There is no childhood as such. Flakes begin flaking three Earthling hours after they themselves have been shed.
They do not reach maturity, then deteriorate and die. They reach maturity and stay in full bloom, so to speak, for as long as Mercury cares to sing.
There is no way in which one creature can harm another, and no motive for one’s harming another.
Hunger, envy, ambition, fear, indignation, religion, and sexual lust are irrelevant and unknown.
The creatures have only one sense: touch.
They have weak powers of telepathy. The messages they are capable of transmitting and receiving are almost as monotonous as the song of Mercury. They have only two possible messages. The first is an automatic response to the second, and the second is an automatic response to the first.
The first is, “Here I am, here I am, here I am.”
The second is, “So glad you are, so glad you are, so glad you are.”
There is one last characteristic of the creatures that has not been explained on utilitarian grounds: the creatures seem to like to arrange themselves in striking patterns on the phosphorescent walls.
Though blind and indifferent to anyone’s watching, they often arrange themselves so as to present a regular and dazzling pattern of jonquil-yellow and vivid aquamarine diamonds. The yellow comes from the bare cave walls. The aquamarine is the light of the walls filtered through the bodies of the creatures.
Because of their love for music and their willingness to deploy themselves in the service of beauty, the creatures are given a lovely name by Earthlings.
They are called harmoniums.
Unk and Boaz came in for a landing on the dark side of Mercury, seventy-nine Earthling days out of Mars. They did not know that the planet on which they were landing was Mercury.
They thought the Sun was terrifyingly large —
But that didn’t keep them from thinking that they were landing on Earth.
They blacked out during the period of sharp deceleration. Now they were regaining consciousness — were being treated to a cruel and lovely illusion.
It seemed to Unk and Boaz that their ship was settling slowly among skyscrapers over which searchlights played.
“They aren’t shooting,” said Boaz. “Either the war’s over, or it ain’t begun.”
The merry beams of light they saw were not from searchlights. The beams came from tall crystals on the borderline between the light and dark hemispheres of Mercury. Those crystals were catching beams from the sun, were bending them prismatically, playing them over the dark side. Other crystals on the dark side caught the beams and passed them on.
It was easy to believe that the searchlights were playing over a sophisticated civilization indeed. It was easy to mistake the dense forest of giant blue-white crystals for skyscrapers, stupendous and beautiful.
Unk, standing at a porthole, wept quietly. He was weeping for love, for family, for friendship, for truth, for civilization. The things he wept for were all abstractions, since his memory could furnish few faces or artifacts with which his imagination might fashion a passion play. Names rattled in his head like dry bones. Stony Stevenson, a friend . . . Bee, a wife . . . Chrono, a son . . . Unk, a father . . .
The name Malachi Constant came to him, and he didn’t know what to do with it.
Unk lapsed into a blank reverie, a blank respect for the splendid people and the splendid lives that had produced the majestic buildings that the searchlights swept. Here, surely, faceless families and faceless friends and nameless hopes could flourish like —
An apt image for flourishing eluded Unk.
He imagined a remarkable fountain, a cone described by descending bowls of increasing diameters. It wouldn’t do. The fountain was bone dry, filled with the ruins of birds’ nests. Unk’s fingertips tingled, as though abraded by a climb up the dry bowls.
The image wouldn’t do.
Unk imagined again the three beautiful girls who had beckoned him to come down the oily bore of his Mauser rifle.
“Man!” said Boaz, “everybody asleep — but not for long!” He cooed, and his eyes flashed. “When old Boaz and old Unk hits town,” he said, “everybody going to wake up and stay woke up for weeks on end!”