by C. L. Moore
Metal—metal. A new thought came to Sam. The Keep recruits—tough, strong, but so far malleable in his hands. They would go through hard struggles landside. When metal becomes work-hardened—
The Sword again.
I must keep my back armored, too, Sam thought.
-
The flitterboat raced in toward Island Six. The jungles hid most of the land, except for a high knoll at one end. There was a copter there, and a man's figure silhouetted against the pearly sky. Barges and lighter craft were moving at temporary beachheads on the shore. Sam pointed; the pilot nodded and swung the flitterboat deftly aside, threading his way among the craft. The v-spray of water rushed up along the transparent prow-shield like rain.
It would not rain today, Sam decided, glancing up at the cloud blanket. That was good. Meterology played an important part in Plymouth—landside conditions were bad enough anyway, without battling torrential rains, so jobs were apportioned according to the weather predictions. There should be a few clear days to work on Island Six and establish a base. Later, much later, a bridge would be constructed to Island Five, and the chain extended by one more link.
Sam stood up as the flitterboat grated against a quay. He jumped lightly on the jetty, instantly in the midst of confusing, ordered activity. A crusher rolled on its caterpillar treads from a barge and lurched monstrously up the beach. Lighter, mobile landcraft followed in its wake, specialized weapons for fighting the jungle mounted on huge-wheeled carriages. The men wore light protective suits and respirators. Heavy armor would only be a handicap at this point.
A tapir-masked figure touched Sam's arm and extended a bundle. "Better wear these, sir. There may still be bugs around—and the poison plants are pretty bad on this hunk of land."
"All right," Sam said, and donned suit and respirator. "I want to get up to the Governor. Is he on that hill?"
"Yes, sir. There's no road yet, though. He came in by copter."
"Find me another one, then."
The man thought for a moment, turned and shouted a question. After a while a twin-screwed gyro came down from somewhere and picked Sam up. Four minutes later he jumped out on the summit of the knoll from the hovering copter and waved to the pilot to proceed.
Hale wasn't wearing an aseptic suit or respirator, so Sam took his off. Up here, above the jungle, there was less danger of infection. Besides, both Sam and Hale had built up a good deal of resistance and immunity in the last few months.
Hale gave Sam a nod. He carried binoculars and a portable microphone, wired from his own grounded copter near by. He had no other equipment except for a large-scale map pinned out on a camp table before him.
"How's it coming?" Sam asked.
"Fair," Hale said. "The five-spray treatment hit the tolerance levels of most of the bugs. But you never know with mopping up."
Anything under a foot long was classified as a bug. That left the fauna—critters—and the flora—the green stuff. The operation meant a little more than merely mopping up, since the fauna was big and the flora unpredictable and perilous.
But the five-spray treatment helped considerably. They had learned much in colonizing five islands. The first step now was to shower the island very thoroughly with solutions that didn't like bugs. One formula hit the lichens chiefly—a vital matter. Another damaged a good deal of the flora. The critters, at best, got slightly sick, but they charged at you with bared fangs and you could shoot them, if you were fast; they didn't have the unpleasant trick of infiltrating your lungs and sprouting quickly into a spongy mass that paralyzed your respiratory apparatus.
Island Six didn't look like the colonized islands or the raw ones now. It looked sick. The jungle wasn't a blazing green riot. It seemed to hang, like Spanish moss draped across the great boles, and occasionally slow, lethargic movements stirred in it. Sam could get a better picture now.
"There's another pair of binoculars in the plane," Hale suggested.
-
Sam got them. He studied the island below. He studied the men. There was something about the patterns of their movements that interested him—a briskness unfamiliar in the first Colony, certainly almost unknown in any Keep. Sam's interest in the jungle was purely superficial and subsidiary. To him the only truly interesting thing was his own kind and he spent long, absorbed thought on the motives behind every act that seemed out of the ordinary in his fellow creatures, his unconscious mind faithful to the concept that there might be something in it for Sam Reed.
These men were very happy in their work. It was something new on Venus. Sam knew their muscles must be aching at the still-unaccustomed toil, the sweat must be running uncomfortably down their bodies inside the protective suits. There was danger in every breath they drew and every move they made. But they were happy. The work was new and absorbing. They were creating. They could see the great strides of their progress simply by glancing behind them. This was the proper occupation of mankind—bringing order out of chaos in the sweat of their brows. It was good and right, and mankind had for too long lacked any pleasure in physical toil. Sam filed the thought away for that day when the pleasure in work gave way to boredom.
Then he glanced sidewise at Hale, still holding the binoculars to his eyes to hide the fact that he was studying his partner.
Abruptly he said, "Hale, what are we going to do about the Harkers?"
Hale spoke crisply into his microphone, waving one arm in perfectly futile gestures of direction to the invisible crusher, and then turned to Sam.
