The planet Mercury sings like a crystal goblet.

It sings all the time.

One side of Mercury faces the Sun. That side has always faced the Sun. That side is a sea of white-hot dust.

The other side faces the nothingness of space eternal. That side has always faced the nothingness of space eternal. That side is a forest of giant blue-white crystals, aching cold.

It is the tension between the hot hemisphere of day-without-end and the cold hemisphere of nightwith-out-end that makes Mercury sing.

Mercury has no atmosphere, so the song it sings is for the sense of touch.

The song is a slow one. Mercury will hold a single note in the song for as long as an Earthling millennium. There are those who think that the song was quick, wild, and brilliant once — excruciatingly various. Possibly so.

There are creatures in the deep caves of Mercury.

The song their planet sings is important to them, for the creatures are nourished by vibrations. They feed on mechanical energy.

The creatures cling to the singing walls of their caves.

In that way, they eat the song of Mercury.

The caves of Mercury are cozily warm in their depths.

The walls of the caves in their depths are phosphorescent. They give off a jonquil-yellow light.

The creatures in the caves are translucent. When they cling to the walls, light from the phosphorescent walls comes right through them. The yellow light from the walls, however, is turned, when passed through the bodies of the creatures, to a vivid aquamarine.

Nature is a wonderful thing.

The creatures in the caves look very much like small and spineless kites. They are diamond-shaped, a foot high and eight inches wide when fully mature.

They have no more thickness than the skin of a toy balloon.

Each creature has four feeble suction cups — one at each of its corners. These cups enable it to creep, something like a measuring worm, and to cling, and to feel out the places where the song of Mercury is best.

Having found a place that promises a good meal, the creatures lay themselves against the wall like wet wallpaper.

There is no need for a circulatory system in the creatures. They are so thin that life-giving vibrations can make all their cells tingle without intermediaries.

The creatures do not excrete.

The creatures reproduce by flaking. The young, when shed by a parent, are indistinguishable from dandruff.

There is only one sex.

Every creature simply sheds flakes of his own kind, and his own kind is like everybody else’s kind.

There is no childhood as such. Flakes begin flaking three Earthling hours after they themselves have been shed.

They do not reach maturity, then deteriorate and die. They reach maturity and stay in full bloom, so to speak, for as long as Mercury cares to sing.

There is no way in which one creature can harm another, and no motive for one’s harming another.

Hunger, envy, ambition, fear, indignation, religion, and sexual lust are irrelevant and unknown.

The creatures have only one sense: touch.

They have weak powers of telepathy. The messages they are capable of transmitting and receiving are almost as monotonous as the song of Mercury. They have only two possible messages. The first is an automatic response to the second, and the second is an automatic reponse to the first.

The first is, “Here I am, here I am, here I am.”

The second is, “So glad you are, so glad you are, so glad you are.”

There is one last characteristic of the creatures that has not been explained on utilitarian grounds: the creaturesseem to like to arrange themselves in striking patterns on the phosphorescent walls.

Though blind and indifferent to anyone’s watching, they often arrange themselves so as to present a regular and dazzling pattern of jonquil-yellow and vivid aquamarine diamonds. The yellow comes from the bare cave walls. The aquamarine is the light of the walls filtered through the bodies of the creatures.

Because of their love for music and their willingness to deploy themselves in the service of beauty, the creatures are given a lovely name by Earthlings.

They are called harmoniums.

Unk and Boaz came in for a landing on the dark side of Mercury, seventy-nine Earthling days out of Mars. They did not know that the planet on which they were landing was Mercury.

They thought the Sun was terrifyingly large —

But that didn’t keep them from thinking that they were landing on Earth.

They blacked out during the period of sharp deceleration. Now they were regaining consciousness — were being treated to a cruel and lovely illusion.

It seemed to Unk and Boaz that their ship was settling slowly among skyscrapers over which searchlights played.

“They aren’t shooting,” said Boaz. “Either the war’s over, or it ain’t begun.”

The merry beams of light they saw were not from searchlights. The beams came from tall crystals on the borderline between the light and dark hemispheres of Mercury. Those crystals were catching beams from thesun, were bending them prismatically, playing them over the dark side. Other crystals on the dark side caught the beams and passed them on.

It was easy to believe that the searchlights were playing over a sophisticated civilization indeed. It was easy to mistake the dense forest of giant blue-white crystals for skyscrapers, stupendous and beautiful.

