The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Wealth of Echindul, by Noel Miller Loomis
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Title: The Wealth of Echindul
Author: Noel Miller Loomis
Release Date: February 19, 2010 [EBook #31326]
Language: English
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Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from Planet Stories July 1952. Extensive
research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on
this publication was renewed.
The WEALTH OF ECHINDUL
By NOEL LOOMIS
_Though he carried with him the loot of the ages, who in The
Pass--that legalized city of vice and corruption--would dare
risk his neck to help Russell, the Hard Luck Man of the
Swamps?_
* * * * *
He came up out of the Great Sea-Swamp of Venus like old Father
Neptune. He was covered with mud and slime. Seaweed hung from his
cheap diving-suit. Brine dripped from his arms that hung limp and
weary; it ran from his torso and made a dark trail in the sand.
[Illustration: _A flash of intuition hit Russell. He knew now how to
win this fight._]
Without even looking back, he stood for a moment as if fighting to
keep on his feet, while the brine made a small puddle in the green
sand. Finally he unscrewed the helmet and took it off. He turned
around slowly and looked back across the two hundred miles of deadly
swamp, at the flaming craters of the Red Lava Range from which he had
come.
With fingers that would hardly function from weariness he took off his
diving-suit and straightened up. His stooping shoulders were free of
that weight for the first time in forty days. He was a small man,
hardly over four feet tall, and not well formed. It seemed incredible
that he had crossed the Great Sea-Swamp on foot.
And as he looked back at the distant rim of green fire that marked the
mountains it seemed incredible to him too. A great sigh of relief and
gratefulness shook his unsymmetrical body, and all the nerve and
colossal will-power that had carried him for six months, suddenly
flowed out of him in a single wave and left him empty. He forgot about
the ordeal that still lay ahead. He forgot everything. He pitched
forward on his face in the sand, and slept.
Some hours later a whistling noise awoke him. He rolled over, awake
instantly, for in past months his ears had saved his life as often as
had his eyes. High in the sky he picked out a cannibal fish from the
Acid Sea. It had set its great wings in a dive.
He raised his heat-gun, fired once, saw the feathers burst into blue
flame, saw it falling; then he rolled over and went back to sleep. Not
even the thud of its heavy body on the sand disturbed him, but an hour
later he heard another warning--a rasping sound--and through the
stench of the ancient swamp he smelled a fetidness that meant danger.
This time as he turned he rolled to his feet. He saw the huge coils of
the Venusian water-constrictor. One lidless phosphorescent eye gleamed
evilly at him, but its great jaws were spread and the dead fish was
half-way down its bone-plated throat.
Grant Russell relaxed. Ordinarily he would have been scared to death
to be within miles of the big saurian. But now for a few hours, with
the fish in its throat it would be comparatively harmless.
Grant rubbed his eyes and stretched. How wonderful sleep could be! For
six weeks he had been in the swamp where he never had dared to take
off his diving-suit even when he was resting on a clump of floating
grass, for fear it would suddenly sink and drop him into a hundred
feet of brown water; six weeks walking through mud sometimes over his
head, with the brown, infested water above that; six weeks pitting all
his swamp lore against sudden death in a thousand forms, with only the
light gravity of Venus to aid him, and his indomitable determination
to keep him going. But now he felt like a million.
No man had ever crossed the Great Swamp alone on foot before. Few had
crossed it in any fashion. Few would have tried it but Grant Russell
because few wanted to do it as much as he did. In spite of his small
size and his scrawny muscles, in spite of Venus which catered to big
men and strong men, he had done it.
* * * * *
The food problem alone would have stopped most men, but Grant had
spent a lot of time around the swamps of Venus. Often he had gone
prospecting with food enough for only one week because he couldn't buy
more, and he had stayed four, five, six weeks.
To do that he had had to experiment. He'd eaten all sorts of things.
Sometimes he had been ill but he had acquired immunity to certain
poisonous plants that contained food values.
The oxygen problem for a diving-suit for forty days would have stopped
most men but Grant had solved that too. If he had not, he never could
have gone to the Red Lava Range after the fabulous gizzard-stones of
Venus's prehistoric echindul.
