Chapter 17: Stronghold of the Lost Planet

With a jolt that shoved the three men back in their seats, the rocket plane pushed out the cargo hatch, and slid into the dark of space on its own power. Behind them, the metallic surface of the Magellan gleamed briefly, and then swung away on its orbit. Riding the red fire of their rockets, they headed on a long low dive for the mysterious surface below.

Pluto was a vast hemisphere, half lighted in the faint, dim glow of the tiny Sun, half in the total darkness of outer space. Here and there wound a silent, frozen river of glistening white. They passed over a gulf of some frigid sea of liquid gases, from which islands of subzero rock projected, and moved inland over a continent of lifeless grays and blacks. Haines gently drew the ship lower and lower, and at last the rocket plane bumped to the ground.

It rolled a few yards and stopped. The three men crowded to the door, tightened their face plates, and forced open the exit. There was a rush of air as the ship exhausted its atmosphere. Then, one by one, they stepped onto the bleak surface of the Sun’s farthest planet.

“I feel peculiar,” whispered Burl. “This planet reminds me of something.”

“I have the feeling I’ve been here before,” Russ said slowly.

Burl felt an odd chill. “Yes, that’s it!”

Haines grumbled. “I know what you mean. I can make a guess. We’ve never really been the right weight since we left Earth. Even under acceleration there were differences one way or the other. But I feel now exactly as I did on Earth. That’s what gives you the odd sensation of return.”

The two younger men realized Haines was right. For the first time since they had left their home world, they were on a planet whose gravity was normal to them. It felt good and yet it felt--in these fearful surroundings--disconcerting.

Above them was the familiar black, unyielding sky of outer space. No breath of air moved. Yet somehow the scene resembled Earth. “It’s like a black-and-white photo of a Terrestrial landscape,” said Burl.

There was a field, some hills, a tiny frozen creek and the dark shapes of rounded mountains in the distance. All without color except for the cold, faint glow of the star that was the Sun.

A thin layer of cosmic dust lay over the surface, such as would be found on any airless world. Russ scooped beneath it and came up with a hard chip.

He squeezed it between his gauntleted fingers. It cracked and broke into powder. He whistled softly. “You know what this feels and looks like?” he said as they came close to the frozen creek on the little hillside. “It feels like dirt--common, Earthly dirt. Like soil. And you know what ... I can already tell you one of Pluto’s secrets.”

They stopped at the creek. It was a layer of frozen crystalline gases. Haines pushed the alpenstock he was carrying into it and scraped away the gas crystals. “I think I can guess,” he said, “and I’ll bet there is ice under this gas.”

“Pluto was once a warm world with a thick atmosphere,” said Russ. “Notice the rounded hills and the worn away peaks of the mountains. Those are old mountains--weather-beaten. This hill is round--weather-beaten. This creek, those rivers of frozen gas--they follow beds that could only be made by real rivers of warm water. The soil that lies beneath this dust--it could only happen on a world that knew night and day, warmth and light, and rain and wind. Pluto was once a living world, a place we’d have called homelike.”

Burl shivered a bit. “Out here? So far from the Sun? How and when?”

Russ shrugged. “We’ll find that out. But the evidence is unmistakable.” They walked on.

There was a low, cracked wall on the other side of the hill, and beyond the wall stood the roofless ruins of a stone house, silent and gray in the airless scene.

They waited with surprise and uncertainty. Haines drew his compressed air pistol, but there was no movement. The scene remained dead and still--the windows of the house were dark.

They advanced on it and flashed a light inside. It was an empty shell. There was no glass within the unusually wide and low window openings, and no door.

“They went in and out the windows,” commented Burl, ducking through one of the openings. “And they weren’t built like us.”

“No,” said Russ, “there’s no reason to suppose the inhabitants would have been built like human beings.”

Inside there was nothing to see, and they left. Beyond, they found a straight depression in the ground filled with flat swirls of cosmic dust. “This looks like a road,” said Haines.

