Fletcher Pratt (8 page)

* It is only fair to mention that Professor Appleyard, one of the members of the expedition which gave this narrative to the world, thinks the amount of time consumed in passing through the atmosphere of Venus is, according to Schierstedt's account, excessive. From measurements by astronomers we know that the atmosphere cannot be so deep as the account would seem to indicate. But it should be remembered that in such moments the human memory is apt to occupy itself with many details of experience which make an account seem long, but which actually are passed through in a few seconds.

It was
with a kind of subconscious surprise that I gazed around after I had put on one of the atotta suits and followed Ashembe through the intricate passages of the space ship. All around us was a fog, thick and yellow-gray in color, like the famous pea-soup fogs of London. Behind it a large but sickly and strangely prolate sun gave the dull illumination of a frosted electric globe.

I looked down. We were in a swamp, up nearly to our knees in the ooze. Around our legs and as far as we could see across this universal slough, an intricate tangle of pale, slimy, almost gelatinous vegetation coiled. Its clinging tendrils hampered our movements, but only here and there did it project a leaf above the surface and then feebly, as though it lacked the strength to stand upright.

Beside us the curved flank of the Shoraru rose up and away, glimmering wetly in the dulled rays of the sun. It lay on its side, its point slightly down, half-submerged, like some wallowing monster. The door through which we had left it stood just above the surface of the swamp, and but for this one object there was nothing to see but swamp, fog and sun.

I turned to look at Ashembe. With detached scientific calm, he was busy filling an emptied liquid hydrogen cylinder with the swamp water, snipping off and cramming in with it samples of the vegetation. This done, he handed me the container, produced a bottle from a pocket in his suit and waved it around in the air for a moment or two—to take a sample of the atmosphere, I imagined. While I was taking both containers back to deposit them in the Shoraru, he busied himself with some instrument he had brought, taking an observation of the sun.

We returned together, helping each other through the door, which Ashembe bolted behind us.*

*But Schierstedt specifically mentions that on leaving Earth, this outer door was welded shut. Evidently Ashembe must have unsealed it—a fact which our traveler fails to mention.

I began to open the next door inward, but he halted me with a gesture.

"Give pause," he said, his voice sounding deep and muffled through the telephonic apparatus of the suit. "This atmosphere may be poisonous, in which case it would be bad for us to carry with us into inner chambers. I will create a vacuum. Seize something."

At the base of the car (now become the side in the position in which it lay) just over where the propulsive tubes passed through the shell, was a row of keys. Hooking one arm through a rack, Ashembe began to turn them rapidly.

I heard a whirring sound, and felt strong winds pluck at me. The dimness of the chamber (the fog had followed us in) decreased, became nonexistent. The cylinder of swamp water rolled from the place where I had dropped it, and accompanied by the bottle of air, banged against the base of the car, and Ashembe began to turn off the keys again.

As soon as he had opened one of the cylinders of liquid air he had prepared at Joyous Gard and the released gas had restored the pressure in our outer chamber to normal, we penetrated deeper into the car. Ashembe fell at once to analyzing the samples he had brought, while I, unable to help him with this, was reduced to the state of enforced idleness of our journey.

"You perceive," he explained, "I could not do thus when landing on your planet. Upon arrival I was practically without fuel, running-upon inertia. Consequently I lacked power to check my progress through your atmosphere. The progress was too rapid and friction not only severely damaged my Shoraru, but rendered it impossible to open at the door, door being fused into place. Therefore I had to cut my way through the base of the Shoraru." "My God," I said. "You're lucky that you didn't land in an ocean or on a mountain."

"Truthful. So are we this time."

I shuddered a little. "What if we had?"

"Not hard to escape. Simply by blowing out more fuel through peak of the Shoraru. But difficult is that we have not much fuel."

"What about the revolution of the planet?"

"Very slow from observation," was the reply. "One revolution in six hundred seventy-four of your hours— about twenty-eight days. Me, I am not entirely certain of this result, but it is accurate within two or three hours.

We have nearly twenty days before, it becomes dark at this point."

"Why," I said, "then everything ought to be frozen here, hadn't it? At our poles where they have long periods of light and dark like this, the ice forms so deeply during the dark that the sun can't melt it again."

"Case is different. One difference is that sun is twice as hot here as at your planet. Another is perhaps the difference in chemical composition of the atmosphere and liquids. Perchance it is not water. I am now determining." He fell silent for a moment, fiddling with his reagents and apparatus. Then: "This air is not good for us," he announced. "It is highly deficient in oxygen—only about four per cent of that in your or our atmosphere. I find also that it has high percentage of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, also small proportion of hydrogen sulphide and much dust ..."

