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Title: The War-Nymphs of Venus
Author: Ray Cummings
Release Date: April 21, 2020 [EBook #61884]
Language: English
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THE WAR-NYMPHS of VENUS
By RAY CUMMINGS
The voluptuous golden civilization of Arron was
doomed. Licentious laughter echoed through the
water-kingdom, unmindful of the relentless,
clanking invasion of the Gorts. What fools, this
handful of warrior-maidens led by a puny Earthman,
to pit their thin strength against Tollgamo's iron army!
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Spring 1941.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
I was fishing for tarpon, lolling back in the stern of my small boat.
The outboard motor, running at trolling speed, was a puttering purr in
the drowsing watery silence. It was sunset of a summer evening of 1948.
The Gulf of Mexico, out beyond the mouth of the little Florida bayou
inlet across which I was heading, was a glassy expanse, blood-red in
the light of the huge setting sun.
To the south lightning was playing along the orange sky. I recall that
a vague uneasiness was upon me. Because a storm might be coming? Surely
it was not that. I was within three miles of the small island where
young Jack Allen and I were camping. It was my intention to head for
there presently, especially as there had been no sign of tarpon. Allen
had been too lazy to come fishing; he had said he would loaf and have
supper ready for us at dark.
My name is Kent Fanning. Jack Allen and I were of an age--twenty-four,
that summer. With our business in New York, we were here on vacation,
having a permit to fish and to camp on the small, uninhabited island.
The intermittent lightning at the southern horizon rose higher. Faint
muttering thunder was audible. A massive grey-white cloud was down
there now, a thunderhead, coming northward with the storm behind it. I
had decided to pull in my line and head for the island when suddenly I
had a strike, the big reel humming as the line went out. A tarpon? I
hooked it, shut off the motor, sat erect with my stout rod braced in
the leather socket of my belt. I was prepared for a long struggle.
And then, two hundred yards or so from me, the water broke with a
floundering splash. I gasped, stared numbed. A floundering, oblong
pink-white thing was there at the end of my line. A slim white arm
flailed up as the thing turned, swimming on the surface frantically
away from me. Pink-white limbs gleaming in the moonlight. Streaming
tawny hair, like seaweed--hair in which my hook seemed to be caught.
A girl! I had her at the boat in a moment, floundering in the
moonlight, gasping, still trying to twist around and disentangle my
hook from her long streaming hair. A small, slim figure, white-limbed
yet flushed like moonlit coral. There was a brief dangling robe wetly
clinging to her. It was of gleaming lustrous green as though perhaps it
was a fabric of softly woven metal, painted green by the sea.
An extraordinary yet very human girl.
Just a few seconds of my stricken amazement. I recall that I gasped
inanely.
"Well--why good Heavens--"
Her gasping laugh rippled like the splashing water in the moonlight.
"Sorry! I got some frightened to be confused."
English! Strangely intoned with little rippling liquid syllables. Like
nothing I had ever heard before and yet my own language.
She had pulled my hook from the gleaming tawny tresses of her hair.
Then she flung up a coral-white arm. I bent, seized her wrist, drew her
up and she came with a nimble, skilled little leap and landed on her
feet in the boat beside me!
II
I find myself now somewhat at a loss accurately and yet succinctly to
depict that next hour or two. You who read this of course have heard
much of the strange affair from newscasters and from the public prints.
Garbled reports, some of them. Others pedantic with technical details
of science. I am no scientist. It is my purpose here merely to give
a factual account of the weird incidents which brought to me, Kent
Fanning, a person certainly of no importance save perhaps to myself, a
sudden prominence not in one world, but in two.
Queer that throughout my lifetime there had always been talk that
some day, here on Earth, scientists would discover the secret of
spaceflight; that then intrepid adventurers would journey out into
space. But as you all know now, the reverse, so seldom anticipated, was
true. Another world came to us, in the person of this strange Venus
girl; came indeed by utter chance, or destiny if you will; to me.
Venus; the Earth. Of all known planets, the two most close, and most
alike. There are things brewing in the Universe of which none of us can
be aware, of course. A myriad things. And here was one of them. Unknown
to us, Venus and the Earth already were intermingled, fused into the
beautiful little person of this strange girl--the blood of Venus, the
blood of Earth flowing in her veins.
You had not heard of George Peters, doubtless. Nor had I! A research
chemist and physicist, in New York City, about 1930. He was a young
man then; I think, twenty-eight. He sought no publicity. A wealthy
man. With some twenty companions, all of them scientists, some of them
older than himself, he was working, not on the secret of spaceflight,
but with a ray--a vibration--which he hoped might reach some distant
planet, as a means of communication if there should be inhabitants
there.
Ironically he did not know he had succeeded! And it was men from
Venus--the villainous Tollgamo of whom now you have heard so much--who
was attracted by his signals and came to him; abducting him and his
companions so that all that was known, here on earth was that one
morning George Peters' laboratory was found wrecked, and he and his
companions were gone.
"George Peters, that is my father," the girl was telling me now as I
headed the small open boat for the island where young Allen and I were
camping.
And she had come to Earth--the first time in her sixteen years that
she had been off Venus; stolen a small spaceflight cylinder from her
father. Her Venus people needed help from the threat of Tollgamo. All
that was good and beautiful on Venus and in her Arone world of love and
music and beauty, was to be destroyed by the monstrous threat of this
Dictator from his mechanized realm of the Gorts.
"Wait," I said, as she poured it at me, at times only half coherent.
"You came here to Earth, for help? You came alone?"
"Yes. You have not, father thinks, yet discovered the secret of
spaceflight. He was sending the cylinder, with drawings and scientific
details of how spaceflight was accomplished by Tollgamo and his evil
men. And so I came. We want that you should build a spaceship and come
to Venus. Your men, and some of your weapons of war, to help us fight
Tollgamo."
And she had dropped here into the Gulf of Mexico, wrecked the little
one-man space-vehicle so that she barely escaped with her life. And it
sank, with its secret of spaceflight obliterated by the sea, even if by
some chance the little metal mechanisms themselves could be recovered.
I think that she had given no thought to that realization as she swam
to save herself and suddenly found my trolling hooks entangled in her
hair. Nereid of the sea. Far more like her Venus mother than her Earth
father, water was almost her natural element, since her blood did not
need the replenishment of oxygen so quickly as ours, so that for ten
minutes or more she need not breathe.
* * * * *
I learned only fragmentary details of all this that Midge Peters had
to tell, there in the boat as we headed for the island. Surely I must
admit that the weirdness of it startled me, and for just a moment
perhaps, it vaguely occurred to me that here was some trickster, or a
mentality unbalanced. But to look at her, was to know that certainly
here was no Earth girl!
I had to believe her. But I must admit, I gave little thought, there in
the boat, to any menace to her world, or to the ironic fact that she
had brought to Earth the treasured secret of spaceflight and already
had lost it so that she was marooned here. Here was the amazing,
beautiful little creature herself in the boat beside me, and what she
was saying of Venus dwindled into insignificance with the stirring
of my pulses as I stared at her. Slim little body, hardly matured,
but fashioned with almost a normal earthly beauty. Yet there was a
strangeness that made her different. The flush of pink coral to her
flesh; her shimmering robe with moonbeams rippling on it like moonrays
on green rippled water; her long tawny tresses, drying now in the wind.
But most of all, I think, the strangeness was in her eyes. The sea was
there in the green depths of her eyes. Eyes that mirrored the soul of a
strange girlhood; eyes that had seen things strange to me, reflecting
now the thoughts, emotions of another world.
"You look at me so queerly," she said suddenly. "Why is that?"
"Well you--you--" Suddenly it was hard to say anything of my
conflicting thoughts. "You--well, why wouldn't I be startled? A little
sea nymph. You should have been named Nereid."
Again her laugh rippled.
"Nereid? Why yes, my father calls me that, though my mother named me
Midge. That was when she learned English. So I am not like Earth-girls?
My father has said it many times. But you--"
Her gaze at me was earnest, direct. "You do not look queer to me," she
added. "You look much in the fashion of my father, grown younger."
Surely I have given only a vague picture indeed of that half hour in
the boat with Nereid as the puttering little outboard motor drove us
to the island where Jack Allen would be waiting for me. Half an hour,
so crowded with my first jumbled impressions of what Nereid's weird
Venus-world must be like.
"That is your island?" Nereid said suddenly. "Why--it looks very
pretty."
The storm still was rising in the south--occasional bursts of lightning
and rolling, reverberating thunderclaps. But the starlight and
moonlight was over us. It silvered the island palms; it lay like white
metal on the sand of the island's shore.
I headed us into the little cove. A small dilapidated dock was there.
On a little rise behind the palmetto fringe, under the palm trees, a
shaft of moonlight gleamed on the white of our tent. I thought that
young Allen would have heard the putt-putt of my motor and be down at
the dock now to greet me. But there was no sign of him.
I shut off the motor. Silence leaped at us.
"Queer," I said. "Jack promised he'd have supper ready."
The glow of campfire beside the tent was visible. In the silence I
could hear the murmur of music from our little portable radio. Allen
must have been here only a few minutes ago. I called,
"Oh Jack--Jack, where are you?"
There was only the roll of my words, echoing into silence. Very queer.
Nereid was in the bow of that boat. "Fend us off," I said as we glided
to the dock.
This weird girl. Water, almost her native element so that suddenly she
dove over the bow. Flash of coral limbs, green-sheathed little body and
streaming tawny hair. There was hardly a splash as she slipped into the
water and then was swimming backward against our gliding little boat.
It slid to the dock, gently eased up, and Nereid was gone.
For a moment I held my breath, with my heart pounding. Foolish
apprehension. Abruptly she appeared, out in the middle of the cove,
head and shoulders bobbing up as she shook the water from her tresses
and flung up an arm to greet me.
"Come back here," I called.
The silent cove echoed with the ripple of her laugh. With weaving
limbs, incredibly swiftly her body slid through the water; submerged
again, and she came up laughing, like a dog shaking herself as she
jumped to the dock.
"Some day we will swim together, Kent." Again she flung me that
sidelong glance of coquetry. "And if you swim like my father, without
much trouble I could drown you. You think so?"
"No argument on that," I said. Queerly I seemed to feel, just for that
instant, almost a vague resentment. Resentment of a man at the superior
prowess of a woman. Instinctive, of course.
She seemed to understand it, and she laughed again. "Our young men of
Venus are like that," she said, "for they, too, cannot swim very well."
And instantly her face clouded. "That, too, is part of the trouble of
my world--the men who would have their mates kept from the water so
that the man may be in everything the master. Our virgins do not like
that."
She clung to my hand as we went up the palmetto-lined path to the camp.
And suddenly she seemed frightened. An aura of sudden menace was here.
I, too, could feel it. Allen had started supper. The things were out;
food was in the frying pan, burning now in a charred mass over the
campfire flames.
"Kent--something wrong--"
* * * * *
We stood tense. Like animals abruptly scenting danger, yet having no
least idea what it was, or from whence it could come.... And abruptly
in the silence, the murmuring little radio here changed from music to a
newscaster's flash.
"Nereid listen--news of you--" I murmured.
Something had been seen, late this afternoon, dropping swiftly from the
sky--something, a meteorite?--the few eyewitnesses differed in trying
to describe it. "_Mysterious missile drops into the Gulf ten miles
off lonely Palmetto Key._" The newscaster drew on his imagination,
conjecturing what the round shining thing could have been, which
two fishing boats had reported seeing coming hurtling down from the
afternoon sky, dropping into the glassy Gulf.
I smiled at Nereid as for a moment we stood listening. Her little
falling space-cylinder already was causing comment. I could envisage
the incredulous amazement of the authorities at Tampa when I took her
there, told them who she was. The world would ring with it. Blaring
newscasters: "_Stranded Venus girl! Marooned on Earth! Venus inhabited!
Venus threatened with bloody revolution! Appeals to Earth for help!