They returned to the rocket plane in order to follow the dead roadway more easily. Passing between the low, dark cliffs of rocky mountains, they came to a plain marked by thousands of columns of rock, pieces of crumbling walls, and many straight depressions that must have been streets. It was the remains of a world that had died.

They found, as they traveled northward and made intermittent landings, that there had been many cities. Now all lay in ruins. There had been great roadways, now covered with the debris of outer space. There had been mighty forests, now miles of petrified black stumps. It was a gloomy sight.

In their landings, they had found inscriptions on walls and bas-reliefs carved on mountains. They knew from these what the Plutonians had looked like, and they had a suspicion of what had happened.

The Plutonians had been vaguely like men and vaguely like spiders. They had stood upright on four thin, wide-spread legs and had two short arms. Their bodies were wide and squat, and they seemed to have been mammalian and probably warm-blooded. They breathed air out of flat, thin nostrils and their heads joined their bodies without necks. Two oval eyes were set below a jutting bald brow. They had worn clothes, they had driven vehicles, they had flown planes.

Their vehicles had globe-shaped power plants. Their airplanes had globes where wings should have been. Their cities and their engines--which existed now only on wall pictures that were probably once advertisements--were built along globe-and-rod principles.

“There’s no doubt,” said Russ, “that the Sun-tapper culture and the Plutonian culture are the same. It’s the descendants of the Plutonians that we are fighting.”

“But how could they have survived?” Burl asked. “This world was never part of the solar system when it was warm.”

“We’ll soon know,” said Russ. “Tomorrow we’re going to see how far we can get into their polar redoubt. Somehow we’ve got to blow up that last station.”

“And I think we three are going to do it,” said Haines. “The Magellan will never take the place from the sky. We’ll have to do it from the ground.”

Now they were reminded of Earth again. For the first time since they had departed from the United States, night fell. They had not been on any other planet long enough for such an experience. But the effect here on Pluto was mild.

Day was like a bright, moonlight night. Night then meant that the dim Sun had set and, in effect, it merely made the landscape slightly darker.

They compared notes late into the night in the rocket plane. By dawn, when again the dim glow shone, they had come to some very definite conclusions about the planet.

A number of the drawings on the walls seemed to have some religious significance. They focused on the phases of a moon. There were symbolic representations of this moon, passing through its phases; presumably Plutonian religious and social practices were related to it.

“But where is this moon?” Burl had asked.

“I think,” Russ answered, “that what some astronomers had suspected about Pluto was right. It did not originate in the solar system, but was captured from outer space. Originally it revolved around another sun, some star which was light-years away. How it tore loose from that star we’ll probably never know--the star might have simply become too dim, their planet might have been on a shaky orbit, an experiment of theirs might have jarred it loose, many things could have happened.

“Once beyond the gravitational grip of its parent sun, the planet wandered through the darkness of interstellar space until it came within the influence of our own Sun. How long this took would again be a guess. Possibly not more than a few thousand years, I’d say, since somehow a remnant of the population managed to survive. This suggests that they had some warning. Enough time passed for them to build the big structure we noticed at the north pole, probably to store food, build underground greenhouses and make sealed homes for a few families. Inside this giant building the last of the Plutonian people kept going.

“Then came the moment when their planet fell into an orbit around our Sun. I’d guess they emerged to find that the new Sun was too far away ever to heat up Pluto again, or to permit the rebuilding of an atmosphere. So they worked out a new scheme. This was to blow up the Sun into a nova--make it a giant and thereby bring its heat all the way out to Pluto--warming this world again, lighting it again, unfreezing its gases and waters. So they set up the Sun-tap stations.”

“That also accounts,” added Haines, “for their limited number of spaceships and their need for secret operations.”

“Yes,” said Burl, “but there are two things that don’t fit in. What happened to their moon--surely it would have gone along with Pluto since it revolved around it? And second, why the thirty-year delay between the first Sun-tap stations and the completion and operation of them?”