Unk, standing at a porthole, wept quietly. He was weeping for love, for family, for friendship, for truth, for civilization. The things he wept for were all abstractions, since his memory could furnish few faces or artifacts with which his imagination might fashion a passion play. Names rattled in his head like dry bones. Stony Stevenson, a friend … Bee, a wife … Chrono, a son … Unk, a father …

The name Malachi Constant came to him, and he didn’t know what to do with it.

Unk lapsed into a blank reverie, a blank respect for the splendid people and the splendid lives that had produced the majestic buildings that the searchlights swept. Here, surely, faceless families and faceless friends and nameless hopes could flourish like —

An apt image for flourishing eluded Unk.

He imagined a remarkable fountain, a cone described by descending bowls of increasing diameters. It wouldn’t do. The fountain was bone dry, filled with the ruins of birds’ nests. Unk’s fingertips tingled, as though abraded by a climb up the dry bowls.

The image wouldn’t do.

Unk imagined again the three beautiful girls who had beckoned him to come down the oily bore of his Mauser rifle.

“Man!” said Boaz, “everbody asleep — but not for long!” He cooed, and his eyes flashed. “When old Boaz and old Unk hits town,” he said, “everbody going to wake up and stay woke up for weeks on end!”

The ship was being controlled skillfully by its pilot-navigator. The equipment was talking nervously to itself — cycling, whirring, clicking, buzzing. It was sensing and avoiding hazards to the sides, seeking an ideal landing place below.

The designers of the pilot-navigator had purposely obsessed the equipment with one idea — and that idea was to seek shelter for the precious troops and matériel it was supposed to be carrying. The pilot-navigator was to set the precious troops and matériel down in the deepest hole it could find. The assumption was that the landing would be in the face of hostile fire.

Twenty Earthling minutes later, the pilot-navigator was stil talking to itself — finding as much to talk about as ever.

And the ship was still falling, and falling fast.

The seeming searchlights and skyscrapers outside were no longer to be seen. There was only inky blackness.

Inside the ship, there was silence of a hardly lighter shade. Unk and Boaz sensed what was happening to them — found what was happening unspeakable.

They sensed correctly that they were being buried alive.

The ship lurched suddenly, throwing Boaz and Unk to the floor.

The violence brought violent relief.

“Home at last,” yelled Boaz. “Welcome home!”

Then the ghastly feeling of the leaf-like fall began again.

Twenty Earthling minutes later, the ship was still falling gently.

Its lurches were more frequent.

To protect themselves against the lurches, Boaz and Unk had gone to bed. They lay face down, their hands gripping the steel pipe supports of their bunks.

To make their misery complete, the pilot-navigator decreed that night should fall in the cabin.

A grinding noise passed over the dome of the ship, forced Unk and Boaz to turn their eyes from their pillows to the portholes. There was a pale yellow light outside now.

Unk and Boaz shouted for joy, ran to the portholes. They reached them just in time to be thrown to the floor again as the ship freed itself from an obstruction, began its fall again.

One Earthling minute later, the fall stopped.

There was a modest click from the pilot-navigator. Having delivered its cargo safely from Mars to Mercury, as instructed, it had shut itself off.

It had delivered its cargo to the floor of a cave one hundred and sixteen miles below the surface of Mercury. It had threaded its way down through a tortuous system of chimneys until it could go no deeper.

Boaz was the first to reach a porthole, to look out and see the gay welcome of yellow and aquamarine diamonds the harmoniums had made on the walls.

“Unk!” said Boaz. “God damn if it didn’t go and set us down right in the middle of a Hollywood night club!”

A recapitulation of Schliemann breathing techniques is in order at this point, in order that what happened next can be fully understood. Unk and Boaz, in their pressurized cabin, had been getting their oxygen from goofballs in their small intestines. But, living in an atmosphere under pressure, there was no need for them to plug their ears and nostrils, and keep their mouths shut tight. This sealing off was necessary only in a vacuum or in a poisonous atmosphere.

Boaz was under the impression that outside the space ship was the wholesome atmosphere of his native Earth.

Actually, there was nothing out there but a vacuum. Boaz threw open both the inner and outer doors of the airlock with a grand carelessnes predicated on a friendly atmosphere outside.

He was rewarded with the explosion of the small atmosphere of the cabin into the vacuum outside.

He slammed shut the inner door, but not before he and Unk had hemorrhaged in the act of shouting for joy.

They collapsed, their respiratory systems bleeding profusely.