Daughter of two worlds brings secret of spaceflight to Earth, and loses
it on her arrival!_"
And some would try to be humorous: "_Girl from Venus brings gift of
spaceflight secret, and loses it before she can give it to us! Isn't
that what you would expect of a woman?_" "_Kent Fanning and weird girl
try to hoax scientists--_"
Somehow as I thought of it, resentment sprang within me at what this
would do to the gentle little Nereid. Allen and I, tomorrow when the
storm was over, would have to take her to Tampa, of course. Or perhaps
we would take her to some scientific Society, with less publicity. And
an effort would be made to recover her cylinder, with its precious
secret.
It was my swift flow of thoughts as for that moment the newscaster
droned on. And suddenly his voice changed. He had been describing the
mysterious falling of what quite evidently had been Nereid's little
vehicle. And now another Press Bulletin had reached him.
"_Mysterious airship descends from the stratosphere, lands in the Gulf
near Palmetto Key, off west coast of Florida. At sunset tonight--_"
Nereid gripped me with a little gasping cry as we listened. A gleaming
metal thing, flatly oblong with a turret globe at bow and stern, had
been distantly seen by a tramp freighter which was heading westward
into the Gulf, bound for Mexico. A metal ship--blood-red with the
sunset on it--slowly floating down; rotating slowly, weirdly on its
horizontal axis.... It had been seen to land on the Gulf surface. And
then slowly submerge, heading shoreward like a plunging submarine as it
vanished!
Nereid murmured, "Tollgamo, he has a ship like that! But my father has
none! Oh Kent--"
A spaceship from Venus! Was it that? Following Nereid here to
seize her; to prevent her from giving the secret of Interplanetary
transportation to Earth! The newscaster was saying something about
U.S. Coast Guard Cutters being ordered from Tampa to investigate.
And from here on little Palmetto Key, young Allen had disappeared! The
implication of that struck at me. For a second I stared at Nereid, the
firelight gleaming soft and warm on her dripping little body; tinting
her pink-coral face which now was stamped with terror.
But we had no more warning than that. The storm was at hand now, and
the wind was lashing the upper fronds of the palms; purple darkness
here on the island with a flash of lightning and almost simultaneous
thunderclap. For that second the palmetto shrubs were whitely illumined
by the electric glare. Fifty feet away a big, dark upright shape
abruptly was visible. And another--and another! Men stalking us!
The glare died. There was only turgid windy darkness. I must have
muttered something to Nereid; my arm went around her as we turned to
run back to our boat in the cove. Too late! From the palm woods behind
us a violet beam of light stabbed out. It caught us; bathed us. There
was a guttural shout; the sound of a little pop and something whizzing
with a whining hum through the air. I felt something strike my legs. A
little blob which with its impact abruptly uncoiled, and then coiled
again as it wrapped itself around my legs so that I crashed heavily to
earth face down.
And another had hit my neck. Ghastly thing--quivering steel spring. It
felt like that; thin quivering metal encircling my throat. Almost like
a thing alive, gripping me with its metal fingers ... strangling me.
I was aware that Nereid, too, had fallen. My groping fingers clutched
at the strangling band; its sharp edges cut my fingers as futilely I
tried to tear it loose. I recall that I lay threshing, lunging, with my
legs pinned and my breath gone. Dark figures were standing over me now.
Guttural chuckling voices mingled with the roaring torrent of Niagara
in my ears. Then the dancing spots before my bulging eyes blurred the
gathering dark shapes.
III
The roaring in my ears came first as my consciousness struggled back.
My fumbling fingers felt my throat. The band was gone; the skin was
swollen there. Then I knew that I was bathed in the cold sweat of
weakness and was lying on the metal grid of a floor. The murmur of
voices sounded around me; and I opened my eyes to find myself in a
dimly starlit, circular turret room. The control room of a spaceship.
It hummed with a throbbing rhythm of its current. But save for that it
was queerly still, vibrationless.
We were in space. Through the round, transparent turret walls I could
see the blazing stars in a black firmament to one side. The other
was shrouded with metal blinds, through the chinks of which dazzling
sunlight was showing, so that I knew we had already left the giant
cone of the Earth's shadow. Heading partly toward the Sun. Heading for
Venus? It seemed so.
Men were here around me. Huge, burly, strangely garbed men--one at the
controls, where banks of levers and dials with quivering indicators
were ranged in rows with a line of little fluorescent globes diagonally
across them. Two other men sat softly talking together; guttural,
unintelligible words. Weird figures indeed. At first glance they could
have been towering robots; wide, square shoulders, rectangular bodies,
round tubular, jointed legs. The starlight glinted on their burnished,
grey-white metal casements. Then as they moved, I saw that their
garments were of flexible woven metal.
The one at the controls was bareheaded, a round bullet head of
close-cropped black hair. His face was heavy; skin queerly grey-white.
Weird features, with a protruding chin and long hawk nose so that the
mouth was a greylipped slit, depressed between the projections of his
nose and lower jaw. And he had deep-set, round dark eyes under shaven
black brows.
Men of science. Humans whose life was of such efficient, mechanical
rigidity that they themselves had the aspect of machines. Worshipers of
precision; of mechanization. The aura of it was on them.
I saw that one of them was sitting impassive, stiffly erect in
his metal garments with his gaze roving me like a guard. Strange,
jewel-like little weapons were at his waist and in pouches of his metal
jacket. On his head was a metal, peaked helmet--its peak fashioned in
the form of a hawk-like bird, poised for screaming flight. Across the
starlit circular room, another of the men was sitting, gazing out at
the firmament. A man? I stared with a new amazement. The same square,
jointed metal garments. But the hips were wider, the shoulders more
narrow. A woman, of this mechanized race of Gorts. Her breast swelled
beneath her mailed tunic. Her hair was black, long to the base of her
neck, covering her ears. A shining black metal band was around her
forehead, holding the hair from her eyes.
Strange, powerful Amazon. She was a good six feet tall; her face was
hawk-nosed like the men, but with lips that were fuller, of a reddish
tinge. Then as I stared, the man at the controls called to her:
"Garga--"
She rose; moved to him. Her dangling weapons, and a huge metal ornament
on her bosom, clanked as she walked. At the control table the leader
gave her orders; guttural crisp words unintelligible to me. She
nodded; went to a small table across the room, where with charts and
computations she seemed figuring the course of our flight.
Garga, woman of the Gorts. Mechanized womanhood, with all that
womanhood stands for in my own world submerged within her so that
she was a mere female machine. And suddenly my mind, still dazed now
in these first moments of my returning consciousness, swept back to
Nereid. Strange world, this Venus, to hold two such contrasting types
of female! What a gulf between them!
Where was Nereid now? Had she been killed in that attack upon us?
Anxiety swept me. I had struggled up on one elbow. The watching Gort
saw me; he muttered an exclamation and the man at the controls came
clanking to his feet. A giant fellow, well over six feet. His slit of
mouth widened with a grin like a gash between his nose and chin as he
bent down over me.
"You--still alive?" he greeted. "What your name?"
I sat up, still rubbing my bruised throat. "Kent Fanning," I said. "So
you talk English? There was a girl with me, back there on that island.
Where is she?"
He gestured blandly. "She safe. Daughter of Peters. Tollgamo wants her
not injured. He will like you too, I think perhaps. You have scientific
skill of Earth science?"
I would be kept alive for the knowledge I might have. "Well, maybe,"
I said. "Where is Peters' daughter? I want to see her. Where are you
taking us? To Venus?"
"You ask too much quick questions," he retorted. His grey knuckles
rapped his mailed chest. "I am Rhool, second to Tollgamo. I talk with
you some else time. Maybe you teach me more the English? Eh?"
"Where is Peters' daughter?" I insisted. I was on my feet, still dizzy;
and as I staggered a little, I clutched Rhool's metal clothed arm. It
angered, or perhaps startled him. With a sweeping gesture, incredibly
powerful, his arm flung me aside. His guttural barking command brought
the woman Garga with a pounce.
I have not mentioned that I am a bit under six feet in height; slim
and dark. Not very powerful; but I have, my friends tell me, a temper
somewhat flaring so that in a rough and tumble fight I usually can take
care of myself. But the glare in Rhool's eyes warned me that this was a
time when discretion certainly was better than valor. The woman Garga
towered an inch or so over me; her fingers gripped my shoulders.
"So?" she muttered. "You think to cause trouble?"
I summoned a grim smile. "I do not. I want to be taken to Peters'
daughter. Where is she?"
Rhool, back at his instrument table now, barked a command; and the
metal-clad Gort woman shoved me. "You come with me. I take you."
To Nereid? I hoped so. Docilely I preceded Garga along a glowing
humming little metal corridor of the spaceship. She said nothing more,
but flung open a small metal door after unbarring its fastenings,
shoved me in and banged it upon me.
I found myself in a small metal sleeping apartment. Brilliant starlight
filtered in through its single bullseye pane. A figure was in the
corner on a fabric couch.
"You Kent? Good Lord."
* * * * *
It was Jack Allen. They had pounced on him, back there on Palmetto Key.
I sat with him now, telling him of the weird things which had happened
to me; telling him of Nereid.
He stared. "Good Lord, Kent--well, I understand it better now."
There were things that he had learned; and as he told them to me,
Nereid's only half-coherent story began to clarify.
"That woman Garga," Allen was saying with his ready grin, "I get along
fine with her. Pumped a lot of facts out of her."
Physically, Allen and I are of quite different types, which is perhaps
why we are such friends. He says I have a romantic, sort of poetic
look--from my mother, who was Spanish. And that, he says, goes with a
bad temper. However that may be, certainly he was always the opposite.
A giant, blond fellow; six feet four; rugged, sun-bronzed, like a young
Viking. And he had an almost unfailing good nature. A slow, quiet
smile. Slow of movement; usually somewhat lazy. But there were times,
rare intervals, when he was angered. His movements were panther-like
then, and I wouldn't like to be the one to meet him in a fight.
"That Garga woman likes me," he grinned. He lowered his voice as he
leaned toward me. "She looks like a machine, but still she's a woman.
Get the idea? If we ever get out of this, that might be the way."
And then he told me what he knew of Nereid's strange Venus world. The
realm of the Arones was in a lush forest, the tropic region. Compared
to our Earth population, there were not many of the Arones. Half a
million perhaps, in little Forest and Water villages, with twenty
thousand in the chief city, known as Arron.... How shall I attempt
even an outline of the ethnological history of Venus? I can give only
the barest suggestion of it. In former ages doubtless there had been
millions of humans on this, Earth's sister planet. A civilization
rising to great heights of science, with all the planet's surface
mastered by man. And then decadence had come. Mankind resting; then
drifting backward. Dwindling in number; with science forgotten, put
aside as a memory, a tradition. And slowly but inexorably the monstrous
animals, insects, the weird vegetation again took primitive possession
of most of the globe.
"So that's your Nereid's people," Allen was saying. "Decadent--soft
now--trying to accomplish nothing."
Except human happiness. I recalled Nereid's words of her world, living
for love and music and beauty. Strange how in all human affairs there
are two sides of looking at everything! I said something like that to
Allen, and he nodded.
"The trouble with science," he agreed, "is that it can be so easily
perverted. Things to benefit mankind, turned into engines of death.
That's the recent history of our own world."
And the Arones had gone to the other extreme. Science was banned. Men
and women should live for human happiness, with no thought of conquest,
or of personal power. And out of this, a few generations ago, had risen
the Gorts. They had been for centuries a nomadic race of giants, mere
savages roaming the barren parts of the planet. Few in number, and like
the savages of our own Earth, apparently doomed to extinction. Banished
criminals from the world of the Arones, generations back, had joined
them, brought them science--stolen things of science.
And out of this sprang the Gort, Tollgamo. His father had started it:
Tollgamo, the son, carried it on. He was a genius, of course. A genius
with mad dreams. To mechanize his little world. There were only a few
thousand of them now. Men and women making themselves into machines;
fed by Tollgamo upon his own mad dreams of Venus conquest.
He had discovered the secret of spaceflight, which before him, on
Venus, had never been known. Peters' Earth-signals had attracted him,
and quietly he had gone to Earth, and seized Peters and his men;
bringing them to Venus so that they might tell him all they knew of
their science. It would be useful, that future day when he would
attempt to conquer the Arones.
Most, perhaps all, of Peters' men were dead now; killed, possibly by
Tollgamo, when their usefulness to him was finished. But Peters had
escaped; gone to the Arones. And telling them their danger, had made
himself the leader of the revival of their science. All Nereid's life,
her father, with a group of men he had trained, had feverishly been
working in the city of Arron, to build weapons with which to combat the
attack when it came.
