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Title: Treasure of Triton
Author: Charles A. Baker
Release Date: April 19, 2020 [EBook #61872]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TREASURE OF TRITON ***
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TREASURE OF TRITON
By CHARLES A. BAKER
The Space Patrol and the terrible guards of
Triton pursued Wolf Larsen. But the black pirate
had two aces in the hole--creation's richest
prize, and a ray-death route to freedom.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Spring 1941.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Triton was a dead world. The hydrogen snow that covered the
illimitable desolation of the plain glowed a weird green in the dying
Neptune-light. Above it, grim and black, towered the west wall of the
great Temple of Triton. The evening gale had drifted the snow high
against its east wall, but here, in its lee, the ground was bare. The
faint light struck sparks of color from the gravel, the stones, the
boulders--gravel that was ruby and sapphire, stones that were giant
moissonites, boulders that were titanic diamonds. The _Wolf Cub_ rested
on that gravel, its beryllium sides a sickly green. In all that world,
only Wolf Larsen lived and moved and breathed.
An alien might have correctly supposed that this world had been
dead for untold ages, that the builders of its Temple had perished
incalculably long ago, that nothing would ever live here again. Wolf
Larsen knew better. In a few hours, it would be dawn, and the strange
life of Triton would revive. That was the reason for his haste.
The job had taken longer than he had expected. The Temple was built of
cyclopean blocks of bort--black diamond, the hardest of all substances.
The life-span of a Tritonian is ten times that of a human, but no one
would ever know how many generations it had taken the Tritonians, with
their primitive technique, to hew those innumerable blocks. Nor did
the Tritonians themselves know for how long they had worshiped at that
fane. Most authorities agreed that it must have been old before the
Pyramids of Egypt were begun.
The Temple was windowless, and had only one door, some six feet square.
Set in the middle of the west face, it was hewn from a single gigantic
block of bort. With that door, Larsen had been struggling ever since
the evening gale died down. It had proved harder to blast a hole
through the bort than he had anticipated. And its thickness had amazed
him. He had been unable to get at its lock; if, indeed, it had a lock.
In fact, he might as well have tried to blast through the wall itself.
Triton, Neptune's moon, keeps one face always turned toward that
planet, and the Temple was built directly beneath it. While Larsen
toiled, the slender crescent of the primary had broadened to the
full, ten times brighter than earth's moon, and now was dwindling
once more. Larsen had not slept for over sixty hours; and despite his
vacuum-walled, electrically heated space-suit, he was chilled to the
bone, his hands numbed with a cold but a few degrees above absolute
zero.
Not in twenty years in the mines of Mercury had he toiled as he had
done in those sixty hours. First, he had burned holes in the bort.
Then he had filled them with cartridges of the fine hydrogen snow,
intimately mixed with solid oxygen pulverized equally fine. Finally
he had exploded the mixture with a micro-wave, and cleared out the
shattered bort. Where the tough stuff had merely crackled, he had pried
it out with a crowbar, until the bar, brittle with cold, had snapped
short. But now the worst of his task was finished. At long last, he had
holed through the door.
Larsen emerged from the _Wolf Cub_ carrying his oxy-hydrogen cutting
torch, a heavy load even in the light gravity of Triton. A star of
blue light flared from it, and snowflakes dropped from the star, as
the products of its combustion condensed in the cold. If he once
extinguished that torch, its fuel would freeze solid, and there would
be no lighting it again.
For all his weariness, and for all the cold, a fierce exultation fired
him. His long planning, his months-long voyage through the void, were
about to bring fruit. The most priceless jewel in the solar system was
within his grasp.
Larsen had done many things for jewels. He had violated every law of
every world. He had killed more men than he himself could remember. He
had stolen meteoric diamonds from Mars, and rubies from Ganymede;
emeralds from Titan, and priceless moissonites from Oberon. And these
he had hidden well on a nameless asteroid, and they could stay there
till the end of time for all Larsen, or anyone else, cared.
By the time the Interplanetary Patrol caught up with him, and he served
a twenty-year term in the mines of Mercury, the spacemen had reached
Triton. And there they had found rubies and emeralds, diamonds and
moissonites and every gemstone known in the solar system, as common as
clay or lime on earth, and Larsen's carefully hidden jewels were worth
as much as so many pebbles.
* * * * *
At first, Larsen had come very near to killing himself, when he learned
that. But a scheme had come to him. There was the Eye of Triton, the
great stone which people of Neptune's moon had worshiped for untold
Neptunian ages. It was clearly unique on Triton, where all other gems
were so abundant. It must be unique in the system; certainly in its
historical value. What value the Tritonians themselves set on it could
be judged from the immense strength of the Temple they had built to
guard it. Tradition held that the Eye had dropped from the heavens; a
meteor, perhaps torn from the heart of Neptune; perhaps from another
system. Few humans had ever seen it, and those only from a distance,
and in the worst of lights. But they agreed that it was transparent
white, like a diamond. Moreover, it was set as the eye of a life-sized
statue of a Tritonian--and the eye of a Tritonian is upwards of five
inches in diameter.
