Fats was undoing my head strap. It stuck and skin came away. “Rise and shine, bub. Time’s awastin’.”
A croak was all I managed. The skinny one was unwrapping me. My legs sagged apart and hurt. “Get up!”
I tried and didn’t make it. Skinny grabbed one of my legs and started to knead it.
I screamed.
“Here, lemme do that,” said Fatty. “I used to be a trainer.”
Fats did know something about it. I gasped when his thumbs dug into my calves and he stopped. “Too rough?” I couldn’t answer. He went on massaging me and said almost jovially, “Five days at eight gravities ain’t no joy ride. But you’ll be okay. Got the needle, Tim?”
The skinny one jabbed me in my left thigh. I hardly felt it. Fats pulled me to a sitting position and handed me a cup. I thought it was water; it wasn’t and I choked and sprayed. Fats waited, then gave it to me again. “Drink some, this time.” I did.
“Okay, up on your feet. Vacation is over.”
The floor swayed and I had to grab him until it stopped. “Where are we?” I said hoarsely.
Fats grinned, as if he knew an enormously funny joke. “Pluto, of course. Lovely place, Pluto. A summer resort.”
“Shaddap. Get him moving.”
“Shake it up, kid. You don’t want to keep him waiting.”
Pluto! It couldn’t be; nobody could get that far. Why, they hadn’t even attempted Jupiter’s moons yet. Pluto was so much farther that.
My brain wasn’t working. The experience just past had shaken me so badly that I couldn’t accept the fact that the experience itself proved that I was wrong.
But Pluto!
I wasn’t given time to wonder; we got into space suits. Although I hadn’t known, Oscar was there, and I was so glad to see him that I forgot everything else. He hadn’t been racked, just tossed on the floor. I bent down (discovering charley horses in every muscle) and checked him. He didn’t seem hurt.
“Get in it,” Fats ordered. “Quit fiddlin’.”
“All right,” I answered almost cheerfully. Then I hesitated. “Say-I haven’t any air.”
“Take another look,” said Fats. I looked. Charged oxy-helium bottles were on the backpack. “Although,” he continued, “if we didn’t have orders from him, I wouldn’t give you a whiff of Limburger. You made us for two bottles-and a rock hammer-and a line that cost four ninety-five, earthside. Sometime,” he stated without rancor, “I’m gonna take it out of your hide.”
“Shaddap,” said Skinny. “Get going.”
I spread Oscar open, wriggled in, clipped on the blood-color reader, and zipped the gaskets. Then I stood up, clamped my helmet, and felt better just to be inside. “Tight?”
(“Tight!” Oscar agreed.)
“We’re a long way from home.”
(“But we got air! Chin up, pal.”)
Which reminded me to check the chin valve. Everything was working. My knife was gone and so were the hammer and line, but those were incidentals. We were tight.
I followed Skinny out with Fats behind me. We passed Wormface in the corridor-or a wormface-but while I shuddered, I had Oscar around me and felt that he couldn’t get at me. Another creature joined us in the air lock and I had to look twice to realize that it was a wormface in a space suit. The material was smooth and did not bulge the way ours did. It looked like a dead tree trunk with bare branches and heavy roots, but the supreme improvement was its “helmet”-a glassy smooth dome. One-way glass, I suppose; I couldn’t see in. Cased that way, a wormface was grotesquely ridiculous rather than terrifying. But I stood no closer than I had to.
Pressure was dropping and I was busy wasting air to keep from swelling up. It reminded me of what I wanted most to know: what had happened to Peewee and the Mother Thing. So I keyed my radio and announced: “Radio check. Alfa, Bravo, Coca-”
“Shaddap that nonsense. We want you, we’ll tell you.”
The outer door opened and I had my first view of Pluto.
I don’t know what I expected. Pluto is so far out that they can’t get decent photographs even at Luna Observatory. I had read articles in the Scientific American and seen pictures in LIFE, bonestelled to look like photographs, and remembered that it was approaching its summer-if “summer” is the word for warm enough to melt air. I recalled that because they had announced that Pluto was showing an atmosphere as it got closer to the Sun.