All that was known to Tollgamo, of course. He had spies in Arron. Queer
how human nature is the same, wherever in the Universe the Creator
has planted it! The fatuous, decadent, pleasure-loving leader of the
Arones was unwilling to believe that the Gorts could be any menace.
The efforts of Peters and his fellow scientists, even now were looked
upon with disfavor. Peters and his men were distrusted, even accused of
having dreams of conquest of their own. Thousands of the Arones thought
it, so that there was an undercurrent of strife in Arron, fostered, of
course, by Tollgamo's spies.
"And now Tollgamo seems to be about ready for his attack," Allen was
telling me. "Peters probably has no weapons of any importance with
which to oppose him. And so Peters made an effort to get help from
Earth. Tollgamo found it out, and sent this ship to follow the girl so
as to keep her from giving the secret of spaceflight to Earth."
The barred metal door of our little cubby suddenly opened. A Gort man
stood there. Allen and I stared. Like the other Gorts, he was encased
in shining mailed garments. But he was crippled, bent and twisted, with
one shoulder higher than the other and a lump on his bent back. On him,
the metal garments were grotesque. He came sidling in, grinning at us
with his ugly, puffed and bloated grey-skinned face.
"I am Borgg," he said. "You will have food and drink soon. You hungry?"
"I want to see the Peters girl," I retorted. "Take me to her."
He shook his head. "Garga will take care of her. She is safe."
His glowing, dark-eyed gaze roved us. Out in the corridor there was a
man's voice--one of the other Gorts passing. And the weird, shambling
hunchback suddenly burst into guttural laughter. "So the Earthmen are
afraid of me? Afraid of Borgg, who wants only to amuse people?"
He suddenly backed away from us, hurling what seemed a stream of
invective at us in the guttural syllables of his own language. Then he
backed through our door, slammed it upon us and bolted it.
We stared at each other blankly. "Well I'll be damned," Allen muttered.
"What could that mean?"
* * * * *
I can only sketch the weird events of that voyage to Venus. My first
spaceflight. You who read this can anticipate taking one soon, of
course. And you are naturally familiar with the glowing words of
description the newscasters have used. With the mechanical details of
Interplanetary traveling, the more scientific-minded among you must
be thoroughly familiar. I think all that need have little place in my
narrative. Human motives; human conflicts. The things of actuality
which happened to me, to Jack Allen, to little Nereid--with those
things only am I concerned here.
There were some ten men and five of the grim Gort women, here on the
space vehicle. By Earth routine of living, it could have been five or
six days. After the first time of sleep, Allen and I were given a fair
freedom of movement. Much of it we spent in the control turret, with
Rhool, the leader here. Tollgamo's lieutenant was well pleased with
himself. He was bringing Nereid back. He had learned from her that her
little space-cylinder was lost at the bottom of the sea on Earth. What
Tollgamo had ordered, Rhool had accomplished, with efficiency which
would bring him commendation. And he was bringing Allen and me back,
Earthmen whom Tollgamo doubtless would very much want to question.
"You tell him much--he treat you well," Rhool assured us with his heavy
leer. He was, I could see, far more impressed with Allen than with
me; Allen who now was winning his confidence, pretending that there
was much he could tell Tollgamo; hinting even that he and I would not
be averse to joining the great Master of the Gorts in his schemes of
conquest.
Nereid was unharmed. The woman Garga was caring for her; and on the
third day from Earth, Allen persuaded Garga to bring Nereid to the
turret. After that, Nereid was often with us, and her fragile, delicate
beauty here among the grey, metal-clad Gorts made her seem ethereal
indeed. She came to my side, with her face lighting up.
"I was afraid they had killed you," she whispered. "Bad time for us
all, my Earth-friend. I--I did very badly on my adventure to Earth."
She told us then that her father had built the little cylinder,
intending to send one of his men in it. But Nereid, who had learned its
operation, had stolen it.
Then suddenly she was whispering to us, that the Gorts in the turret
might not hear. "I have a brother--my twin--his name is Leh. Tollgamo
does not know there is such a person." She shot a furtive glance
around the turret. "For several years he has been living with the
Gorts. Pretending he is one of them. From him, father has gotten much
information of Tollgamo's plans. It would be death to Leh if who he is
were known. And now I will tell you--Leh is--"
A guttural shout from Rhool at the control table checked her.
"He says, stop whispering," she murmured. "That other thing I will tell
you later.... I speak the English," she said to Rhool. "You speak it
too? Then we talk it here, so that these Earthmen may understand?"
Rhool laughed. His heavy dark gaze roved her. "You very beautiful," he
said. "See--I talk English. Come sit by me. The starshine makes you
beautiful, girl of Arron."
I tensed, with my heart pounding as I saw his darkly leering gaze rove
over her again.
"Easy!" whispered Allen. "Don't start anything."
Then at last Venus had grown to a full-round, glowing silver disk
before our bow. After the next time of sleep it was a monstrous
ball, filling half the firmament, mottled with clouds so that its
surface configurations were only vaguely apparent. Heavy, thick Venus
atmosphere. Within another day of our living routine we dropped into
it, sliding diagonally downward, with slackening velocity now and
rocket streams of fluorescent gases to check and guide us.
With Rhool and Nereid I was in the starlit turret. It was night here,
the Venus night of atmospheric fog. Rhool had been drinking from a
little gourd at his belt, and was flushed with his triumph and the
liquor.
"A few hours," he said to Nereid. "Then I give you to Tollgamo." His
arm went suddenly around her waist, drawing her against him. What he
was muttering in his own language I had no idea; but as she cried out,
struggling with him, I jumped.
"That's enough from you--let her alone!" I rasped.
* * * * *
He cast her off, leaped to his feet. Rage darkened his heavy face so
that it seemed to blacken. My lunging jab struck his mailed chest, but
my swing at his face missed him. He jumped backward, with a hand going
to a weapon at his belt. I have no doubt that I would have been dead
in another few seconds. But there were shouts behind me; the woman
Garga and Allen coming from the corridor. Garga's guttural remonstrance
checked the angry Rhool. And then Borgg, the weird little hunchback,
came shambling forward.
"Stop it!" Allen shouted at me. "Easy there, you idiot!"
Borgg grabbed me. As I fought, his mouth jabbed against my ear. His
voice was a sibilant whisper. "Fight me--not too hard! I am Leh--her
brother!"
Nereid's brother! Spy among the Gorts, for years masquerading in this
grotesque guise of half-demented hunchback jester! I struggled with him
now as he cuffed me, while Nereid stared terrified and Rhool laughed
with coarse ribald amusement, appeased that I was being beaten.
And then Leh shoved me from the turret, dragged me down the corridor,
slammed me into my sleeping cubby. Again his mouth was to my ear.
"Later tonight, I will try and turn you loose. And your friend Allen,
and my sister."
In a swift whisper he told me his plans. At the ship's lower exit porte
he had hidden a small anti-gravity platform, and three pressure suits.
We could escape from there. He shoved the door upon me, barred it and
was gone.
I sat tense in the darkness, those last hours. Through the bullseye
window the Venus clouds were an opalescent haze of weird glowing
luminosity, like phosphorescence in tropic water. It seemed inherent
to the cloud-vapours; but more than that I could see that it was
radiating up from below. Venus-shine. Pale and weirdly beautiful light
inherent to the planet herself.
And then our little ship sank below the clouds, and the surface of
Venus lay spread some ten thousand feet below me. It was an amazing
world of lush shining forests and gleaming, rippling opalescent water.
We were near the country of the Arones; but for just a moment, beyond
the shining sea, tiers of black metal mountains were visible which I
knew to be the country of the Gorts.
The rasp of my door softly opening made me turn. The grotesque hunched
form of Nereid's brother stood there, with a hand in a silencing
gesture to his mouth.
"Most of them are in the forward control turret. You go down into the
hull to the exit porte. My sister and Allen will join you."
He shoved me. Then he softly closed my door, barred it, and shambled
forward toward the turret, grinning, mumbling an inane little tune. I
ducked into a doorway; went down an incline ladder. The hull corridor
was dark, with just a small hooded light of green glow. Tense, alert,
I came to the pressure porte doorway. And suddenly a figure stirred in
the shadows.
"Kent!" It was Nereid, crouching here, waiting for me. I gripped her.
"Where's Jack?"
"My brother said he would send him down. But he has not come."
Then we heard faint footsteps on the incline. And suddenly from up
there in the dimness, came Allen's voice:
"Why--why hello, Garga. I didn't see you."
And the Gort woman's voice: "Where you go, Jack Allen?"
"Why--why Rhool said he didn't mind my moving around the ship. Come
into the turret, Garga. I want you to show me your world. Don't you
think I am going to like it?"
"Maybe. And if Tollgamo like you, Jack Allen--"
Their voices receded. Allen would make no attempt now to join us, that
was obvious. With Garga eager always to be with him, his attempt would
be futile.
I whispered it to Nereid.
"We are close to my country now," she murmured. "Too late for us to
escape successfully, if we wait much longer."
We did not need the pressure suits which Leh had hidden here, thinking
he might find an opportunity for us to disembark while still above the
atmosphere. The anti-gravity platform was an oblong, raft-like metallic
thing, with its mechanisms under a hood in its bow. Nereid understood
its workings. She lay flat upon it as I slid it through the porte and
jumped beside her.
We went like a sliding rocket, with a rush of wind that stopped our
breath. But the hooded bow partially shielded us, so that presently we
could breathe. Behind us, and over us now, the gleaming shape of the
spaceship was seemingly sliding upward and backward. Beneath us the
shining sea with a glowing shoreline off at the horizon seemed rocking
with a crazy sway. And then at last we steadied.
"Did it!" I gloated. "We made it, Nereid. Evidently they didn't see us
rocketing off."
There was no sign of any alarm from the ship and presently it had
dwindled high above us and was gone.
Amazingly swift, that downward glide. The wind whistled past us with a
screaming whine. At five hundred feet Nereid leveled us as we headed
for the glowing shoreline. I could see artificial illumination there
now, a myriad little dots of colored lights. And then little colored
beams were waving.
"My city--the city of Arron," Nereid said.
It was a few miles back in the forest, where a great shining lagoon
opened. A riot of glowing, prismatic color burst upon us; and as Nereid
saw it, she sucked in her breath with a little gasp.
"The love festival," she murmured. "Oh why--why would they have that in
times like these? With Tollgamo so ready to attack us?"
I stared down with awed amazement at the scene of weird sensuous beauty
spread now so close beneath us.
* * * * *
Allen's first sight of the country of Gorts, as he afterward told me,
was a line of terraced hills that rose steeply up from the shore of the
placid sea. He was in the controlroom of the Spaceship with Rhool, and
with the grim woman Garga beside him. It had been a tense time for
Allen, when the escape of Nereid and myself was discovered. But he had
been allowed a measure of freedom, whereas I was locked in my cubby.
Allen was not suspected, nor, fortunately, was Leh. Two of the Gorts
came in for Rhool's wrath.
"Tollgamo will deal with you," he said.
Then Allen spoke up, denouncing me as a traitor to him; claiming that
I had agreed to join Tollgamo. "That Peters girl bewitched him," Allen
said.
Whether it fooled the big, leering Rhool or not, Allen couldn't tell.
Perhaps it did, for Allen now was taken more as one of them, than a
prisoner.
The Country of the Gorts! To Allen, as he stared down through the
turret window of the spaceship, those terraces of grey metal rock were
as grim and forbidding as the Gort people themselves. In the glowing
night-sheen, the barren wastes near the shore seemed utterly without
life. And then Allen saw weird vegetation in little patches; and
occasionally roaming wild things with round eyes which stared up at the
ship. Some of them incuriously stared; others, frightened, scuttled
away.