For oxygen, he had discovered a plant that grew in the bottom of the
swamp. You could cut its stalk into sections and put them in a
container and they would exude oxygen for several hours. But he had to
carry at least one extra stalk all the time, and he had to keep his
eyes sharp for more. Sometimes it had been close.
Grant looked at the Red Lava Range and felt the precious leather bag
inside his shirt and smiled. Yes, he'd done it. He'd found one of the
fabulous nests of the echindul--and it had been loaded with stones,
just as ancient Venusian legend insisted.
The extinct echindul had been a sort of flying lizard that had nested
in the mysterious, almost inaccessible Red Lava Range. Every echindul
had had two gizzard-stones, and each matched pair of stones had an
unusual property.
Grant reached in his watch-pocket and brought out the one he had kept
out of the bag. He held it up and watched the sunlight, filtering
through Venus's thick clouds, and the firelight, reflected from Red
Lava Range two hundred miles away, play on the chatoyant interior of
the stone as if they were chasing each other.
Those stones would be worth forty thousand Earth dollars a pair if he
could get them to a reputable dealer in Aphrodite, Venus's largest
city. Therein lay Grant Russell's next problem, and in spite of the
satisfaction he felt at emerging from the Great Swamp, he knew that
getting safely to Aphrodite might be an even more serious problem.
Aphrodite's only approach over the Lead Vapor Mountains from the
southern hemisphere was through The Pass, a legalized city of vice. On
one side The Pass was flanked by the Bubbling Zinc Pits and on the
other side it was skirted by the Fluoride River, and man had not yet
devised any way to navigate either of these. It was doubtful, even,
that any species native to Venus could cross those two areas, but on
this authorities did not agree for in the year 2542 Venus and its
natives were still largely unknown.
Not so far unknown, however, that Grant Russell failed to recognize
the single luminous eye that had risen out of the water on a long,
slender stalk. "A fish," he thought, or as some would have said, a
Venusian. It saw that he was looking at it, and it dropped out of
sight. There was the swirl of brown water that marked its
under-surface progress. It swam like a fish, but it wasn't really a
fish. It was one of Venus's four dominant species and the most "human"
of all.
The swirl moved fast across the surface of the water and disappeared
in the direction of Aphrodite but Grant knew that its place would be
taken within a few minutes by another. And if Grant had had any
forlorn hope that he might be able to slip through The Pass, he gave
it up, for he knew now that his movements were reported hourly and
that his possession of the fabulous stones was undoubtedly known to
Relegar, the Uranian.
Relegar was the master of The Pass. He was no human and he had no
human feelings. Killings and stealing were a business to him, and he
had the most efficient spying system on any planet. It was well known
unofficially that he kept an underground factory busy extracting a
drug from the stamen of the swamp-orchid. The drug was labeled
"Venus-snow," and Relegar found it highly profitable to trade it to
the fish in the Sea-Swamp on the southwest and to the semi-aquatic
people in the great Gallium Bogs to the southeast--some called them
"frogs"--for information.
Relegar's spy-system was a monopoly by reason of a peculiar fact: the
fish-people talked in a high sound-range that no solar being but a
Uranian could hear; no Uranian trusted another Uranian, and so Relegar
was the only entity in The Pass who knew the dialect of the
fish-people. Seldom did any person or any entity find anything of
value in the bottom half of Venus that was not promptly reported to
the Uranian.
Therefore Grant Russell did not dare enter The Pass with the stones on
his person. This was a quick way to lose them--and perhaps his life.
Some day, thought Grant wishfully, some big-shot would come along and
clean out The Pass and then the little honest men would be safe. On
the rare occasions when a prospector did find something of value and
get back to land he would be allowed to keep it. Grant wished he had a
lot of power or a lot of money. He'd take over the clean-up job. But a
fellow like him, without friends, without influence, without money,
didn't have a chance.
* * * * *
Grant had thought about that a good many times on his long trip across
the swamp, but he had worried more about how to dispose of his own
stones before Relegar got hold of him. He would of course have to use
deception. But how? If he could hide the stones some place he could go
on into The Pass empty-handed and pretend that he'd had the usual lack
of luck. Then he could see Netse, the Jovian fence, and make a deal
for protection. He'd have to give up half, but that was the easiest
way out, for Relegar would keep hands off if Netse got there first.
