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.
“It’s harder than a bitch,” he said.
The bit began to bite. A small pile of fragments built up around the hole. The surface was hard, no doubt of that. The bit didn’t go too deep and the pile of fragments was small.
Tyler gave up. He lifted out the bit and snubbed off the motor.
“Enough for analysis?” he asked.
“Should be,” said Orson. He took the bit from Tyler and handed him a small specimen bag. Tyler laid the open mouth of the bag on the surface and brushed the fragments into it.
“Now we’ll know,” he said. “Now we will know something.”
A couple of hours later, back in the ship, we knew.
“I have it,” Orson said, “but I don’t believe it.”
“Metal?” asked Tyler.
“Sure, metal. But not the kind you have in mind. It’s steel.”
“Steel?” I said, horrified. “It can’t be. Steel’s no natural metal. It’s manufactured.”
“Iron,” said Orson. “Nickel. Molybdenum, vanadium, chromium. That works out to steel. I don’t know as much about steel as I should. But it’s steel—a good steel. Corrosion resistant, tough, strong.”
“Maybe just the platform for the structures,” I said. “Maybe a pad of steel to support them. We took the specimen close to one of them.”
“Let’s find out,” said Tyler.
We opened up the garage and ran down the ramp and got out the buggy. Before we left we turned off the television camera. By this time Moon Base would have seen all they needed to see and if they wanted more they could ask for it. We had given them a report on everything we had found—all except the steel surface and the three of us agreed that until we knew more about that we would not say anything. It would be a while in any case until we got an answer from them. The time lag to Earth was about sixty hours each way.