"Yeah." Lew was grim. "I've an idea they won't be landing on Pluto." He gnawed his lip, wondering if he could avoid giving Garner this information. Well, it wasn't exactly top secret, and the Arm would probably find out anyway. "The Belt has made trips to Pluto, but we ever tried to land there. Not after the first ship took a close-up spectroscopic reading…"
They played at a table just outside the pilot room door. Kzanol/Greenberg had insisted. He played with one ear cocked at the radio. Which was all right with Kzanol, since it affected the other's playing.
Garner's voice came, scratchy and slightly distorted, after minutes of silence. "It sounds to me as if it all depends on where they land. We can't control that. We'd better think of something else, just in case. What have you got besides missiles?"
The radio buzzed gently with star static.
"I wish we could hear both sides," Kzanol growled. "Can you make any sense of that?"
Kzanol/Greenberg shook his head. "We won't, either. They must know we're in Garner's maser beam. But it sounds like they know something we don't."
"Four."
"I'm taking two. Anyway, it's nice to know they can't shoot at us."
"Yes. Well done." Kzanol spoke with absent-minded authority, using the conventional overspeak phrase to congratulate a slave who shows proper initiative. His eye was on his cards. He never saw the killing rage in his partner's face. He never sensed the battle that raged across the table, as Kzanol/Greenberg's intelligence fought his fury until it turned cold. Kzanol might have died that day, howling as the disintegrator stripped away suit and skin and muscle, without ever knowing why.
Ten days, twenty-one hours since takeoff. The icy planet hung overhead, huge and dirty white, with the glaring highlight which had fooled early astronomers. From Earth, only that bright highlight is visible, actually evidence of Pluto's flat, almost polished surface, making the planet look very small and very dense.
"Pretty puny," said Kzanol.
"What did you expect of a moon?"
"There was F-28. Too heavy even for whitefoods."
"True. Mmph. Look at that big circle. Looks like a tremendous meteor crater, doesn't it?"
"Where? Oh, I see it." Kzanol listened. "That's it! Radar's got it cold. Powerloss," he added, looking at the radar telescope through the pilot's eyes, "you can almost see the shape of it. But we'll have to wait for the next circuit before we can land."
Slowly the big ship turned until its motor faced forward in its orbit.
The Belt fleet stayed a respectful distance away- very respectful, four million miles respectful. Without the telescopes Pluto barely showed a disc.
"Everybody guess a number," said Low. "Between one and one hundred. When I get yours I'll tell you mine. Then we call Garner and let him pick. Whoever gets closest to Garner's number is It."
"Three." "Twenty-eight." "Seventy."
"Fifty. Okay, I'll call Garner." Low changed to maser. "One calling Garner. One calling Garner. Garner, we've about decided what to do if he doesn't go down. None of our ship radars are damaged, so we'll just program one ship to aim at the honeymooner at top speed. We watch through the telescopes. When our ship gets close enough we blow the drive. We want you to pick a number between one and one hundred."
Seconds passing. Garner's fleet was closer now, nearing the end of its trip.
"This is Tartov in Number Three. He's going down."
"Garner here. I suggest we wait and use the radar proof, if we. can. It sounds like you're planning for one man to ride in somebody's airlock until he can reach to Belt. If so, wait for us; we may have room for an extra in one of the Earth ships. You still want a number? Fifty-five."
Lew swallowed. "Thanks, Garner." He turned off his maser-finder.
"Three again. You're saved by the bell, Lew. He's going down on the night side. In the predawn area. Couldn't be better. He may even land in the Crescent!"
Lew watched, his face pale, as the tiny light burned above Pluto's dim white surface. Garner must have forgotten that a singleship's control bubble was its own airlock; that it had to be evacuated whenever the pilot wanted to get out. Lew was glad the flatlander fleet had followed. He did not relish the idea of spending several weeks riding on the outside of a spaceship.
Kzanol/Greenberg swallowed, swallowed again. The low acceleration bothered him. He blamed it on his human body. He sat in a window seat with the crash web tightly fastened, looking out and down.
There was little to see. The ship had circled half the world, falling ever tower, but the only feature on an unchanging cue-bali surface had been the slow creep of the planetary shadow. Now the ship flew over the night side, and the only light was the dim light of the drive dimat least when reflected from this height. And there was nothing to see at all… until now.
Something was rising on the eastern horizon, something a shade lighter than the black plain. An irregular line against the stars. Kzanol/Greenberg leaned forward as he began to realize just how big the range was, for it couldn't be anything but a mountain range. "What's that?" he wondered aloud.
"One hundredth diltun." Kzanol probed the pilot's mind. The pilot said, "Cott's Crescent. Frozen hydrogen piled up along the dawn side of the planet. As it rotates into daylight the hydrogen boils off and then refreezes on the night side. Eventually it rotates back to here."