But where could he hide the stones? There was too much continual
volcanic subterranean activity in the swamp, and on what little dry
land Venus had it was doubtful that any hiding-place could be called
permanent. It might be solid today and swallowed by an earthquake
tomorrow.
The only real solution was to have somebody else keep them for a
while, Grant thought, and that was a discouraging thought, for whom
could he trust in The Pass even if he could reach them? For that
matter, who in The Pass would risk his life to help out Grant Russell,
the Hard-Luck Man of the Swamp?
He'd been known as a hard-luck man as far back as he could remember.
His parents had been killed in a rocket crash on a trip to Mars; he'd
been raised by one relative after another and they'd each one gotten
rid of him as soon as they could. Finally he had married a nice girl
and they had been happy until their daughter was born. Then the mother
had died.
Grant had gone to pieces for a while. When he came to, he was broke,
hungry, ragged. Then when it was too late he had become frantic over
the safety of his small daughter, Beth. He found that she was safe in
a child welfare home in New Jersey, but they would not release her to
him until he could pay what he owed for her care and have enough left
over to establish himself as a substantial citizen.
He had told her goodby. She was the image of her mother, and she had
held onto his hand as long as she could and said between sobs, "Daddy,
can we have a farm some day, and raise strawberries, and have just us
two? I don't want to be an orphan." He had gulped and said, "Sure,"
and then he had come to Venus. It was a new planet, largely
unexplored, full of opportunity.
That had been three years ago. Things had been tough at times but now
he could afford to smile. He'd hit the jackpot--a million-year-old
nest of the echindul, with sixteen pairs of stones. He put the one
stone safely back in his watch-pocket. He was keeping that one. When
he sold the others he would have the dealer pick out the mate to this
one, and he and Beth would keep this pair. They would be well able to
afford it.
He felt the bag at his side. The stones didn't weigh much, perhaps a
couple of ounces apiece, but the famous telepathic stones of Venus
were well known on Earth. Wealthy young lovers would carry a pair, if
they could get them, so that each could know what the other was
thinking.
Scientists said the stones were matched crystals so that each pair, in
effect, was tuned in together. They said also that the stones were
little more than nature's ultimate extension of man's feeble attempts
at radio communication.
Grant Russell knew little about that. What he did know was that those
stones were worth half a million dollars. He gathered up his patched
diving-suit and packed it, from long habit. He raised his head and saw
another eye watching him from the swamp. He watched the eye and
listened to the rasping of the bone-plates in the constrictor's
throat.
Ordinarily he would have tried to kill the big saurian, for its skin
had the property of turning slightly radioactive after death and it
was worth a couple of hundred dollars delivered in Aphrodite, but a
thought occurred to him. He watched the saurian and began to smile.
The constrictor could be worth a lot more than two hundred dollars to
him.
He flipped a handful of green sand at the eye in the swamp and it
withdrew abruptly into the water. He ran, making a wide circle around
the constrictor's powerful tail. He darted in to the head and stood
above the lidless eye. Three years ago he would not have walked this
close to a _dead_ constrictor, but now--well, he'd learned not to be
scared until there was need of it. He bent down. The fish was well
inside the saurian's mouth. The constrictor's jaws were distended and
it was helpless.
Grant whipped the bag of stones from inside of his jacket and tied the
leather thong to one leg of the fish. He made sure he had the one
single stone in his watch-pocket. That one he had to keep to be able
to find the others. He went back to the edge of the swamp and waited
until he saw an eye come up, whereupon he flipped another handful of
sand at it.
He stayed there for two hours, until the bag of stones was well down
the saurian's throat. Then he set out for The Pass. He was painfully
hungry now, but he was light-hearted. Never again would he have to
risk the death that infested the Great Sea-Swamp. Within thirty days
he would be home--home on Earth. He and Beth would get a little house
out in the country and have a little garden, and he could relax and
watch his daughter grow up. She was only seven now. It wasn't too
late.
* * * * *
It was dark when he got to The Pass, the sinister city where he'd seen
men killed for a twenty-dollar bill, where girls had been sold over
the counter for fifty. He knew better than to go directly to Netse,
for the Jovian and the Uranian had a sort of throat-cutting
partnership in the underworld, and while Grant was sure Netse would
help him directly to get a bigger cut, he knew also that Netse
wouldn't want to be too obvious about it.
