"Latent Image"
by WESLEY LONG
Illustrated by Orban
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Astounding Science-Fiction, May 1944.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
John McBride stood on the roof garden of Satan's Hotel, looking acrossthe River Styx at Sharon. To his left, the River Styx emptied into theSulphur Sea, and in the evening sky to his right, the dancing flameslighted the cloud banks over Mephisto, where the uranium smeltersworked on a nonstop plan.
John McBride was in Hell.
But Hell is a city on Pluto, where the planners had a free handbecause no intelligent life had ever scarred the planet until man camewith his machinery and his luxury and his seeking for metal. Uraniumhad been found in plenty on Pluto, and so man had created a livableplanet from the coldest, most forbidding planet in the System.
John McBride was in Hell, on Pluto, but his mind was dwelling in alittle cube that rotated about a mythical spot halfway between Soland Pluto; one of the many stations that created the space warp thatfocused Sol on Pluto with an angle of incidence equal to the incidenceof Sol on Terra. Enid McBride was back there in that minute station,and John McBride wanted to be with her.
But Dr. Caldwell, the resident doctor of the Plutonian Lens, said:"John, if you've got to go to Pluto, that's O.K. But you can't takeEnid with you. That's strictly out, with a capital 'O,' get me?"
"I suppose—"
"I've been doctoring for many years, John. It's safe for you to runoff for a week or so, but don't move Enid. Your kid won't be born fora month, yet, but if you subject her to the 4- or 5-G you need to getfrom here to Pluto, you'll have—not only the baby, but as nasty a messas you've ever seen! Take it from me, fella, 4-G is worse than a fallif you keep it up for hours. No dice!"
"O.K.," said John, unhappily. "She'll be all right?"
"Sure," said Caldwell. "Besides, all you can do now is to sit around,bite your fingernails, and ask foolish questions. If I had my way,you'd be away when the youngster is born, that'd save you from a lot ofuseless worry."
"That isn't fair."
"I know you feel that way. Enid does too. But it is still sort offutile. You want the right to worry; go ahead and worry. After all,there are enough people around the Lens that know you are worrying.She'll be all right, I tell you!"
"You'll let me know if anything turns up?"
"That's a promise, John."
So John McBride was standing on a roof garden in Hell, thinking howappropriate it was. He was in Hell, all right. Hell was a nice placeto be, warm, pleasant, and happily balanced. But it was no place tobe when your wife is nineteen hundred million miles away. Ah, well,another week of this and he would be racing homeward.
Home! That was funny, to consider home, a place in space where gravitywas furnished by an mechanogravitic warp, and where there were nowindows to open, and where you lived in a cube of steel three thousandfeet on a side, mostly filled with the items required for living plusthe maze of equipment required to maintain the great lens that gavePluto its sun.
Home! It was a far cry from his boyhood home on Venus, where thegreenery of the forest fought with the very walls. But home is whereyou like it, and McBride liked it.
He wished that he were there, for he felt that Enid needed him.
Then with that perversity of nature that people call fate, a bellho