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Title: Treasure of Triton

Author: Charles A. Baker

Release Date: April 19, 2020 [EBook #61872]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TREASURE OF TRITON ***




Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

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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