What was he going to do with it? It would be foolish to leave it here. Once departed from this valley, he might never find it again. He’d be wise, though, to be careful about what he took aboard his ship. Suppose the cube had been left there for him to find?

  The idea seemed fantastic, and some of his doubts faded. A couple more tests, he decided, and then–He took off his glove, and gingerly touched the handle with his bare finger.

  ‘I contain paint!’ something said into his mind.

  Kilgour jumped backward. ‘Hug!’ he gulped.

  He looked around wildly. But he was alone in a green valley that stretched into distance. He returned his attention to the crystal block. Again, he touched the handle.

  ‘I contain paint.’ This time there was no doubt. The thought was clear and sharp in his mind.

  Kilgour straightened slowly. He stood, mentally dazzled, staring at his find. It took a long moment to start his thought on the uphill climb of imagining the technological stature of a race that could turn out such a container. His mind soared, and then reluctantly retreated. He grew amazed. Because, simple though it was, nothing in the science of man even foreshadowed such a development. A container of paint that said –what it had said. A can labeled with a self-identifying thought.

  Kilgour began to grin. His long, homely face twisted with good humor. His gray-green eyes lighted up. His lips parted, revealing even, white teeth. He laughed joyously. A can of paint! The paint would probably have other ingredients than white lead, linseed oil, and a coloring oxide. But that was something to explore later.

  For the moment, possession was enough. No matter what else he discovered on Venus, his trip was already paid for. It was the simple, used-every-day things that made fortunes. Briskly, Kilgour reached down, grabbed the handle with his bare hand, and started to lift.

  He had got it off the ground, when a dazzlingly bright liquid squirted from it on to his chest. It spread quickly over his body, clinging like glue, yet running swiftly. It was white when it started, but it changed to red, yellow, blue, violet, then it spread into a myriad of shades. He stood finally, drenched clothes flashing all the colors of the rainbow. And at first he was furious rather than alarmed.

  He began to strip. He was wearing a pullover sweat shirt and a pair of sport shorts; nothing else. The two pieces sparkled like varicolored fire as, with a synchronized jerk, he unloosened his belt and pulled the shirt up over his head.

  He could feel the liquid running down over his bare body; and it was not until he had removed his shirt–his shorts had fallen around his ankles–that he noticed an odd fact. The paint, which had been mostly on his shirt, had flowed completely off it and on to his skin. Not a drop had fallen to the ground. And his shorts were clean also.

  All the paint was on his body. It glowed as it thinned out over the greater surface. It sparkled and shimmered like a flame seen through a prism as he wiped at it with his shirt. But it didn’t come off. Frowning, he pushed at it with his hands. It clung to his fingers with a warm stickiness. It bobbed and danced with color as he shoved it groundward. It went down one place, and came up another.

  It was a unit, of which no portion would separate from any other portion. It flowed so far, then no farther. It assumed every conceivable shape. But always it remained one piece. Like a vivid, tinted, immensely flexible shawl draped in various patterns, it altered its form, not its essential oneness. After ten minutes, he was still no nearer getting rid of it.

  “Paint”,’ Kilgour read aloud out of his medical book, “can be removed by applying turpentine”:

  There was turpentine in his storeroom. He secured the bottle, and climbed out of the ship again, he poured a generous measure into the cupped palm of his hand, and applied it vigorously. That is, he started to apply it. The turpentine flowed out of his hand and on to the ground. The paint wouldn’t allow itself to be touched by the liquid.

  It took several attempts to convince the astounded Kilgour. But finally, still determined, he re-entered the ship. In quick succession he tried petrol, water, wine, even some of his precious rocket fuel. The paint wouldn’t make contact with any of them. He stepped under a shower. The water rained down on the portion of his body that was covered by paint, a fine stinging spray of wetness. But there was no sensation at all where the paint clung.

  And it definitely didn’t wash off.

