Clifford Simak - The Thing in the Stone - And Other Stories

As I say, we got along fine. We played chess tournaments—yeah, three men in a tournament and it was all right because none of us knew chess. If we had been any good I suppose we would have been at one another’s throats. We dreamed up dirty ditties and were so pleased with our accomplishments that we’d spend hours singing them and none of us could sing. We did a lot of other futile things—by now you should be getting the idea. There were some rather serious scientific experiments and observations we were supposed to make, but all of us figured that our first and biggest job was to manage to stay sane.

When we neared Pluto we dropped the fooling around and spent much time peering through the scope, arguing and speculating about what we saw. Not that there was much to see. The planet resembled nothing quite as much as a billiard ball. It was smooth. There were no mountains, no valleys, no craters—nothing marred the smoothness of the surface. The dots were there, of course. We could make out seven groups of them, all positioned along the equatorial belt. And in close up they were not simply dots. They were structures of some kind.

We landed finally, near a group of them. The landing was a little harder than we had figured it would be. The planetary surface was hard—there was no give to it. But we stayed right-side up and we didn’t break a thing.

People at times ask me to describe Pluto and it’s a hard thing to put into words. You can say that it is smooth and that it’s dark—it’s dark even in broad daylight. The sun, at that distance, is not much more than a slightly brighter star. You don’t have daylight on Pluto—you have starlight and it doesn’t make much difference whether you’re facing the sun or not. The planet is airless, of course, and waterless and cold. But cold, as far as human sensation is concerned, is a relative thing. Once the temperature gets down to a hundred Kelvin it doesn’t much matter how much colder it becomes. Especially when you’re wearing life support. Without a suit containing life support you’d last only a few seconds, if that long, on a place like Pluto. I’ve never figured out which would kill you first—cold or internal pressure. Would you freeze—or explode before you froze?

So Pluto is dark, airless, cold and smooth. Those are the externals only. You stand there and look at the sun and realize how far away you are. You know you are standing at the edge of the solar system, that just out there, a little way beyond, you’d be clear outside the system. Which doesn’t really have to be true, of course. You know about the tenth planet. Even if it’s theory, it’s supposed to be out there. You know about the millions of circling comets that technically are a part of the solar system, although they’re so far out no one ever thinks of them. You could say to yourself this really is not the edge—the hypothetical tenth planet and the comets still are out there. But this is intellectualization; you’re telling yourself something that your mind says may be true, but your gut denies. For hundreds of years Pluto has been the last outpost and this, by God, is Pluto and you’re farther away from home than man has ever been before and you feel it. You don’t belong to anything any more. You’re in the back alley, and the bright and happy streets are so far away that you know you’ll never find them.

It isn’t homesickness that you feel. It’s more like never having had a home. Of never having belonged anywhere. You get over it, of course—or come to live with it.

So we came down out of the ship after we had landed and stood upon the surface. The first thing that struck us—other than the sense of lostness that at once grabbed all of us—was that the horizon was too near, much nearer than on the Moon. We felt at once that we stood on a small world. We noticed that horizon’s nearness even before we noticed the buildings that the probe had photographed as dots and that we had dropped down to investigate. Perhaps buildings is not the right word—structures probably would be better. Buildings are enclosures and these were not enclosures. They were domes someone had set out to build and hadn’t had time to finish. The basic underlying framework had been erected and then the work had stopped. Riblike arcs curved up from the surface and met overhead. Struts and braces held the frames solid, but that was as far as the construction had gone. There were three of them, one larger than the other two. The frames were not quite as simple as I may have made them seem. Tied into the ribs and struts and braces were a number of other structural units that seemed to have no purpose and make no sense at all.

We tried to make sense out of them and out of the scooped-out hollows that had been gouged out of the planetary surface within the confines of each construct—they had no floors and seemed fastened to the surface of the planet. The hollows were circular, some six feet across and three feet deep, and to me they looked like nothing quite as much as indentations made in a container of ice cream by a scoop.

About this time Tyler began to have some thoughts about the surface. Tyler is an engineer and should have had his thoughts immediately—and so should the rest of us—but the first hour or so outside the ship had been considerably confusing. We had worn our suits in training, of course, and had done some walking around in them, but Pluto seemed to have even less gravity than had been calculated and we had had to get used to it before we could be reasonably comfortable. Nor had anything else been exactly as we had anticipated.

“This surface,” Tyler said to me. “There is something wrong with it.”

“We knew it was smooth,” said Orson. “The pictures showed that. Coming in, we could see it for ourselves.”

“This smooth?” Tyler asked. “This even?” He turned to me. “It isn’t geologically possible. Would you say it is?”

“I would think not,” I said. “If there had been any upheaval at all this floor would be rugged. There can’t have been any erosion—anything to level it down. Micrometeorite impacts, maybe, but not too many of them. We’re too far out for meteorites of any size. And while micrometeorites might pit the surface there would be no leveling process.”

Tyler let himself down on his knees rather awkwardly. He brushed a hand across the surface. The seeing was not too good, but you could see that there was dust, a thin layer of dust, a powdering.

“Shine a light down here,” said Tyler.

Orson aimed his light at the spot. Some of the gray dust still clung where Tyler had wiped his hand, but there were streaks where the darker surface showed through.

“Space dust,” said Tyler.

Orson said, “There should be damn little of it.”

“True,” said Tyler. “But over four billion years or more, it would accumulate. It couldn’t be erosion dust, could it?”

“Nothing to cause erosion,” I said. “This must be as close to a dead planet as you ever get. Not enough gravity to hold any of the gases—if there ever were gases. At one time there must have been, but they’ve all gone—they went early. No atmosphere, no water. I doubt there ever was any accumulation. A molecule wouldn’t hang around for long.”

“But space dust would?”

“Maybe. Some sort of electrostatic attraction, maybe.”

Tyler scrubbed the little patch of surface again with his gloved hand, removing more of the dust, with more of the darker surface showing through.

“Have we got a drill?” he asked. “A specimen drill.”

“I have one in my kit,” said Orson. He took it out and handed it to Tyler. Tyler positioned the bit against the surface, pressed the button. In the light of the torch you could see the bit spinning. Tyler put more weight on the drill.