“…Look at the poor little tyke shiver,” McTeague said. “He hates this hunting worse than pulling teeth.” Then, to the hexapod, “Never mind, Toots. When we get back you can have a nice bowl of vitamush and berl steak.”
They started out. McTeague, by right of seniority, was in the lead. He held the hexapod by a leash of psychroplex. Kent, walking beside Willets, felt a flash of pleasure at being out in the open again, though the visible curvature of Triton’s surface made him move unsteadily. He looked up and ducked involuntarily. Neptune’s blue- green disk, now directly overhead, filled half the sky.
“Watch out for low grav, Kent,” McTeague’s voice said in his ear. “Don’t worry, old Nept won’t fa ll on you. All you men, set your object comps on the ship.”
“Don’t you have a map or chart?” Kent asked.
“Nope. The navigator keeps a record, of course, and sets us down on a different spot each time. He and the old man are doing it methodically… Look at Toots! We must be getting near a colony.”
The hexapod was pulling back on the lead and struggling. McTeague took a firmer grip on the leash and began to tug him along. Three or four hundred yards farther the hexapod sat down and refused to move. Kent could see him shivering inside his pressure suit. His purplish fur was fluffed out like chenille. McTeague snapped the creature’s lead into a chock on his suit.
“This is it,” he said. “Kent, this is for you. The others have dug lots of pillows. Set your atom blast to three, and cut out a section of rock about two feet square. Use your blast to pry it up with—I’ll show you how—and then cut it cross-ways twice so it’s in fours. By then you ought to be able to see the pillows—they’re in cells, sort of, in the rock. If it is rock.”
They began work. Kent found a weird fascination in seeing the rock curdle and flow in the unearthly glare of his atom blast. “When you see the pillows,” McTeague said over the suit radio, “take your blast and sort of flick down the edges of the cells, see, like this, and pick up the rock and shake them out. They come out easy.”
He fitted action to his words. Kent, imitating him, began to make good progress. “Cute little things, aren’t they?” commented McTeague. Out of his shoulder pack he drew a shapeless bundle and pressed a button on its side. It began to expand.
“When you got enough pillows,” McTeague ordered, “take the scoop hanging on the left side of your suit and shovel them into the sled. Those inflators are certainly a bright idea. Oh, an’ if your suit gets too damp, shove the dryer up. It helps.”
“How do you like it?” he asked Kent when the party had been working for three or four hours.
The question took Kent somewhat by surprise. He straighten ed in his pressure suit. He hadn’t, he found, been thinking about much of anything; he had been cutting out pumice-like rock and extracting pillows from it in a mindless trance that was definitely tinged with pleasure.
“It’s nice, somehow,” he answered.
“I thought you’d like it,” McTeague answered, pleased. “Everybody on the ship does, even the old man.”
“Except Toots.”
“Yeah, except Toots.”
They finished with the colony of pillows; further investigation with the blasts showed only one or two isolated specimens. Neptune was beginning to set.
“Might as well hunt another spot,” McTeague said. “Look at Toots—see how he’s pulling back toward the ship, and at the same time’s got a sort of list to the right? That means there’s probably another colony off to the left. Let’s go.” He started off to the left, pulling the big, inflated sled and tugging the reluctant Toots after him.
They had gone four or five kilometers, vapor trails from their suit vents floating behind them, when Toots suddenly reared back and began fighting the leash enthusiastically.
“What’s got into him?” McTeague said. “He doesn’t usually act like that even when it’s a big colony. Abrams, you take his lead and the sled; I’ll go ahead and see what’s doing.”
“I might have known it was a stiff,” he said when he returned. “Toots hates dead bodies worse than hunting pillows, even. Abrams, you hold on to Toots, and I want you other two men to come help cut a grave for whoever it is.”
“I thought nobody except us ever visited Triton,” Kent said as they walked along. “Did he have a ship?”
“Not around within seeing range. I suppose he could have come here on a life craft, after a wreck, or maybe he was marooned; it’s been done. We’ll get his identity badge and look through his sack before we bury him. Too bad we can’t take him back to Terra, but it’s too long for him to keep, and the old man hates dead bodies, anyhow. Jonahs, he says.”
They came upon the body. The man had died in a pressure suit, on his feet, with an atom blast of recent design in his hand. His face was intelligent and young. “Looks like he was fixing to dig for pillows,” McTeague said. “Maybe Venus Novelties sent him out. I hate to say it, but in that case he deserved what he got. Anybody that would work for a scab outfit like that—!”
“What killed him, do you think?” Kent asked.
“Hard to say. His shoulder tanks had plenty of oxy. They say death is always heart failure in one way or another… Get busy with that grave. I want it about two meters by one by one.” McTeague took the dead man about the waist and put him down on the stony surface of the satellite. He opened the psychroplex helmet and fumbled around the man’s neck for the identity disk.
“Edward Clutts,” he read with the aid of his suit light. “The serial’s K20-4340. What’s K20, anyhow?”
“Scientific worker,” Kent replied.
“Uh. Then I doubt Venus Novelties sent him. The disk was issued four years ago, so he hasn’t been here less than two years or more than four… Funny he’s not decayed at all; the suit heater usually keeps running long enough for them to spoil some.”
“That’s only if the oxy runs out,” Willets said. “He probably froze to death.”
“Could be. Let’s see what he’s got in his sack.” McTeague turned the body over and opened the container on the back of the suit.
“He’s got a lot of stuff. Thermometers and all sorts of things. What’s this gadget?”
“Geiger counter,” Kent replied. He had been watching with intense, strained attention.
“Hm. Looks like he was trying to investigate Triton. The poor chump, he might as well have investigated Nereid. There’s nothing here at all. Except the pillows, I mean. Have you got the grave ready yet?”
“Yeah, but there’re a lot of pillows in the slab we just levered up,” Willets replied. “You want we should just leave them, or can we break down the cell walls and shake them out?”
McTeague considered. “No reason why we shouldn’t get as many out as we can,” he said. “He’ll never know the difference. We’re bound to leave a good many in the rock anyhow.”
Obediently, Kent and Willets began flicking their blasts back and forth over the cell walls and shaking the pillows out. When they had finished McTeague put the body down gently in the hole they had left, and the slab was replaced. Then McTeague called Abrams to come up with the hexapod, and they all began digging pillows again. At the end of the shift, the sled was nearly full.
“Good day’s work,” McTeague said with approval. “Don’t let me forget to tell the old man about the stiff and give him the identity disk and stuff. It’s got to go in the log.”
“Will there be an investigation?” Kent queried.
“Nothing to investigate. His heater stopped.”
“I suppose.” Kent was far from convinced, and yet he had to admit that McTeague was probably right. Edward Clutts had died when his suit heater stopped running. “It—could it have had anything to do with the pillows?” he said.
McTeague turned and stared at him. “With the pillows} Why, the pillows don’t do anything at all except keep hot.”
“On Triton.”
“Well, Triton’s their home. If they’re going to keep warm any place, it’s got to be there.”
They reached the ship, Toots leaping and frisking around them. Sometimes he got all six legs off the ground at once. The sled was taken up the gangplank and its burden of pillows emptied into Number One hold. Kent held one of them in his ungloved hand, and it was hot. And not eight hours ago he had himself dug it out of Triton’s rock. The coldest spot in the known universe…
After supper— Toots messed with the spacemen, and they all broke the old man’s orders by slipping the hexapod bits of berl meat and gravy-sticks under the table—McTeague came up to where Kent was sitting and