The ship now was following a broad, gleaming inlet of the iridescent
sea. Ten Earth-miles or so, to its head where lights gleamed on a
terraced hillside. It was Tollgamo's little city. Allen had only a
brief glimpse as the ship swooped down and settled into the rack of a
metal landing stage. Rows of blue and green lights were strung in half
a dozen rows on the terraces, one above the other to mark the streets,
with metal ladders vertically connecting them. Metal and stone little
houses, polished, grey-blue, lined the streets. At one end of the lower
street, close by a promontory bluff where beyond a bridge-like metal
ladder a smaller kiosk overlooked the inlet, there was a larger, square
building, terraced into three stories. Round spots of dull purple light
marked its four corners. On its roof, metal-garbed figures paced back
and forth.
"Tollgamo the Master--that is his house," the woman Garga murmured to
Allen.
Green-yellow, turgid smoke belched from a chimney-like opening in the
cliff, where doubtless, partly underground, a factory was in operation.
Figures moved in the grim weird glow of the bleak streets; apparatus
was being dragged along one of them. Men and women working; and in the
doors and windows of the cubical houses, the figures of children stood
peering.
As the ship settled lower, Allen realized that both above and below
ground it was a beehive of activity now. And presently he could hear
sounds; the clank of metal machinery; the grind of gears; the voices of
the workers.
Beside him Allen was suddenly aware of the grotesque, hunched form
of Nereid's brother, Leh. Neither of them spoke; and then Leh, with
a surreptitious gesture, indicated the shining inlet. Down on the
opposite shore of it, a tunnel mouth showed, with a red-yellow glare
back under the opposite cliff. A crowd of metal-clad workers, goggled
against the glare so that they looked like huge beetle-eyed insects,
were struggling with apparatus which they were pulling out.
Leh was tense. Then a moment came where he was able to whisper
furtively to Allen. "I will try later to get us to that cliff. Do you
see that Kiosk? If we can get there, we will dive to the water. From
there I have a way of escaping."
That was all. Allen had only time to murmur assent. The ship landed.
With Rhool half guarding, half leading him, he was taken along
the lower street. The workers stood grim, impassive, until they
recognized Rhool. Then like machines they stood stiff, with a hand
touching the metal insignia of their helmets until Rhool had passed.
Even the children stood rigid, saluting. Little bodies drilled to
efficiency; impassive childish faces. But in their eyes still there was
childhood--excited, wondering childhood.
Rhool and Allen passed the guards at the entrance to Tollgamo's home.
In the dim blue-green glow of a metal room Allen was told by Rhool
to stand, and Tollgamo would come. Then Rhool was gone. Unseen eyes
were watching Allen. He sensed it; and stood stiffly against one wall,
awaiting the coming of the Master. It was a strange, square apartment.
Blue-lit, so that its richly tiled floor and ceiling glistened
like polished steel. The furniture was square, glistening in the
light-sheen. At one end of the room a huge polished table with a single
big chair at its end, held a variety of small apparatus, a bank of
levers and little buttons as though for signalling commands. And there
was a neat stack of what seemed to be charts and mathematical data.
A murmur outside the room brought Allen back from his contemplation of
his surroundings. Men's voices; a guttural command. Then Rhool came
in, walking with stiff, pseudo mechanical tread. On his heavy face
was a grinning leer. Behind him there was a Gort man and woman. Allen
recognized them; both had been on the spaceship and both were blamed by
Rhool for the escape of Nereid and me. They came now marching stiffly
erect. Their faces were impassive, but terror was in their eyes and in
the tense set of their lips.
* * * * *
And then at last came Tollgamo. Involuntarily Allen gasped at sight of
him.
He was a giant figure of a man, six feet six, at least. Unlike
the square, robot appearance of his menials, his garments of grey
metal-fabric were soft, and clinging. A flowing tunic fell from his
powerfully broad shoulders to below his waist, with a wide, glistening
metal belt; trousers which sheathed his powerful, shapely legs; shoes
with padded soles so that he moved soundlessly. He was bareheaded,
and his black hair, closely clipped, came to a peak at his forehead.
His skin was the familiar Venus grey, but there was a saffron cast
to it. His high-bridged nose was hawk-like, his chin protruding, but
square--the firm jaw completely characteristic of determination and
power.
His thin-lipped mouth, as he came quietly in and surveyed Allen with
dark-eyed gaze, was faintly smiling. Allen, standing rigid, silently
met the stare. It was then that he felt, far more than in Tollgamo's
commanding aspect, the power of the man's personality. A dominant force
seemed to radiate from him, so that no one could be in his presence an
instant without feeling it. An aura of command that made Allen suddenly
feel like a child. Helpless; and with a vague, indefinable shudder
within him.
And then Tollgamo spoke. Suave, gentle voice of careful, cultivated
English, meticulously correct, yet with a strange foreign intonation.
"So you are one of the Earthmen, Jack Allen?"
"Yes," Allen said; and then remembered Rhool's instructions, so that
after a moment he added, "Yes, Master. I give you service."
Tollgamo's faint ironic smile broadened; his glittering dark eyes
seemed to hold a twinkle of sardonic amusement, "You learn fast." His
gaze darted away; went to Rhool, and then to the Gort man and woman
from the spaceship who stood with terror in their eyes.
"I hear that you need punishment," he said gently. "This Earthman will
learn from it." His tone, almost drab, was casual, with a slow finality.
With pounding heart, Allen stood watching the metal-clad man and woman
as Tollgamo quietly confronted them. The terror leaped from their eyes
to stamp their faces. And Tollgamo said quietly,
"That is bad to show fear. That forces the punishment to be worse."
At his gesture, a flick of his jeweled fingers, they bared their grey
chests. Tollgamo's hands were at his ornamented belt, each of them
leveling a little jeweled weapon. The weapons suddenly hissed, and from
each of them a tiny violet pencilray of heat-light sprang. Allen gulped
as the beams struck the chests of the two victims, and the grey flesh,
turned red, then black as Tollgamo wrote a brand of punishment, an
insignia of dishonor. The man stood firm, with a hand still at salute,
his slit of mouth twisted as he pressed his lips together in an attempt
to restrain his cry of pain.
But the woman involuntarily moaned. It was too much for Allen. He
gasped,
"Stop that, you damned torturer! They're not the ones who are guilty
anyway! They--"
Tollgamo had finished. He snapped off the tiny rays and slowly turned
to where Allen had taken a step toward him. And the smile now was gone
from his serene face.
"You are not yet trained," he said quietly. "I forgive you for that--so
short a time." Another flick of his hand; and Rhool led the stumbling
man and woman away.
The smell of the burning flesh drifted off; and Tollgamo, alone here
now, fronted the shuddering Allen. Again he was gently smiling.
"You show weakness?" he said. "I am disappointed. So you know who
released that Kent Fanning, and Peters' daughter?"
"No I don't. I'm sorry. That was just my desire to stop you doing that
to that woman."
Amusement was in Tollgamo's eyes and twitching at his thin grey lips.
"So? You would join me, and still try to lie to me?" His gesture
dismissed it. "We will talk of that some other time." For a moment he
stood pondering. "That girl--that Peters' daughter," he added. "Rhool
tells me she is very beautiful. Is that so?" There seemed a twinkle in
his inscrutable eyes.
"Yes," Allen agreed.
"That is interesting. I must see for myself. I think perhaps I must
protect her from the things that will happen tonight."
Allen tensed inside. Did he mean that his attack upon the Arones would
take place tonight?
"The woman Garga will give you supper," Tollgamo added abruptly. From
a ring on his finger a silent light-signal sprang across the room and
through a small arcade doorway; and at once Garga appeared there.
"Take him to my rest-room," Tollgamo said. "He is hungry. Give him
food. I will send for him later."
"Yes, Master."
Then as Tollgamo moved away, lithe and silent as a great panther, with
his padded soles soundless on the metal floor, he said quietly.
"Your thoughts are very transparent, Earthman. But I think you can be
of use to me."
* * * * *
In the small adjoining room, Garga brought Allen food. They ate it
together.
"What did he mean by things that will happen tonight?" Allen suddenly
murmured.
Garga had been sitting, staring at him with her slumbrous dark gaze.
"The attack," she said.
"And Peters doesn't know that?"
"No." Her hand touched him. "I am trusting you."
"Of course," Allen agreed. He recalled how Nereid's brother, Leh,
as the spaceship landed, had gazed down at the inlet, across which
workers were bringing things from a tunnel to the edge of the water.
Leh had sucked in his breath as though with startled surprise.
"The attack," Allen murmured. "Will it be upon the city of Arron?"
"Yes--naturally. And the imbecile slaves there--they think they are
going to help." Her grim grey face lighted with a smile. "That will be
amusing; those imbecile workers causing bloodshed, making it so easy
for us, when we get there."
"Get there--how, Garga? By air?"
Allen felt that Leh now was trying to get just such information as
this; and he and Allen would escape--get to Arron and warn Peters.
But evidently haste was necessary. By what Tollgamo said, he would be
attacking perhaps within a few hours.
"By air?" Garga echoed. "Oh no. By water." She leaned closer to Allen.
A woman warrior. But the womanhood in her now was making her bosom rise
and fall with her emotion at Allen's nearness. "Under the water," she
murmured. "You see how clever we are? That is the last method of attack
that the Arones think we will try. There are grottos beneath the city
of Arron. Grottos with the sea in them. So that we shall come up that
way, appearing all over the city at once." She chuckled. "They will not
know there is to be any attack at all. Just trouble with the imbeciles.
And suddenly we will be there among them!"
Allen had it now! All the information needed. More than ever now he
wanted to connect with Leh, and escape out of here.
"Garga, listen," he murmured, "were you ordered to stay here with me,
until Tollgamo sends for me?"
"Yes," she agreed. Her gaze clung to his. "That will not be--too hard
for you?"
"No--no, of course not, Garga, but listen--" Abruptly Allen tensed. In
a dark doorway nearby, beyond which Allen knew Tollgamo's guards were
stationed, a dim blob of figure had appeared. Garga's back was to the
door; she did not see the lurking shape. It was a hunched, misshapen
silhouette. Leh, in his masquerade as jester, standing there listening.
"Listen," Allen quickly resumed. "There's no reason why you should not
show me around a bit, is there? On that cliff quite near here there's a
little kiosk that looks over the inlet. You and I--alone there, Garga?"
His hand touched her square, metal-clad shoulder; and at once her hand
went up, gripping his. "Perhaps."
"I would like to have you show me what's going on," he urged. "And to
sit there with you, just for a little time."
Leh heard it. His hunched figure in the doorway moved and his head
nodded assent; and then he drew back, was gone.
"I will get you a cloak," Garga murmured abruptly.
She came with the cloak in a moment; a long, dark-grey garment of
flexible metal. With this on, and with the helmet which Rhool had given
him, Allen could pass for a Gort. Garga was eager, trembling, as she
took him through a small side doorway. The nearby glowing city street
bustled with activity. Garga and Allen were not challenged as they
skirted the edge of the metal street; and presently came to a dark and
narrow little bridge, a fifty foot catwalk-span over a chasm to the
promontory head where the lookout kiosk stood dark and silent above the
lagoon.
A new idea had come to Allen. As together they crossed the catwalk he
murmured to Garga:
"The Master spoke of the Peters girl, and asked me if she is beautiful."
Garga smiled. "So? The Master is ironical always. He plays with you."
"Meaning what?"
"He has seen that girl many times. Ten years ago, when there was no
threat of Tollgamo, he was in Arron. She was just a child then. He
played with her. And he has loved her ever since."
They came to the kiosk, entered its dark interior. It was merely a roof
over a circular metal bench, with a waist high railing. Thirty feet
down, the sea inlet was a black ribbon of water. The yellow tunnel at
the bottom of the opposite cliff was dark now, but further up the inlet
there were lights and activity.
Allen sat with a hand gripping Garga's mailed arm. Across the
background of his mind he was trying to plan ... he could seize this
amourous woman's weapons. But then what? Would Leh be able to come
here now? Leh, who had mentioned diving from here, with a way of escape
from the inlet.
"Tollgamo loves Peters' daughter?" Allen was murmuring.
"Yes. It is sure, although he would not have it known. And he is
planning tonight, before we attack Arron, to--"
A dark figure near them suddenly materialized. For a second Allen
thought that it was Leh. But it was Rhool! Rhool who doubtless had seen
Garga coming here, and followed her.
In that tense second Allen was aware that Rhool was drawing a weapon.
