Donald A. Wollheim (ed) (24 page)

Jackie Smith raised the gun, a fraction of an
inch. "Open it, Midget," he whispered. "She's cold in
there."

Lundy stood still. The sweat ran on him and
he was colder than a frog's belly in the rain; and for no reason at all he said
thickly,

"No.
She's hot. She can't breathe in there. She's hot."

Then he jerked his head up and yelled. He
came around to face Smith, unsteady but fast, and started for him.

Smith's ugly face twisted as though he might
be going to cry. "
Midgetl
I don't want to shoot
you. Open the safe!"

Lundy said, "You damned fool," with
no voice at all, and went on.

Smith
hit the firing stud.

The
anaesthetic
needles hit Lundy across the chest. They didn't hurt much.
Just
a stinging prick.
He kept going. No reason. It was just something he
seemed to be doing at the time.

Behind him Farrell whimpered once like a
puppy and lay down across the little safe. He didn't move again. Lundy got down
on his hands and knees and reached in a vague sort of way for the controls.
Jackie Smith watched him with dazed green eyes.

Quite
suddenly, Iron Mike blew his guts out.

The control panel let go a burst of blue flame.
The glare and heat of it knocked Lundy backward. Things hissed and snarled and
ran together, and the convertible began to dance like a leaf
ki
a gale. The automatic safety cut the rockets dead.

The
ship began to fall.

Smith said something that sounded like
She
and folded up his chair. Lundy rubbed his hand across his face. The
lines of it were blurred and stupid. His dark eyes had no sense in them.

He
began to crawl over the lurching floor toward the safe.

The clouds outside ripped and tore across the
ship's nose, and presently only water showed. Black, still,
tideless
water dotted with little islands of floating weed that stirred and slithered
with a life of their own.

Black water, rushing up.

Lundy didn't care. He crawled through Farrell's blood, and he didn't
care about that, either. He pushed Farrell's body back against the cabin wall
and began to scratch at the shiny door, making noises like a hound shut out and
not happy about it.

The ship hit the water with a terrific smack. Spray
gey-sered
up, dead white against the black sea, fell back, and closed in. Presently even
the ripples went away.

Dark green weed-islands twined sinuously upon
themselves, a flock of small
seadragons
flapped
their jeweled wings down and began to fish, and none of them cared at all about
the ship sinking away under them.

Not even Lundy cared, out cold in the
space-tight cabin, with his body wedged up against the safe and tears drying
with the sweat on his
stubbled
cheeks.

II

T
he
first thing
Lundy
knew about was the stillness.
A dead feeling, as though
everything in creation had stopped breathing.

The second thing was his body. It hurt, like
hell, and it was hot, and it didn't like the thick, foul air it was getting.
Lundy pushed himself into a sitting position and tried to boot his brain into
action. It was hard work, because someone had split his head open four ways
with an axe.

It wasn't really dark in the cabin. A wavering silver glow almost like
moonlight came in through the ports. Lundy could see pretty well. He could see
Farrell's body sprawled out on the floor, and a mess of junk that had once been
equipment. He could see the safe.

He looked at it a long time. There wasn't
much to look at. Just an open safe with nothing in it, and a piece of black
cloth dropped on the floor.

"Oh,
Lord," whispered Lundy.
"Oh, my Lord!"

Everything hit him at once then. There wasn't
much in him but his stomach, and that was tied down. But it tried hard to come
up. Presently the spasms stopped, and then Lundy heard the knocking.

It wasn't very loud. It had a slow, easy
rhythm, as though the knocker had a lot of time and didn't care when he got in.
It came from the airlock panel.

Lundy got up.
Slowly, cold
as a toad's belly and as white.
His lips drew back from his teeth and
stayed there, frozen.

The knocking kept on.
A
sleepy kind of sound.
The guy outside could afford to wait. Sometime
that locked door was going to open, and he could wait. He wasn't in a hurry. He
would never be in a hurry.

Lundy looked all around the cabin. He didn't
speak. He looked sideways out of the port. There was water out there.
The black sea-water of Venus; clear and black, like deep night.

There was level sand spreading away from the
ship. The silver light came up out of it. Some kind of phosphorescence, as
bright as moonlight and
faindy
tinged with green.

Black sea-water.
Silver sand.
The
guy kept on knocking at the door.
Slow and easy.
Patient.
One—two.
One—two.
Just off beat with Lundy's heart.

Lundy went to the inner cabin, walking
steadily He looked around carefully and then went back. He stopped by the lock
panel.

"Okay, Jackie," he said.
"In a minute.
In a minute, boy."

Then he turned and went very fast to the port locker and
got a quart bottle out of its shock cradle,
and raised it. It took both hands.

After
a while he dropped the bottle and stood still, not looking at anything, until
he stopped shaking. Then he pulled his
vac
-suit down
off its hook and climbed into it. His face was grey and quite blank.

He
took all the oxygen cylinders he could carry, emergency rations, and all the
benzedrine
in the medicine kit. He
put the limit dose of the stimulant down on top of the brandy before he locked
his helmet. He didn't bother with the needle gun. He took the two Service
blasters—his own, and Smith's. The gentle knocking didn't stop.