So Grant, by this time weary in the shoulders from carrying his
equipment, turned down Thorium Avenue toward Nellie's Boarding House.
But under the first streetlight he was stopped by a grimy boy. This
was notable, because the boy was an Earthman. There weren't too many
Earthmen in The Pass.
"Where you been, Hard-Luck Russell?" the boy asked insolently.
Grant's throat was dry. He knew what that meant. Nobody who knew
Hard-Luck Russell would bother to stop him unless they had orders to
do it--orders that came from Relegar.
"In the Swamp," Russell said, swallowing hard.
The kid stared at the diving-suit in Grant's hand, stared at Grant's
face with a sharp, penetrating, unashamed inquisitiveness that made
Grant use all of his will-power to stare back. The kid suddenly
disappeared.
Grant forced himself not to walk faster. The kid had put the finger on
him. It was the first time Relegar had ever done that. Those damned
eyes! Relegar must know what Grant had found, and the knowledge that
the Uranian knew about the stones made him weak. Relegar was a bad
spider.
Grant's impulse was to run but he forced himself to be steady. Now he
didn't dare go straight to Netse. He went on to Nellie's place and
hammered on the door. "Oh, it's you. Come on in." Nellie opened the
door. Nellie was a Martian, a century-plant, and nobody knew whether
it was he or she or whether it made any difference, but they called it
"she" and they called it "Nellie."
Grant went in. Nellie's leaves rustled and that queer whispery voice
came from her. "Do you want a cot?"
"I'll have a room this time," said Grant. "How much?"
"A buck," said Nellie's leaves. "Pay now."
She collected. He took his diving-suit to the room. He didn't like the
smell of cabbage and garlic, and the fumes of chlorine were so strong
he nearly choked. A Saturnian must be pickling insects somewhere up on
the second floor. He sat down. He was starved but he didn't want to go
outside until he had a chance to figure things out. He thought maybe
the first thing to do was to see Netse.
From the sounds he thought the two girls across the hall were getting
ready to go out. He lay down on the bed to rest.
At ten o'clock they left, jabbering. It was good to hear Earth-people
talk, even if it was French, which he didn't understand. As soon as
the front door closed after the girls he tiptoed across the hall and
tried the doorknob. It was locked. He opened it with his skeleton key.
The room was dark and he did not turn on a light. He opened the window
and dropped softly to the ground in a narrow space between two
buildings.
A grating voice said, "Where you going, punk?"
Grant froze. He wanted to run but couldn't. He turned. Back at the
alley, in the light, was a medium-size, solidly built man with black
hair and a long scar on his left cheek. Grant wheeled, but stopped
short. In front of him, at the street end, was a huge Neptunian. It
was ten feet high. Grant shuddered. He didn't want that thing too
close to him with its razor-sharp teeth and its fondness for blood. He
walked toward the Earthman.
* * * * *
They took him into a snow-joint over on Chloride Street. The man led,
the Neptunian followed. They went down many flights of stairs carved
in the solid purple lava and finally into an elevator. They went
farther down.
This, then, was Relegar's headquarters. The Uranian couldn't stand
radiation for any length of time. Out on Uranus they had almost none,
and so Venus, with its very heavy clouds that filtered the sunlight,
was one of the few planets where a Uranian could live. Even so, the
Uranians on Venus, having an instinctive dread of sunlight because
sunlight usually meant radiation, preferred to stay underground.
Perhaps it was more like their native world that way, for they lived
underground even on Uranus.
They got out of the elevator in a rock cavern and walked a hundred
feet. They passed two guards and went through a steel door. They were
in a big room, dimly lighted by red bulbs. Giant didn't like the
dimness and he didn't like the smell. He tried to see.
"Here he is," said the man.
There was an odd bass rambling which Grant recognized as the voice of
a Uranian. He shivered. Then there were words, and Grant knew the
Uranian, wherever he was--maybe in a different room--was using a
modifier to turn his sounds into Earth-language: "Walk closer,"
ordered the queer voice. "I want to watch your face."