All that saved them from death was a fully automatic emergency system that answered the explosion with another, bringing the pressure of the cabin up to normal again.

“Mama,” said Boaz, as he came to. “God damn, Mama — this sure as hell ain’t Earth.”

Unk and Boaz did not panic.

They restored their strength with food, rest, drink, and goofballs.

And they then plugged their ears and nostrils, shut their mouths, and explored the neighborhood of the ship. They determined that their tomb was deep, tortuous, endless — airless, uninhabited by anything remotely human, and uninhabitable by anything remotely human.

They noted the presence of the harmoniums, but could find nothing encouraging in the presence of the creatures there. The creatures seemed ghastly.

Unk and Boaz didn’t really believe they were in such a place. Not believing it was the thing that saved them from panic.

They returned to their ship.

“O.K.,” said Boaz calmly, “there has been some mistake. We have wound up too deep in the ground. We got to fly back on up to where them buildings are. I tell you frankly Unk, it don’t seem like to me this is even Earth we’re in. There’s been some mistake, like I say, and we got to ask the folks in the buildings where we are.”

“O.K.,” said Unk. He licked his lips.

“Just push that old on button,” said Boaz, “and up we fly like a bird.”

“O.K.,” said Unk.

“I mean,” said Boaz, “up there, the folks in the buildings may not even know about all this down here. Maybe we discovered something they’ll be just amazed about.”

“Sure,” said Unk. His soul felt the pressure of the miles of rock above. And his soul felt the true nature of their predicament. On all sides and overhead were passages that branched and branched and branched. Andthe branches forked to twigs, and the twigs forked to passages no larger than a human pore.

Unk’s soul was right in feeling that not one branch in ten thousand led all the way to the surface.

The space ship, thanks to the brilliantly-conceived sensing gear on its bottom, had sensed its way easily down and down and down, through one of the very few ways in — down and down and down one of the very few ways out.

What Unk’s soul hadn’t suspected yet was the congenital stupidity of the pilot-navigator when it came to going up. It had never occurred to the designers that the ship might encounter problems in going up. All Martian ships, after all, were meant to take off from an unobstructed field on Mars, and to be abandoned after landing on Earth. Consequently, there was virtually no sensing equipment on the ship for hazards overhead.

“So long, old cave,” said Boaz.

Casually, Unk pressed the on button.

The pilot-navigator hummed.

In ten Earthling seconds, the pilot-navigator was warm.

The ship left the cave floor with whispering ease, touched a wall, dragged its rim up the wall with a grinding, tearing scream, bashed its dome on an overhead projection, backed off, bashed its dome again, backed off, grazed the projection, climbed whisperingly again. Then came the grinding scream again — this time from all sides.

All upward motion had stopped.

The ship was wedged in solid rock.

The pilot-navigator whimpered.

It sent a wisp of mustard-colored smoke up through the floor-boards of the cabin.

The pilot-navigator stopped whimpering.

It had overheated, and overheating was a signal for the pilot-navigator to extricate the ship from a hopeless mess. This it proceeded to do — grindingly. Steel members groaned. Rivets snapped like rifle shots.

At last the ship was free.

The pilot-navigator knew when it was licked. It flew the ship back down to the cave floor, landing with a kiss.

The pilot-navigator shut itself off.

Unk pushed the on button again.

Again the ship blundered up into a blind passage, again retreated, again settled to the floor and shut itself off.

The cycle was repeated a dozen times, until it was plain that the ship would only bash itself to pieces. Already its frame was badly sprung.

When the ship settled to the cave floor for the twelfth time, Unk and Boaz went to pieces. They cried.

“We’re dead, Unk — we’re dead!” said Boaz.

“I’ve never been alive that I can remember,” said Unk brokenly. “I thought I was finally going to get some living done.”

Unk went to a porthole, looked out with streaming eyes.

He saw that the creatures nearest the porthole had outlined in aquamarine a perfect, pale yellow letter T.

The making of a T was well within the limits of probability for brainless creatures distributingthemselves at random. But then Unk saw that the T was preceded by a perfect S. And the S was preceded by a perfect E.

Unk moved his head to one side, looked through the porthole obliquely. The movement gave him a perspective down a hundred yards of harmonium-infested wall.

Unk was flabbergasted to see that the harmoniums were forming a message in dazzling letters.

The message was this, in pale yellow, outlined in aquamarine:

IT’S AN INTELLIGENCE TEST!

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