Yellow eyes burned into his, confused and wild. Then Avery turned
jerkily away.
"No. But you can't land, Falken. Look at it."
Falken looked, using a powerful search-beam, probing. Vulcan was
smaller even than Mercury. There was no atmosphere. Peaks like
splinters of black glass bristled upward, revolving slowly in the Sun's
tremendous blaze.
The beam went down into the bottomless dark of the canyons. There was
nothing there, but the glassy rock and the dim glints of light through
it.
"All the same," said Falken, "I'm going to land." If there was even a
tiny chance, he couldn't let it slip.
Unregeneracy was almost dead in the inhabited worlds. Paul Avery was
the only recruit in months. And it was dying in the miserable outer
strongholds of independence.
Starvation, plague, cold, and darkness. Insecurity and danger, and the
awful lost terror of humans torn from earth and light. Unless they
could find a place of safety, with warmth and light and dirt to grow
food in, where babies could be born and live, Gantry Hilton would soon
have the whole Solar System for his toy.
There were no more protests. Falken set the ship down with infinite
skill on a ledge on the night side. Then he turned, feeling the blood
beat in his wrists and throat.
"Vac suits," he said. "There are two and a spare."
They got into them, shuffled through the airlock, and stood still, the
first humans on an undiscovered world.
* * * * *
Lead weights in their boots held them so that they could walk. Falken
thrust at the rock with a steel-shod alpenstock.
"It's like glass," he said. "Some unfamiliar compound, probably, fused
out of raw force in the Solar disturbance that created the planets.
That would explain its resistance to heat."
Radio headphones carried Avery's voice back to him clearly, and Falken
realized that the stuff of the planet insulated against Solar waves,
which would normally have blanketed communication.
"Whatever it is," said Avery, "it sucks up light. That's why it's never
been seen. Only little glimmers seep through, too feeble for telescopes
even on Mercury to pick up against the Sun. Its mass is too tiny for
its transits to be visible, and it doesn't reflect."
"A sort of dark stranger, hiding in space," said Sheila, and shivered.
"Look, Eric! Isn't that a cave mouth?"
Falken's heart gave a great leap of hope. There were caves on Pluto.
Perhaps, in the hidden heart of this queer world....
They went toward the opening. It was surprisingly warm. Falken guessed
that the black rock diffused the Sun's heat instead of stopping it.
Thin ragged spires reared overhead, stabbing at the stars. Furtive
glints of light came and went in ebon depths. The cave opened before
them, and their torches showed glistening walls dropping sheer away
into blackness.
Falken uncoiled a thousand-foot length of synthetic fiber rope from his
belt. It was no larger than a spider web, and strong enough to hold
Falken and Avery together. He tied it to each of their metal boots to
and let it down.
It floated endlessly out, the lead weight dropping slowly in the light
gravity. Eight hundred, nine hundred feet. When there were five feet of
rope left in Falken's hand it stopped.
"Well," he said. "There _is_ a bottom."