It scraped the marrow in his bones, that queer voice. He saw a big
tunnel, and at the far end of it, barely discernible in the dim light,
was Relegar. Grant stared, chilled. His eyes became used to the queer
light, and then he began to make out details. The tunnel was round and
big enough so that a man could have walked into it, and at the far end
the big Uranian seemed to be standing on his side, with his sixteen
huge jointed legs supporting him, half of them on the floor and half
on the ceiling. His purple, hairy body was supported in the middle
almost as from a web. His two semi-globular eyes, seemingly opaque,
were surrounded by six smaller ones. Grant knew the smaller ones could
detect infra-red, and now he felt his face growing warm and knew they
had on infra spot on him.
"What did you find in the swamp?" asked that dissonant voice.
Grant swallowed and licked his lips. "Nothing," he said finally.
The great maw of the spider, rimmed in red, opened wide as if the
Uranian was yawning. It showed long, curving white fangs. Then Relegar
said, "You found stones of the echindul."
"I have only one," said Grant, and held it out fearfully.
A curious red began to creep over Relegar's body. His next words were
deadly: "One is no good. You found many. What did you do with them?"
Grant watched the great, gray poison-mandibles lift, and he was
terrified. He wanted to speak but he could not.
"You've hidden them somewhere," said the horrible voice. "You intended
to go back after them. Well, I am going to let you do that. But I
shall be after you. I, in person, shall be on your trail. How will you
like that?"
"I--I haven't got them. I don't know where they are," Grant insisted,
which, in a manner of speaking, was true.
Relegar's two big bulbous eyes seemed to grow bigger and bigger, but
still the light was reflected only from their surface. Grant took a
step backward. Relegar swayed his body toward him, but the legs did
not move. "Go get your stones," he said. "But whenever you do, I'll be
right behind you. And don't try to go to Aphrodite."
The lights went out. The giant Neptunian was at Grant's side. Grant
felt the leathery skin against his hand. They took him up and kicked
him out on the street.
Grant got dazedly to his feet. He had to see Netse the Jovian, quick.
Netse would exact a steep price as soon as he found out that Relegar
had threatened, but even one-third of the money would be better than
nothing. And he knew what it meant to be trailed by Relegar. No being
from any planet had ever come back sane from being hunted by Relegar.
Most of them didn't come back.
He stopped at the big jewelry house over on Curium Avenue. He saw that
it was now nearly one o'clock in the morning, and of course the
jewelry store was closed, but he knew that Netse seldom slept and that
the Jovian probably did more business at night than during the day. He
pressed the night button and waited.
The square of sidewalk dropped. Grant walked between X-ray scanners
and remembered to deposit his heat-gun. He was met by an Earthman who
took him up a long escalator. They went into a well-lighted room hung
with rich tapestries and golden drapes. The man escorted Grant to a
pedestal in the center of the room. The lights went out and it was
inky black.
Then suddenly there sprang into sight on the pedestal a transparent
dome the size of a small goldfish bowl. It was lighted by ultra-violet
from the bottom. In the center of the dome a small golden ball hung by
a platinum wire, and on the ball was a tiny butterfly--Netse the
Jovian. Netse's wings moved slowly as he walked around the ball, and
the violet light brought out the delicate green luminous tracery in
his wings. Grant involuntarily stepped back.
There were whistling words and Grant was aware that they came through
a speaker and amplification system. He knew the dome that protected
the Jovian was almost indestructible. "You wished to see me?" The
wings moved slowly back and forth. Each one had a purple spot in the
center like an eye.
Grant gulped. "Yes. I--I have something to show you. I need your
help." He wondered if the purple spots actually were eyes.
"Most people do," said Netse dryly.
Grant, inordinately ill at ease, fumbled in his watch-pocket. It was
incredible that this tiny butterfly that would hardly outweigh a
cigarette paper should have the brain to conduct a ramified business
such as this one, and it was even more incredible that men and
everything else--except perhaps Relegar--would yield to its will.
Will, of course, was the key factor. Will was dominant and men obeyed.
* * * * *
Grant held out the echindul stone. "This is one of a pair," he said.
"I found the other one too."
"You have just come back from the Red Lava Range," said the whistling
voice. "How many pairs did you find?"
Grant stared at the butterfly. Some thought the Jovians could read
minds. Grant wondered. Then he decided to be honest. "Sixteen."
Netse's wings quit moving for a minute. "What do you want me to do?"
