The little five-limbed creature that rested on his shoulder didn’t answer, but then it never did. It couldn’t talk, but it was something to talk to. It was company. In size and weight it felt amazingly like a hand resting on his shoulder.
He’d had Dorothy for…How long? At a guess, four years. He’d been here about five, as nearly as he could reckon it, and it had been about a year before he’d found her. Anyway, he assumed Dorothy was of the gentler sex, if for no other reason than the gentle way she rested on his shoulder, like a woman’s hand.
“Dorothy,” he said, “reckon we’d better get ready for trouble. Might be lions or tigers in there.”
He unbuckled his sol-gun holster and let his hand rest on the butt of the weapon, ready to draw it quickly. For the thousandth time, at least, he thanked his lucky stars that the weapon he’d managed to salvage from the wreckage of his spacer had been a sol-gun, the one and only weapon that worked practically forever without refills or ammunition. A sol-gun merely needed exposure to the rays of a sun—any bright and close sun—for an hour or two a day; it soaked up energy. And, when you pulled the trigger, it dished it out. With any weapon but a sol-gun, he’d never have lasted five years here on Kruger III.
Yes, even before he quite reached the edge of the red jungle, he saw a lion. Nothing like any lion ever seen on Earth, of course. This one was bright magenta, just enough different in color from the purplish bushes it crouched behind so that he could see it. It had eight legs, all jointless and as supple and strong as an elephant’s trunk, and a scaly head with a bill like a toucan’s.
McGarry called it a lion. He had as much right to call it that as anything else, because it had never been named. Or if it had, the namer had never returned to Earth to report on the flora and fauna of Kruger III. Only one spacer had ever landed here before McGarry’s, as far as the records showed, and it had never taken off again. He was looking for it now; he’d been looking for it systematically for the five years he’d been here.
If he found it, it might—just barely might—contain, intact, some of the electronic tubes which had been smashed in the crash landing of his own spacer. And if it did, he could get back to Earth.
He stopped ten paces short of the edge of the red jungle and aimed the sol-gun at the bushes behind which the lion crouched. He pulled the trigger, and there was a bright green flash, brief but beautiful—oh, so beautiful—and then the bushes weren’t there any more, nor was the eight-legged lion.
McGarry chuckled softly. “Did you see that, Dorothy? That was green, the one color you don’t have on this bloody red planet of yours. The most beautiful color in the universe, Dorothy. Green! And I know where there’s a world that’s mostly green, and we’re going to get there, you and I. Sure we are. It’s the world I came from, and it’s the most beautiful place there is, Dorothy. You’ll love it.”
He turned and looked back over the brown plain with brown bushes, the violet sky above, the crimson sun. The eternally crimson sun Kruger, the sun that never set on the day side of this planet, which always faced it as one side of Earth’s moon always faces Earth.
No day and night—unless one passed the shadow line into the night side, which was too freezingly cold to sustain life. No seasons. A uniform, never-changing temperature, no wind, no storms.
He thought for the thousandth—or the millionth —time that it wouldn’t be a bad planet to live on, if only it were green like Earth, if only there was something green upon it besides the occasional flash of his sol-gun. Breathable atmosphere, moderate temperature—ranging from about forty Fahrenheit near the shadow line to about ninety at the point directly under the red sun, where its rays were straight instead of slanting. Plenty of food, and he’d learned long ago which plants and animals were, for him, edible, and which made him ill. Nothing he’d tried was poisonous.
Yes, a wonderful world. He’d even got used, by now, to the solitude of being the only intelligent creature on it. Dorothy was helpful, there. Something to talk to, even if she didn’t talk back.
Except—Oh, God—he wanted to see a green world again.
Earth, the only planet in the universe where green was the predominant color, where plant life was based on chlorophyll.
Other planets, even in the solar system, Earth’s neighbors, had no more to offer than greenish streaks in rare rocks, an occasional tiny life-form of a shade that might be brownish green if you wanted to call it that. Why, you could live years on any planet but Earth, anywhere in the system, and never see green.
McGarry sighed. He’d been thinking to himself, but now he thought out loud, to Dorothy, continuing his thoughts without a break. It didn’t matter to Dorothy. “Yes, Dorothy,” he said, “it’s the only planet worth living on—Earth! Green fields, grassy lawns, green trees. Dorothy, I’ll never leave it again, once I get back there, I’ll build me a shack out in the woods, in the middle of trees, but not trees so thick that grass doesn’t grow under them. Green grass. I’ll paint the shack green, Dorothy. We’ve even got green pigments back on Earth.”
He sighed and looked at the red jungle ahead of him.
“What’s that you asked, Dorothy?” She hadn’t asked anything but it was a game to pretend that she talked back. A game that helped him to keep sane. “Will I get married when I get back? Is that what you asked?”
He gave it consideration. “Well, it’s like this, Dorothy. Maybe and maybe not. You were named after a woman back on Earth, you know. A woman I was going to marry. But five years is a long time, Dorothy. I’ve been reported missing and presumed dead. I doubt if she’s waited this long. If she has, well, yes, I’ll marry her, Dorothy.”
“Did you ask, what if she hasn’t? Well, I don’t know. Let’s not worry about that till we get back, huh? Of course, if I could find a woman who was green, or even one with green hair, I’d love her to pieces. But on Earth, almost everything is green except the women.”
He chuckled at that and, sol-gun ready, went on into the jungle, the red jungle that had nothing green except the occasional flash of his sol-gun.
Funny about that. Back on Earth a sol-gun flashed blue. Here under a red sun it flashed green when he fired it. But the explanation was simple enough. A sol-gun drew energy from a nearby star and the flash it made when fired was the complementary color of its source of energy. Drawing energy from Sol, a yellow sun, it flashed blue. From Kruger, a red sun, green.
Maybe that, he thought, had been the one thing, aside from Dorothy’s company, that had kept him sane. A flash of green several times a day. Something green to remind him what the color was. To keep his eye attuned to it, if he ever saw it again.
It turned out to be a small patch of jungle, as patches went on Kruger III. One of what seemed countless millions of such patches. And maybe it really was millions; Kruger III was larger than Jupiter. Actually it might take more than a lifetime to cover it all. He knew that, but he didn’t let himself think about it. It might be bad if he once let himself doubt that he would ever find the wreckage of the only ship that had ever preceded him here. Or if he let himself doubt that, once he found the ship, he would find the parts he needed to make his own spacer operative again.
This patch of jungle was a mile square but it was so dense that he had to sleep once and eat several times before he had finished it. He killed two more lions and one tiger. And when he had finished, he walked around the circumference of it, blazing each of the largest of the trees along the outer rim so he wouldn’t repeat by searching this particular jungle again. The trees were soft; his pocket knife took off the red bark down to the pink core as easily as it would have taken the skin off a potato.