And Allen leaped, catapulted with lowered head. He caught Rhool in the
stomach, knocked him backward. But the Gort's weapon had stabbed, a
hiss of violet light. It missed Allen; struck Garga. She went down.
On the metal floor of the kiosk, Allen rolled with the giant Rhool.
The Gort had no chance to use his weapon again. Allen in a second or
two was on top of him, pounding his head against the metal floor. It
cracked, and his big body quivered and lay limp.
Allen jumped up. He was aware of a commotion on the catwalk bridge. A
running figure. And men back in the glare at the end of the street;
men shouting, and then running forward. The figure on the catwalk was
Leh. He came plunging into the kiosk. Allen was bending over the fallen
Garga. She was dying, with bloody foam gushing at her mouth. But she
was trying to smile, her eyes staring at Allen. Contrition swept him.
This Amazonian woman-warrior.... Trained to be a cruel machine. But she
had remained only a woman; and she was dying now; just a woman staring
with her last wistful gaze at the Earthman she loved so that she might
take the image of him with her into the Great Beyond.
Allen murmured: "Oh, Garga, I'm sorry."
She may have heard him, but then her breath stopped, the light went out
of her eyes and she was gone.
Allen jumped up as Leh gripped him. Leh, with his face and figure
changed now so that Allen saw him as a handsome stripling, with
something of the look of Nereid.
"Come on," Leh gasped. "Get that helmet off, and that heavy cloak.
Hurry!"
A shot came from the catwalk, a spitting electronic stab that sent a
shower of sparks on the kiosk ceiling. From the rail Allen and Leh
dove. Then they were swimming; Leh guiding him as shots stabbed down at
them. Allen was aware that Leh was dragging him underwater through a
small subterranean passage to emerge in a watery cave. A water-cylinder
was here, a twenty foot little submarine, as one might describe it
on Earth. Two small seats were amidships in it, with its operating
mechanisms around them. A moment later, they were off.
* * * * *
It was a weird underwater journey; some two hours, Allen guessed, while
they sat in the dimness of the humming little cylindrical interior.
Through the visor pane of the turret into which their heads projected,
Allen had a dim vista of the turgid green-black depths, illumined by
the small search-ray which preceded them. The vessel was propelled by a
rocket-stream of disintegrating water as the electrolysis of backward
gas-thrust shoved them forward.
Sub-sea world of Venus. Allen saw little of it then, but still enough
to suggest its ramified weirdness. They sped out through the watery
tunnel, down the inlet at a depth of perhaps fifty feet, and then
into the open sea. Empty, black-green depths. Running at fifty feet
submersion, Allen could see beneath them the vague vista of a slimy
undulating bottom. Then it dropped away, with only occasional jagged
spires of peaks. Tumbled, submarine world. Fishes flipped away,
frightened by the light. Occasionally, there was a glimpse of monstrous
things that quivered; shapes that hung suspended, watching with
dull-green round eyes.
A submarine forest for a time was to one side, an intricate tracery of
vegetation, with air-pods holding it upright as it slowly weaved and
undulated like a thing quivering with life. A gigantic thing like a
great squid with weaving tentacles came wobbling from a forest glade.
It lunged to attack, but the little cylinder avoided it and sped past.
Leh hardly spoke. He was tense, guiding their frail craft; and tense
too with this emergency of haste to get to Peters. Leh had learned as
much or more of Tollgamo's plans than had Allen.
Then at last they were nearing their destination. Allen had learned
now that Peters and his men of science were not located in the city of
Arron. They had laboratories, workshops and arsenal on a rocky island
fortress. It was some twenty miles by water from Arron; within a mile
or so of a partly submerged section of the forest, where a village
known as the Water City was built.
Allen saw the watery foundations of the Water City as the cylinder sped
past. Then Leh was slackening, to land at a sub-sea dock beneath the
arsenal. The dock's weird dark outlines presently were beside them.
With air-renewer mechanisms like a pack on their shoulders, and a
round transparent glassite helmet, which had an elastic gasket tightly
fitting their throats, they emerged through the cylinder's little
pressure lock into the water. Heavy shoes made them able to walk, with
a pushing swaying shove.
Leh, with a metal-tipped finger, touched a tiny metal plate on Allen's
helmet. And Leh's voice, dim, muffled, sounded in Allen's ears.
"You follow me. There will be a guard where we emerge."
Allen swayed along a rocky path which was slowly ascending. The turgid,
black-green depths here were dimly lighted by a glow from some unseen
source. It was a tumbled, honeycombed submarine slope. Clumps of
vegetation stood like black thickets to the sides. Ahead, the glow
seemed brighter.
Then suddenly Leh stopped his advance; stood rigid. Within the round,
wholly transparent ball of his helmet his youthful face was tense. And
his voice murmured.
"Allen, look there!"
They had no more warning than that. From a clump of tawny submarine
vegetation nearby, two human figures suddenly emerged! Figures that
stood as though startled for a second, and then came plunging to attack!
V
Festival of Love! On the swaying little anti-gravity platform I
lay with Nereid, staring down at the strange, colorful scene that
stretched beneath us. It was at the end of our escape-flight from the
Spaceship, in time doubtless before Allen on that trip arrived in
Tollgamo's mountain city.
What Allen saw of the grim little metal and rock city of the Gorts was
in weird contrast to what I saw now of the riotous, colorful forest
and water scene where the gay festival of Love and Music was in full
progress.
There was only a brief glimpse at first, as we swooped down. We had
already passed over the main city of Arron. It lay between the open
sea and an area a mile or so inland, where there was a lagoon, little
chains of lakes, threads of tiny streams and a myriad little dots
of tropic islands. I had seen, down in the forest, lines of gay,
pastel-tinted lights to mark the city streets. Then we came to the
lagoon, where the festival was being held.
A watery failyland of gayety. The lagoon, a circular spread of water of
perhaps five miles, was rippled with a soft night-breeze. The ripples
were stained with the opalescent night-sheen from the overhead clouds,
and stained like a painter's pallette with a riot of glorious tints
from the strings of colored lights which connected the little islands.
One big island, a thousand feet in length, stood in the center. A
pavilion was on it, from which soft exotic music flooded out into the
night--music that blended on the tropic breeze with a vast murmur of
excited voices. I could guess that there might be four or five thousand
people disporting themselves here. The main island was thronged with
people moving about, or crowding toward the pavilion where with
the music there seemed dancing and perhaps some form of theatrical
entertainment.
Boats were on the thread-like little canals between the islands. A
barge crowded with young men and girls, all in gay-colored robes, was
slowly approaching from the open lagoon. Little boats, mere six foot
rafts, each held a girl and man; the man paddling, the girl fending off
flowers with which she was pelted by young men on other rafts, or on
the shore.
The laughing screams of girls floated up as they swam in the open
lagoon, their voices calling jocular defiance to the men on shore to
come out and catch them.
Nereid slid our little flying platform skilfully down. We landed on a
small level island which was connected with the big island by an arcade
bridge. No one had seemed to notice us. Boats were tied up here along
the shore. Others were arriving, disembarking the gay merrymakers. All
were in holiday attire; a variety of motley costumes, indescribable as
a fancy-dress costume ball on Earth. Some of them, men and girls, wore
cloaks and hoods, with little gaily colored masks covering their eyes.
I stood for a moment with Nereid. "You're going to find your father?" I
suggested.
"Yes. If he is here." She told me then of the Arsenal rock beyond the
Water City, where Peters and his men most of their time were working.
"He is there probably," she added. "I think he would not come here
tonight."
"Then what would we do, go to him there?"
"Yes, of course. I will see our Ruler first. Jenten-Shah--he will
be here. Over there on the big island, in the pavilion probably."
Bitterness was in her tone. Nereid was thinking of the menace of the
Gorts, with their engines of destruction. She and I did not know then,
what Allen was just about now learning--that there was an urgency of
haste since Tollgamo's attack would be made tonight. But as we threaded
our way under the gay colored lights across the arcade to the main
island, I somehow seemed to feel the undercurrent of menace here.
Occasionally we passed little figures who were evidently onlookers.
The imbecile workers, lower class who were almost in the position
of slaves. They were weird little creatures, most of them no more
than four feet tall, grey-skinned and powerfully built. We passed
one who was standing on the shore gazing at a raft where a lone girl
shrouded in blue-white filmy drapery was being pelted with flowers. The
gnome-like imbecile stood impassive, gazing with vacant face. Then he
was muttering to himself. A fragment of it reached us.
"Tollgamo is coming to help us workers. We won't have to work tomorrow.
Then we can do things like this."
I gripped Nereid. "You hear what that worker said? No work for him
tomorrow. Do you suppose--"
She tried to smile. "What an imbecile says never means much, Kent. But
I must tell father."
* * * * *
Occasionally now people were staring at us, at me. Some rushed at us,
but Nereid with an imperious gesture scattered them; and in a moment,
with their other diversions, they had forgotten us. Then we came to
where there was a pile of cloaks. Nereid gave me a dark robe and hood;
and found a long white cloak and white cowl for herself. Then from her
green undergarment she produced a little golden star, fastened it on
the breast of her cloak. Queer insignia, that star with a crescent moon
above and below it.
The white cloak and cowl to signify that she was an Untouchable.
Nereid's beautiful little face bore a faint twisted smile. "That is
what some of them call us, Kent. That is a term of derision, because
now, at a festival like this, there are things we do not like."
Love, music, laughter--all so admirable. But here in Arron, under the
leadership of the wanton Ruler, Jenten-Shah, it was becoming license.
There were some five hundred young Virgins here in Arron, who were
trying at least for moderation. And trying to help Peters prepare for
the menace of the Gorts ... Untouchables. Nereid was leader of them.
In our robes and cowls now, Nereid and I were attracting no attention
save that occasionally there was a jibe at Nereid. Laughing young men,
befuddled perhaps by some intoxicating drink with wanton girls clinging
to them, would sometimes lunge at us with mocking laughter. But we
pushed past them, shoving our way toward the big open pavilion. I could
see now the jam of people under its low spreading roof.
We were still following the shorefront. From the pavilion a bevy of
girls with flowing drapes came running and plunged into the water of
the lagoon.
I gripped Nereid's white-cloaked arm. "That big figure in red--who is
that?"
I had seen the giant figure here at an edge of the crowd, when we
crossed the arcade bridge. A man in robe and cowl of red and black.
Then he had vanished. He was visible again now, a huge fellow, six and
a half feet, at least. He was standing a hundred feet or so ahead of
us, on the pink-white coral sand of the shore. And then abruptly he
moved away and was gone again.
Nereid stared, and then shook her head. "I do not know. I--" She
checked herself; her face had a queer startled look.
"What--" I demanded. But we were in the pavilion now, with the jam of
watching people pressing us.
"You will wait here, Kent?" Nereid murmured. "I will ask Jenten-Shah of
my father."
I drew back behind a palm on which great orchid-like flowers were
growing. I could see the dais where the gay fatuous ruler was seated
with food and drink before him, with his young women favorites around
him as they watched the platform where a barbarically voluptuous woman
in flame-colored drapes was dancing with colored light-beams upon her.
I had a glimpse of Nereid importuning Jenten-Shah. It was brief; and
then Nereid came back to me.
"Father is not here, Kent. He told the King not to hold this festival
tonight."
"Did you mention that imbecile worker?"
She nodded. Her face was grim, frightened now. "He said, if any
imbecile causes trouble there will be a hundred imbeciles killed as
punishment. He is drunk with _marite_. He laughed at the idea that
Tollgamo would dare attack."
Merrymaking on the brink of disaster and death.
* * * * *
As though both Nereid and I were fascinated now, for a time we stood in
the pavilion corner, watching the colorful scene. Half the people here
were robed and masked, waiting a later time when a bell would give the
signal for the unmasking. I saw several of the white-robed girls--the
Untouchables. Then one of them, with a golden star on her breast, like
Nereid's but without the crescent moons, came and joined us. Nereid had
met her a while ago near the Ruler's dais. Her name was Venta. Under
Nereid, she was commanding the little group of protesting Virgins.
She was very like Nereid, save that beneath her white cowl I could see
that her hair was dark. She stared at me. "So? The Earthman?" She shook
my hand with a quaint awkwardness. "You look in the same fashion as her
father, the Meester Peters," she commented.
