What a fatuous fool I was at that moment! Queer how in life, things
momentous may of actuality hang upon seeming trivialities! If only I
had listened to Alan Grant then! But in that instant, as I peered into
the eyepiece of the telescope, a rift in the clouds of Zura opened up.
I must have muttered some exclamation.
"What is it?" Alan demanded.
"The clouds are breaking! We may be able to see the surface now. Wait,
I'll swing it onto the image screen, so we can both see it."
I made the connections. The little flurescent screen glowed with an
image of the atmosphere of Zura--turgid, green, yellow and black masses
of clouds, whirled and tossed by giant storms.
"Good Lord!" Alan exclaimed. "Are we supposed to descend through that?"
"No. We'd have to have a rift. There's one coming there now."
Midway between the equator and the pole there was a widening opening.
Then a segment of the dark surface was visible. I focused the
electro-telescope, swung its controls to a smaller area with a greater
magnification. The surface of Zura! What a weird, wild scene! The image
gave us perhaps a square mile. There was a turgid twilight down there,
through which the daylight now was slanting, broken by the haze which
still remained in this clearer atmosphere.
The terrain was rocky--a bleak, desolate waste, barren and empty.
Tumbled rocks, buttes and spires, all slate-gray, sleek and glistening
like marble. A tumbled terrain, with fissures and cave-mouths
everywhere; rifts, gullies and huge canyons. Was it rock, or metal?
Extremely dense--it had that obvious aspect; a compressed little world,
with its surface broken, mangled as though by some titanic cataclysm.
* * * * *
It was a frigid little world. White patches of snow and sleek blue ice
everywhere were apparent. But it was melting ice now. Weirdly in places
it drooped, grotesquely leprous where it had melted away. And in the
hollows, there was water. Off to one side, a big bowl-like depression
was a lake of water, scattered with melting ice. Frigid world, but now
approaching the sun, warmth was striking down, melting the congealed
surface. Masses of ice turning rotten. As I stared, a great frozen mass
which hung like a white veil over a hundred-foot cliff abruptly broke
away. Sunlight chanced to strike it as it came splintering down, so
that it looked like fractured spun glass, a riot of prismatic color.
"John! Look! There, down at the lower corner!" Alan was tensely
pointing to a corner of the image screen. What was this? I stared and
caught my breath. It seemed that against a distant ice-spire which
stood like a stalagmite on the weird melting landscape, a white figure
was poised. It seemed to move a little.
"Someone alive down there!" Alan murmured. "Look--that figure moved!"
Zura inhabited! We had never given a thought to that, save to assume
that it was not. My fingers were shaking as I fumbled at the telescope,
shortening the focus still further, giving a greater magnification
of a much smaller area. Our fluroscope screen blurred; then slowly
clarified, with an area of only a hundred feet or so.
Numbed, we stared at a white figure which was against the ice-spire. A
girl! A human girl? Heaven knows, it seemed so. Pale white in the weird
Zurian daylight, she stood motionless, seemingly gazing out over the
melting landscape. A girl the size of a girl on earth. A white garment,
white fur perhaps, draped her breasts and thighs. Her long hair, white
as a veil of frozen falling water, was tumbled over her shoulders.
Woman carved in white marble. Woman molded of sleek ice. If we had not
seen her move, she could have been a strange statue of a beautiful
earthgirl, frozen there. Then suddenly as the swirling clouds shifted,
a shaft of sunlight fell upon her. There was a pink-whiteness, like a
delicate flush, on her limbs, neck and face.
For that second Alan and I breathlessly stared. And then, as though the
sunlight were something horribly frightening, her little body seemed to
shudder. She turned, plunged into the shadows of a rock-rift and was
gone!