It was not intended for life. Arnsen felt himself an intruder.
O’Brien met his glance. The boy was smiling, rather wryly.
“I know,” he said. “It doesn’t look very promising, does it? But this is the place.”
“Maybe—a million years ago,” Arnsen said skeptically. “There’s nothing here now.”
Silently O’Brien put the crystal in the giant’s hand.
From it a pulse of triumph burst out! Exultation! The psychic wave shook Arnsen with its intensity, wiped doubt from his face. Invisibly and intangibly, the jewel shouted its delight!
The glow within it waxed brighter.
Hastings said abruptly, “Time to eat. Metabolism’s higher in space. We can’t afford to miss a meal.”
“I’m going out,” O’Brien said.
But Arnsen seconded the pilot. “We’re here now. You can afford to wait an hour or so. And I’m hungry.”
They opened thermocans in the galley and gulped the hot food standing. The ship had suddenly become a prison. Even Hastings was touched with the thirst to know what awaited them outside.
“We circled the asteroid,” he said at last, his voice argumentative. “There’s nothing here, Mr. O’Brien. We saw that.”
But O’Brien was hurrying back to the control cabin.
The suits were cumbersome, even in the slight gravity. Hastings tested the oxygen tanks strapped on the backs, and checked the equipment with stringent care. A leak would be fatal on this airless world.
So they went out through the airlock, and Arnsen, for one, felt his middle tightening with the expectation of the unknown. His breathing sounded loud and harsh within the helmet. The tri-polarized faceplates of the helmets were proof against sun-glare, but they could not minimize the horrible desolation of the scene.
A world untouched—more lifeless, more terrible, than frigid Jotunheim, where the Frost Giants dwelt. Arnsen’s heavily-leaded boots thumped solidly on the slag. There was no dust here, no sign of erosion, for there was no air.
In O’Brien’s hand the crystal flamed with milky pallor. The boy’s face was thin and haggard with desire. Arnsen, watching, felt hot fury against the incubus that had worked its dark spell on the other.
He could do nothing—only follow and wait. His hand crept to the weighted blackjack in his belt.
He saw the hope slowly fade from O’Brien’s eyes. Against his will he said, “We’re only on the surface, Doug. Underground—”
“That’s right. Maybe there’s an entrance, somewhere. But I don’t know. We may be a thousand years too late, Steve.” His gaze clung to the crystal.
It pulsed triumphantly. Pale flame lanced joyously from it. Alive it was; Arnsen had no doubt of that now. Alive, and exulting to be home once more.
Years too late? There was not the slightest trace of any artifact on this airless planetoid. The bleakness of outer space itself cast a veil over the nameless world. The three men plodded on.
In the end, they went back to the ship.
The quick night of the tiny world had fallen. The flaming corona of the sun had vanished; stars leaped into hard, jeweled brilliance against utter blackness. The sky blazed with cold fires.
Lifeless, alien, strange. It was the edge of the unknown.
They slept at last; metabolism was high, and they needed to restore their tissues. Hours later Arnsen came to half wakefulness. In his bunk he rose on one elbow, wondering what had roused him. His mind felt dulled. He could scarcely tell whether or not he was dreaming.
Across the ship a man’s head and shoulders were silhouetted against a port, grotesquely large and distorted. Beyond, the stars blazed.
They moved. They swirled in a witch-dance of goblin lanterns, dancing, whirling, spiraling. Blue, yellow, amethyst and milky pearl, streaks of light golden as the eye of a lioness—and nameless colors, not earthly, made a patterned arabesque as they danced their elfin saraband there in the airless dark.
The dark swallowed Arnsen. Slumber took him. …
Slowly, exhaustedly, he came back to consciousness. His head ached; his tongue was thick. For a moment he lay quietly, trying to remember.
Dream? Arnsen cursed, threw his blankets aside, and sprang from the bunk.
O’Brien was gone. Tex Hastings was gone. Two spacesuits had vanished from their racks.
Arnsen’s face twisted into a savage mask. He knew, now, what had been so wrong about his vision of the night. The man he had glimpsed at the port had been outside the ship. Doug?
Or Hastings. It did not matter. Both men were gone. He was alone, on the mystery world.
Arnsen set his jaw, gulped caffeine tablets to clear his head, and wrenched a spacesuit from its hooks. He donned it, realizing that sunlight once more was pouring down from the distant sun.
Soon he was ready. He went out of the ship, climbed atop it, and stared around. Nothing. The bleak, light-and-shadow pattern of the asteroid stretched to the sharply curving horizon all around. There was nothing else.
Nor were there tracks in the iron-hard slag. He would have to search at random, by pure guesswork. In the low gravity his leap to the ground scarcely jarred him. He gripped the billy at his left and moved forward, toward a high pinnacle in the distance.
He found nothing.
Worst of all, perhaps, was the horrible loneliness that oppressed him. He was too close to Outside now. He was the only living thing in a place never meant for human life. The ghastly bleakness of the asteroid sank like knife-blades into his mind, searing it coldly. There was no relief when he looked up. The distant sun, with its corona, was infinitely far away. The rest of the sky held stars, remote, not twinkling as on Earth, but shining with a cold intensity, a pale fury relentless and eternal. In the light the heat seared him through his armor; in the shadows he shivered with cold.
He went on, sick with hate, seeking the unknown thing that had taken Doug.
The boy was a poet, a dreamer, a fool, easy victim for the terror that haunted the asteroid.
Exhausted, he turned back. His air supply was running low, and there was no sign of either Doug or Hastings. He headed for