Then suddenly all three of us were stricken tense. There was a
commotion across the crowded pavilion, where a scantily clothed young
girl was struggling, terrified, in the grip of a thick-set, crooked
little imbecile man. He was forcing his caresses on her and the girl
was screaming.
The music suddenly ceased. In the hushed, stricken silence, the
imbecile's crazy childish laughter mingled with the girl's screams.
Then there was a rush as a group of young men nearby plucked the girl
away, knocked the gnome-like worker down, beating him, slamming him
until he lay inert.
It was like a spark in gunpowder. People were shouting. Somebody found
another imbecile and attacked him. A wave of shouting spread beyond the
pavilion. But it lasted only a moment. The music started up again. The
dancing continued.
Nereid gripped me. "Out in the workers' village they will hear of that.
And what they might try to do--"
Her words evoked a grim picture of powerful little men, with minds like
children suddenly enraged to frenzy; and the half-drunken youths at the
festival, ready enough to kill any worker, with the Ruler encouraging
them.
And this was what Tollgamo wanted, of course; confusion here to make
his attack easier.
The girls now were swiftly talking in their own language. We had shoved
our way out of the pavilion, were standing near the shorefront; and the
girls had drawn a little apart from me. I could see Venta nodding as
Nereid gave her instructions. Then Nereid came to me.
"She will get our Virgins, Kent. She has ten other girls who will help
her collect them all."
The Virgins--five hundred of them if Venta could locate them all--would
come in surface boats, past the Water City to the Arsenal. Nereid and I
would precede them, starting now. All to offer ourselves to Peters and
his fighting men if Tollgamo should strike tonight. But how would he
strike? That we did not know.
"And in the Water City," Nereid was hastily telling me, "many of the
people living there have come here to the festival tonight. But some
of our girls live there." Again her lips twisted with that wry little
smile. "They will be there now. Some have brothers and fathers who work
with my father in the Science Arsenal. But some do not, and I will send
them here. If there is trouble with the imbeciles, they will help quell
it."
Venta, ready to start on her mission, called goodbye. Then for just a
moment Nereid ran after her to add something. Two other girls in the
white Untouchable robes joined them, and stood talking about fifty feet
away from where I waited. The shore there had risen to a little grassy
bluff about twenty feet above the glittering, light-bathed lagoon.
And suddenly I gasped. From a clump of vivid blue and orange palms
which grew thickly beside the four girls, a figure suddenly emerged. A
giant man-shape, in red and black robe. Then his robe and cowl dropped
from him, revealing a towering powerful giant with dark close-clipped
hair, dressed in a grey garment of woven metal with jeweled weapons at
his broad belt. And in that second of my numbed gaze, I was aware that
he had scattered the girls and had seized Nereid, holding her slim form
against his huge bulk.
And one of the other girls screamed: "Tollgamo!"
* * * * *
Tollgamo! My first sight of him. And like Allen, for just a second I
stood numbed, awed by the power, the dominance that radiated from him.
He was quietly smiling. His hand went up to wave the girls away.
"Tollgamo! Tollgamo!" The name went like a wave, back from the shore,
so that the merrymakers gasped, stood stricken. For that second it was
a tableau, with only the smiling Tollgamo in movement. Slowly he was
backing, drawing the fighting, struggling Nereid with him. Backing
toward the thick clump of palms.
Then I was aware that I was dashing forward, shouting. It was only
fifty feet. From one of Tollgamo's hands, a spit of tiny blue light
hissed at me. Missed. Then Venta and two of the other girls had cast
off their white robes. Slim little creatures, like Nereid, greenly
clad. Soon Tollgamo was struggling with all four of them. He flung them
off, still trying to hold Nereid.
It was only a second or two as I plunged at them. Then in a group they
went over the little promontory and hit the water with a splash. Almost
simultaneously I dove. The green opalescent water closed over me.
Somewhere near at hand I could see the blurr of the struggling figures.
But I could not reach them. With all my strength I swam, but then I had
to come up for air. I dove again. Accursedly helpless. Then on another
try I met a girl coming up, then another and another--all four of them
bobbing to the surface with me. All panting; unhurt, but angry that
they had not captured Tollgamo!
Then Venta and the other two girls swam away on their errand. Nereid
drew me forward as we swam, to avoid the commotion of gathered people
on the bank. Tollgamo was gone. His plan had been, quite evidently, to
dive into the water with Nereid here. Some twenty feet down, as the
girls attacked him, he had tried to shove Nereid through a rock-rift,
which obviously opened again to some cave where air was trapped.
"I got away from him," Nereid was saying. "A man, even Tollgamo, is so
clumsy in the water, so quick to smother. I could have followed him but
he blocked the little passage with a rock."
"And maybe he's trapped down there?"
She shook her head. "There are so many passages, and all lead out to
the sea. Of course he had a cylinder-boat under there."
Together we swam out into the open lagoon, diagonally across it to
where, beyond the lights of the festival, Nereid had a little surface
boat in which we could get now to the Water City.
"My boat is about a mile from here. Can you swim so far?"
"Yes. I guess so." I had always counted myself a strong swimmer; a
mile was not too much for me. But I was like a puffing tugboat now,
laboriously splashing along. Nereid was laughing at my efforts; trying
to tow me; then giving it up, swimming around me, under me.
Occasionally, while we were still in the light-glare, other girls came
dashing up, with questions of Tollgamo; and of me. Once a group of them
dashed at me, with shouts of laughter trying to seize me, but Nereid
drove them off. Then we were swimming alone in the luminous opalescent
night; and at last we reached the little boat. Nereid was already in
it; waiting impatiently to haul me aboard as I came panting.
It was a narrow, canoe-like surface craft; some twenty feet long, of
dull white metal. Its hooded mechanisms were in bow and stern--water
electrolysis. Soon we had attained a considerable speed, silent,
vibrationless. And then we were on the open sea, with the lights of
Arron fading behind us.
* * * * *
Venus night at sea. It was weirdly beautiful. The low-hanging curtain
of heavy clouds was luminous with pale blue and silver sheen. The
water, silver-rippled by a gentle night-breeze, was opalescent as our
little craft hurled up a bow wave, with a gleaming phosphorescent wake
behind us. Off to the right, for a time, the faint blurred outlines
of metal mountains were visible on a promontory near the land of the
Gorts. Then we passed it; and the forest to the left had faded away to
be just a blur.
Beside me, Nereid sat grim and silent, staring ahead as she steered
our boat. The breeze tossed her tawny tresses against me. My mind went
back to that other night, back on Earth when she had sat in my little
fishing boat, with its outboard motor puttering. How long ago that
seemed. And like that other night, my hand went now to a lock of her
hair, beside us on the seat.
"Nereid, when this is over, this war--"
Her face turned toward me. She was faintly, whimsically smiling.
"I think my father will like you," she murmured.
"And you, Nereid?"
There was no impishness, this time. Her gaze met mine, shyly, and she
nodded.
But a moment later we were again both thinking of Tollgamo. And we were
wondering about Allen, and Nereid's brother, Leh. Had Tollgamo put them
to death, in vengeance for our escape from Rhool's spaceship?
Then at last, to our left, the outlines of the lush forest shore were
close at hand.
"The Water City," Nereid murmured.
It was built in what seemed a partly submerged area of the jungle.
Tangled tree-tops projecting from the water, with little houses of
thatch and wood built like birds' nests between them. Or queer little
dwellings of woven blue rush, built on platforms that floated on the
water and were lashed between the protecting tree-trunks. Narrow arcade
bridges connected the houses; and the little balcony platforms where
boats were moored.
There were a few dots of lights. Then we passed the first group of
houses. Very queer. Nereid stared at me. Queer indeed. It was far into
the time of sleep, but still there should have been someone attracted
to the house doorways as we passed.
We had slackened now, with the houses, most of them dark, clustering
all about us.
"There is Venta's home," Nereid murmured. "Her father and brother will
be there."
We drifted under an arching bridge. The figure of a man was lying on
it. Asleep? Nereid called softly to him, but he did not move. Then I
was aware of a queer, acrid smell here. Choking smell. Nereid coughed
suddenly.
The boat landed at a low platform dock of Venta's home. We jumped to
the platform. Two men were here. Venta's father and brother. They lay
in a heap, one half upon the other. Dead! The opalescent sheen of the
glorious night was ghastly on their dead faces; mouths goggling with
blackened, protruding tongue; eyes staring with the agony and death.
And from here we could see other house balconies. Inert forms on them.
All dead.
In that stricken second, as we stood shuddering on the little platform
with the sea lapping under it, a new horror suddenly assailed us. There
was a tangle of vegetation here, tree branches overhead; air-vines with
redolent flowers and pods on them, dangled, swaying in the breeze. And
abruptly I realized that the dangling, rope-like vines were visibly
growing! At an edge of the platform one of them was slithering like a
serpent!
And Nereid gasped: "That smell! The gas of nitro-carbon in some
terrible concentration!"
I stood numbed. Nitrogenous gas-fumes, sprayed here on the night-breeze
by what deadly means I could not guess, had asphixiated the people of
the little Water City. Most of them asleep, they were quickly overcome
by the insidious fumes. An intensification of the gas which was
normally used by the Arones to stimulate vegetation growth, as we on
Earth use fertilizer. Nitro-carbon--deadly to humans; stimulating to
plant-life!
And the air-vines here were growing with a deadly acceleration!
In that same second, as we stood momentarily confused, one of the
dangling, swaying vines, grown monstrous now to be as thick as my arm,
struck against Nereid. Sentient vegetation! With the contact, the
damnable dangling vine suddenly wrapped itself around her, its powerful
sinuous blue feelers gripping her slender white throat, strangling her!
And in the night-silence an imbecile was gibbering, with triumphant,
maniacal laughter!
VI
For an instant I was stunned, with so great a rush of horror that the
weird scene blurred before me. Then I leaped, tearing at the quivering
vine-rope that held Nereid in its grip. Ghastly thing. I tore it loose,
broke it--gruesome, squashing, flimsy stuff. But as I cast broken
segments of it away, more seemed to come.
Weird, horrible combat. A slithering tentacle gripped my ankles.
Another was winding itself around my throat. There was a terrible
moment when I thought that Nereid and I would go down; and on the
platform now at our feet, another leafy vine had come crawling, with
lashing feelers and red pods that opened like little bloody jaws.
Then I tore Nereid loose. The whole platform now seemed cluttered with
writhing vegetation. From overhead dangling things were swinging,
reaching down at us.
"Nereid, our boat--which way?" In the dim luminous light I was
confused. Nereid led me; and we staggered to our boat, tumbled into it.
A vine-end like a rope threshed at us as we frantically shoved off.
And in the silence now, with only the leafy rustling of the growing
vines, the gibbering, maniacal laughter of the imbecile still sounded.
"Kent, look--" Nereid touched my arm as she guided our little boat out
into the open water. On a rock nearby, a hunched, gnome-like figure was
crouched. Then I saw his face, goggled with great round eyepanes and
nose-breather, with a pipe that led to a pack on his back.
Nereid steered us toward him; we stopped and I reached and seized him.
"You did this?" I demanded. "You turned loose the gas that killed these
people? Who told you to do it? Who gave you the gas, and the mechanisms
to spread it?"
His laughter turned to a terrified whimpering. Nereid murmured,
"That mask he's wearing--the workers use that, in our agriculture when
they spray with the nitro-carbon. But we have no sprayers that could do
a thing like this, nor gas deadly enough."
"You did it?" I shook him.
And then he was laughing again. And suddenly I realized that of course
he could not understand English. I cast him loose. And Nereid flung
questions at him in her own language.
"Figures came up from the water," she said. "He happened to have his
mask and saved himself."
We left him there on the rock, still laughing. Tollgamo's first attack!
Would he try to loose this gas on Arron? Our little boat sped past the
Water City. I could see now that the quivering, slithering vegetation
everywhere was engulfing the flimsy houses. Its stimulated growth would
persist, an hour or a day, and then subside.
