The Potter of Firsk and Other Stories (19 page)

Thifer’s eyes began to glisten. Before long epithets were exchanged and the word ‘goat’ was used, whereupon Magnus Ridolph rose to his feet, bowed in icy politeness and left the dome.

The lunch and the discussion comprised the two occasions on which Howard Thifer and Magnus Ridolph spoke during the cruise. Only when the ship sank into a glass-smooth basin of what evidently had been a tremendous blister in the basalt did the two once more exchange words. And now Thifer, on his home territory, was inclined to be affable.

“Rock, rock, rock,” he said. “Damn impressive planet and not a bad place to live if it had an atmosphere. Not too hot, not too cold. Maybe one of these days I’ll set up an air plant, build up some atmosphere. Should make a good tourist planet, wouldn’t you say, Ridolph?”

“Very spectacular,” agreed Magnus Ridolph. A year or so previously he had seen published in the
Augustan Review
a list of the settled planets arranged by Arthur Idry, the explorer, in order of their increasingly unearthly and bizarre quality.

Earth was naturally norm, with Fan, Naos VI, Exigencia, Omicron Ceti III, Mallard 42, Rhodope, New Sudan, high on the list. At the bottom were ranged such strange worlds as Formaferra, Julian Wolters IV, Alpheratz IX, Gengillee. Looking now across Jexjeka Magnus Ridolph decided that Idry had missed a good bet for last place on the list.

Jexjeka was the sole satellite of three suns—Rouge, a nearby red giant, Blanche, a white Sol-sized star at a greater distance, and Noir, Blanche’s dark companion. Jexjeka revolved around Rouge so that for half of each sidereal year two suns shone during the day. For the other half Rouge shone during the day, Blanche during the so-called night.

Rouge filled half the black sky, a monster ball of molten red whose globular shape was manifest. Indeed its equatorial region seemed to bulge out into the observer’s face. The dazzling white disk of Blanche hung slightly to the side. Noir was nowhere visible.

The ship had berthed at the center of a vast shallow basin. The black glass of the floor rose in a gradual catenary to a mile-high rampart of gray rock, at the base of which were a huddle of shiny domes and a tailings pile. Thifer’s living quarters were in another dome slightly removed from the mine buildings, beside oasis A, a pool of clear water.

Formed by chemical action in the warm interior of Jexjeka it was conveyed to the surface in the form of vapor, to condense and trickle into a pool, where it gradually evaporated into interstellar space, which here began at the planet’s surface. Magnus Ridolph was forced to admit that the planet had a certain mad beauty to it.

Distance on this airless world of gigantic proportions was hard to estimate. The perspectives had a peculiar distorted slant. Magnus Ridolph judged Thifer’s dwelling to be a mile distant and he was surprised when the surface car, which trundled along the glass-smooth bed of the blister, required ten minutes to make the trip.

The car entered an airlock. Thifer swung open the door. “We’re here.”

It was evident that Thifer had devoted neither time nor money to sybaritic niceties. Magnus Ridolph frowned at the unrelieved concrete floor, the blank walls, the rigid furniture.

“Your quarters are this way,” said Thifer and led Magnus Ridolph down a hall walled with corrugated aluminum to a room overlooking the pool.

The room was furnished with a narrow bed, a chest of drawers painted gray-green, a straight-back chair painted white.

“You are very wise,” Magnus Ridolph observed sagely. “Very sensitive.”

“How so?” inquired Thifer.

“You have accurately grasped the personality of the planet and have carried the feeling in its most subtle nuances into the furnishings of your house. Quite correctly you decided that starkness and rigor was the only answer to the blank simplicity of the landscape.”

“Mmmph,” said Thifer, grinning sourly. “Glad you like it. Most people don’t. Damned if I’ll spend any money on padding fat buttocks. I made it the hard way—hard work and hard living—and blast it if I’ll change my style now.”

“Sensible,” agreed Magnus Ridolph. “Ah—your food is as unaffected as your accommodations?”

“We eat,” said Thifer. “Nothing fancy but we eat.”

Magnus Ridolph nodded. “Well, I think I’ll bathe and change clothes. Perhaps you’ll have my luggage brought in?”

