First Lensman by E. E. Smith (epub e ink reader .TXT) 📕

“Thanks, Willoughby. I’ll remember that.”

Samms had not been entirely frank with the private captain. From the time required to make the trip, he knew to within a few parsecs Trenco’s distance from Sol. He did not know the direction, since the distance was so great that he had not been able to recognize any star or constellation. He did know, however, the course upon which the vessel then was, and he would know courses and distances from then on. He was well content.

A couple of uneventful days passed. Samms was again called into the control room, to see that the ship was approaching a three-sun solar system.

“This where we’re going to land?” he asked, indifferently.

“We ain’t going to land,” Willoughby told him. “You are going to take the broadleaf down in your boat, close enough so that you can parachute it down to where it has to go. Way ’nuff, pilot, go inert and match intrinsics. Now, Olmstead, watch. You’ve seen systems like this before?”

“No, but I know about them. Those two suns over there are a hell of a lot bigger and further away than they look, and this one here, much smaller, is in the Trojan position. Have those big suns got any planets?”

“Five or six apiece, they say; all hotter and dryer than the brazen hinges of hell. This sun here has seven, but Number Two⁠—‘Cavenda,’ they call it⁠—is the only Tellurian planet in the system. The first thing we look for is a big, diamond-shaped continent⁠ ⁠… there’s only one of that shape⁠ ⁠… there it is, over there. Notice that one end is bigger than the other⁠—that end is north. Strike a line to split the continent in two and measure from the north end one-third of the length of the line. That’s the point we’re diving at now⁠ ⁠… see that crater?”

“Yes.” The Virgin Queen, although still hundreds of miles up, was slowing rapidly. “It must be a big one.”

“It’s a good fifty miles across. Go down until you’re dead sure that the box will land somewhere inside the rim of that crater. Then dump it. The parachute and the sender are automatic. Understand?”

“Yes, sir; I understand,” and Samms took off.

He was vastly more interested in the stars, however, than in delivering the broadleaf. The constellation directly beyond Sol from wherever he was might be recognizable. Its shape would be smaller and more or less distorted; its smaller stars, brilliant to Earthly eyes only because of their nearness, would be dimmer, perhaps invisible; the picture would be further confused by intervening, nearby, brilliant strangers; but such giants as Canopus and Rigel and Betelgeuse and Deneb would certainly be highly visible if he could only recognize them. From Trenco his search had failed; but he was still trying.

There was something vaguely familiar! Sweating with the mental effort, he blocked out the too-near, too-bright stars and studied intensively those that were left. A blue-white and a red were most prominent. Rigel and Betelgeuse? Could that constellation be Orion? The Belt was very faint, but it was there. Then Sirius ought to be about there, and Pollux about there; and, at this distance, about equally bright. They were. Aldebaran would be orange, and about one magnitude brighter than Pollux; and Capella would be yellow, and half a magnitude brighter still. There they were! Not too close to where they should be, but close enough⁠—it was Orion! And this thionite way-station, then, was somewhere near right ascension seventeen hours and declination plus ten degrees!

He returned to the Virgin Queen. She blasted off. Samms asked very few questions and Willoughby volunteered very little information; nevertheless the First Lensman learned more than anyone of his fellow pirates would have believed possible. Aloof, taciturn, disinterested to a degree, he seemed to spend practically all of his time in his cabin when he was not actually at work; but he kept his eyes and his ears wide open. And Virgil Samms, as has been intimated, had a brain.

The Virgin Queen made a quick flit from Cavenda to Vegia, arriving exactly on time; a proud, clean spaceship as high above suspicion as Calpurnia herself. Samms unloaded her cargo; replaced it with one for Earth. She was serviced. She made a fast, eventless run to Tellus. She docked at New York Spaceport. Virgil Samms walked unconcernedly into an ordinary-looking restroom; George Olmstead, fully informed, walked unconcernedly out.

As soon as he could, Samms Lensed Northrop and Jack Kinnison.

“We lined up a thousand and one signals, sir,” Northrop reported for the pair, “but only one of them carried a message, and it didn’t make sense.”

“Why not?” Samms asked, sharply. “With a Lens, any kind of a message, however garbled, coded, or interrupted, makes sense.”

“Oh, we understood what it said,” Jack came in, “but it didn’t say enough. Just ‘ready⁠—ready⁠—ready’; over and over.”

“What!” Samms exclaimed, and the boys could feel his mind work. “Did that signal, by any chance, originate anywhere near seventeen hours and plus ten degrees?”

“Very near. Why? How did you know?”

“Then it does make sense!” Samms exclaimed, and called a general conference of Lensmen.

“Keep working along these same lines,” Samms directed, finally. “Keep Ray Olmstead in the Hill in my place. I am going to Pluto, and⁠—I hope⁠—to Palain Seven.”

Roderick Kinnison of course protested; but, equally of course, his protests were overruled.

Pluto is, on the average, about forty times as far away from the sun as is Mother Earth. Each square yard of Earth’s surface receives about sixteen hundred times as much heat as does each of Pluto’s. The sun as seen from Pluto is a dim, wan speck. Even at perihelion, an event which occurs only once in two hundred forty eight Tellurian years, and at noon and on the equator, Pluto is so bitterly cold that climatic conditions upon its surface simply cannot be described by or to warm-blooded, oxygen-breathing man.

As good an indication as any can be given, perhaps, by mentioning the