



                           HALF AROUND PLUTO

                         BY MANLY WADE WELLMAN

                  _Pluto was a coffin world, airless,
                utterly cold. And they had ten days to
              reach Base Camp, ten thousand miles away._

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
             Worlds of If Science Fiction, December 1958.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


Their glassite space helmets fogged, and their metal glove joints
stiffened in the incredible surface cold: but the two men who could
work finished their job. In the black sky glistened the little arclight
of the sun, a sixteen-hundredth of the blaze that fell on Earth. Around
them sulked Pluto's crags and gullies, sheathed with the hard-frozen
pallor that had been Pluto's atmosphere, eons ago.

From the wrecked cylinder of the scout rocket they had dragged two
interior girders, ready-