Somewhere in the back of my head a memory from some book stirred. "Why, that's almost exactly what our scientists predicted from observations!"

"Truthful. Your scientists are backward in many points, but their spectroscopic work is well done ... They are correct about this being the early planet also. The dust which is very much in the air is composed of silica, alumina, oxides of iron and titanium and compounds of calcium, sodium and potassium. This is exactly the formula for matter flowing from volcanic action, and gases in atmosphere, especially carbon dioxide, indicate the same thing. There must be very intense volcanic activity throughout this Venus. Very dangerous to remain there any time." "Then the whole of Venus is like this?"

"Question. Entire of your planet is not like the place where I landed? But all this planet may be more like this place because it is the younger and more homogeneous world. For certainly, the atmosphere is altogether like it is here—thick and heavy and bad. Of the rest it is mostly impossible to tell unless we make journeys here and there, but I think it is much like this place. For one thing water is very plentiful here."

"Oh, the swamp liquid is water, then?" I interrupted. "Yes, but with very little salt therein. Water is plentiful here, but there is extremely small amounts of water in the atmosphere. This would show that water is almost absent from most portions of the planet, though the atmosphere is so heavily saturated with carbon dioxide vapor and dust - that it could hardly take up much. Come."

He was putting away the chemical apparatus.

"What about the chances for getting your pleci?" Ashembe shook his head. "I am in doubt. Not very promising, although this is a young world and may have it in volcanic vapor or in combination in volcanic rocks." He began to pull on his atotta suit again, and I did likewise.

When we reached the outside of the car, he paused to fix above the door one of the light-giving quartz rocks from the interior, and we set off together, plunging our way through the slimy vegetation of the swamp.

Fifteen minutes of amphibian progress brought us to a place where the vines thinned out and the water became shallower. I noticed that to right and left and occasionally straight ahead vague spots were visible here at the edge; three-foot circles of changing color like the iridescence that is formed on the surface of water by a drop of oil. I pointed to one of them in 'question, but Ashembe merely shook his head without deigning to speak.

A little farther along one of these agglomerations lay directly before us and we paused to look at it. It was apparently a solid structure, a flat, deep object floating just below the surface of the swamp, pulsating gently with a motion of its own.

"What is it?" I asked.

"An algal growth of some kind perchance," said Ashembe. "They are common on early worlds."

He turned away, but I held back and with the same impulse that makes one kick at a hat in the street, poked my foot into it. It met nothing solid at all; just as though I had kicked a jelly. But swifter than thought, before I could withdraw the foot, the whole iridescent, purple and green mass flowed forward around the offending member and then around my other foot, and held both in a soft, firm grip. I tried to draw loose, to run. The thing clung, creeping slowly upward. I bent to tear it loose with my fingers and my hand, like my feet, was seized in a steady, paralyzing grip. I could not move, struggle as I would. A chill of horror went over me.

"Ashembe!" I called after my companion's retreating form, and with a vast effort, heaved the imprisoned arm up a few inches. The growth came up with it, like a great pancake, then fell back with a solid plop as I could no longer hold its weight. It gripped my legs all the tighter for the interruption. I almost pitched onto my face in the slimy mass.

"Ashembe!" I cried again, struggling to retain my balance, and out of the corner of my eye, caught sight of his arm as he brought the destructive heat-ray into sudden action. I heard the warning hum, saw the gleam of fierce light, and a great plume of steam sprang up and obscured the lenses that covered my eyes. The tugging at my arm ceased, and though my fingers were still caught, I could draw the hand loose and raise it. About my feet the water toiled, furiously. Steam covered everything. Then Ashembe's arm was about me, pulling me loose.

Through the cloud of steam the expressionless mask that covered Ashembe's features became visible. "Are you liberated?" he asked, anxiously.

I extended toward him the hand that had been caught. Around the fingers still clung fragments and tatters of the iridescent jelly of the thing that had tried to drag me down, its heart a mass of color too lovely to be deadly. He reached an inquisitive finger toward it, touched, and the jelly clung to him as it had to me. Torn as it was, it took our united strength to pull it loose, and when we returned to the Shoraru after our journey, there were still bits of it hanging here and there on the atotta suit.

"You are extremely faulty," Ashembe told me severely. "It is the very good rule we have never to interfere with unknown plants and animals. All have great potentialities of danger."

