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.