"Oh. Thanks."
Evanescent mountains of hydrogen snow, smooth and low, like a tray of differently sized snowballs dropped from a height. They rose gently before the slowing ship, rank behind rank, showing the tremendous breadth of the range. But they couldn't show its length. Kzanol/Greenberg could see only that the mountains stretched half around the horizon; but he could imagine them marching from pole to pole around the curve of the world. As they must. As they did.
The ship was almost down, hovering motionless a few miles west of the beginning rise of the Crescent. A pillar of fire licked a mile down to touch the surface. Where it touched, the surface disappeared. A channel like the bed of a river followed below the ship, fading into the darkness beyond the reach of the light.
The ship rode with nose tilted high; the fusion flame reached slightly forward. Gently, gently, one mile up, the Golden Circle slowed and stopped.
Where the flame touched, the surface disappeared. A wide, shallow crater formed below the descending ship. It deepened rapidly. A ring of fog formed, soft and white and opaque, thickening in the cold and the dark, closing in on the ship. Then there was nothing but the lighted fog and the crater and the licking fusion fire.
This was the most alien place. He had been wasting his life searching out the inhabited worlds of the galaxy; for never had they given him such a flavor of strangeness as came from this icy world, colder than… than the bottom of Dante's Hell.
"We'll be landing on the water ice layer," the pilot explained, just as if he'd been asked. He had. "The gas layers wouldn't hold us. But first we have to dig down."
Had he been searching for strangeness? Wasn't that a Greenberg thought slipping into his conscious mind? Yes. This soul-satisfaction was the old Greenberg starlust; he had searched for wealth, only wealth.
The crater looked like an open pit mine now, with a sloping ring wall and then an almost flat rim and then another, deeper ring wall and… Kzanol/Greenberg looked down, grinning and squinting against the glare, trying to guess which layer was which gas. They had been drilling through a very thick blanket of ice, hundreds or thousands of feet thick. Perhaps it was nitrogen? Then the next layer, appearing now, would be oxygen.
The plain and the space above it exploded in flame.
"She blows!" Lew crowed, like a felon reprieved. A towering, twisting pillar of yellow and blue flame roared straight up out of the telescope, out of the pale plain where there had been the small white star of the Golden Circle. For a moment the star shone brightly through the flames. Then it was swamped, and the whole scope was fire. Lew dropped the magnification by a ten-factor to watch the fire spread. Then he had to drop it again. And again.
Pluto was on fire. For billions of years a thick blanket of relatively inert nitrogen ice had protected the highly reactive layers below. Meteors, as scarce out here as sperm whales in a goldfish bowl, inevitably buried themselves in the nitrogen layer. There had been no combustion on Pluto since Kzanol's spaceship smashed down from the stars. But now hydrogen vapor mixed with oxygen vapor, and they burned. Other elements burned too.
The fire spread outward in a circle. A strong, hot wind blew out and up into vacuum, fanning great sheets of flame over the boiling ices until raw oxygen was exposed. Then the fire dug deeper. There were raw metals below the thin sheet of water ice; and it was thin, nonexistent in places, for it had all formed when, the spaceship struck, untold eons ago, when food yeast still ruled Earth. Sodium and calcium veins; even iron burns furiously in the presence of enough oxygen and enough heat. Or chlorine, or fluorine; both halogens were present, blowing off the top of Pluto's frozen atmosphere, some burning with hydrogen in the first sheets of flame. Raise the temperature enough and even oxygen and nitrogen will unite.
Lew watched his screen in single-minded concentration. He thought of his future great-great-grandchildren and wondered how he could possibly make them see this as he saw it now. Old and leathery and hairless and sedentary, he would tell those children: "I saw a world burning when I was young…" He would never see anything as strange.
Pluto was a black disc almost covering his scope screen, with a cold highlight near the sunward arm. In that disc the broad ring of fire had almost become a great circle, with one arc crawling over the edge of the world. When it contracted on the other side of the world there would be an explosion such as could only be imagined. But in the center the ring was darkening to black, its fuel nearly burned out.
The coldest spot within the ring was the point where the fire had started.
The Golden Circle had gone straight up, ringing and shivering from the blast, with sheets of fire roaring past the wing and hull. Kzanol/Greenberg had the wind knocked out of him. Kzanol was just now recovering consciousness. The ship was not yet harmed. It certainly hadn't been harmed by the heat of combustion. The ship's underbelly was built to withstand fusion heat for weeks.
But the pilot was out of control. His reflexes had taken over at the instant the shock wave hit, and then his conscious mind… He found himself his own master for the first time in weeks, and he made his decision. He turned off the fuel feed. The drive couldn't possibly be started again. Kzanol raged and told him to die, and he did, but it was too late. The ship, deprived of power, bucked and swooped in the burning wind.
Kzanol/Greenberg cursed fluent and ancient English.