"I want you to assure me safe passage to your office. I will give you
three-fourths of them," Grant blurted. He had not meant to make an
offer like that. He had intended to let Netse ask but the delicacy of
his situation hit him abruptly and fully and he was weighed down with
sudden desperation.
"How can you find the others?" asked Netse.
"I--" Grant got cautious. "I have provided for that."
The butterfly fluttered to the top of the dome and hung upside down
for a moment. Then the whistling came again. "I am sorry. I do not see
where I can be of any assistance."
Grant was stunned. He held out both hands. "But--"
The lights went out. The Earthman was at his side, leading him out. He
was given his heat-gun. "But what--why?--I don't understand," Grant
said, bewildered.
His escort looked at him, opened his mouth, and showed Grant he was
tongueless. He positioned Grant on the square and a moment later Grant
was back on the sidewalk.
Discouragement was on him like a great weight. It deadened him. It
smothered him. He paced the streets and eventually found himself
before a restaurant. He remembered then that he had not eaten for a
long time. He went in and ordered oysters. That was about the only
meat you could buy in The Pass and be sure of not eating some sentient
being. Then, waiting, he sat in a booth with his head between his
hands.
It was apparent they didn't want him to have any part of his
stones--the stones he had spent six months and risked his life
for--the stones that meant so much to him and to Beth. They wanted all
of his stones. The dirty Shylocks. They weren't willing to take half,
or two-thirds, or three-fourths. They wanted all. They weren't willing
for him to have any part of them. He would have settled for ten per
cent, which would have been over fifty thousand dollars, but they
didn't offer him ten per cent. They offered nothing. They wanted all.
Netse must have been contacted by Relegar and told to keep hands off.
That was why Grant had wanted to see Netse first. But he had not
dreamed that Netse would refuse him entirely. He had thought it would
be merely a matter of the price.
Now what could he do? He didn't dare let the constrictor have more
than three day's head-start, for the saurian would finish digesting
the fish in about five days. That meant Grant would have to start back
to the swamp tomorrow. But Relegar's spies would report every move.
The minute he set out, Relegar would be notified. And Relegar would
come after him. Grant shuddered. Where his hands touched his face his
finger tips were cold.
Relegar would find him. The spider had a locator sense that was
infallible. He could set out days later and find Grant unerringly. And
how could one fight the Uranian when they met? Relegar's nervous
system was so constructed that he was practically impossible to kill.
You could boil him or freeze him without injuring him. Uranians had
been boiled alive in prussic acid for forty hours without ill effects.
You could cut off legs and even sever the head and they would still
live. So what could a man do?
There was only one thing Grant knew. That was to go after the stones.
They were his and he would never give them up. They might take the
stones away from him, but he would never give them up.
So the next morning he overhauled his suit and patched it. He got
fresh oxygen and bought a meager supply of food. He had one more good
meal and started out south again with the single stone in his
watch-pocket.
It took him seven hours to reach the place where he had left the
constrictor. It was gone, of course. How far, he could not know. He
took the one telepathic stone from his pocket. He found a spot where
he could sit in the open, cross-legged, with his eyes fixed on the
stone. From the corner of his eye he saw a brown detached eye on a
stalk pop up from the surface of the water, but he paid no attention.
He concentrated on the stone.
The stone had a fair polish. He looked at its surface and shut out all
the normal sounds from his ears. The stone seemed to be in motion on
the inside, and presently that motion communicated itself to his mind.
He had a picture of a constrictor, lying sleepily in a pool of brown
water surrounded by heavy, deep grass that hung over the banks and
grew down into the water.
He heard now the distant bellow of a swamp-ox, the buzzing of aquatic
bees. Slowly he turned the stone on its edge and revolved it
carefully. When the picture was clearest in his mind he picked out an
orientation point in the distant mountains. Then, well pleased, he put
the stone in his pocket, got into his diving-suit, screwed on the
helmet, adjusted the oxygen, and stepped off into the brown water of
the swamp.
The bottom here was steep but it was good. It was hard and not more
than knee-deep in mud. He traveled carefully, freezing on occasion
when huge shadows moved above him. He was in fifty feet of water and
he liked that better because it was easier to go unnoticed. He avoided
a patch of electric cactus, for the spines would have electrocuted him
even through the suit, and he went far around an area of white
bull-root, shaped like women's legs, because he knew the bull-root was
always infested with swamp-razors that would cut through the seams of
his diving-suit.
