THE PLUTO LAMP By CHAS. A. STEARNS _It was the most outrageous kind of irony that fate, and the Commission of Galactic Astrography, should select such a prime misfit as Knucklebone Smith to light the lamp of Pluto._ [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] This is really two stories. The first is solar history; the second, the mostly true legend of a misfit called Knucklebone Smith. Knucklebone, so far as anyone could ever determine, was his real name--the sin of prankish, or perhaps disillusioned parents. He was exactly six feet eight inches tall from the insulated soles of his engineering boots to the top of his planeteer's helmet. He never in his life weighed more than one hundred sixty-five pounds. His face was angular and horse-like, and it had never, within the memory of anyone who knew him, contained the slightest vestige of a smile. He was not nature's first error, nor her last, but he differed from the unexceptional many in that he believed in Destiny ... with a capital 'L.' Throughout a lifetime of unfortunate ventures he remained firm in the conviction that sooner or later he would find his own metier and become famous. At last he did, and that is the story of Knucklebone Smith. The Pluto Lamp, a relic of the pioneering days of interstellar flight, is harder to explain, but easier to believe. It was once as well known to spacemen as Rafferty Shoals to the ancient China clippers. The gulf between the stars was vast and uncharted in those days; still a thing of superstitious dread for the planet-bound. But it was no more unknown than the solitary planet which tails all the others in its dark, millennial path about our own sun. The planetary freighters went as far as Uranus and no farther. For the black little planet whose very namesake is Hell had nothing to attract them that could not be gotten at more conveniently. The starships passed it by warily, giving it a wide berth, for it had an evil reputation. The old scanners were unreliable at best, what with the confusing debris that fills space, and more than one ship, through miscalculation, swerved from its course, brushing through the magnetic field of the unillumined wasteland, and crashed on the hard frozen surface of Pluto. It was inevitable that someone would give birth to the idea of the Lamp. It was to be a permanent, unmanned beacon, strategically placed on the Dead Planet to warn ships that should have passed in the night, but didn't always make it. A magnificent idea, everyone thought. Everyone, that is, excepting Knucklebone Smith.