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 theillimitable desolation of the plain glowed a weird green in the dyingNeptune-light. Above it, grim and black, towered the west wall of thegreat Temple of Triton. The evening gale had drifted the snow highagainst its east wall, but here, in its lee, the ground was bare. Thefaint light struck sparks of color from the gravel, the stones, theboulders—gravel that was ruby and sapphire, stones that were giantmoissonites, boulders that were titanic diamonds. The Wolf Cub restedon 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 beendead for untold ages, that the builders of its Temple had perishedincalculably long ago, that nothing would ever live here again. WolfLarsen knew better. In a few hours, it would be dawn, and the strangelife of Triton would revive. That was the reason for his haste.
The job had taken longer than he had expected. The Temple was built ofcyclopean 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 onewould ever know how many generations it had taken the Tritonians, withtheir primitive technique, to hew those innumerable blocks. Nor didthe Tritonians themselves know for how long they had worshiped at thatfane. Most authorities agreed that it must have been old before thePyramids 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 giganticblock of bort. With that door, Larsen had been struggling ever sincethe evening gale died down. It had proved harder to blast a holethrough the bort than he had anticipated. And its thickness had amazedhim. 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 thatplanet, and the Temple was built directly beneath it. While Larsentoiled, the slender crescent of the primary had broadened to thefull, ten times brighter than earth's moon, and now was dwindlingonce more. Larsen had not slept for over sixty hours; and despite hisvacuum-walled, electrically heated space-suit, he was chilled to thebone, his hands numbed with a cold but a few degrees above absolutezero.
Not in twenty years in the mines of Mercury had he toiled as he haddone 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. Finallyhe had exploded the mixture with a micro-wave, and cleared out theshattered bort. Where the tough stuff had merely crackled, he had priedit out with a crowbar, until the bar, brittle with cold, had snappedshort. But now the worst of his task was finished. At long last, he hadholed through the door.
Larsen emerged from the Wolf Cub carrying his oxy-hydrogen cuttingtorch, a heavy load even in the ligh