The Call From Beyond

The Call From Beyond by Clifford D. Simak - Alone, accursed, he set out on the long, dark voyage to the forbidden gateway to worlds beyond life itself—restless forever with an ultimate knowledge, possessing which no man could die!

The pyramid was built of bottles, hundreds of bottles that flashed and glinted as if with living fire, picking up and breaking up the misty light that filtered from the distant sun and still more distant stars.

Frederick West took a slow step forward, away from the open port of his tiny ship. He shook his head and shut his eyes and opened them again and the pyramid was still there. So it was no figment, as he had feared, of his imagination, born in the darkness and the loneliness of his flight from Earth.

It was there and it was a crazy thing. Crazy because it should not be there, at all. There should be nothing here on this almost unknown slab of tumbling stone and metal.

For no one lived on Pluto's moon. No one ever visited Pluto's moon. Even he, himself, hadn't intended to until, circling it to have a look before going on to Pluto, he had seen that brief flash of light, as if someone might be signaling. It had been the pyramid, of course. He knew that now. The stacked-up bottles catching and reflecting light.

Behind the pyramid stood a space hut, squatted down among the jagged boulders. But there was no movement, no sign of life. No one was tumbling out of the entrance lock to welcome him. And that was strange, he thought. For visitors must be rare, if, indeed, they came at all.

Perhaps the pyramid really was a signaling device, although it would be a clumsy way of signaling. More likely a madman's caprice. Come to think of it, anyone who was sufficiently deranged to live on Pluto's moon would be a fitting architect for a pyramid of bottles.