Northwest of Earth (6 page)

“The Gorgon, Medusa, a beautiful woman with—with snakes for hair, and a gaze that turned men to stone, and Perseus finally killed her—I remembered this just by accident, NW, and it saved your life and mine—Perseus killed her by using a mirror as he fought to reflect what he dared not look at directly. I wonder what the old Greek who first started that legend would have thought if he’d known that three thousand years later his story would save the lives of two men on another planet. I wonder what that Greek’s own story was, and how he met the thing, and what happened …”

“Well, there’s a lot we’ll never know. Wouldn’t the records of that race of—of
things
, whatever they are, be worth reading! Records of other planets and other ages and all the beginnings of mankind! But I don’t suppose they’ve kept any records. I don’t suppose they’ve even any place to keep them—from what little I know, or anyone knows about it, they’re like the Wandering Jew, just bobbing up here and there at long intervals, and where they stay in the meantime I’d give my eyes to know! But I don’t believe that terribly hypnotic power they have indicates any superhuman intelligence. It’s their means of getting food—just like a frog’s long tongue or a carnivorous flower’s odor. Those are physical because the frog and the flower eat physical food. The Shambleau uses a—a mental reach to get mental food. I don’t quite know how to put it. And just as a beast that eats the bodies of other animals acquires with each meal greater power over the bodies of the rest, so the Shambleau, stoking itself up with the life-forces of men, increases its power over the minds and the souls of other men. But I’m talking about things I can’t define—things I’m not sure exist.”

“I only know that when I felt—when those tentacles closed around my legs—I didn’t want to pull loose, I felt sensations that—that—oh, I’m fouled and filthy to the very deepest part of me by that—pleasure—and yet—”

“I know,” said Smith slowly. The effect of the
segir
was beginning to wear off, and weakness was washing back over him in waves, and when he spoke he was half meditating in a low voice, scarcely realizing that Yarol listened. “I know it—much better than you do—and there’s something so indescribably awful that the thing emanates, something so utterly at odds with everything human—there aren’t any words to say it. For a while I was a part of it, literally, sharing its thoughts and memories and emotions and hungers, and—well, it’s over now and I don’t remember very clearly, but the only part left free was that part of me that was all but insane from the—the obscenity of the thing. And yet it was a pleasure so sweet—I think there must be some nucleus of utter evil in me—in everyone—that needs only the proper stimulus to get complete control; because even while I was sick all through from the touch of those—things—there was something in me that was—was simply gibbering with delight … Because of that I saw things—and knew things—horrible, wild things I can’t quite remember—visited unbelievable places, looked backward through the memory of that—creature—I was one with, and saw—God, I wish I could remember!”

“You ought to thank your God you can’t,” said Yarol soberly. His voice roused Smith from the half-trance he had fallen into, and he rose on his elbow, swaying a little from weakness. The room was wavering before him, and he closed his eyes, not to see it, but he asked, “You say they—they don’t turn up again? No way of finding—another?”

Yarol did not answer for a moment. He laid his hands on the other man’s shoulders and pressed him back, and then sat staring down into the dark, ravaged face with a new, strange, undefinable look upon it that he had never seen there before—whose meaning he knew, too well.

“Smith,” he said finally, and his black eyes for once were steady and serious, and the little grinning devil had vanished from behind them, “Smith, I’ve never asked your word on anything before, but I’ve—I’ve earned the right to do it now, and I’m asking you to promise me one thing.”

Smith’s colorless eyes met the black gaze unsteadily. Irresolution was in them, and a little fear of what that promise might be. And for just a moment Yarol was looking, not into his friend’s familiar eyes, but into a wide gray blankness that held all horror and delight—a pale sea with unspeakable pleasures sunk beneath it. Then the wide stare focused again and Smith’s eyes met his squarely and Smith’s voice said, “Go ahead. I’ll promise.”

“That if you ever should meet a Shambleau again—ever, anywhere—you’ll draw your gun and burn it to hell the instant you realize what it is. Will you promise me that?”

