Marcius Kemble looked fearfully around at the bleak, frozen landscape of Pluto, a cold Hell, hardly reached by the light of the sun. Then he began to laugh.
Marcius laughed into the little plastic world of his helmet and the sound roared back into his own ears, and he laughed louder. Tears streamed down over the contact lenses in his eyes and caused the white mountains to gesticulate and beckon to him.
He was beginning to see it all very clearly now. It wasn't his own laughter in his helmet. The white mountains were laughing at him, the stars and sun were laughing, and all the people of all the planets. It was all concentrated into his ears by the curve of his helmet.
They were spying on him to see what he would do, laughing because he could do nothing, their voices filling his head, asking who he was, what he was going to do now, mocking him. He would show them! Run to the laughing white mountains, cast them into an ocean, crush them beneath his feet! That would put them in their places! Do it now!
Marcius pulled himself to his feet. He knew that he had been running and had fallen, striking his helmet upon something hard, and that he had been laughing, crying and cursing at the same time. The reverberating blow had shocked him into silence. And he was remembering the words of the doctor who had cared for him, back on Mars.
The doctor had said, "You have a great mind, Sire, and a very strong will, but there are some flaws, as in all men. If you should know defeat, your only hope will be death. Living, your mind would refuse to give up, beating itself into insanity against a blank wall."
Now, Marcius knew what the doctor had meant. There were still the voices in his mind repeating over and over, "Who are you?—Who are you?" almost as if they were mocking the beating of his heart.
There was something strange about the voices, Marcius thought. It was as if there were some alien intelligence behind them. There were two of them, and they seemed to require an answer from him. It was with no great hope that he answered the voices by concentrating upon his name and present predicament.
The thoughts of Marcius Kemble did not go unheard. Unknown to the rest of the solar system, Pluto had its inhabitants. To Earth men, these would be very strange beings, not alone in appearance but in composition. Their heads were roughly triangular, widening upward from a pointed chin and resting on thin, yet strong, necks above equally strong and spindly man-like bodies. They were mainly composed of elements which became solid only at very low temperatures.