THE MONSTER behind thrust them forward again, and they drifted out of the communication shaft into a room—forward of the ship, Degnan judged by its size, and lighted with the murky red glow that was all human eyes could register of what for Venusians was a brilliant illumination.
There were two more Over Beings here, afloat side by side, watching. Degnan knew more about Venusians than most men, but he couldn’t read their expressions—his experience among the Under Race didn’t help him there; these creatures were as different in mind from their poor relations as they were in body from man. But he recognized the insignia one of them wore as those of a high officer in the Venusian fleet—surprisingly high to be aboard this miserable cargo shell. Both of them were armed, and Degnan’s other thoughts were lost in the craving to get his hands on one of those weapons.
He saw something else that made his heart bound with illogical hope. At four places around the red-lit chamber’s periphery the wall bulged smoothly inward, and an airseal door was inset into each curve. Those, on this model of ship, marked the berths where emergency rockets, provisioned and fueled, were carried when a crew was aboard . . . And one of those doors was standing open, more red light glowing beyond.
The madness of the idea didn’t occur to Degnan then. He twisted and got his first look at the girl he was holding and who held to him. Her face floated before—above, below?—him, ghost-pale in the bloody light, darkly haloed by hair that drifted in wild weightless disorder. As he had half-expected from her terrified rigidity, her eyes were wide, dilated, unseeing. He tried briefly to pry one of her hands loose from his arm, and knew he would have to break her fingers first.
She had to be jarred out of it, and that inside seconds. Already he could hear the hissing of the third Venusian’s air-tubes, emerging from the shaft.
Degnan clenched his teeth and slapped the girl’s face; her panic grip loosened, and he caught her by the shoulders and shook her till he was afraid her neck would snap. But he saw her lips move, the pupils of her eyes return to normal size, and he whispered sharply, “Do you hear me?”
She nodded dazedly. The Venusian that had brought them out of the hold was hovering close, barbed goad poised; the red chamber was turning slowly about them. Degnan whispered, “There’s one chance. When I say ‘Go!’, we’ll shove off in opposite directions. Action and reaction. You try to occupy the one there; I’ll take the two on the other side.”
She drew a shuddering breath, said, “All right.” He was thankful she didn’t add what they both knew—that the chance was no chance at all.
“Get ready, then,” said Degnan harshly. They braced themselves against each other and waited for their slow rotation to bring them into position . . .
The high-ranking Venusian floated into Degnan’s field of vision with a soft hissing. One of its almost-hands of delicate claws and flattened pads was extended, holding something that gleamed and that Degnan recognized—too late, a fractional instant before it exploded into blinding light.
The flare was literally blinding; when it vanished he could see only confused darkness. He had met it before, when he was seized, and knew it for one of the Over Race’s clever new devices for dealing with Earthmen—one harmless to themselves, since it used light invisible to Venusians. But there was something funny about this time. The darkness didn’t stay on and slowly clear up, but he stay on and slowly clear up, but he and shadow, seemed to be plunging into concentrically smaller circles of buzzing nothingness, himself dwindling away to nothing, losing consciousness . . .
THE RED light burned once more.
The air was murk-red, close and stuffy, and something somewhere was going “Blip . . . blip. Blip . . . blip,” in a curious paired rhythm.
And someone was shaking him by the shoulders, almost in time to the noises. Degnan snorted, gulped down a sudden sickness, and sat up, looking into the face of the dark-haired girl.
“Turn about’s fair play,” he said dizzily, “but you can stop now.”
She drew back, gazing at him with intense relief. “Thank heavens! Now maybe you can do something.”
Degnan threw his legs over the edge of the bunk he had been lying on and stared blurrily at gleaming dials and instruments set into an opposite wall, very close and curving. He passed a hand across his eyes. “Do—what?”
“Find out where we’re going—and—and do something about it.”
The man’s head was clearing. Now he became aware of the low monotonous rumble of a rocket drive; that, and the cramped quarters, and the red light, told him where they were. But once oriented, he only felt more bewildered. They were in an emergency rocket from the Venusian freighter, and it was under power.