He
stood for a moment looking at the open safe and the black cloth dropped beside
it. Something cruel came into his face.
A tightness, a
twitching and setting of the muscles, and a terrible look of patience.

Being
under water wouldn't bother a Thing from outer space. He reached up and lifted
the net of tight-woven metal-mesh down off its hook and fastened it on his
belt. Then he walked over and opened the airlock door.

Black
water swirled in around his weighted boots, and then the door opened wide and
Jackie Smith came in.

He'd
been waiting in the flooded lock-chamber.
Kicking his boots
against the inner door, easy, with the slow breathing of the sea.
Now
the water pushed his feet down and held him upright from behind, so he could
walk in and stand looking at Lundy.
A big blond man with
green eyes, and white bandages strapped under his open black tunic, looking at
Lundy.
Not long.
Only for a second.
But long enough.

Lundy
stopped himself after the third scream. He had to, because he knew if he
screamed again he'd never stop. By that time the black water had pushed Jackie
Smith away, over to the opposite wall, and covered his face.

"Oh,
Lord," whispered Lundy. "Oh, Lord,
what did he see before he drowned?"

No one answered. The black water pushed at
Lundy, rising high around him, trying to take him over to Jackie Smith. Lundy's
mouth began to twitch.

He shut his teeth on his lower Hp, holding
it, holding his throat. He began to rim, clumsily, fighting the water, and then
he stopped that, too. He walked, not looking behind him, out into the flooded
lock. The door slid shut behind him, automatically.

He walked out across the firm green-silver
sand, swallowing the blood that ran in his mouth and choked him.

He didn't hurry. He was going to be walking for a long, long time. From
the position of the ship when it fell he ought to be able to make it to the
coast—unless
It
had been working on him so the
figures on the dials hadn't been there at all.

He checked his direction, adjusted the
pressure-control in his
vac
-suit, and plodded on in
the eerie undersea moonlight. It wasn't hard going. If he didn't hit a deep
somewhere, or meet something too big to handle, or furnish a meal for some
species of hungry Venus-weed, he ought to five to face up to the Old Man at
H.Q. and tell him two men were dead, the ship lost, and the job messed to hell
and gone.

It was beautiful down there. Like the dream-worlds you see when you're
doped or delirious. The phosphorescence rose up into the black water and danced
there in wavering whorls of cold fire. Fish, queer gaudy
litde
things with
jewelled
eyes, flicked past Lundy in
darts of sudden color, and there were great stands of weed like young forests,
spangling the dark water and the phosphorescence glow with huge burning spots
of blue and purple and green and silver.

Flowers.
Lundy got too close to some of them once.
They reached out and opened round mouths full of spines and sucked at him
hungrily. The fish gave them a wide berth. After that, so did Lundy.

He hadn't been walking more than half an hour
when he hit the road.

It was a perfectly good road, running
straight across the sand. Here and there it was cracked, with some of the huge
square blocks pushed up or tipped aside, but it was still a good road, going
somewhere.

Lundy stood looking at it with cold prickles
running up and down his spine. He'd heard about things like this. Nobody knew
an awful lot about Venus yet. It was a young, tough, be-damned-to-you planet,
and it was apt to give the snoopy scientific guys a good swift boot in their
store teeth.

But even a young planet has a long past, and
stories get around.
Legends, songs, folk tale.
It was
pretty well accepted that a lot of Venus that was under water now hadn't been
once, and vice versa. The old girl had her little whimsies while doing the
preliminary mock-up of her permanent face.

So once upon a time this road had crossed a plain under a hot pearl-grey
sky, going somewhere. Taking caravans from the seacoast, probably.
Bales of spices and spider-silk and casks of
vakhi
from the
Nahali
canebrakes, and silver-haired
slavegirls
from the high lands of the Cloud People, going along under sultry green
liha
-trees
to be sold.

Now it crossed a plain of glowing sand under
still black water. The only trees that shadowed it were tall weeds with
brilliant, hungry flowers, and the only creatures that followed it were little
fish with
jewelled
eyes. But it was still there,
still ready, still going somewhere.

It was headed the same way Lundy was. It must
have made a bend somewhere and turned to meet him. Lundy licked cold sweat off
his lips and stepped out on it.

He stepped slow and careful, like a man coming alone down the aisle of
an empty church.

He walked on the road for a long time. The
weeds crowded in thicker along its edges. It seemed to run right through a
dense forest of them that spread away as far as Lundy could see on either side.
He was glad of the road. It was wide, and if he stayed in the middle of it the
flowers couldn't reach him.

It got darker outside, because of the weeds
covering the sand. Whatever made the phosphorescence didn't like being crowded
that way, and pretty soon it was so dark that Lundy had to switch on the light
in the top of his helmet. In the edges of the beam he could see the weed fronds
moving lazily with the slow breathing of the sea.

The flowers were brighter here. They hung like lamps in the black water,
burning with a light that seemed to come out of themselves.
Sullen
reds and angry yellows, and coldly vicious blues.