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!”
The ship was being controlled skillfully by its pilot-navigator. The equipment was talking nervously to itself – cycling, whirring, clicking, buzzing. It was sensing and avoiding hazards to the sides, seeking an ideal landing place below.
The designers of the pilot-navigator had purposely obsessed the equipment with one idea – and that idea was to seek shelter for the precious troops and materiel it was supposed to be carrying. The pilot-navigator was to set the precious troops and materiel down in the deepest hole it could find. The assumption was that the landing would be in the face of hostile fire.
Twenty Earthling minutes later, the pilot-navigator was still talking to itself – finding as much to talk about as ever.
And the ship was still falling, and falling fast.
The seeming searchlights and skyscrapers outside were no longer to be seen. There was only inky blackness.
Inside the ship, there was silence of a hardly lighter shade. Unk and Boaz sensed what was happening to them – found what was happening unspeakable.
They sensed correctly that they were being buried alive.
The ship lurched suddenly, throwing Boaz and Unk to the floor.
The violence brought violent relief.
“Home at last,” yelled Boaz. “Welcome home!”
Then the ghastly feeling of the leaf-like fall began again.
Twenty Earthling minutes later, the ship was still falling gently.
Its lurches were more frequent.
To protect themselves against the lurches, Boaz and Unk had gone to bed. They lay face down, their hands gripping the steel pipe supports of their bunks.
To make their misery complete, the pilot-navigator decreed that night should fall in the cabin.
A grinding noise passed over the dome of the ship, forced Unk and Boaz to turn their eyes from their pillows to the portholes. There was a pale yellow light outside now.
Unk and Boaz shouted for joy, ran to the portholes. They reached them just in time to be thrown to the floor again as the ship freed itself from an obstruction, began its fall again.
One Earthling minute later, the fall stopped.
There was a modest click from the pilot-navigator. Having delivered its cargo safely from Mars to Mercury, as instructed, it had shut itself off.
It had delivered its cargo to the floor of a cave one hundred and sixteen miles below the surface of Mercury. It had threaded its way down through a tortuous system of chimneys until it could go no deeper.
Boaz was the first to reach a porthole, to look out and see the gay welcome of yellow and aquamarine diamonds the harmoniums had made on the walls.
“Unk!” said Boaz. “God damn if it didn’t go and set us down right in the middle of a Hollywood night club!”
A recapitulation of Schliemann breathing techniques is in order at this point, in order that what happened next can be fully understood. Unk and Boaz, in their pressurized cabin, had been getting their oxygen from goofballs in their small intestines. But, living in an atmosphere under pressure, there was no need for them to plug their ears and nostrils, and keep their mouths shut tight. This sealing off was necessary only in a vacuum or in a poisonous atmosphere.
Boaz was under the impression that outside the space ship was the wholesome atmosphere of his native Earth.
Actually, there was nothing out there but a vacuum. Boaz threw open both the inner and outer doors of the airlock with a grand carelessness predicated on a friendly atmosphere outside.
He was rewarded with the explosion of the small atmosphere of the cabin into the vacuum outside.
He slammed shut the inner door, but not before he and Unk had hemorrhaged in the act of shouting for joy.
They collapsed, their respiratory systems bleeding profusely.
All that saved them from death was a fully automatic emergency system that answered the explosion with another, bringing the pressure of the cabin up to normal again.
“Mama,” said Boaz, as he came to. “God damn, Mama – this sure as hell ain’t Earth.”
Unk and Boaz did not panic.
They restored their strength with food, rest, drink, and goofballs.
And they then plugged their ears and nostrils, shut their mouths, and explored the neighborhood of the ship. They determined that their tomb was deep, tortuous, endless – airless, uninhabited by anything remotely human, and uninhabitable by anything remotely human.
They noted the presence of the harmoniums, but could find nothing encouraging in the presence of the creatures there. The creatures seemed ghastly.
Unk and Boaz didn’t really believe they were in such a place. Not believing it was the thing that saved them from panic.
They returned to their ship.
“O.K.,” said Boaz calmly, “there has been some mistake. We have wound up too deep in the ground. We got to fly back on up to where them buildings are. I tell you frankly Unk, it don’t seem like to me this is even Earth we’re in. There’s been some mistake, like I say, and we got to ask the folks in the buildings where we are.”
“O.K.,” said Unk. He licked his lips.
“Just push that old on button,” said Boaz, “and up we fly like a bird.”
“O.K.,” said Unk.
“I mean,” said Boaz, “up there, the folks in the buildings may not even know about all this down here. Maybe we discovered something they’ll be just amazed about.”
“Sure,” said Unk. His soul felt the pressure of the miles of rock above. And his soul felt the true nature of their predicament. On all sides and overhead were passages that branched and branched and branched. And the branches forked to twigs, and the twigs forked to passages no larger than a human pore.
Unk’s soul was right in feeling that not one branch in ten thousand led all the way to the surface.