When he came out of the water he found his orientation point and kept
going. He came to a wide stretch of water, and with the wind at his
back, made fast time by climbing on an island of floating grass and
going straight across. This was important. He needed to find the
constrictor by the time Relegar started after him.
The spider could travel much faster than Grant for it walked on water
where Grant was forced to wade on the bottom. But Relegar would wait a
while. He wouldn't want to be on the surface of Venus any longer than
necessary, even for half a million dollars, so he would give Grant
plenty of time, since there was no danger of his getting away.
Grant was encouraged by the fact that the constrictor did not appear
to be far away. Everything here depended on his reaching the saurian
two days ahead of Relegar. Not that he expected to run. That was
hopeless. But he did have a partial plan. He thought he knew how to
recover the stones and to face the Uranian without being immediately
killed. And he hoped for some now unforeseen development that
subsequently would help him to get through The Pass.
That last item was a weak point, a very weak point, but there was
nothing he could do about it now. He could not wait for a plan. He had
to go ahead and trust his own ingenuity to devise a means of getting
to Aphrodite later. If he could keep Relegar from going back to The
Pass until he himself could get through The Pass, then he would be
unmolested, for Relegar was master of The Pass, and no entity of any
sort, not even as powerful a one as Netse, would touch any being in
whom Relegar was interested unless Relegar himself should order it.
If Grant could get through The Pass and across Division Street he
would be safe, for Aphrodite proper was under the jurisdiction of the
Planetary Police, and even Relegar respected them.
* * * * *
Grant found the constrictor on the second day, lying in a shallow pool
with only its dorsal spines showing. Working slowly and carefully and
entirely under water, he located the saurian's head, concealed in a
clump of floating grass. The reptile was still in something of a
torpor from its meal, and Grant had no difficulty in approaching it
through the water and attacking it with the heat-gun on the soft part
of the neck below the head.
The first bolt must have gone through and severed its spinal column,
but Grant risked destruction from the threshing body long enough to
burn the head off entirely. He got out on solid ground and waited
until sundown for the monster's contortions to die. Then he worked
fast. The flying scavenger-foxes were already settling on the
constrictor's back and tearing out great chunks of flesh. He went back
under water and cut out the saurian's gizzard with the heat-ray. He
dragged it off to one side and tremblingly cut it open with his knife,
and he was relieved and exultant when he recovered all fifteen of the
stones. The bag had disintegrated, but he put the stones carefully in
his pockets.
Then he went back once more. He cut off a piece of the hide two feet
square. He took only the outer hide, which was dry and which held the
great iridescent scales that formed isotopes after death. From some
marsh-bamboo and some wire-vines he formed a shield. By that time it
was midnight. He turned his light on the pool where the saurian had
been, and shuddered. The water was dull red, and alive with creatures
fighting each other to get to the carcass. The surface was covered
with flying things, some small, some huge, all fighting, fighting.
Life on Venus was an eternal, bloody fight. This slaughter, once
started, would go on for weeks, until the fighting creatures in this
immediate area of the swamp were exhausted.
Grant snapped off the light as clouds of flying things arose. He
started down the neck of dry land and walked all night, going as far
as he could without submerging, getting out of range of the holocaust
around the dead constrictor. Eventually he came to a lavawood tree. He
examined it carefully, then climbed it. He found a crotch in the
limbs. He lay down and hung his arms and legs over the limbs, pulled
the shield over him, and went to sleep.
From the brilliant, blinding light of the sun even through the clouds,
and the vapor arising from the surface of the swamp, he knew it was
mid-afternoon when he awoke. He started up, but long habit stopped him
almost as soon as he moved. He opened his eyes and was fully awake,
listening for the sound that had awakened him. He heard it, a rasping
noise like the sound of a knife-blade scraped against the grain of a
fresh hog-skin. He looked across the swamp. Less than fifty yards away
was Relegar, walking toward him on the water. The sound came from the
scraping of his gray poison-mandibles against each other.
Relegar's mouth, as wide as his body, was open. The two bulbous eyes
gleamed like pieces of polished metal. They saw Grant. The spider's
sixteen jointed legs, that held his purple body three feet above the
water, moved too fast for Grant to follow them. The Uranian skittered
across a hundred feet of water and walked out on the land.