  He filled his bathtub, and seated himself in it. The paint shinnied up his neck, and around his chin, and flowed over his mouth and nose. It didn’t go in his nostrils or his mouth, but it covered both apertures. Kilgour stopped breathing and sat stubborn; then he saw the paint was creeping up towards his eyes. He jumped out of the tub, and ducked his head into the water.

  The paint retreated from his nose, hesitated at his mouth, and then sank back halfway towards the lower end of his chin. It seemed to find some anchor point there for, no matter how deep or how often he ducked, it refused to go any lower.

  Apparently, having reached his head, it was not prepared to give up that vantage point. Kilgour spread a rubber mat on his favorite chair and sat down to do some hard thinking. The whole incident was ridiculous. He’d be the laughing stock of the solar system if it was ever found out that he had got himself into such a fantastic predicament.

  By some accident, a can of Venusian paint had been dropped or lost on this uninhabited meadow; and here he was, smeared with the stuff. The quick way it had flowed over his mouth and nose showed that thought-mindless, it could be deadly. Suppose it had refused to retreat an inch. He would have suffocated in a few minutes, and would now be lying dead in his bathtub.

  Kilgour felt a chill climb his spine. The chill remained even after it struck him that he could easily have forced a funnel into his mouth, and breathed that way. The chill remained because it was only accident that the incredible stuff hadn’t climbed up over his eyes.

  He pictured a blind suffocating man searching in a roomy storeroom for a funnel.

  It took a long minute for his normally sunny disposition to make a partial comeback. He sat stiff, forcing his mind. Paint–that jumped out of a can, showed no sign of drying, yet wasn’t really a liquid, because it wouldn’t soak into clothing or flow according to the law of gravity. And wouldn’t let liquid touch it.

  Kilgour’s mind paused there, in a sudden comprehension. Why, of course. Waterproof. He should have remembered. This was no ordinary paint. It was waterproof, rainproof, liquid-proof– the ultimate paint.

  He grew excited. He stood up jerkily, and began to pace the floor. For twenty-five years, ever since the first of the super rockets had gushed out to the barren Moon and then to semi-barren Mars, Venus had been the goal of the explorers. Journeys there, however, had been forbidden until some means was discovered to overcome the danger of ships falling into the Sun. That incandescent fate had befallen two ships. And it had been mathematically proven, not merely by cranks, that such a catastrophe would happen to every spaceship until the planets Earth and Venus attained a certain general position with relation to each other and Jupiter.

  The ideal conditions were not due to occur for another twenty-eight years. But six months before Kilgour took off, a famous astronomer had pointed out that some of the conditions would prevail for about a year. The article caused a sensation among spacemen; and, though the government refused to withdraw its ban, Kilgour had heard that a high patrol officer had privately stated that he would look the other way if anybody started out. And that he would see to it that men of like mind carried out the necessary pre-flight inspections. Several expeditions, ostensibly bound for Mars, had been busily fitting up when Kilgour launched his small craft into space, Venus-bound.

  Great things were expected of Venus. But not so great as this. Kilgour stopped his pacing. A race that could develop a perfect paint, anything perfect, was going to prove worth knowing.

  His thought ended. He had glanced down at his body. And now, he saw something that startled him. The paint, brilliant in its million facets of changing color, was spreading. In the beginning, it had covered a quarter of his flesh. Now, it covered a good third. If it kept on, it would soon overrun him from head to toe, eyes and ears and nose and mouth and all.

  It was time he started figuring ways and means of removal. In earnest.

  Kilgour wrote:

  ‘A perfect paint should be waterproof and weatherproof as well as beautiful. It should also be easily removable.’

  He stared gloomily at the final sentence. And then, in a fit of temper, he flung down the pencil and walked over to the bathroom mirror. He peered into it with a nasty smirk on his face.

  ‘Pretty, aren’t you!’ he snarled at his blazing image. ‘Like a gypsy arrayed in dance finery.’

  The reality, he saw on second glance, was more chromatically splendid than that. He shone in about ninety colors. The various combinations did not blur dully one into the other. They merged with a sharp brightness that seemed to make even the most subtle shades project with intensity. Yet in some curious fashion the paint was not showy. It was bright, but it did not hurt his eyes. It was brilliant, but it failed to jar his sense of good taste. He had come to sneer, but he remained several minutes to appraise its startling beauty.