The girl was watching him as if expecting him to produce a rabbit from a nonexistent hat. Her hair, still tangled, hung normally about her face now—one Venus gravity would be the acceleration of the lifeboat—and the traces of hysteria were gone. She was as rumpled and soiled as Degnan; she was thin, and her face with its bright expectant eyes held shadow-smudges of suffering. And for all that she reminded him somehow of Athalie—Athalie far away and dear, a part of the pleasant dream that life on Earth seemed now. But Athalie was blonde and richly curved, and he had never seen her other than immaculately clean, sweet-smelling, well-groomed . . .
He heaved himself shakily erect, glancing round the interior of the rocket. Half of it was bunks, uncomfortable but endurable for man or Venusian, three of them, one above the other; the other half was filled by an instrument panel with another bunk above that. The blipping came from the panel and went on and on maddeningly.
The controls he saw were oddshaped, made for Venusian claws, but mostly recognizable; few and simple compared to those of a regular space ship. The rocket was not equipped for complex navigation or sightseeing; there were no vision devices, no calculator.
“That noise,” Degnan said over his shoulder, “is a radar echo. This type of boat has an elementary pilot mechanism that automatically heads for the nearest planet-sized body. It’s bouncing a beam off the nearest planet—listen.” The thing went ‘Blip . . . blip.’ The interval is the time it takes for the echo to get back. Twice the distance to the planet in lighttime. Which means it’s pretty close. If it’s Earth, we’d be inside the Moon’s orbit.”
“If it’s—Do you think it’s Earth?”
“Yes,” said Degnan deliberately. “That’s the likeliest—considering how long the Sheneb accelerated and how long we were in free flight, we could hardly have been close to anything else. It couldn’t very well be Mars, and Mercury’s beyond the Sun . . .”
“Earth!” the girl said in a choked voice. She watched him with puzzled eyes as he turned away and sat down heavily on the bunk’s edge again. “But—aren’t you going to—”
“—do something?” Degnan shrugged ironically. “The robot’s steering on the radar-sight, and I couldn’t do any better. There should be an automatic parachute-release, too, when we hit atmosphere—but we won’t need that. Earth’s at war now, and nothing bigger than a pebble could slip past the interceptor barrage. We ought to be picked up before long.”
“Oh,” sighed the girl.
“Now,” said Degnan, “let’s you tell me something. What happened? How’d we get here?”
She looked at him blankly. “Why—we got away—didn’t we?”
“We were about to try. But I didn’t duck in time.”
“Oh, yes—your plan.” She smiled uncertainly, a frown puckering her brows. “Evidently it worked.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Degnan rudely. “We both must have passed out.”
HE THOUGHT hard, aching head in his hands. And cloudy pictures rose in his brain—memories, or half-memories, plucked with difficulty out of emptiness. Himself, wresting the steel-tipped goad from the Venusian’s grip—battering at the others with it, smashing a chitinous head. A couple of jointed legs afloat in the air and twitching gruesomely. Thrusting the girl through the open door, div
ing after her. Launching the lifeboat into space.
In clipped syllables he imparted those fragments to the girl as they occurred to him, and she nodded thoughtfully. “Yes. Yes, that’s the way it was.”
Degnan flexed his right arm and tested the muscles of his back likewise. He said, “I’m stiff and sore enough to have been in a fight. And if we both remember it, it must be so. But neither of us remembers very clearly—isn’t that right? In other words, something smells!”
“You know what the doctor said about memories.”
“Uh-huh. We forget unpleasant things.” Degnan smiled grimly. “But if I really smashed up three Over Racers—that’s a pleasure I’d never forget. And I’d feel good now—but I don’t. That bothers me, too.” The girl gazed at him helplessly. Degnan grinned with sudden abandon. “The answer I can think of—I must be a dual personality, and one of me’s a superman. That’s the only way we could have got away like that; we didn’t have the chance of a snowball in hell.”
