[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Astounding Science-Fiction, May 1944.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
John McBride stood on the roof garden of Satan's Hotel, looking across
the River Styx at Sharon. To his left, the River Styx emptied into the
Sulphur Sea, and in the evening sky to his right, the dancing flames
lighted the cloud banks over Mephisto, where the uranium smelters
worked on a nonstop plan.
John McBride was in Hell.
But Hell is a city on Pluto, where the planners had a free hand
because no intelligent life had ever scarred the planet until man came
with his machinery and his luxury and his seeking for metal. Uranium
had been found in plenty on Pluto, and so man had created a livable
planet from the coldest, most forbidding planet in the System.
John McBride was in Hell, on Pluto, but his mind was dwelling in a
little cube that rotated about a mythical spot halfway between Sol
and Pluto; one of the many stations that created the space warp that
focused Sol on Pluto with an angle of incidence equal to the incidence
of Sol on Terra. Enid McBride was back there in that minute station,
and John McBride wanted to be with her.
But Dr. Caldwell, the resident doctor of the Plutonian Lens, said:
"John, if you've got to go to Pluto, that's O.K. But you can't take
Enid with you. That's strictly out, with a capital 'O,' get me?"
"I suppose--"
"I've been doctoring for many years, John. It's safe for you to run
off for a week or so, but don't move Enid. Your kid won't be born for
a month, yet, but if you subject her to the 4- or 5-G you need to get
from here to Pluto, you'll have--not only the baby, but as nasty a mess
as you've ever seen! Take it from me, fella, 4-G is worse than a fall
if you keep it up for hours. No dice!"
"O.K.," said John, unhappily. "She'll be all right?"
"Sure," said Caldwell. "Besides, all you can do now is to sit around,
bite your fingernails, and ask foolish questions. If I had my way,
you'd be away when the youngster is born, that'd save you from a lot of
useless worry."
"That isn't fair."
"I know you feel that way. Enid does too. But it is still sort of
futile. You want the right to worry; go ahead and worry. After all,
there are enough people around the Lens that know you are worrying.
She'll be all right, I tell you!"
"You'll let me know if anything turns up?"
"That's a promise, John."
So John McBride was standing on a roof garden in Hell, thinking how
appropriate it was. He was in Hell, all right. Hell was a nice place
to be, warm, pleasant, and happily balanced. But it was no place to
be when your wife is nineteen hundred million miles away. Ah, well,
another week of this and he would be racing homeward.
Home! That was funny, to consider home, a place in space where gravity
was furnished by an mechanogravitic warp, and where there were no
windows to open, and where you lived in a cube of steel three thousand
feet on a side, mostly filled with the items required for living plus
the maze of equipment required to maintain the great lens that gave
Pluto its sun.
Home! It was a far cry from his boyhood home on Venus, where the
greenery of the forest fought with the very walls. But home is where
you like it, and McBride liked it.
He wished that he were there, for he felt that Enid needed him.
Then with that perversity of nature that people call fate, a bellhop
approached him and handed him a spacegram. McBride tipped the boy and
opened the envelope easily. He'd been getting 'grams by round numbers
for several years, and this was no novelty. He was not aware of its
importance until he opened the folded page and read:
JOHN MC BRIDE
SATAN'S HOTEL
HELL, PLUTO
HIT SKY FOR HOME. ENID IN NO GREAT DANGER FROM FALL, BUT HER
RECOVERY WILL BE ASSISTED BY YOUR PRESENCE.