The Call from Beyond
I
The Pyramid of Bottles
The pyramid was built of bottles, hundreds of bottles that flashed and glinted as if with living fire, picking up and breaking up the misty light that filtered from the distant sun and still more distant stars.
Frederick West took a slow step forward, away from the open port of his tiny ship. He shook his head and shut his eyes and opened them again and the pyramid was still there. So it was no figment, as he had feared, of his imagination, born in the darkness and the loneliness of his flight from Earth.
It was there and it was a crazy thing. Crazy because it should not be there, at all. There should be nothing here on this almost unknown slab of tumbling stone and metal.
For no one lived on Pluto’s moon. No one ever visited Pluto’s moon. Even he, himself, hadn’t intended to until, circling it to have a look before going on to Pluto, he had seen that brief flash of light, as if someone might be signaling. It had been the pyramid, of course. He knew that now. The stacked-up bottles catching and reflecting light.
Behind the pyramid stood a space hut, squatted down among the jagged boulders. But there was no movement, no sign of life. No one was tumbling out of the entrance lock to welcome him. And that was strange, he thought. For visitors must be rare, if, indeed, they came at all.
Perhaps the pyramid really was a signaling device, although it would be a clumsy way of signaling. More likely a madman’s caprice. Come to think of it, anyone who was sufficiently deranged to live on Pluto’s moon would be a fitting architect for a pyramid of bottles.
The moon was so unimportant that it wasn’t even named. The spacemen, on those rare occasions when they mentioned it at all, simply called it “Pluto’s moon” and let it go at that.
No one came out to this sector of space any more. Which, West told himself parenthetically, is exactly why I came. For if you could slip through the space patrol you would be absolutely safe. No one would ever bother you.
No one bothered Pluto these days. Not since the ban had been slapped on it three years before, since the day the message had come through from the scientists in the cold laboratories which had been set up several years before that.
No one came to the planet now. Especially with the space patrol on guard … although there were ways of slipping through. If one knew where the patrol ships would be at certain times and build up one’s speed and shut off the engines, coasting on momentum in the shadow of the planet, one could get to Pluto.
West was near the pyramid now and he saw that it was built of whisky bottles. All empty, very empty, their labels fresh and clear.
West straightened up from staring at the bottles and advanced toward the hut. Locating the lock, he pressed the button. There was no response. He pressed it again. Slowly, almost reluctantly, the lock swung in its seat. Swiftly he stepped inside and swung over the lever that closed the outer lock, opened the inner one.
Dim light oozed from the interior of the hut and through his earphones West heard the dry rustle of tiny claws whispering across the floor. Then a gurgling, like water running down a pipe.
Heart in his mouth, thumb hooked close to the butt of his pistol, West stepped quickly across the threshold of the lock.
A man, clad in motheaten underwear, sat on the edge of the cot. His hair was long and untrimmed, his whiskers sprouted in black ferocity. From the mat of beard two eyes stared out, like animals brought to bay in caves. A bony hand thrust out a whisky bottle in a gesture of invitation.
The whiskers moved and a croak came from them. “Have a snort,” it said.
West shook his head. “I don’t drink.”
“I do,” the whiskers said. The hand tilted the bottle and the bottle gurgled.
West glanced swiftly around the room. No radio. That made it simpler. If there had been a radio he would have had to smash it. For, he realized now, it had been a silly thing to do, stopping on this moon. No one knew where he was … and that was the way it should have stood.
West snapped his visor up.
“Drinking myself to death,” the whiskers told him.
West stared, astounded at the utter poverty, at the absolute squalor of the place.
“Three years,” said the man. “Not a single sober breath in three solid years.” He hiccuped. “Getting me,” he said. His left hand came up and thumped his shrunken chest. Lint flew from the ragged underwear. The right hand still clutched the bottle.
“Earth years,” the whiskers explained. “Three Earth years. Not Pluto years.”
A thing that chattered came out of the shadows in one corner of the hut and leaped upon the bed. It hunched itself beside the man and stared leeringly at West, its mouth a slit that drooled across its face, its puckered hide a horror in the sickly light.
“Meet Annabelle,” said the man. He whistled at the thing and it clambered to his shoulder, cuddling against his cheek.
West shivered at the sight.
“Just passing through?” the man inquired.
“My name is West,” West told him. “Heading for Pluto.”
“Ask them to show you the painting,” said the man. “Yes, you must see the painting.”
“The painting?”
“You deaf?” asked the man, belligerently. “I said a painting. You understand—a picture.”
“I understand,” said West. “But I didn’t know there were any paintings there. Didn’t even know there was anybody there.”
“Sure there is,” said the man. “There’s Louis and—”
He lifted the bottle and took a snort.
“I got alcoholism,” said the man. “Good thing, alcoholism.