  He turned away at last. ‘If,’ he thought, ‘I could get a spoonful loose, I could put it into a retort and analyze it.’

  But he had tried that. He tried it again, with a sudden hope. As before, the paint flowed into the spoon willingly, but when he raised the spoon, it flowed back on to his skin. Kilgour procured a knife, and tried to hold the paint on his spoon. But when he lifted his hand, the paint slid between the blade and the spoon like so much oil.

  Kilgour decided that his strength was not sufficient to press the knife tight on to the spoon edge. He headed for the storeroom. There was a small scoop there with a pressure cover. It was too round and too small; he could only force a little bit of the paint into it. And it took more than a minute to tighten the cover nuts with a wrench. But when he lifted the scoop and opened it, there was a little pool of paint filling the bottom quarter of the scoop.

  Kilgour walked over and sat down hastily in his chair. He had the curious, wretched feeling that he was going to be ill. His brain reeled with relief; and it was several minutes before he could even think about his next move. Logically, of course, he ought to remove painstakingly, and it would be painstaking, all the paint by the method he had just evolved. But first – He poured the paint in the scoop into a measuring retort. It measured just a little more than a dessertspoonful.

  There were, he estimated, at least five hundred such spoonfuls on his body, and it would take him – he removed a second scoopful, timing himself– a fraction over two minutes for each operation.

  One thousand minutes! Seventeen hours! Kilgour smiled ruefully, and went into the galley. He’d need food four or five times during such a period of time, and right now was one of the times. While he was eating, he pondered the problem with the calmness of a man who has found a solution, and who, therefore, can afford to consider other possibilities.

  Seventeen hours was a long time. Surely, now that he had some free paint, he could go into his small chemical lab and quickly discover a dozen chemical reactions that would remove the entire mess from him in a few minutes.

  Perhaps a larger, more complete laboratory might have yielded results. His was too small. The paint refused to react to any of the elements and solutions that he had. It wouldn’t mix. It wouldn’t combine. It wouldn’t burn. It was immune to acids and metals, and it did not seem to influence anything he used either catalytically or otherwise.

  The paint was inert.

  ‘Of course,’ Kilgour said at last, explosively, to himself. ‘How could I have forgotten? The stuff would be weatherproof with a capital W. It’s perfect paint.’,

  He went to work with the scoop. He developed a dexterity with the wrench in screwing and unscrewing the nuts, that enabled him to remove a spoonful every three-quarters of a minute. He was so intent on maintaining the speed of the operation that he had half a pailful of paint before it struck him with a tremendous shock that there was still as much paint as ever on his body.

  Kilgour trembled with the thought that came. Feverishly, he measured the paint in the half-filled pail. And there was no question. He had emptied into the pail approximately as much as the original crystal container had squirted on to him – without affecting the quantity on his body.

  Once applied, the ultimate paint was self-renewing.

  He wrote that down at the bottom of his list of the paint’s qualities. Then he grew aware that he was perspiring freely. The sweat stood out in little foamy globules over the unpainted part of his body. Kilgour’s brain performed its newest leap of comprehension. He snatched up his notebook and jotted down: The perfect paint is also cold and heatproof.’

  Within half an hour, it was impossible to be objective about it. The paint covered nearly half his body. His hard work had warmed him considerably. He was roasting from his own animal heat. And scared. He thought shakily: ‘I’ve got to get out of here. I’ve got to find a Venusian city, and get an antidote for this stuff.’

  It didn’t matter any more whether he was made ridiculous or not.

  In a spasm of panic, he headed for the control board. His hand reached for the launching lever. But paused at the last instant.

  The can! It had said: ‘I contain paint.’ Surely it would also have directions for use of contents, and for subsequent removal.

  “I’m a pie-eyed nut,’ Kilgour whispered to himself as he ran. ‘ I should have thought of that ages ago.’