A certain plutocrat of Cyrene had offered Larsen a cool million for the
Eye, even if it turned out to be nothing but a diamond. For a million,
you could buy everything that Cyrene had to offer and Cyrene, the
pleasure-dome on the far side of earth's moon, offered every pleasure
and every luxury that mankind had ever developed. Men could prolong
their lives, and their vigor, indefinitely nowadays if they could
afford to pay for all the resources of modern medicine. Best of all,
the I.P.P. had no jurisdiction in Cyrene, and the local authorities
never bothered any resident of the little planet provided he was
supplied with money enough.
It would be doubly pleasant to win such a fortune at the expense of
the Tritonians. To be sure, they had never been known to harm anyone.
But it was precisely such inoffensive beings that Larsen loathed and
despised most bitterly. Besides, he blamed them for the discovery of
the gems which had made his own valueless.
In any case, he had gone too far to back down now. Landing on
Triton without a license, as he had done, was itself a violation of
Interplanetary Law. Attempted violation of a Tritonian temple was a
serious offense. If the Patrol caught him, he would spend the rest of
his life in the mines of Mercury. And they would be sure to catch him
if he failed to get the Eye.
It wasn't like the good old days, when an outlaw could always keep
a million miles ahead of the Patrol. Now every port where he might
obtain supplies was too closely watched. Only Cyrene offered a place
of refuge, and there only to a man with plenty of money. Larsen smiled
grimly. Whatever happened, he was not going back to the mines. There
was always one very sure way of cheating the law!
He pushed the torch ahead of him through the hole, cautiously. Its
exhaust condensed to ice on the cold bort. A few projections of the
bort barred his way. Larsen turned up the torch, directed it on them.
The bort glowed yellow in the fierce heat, as the pure carbon burned,
which condensed to dry ice on his space-suit.
When those obstructions were gone, Larsen crawled past into the Temple,
and stood up. A thin powder of snow covered everything. The bluish
glare of the torch, reflected from it, suggested but faintly the
vastness of the place. Before him crouched a monstrous figure, human
sized, but lobster shaped, its head enormous, its dozen legs many
jointed. Many similar figures lay on the floor, as stiffly motionless,
each grasping a massive double-headed ax.
Larsen had to turn up his torch before he could be sure that the
crouching figure was indeed the idol he sought, and those others its
guardian priests, frozen in the death-like sleep of their kind. Not
till dawn could anything awaken them. Dawn, he knew, could not be far
off. But he reckoned that it would take some time for its reviving
warmth to penetrate the immense thickness of those walls.
Cautiously, he wiped the snow off the single enormous eye that
occupied the center of the idol's forehead. The eye flashed fire at
him; blue-white, transparent, lustrous as a diamond. It had been
cut, diamond fashion, in many facets, to resemble the many-lensed,
insect-like eyes of the Tritonians themselves. The eye was set in a
band of cement. Larsen tested that cement with a chisel. He cursed. It
was almost as hard as the bort from which the idol had been hewn. He
dared take no chances on scratching the Eye. He turned on his torch
full blast, and began to cut into the bort around the cement, careful
to keep the flame away from the Eye. Sudden heating might crack that
mysterious stone.
* * * * *
Larsen worked feverishly, forgetful of time, sweating despite the
chill, until he felt a draught on his back; a cold that bit through his
space-suit to his very marrow. Snowflakes were swirling around him.
The dawn-wind, blowing through the hole in the door! On Triton, the
hydrogen atmosphere froze every night.
From either side, winds rushed in to fill the vacuum, but themselves
froze before they had gone far.
The Eye seemed loose in its socket. Larsen turned down the torch.
Cautiously, he grasped the cement. The Eye came away in his hand. He
was used, by now, to the low gravity of Triton, but the lightness of
the stone surprised him. It seemed as light as pumice.
Larsen looked up just in time. The Tritonians were stirring! The wind,
so cold to him, was warm to them; it meant air to them. Those great
pale eyes--one to each Tritonian--were fixed on him, glaring with
a phosphorescent luster. There was no expression on their gargoyle
faces. Their cavernous mouths gaped open; toothless, but rimmed with
razor-sharp horn, like the jaws of a snapping turtle. The snow dropped
from them; their lobster-segmented shells were dull black, like the
bort of the statue. They were closing in on him. He could not tell
their numbers; behind those visible, more kept crowding out of the
shadows.
As the Tritonians neared him, he saw that they turned their heads away.
