Big Book of Science Fiction (24 page)

The dimness made it difficult for
me to keep up with the Venerians, who were evidently water-livers as we are
creatures of the land, for they were amazing swimmers. Abruptly the passage
widened, and the light became enough stronger for me to catch up with the pair
ahead.

They directed their course upward
through the water, came to the surface (where I saw we were well beyond the
swamp belt) and took fresh gulps of air through their elevated nostrils. Then,
diving beneath the surface again, they coasted along slowly. I caught a flash
of something silvery ahead in the water. So did the Venerians. One of them
snatched the tube-weapon from his belt, the other jerked out his spear; both
swam faster.

Their quarry was a huge fish, its
head and body covered with scaly plates. A long tail projected backward from
this coat of mail and two big paddles hung near the beast’s head. I’m no
biologist, but I just happen to have taken my girl to the museum one afternoon,
and we saw something just like it. I remember kidding about the tag, which
described it as an “ostracoderm.”

It had seen the Venerians, and
evidently had a well-developed respect for them, for it fled down the watery
path like an arrow—but not fast enough.

The Venerian with the spear
gained more rapidly than his companion, heading the fish off with its barbed
point, and herding it around. The other lifted his tubed weapon; there were two
muffled thuds, like the blows of a padded hammer, and the seven-foot fish’
wavered, then stopped, its paddles moving convulsively. The Venerian with the
spear ranged alongside dodged the reflex swing of the long tail, and thrust his
weapon in where the bony plate of the head met the cuirass of the body. The big
fish heaved once more, then slowly began to sink, but the two Venerians, each
wrapping his tentacles round the fish’s tail, began to tow him back toward the
hall of the well.

Neither of them rose to the
surface during all this period. They were marvellously adapted to staying under
water.

They were evidently regular,
professional hunters by the manner in which they went about their business. It
occurred to me that a race which could divide labor in this fashion, which
could produce the explosive weapons, and organize life with the ingenuity shown
in the common dining-hall, with its ingenious arrangements for service of food,
must possess other and interesting establishments of some kind in the swampy
land that represented continents on this planet.

Filled with a desire to see them,
I took to the air once more and hurried back to the building. The door was
still open, and the hall held an assortment of Venerians, some merely standing
and talking, some diving into the well to swim off somewhere, and some passing
through the portal out into the jungle of fungi. I had seen the sea-hunters;
now I followed a party of those who remained on the surface.

They blinked as the brighter
light of the out-of-doors struck their eyes, and I wondered what they would do
in the dazzling illumination of an earthly day. After a moment or two to
accustom their eyes to the light, they struck out up the gentle slope behind
the ball-shaped building. The vegetation was a perfect tangle, and 1 wondered
how the Venerians would manage if they left the path they were following until
I saw one of them blunder against the trunk of one of the yellow trees. It was
all of twenty-five feet high, but his impact sent it crashing to the ground as
though it were made of tissue-paper.

The slope became steeper as the
Venerians pushed on, kicking the big, soft stems out of their way when they had
fallen to block the path. At last the track encountered a buttress of
outcropping stone, the first I had seen on the planet. The Venerians paused.
Two of them produced tube-weapons from their belts and, walking with some care,
took the lead in the group, which had suddenly grown silent.

What were they afraid of? Some
grisly amphibian monster of the swamps, I fancy. At all events, one of them
suddenly lifted his weapon and fired it in among the crowding growths. I caught
a glimpse of a pair of huge eyes, heard the thud of the fall of a big mushroom
and that was all. The Venerians with the weapons crouched and peered; there
were a few words, and then they pushed on again. On that steaming planet, the
ordinary individual must live far closer to the terrors of the beast-world than
he does on earth.

The Venerians followed their path
down a little dip till it ended at another bulbous building like the hall of
the food and the well. Its door was open; within it had the same cold and
feeble illumination as the other. All about the outer room of this place were
shelves filled with tools, and a Venerian in attendance. At the back another of
the thick doors gave on a room in which I glimpsed pulsating machinery. They
were that high up the scale.

The party I had followed received
tools from the attendant in the outer hall, and came out again, following
another path to the hillside behind. There, where a cliff towered out of the
swamp, they entered a hole that had been dug in the stony face of the hill, and
drawing from the pouches at their belts some balls that emitted the same light
I had seen indoors, they plunged in.

I followed them. It was
injudicious, no doubt, but I only found that out later. At the time, I had only
noticed that my movements were sometimes faster, sometimes slower, and I had
not worked out the rationale of what turned out to be a very dangerous
business. It also turned out to be an interesting business, though one that had
no particular meaning for me, and has not had since.

It was a mine. The Venerians
worked it by means of a shafted tool, which is attached by a metal cord to a
box about two feet square, the box standing on the floor behind the miner and
evidently furnishing the power for the operation. At the working end of the
shafted head is a circle of metal teeth, and beneath the teeth a basket of
woven metal. The Venerian presses the tool against the rock he is mining. The
teeth spring into motion with the pressure, the rock is pulverized and falls
into the basket as a powder. When the basket is filled, the miner takes it to
the power box, empties it in and pulls a small rod. Immediately, the box emits
a strong red glow, and in a minute or two a bar of shining metal is discharged
at the back, and a little ball of waste material falls beside it.