Shuddering, we drove our boat onward. The great Arsenal rock loomed
ahead of us now, a huge almost square lump of metallic rock rising
sheer from the water to a height of two or three hundred feet. On
all sides it was like that; its only access was from beneath where
subterranean passages ran into its honeycombed, grotto interior.
Impregnable fortress, save from beneath the sea.
Nereid tied our little craft to a metal fastener against the black,
sleek rock-cliff. Then for me she produced the air-mechanisms and round
transparent helmet with elastic gasket to fit around my throat. And
heavy, metal-weighted shoes for us both.
But no helmet was needed for her. "We will be there in ten or fifteen
minutes," she said. "I can see better without the head-covering."
We dropped into the luminous, opalescent water. Nereid held my hand
as I floundered a little, trying to remain balanced upright while our
weighted shoes carried us slowly down. It was a descent of some fifty
feet, with the opalescent surface light fading into the black-green
of the depths. Then slowly an undulating dark surface seemed coming
up to us; and we landed, swaying on our feet. Weird, submarine world.
The jagged slope to one side went on down into the depths. Beside us,
swaying leafy vegetation stood upright in the water--a little thicket
here, with what seemed a rocky path, ascending along the edge of the
black abyss.
Through my transparent helmet I stared at Nereid. She was smiling,
unbreathing, as much at home down here as on the land. She gestured
that we were to take the ascending path; and held my hand to steady me
as we started our swaying, shoving climb. I could see now that ahead of
us there was a little tunnel into the cliff where we would emerge into
air.
And suddenly I felt Nereid's hand tighten convulsively on mine. I saw
the blurred figures in another second, two upright swaying blobs close
ahead of us as we emerged past the seaweed clump. Two men down here.
Tollgamo's men? I shook loose from Nereid and plunged forward.
Then in another second I could see the faces in the transparent
helmets. And one of them I recognized. It was Leh and Allen here, as
startled as ourselves at the sudden encounter.
* * * * *
I think now I need only briefly sketch that following hour or two while
within the Arsenal fortress Allen and I met Peters and his men, and all
of us hastily prepared for Tollgamo's attack. I found Nereid's father
quite what I had expected--a quiet, grave-faced man of somewhat my own
type, garbed like his fellow scientists in tight trousers and blouse of
sleek black fabric. There was no time then to exchange more than the
briefest of questions, as Nereid hastily told him what had happened to
her since her little note had informed him of her furtive departure
for Earth.
"You worried me very much, my daughter," he said quietly. And the same
sense of humor which she herself had twinkled now in his grey eyes.
"But I think this is no time for reproof."
Peters of course had known that Tollgamo's attack was imminent; and he
was almost ready. Allen and I could help little here with everything
so indescribably strange. Nereid's virgins were arriving now in little
dripping groups that scattered through the workshop grottos with
chattering voices that added immeasurably to the confusion. They were
all like Nereid, most of them clad in the brief, shining sea-green
garment, all of them with flowing hair and eager, excited little faces.
But I could see now the evidence of Nereid's Earth heritage--these
other girls, even more slim and frail-looking, with oval faces and pert
little pointed chins. And their skin was distinctly less pink-white
than hers.
Finally the departure for battle. Assembling of this weird little
sub-sea army. I watched it with silent, awed amazement. There was but
one type of sub-sea vessel here, the small underwater cylinders such
as Leh and Allen had come in from the country of the Gorts. Most of
them were that same twenty foot size, to carry two men; and a few
of them were some thirty feet, with space for three. An underwater
electronic ray armed them in bow and stern. Leh explained the weapon to
me. It had an effective range of fifty feet, with a current duration
of some ten seconds. It would kill any living substance at that range
almost instantly; and with duration would eat into the metal armour of
Tollgamo's ships.
"My father has had no opportunity to build an underwater weapon of more
range and power than this. It is all we have," Leh was telling us. And
my heart sank, and Allen and I exchanged glances of dismay, as Leh
added:
"Tollgamo has built them up to a range of three hundred feet."
There were about fifty of the small cylinder-boats; most of them to
take two men. For battle tonight it was all Peters could assemble.
But the cylinders were fleet as darting fishes. We had mobility, and
courage, but with sinking heart I wondered if it would serve us.
And I also wondered what Tollgamo would have. Leh's information gave
us little hint; and presently he, Allen and I took one of the larger
cylinders.
We ran without lights. For a time all I could see was a turgid vista
of dark-green depths. An abyss of water at times was beneath us. Then
there were the tops of jagged mountain peaks, naked black needle
spires rising in clusters out of the depths. Leh knew very well the
oceanography here in this undulating terrain of seascape. We headed
for the mouth of the inlet at the head of which Tollgamo's city was
perched. But before we reached there, little lights down in the watery
green haze suddenly appeared. An orange, blurred haze, separating in a
moment into dotted points of light.
"Tollgamo's forces!" Leh murmured.
At perhaps a hundred feet of depth, we shut off our tiny rocket-streams
of oxo-hydro fluorescence and hung poised. The three of us sat
breathless, peering. Had our tail-stream been discovered? It seemed
not. There was no undue movement of the Tollgamo lights. Just a
slow-moving little string of them, ahead and below us.
* * * * *
I could see the bottom now, a great undulating spread here of dark
surface. Rock, doubtless, with slime and ooze on it. The moving dots
of light presently disclosed the blobs of enemy vessels. Ten of them,
crawling on the bottom in a slow moving line. Cubes and oblongs of
metal. Dwarfed by distance they were like struggling little bugs, with
lighted eyes and tiny searchbeams waving like feelers before them.
Metallic vehicles, perhaps with caterpiller tread, crawling on the
bottom.
We drifted closer; almost over them for a moment so that I could guess
that each of them was a hundred feet or more in length. Turreted oblong
vessels, armoured; and armed with the three hundred foot rays. How
many men were in them? Of this Leh had little knowledge, save that he
thought perhaps a total of two thousand. Men and women, crawling along
in the ooze of this sea bottom, tense, with minds only upon the kill.
"They're heading for Arron," Leh murmured. "In those big ships they
surely must have a vast apparatus for land attack."
To come up abruptly within the lagoons and interior waterways of Arron.
Perhaps then, on the windward side of the city, to loose their deadly
lethal gas.
Two hours, at least, for them to reach Arron. The lights crawled under
us; and a vagrant ocean current drifted us away, so that presently we
dared fling on our rocket-stream power and speed back to Peters. He was
ready now, and his hundred men embarked in the fifty little cylinders.
And the five hundred girls were ready, too. I saw them on the ocean
surface, from the turret of our cylinder as we bobbed to the top. An
amazing army of green-clad nymphs. Each of them had a ray-cylinder
of our fifty foot projector. They lay, each of them on a six-foot
little sub-sea sled, powered, like our cylinders, with the oxo-hydro
gas-streams. In effect, a narrow, six foot long raft, with a hooded bow
that housed the control mechanisms and protected the girls' faces from
the rush of water. The girls' bodies had a weight of about the same
as water. Specific gravity of 1. And the sled with its mechanisms was
adjusted to be the same. Girl and sled--neither to float nor sink, but
approximately to hang poised. And thus, with little tilting fins on the
sled's sides, and lateral and vertical bow and stern rudders, the power
would thrust them down into the depths and up again at will.
We started. Running at first on the surface, the largest of our little
cylinders with Peters and two of his skilled men led us in a line. And
behind us came the girls, in squads of twenty, each with a leader. They
had often practiced it, for sport and for the possibility of such a
time as this.
As we passed the Water City, we submerged to fifty feet. I turned to
look back through our turret. Like darting fishes the girls came down,
still holding their formation as we swept on through the green-black
depths to battle.
VII
For a time we ran with short-range headlight beams preceding us, then,
as we neared the area where we knew Tollgamo's ships should now be, we
ran dark. But still there were the glowing, bubbling rocket-stream
tails of our fifty little cylinder boats; and the rocket-streams of the
girls' diving sleds. And our swift passage through the water left a
phosphorescent wake so that the area all around us glowed, opalescent
with a pallid, eerie light.
Leh and his father had arranged the tactics of battle which we hoped we
could employ. He explained them to us now. Peters' larger cylinder was
banded with white alumite stripes so as to be easily distinguishable.
Its light signals would give us orders.
"There is a ridge," Leh was saying. "It crosses from the promontory
head of the metal mountains across to the Arron forests. We think
Tollgamo will follow it as his best method of approach."
It was a transverse ridge, lying at an average of not much more than
fifty feet beneath the surface. A submarine plateau, in main extent
some ten miles long and a quarter of a mile wide, with deeps on both
sides of it where the bottom dropped sharply away, in places to
unfathomable depths. If we could catch the Tollgamo vehicles in that
area it was our best chance for a shallow attack. And that, we needed.
The girls especially, could not dive into the lower, higher pressures.
Then presently ahead of us, Peters signalled and we all slackened,
wheeling, gathering in a group.
"There they are!" Leh murmured tensely. "Just climbing to the ridge."
The shallower water here was bright with the upper light filtering
down. Astonishingly bright; and suddenly I realized that the Venus
night was over. Dawn had come to the world of air above us, penetrating
the cloud-masses of the Venus atmosphere. It came down here with a
faint ruddy glow, so that now we could see miles of the area before us.
At first it was blurred and unreal. But in a moment I was used to it,
my mind translating its distortion into the terms of its reality.
A dark abyss was under us here as we poised. Ahead, a thousand feet
away now, the ridge was visible. A cliff was at one side of it, a
honeycombed, submarine wall, a peak of which rose above the surface as
a volcanic little island, with a tiny crater mouth, yawning faintly
yellow from the fires of the earth which here must be close.
The slow-moving, struggling little line of submarine vehicles was just
mounting to the ridge. Only a few miles from here and they would be
under the city of Arron. We must turn them back here.
Slowly we approached, still out of Tollgamo's range. We had long since
been seen, of course. The waving headlights of the ten huge black
vessels turned our way. Monsters with searching, glaring eyes. And then
a tentative shot came. In the blurred watery twilight it was a stab of
thin violet light. Not instantaneous, but slow-moving as though for a
second it was pushing its way at us. But it blurred to nothingness far
short of us; and in a few seconds it died.
At Peters' signal we divided now, spreading fanshape between the
leading Tollgamo ship and Arron; skimming close under the surface,
still keeping three hundred feet or more away from the leading vessel.
But we had to get within fifty feet for our rays to be effective! I
could feel my heart pounding, and my blood seemed cold.
And then a puff of orange light from the bow of Peters' cylinder gave
the signal for our first attack. Beside me I could hear Allen suck in
his breath. My hands were on the small gun-firing mechanisms--my two
small ray projectors on one side of the cylinder, Allen's on the other,
with Leh's ranging in a quadrant of the bow and stern. In a slanting
dive, we plunged forward and down.
* * * * *
It was a chaos of blurred confusion to me, that first slanting plunge
that took us close past the looming black side of one of the Tollgamo
vessels, half circling it until in a few seconds we had fired our six
little stabbing bolts and were past, rising again. I was aware that all
the area of water suddenly seemed churned into silver phosphorescence
through which shapes were diving. A bolt stabbed at us and missed.
Then as we were mounting, one caught us. For a second it clung, with
a bubbling red viscosity of fusing metal, glaring against my small
bullseye pane. Would it eat through? Undoubtedly, if it clung too long,
or if another were to strike in the same place.
But we twisted away from it: and in another second its built-up
electronic power had discharged and it died. I realized then the
advantage of our mobility with our five hundred and fifty agile little
units against the ten huge caterpiller vehicles of Tollgamo, at least
we might have an equal chance. Their three hundred foot rays were
thin as pencil-streaks. Not easy for them to hit a tiny, swift-moving
target. And I saw too, that once we were close, there were many angles
at which the rays could not reach us.
Leh, Allen and I each fired two charges in that first dive. I saw some
of them strike against the looming black armoured hull of the Tollgamo
vessel as we flipped past it, each hit marked by bubbling red pits of
metal. Through the bullseye windows I caught a vague glimpse of crowded
men and women Gorts inside.
Then we were back, almost at the surface, out of range again, wheeling,
poising, with the enemy behind and beneath us. I stared down, and saw
that the girls, like a school of plunging dolphins, were making their
dive. And then I had my first sight of one as she was struck. She was
a tiny descending silver streak; and the bolt darted up, caught her.