He got restlessly to his feet, paced the cramped space of the rocket’s cabin. His last sharp-etched memory was of that greater red-lit chamber aboard the Sheneb, the watching monsters, the blinding light. Beyond that everything was fuzzy, even now that they had compared notes. And something else was eluding him. Something was wrong about here and now, about this ship.
He turned sharply on the girl. “Look—what are we breathing here?” She stared wide-eyed and said without conviction, “Air.”
“Obviously. But where’s it coming from?”
“The aerator. I knew enough to check that, before you came to.”
“Yeah, sure,” said Degnan softly. “But that’s a Venusian aerator. It should be turning out formaldehyde—not oxygen. Furthermore, the temperature here’s about thirty degrees Centigrade, where a Venusian thermostat should be holding it at a hundred.”
She bit her lip. “Then—the Venusians must have fixed it that way. On purpose.”
Degnan looked at her with a surprised new respect. “Go on,” he Urged. “Develop that thought.”
“I—can’t,” she faltered. “I don’t see why.”
“Neither do I.” said Degnan blackly, and resumed his pacing. “But so help me, I’m going to.”
The girl gazed at him with veiled intentness. She saw a rough-hewn face masked now by two weeks’ growth of crisp black beard—that must have got its swarthiness from an admixture of American Indian blood, whence also high cheekbones, and a thin, determined mouth that might under the wrong conditions be cruel. It was not the face of a man accustomed to be baffled long.
“Yes,” she murmured, “I think you will.”
IT WAS less than an hour later when the radarscope changed its note abruptly and emitted sharp staccato sounds that, translated from interplanetary code, were a peremptory “Heave to!”
Degnan had made a note of the rocket control; he shut the power off and, floating weightless once more, sought for and found a two-way radio. He tuned it, and brought in a hard-boiled voice, speaking English with a Latin accent, which said it was the Chilean battle cruiser O’Higgins, and ordered, “No funny tricks. You are covered, señores cucarachas!”
With fervent persuasiveness, Degnan explained that they were not cockroaches, they were human. The voice sounded unconvinced, then half-convinced—all the same, a booby-trap expert must board them before they could be picked up by the cruiser.
“That,” Degnan admitted, “is a sound idea.”
The girl caught her breath. “Do you think this ship is a trap with us for bait? That would explain—”
“If in a few minutes we get blown to atoms,” said Degnan levelly, “it’ll just about explain everything.”
But after some fifteen minutes the lifeboat, pronounced safe as inspection could make it, was engulfed by a huge lading lock in the cruiser’s side.
Aboard the O’Higgins there was gravity again—naturally, since the cruiser had, like all modern warships and very few other vessels, a full gravitic drive, which meant that its acceleration was limited not by human capacity to endure but by its power plant’s ability to give out, and that it could spiral faster than an ordinary ship could travel a straight line.
Degnan, bedraggled, unshaven and red-eyed, clambered out of the lifeboat’s airlock and confronted a brown smooth-faced little man immaculately glittering in uniform.
“I am Menendez, capitals de la Armada del Espacio. And who are you, who come to us under circumstances so peculiar?”
“Ralph Degnan’s my name; better make a note of it,” said Degnan curtly. “The two of us have just left the custody of our friends the cockroaches; we couldn’t be choosy about the circumstances. Ex-freighter Sheneb, apparently heading toward Neptune . . .” He glanced sidelong at the girl; she looked ready to faint now that rescue was an accomplished fact, and was making futile absent-minded efforts to repair her face and costume, without seeming to pay attention to what was being said. Nevertheless, he switched to Spanish, becoming more polite in obedience to the form of the language: “If Your Honor pleases, I will request that he land me at the city of Los Angeles.”
Captain Menendez raised a startled eyebrow. He said stiffly, “We land at Valparaiso, six days from now.”
“Es preciso.” Degnan’s eyes bored steadily into the other’s. “If Your Honor will check my identity with North American Military Intelligence . . .”
The captain was startled again, with the other eyebrow. He recovered himself. “Very well. By all means, señor Degnan. And while the check is being made, with what may I serve . . .”
