HALF AROUND PLUTO
BY MANLY WADE WELLMAN
Pluto was a coffin world, airless,
utterly cold. And they had ten days to
reach Base Camp, ten thousand miles away.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of If Science Fiction, December 1958.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Their glassite space helmets fogged, and their metal glove joints stiffened in the incredible surface cold: but the two men who could work finished their job. In the black sky glistened the little arclight of the sun, a sixteen-hundredth of the blaze that fell on Earth. Around them sulked Pluto's crags and gullies, sheathed with the hard-frozen pallor that had been Pluto's atmosphere, eons ago.
From the wrecked cylinder of the scout rocket they had dragged two interior girders, ready-curved at the ends. These, clamped side by side with transverse brackets and decked with bulkhead metal, managed to look like a sled.
