure,” I said. “The only thing I know is that it couldn’t be erosive.”
Before we went to sleep we tried to fix up a report to beam back to Moon Base, but anything we put together sounded too silly and unbelievable. So we gave up. We’d have to tell them some time, but we could wait.
When we awoke we had a bite to eat, then got into our suits and went out to look over the structures. They still didn’t make much sense, especially all the crazy contraptions that were fastened on the ribs and struts and braces. Nor did the scooped-out hollows.
“If they were only up on legs,” said Orson, “they could be used as chairs.”
“But not very comfortable,” said Tyler.
“If you tilted them a bit,” said Orson. But that didn’t figure either. They would still be uncomfortable. I wondered why he thought of them as chairs. They didn’t look like any chairs to me.
We pottered around a lot, not getting anywhere. We looked the structures over inch by inch, wondering all the while if there was something we had missed. But there didn’t seem to be.
Now comes the funny part of it. I don’t know why we did it—out of sheer desperation, maybe. But failing to find any clues, we got down on our hands and knees, dusting at the surface with our hands. What we hoped to find, I don’t know. It was slow going and it was a dirty business, with the dust tending to stick to us.
“If we’d only brought some brooms along,” said Orson.
But we had no brooms. Who in his right mind would have thought we would want to sweep a planet?
So there we were. We had what appeared to be a manufactured planet and we had some stupid structures for which we could deduce not a single reason. We had come a long ways and we had been expected to make some tremendous discovery once we landed. We had made a discovery, all right, but it didn’t mean a thing.
We finally gave up with the sweeping business and stood there, scuffing our feet and wondering what to do next when Tyler suddenly let out a yell and pointed at a place on the surface where his boots had kicked away the dust.
We all bent to look at what he had found. We saw three holes in the surface, each an inch or so across and some three inches deep, placed in a triangle and close together. Tyler got down on his hands and knees and shone his light down into the holes, each one of them in turn.
Finally he stood up. “I don’t know,” he said. “They could maybe be a lock of some sort. Like a combination. There are little notches on the sides, down at the bottom of them. If you moved those notches just right something might happen.”
“Might blow ourselves up, maybe,” said Orson. “Do it wrong and bang!”
“I don’t think so,” said Tyler. “I don’t think it’s anything like that. I don’t say it’s a lock, either. But I don’t think it’s a bomb. Why should they boobytrap a thing like this?”
“You can’t tell what they might have done,” I said. “We don’t know what kind of things they were or why they were here.”
Tyler didn’t answer. He got down again and began carefully dusting the surface, shining his light on it while he dusted. We didn’t have anything else to do, so helped him.
It was Orson who found it this time—a hairline crack you had to hold your face down close to the surface to see. Having found it, we did some more dusting and worried it out. The hairline described a circle and the three holes were set inside and to one edge of it. The circle was three feet or so in diameter.
“Either of you guys good at picking locks?” asked Tyler.
Neither of us were.
“It’s got to be a hatch of some sort,” Orson said. “This metal ball we’re standing on has to be a hollow ball. If it weren’t its mass would be greater than it is.”
“And no one,” I said, “would be insane enough to build a solid ball. It would take too much metal and too much energy to move.”
“You’re sure that it was moved?” asked Orson.
“It had to be,” I told him. “It wasn’t built in this system. No one here could have built it.”
Tyler had pulled a screwdriver out of his toolkit and was poking into the hole with it.
“Wait a minute,” said Orson. “I just thought of something.”
He nudged Tyler to one side, reached down and inserted three fingers into the holes and pulled. The circular section rose smoothly on its hedges.
Wedged into the area beneath the door were objects that looked like the rolls of paper you buy to wrap up Christmas presents. Bigger than rolls of paper, though. Six inches or so across.
I got hold of one of them and that first one was not easy to grip, for they were packed in tightly. But I managed with much puffing and grunting to pull it out. It was heavy and a good four feet in length.
Once we got one out, the other rolls were easier to lift. We pulled out three more and headed for the ship.
But before we left I held the remaining rolls over to one side, to keep them from tilting, while Orson shone his light down into the hole. We had half expected to find a screen or something under the rolls, with the hole extending on down into a cavity that might have been used as living quarters or a workroom. But the hole ended in machined metal. We could see the grooves left by the drill or die that had bored the hole. That hole had just one purpose, to store the rolls we had found inside it.
Back in the ship we had to wait a while for the rolls to pick up some heat before we could handle them. Even so we had to wear gloves when we began to unroll them. Now, seeing them in good light, we realized that they were made up of many sheets rolled up together. The sheets seemed to be made of some sort of extremely thin metal or tough plastic. They were stiff from the cold and we spread them out on our lone table and weighed them down to hold them flat.