For a horrible second or two it clung. I saw her waver; come loose from
her sled. And then she was a twisted, blackened, almost shapeless blob,
slowly drifting down, with crimson air-bubbles for a moment rising.
Then on the black ridge bottom her inert form lay, with a little
movement as the water made it weave, as though horribly she were still
alive.
For five minutes we stared down at the swarm of attacking girls. They
swarmed within the wide angles of the opposing rays. Some of them were
at the hulls of the enemy ships, holding their rays close, trying to
melt through.
Then at last they were rising; swooping back to the surface. Some of
them! But others were wavering away. With broken mechanisms discarded,
some were swimming free. And others were sinking. Broken, twisted
little shapes, with the water tinted crimson as they sank.
Leh, Allen and I stared at each other, white-faced, as the girls came
fluttering up, flipping on the surface to get air, organize into squads
again; and to recharge their tiny projectors. The squads reformed. My
heart sank at the pitiful gaps in the formations. We had lost more
than a hundred and fifty girls in that first attacking dive. And two
of our ten cylinder-boats were crippled. Air bubbles were oozing from
them; then the exit escape porte of one of them opened as the little
cylinder sank. The two men came out, with buoyant belts which all of us
were wearing so that they floated away on the surface.
But we had done some damage. Two or three of the big Tollgamo vessels
seemed to be in distress. The one leading the line had checked its
advance. Those behind seemed trying to hasten forward, so that now
the ships were bunching. One of them, seemingly out of control, had
slued sidewise, close to the edge of the abyss where the green-black
depths went down perhaps a thousand fathoms. Perilously close, so that
now as we stared it sagged drunkenly on the brink and seemed out of
commission. And at the window portes of another of them, a dull-red
glare was apparent. An interior fire.
"Not too bad," Leh was muttering. "We'll do better, next time."
Where was Nereid? My heart seemed to stick in my throat with
apprehension as I watched the girls coming up. And then I saw her;
still unharmed. She came close past our turret on her power-sled, her
white arm waved at us as she flipped past and broke the surface for air.
And then Allen suddenly gasped,
"What the devil is that? What now?"
Tollgamo wasn't waiting for our second dive! His leading ship suddenly
was starting ahead of the others. And then suddenly, from three or four
of the enemy vessels tiny black dots were rising. Water bullets....
Needle-like, foot-long projectiles. They came hurtling at us. And then
they burst with muffled, blurred sounds of little explosions. Some were
near the surface, tossing up spouts of iridescent water.
It startled us into sudden confusion. Several of our girls were caught
in the exploding puffs; and one of our cylinders. I saw it break apart
in sluggish tearing fragments of metal and what had been its living
occupants. A girl, caught at the surface, was hurled into the air.
* * * * *
A chaos. And in the midst of it, Peters gave the signal for a general
attack; sustained attack, this time. Again Leh plunged us into what now
was a watery inferno. How long it lasted I cannot say. Ten minutes.
Half an hour. An eternity of horror, with everyone for himself. There
were times when I could see little of it. The shallow, fifty foot
depth of ocean here was a glare of red and orange and opalescent light
through which our cylinders dove and the girls plunged up and down like
voracious little fishes.
There was an inferno of lights and muffled ghastly rumbles down below.
And the surface now was strewn. Our broken cylinders sagging there;
then sinking as the men tried to get out. Men and girls swimming,
wounded, and then sinking. Chaos of human wreckage. The rippled
daylight surface now was tossed by crazy waves; water stained with
blood; or orange and blue with oil and gas-fumes.
Then I saw that Peters' cylinder was gone. Only ours and two others
left. Leh, Allen and I, now in command. Empty authority. The girls,
down in the weird lurid depths, were fighting with utter desperation,
heedless of the possibility of command.
An eternity of horror. But now, two of the Tollgamo vessels had slid
over the brink, sinking slowly into the abyss. I saw another of them
burst with interior fire. Muffled explosions, that spewed out Gorts
and broken equipment. Then there was a time when one of the distressed
vessels emitted an inky fluid as though it were some giant squid--a
pall of black water, to hide the disembarking men. We fought through
it, until presently it drifted away.
"Getting them," I heard Allen mutter once. "By Heaven, only two of
those boats in action now--Tollgamo's and this other one."
We were plunging at Tollgamo's ship. Its portes were red with glare.
The enemy rays now were lessening. It seemed that only one or two
were left. And the battle now had changed its aspect. From the broken
Tollgamo ships, many of the Gorts had safely emerged, with helmets and
weighted shoes so that now they were walking, swaying on the rocky
bottom. Five hundred or more of them. And the girls swooped down at
them. Myriad hand to hand combats between the unweildy Gorts and the
Arron virgins that plunged at them like darting hungry sharks.
The bottom now was strewn with the dead as the girls plunged and
fought and we darted our cylinder among them, struggling to find
opportunity to strike with our rays.
Where was Nereid? Again cold apprehension struck at me; it was so long
since I had seen her. And now a new ghastly horror was entering the
turgid scene. Attracted by the lights, the muffled roars and the blood,
monsters of the deep were coming. Eaters of carrion. Sea vultures.
Some came in little swarms, a thousand tiny silvery shapes, darting
at the bodies, picking at them until only white skeletons lay here
on the slimy sea bottom. Other shapes, huge with glaring round eyes
like torches, came slithering from the deeps, searching for the dead,
seizing the wounded.
"That Tollgamo ship is all that's left," Leh was saying. He sped us
toward it. Quite obviously now it was trying to escape. Forty or fifty
girls were clinging to its hull; too close for its single remaining
ray weapon to hit them; girls with close-held projectors eating with
bubbling red electro-glare into the hull-plates. We had a glimpse into
one of the bullseye portes--gas fumes and red glare in there; and the
Gorts, trapped there, in a panic making ready to disembark. We lay
close, firing our bolts.
Suddenly a wounded girl was drifting past our turret; she seemed
struggling to get to our little pressure porte. Nereid?
Then I saw that it was Venta. She got into the porte; and I pumped out
the water; threw myself in and bent over her. She was gasping, but
still trying to smile at me.
"We--we have won, Earthman."
"Yes. Yes, Venta. You just lie quiet. Have you seen Nereid?"
"Yes. Here, just a little while ago. I don't know, now."
I stared out the porte bullseye. The Tollgamo ship was breaking;
I could see its air coming out in bubbling puffs that caught our
cylinder and shoved it away. That ship would be water-filled in a
moment. And then I stiffened; tense with horror as I stared. A little
side exit-porte of the wrecked vessel suddenly opened. A single huge
figure lunged out. A dark-clad giant figure, with round air-helmet and
weighted shoes.
Tollgamo! He was no more than fifty feet from me; a red sheen of light
struck his helmet so that I could see his face with its quiet, grim
smile. And then suddenly, in a leaping dive, he flung himself forward,
and seized a girl who was clinging to the vessel's side, blasting with
her ray-torch.
Nereid! In the glare, abruptly I saw her, as Tollgamo seized her,
catching her by surprise so that she had no chance to escape him. And
then her torch and her knife were gone, as he held her body against him
and with swaying, shoving tread started away along the bottom.
* * * * *
There were weighted shoes here in our pressure porte. I was only a
moment getting Venta out of the porte into the main part of the hull. I
slid its door; adjusted my helmet; admitted the water. And then I was
swaying out on the rocks, with a knife in my hand.
Vaguely I could see Tollgamo, with Nereid struggling in his grip as he
advanced with swaying tread toward where, near at hand, the honeycombed
cliff of that little crater-island loomed here. I struggled after him.
Then I saw that he had plunged into what seemed a water-filled little
passage leading back under the island. I was there in a moment; tense,
alert, cautious now that he might be crouching somewhere here in ambush.
The ten foot high narrow passage wound up an ascent until unexpectedly
my head broke the surface. I twitched off the helmet. I had thought
that Tollgamo knew that he was being followed, but evidently he did
not. Neck deep in water, I was near the rocky shore of a subterranean
lagoon ... a huge jagged grotto here in the depths of the honeycombed
little island.
And then I saw Tollgamo. His helmet was off now. Carrying Nereid in
his arms, he had mounted a broken rocky wall of the grotto, so that he
was some fifty feet back and ten feet above me. I had kicked off my
weighted shoes. I tried to dive, but I was discovered. Nereid gave a
little cry; and as Tollgamo saw me, he suddenly checked his climb, set
Nereid on her feet and held her against him. I had floundered forward,
on the shore now; and dropped my knife, plucking a little ray-projector
from my belt. Its fifty foot stab was ample here. Was Tollgamo armed?
Brief thoughts; brief tableau. For that second he and Nereid stared
down at me. A red glare painted them, a glare that came from what I
saw now was a glowing pit almost beside them on this little volcanic
island. In the heavy subterranean silence I could hear the low
muttering, hissing rumble of the fires deep in the bowels of the earth,
and the grotto was heavy with their sulphuric smell.
A slow ironic smile was on Tollgamo's gray face, painted now by the red
and yellow glare.
"So, the Earthman!" he said. "And he finds Tollgamo unarmed."
My little projector was leveled; but as he held Nereid against him I
could not dare fire. He saw it, and his ironic smile broadened. Was he
really unarmed? It seemed so. I could see the empty weapon-clips at his
belt, from which evidently he had torn his exhausted weapons and flung
them away. And his hands were both in plain view, gripping Nereid's
shoulders. There was just a second when I saw his gaze flick from my
leveled gun as he desperately measured his chances for escape.
And then he seemed to reach his decision. The quiet smile still plucked
at his thin gray lips. I must have made a move with my leveled muzzle;
and suddenly it seemed to startle him.
"Don't fire, Earthman!" he said sharply. "You would kill her."
And then, with a twitch of his big powerful arms he swept Nereid, not
further to shield himself, but behind him. And he added softly, to her:
"So you see Tollgamo has lost? That is too bad." His breath went out in
a long hiss. "I had thought to conquer Arron, to share it with you."
His soft voice was ironical; as though now at the last he was jibing at
the futility of all human effort.
I stood numbed, withholding my shot as now he cast her away; and he
stood alone on the red-yellow brink. His gaze turned to me.
"You see, Earthman, you need not kill me," he said gently. "I should
not like anyone to do that--much less an Earthman."
Still his jibing irony. But there was tragedy in his smoldering dark
eyes; the tragedy of failure, as now his dream at last was broken.
He was still quietly smiling, as he poised on the brink, staring down
at the fiery abyss. Then slowly he leaned forward, toppled and fell.
For a second his plummeting body was visible, and then the red-yellow
glare swallowed it.
* * * * *
I think that there is little I need add. I have no wish to picture
the return of our pitiful little army to Arron. Victorious army....
How trite, but how true it is--in warfare, even the victor is
vanquished! But surely, there is a better time ahead for Venus now.
Jenten-Shah, degenerate ruler of the Arones, was killed that night by
an imbecile worker. Peters was killed; and Leh is ruling. Surely he
will bring order out of chaos, and minimize license in the lives of the
pleasure-loving Arones, so that now there need be no rebelling young
Virgins with the opprobrium of Untouchables.
Certainly that is what we all hope.
Nereid and I are married now and are very happy. My strange little
wife, daughter of two worlds. I know that I shall have to take her back
to Venus presently. Loyally she insists she likes our Earth quite as
well as Venus. But as I recall the lush tropic beauty of the glowing
Arron nights, and the soft iridescence of the water--well, I doubt it
very much.
I want Nereid to like Earth. Our little home is in the tropics, by the
palm-lined edge of a lagoon. We are secluded here, which is what Nereid
wants. When people see her she is dressed always in Earth fashion. But
when we are, alone, at night--
I wanted to finish this narrative tonight. I thought I could finish by
dawn. It is bright moonlight. I thought Nereid was asleep, but just a
little while ago she came from our bedroom to the veranda where I am
writing. Nereid, with her tawny hair flowing, her beautiful body again
in the shining sea-green garment.
Then she went past me, flinging me her impish, whimsical little smile
as she ran for the lagoon. She is swimming down there now. Occasionally
she calls up to me, daring me to come down.
* * * * *
[Transcriber's Note: No heading for Section IV in original.]
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