and . . . ”
“Encouraging, huh?” Seaton broke in. “If such a dyed-in-the-wool pessimist as you are
can permit himself to use such a word as that, we’re practically landed on a planet right
now!”
“And shows the same types and varieties of stellar spectra,” Crane went on,
unperturbed. “I have identified with certainty no less than six white dwarf stars, and some
forty yellow dwarfs of type G.”
“Fine! What did I tell you?” exulted Seaton.
“Now go over that again, in English, so that Peggy and I can feel relieved about it, too,”
Dorothy directed. “What’s a type-O dwarf?”
“A sun like our own Sol, back home,” Seaton explained. “Since we are looking for a
planet as much as possible like our own Earth, it is a distinctly cheerful fact to find so
many suns similar to our own. And as for the white dwarfs, I’ve got to have one fairly
close to the planet we land on, because to get in touch with Rovol I’ve got to have a
sixth-order projector; to build which I’ve first got to have one of the fifth order; for the
construction of which I’ve got to have neutronium; to get which I’ll have to be close to a
white dwarf star. See?”
“Uh-huh! Clear and lucid to the point of limpidity not.” Dorothy grimaced, then went on:
“As for me, I’m certainly glad to see those stars. It seems that we’ve been out there in
absolutely empty space for ages, and I’ve been scared a pale lavender all the time.
Having all these nice stars around us again is the next-best thing to being on solid
ground.”
At the edge of the strange galaxy though they were, many days were required to reduce
the intergalactic pace of the vessel to a value at which maneuvering was possible, and
many more days passed into time before Crane announced the discovery of a sun which
not only possessed a family of planets, but was also within the specified distance of a
white dwarf star.
To any Earthly astronomer, whose most powerful optical instruments fail to reveal even
the closest star as anything save a dimensionless point of light, such a discovery would
have been impossible, but Crane was not working with Earthly instruments. For the
fourth-order projector, although utterly useless at the intergalactic distances with which
Seaton was principally concerned, was vastly more powerful than any conceivable
telescope.
Driven by the full power of a disintegrating uranium bar, it could hold a projection so
steadily at a distance of twenty light-years that a man could manipulate a welding arc as
surely as though it was upon a bench before him which, in effect, it was-and in cases in
which delicacy of control was not an object, such as the present quest for such vast
masses as planets, the projector was effective over distances of many hundreds of light-
years.
Thus it came about that the search for a planetiferous sun near a white dwarf star was
not unduly prolonged, and Skylark Two tore through the empty ether toward it.
Close enough so that the projector could reveal details, Seaton drove projections of all
four voyagers down into the atmosphere of the first planet at hand. That atmosphere
was heavy and of a pronounced greenish-yellow cast, and through it that fervent sun
poured down a flood of lurid light upon a peculiarly dead and barren ground-but yet a
ground upon which grew isolated clumps of a livid and monstrous vegetation.
“Of course detailed analysis at this distance is impossible, but what do you make of it,
Dick?” asked Crane. “In all our travels, this is only the second time we have encountered
such an atmosphere.”
“Yes; and that’s exactly twice too many.” Seaton, at the spectroscope, was scowling in
thought. “Chlorin, all right, with some fluorin and strong traces of oxide of nitrogen,
nitrosyl chloride, and so on-just about like that one we saw in our own galaxy that time. I
thought then and have thought ever since that there was something decidedly fishy about
that planet, and I think there’s something equally screwy about this one.”
“Well, let’s not investigate it any further, then,” put in Dorothy. “Let’s go somewhere else,
quick.”
“Yes, let’s,” Margaret agreed, “particularly if, as you said about that other one, it has a
form of life on it that would make our grandfathers’ whiskers curl up into a ball.”
“We’ll do that little thing; we haven’t got Three’s equipment now, and without it I’m no
keener on smelling around this planet than you are,” and he flipped the projection across
a few hundred million miles of space to the neighboring planet. Its air, while somewhat
murky and smoky, was colorless and apparently normal, its oceans were composed of
water, and its vegetation was green. “See, Mart? I told you something was fishy. It’s all
wrong-a thing like that can’t happen even once, let alone twice.”
“According to the accepted principles of cosmogony it is of course to be expected that all
the planets of the same sun would have atmospheres of somewhat similar composition,”
Crane conceded, unmoved. “However, since we have observed two cases of this kind, it
is quite evident that there are not only many more suns having planets than has been
supposed, but also that suns capture planets from each other, at least occasionally.”
“Maybe-that would explain it, of course. But let’s see what this world looks like—-see if
we can find a place to sit down on. It’ll be nice to live on solid ground while I do my stuff.”
He swung the viewpoint slowly across the daylight side of the strange planet, whose
surface, like that of Earth, was partially obscured by occasional masses of cloud. Much
of that surface was covered by mighty oceans, and what little land there was seemed
strangely flat and entirely devoid of topographical features.
The immaterial conveyance dropped straight down upon the largest visible mass of land,
down through a towering jungle of fernlike and bamboolike plants, halting only a few feet
above the ground. Solid ground it certainly was not, nor did it resemble the watery muck
of our Earthly swamps. The huge stems of the vegetation rose starkly from a black and
seething field of viscous mud-mud unrelieved by any accumulation of humus or of debris-
and in that mud there swam, crawled, and slithered teeming hordes of animals.
“What funny-looking mud-puppies!” Dorothy exclaimed. “And isn’t that the thickest,
dirtiest, gooiest mud you ever saw?”
“Just about,” Seaton agreed, intensely interested. “But those things seem perfectly
adapted to it. Flat, beaver tails; short, strong legs with webbed feet; long, narrow heads
with rooting noses, like pigs; and heavy, sharp incisor teeth. Bet they live on those ferns
and stuff that’s why there’s no underbrush or dead stuff. Look at that bunch working on
the roots of that big bamboo over there. They’ll have it down in a minute-there she goes!”
The great trunk fell with a crash as he spoke, and was almost instantly forced beneath
the repellant surface by the weight of the massed “mud-puppies” who flung themselves
upon it.
“Ah, I thought so!” Crane remarked. “Their molar teeth do not match their incisors, being
quite Titanotheric in type. Probably they can assimulate lignin and cellulose instead of
requiring our usual nutrient carbohydrates. However, this terrain does not seem to be at
all suitable for our purpose.”
“I’ll say it doesn’t. I’ll scout around and see if we can’t find some high land somewhere,
but I’ve got a hunch that we won’t care for that, either. This murky air and the strong
absorption lines of SO2 seem to whisper in my ear that we’ll find some plenty hot and
plenty sulphurous volcanoes when we find the mountains.”
A few large islands or small continents of high and solid land were found at last, but they
were without exception volcanic. Nor were those volcanoes quiescent. Each was in
constant and furious eruption; not the sporadic and comparatively mild outbursts of
violence which we of green Terra know, but the uninterrupted, world-shaking cataclysmic
paroxysms of primeval forces embattled-an inexhaustible supply of cold water striving to
quench a world-filling core of incandescent magma. Each conical peak and rugged vent
where once a cone had been spouted incredible columns of steam, of smoke, of dust, of
molten and vaporized rock, and of noxious vapor. Each volcano was working steadily and
industriously at its appointed task of building up a habitable world.
“Well, I don’t see any place around here either fit to live in or solid enough to anchor an
observatory onto,” Seaton concluded, after he had surveyed the entire surface of the
globe. “I think we’d better flit across to the next one, don’t you, folks?”
Suiting action to word, he shot the beam to the next nearest planet, which chanced to be
the one whose orbit was nearest the blazing sun, and a mere glance showed that it