There was a long silence. Yarol’s somber black eyes bored relentlessly into the colorless ones of Smith, not wavering. And the veins stood out on Smith’s tanned forehead. He never broke his word—he had given it perhaps half a dozen times in his life, but once he had given it, he was incapable of breaking it. And once more the gray seas flooded in a dim tide of memories, sweet and horrible beyond dreams. Once more Yarol was staring into blankness that hid nameless things. The room was very still.

The gray tide ebbed. Smith’s eyes, pale and resolute as steel, met Yarol’s levelly.

“I’ll—try,” he said. And his voice wavered.

N
ORTHWEST
S
MITH LEANED
his head back against the warehouse wall and stared up into the black night-sky of Venus. The waterfront street was very quiet tonight, very dangerous. He could hear no sound save the eternal slap-slap of water against the piles, but he knew how much of danger and sudden death dwelt here voiceless in the breathing dark, and he may have been a little homesick as he stared up into the clouds that masked a green star hanging lovely on the horizon—Earth and home. And if he thought of that he must have grinned wryly to himself in the dark, for Northwest Smith had no home, and Earth would not have welcomed him very kindly just then.

He sat quietly in the dark. Above him in the warehouse wall a faintly lighted window threw a square of pallor upon the wet street. Smith drew back into his angle of darkness under the slanting shaft, hugging one knee. And presently he heard footsteps softly on the street.

He may have been expecting footsteps, for he turned his head alertly and listened, but it was not a man’s feet that came so lightly over the wooden quay, and Smith’s brow furrowed. A woman, here, on this black waterfront by night? Not even the lowest class of Venusian street-walker dared come along the waterfronts of Ednes on the nights when the space-liners were not in. Yet across the pavement came clearly now the light tapping of a woman’s feet.

Smith drew farther back into the shadows and waited. And presently she came, a darkness in the dark save for the triangular patch of pallor that was her face. As she passed under the light falling dimly from the window overhead he understood suddenly how she dared walk here and who she was. A long black cloak hid her, but the light fell upon her face, heart-shaped under the little three-cornered velvet cap that Venusian women wear, fell on ripples of half-hidden bronze hair; and by that sweet triangular face and shining hair he knew her for one of the Minga maids—those beauties that from the beginning of history have been bred in the Minga stronghold for loveliness and grace, as race-horses are bred on Earth, and reared from earliest infancy in the art of charming men. Scarcely a court on the three planets lacks at least one of these exquisite creatures, long-limbed, milk-white, with their bronze hair and lovely brazen faces—if the lord of that court has the wealth to buy them. Kings from many nations and races have poured their riches into the Minga gateway, and girls like pure gold and ivory have gone forth to grace a thousand palaces, and this has been so since Ednes first rose on the shore of the Greater Sea.

This girl walked here unafraid and unharmed because she wore the beauty that marked her for what she was. The heavy hand of the Minga stretched out protectingly over her bronze head, and not a man along the wharf-fronts but knew what dreadful penalties would overtake him if he dared so much as to lay a finger on the milk-whiteness of a Minga maid—terrible penalties, such as men whisper of fearfully over
segir
-whisky mugs in the waterfront dives of many nations—mysterious, unnamable penalties more dreadful then any knife or gun-flash could inflict.

And these dangers, too, guarded the gates of the Minga castle. The chastity of the Minga girls was proverbial, a trade boast. This girl walked in peace and safety more sure than that attending the steps of a nun through slum streets by night on Earth.

But even so, the girls went forth very rarely from the gates of the castle, never unattended. Smith had never seen one before, save at a distance. He shifted a little now, to catch a better glimpse as she went by, to look for the escort that must surely walk a pace or two behind, though he heard no footsteps save her own. The slight motion caught her eye. She stopped. She peered closer into the dark, and said in a voice as sweet and smooth as cream,

“How would you like to earn a goldpiece, my man?”

