what to see on
ceres

For a scenic browse, and an answer-page for Guess The World....

enclaves on ceres

...Almost centrally located in the Martian quarter was a glittering, garish locality where every diversion could be found.  This was called Pulambar, after the great City of Pleasure at home on Mars.

Along the equator ran a strip of dry, hot sand, rusty red - an imported bit of the Martian desert.  Across that sand-strip, to the south, a quarter was divided into four smaller areas, for Ganymede, Io, Europa and Callisto.

Above this quarter, tethered like a balloon by a gravity beam, hovered a sort of satellite.  A twenty-mile globe had been artificially made of banded gas without and a solid core within.  It was a miniature Jupiter, and some thought it the greatest wonder of all the Fair.

The northern quarter of the Eastern Hemisphere was Earth's, divided into many smaller districts for the wealth of various national and continental exhibits.  Here, as with the Martian Pulambar, there was a central area, but it was for sports...  Along the equator tossed the waves of an artificial ocean...

The southern shore, at the very equatorial line, was matted with Venusian jungle, under a localized fog...

Manly Wade Wellman, The Worlds of Tomorrow (Thrilling Wonder Stories, October 1940)

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stowaway finds mystery on ceres

...Ronnie noticed something off to his right.  It was a cleft in the rusty ground.  The other members of the party were straggled out ahead of him now; for he hadn't been able to move quite as fast as they in his ill-fitting space armor.

The cleft offered no unusual promise.  The men had ignored it.  Nevertheless, youthful whim sent Ronnie hopping to its brink.  Thick gloom enveloped its depths.  But close to the torn lip of the cleft there were curious, broken fragments lying in the dust.  They were flat and flaky, like pieces of shattered, red glass.  As any adult would have done, Ronnie stooped and picked one of them up.  Inside the thin, translucent texture of the shard, there slumbered a deep, bloody glow.

Ronnie wanted to yell out about his find to his brother up ahead; but something unfathomable restrained him...

Raymond Z Gallun, Red Shards on Ceres (Thrilling Wonder Stories, December 1937)

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marooned on ceres

It was the thirty-ninth day, Earth time, since the Lady Betty's
departure. Pelican sat straddle-legged on the apex of a sixty-foot tor, the
highest piece of ground he had encountered, and surveyed the scene before
him.

Away to the brief, deeply curved horizon stretched a monotonous
landscape of dust, rocks and loam, molded into low hummocks and shallow
gullies, dotted here and there with tiny shrubs and berry-bearing bushes.

A heavy thump reached his ears, he turned his head, caught a
momentary glimpse of something falling, and heard a second thump. He
jumped to his feet, stared without avail, commenced running in the
direction from which the mysterious sounds had come.

Assisted by weak gravity, handicapped by thin atmosphere, he
bounded along in giant strides, his chest straining mightily. A gun whined in
a distant ravine; Pelican saw its thin, pale-golden beam angle to the sky.
Two figures—a woman and a uniformed man—sprang from the depression,
raced across his line of progress a quarter of a mile ahead. Four more
figures sprouted from the same spot and rushed after the fugitives.

"Pirates!" cried Pelican....

Eric Frank Russell, The Saga of Pelican West (Astounding, February 1937)

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escape on ceres

…With infinite care I pushed open the closet door, stepped out, then slid the bolt again to make it appear that I was still a prisoner.  On tiptoe I approached a window, raised it.  Still no sound other than the hiss of the torch.  I swung down to the ground, closed the window behind me, and ran toward the sleek silvery little space-ship.

The ice-covered plain was bitterly cold; I had neglected to put on one of the asbestoid over-suits.  The deserted huts, the head of the mine shaft loomed like a row of dark specters in the wan starlight.  And since the cold light of the stars was cast from different angles, double, triple and even quadruple shadows fell across the barren wastes.  Bleak, desolate, to an earthman, but I was used to the cold Cerean scene.  Great jagged pinnacles of rock stabbing like crooked daggers at the frosty sky; rounded meteor holes dug into the ground; occasional patches of pale ice-moss, dangling like white beards from the grotesque rocks; and beyond, the glistening plain, dropping away to a ridiculously close horizon.  I gasped in the cold air as I ran, felt it bite my lungs.  Without gravity shoes, I covered the distance to the ship in a dozen great bounding leaps…

Frederick Arnold Kummer, Jr., Star Pirate (Planet Stories, Summer 1940)

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modestly inhabited ceres

…Between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars they made a most valuable economy by landing on Ceres, one of the largest of the asteroids, and travelling about fifty million miles on her towards the orbit of the Earth without any expenditure of force whatever.  They found that the tiny world possessed a breathable atmosphere and a fluid resembling water, but nearly as dense as mercury.  A couple of flasks of it form the greatest treasures of the British Museum and the National Museum at Washington.  The vegetable world was represented by coarse grass, lichens, and dwarf shrubs, and the animal by different species of worms, lizards, flies, and small burrowing animals of the rodent type…

George Griffith, A Honeymoon in Space (1901)

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lungless creatures evolved on airless ceres

The space-dog stood three feet high at the shoulder. Its body was of dusty, mineraline gray flesh that had an inorganic look. Its four legs ended in heavy digging paws, and its mouth was furnished with great grinding tusks. It had no nostrils, for the creature was not an air-breathing animal.

It was, in fact, one of a unique species. The early explorers who first visited the asteroid Ceres had been amazed to find these creatures living on that airless little world. They were product of an evolution working without atmosphere, creatures able to assimilate the inorganic elements they dug from the ground, and consume them by a chemical process other than oxidization. They had dim telepathic powers by which their rudimentary minds communed.

Edmond Hamilton, The Three Planeteers (Startling Stories, January 1940)

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