His bone-scraping voice came to Grant in the tree. "I'll take the
stones now." It was a sinister voice. Grant felt a crawling,
instinctive horror as the spider came toward him, its jointed legs
moving delicately. "You've saved me some trouble by finding them."
Grant overcame his paralysis and reached for the heat-gun. Relegar saw
the motion and stopped. "You can't hurt me with that heat-projector,"
he said. "You might shoot off a leg, but I'd have you half eaten
before you could fire a second bolt."
The knowledge hit Grant with what was almost a shock that there was
some way he could get the best of Relegar, otherwise the big spider
would not have spoken at all. He well knew that he couldn't kill
Relegar with the heat-gun. He could burn off a leg, yes, but he
doubted that the infra-rays would affect the spider's body at all. He
moved a little on the limbs, got a hold on the snake-skin shield, and
dropped to the ground.
Relegar darted forward to meet him. But ten feet away the spider
stopped, and Grant knew he had felt the radiation from the snake-skin.
Relegar's mouth hung open, his white fangs gleaming in the red maw.
The two bulbous eyes were suddenly shot with the red fire of anger.
Grant did not hesitate. As he landed on the ground he fired a
heat-bolt at one of Relegar's left legs. It smoked. There was an odor
of burned hair. The queer material of the leg glowed white for an
instant and then burned in two and the bottom part dropped off.
Relegar squealed. His two eyes almost exploded in a rage of red. He
wasn't permanently injured--he would grow a new leg--but he was
furious because he dared not come close to the shield. The radiation
would paralyze him within a couple of seconds. Grant saw his body sag
a little on the corner where the leg had been, and then he had one of
those flashes of intuition that every being had to have, to live long
in the swamp. He knew how to win this fight. He trained the heat-gun
on the second leg on the same side and pressed the trigger. That leg
burned in two and Relegar's body sagged still more.
Grant started on the third one. A feeling of triumph was growing in
him. Then Relegar charged.
Grant hadn't expected that. There was little he could do but hold the
shield frantically before him to try to ward off the fangs and the
mandibles.
He had had no idea that the Uranian's body was so heavy. It seemed to
Grant the thing must weigh three or four hundred pounds. It thundered
into him and knocked him over as if he had been a straw. The heavy
hoofs galloped over him. He was surprised, but he rolled on over and
came to his feet, shooting.
He got the fourth and fifth legs this time. Relegar's body sagged
considerably, but the spider, his entire body turning red with rage,
spun around and charged again. This time the great mouth was open, the
fangs ready, and the mandibles were extended. Grant left himself open
until he could feel the spider's fetid breath in his face, then he
flung out his shield.
The sharp fangs struck it. Relegar turned into a tornado of fury for
perhaps a second, trying to shake the skin from his teeth. But it was
too late. The skin came loose, but the radiation had paralyzed the
spider. He sank feebly to the ground with the shield under him. His
eyes glared with unutterable malignant hate, but that was all. His
muscles were impotent.
Grant stood a few feet away, getting his breath, feeling the
trip-hammer in his temple slow down to normal. Then he aimed. The
sixth, seventh, and eighth legs burned off. He put the pistol in its
holster.
"I'm not going to try to kill you," he said. "I suppose that's
impossible anyway, short of cutting you up into small pieces, and I
don't relish that idea. But I'll leave you the snake-skin. It will
have passed the peak of its radioactivity by tomorrow and you can
start back for The Pass. But you won't go back very fast. You've got
legs on only one side. It's going to be slow navigating, especially on
water. In fact, I think maybe you'll have to wait until you grow some
new legs."
He patted his pockets filled with half a million dollars' worth of
echindul stones. "Long before that I'll be in Aphrodite depositing my
stones at the First Interplanetary Bank."
He watched Relegar's eyes turn dead, cold black, then he screwed on
his helmet, adjusted the oxygen, and stepped off into the brown water.
He felt rather good, wading through the mud at the bottom of the
swamp. He was somewhat astonished that it had fallen to him, a nobody,
to be the means of breaking up Relegar's hold on The Pass. But it was
a very satisfactory feeling. He thought about Beth and New Jersey and
strawberries with fresh cream. He sighed happily. His luck had
changed.
* * * * *
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