“Sure,” said Thifer. “Bathroom’s past that panel. Nice brisk shower does wonders for a man. Piped direct from the pool. Lunch in about an hour.”

Reflecting that the sooner he resolved the mystery of oases C and D the sooner he could return to civilization, at lunchtime Magnus Ridolph announced his intention of immediate investigation.

“Good, good,” said Thifer. “You’ll need an air-suit and something to get around in. You’ll have to go by yourself—I’ve got a stack of work to attend to. You won’t be bothered—there’s nobody at either C or D. Getting close to the eighty-fourth day.”

Magnus Ridolph nodded in polite acquiescence.

After lunch Thifer fitted him with an air-suit, took him behind the dome to an area cluttered with all types of boats, in varying degrees of repair.

Magnus Ridolph chose a small homemade hopper—two light I-beams welded to form an X and fitted with a plywood platform. The hopper was lifted by jets at the tips of the X, propelled and steered by a jet under the platform. Simple, useful, foolproof.

Armed with a small hand-gun—despite Thifer’s assurance that no living creature roamed the planet—Magnus Ridolph climbed on the platform, settled himself in an orderly fashion, tested the power-pack, inspected the fuel cartridge, flicked the switch, jiggled the controls, slowly turned the wing-nut which served as a lift control.

The hopper rose like an elevator. Magnus Ridolph nodded coolly to Thifer, who stood watching him with a poorly concealed grin of amusement, and sent the hopper skidding up on a slant over the great gray pegmatite rampart.

Wilderness, thought Magnus Ridolph—wilderness in the most implacable magnitude. Incomprehensible chaos of black and gray, stained vermilion in the light of Rouge and Blanche. Tables, spires, crevasses the human eye had never been designed to see, the human brain to grasp.

Massiveness in terms of cubic miles, cubic tens of miles. Pillars of crystal threaded with crimson light. Fields of silver-shining gneiss, rippled in accurate sinusoidal waves. Canyons shadowed in the imperturbable black of airless shade. Blisters with polished floors, craters, blowholes…

As Magnus Ridolph flew he asked himself, if there were life on Jexjeka with a volition that permitted settlement at A and B but barred it at C and D, where and how would this life manifest itself? The repetition of the eighty-four-day period indicated cyclical activity, seasonal fluctuation, obedience to some sort of law.

Religious sacrifices? Disease with an eighty-four-day incubation period? Magnus Ridolph pursed his lips skeptically. He halted the hopper, scanned the face of Jexjeka below him, saw a vast obsidian mirror, tilted at ten or fifteen degrees. Ten miles it extended to its edge, where the surface was marred by striated conchoidal ripples.

Magnus Ridolph dropped to twenty feet above the glistening surface. The light from the two suns penetrated the clear glass, flittered and shone from tiny aventurine flakes. Magnus Ridolph landed, alighted, stooped, looked closely at the surface. Clean polished glass, not one puff of dust.

Magnus Ridolph climbed back on the hopper, raised it three feet, let it skid down slope to where the obsidian surface curled up into a lip. Beyond was a precipice. Magnus Ridolph floated over the edge, peered into the darkness. Sight was swallowed in the blackness.

He let the hopper settle—down, down, down, out of the sunlight. He flicked on the lights stapled to the sides of the platform. Down, down, down—at last the bottom of the canyon loomed gray below, rose to meet him.

The hopper came gently to rest like a piece of water-logged wood settling to the dark bed of an ocean. The canyon floor was an unidentifiable black rock with large fibrous gray crystals. Magnus Ridolph looked up, down the stony waste to the edge of his private pool of light. No dust, no evidence that living foot had rested on this secret floor.

Raising the hopper a few feet over the rock floor he cruised slowly up the canyon. Nothing—bare rock bed, cold, dismal, forlorn. Magnus Ridolph suddenly felt a trace of uneasiness, a clamped-in feeling. He raised the hopper—up, up, up, into the pale red light of Rouge and Blanche, clear of the obsidian plain. He took his bearings and proceeded toward B.

He was impressed by the extent of Howard Thifer’s development work. Thirty or forty acres surrounding the pool had been covered with light black loam from Thaluri II and the fiber-trunked trees with the square glass leaves ranged in row after row. On most of these trees orange-brown fruit swelled from the trunks the size of melons, ready for harvest.