Those enormous eyes, adapted to the faint sunlight of Triton, could not
bear the glare of the torch. An ax rose over a helmeted head, grasped
by four tentacular arms. Larsen put down the Eye, and turned up the
torch, aiming it at the dragon's head, looming behind those arms. It
shriveled, turned from black to red. Its owner slumped to the floor,
its limbs still writhing feebly.
Larsen picked up the Eye again, and started for the door. He moved
deliberately, spraying death around him. The Tritonians could not face
the blazing heat of the torch, or its blinding glare. Some fled in
panic, some retired more slowly, some stood, as if bewildered, in his
very path, until he burned them out of it. At the door, he wheeled to
face them, turning down the torch. They started to close in again, and
he turned it up, sweeping them at close range. Half a dozen fell, the
others broke.
The torch was flickering now, as its fuel ran low. In frantic haste,
Larsen unsnapped its carrying strap, dropped it, and plunged into
the hole he had blasted. In utter blackness, he clawed through it,
expecting, every instant, to feel monstrous jaws or talons seize him
from behind. He emerged into the blinding white smother of the dawn
blizzard. Thin as the air was, the force of it hurled his light body
back against the door as he tried to rise. He dropped on all fours, and
crawled forward, dead into the freezing wind, the Eye still clutched in
one hand. The twenty yards to the _Wolf Cub_ seemed twenty miles; he
had about given up all hope when suddenly he bumped into it.
* * * * *
Larsen groped along its smooth side until he found the air-lock door.
As he opened it, the light inside went on automatically.
* * * * *
At that precise instant, steely arms wrapped themselves around him, a
monstrous face loomed over him, open-jawed. In a frenzy, Larsen thrust
out his right hand. Those jaws closed on his wrist. A blazing agony
shot up his arm. His own scream, echoing from his helmet, deafened
him. The pain was gone as abruptly as it had come. The face of the
Tritonian seemed to melt, to explode. Those arms went limp, the thing
collapsed like a punctured balloon.
There was no feeling at all in Larsens' hand now. Not daring to look
at it, he stumbled through the air-lock, into the cabin. Even now, he
was careful to put the Eye of Triton in the velvet-lined jewel-case
he had prepared for it, before strapping himself into his pilot's
seat. Awkwardly, with his left hand, he opened the throttle of the
rocket-tube, gave the _Wolf Cub_ three gravities acceleration. That was
agony to his weary body. But the warmth of the cabin offset the pain.
Gingerly, Larsen looked at his right hand. The glove had been torn
clean off it. It was dead white, swollen. The swelling, extending to
the wrist, had prevented much air escaping from his suit, before he
could get inside the cabin. The skin was covered with fine, bloodless
cracks, but the jaws of the Tritonian had never touched it. The
inconceivable cold had instantly frozen every drop of blood and lymph
in it, bursting every blood-vessel, every capillary, every cell. His
hand was dead. Presently, as it thawed, it would rot, turn black, and
drop off. Before that, he must get a tourniquet on it. On the other
hand, the warm air from his space-suit, escaping into the jaws of the
Tritonian, had been as fatal to it as the breath of a blast furnace
would have been to a human.
He had been lucky, after all. The surgeons of Cyrene could graft on
a new hand--for a price. And he would have that price! In fifteen
minutes, awkward with his left hand, Larsen had the _Wolf Cub_ on her
course to Luna, and could shut off his rocket-jet. His right arm was
beginning to throb, as the nerves thawed. It would give him hell, in
the months of voyaging before him, and he knew his slender stock of
drugs would never last. But, as he fixed the tourniquet, the thought of
his million was more soothing than any narcotic could have been.
Larsen unstrapped himself, and shoved over to the jewel case. He
blinked down at it incredulously. The charred ring of cement was there.
But it no longer enclosed the Eye of Triton. Instead, the case was half
filled with a transparent liquid. Larsen dipped a trembling finger into
it. It was cold.
He carried the finger to his lips. The walls of the tiny cabin echoed
to his mad laughter. The Eye of Triton, the one priceless gem on a
world of gems, had been a block of ice--the only ice on Triton. The
warmth of the cabin had melted it to water, worth exactly as much as
any other water.
Suddenly, Larsen realized that he was parched with a feverish thirst.
He lifted the jewel case to his lips, and drained it in one single
prodigious gulp. He had spent plenty of money on liquor before, he
reflected. But this must be the first time in history a man had drunk
up a million at one draught.
His arm hurt like fire now, the ache of it mingling with the ache of
his weary body, the ache of his sick brain. With his left hand, he
began to spin the handle of the Kingston valve. The last sound Wolf
Larsen heard was the hiss of the air, as it rushed out of the cabin.
That, and the laugh with which his last breath left his lungs.
There was always one sure way to cheat Interplanetary Law.
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