“Un bano!” said Degnan prayerfully.
A BATH and shave achieved in the cramped facilities of a cabin in officers’ quarters, and the food he was brought devoured, Degnan lit the first luxurious cigarette in two weeks and thought briefly of the dark-haired girl—mostly of how little he knew about her. He didn’t know who or what she was—or even whether that was important.
What was important—a gnawing feeling told him—was the confusion in his own memory. The enemy had done that, somehow; on Venus, Degnan knew, psychology was the mother of sciences, like physics on Earth, and they had had plenty of chance to study the human mind, which they considered so inferior to their own.
It was so vivid, that glimpse of a Venusian like a smashed bug sprawling in midair, a couple of detached legs jerking. Vivid, but somehow it lacked the essential stuff of reality. It fed without appeasing his bitter hatred of the Over Race.
He couldn’t say just why he hated them so intensely. It was a feeling scarcely connected with what he, personally, had suffered; the best reason he could think of was his instinctive sense of their abnormality, some monstrousness about them wholly apart from their unhuman form. In a sense, the dominant species of Venus was an artificial product; they didn’t come normally from eggs like the Under Race, but out of the hot spawning beds where forcing and selection kept the recessive mutation that had created them alive.
Degnan shook his head angrily. The Venusians couldn’t have made him a tool in any fantastic scheme they might have for getting behind Earth’s defenses. That left the lifeboat—which some time ago had been cast off into space, headed back toward Venus with jammed controls. And the girl: was she Number One? She looked like only an unhappy young woman who had been an inconspicuous clerk until caught in the vortex of interplanetary war, who was as innocent as her story . . . which could be checked easily, of course.
He wouldn’t have to worry about her any more. Unless—which was unlikely—they ordered him to when he reported in Los Angeles. He lit a second—or was it a third?—cigarette, and tried to let the smoke sooth away his trick memories and the all-too-real recollection of the black and crimson hell on the Sheneb.
A knock at the cabin door, and an orderly was there, saying respectfully: “El capitan le atiende.”
Captain Menendez was affable. “It is impossible for the O’Higgins to leave her patrol, Colonel Degnan—but a North American liaison vessel will come alongside t
o take you off and to Los Angeles. That will be before very many minutes now. Your Intelligence was delighted to hear that one of their agents had escaped the claws of the Venusians. Y es verdaderamente un milagto, no?”
“A miracle—yes,” admitted Degnan with gloomy reserve. That was just what was bothering him so much.
Menendez looked puzzled; he said severely, “You are more lucky than you know. I have received a dispatch about the ship that you escaped from—a freighter, was it not, of a type like our M3s?” Degnan nodded.
“Then it can be no other. It tried to run away, and the warship that had ordered it to stop was forced to open fire.”
“And the people—the Earth people on it?” asked Degnan with stiff lips.
The captain shrugged. “Of course their presence was not known,” he said apologetically, then brightened: “But you see how effective is the Patrol. If the cucarachas come close enough to look at our Earth—one pounce and we are on them!” He glanced round him, swelling a little, and Degnan sensed the little man’s proud confidence in the steel length and strength of his great ship, its power and its armaments that could lay waste to a whole planet’s surface. The Venusians too had ships like this, but not as many as the United Nations of Earth; and in the tremendous battleships, compared to which a mere cruiser was a mosquito, they were hopelessly outnumbered.
“Tell me,” said Degnan, “how has the war gone? Where I’ve been, there wasn’t any news.”
Menendez shrugged again. “Nor have we heard much. In the last days our forces have occupied Neptune and the Venusian moons of Jupiter and Saturn, but that was a trifling affair; they had been evacuated already. So far we are defensive; we guard ourselves arid prepare. Of course,” he tried to look knowing. “I cannot tell you the plans of the Combined Fleets. But one thing I tell you: this war will not be long.”
“I hope you’re right,” said Degnan, then realized that he was repeating the doubtful words of the doctor on the Sheneb.
“Oh, yes—one more business. Do you wish that the señor be sent to Earth with you? She is of your nation.”
Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 32