A flash of perversity twisted Smith’s reply out of its usual slovenly dialect, and he said in his most cultured voice, in his most perfect High Venusian,

“Thank you, no.”

For a moment the woman stood quite still, peering through the darkness in a vain effort to reach his face. He could see her own, a pale oval in the window light, intent, surprised. Then she flung back her cloak and the dim light glinted on the case of a pocket flash as she flicked the catch. A beam of white radiance fell blindingly upon his face.

For an instant the light held him—lounging against the wall in his spaceman’s leather, the burns upon it, the tatters, ray-gun in its holster low on his thigh, and the brown scarred face turned to hers, eyes the colorless color of pale steel narrowed to the glare. It was a typical face. It belonged here, on the waterfront, in these dark and dangerous streets. It belonged to the type that frequents such places, those lawless men who ride the spaceways and live by the rule of the ray-gun, recklessly, warily outside the Patrol’s jurisdiction. But there was more than that in the scarred brown face turned to the light. She must have seen it as she held the flash unwavering, some deep-buried trace of breeding and birth that made the cultured accents of the High Venusian not incongruous. And the colorless eyes derided her.

“No,” she said, flicking off the light. “Not one goldpiece, but a hundred. And for another task than I meant.”

“Thank you,” said Smith, not rising. “You must excuse me.”

“Five hundred,” she said without a flicker of emotion in her creamy voice.

In the dark Smith’s brows knit. There was something fantastic in the situation. Why—?

She must have sensed his reaction almost as he realized it himself, for she said,

“Yes, I know. It sounds insane. You see—I knew you in the light just now. Will you?—can you?—I can’t explain here on the street …”

Smith held the silence unbroken for thirty seconds, while a lightning debate flashed through the recesses of his wary mind. Then he grinned to himself in the dark and said,

“I’ll come.” Belatedly he got to his feet. “Where?”

“The Palace Road on the edge of the Minga. Third door from the central gate, to the left. Say to the door-warden—’Vaudir.’”

“That is—?”

“Yes, my name. You will come, in half an hour?”

An instant longer Smith’s mind hovered on the verge of refusal. Then he shrugged.

“Yes.”

“At the third bell, then.” She made the little Venusian gesture of parting and wrapped her cloak about her. The blackness of it, and the softness of her footfalls, made her seem to melt into the darkness without a sound, but Smith’s trained ears heard her footsteps very softly on the pavement as she went on into the dark.

He sat there until he could no longer detect any faintest sound of feet on the wharf. He waited patiently, but his mind was a little dizzy with surprise. Was the traditional inviolability of the Minga a fraud? Were the close-guarded girls actually allowed sometimes to walk unattended by night, making assignations as they pleased? Or was it some elaborate hoax? Tradition for countless centuries had declared the gates in the Minga wall to be guarded so relentlessly by strange dangers that not even a mouse could slip through without the knowledge of the Alendar, the Minga’s lord. Was it then by order of the Alendar that the door would open to him when he whispered “Vaudir” to the warden? Or would it open? Was the girl perhaps the property of some Ednes lord, deceiving him for obscure purposes of her own? He shook his head a little and grinned to himself. After all, time would tell.

He waited a while longer in the dark. Little waves lapped the piles with sucking sounds, and once the sky lit up with the long, blinding roar of a space-ship splitting the dark.

At last he rose and stretched his long body as if he had been sitting there for a good while. Then he settled the gun on his leg and set off down the black street. He walked very lightly in his spaceman’s boots.

A twenty-minute walk through dark byways, still and deserted, brought him to the outskirts of that vast city-within-a-city called the Minga. The dark, rough walls of it towered over him, green with the lichen-like growths of the Hot Planet. On the Palace Road one deeply-sunk central gateway opened upon the mysteries within. A tiny blue light burned over the arch. Smith went softly through the dimness to the left of it, counting two tiny doors half hidden in deep recesses. At the third he paused. It was painted a rust green, and a green vine spilling down the wall half veiled it, so that if he had not been searching he would have passed it by.