Short Fiction · Half Around Pluto (2/2)

Into his belt-bag he thrust the log book. Nothing else went aboard the sled⁠—no food, no water container, no tools, instruments or oxygen tanks. The tent he left lying there, with all that had been carried inside the night before.

As the sun rose clear of the distant rim of the plain to eastward, he rigged a line to the steering boom, then lashed himself securely within reach of the engine. Steering by the taut line, he started westward, slowly at first, then faster. It was as he had hoped. The lightened sled attained and held a greater speed than on any previous day.

“I’ll make it,” he said aloud, with nobody else to listen on all Pluto. “I’ll make it!”

Faster he urged the engine’s rhythm, and faster. He clocked its speed by the indicators on the housing. A hundred and fifty miles an hour. A hundred and sixty; not enough. Whipping the boom line tight around his waist to hold his course steady, he sighted between the upcurve of the runner forward. There was level, smooth-frozen country, mile upon mile. He speeded up to one hundred and seventy-five miles an hour. More. The sled hummed at every joining.

At noon, he had done a good thousand miles. At midafternoon, sixteen hundred. Two and a half hours of visibility left, and more than four hundred miles to go.

“I can do those on my head,” muttered Wofforth to himself, and then, far in the distance, the flat rim of the horizon was flat no longer.

It had sprung up jagged, full of points and bulges. Speeding toward it, he steered by the line around his waist while he cut his engine. He came close at fifty miles an hour, almost a crawl.

Some ancient volcanic action had thrown up those mountains, like a rank of close-drawn sentries. The sled could not cross them anywhere. Still reducing speed, Wofforth drew close to a notch, but the notch gave into a crater, a great shallow saucer two miles in diameter and filled with shadows below, so that Wofforth could not gauge its depth. Opposite, another notch⁠—perhaps once the crater had been a lake, with water running in and out. If he had come there at noon, he could have seen the bottom, and perhaps⁠—

“But it isn’t noon.” Wofforth was talking to himself again. His voice sounded thin and petulant in his own ears. “By noon tomorrow, the heat will be out of this suit.”

He stopped the sled, unlashed himself and trudged to the notch. He stood in it, looking down, then across.

The little bright jewel of the sun, sagging toward the horizon, showed him the upper reaches of the crater’s interior, pitched at an angle of perhaps fifty degrees.

Even if it had been noon, it would have been no use. The sled could never climb a slope like that.

Then he looked again, this way and that. He nodded inside his helmet.

He might as well try.

Returning to the sled, he started the engine and lashed himself fast again. He steered away from the crater, and around. He made a great looping journey of twenty miles or so across the plain, building speed all the time.

As he rounded the rear curve of his course, he was driving along at two hundred and sixty miles an hour, and he had to apply pressure to the boom with both hand and knees to point the sled back straight for the notch. Straightening his humming vehicle into a headlong course, he leaned forward and sighted between the upcurved runners.

“Now!” he urged himself, and watched the break in the crater wall rush toward him.

It greatened, yawned. He leaped through, and with a groaning gasp of prayer he dragged the boom over to steer the sled right.

It worked, as he had not dared hope. The runners bounced, bit. Then he was racing around the inside of the great cup’s rim, like a hurtling bubble on the inner surface of a whirlpool’s funnel. Two miles across, three miles and more on the half diameter⁠—the engine laboring up to three hundred miles an hour, centrifugal force holding it there⁠—

Little more than thirty seconds raced by when he knew he had won. He saw the far notch growing near. He came to it in a last booming rush, and hurled his whole weight against the boom to face the runners into the notch.

Under the low-dropping sun, he and his sled shot into open country beyond the range.

His right arm felt dead from shoulder to fingertip. His head roared and drummed with the racing of his blood. His face had tired spots in it, where muscles he had never used before had locked into an agonized grimace.

On he sped, straight west, gasping and gurgling and mumbling in crazy triumph.

An hour, an anticlimactic hour wherein the sled almost steered itself over the smoothest of plain, and up ahead he spied the black outline of Base Camp.

It was a sprawling, low structure, prefabricated metal and plastic and insulation, black outside to gather what heat might come from outer space. It held aloof on the dull frozen plain from the irregular stain where the expedition ship had braked off with one set of rockets and had soared away with another set. Larger, more familiar, grew Base Camp with each second of approach. Shakily Wofforth cut his engine, slowed from high speed to medium, to a hundred miles an hour, to sixty, to fifty. He made a final circle around Base Camp, and let it coast in with the engine off, to within twenty yards of the main lock panel.

He got up, on legs that shook inside his boots. He felt his heart still racing, his head still ringing. He sighed once, and walked close, his gauntlet fumbling at the release button on the lock panel.

But the button did not respond.

“Jammed,” he said. “No⁠—locked.”

He couldn’t get in. He had reached Base Camp, but he could not get in. They hadn’t counted on his return. They’d gone off and left Base Camp locked up.

He sagged against the lock panel, and cursed once, with an utter and furious resignation.

He felt himself slipping. He was going to faint. His legs would not hold him up. He was slipping forward⁠—seemed to be sinking into the massive and unyielding outer surface of Base Camp. It was a dream. Or it was death.

He did not lose all hold on his awareness. He had a sense of lying at full length, and blinding light flashes that made his eyelids jump. And a tug somewhere, as though his helmet was coming off. He would have put out a hand to see, but his left arm was broken, and his right arm limp from weariness.

“You’re back,” said a voice he knew, a voice strained with wonder. “You managed. I knew you would.”

“Now,” said Wofforth, “I know it’s a dream. We dream after we die.”

A hand was cupped behind his neck, lifting him to a sitting position. He felt warm fluid at his lips. “It’s no dream,” said the voice beseechingly. “Look at me.”

“I don’t dare. The dream will go away.”

But he opened his eyes and looked at her hair like Plutonian night, her eyes like bright stars. “Lya,” he said. “I’m going to call you Lya.”

“Please call me Lya.”

“I’d be bound to dream about you. I’ve dreamed about you so much.⁠ ⁠… Owww!”

He got his right hand up to cherish his tingling cheek.

“So you felt that,” she said. “Now you know you’re awake. Or must I slap you again?”

“I’m sorry, Madame.”

“You called me Lya. Can you stand up? I’ll help you.”

She helped him. He stood up, there in the admission chamber of Base Camp. Lya Stromminger was smiling, and she was crying, too.

“You didn’t go away,” he said. “You’re still here.” The weight of his odyssey, half around Pluto, was beginning to stagger him.

“No, I stayed. I knew you’d come back. I knew Pluto couldn’t kill you or keep you from coming back.”

He drank more from the cup she held to his lips.

“We’ll wait together for them to come with the next expedition,” she promised him.

“Twenty years? Supplies⁠—”

“There’ll be plenty. Don’t you know about Pluto? Didn’t those craters, those old volcanoes, tell you?”

Thinking of how he had crossed the crater, Wofforth shuddered.

“Pluto is colder than anybody even guessed⁠—outside. But inside are the internal fires⁠—like all the solid planets. We made our tests and we can tap them. I kept the instruments for that. It means we’ll have power, and can make our synthetic foods and so on for as long as we need them. You and I are the inhabitants here⁠—”

He stumbled to a chair and sat. “Twenty years⁠—” he said.

Her arm was still around him. Her hair brushed his cheek. “It won’t be long. We have so much to say to each other.”