He began kicking and squirming like a mad dancer.
In the midst of his struggles, his heel struck on something and started him spinning, head over heels. It was the ship. The combined gravities of the ship and his own body had brought them together again, and he was revolving about the heavier object in a close orbit, and he was turning end for end, now.
Marcius could not feel the motion. It seemed as if the universe were turning about his stationary body, rising at his head and setting at his feet.
He saw the ship then, but it was no longer a ship. It dawned on him why the Plutonians had never ventured much nearer the sun, and why, after they had known all about him, they had let him go.
Receding from him, was a perfect sphere of liquid mercury, once the hard hull of a space ship, covered with a thin layer of water that had once been windows, with small pieces of solid material floating on the surface. It was only a natural law that it should revert to this form when deprived of the sub-temperatures of Pluto.
Yes, Marcius Kemble saw it all now, but too late. He remembered a demonstration he had seen when a child. A man had poured mercury into a mold and cooled it to near absolute zero. When withdrawn from the mold, it had been a little bell that gave a clear tone.
Why hadn't he thought of it before? The cold bodies of the Plutonians enabled them to handle such metals as he would handle steel! They made their ships and machines of such things as mercury and ice, and perhaps a few materials unknown to man, but all of a low melting point. Why should they do otherwise, when the extreme cold of Pluto made those things as hard as steel? It was even doubtful if they could produce enough heat to melt steel or even glass, or if they could produce a substance able to retain such fires.