He wondered how long it had been since the take-off. Time obviously had no direct meaning for him any longer, but he still wondered. He did not know what the standard dose of dormitol for the occasion was; he might have been asleep anywhere from an hour to a week. He tried to judge by his unshaven cheeks; but his beard was so light and slow-growing that he could conclude nothing. Nor did he know the rate of the rocket. Had he already settled into a cirucumterrestrial orbit? Or was he one of the few who had excitingly escaped the Earth’s grasp anci shot onward into the unknown? Might he—
That was the one hope. The one notion to cling to, to make life valuable. He treasured it, but even a prospect as enthralling as that of being the Columbus of an alien planet must fight a losing battle against pure ennui.
His chronometer had run down during his sleep. (He might have deduced something from that, but he could not remember, in the recent confusion, when he had last wound it.) He did not bother to rewind it. What were hours and minutes in this temporal vacuum?
He ate when he was hungry, wondering if his stomach obeyed the calculated averages. Supposing he should overeat and be doomed to the death of starvation? But he ate by instinct nonetheless. He read occasionally, he maddened himself with the small stock of cards and puzzles, he slept when he wanted to—which was a great deal of the time. He constructed fantasies of how he would conquer the alien planet single-handed.
Finally, hours or days or weeks after he first awoke, he went back to the brandy bottle which he had hardly touched since that breakfast. He finished it almost at a gulp and threw a magnificent party in which he entertained in his narrow quarters all the most enjoyable people he had ever known and finally retired to the floating couch, where he made some momentously significant discoveries as to the erotic importance of gravity.
Then the repulsion jets automatically blasted and the rocket braked to a safe landing on the alien planet. He donned his breathing suit and, tenderly holding the hand of the swizard girl, he opened the lock and led her forth to be the queen of his alien empire.
The strong, pure oxygen of the suit, headier than the aerous mixture circulated in the rocket, sobered him. The swizard girl vanished, and so did his delusions of conquering magnificence. But drunk or sober, he was indisputably stepping forth from the one-way rocket onto the barren soil of an alien world.
It is reported by one of the older poets that stout Cortez—by whom he doubtless means stout Balboa—with eagle eyes stared at the Pacific, and all his men looked at each other with a wild surmise. This is a somewhat more plausible account of the discovery of a new world than that of a composer of much the same period, who represents Vasco da Gama, upon his discovery of India, as bursting into a meltingly noble tenor aria.
Words do not come, let alone song, even if your breathing suit permitted you to utter them. “A wild surmise” is the exactly right phrase for the magnificent bewilderment that seizes you.
Not quite consciously, Gan Garrett checked the readings of the various gauges on his arm. Gravity low, temperature very low, atmosphere nonexistent. He scanned the pitted desert on which he had landed, noted the curious, sharp outlines of the jagged rocks, the complete absence of erosion on an airless world. The bright cold light turned the desert scene into one of those vividly unreal landscapes which the closed eyes sometimes present to the half-sleeping mind, or into a painting by that eccentric twentieth-century master Salvador Dali.
The light—Gan Garrett tilted back his head, and the moon shone so brightly into his visioplate as almost to blind him. It was an enormous, titanic moon, of curiously familiar outlines, and its light, he calculated roughly, was a good twenty times as brilliant as earthly moonlight. He turned to the filing cabinet of his memory and tried to recall a planet that possessed a moon like that. Certainly none in the Solar System. And, therefore—
The thermocells of his suit did not prevent a chill from coursing along his spine. An extrasystemic planet— The men of Earth still wondered if they could accomplish translunar trips, if they could some day safely reach Mars. And he, the outcast, the one-way tripper—
He began the casting up of hasty plans, and wished that he had left just a little of that brandy. This sudden sobriety was uncomfortable.
He knew scientists who would tell him flatly that a planet without atmosphere is incapable of sustaining life, that he must be alone on this cold spinning desert world. But to say that life can only be the carbon-nitrogen-and-oxygen-sustained life which we know had always seemed to him anthropocentric stupidity. There might be intelligent life here which he could not even recognize as such—worse yet, which could not recognize him.
He would have to base himself on the rocket, and from there conduct carefully plotted tours of exploration until he could discover—what? At least he had many many Earth-years yet to do it in. Should he start now, or wait for the sun, which would reduce the wear on his thermocells? Now, at night, he could at least attempt to draw some conclusion as to his whereabouts from a study of the sky. He would need first of all to refresh his memory more accurately from a couple of microbooks. Then—
He was starting back for the lock of the rocket when he saw them. The suit was not wired for sound; he could not hear what must have been their heavily clumping approach. For