When a pile of the metal bars has
accumulated, the miner picks them up and carries them back to the tool-hall,
where he turns them in, receiving in exchange a metal token which he deposits
in one of his pouches.

I watched the Venerian miners
carefully and for a long while, hoping to learn the secret of their power box.
Eventually, I thought something would go wrong with one of them, or it would
need a re-charge, and the miner would open it. If I could get an inkling of
that, and tell it to some of my engineering friends, it would not only be a
proof of my strange experience, but it might also be worth—well, a great deal.

So much interested in the project
did I become, that I failed to notice the passage of time, and during one of
the miner’s visits to the hall of the machines, as I waited for him to return,
I suddenly realized that it had grown dark. The miner, too, seemed to be gone
for an extraordinarily long time. If he had finished his assigned task for the
day, there was no sense remaining where I was. I started to leave—and found I
could not move an inch.

It was at this point I realized
the implications of the fact that Roger Bacon’s drug enabled the use of the
power of light. There was no light; and there I was, bound by motionlessness,
as though in a nightmare; marooned on a planet millions of miles from home,
from my own body even, and with no means of returning. I could hear the crash
of some beast through the vegetation and the patter of the eternal Venerian
rain. That was all; I was alone.

At such moments, in spite of the
statements of some writers, one does not rave and storm, or review the mistakes
of a past life. I thought of my body back in the room on Bank Street, Earth, and
what the old man would do as it sat there in the chair, lifelessly. Would he
dare to call the police or a doctor? Would he try to dispose of part of “me”?
Was there any antidote to the drug mandragoreum that he could apply? Suppose I
finally obtained some kind of release, with the coming of the Venerian dawn,
and came rushing home to find my body beneath the waters of the Hudson or on a
dissecting table in the New York morgue?

Or perhaps I would remain as a
disembodied brain there on Venus throughout eternity? The creatures of this
planet had taken no notice of me, and I had made no attempt to communicate with
them. Could I if I wished? It was a pretty academic problem. I remembered Jack
London’s remark that the blackest thing in nature was a hole in a box. That was
what I was in—a hole in a box.

From that point, I turned to
wondering how long it would be before dawn on Venus. For all I knew it might
not come for fifty or sixty hours—quite enough time for anything on earth to
happen to my body. It would begin to need nourishment, even if nothing more
drastic happened to it. There it sat, in what resembled a hypnotic trance. How
long could people stay alive in such a state? I tried to remember and could not
recall ever having heard anywhere. Every time I tried to review my knowledge on
the subject it turned out to be too sketchy to be helpful.

I was aroused from this reverie
by a grunting sound like that made by a wallowing pig, and looking toward the
mouth of the cave, saw a pair of phosphorescent eyes gleaming at the entrance.
Apparently the animal, who had no outline in that absolute black, was disturbed
by the smell of the place, for the grunts changed into a grinding bellow and it
backed out. Perhaps I could communicate with the Venerians after all— provided
my mind did not die with my distant body.

Followed another series of
grunts, and the sound of heavy footsteps, followed by angry snarls. Then came
the sound of heavy bodies hurled about. Two of the Venerian beasts were
fighting outside my prison. Of all the events of that journey, this one stands
out most clearly; the quarrel of those two Venerian monsters, whose shape I did
not even know, snarling and biting each other under the rain, while I hung in
the cave without the power of motion.

The battle trailed off to one
side and ended in grunting moans, which in turn faded into a sound suggestive
of eating. One of the invisible beasts had evidently been victorious and was
celebrating—noisily. Finally this sound also ceased, and there was only the steady
beat of the rain.

It seemed to grow heavier, and I
began to wonder how that mattered on a planet where it was always raining. Far
in the distance, I heard the roll of thunder; and I noted without really
thinking about it that they had thunderstorms on Venus as well as on earth.

The rain fell harder; again came
the-peal of thunder, and as it rolled I could see lightning flickering, far in
the distance. A new, wild hope rose in me. Lightning was light; if one of those
flashes came near enough—

For a time it seemed that it
would not. The lightning flashed away among the distant clouds, the thunder
continued to boom, but the storm seemed about to pass off to one side and away
from me. I was just giving up hope when there were simultaneously a terrific crash
and a dazzling burst of lightning across the door of the cave.

With a twist of the shoulders, I
was out and riding. It was as dark as before out there, but I was now in the
open, where I could travel on any flash of lightning that came, and I did, in a
long series of jerking leaps. Another flash—I was among the clouds. Another—I
was more than halfway through them. I believed I could see the stars of space
beyond. Another flash below me, and I was at last out of the atmosphere of that
grim and slimy planet and riding the ether in the light of the stars.

When I reached the earth and the
room on Bank Street, dawn was just coming up behind the skyscrapers. 1 felt
cold and numb all over; the old man was standing in the center of the room,
looking at me anxiously.

“Thank God!” he said, as I opened
my eyes and moved a palsied hand. “I had begun to fear that you could not make
the return trip, and I would have to look for you—although that is very
difficult for a person of my constitution.”

“I need some coffee,” was all I
said; and as I looked at him, I noticed how very much he resembled the
Venerians I had seen.

“Was it an interesting journey?”
he asked.

“Wonderful; but I need some
coffee,” I repeated. “I’ll tell you about it later.”