Back on Earth, his mother told her friends confidentially that she hadn’t the least idea how she’d managed it, but she’d lost several pounds and wasn’t it wonderful to lose weight without dieting? Joe’s father apologetically admitted to his friends that he was getting a little bit absent-minded these days. Joe? His son Joe? Oh, Joe was fine! Out on a cargo ship to Pluto to get space-hunger and the wanderlust out of his system at the same time. Come to think of it, his ship ought to be landing on Pluto any day now ...
It was time for landing. Three days from landing the first mate inspected the cargo holds and had some extra braces put in place. Later, the ship performed elephantine maneuvers in space. The sensation on board was precisely what would be produced by a slow and deliberate earthquake, when all of solidity changed its position, and changed back, and changed again, and again, and again. It was productive of pure, instinctive panic.
Naturally, Joe gave no sign of his sensations. He knew that a pale disk had appeared in the stars before the Mavourneen. It was not bright like the face of a planet near the sun. Here the sun was only a bright star, yielding about as much light as the moon does to Earth. There were no days on Pluto. There was night; yes. Night without a moon, and with infinitesimal stars, much brighter than on Earth, shining in incredible multitudes from every crack and cranny of the heavens. And there was twilight. That was when the star-sized sun was overhead. But there was no day.
Joe knew, too, that the ghost disk to be seen from the Mavourneen’s control room ports showed no markings at all. There were no seas. If there was water, it was frozen. There was no air. It was frozen, too. The planet was a featureless gray phantom of solidity as the Mavourneen approached its twilight side.
The ship’s space radio was sending a beam of radio waves on ahead to notify its coming. Other signals were coming back from the tiny human settlement deep under the planet’s frigid surface. Joe tried to imagine how explorers had found the heart to search such a planet for the mineral deposits which made a settlement worth while. The settlement itself, of course, was no problem. A ship like the Mavourneen would need only to settle to solidity anywhere, and it could run a shaft down to something which would neither evaporate or run away as a liquid at a temperature at which human beings could live. One ship could establish a village, which other ships could supply and increase down under the cold. For more than fifty years, now, there had been humans living on Pluto and working its mines. There were even families . . .
But Joe could not quite imagine family life on Pluto.
He knew that the landing was due, but he did not know when the ship went down to the planet-wide plain which a radio beam assured the Mavourneen’s skipper was his destination. Joe did not see the tiny, flickering, pinpoint of brightness which was the landing-beacon and the first actual contact with human beings outside the ship for some thousands of millions of miles. He was swabbing a floor when his ears abruptly felt strange. There was something very odd about all his surroundings. It was seconds before he realized what had happened.
The drive was off. It had been in his ears every second of the time since leaving Earth. Now it had stopped.
The Mavourneen had landed on Pluto.
Joe continued to swab. But his feelings were remarkable.
During his next watch, the unloading of cargo on Pluto began. The ship was sealed to the ground by a wall attached to the rounded hull at the top, and to the landing-platform at the bottom. It was made of stuff squirted out of hoses, which hardened where it landed and almost as it splashed. It was water, mined at the end of one of the galleries leading in all directions from the underground settlement. It made an airtight connection of the ship to the ground. In thick work jackets, the crew of the Mavourneen unloaded cargo in this temporary ice-walled cavern. Their breaths were frosty in the glare of the unloading-lights. The cargo vanished into shafts going down into the village.
In his watch off, Joe was given shore-leave. He was permitted to go down to the village on Pluto. There were nearly two thousand people here, and ships came fairly often. There was no loneliness. The folk who lived here felt no such hunger for talk as Joe felt. They had a reasonably spacious community, with metal walls and ceilings—mostly painted white—and they had shops and homes, and life went on very comfortably. The air had a peculiar, invigorating smell to it, because of the hydroponic gardens which grew fresh vegetables. It was warmer, too, than on the ship. The community had an atom pile for power, and mined uranium as part of its way of life. Part of the cargo for Earth was pigs of uranium.
The only thing Joe could really note down as distinctive was that the settlement was warmer than he was at all used to. Otherwise the feel of things was like that in a medium-sized village, assuming only that it lived in a single apartment house and that all the time was night. —That was because all the light was artificial. But this did not seem strange to Joe. He had seen no other sort of light all the way out on the ship.
He bought souvenirs for his parents—minerals, and some of those inexplicable fossil-bearing lumps of transparent rock that are familiar enough in museums. There was no other distinctive local product to buy. The settlement on Pluto was small, but it was prosperous and up-to-date. The only thing in the least backward about it was the visi-screen shows. They were brought out recorded on tape, and Joe had seen all of them.
Just before the last of the ship’s cargo was unloaded, Joe broke his arm. It was one of those unforeseeable accidents. A cargo sling let go the fraction of a second before it should have. A bale came tumbling, and Joe tried to stop it with a cargo hook, and the bale was heavier than it should have been. His arm was flicked aside with a deceptive gentleness, and he felt the bones snap.
It was nothing very serious. There was a hospital, of course, where highly professional X-rays determined the exact damage, and a perfectly competent surgeon pinned the bones, put the arm in a light plastic cast, and told Joe he was quite fit for light duty. Even the first mate took it casually.
“I’ll give you second steward rating on the way back,” he said matter-of-factly. “That’ll mean a little better pay, even. You wait on table and help the cook for the officers’ mess.”
“But the work I was doing—”
“A second steward’s signing off,” said the mate. “Hell stay out here between ships. Good pay in the mines. And there’s a man wants to get back to Earth. He’s made a stake. His papers say he’s an engineer, third, but he’ll go back as spaceman, second class.”
And that was that. There was no passenger traffic to Pluto. There was nothing to see. While the ship was aground Joe never saw the surface, and aside from the souvenir minerals the only oddity he remembered was the warm, man-made climate.
He was helping the cook with the officers’ mess when the Mavourneen took off again. He felt the cotton-wooly sensation in his ears when the drive warmed up, and he knew the moment of take-off because the sound changed. And of course he knew it would no longer be possible to go down into the underground settlement on his watch off. But that was all. He regretted that he hadn’t been able to see the ice seal melted down by space-suited figures using torches to melt the ship free. The water would have frozen again instantly, of course. Then the walls would be broken up and taken down into the village to be used again later.