"But who would think a formless thing like that—?"

"In your own planet you have the blossoms of some plants, not only harmless looking but artistic in appearance, that are highly dangerous," was his reply. "Some of them catch insects and small animals. I have visited other planets and in each found obviously innocent objects that were really of danger. Beware."

We had been forging on as we spoke, and the water had now become definitely shoal. A moment later we stepped out on land. But what a land! The huge, languid sun still shone through the yellow fog to show us a land without earth, a coast of striated, tortured rock, with long cracks running through it away back into the distance. Under our feet the rock was hard and bare, and every few paces we came upon a little pocket of jagged stones, black and fearfully rough, like the clinkers from a furnace. Over these Ashembe paused. They seemed to excite his interest, and he picked up several to add to the collection of similar objects in the cylinder he had brought.

"I am justified," he said as we worked slowly up the rough slope from the foreshore. "This is clearly the outflow from a volcano, these rocks being ordinary volcanic cinders. We must hasten. Dangerous to remain here on account of volcanic activity."

Soon we were assisting each other over and around big boulders, and then without realizing the gradations, were climbing, hand and foot, up a veritable mountain. We must have been at it for three or four hours before my indefatigable companion paused for a rest.

I looked around. The thickness of the atmosphere obscured everything, but we could see away behind us the slope up which we had come, jagged and torn, like nothing on Earth, so much as the slope of Vesuvius just beyond Naples. Above us the same slope stretched on to an invisible height.

"How are we going to find our way back?" I asked. From his belt Ashembe produced a little instrument, not unlike a watch with a bright metal face. "Attend," said he, holding it up, its face pointing down the slope up which we had come, then slowly turning it so that it swept the compass. At one point he paused. A loud ticking sound was audible and the gleaming metal face was clouded over.

"In that direction lies the Shoraru," said my companion, pointing toward the locality the instrument faced. "This is the Boshee, always used by our explorers. In the Shoraru is a—a small radio apparatus, you would call. The Boshee is a receiver, attuned to receive only impulses from this apparatus. It has within an arrangement like ears on either side." He pointed to two tiny, bell-shaped openings on opposite sides of the instrument. "When the impulse entering by one ear is equal to that entering by the other it causes the instrument to make sound and obscures the receiving mirror. Thus it must point in the correct direction."

"But what if it is pointed in the direction exactly opposite to the right one?"

"Then it makes the sound, but the mirror is not obscured. The impulses within the Boshee are directed in the direction from which they come—reflected. When it is pointed in the exact opposite direction, they are reflected to the back of the instrument, and there is no cloud on mirror. See." He turned the Boshee and, as he had said, the ticking was distinctly audible, but the mirror remained unclouded.

We resumed our progress, climbing heavily over the crags that now barred our path. It was monotonously alike—gray rocks with tearing edges that crumbled and broke as we climbed, fog, red sun and silence.

It became apparent, after a little further progress, that we were no longer going upward. For a while longer we stumbled among the rocks of a kind of plateau and then found ourselves going definitely downward through the same infinitudes of monotonous gray stone, featureless save for the fantastic shapes given them by successive outpourings and crumblings of bluetonian material. I grew weary, begged Ashembe to halt, and as we paused again, throwing ourselves flat to rest, we heard a low drum-beat of sound, regularly repeated.

"What's that?" I asked, starting to a sitting position.

"The possibility is a volcano," he declared with entire calm. "Let us proceed with caution."

We "proceeded with caution" toward the sound. The down slope, like the upgrade before it, now came to an end, and we found ourselves in a valley between cyclopean blocks of detritus from some silent volcano, all as void of life or any sign of it as everything we had passed since we emerged from the swamp of the algae. The sound became louder, a steady boom-boom of reverberations somewhere in the distance, and when we stopped we could feel the ground vibrate with the attendant shock. Suddenly Ashembe gripped my arm and pointed straight ahead.

"You see?" he asked.

I could see nothing but the silent sun and rock and said so. "No? Well, come," and we toiled on for another quarter mile or so. My attention was taken up with negotiating the ground, which now began to show a series of alarming cracks beneath out feet, but when we next halted I could see dimly, in the distance, a black cloud like a darker spot in the surrounding murk, floating high above the surface. Beneath it and equally far was a great red funnel of flame, dimmed to a ghostly pink by the distance. The booming sound we heard came from it, and all around us the vibration of the ground was now clearly perceptible.

"A volcano?"