On an area set aside for pasture a dozen Thalurian cows crawled, cropping at silver spiny grass. And from the orchard a dozen shiny-skinned Thalurian natives peered at Magnus Ridolph, ducking back behind the glass foliage when he turned to look at them.

They bore a strange resemblance to the cows, Magnus Ridolph noticed, though they stood upright and the cows half-crawled, half-wallowed. Their eyes rose on thick stalks above the headless shoulders, with the food-mouth between the eyes.

Magnus Ridolph alighted from the hopper. The Thalurians bent their eye-stalks through the foliage, danced nervously as he approached.

Magnus Ridolph nodded politely, glanced here, there, looked at the pool of water. Nothing of interest—he found it to be merely a pool of water, boiling slightly into the vacuum though the temperature was close to freezing. He returned to the hopper, rose high, headed for C on the other side of the planet.

C appeared identical to B except for the absence of the Thalurians and the Thalurian cows. Peculiar, that resemblance, thought Magnus Ridolph—evolutionary kinship. No doubt a similar organic relationship existed among Earth fauna in the eyes of the Thalurians.

He examined the trees. The ripe fruit had burst, releasing hordes of tiny pulsing corpuscles, round and red as pomegranate seeds. They jerked, quivered, urged themselves away from the parent tree.

Magnus Ridolph looked long and carefully through the orchard. He examined it intently, minutely. Nothing—as Thifer had told him, no sign of struggle, no damage, no clues. Magnus Ridolph strolled back and forth seeking tracks, bent grass, broken twigs.

Broken twigs? No—but several of the twigs which might have borne big glass leaves ended in bare nubbins of fiber. There was no sign of the missing leaves at the base of the tree. Magnus Ridolph whistled through his teeth. A few missing leaves might mean much or nothing. Perhaps it was normal for trees to carry leafless twigs. Magnus Ridolph tucked the idea to the back of his mind. He would question Thifer when opportunity offered.

Up in his hopper, away to D. Identical to B and C except that it lay at the foot of a tremendous spike of red granite, which shone like bronze where the dull light of Rouge—a sliver of Rouge bulging over the horizon—struck. D was as deserted as C. A few leaves were missing from some of the trees.

The sliver of Rouge disappeared. Darkness poured down as if the sky were a chute. Magnus Ridolph shivered in spite of the warmed air in his suit. Desolation, solitude, existed only by contrast with a mental picture of what might be.

Such concepts never occurred to a brain in mid-space. Space was tremendous, empty—the ultimate grandeur—but neither dismal nor desolate. The loneliness of the dark orchard at D preyed on the brain only because other orchards, warm, fragrant, hospitable, existed.

He flung the hopper high, returned to B, where it was still day. He alighted, examined the trees while the Thalurians hid and watched him with eye-stalks pushed through the glass foliage. Every twig ended in a square brittle leaf.

Back on his hopper, up into airless space. Very little power gave the hopper great speed in the absence of friction. And Magnus Ridolph arrived back at Station A in time for dinner.

Thifer greeted him with initial curiosity, then ignored him, conversing in a belligerent grumbling tone to Smitz, the mine foreman, a thin sad-eyed man with hair like salt-grass. Magnus Ridolph, at the far end of the table, ate sparingly of cucumbers and a poorly-seasoned pot-pie.

At last Thifer turned to Magnus Ridolph with an amused sardonic expression as if, now that important business had been dealt with, other matters could be considered.

“Well,” said Thifer, “did you locate your ghosts?”

Magnus Ridolph raised his fine white eyebrows. “Ghosts? I don’t understand you.”

“You said once that you thought ghosts might be responsible for the disappearances.”

“I fear you misinterpreted my words. I spoke on a level of abstraction you plainly did not comprehend. In reply to your question I saw no ghosts.”

“See anything at all?”

“I noticed that leaves were missing from some of the trees at C and D. Do you know why this should be?”

Thifer, with a sly wink at Smitz, the foreman, who sat watching Magnus Ridolph with an open smile, said, “Nope. Maybe when the boys disappeared they took the leaves with ’em for souvenirs.”

“You may have hit on the correct answer,” said Magnus Ridolph evenly. “Some sort of explanation exists. Hm—there are no other planets in the system?”