  The crystal ‘can’ lay on the grass, where he had left it. He snatched at it. ‘I contain a quarter of paint,’ it thought at him.

  So he had squirted three-quarters of the contents on to himself. It was an important thing to know. He’d be wise not to add the rest to the spreading horror that was enveloping him in an air-tight casing of liquid brilliance.

  Cautiously, taking care not to lift the container from the ground, he fumbled over it with his bare hands. Almost instantly, he had his first response. ‘Directions: Fix controllers around area to be painted, then apply. Paint will dry as soon as controlled area is covered. To remove, press darkener over paint for one terad.’ The incomprehensible word seemed to refer to a short period of time. ‘Note,’ the thought continued, ‘darkeners may be purchased at your neighborhood hardware and paint stores.’

  Kilgour thought furiously, ‘Isn’t that just dandy. I’ll run over right now, and get me one.’

  In spite of his scathing words, he felt amazingly better. It was a practical world he had come to, not a nightmare planet where creatures with ten eyes and eight legs moaned and yammered with instant alien hatred for human explorers. People who used paint wouldn’t murder him out of hand. That had been obvious all the time. Intelligence implied a semi-rational outlook, an orderly, organized universe. Naturally, not all non-human races would like human beings. But then, human beings had a habit of not liking each other.

  If the container and the paint it contained were criteria, the civilization of Venus was superior to that of man. Accordingly, the inhabitants would be above petty persecution. The fantastic, ludicrous mess he had gotten himself into was basically solved by that fact.

  But that didn’t stop him from getting hotter and hotter under his coat of paint. It was time he found himself a Venusian. He picked up the container, lifting it with his fingers from underneath. It thought at him:

  ‘Ingredients of this paint, as per government requirements, are:

  I?! ?! – 7 %

  ?! ?! ? – 13 %

  Liquid light – 80 %’

  ‘Liquid what?’ asked Kilgour aloud.

  ‘Warning,’ came the thought. ‘This paint must not be allowed in proximity to volatile substances.’

  There was no explanation for that, though Kilgour waited for further thoughts. Apparently Venusians knew enough about their government regulations to obey them without question. He himself had tried to put the paint in contact with the volatile substances, turpentine, gasoline, his rocket fuel, and a couple of other explosives. And no harm done. It seemed a silly regulation if it didn’t mean anything.

  Kilgour set the can down, and headed once more for the control board. The launching lever was glass smooth to his palm as he pulled it back until it clicked. He sat braced, waiting for the automatic machinery to set off the potent violence of fired tubes.

  Nothing happened.

  Kilgour had a premonition. He jerked the launching lever back into place, then clicked it again. And still there was no explosion.

  His brain was reeling. The premonition was a living force. His whole body was heavy with the strength of it. He had poured the rocket fuel back into its great tank after trying to wipe the paint off his flesh with it. It had only been a few liters, but spacemen practiced queer economies. He had poured it back because the paint had not seemed to affect it in any way.

  ‘Warning,’ the can had said. ‘This paint must not be allowed in proximity to volatile substances.’

  The inert stuff must have de-energized the eighteen thousand gallons in his one remaining fuel tank.

  Try the radio again. He had started sending out signals when he was a few million miles from Venus, and had listened on his receiver. But the great void had remained unresponsive. Nevertheless, the Venusians must have such a thing. Surely they would answer an emergency call.

  But they didn’t. Half an hour went by, and his calls went unheeded. His receiver remained silent, not even static came in on any wave length. He was alone in a universe of choking, crowding, growing, maddening by colorful paint.

  Darkener – liquid light – Perhaps it shone, not only in bright exterior light, so that if he turned off the lights – His finger on the switch, he noticed for the first time how dark it was outside. His lock doors were open; and slowly, Kilgour walked over to them and stared out into a night that was unbroken by starlight. The darkness, now that it had come, was intense. The clouds, of course, the eternal clouds of Venus – So bright was the sun at Venus’s distance from it that in daytime the clouds were a protection that yet failed to more than dim the dazzling glare.

 

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