"What do you want us to do?" he asked mildly.
"They're too quiet. They let us win—maybe too easily. Once before they let us think we were winning, until they were ready to strike. I know—that was my fault. I was younger then. I didn't have much sense. This time I'm on the level—I know I've got to be. But I still don't trust the Harkers."
Hale regarded him with a quiet gaze that gave nothing away.
"Maybe," he said enigmatically. "How far ahead have you planned, Reed?"
It was Sam's turn to hedge. "What do you mean?"
"I mean there's going to be trouble in a few years—five or ten, wouldn't you say? Or have you figured on that yet?"
Sam sighed with some relief. So that much of it had emerged into the open, then. Since his triumph on the telecast, when he had forced the Immortals to surrender to his demands and snatched victory from defeat by a promise he could not keep, he had not spoken privately with Hale.
That was Hale's doing. He had taken care that there were always others present. And now it had somehow become impossible for Sam to ask him openly whether or not he had recognized Joel Reed from the start. There was a psychological pressure there Sam recognized and did not like. It meant that Hale had more power latent in him than Sam had quite counted on.
At least, one thing was emerging now—the immortality question. And Hale knew. Obviously he knew the truth. Still—he had tacitly accepted the fraud. He was making use of recruits who could have been won no other way, lending his name to a swindle beside which Sam's original deceit was nothing.
Realizing that clearly for the first time, Sam felt surer of himself.
"Yes, I figured on it," he said. "I wish I didn't have to. Maybe the end justifies the means—we couldn't have worked in any other way, could we?"
Hale's brow lifted a little at the pronoun. But the question itself he could not deny. He had accepted the benefits; he could scarcely refuse a share in the responsibility now.
"No, we couldn't. Or at any rate, we didn't," he acknowledged. "What we do with the scheme now will show whether it's justified. We'll have to watch that, Reed." It was a warning. "Do you have anything planned yet about how you'll meet that crisis when it comes?"
-
Sam had, of course. But he was quick to accept the warning. So Hale would go only so far in exploiting the candidates for immortality, eh? Very well, then, Sam's plans would have to remain disguised until the hour came for action.
"I've thought of several
outs," he said carefully. "We'll discuss it when we have more time." He had thought of one safe out and one only, and Hale was a fool, he thought, if he didn't know it. When the promise of immortality showed itself a fraud, there was going to be a tremendous surge of resentment against the men who had made the promise—Hale by implication, along with Sam. Violence would be the result; and you can meet violence only one way. Sam meant to be prepared for that day. If Hale disapproved of his solution, let Hale find a better one or take the consequences. Sam meant to provide for Sam Reed. And if Hale tried to interfere in Sam's plans about that vital subject, there was going to be conflict in Plymouth Colony.
Sam had an uncomfortable notion that Hale might be a more formidable opponent than he had heretofore guessed.
It seemed prudent to change the subject. Sam had found out most of what he wanted to know, but the thing which had ostensibly brought him here remained unsolved, and it, too, was important enough.
"About the Harkers," he said, "this time I think we'd better stay in touch with them. We've got more chance of watching out for their schemes if we're working together. And right now, I don't see how they can go on opposing our plans. Even they must know that if colonization is ever going to succeed, it's got to succeed right here in Plymouth Colony. If this fails, there'll never be another attempt."
"You're right, of course. I believe all the Keep Immortals must know that by now."
"Then they'll have to work with us toward the same goal, if their motives are as good as I've been told they are. We're the winners. I think it may be up to us to make the first gesture toward consolidation."
"Yes?"
Sam hesitated. "I don't trust myself to do it," he said with a burst of frankness. "Zachariah Harker and I are ... well, we don't get along. Whenever I see him I want to hit him. You'd be a smoother diplomat than I am. You're an Immortal. You've known them all for a long time. Will you do it, Hale?"
Hale hesitated in turn. Then, obliquely, he said, "You're an Immortal too, Reed."
"Maybe. I suppose so. Not in the same sense, though. That's something I'll have to investigate some day, when I have time. It isn't important now. Will you go?"
Still Hale hesitated. While he stood there, evidently searching for the right phrase, the transmitter in his hand buzzed thinly with excited voices and he put it to his ear, relieved at the interruption.
For a moment he listened, peering toward the distant jungle where now and there a treetop could be seen to sway and go down before the juggernaut onslaught of the invisible crusher at its work.
"Take your binoculars," he said to Sam. "Step over to the left there—I think there's a gap where you can see across the quarter-line. You shouldn't miss this—they've run into a siren web."
Curious, Sam obeyed.
-
The binoculars seemed to lift the jungle forward and upward in one tremendous jump. The crusher had quartered the island, smashing flat four broad avenues between which wedge-shaped segments of jungle still stood, drooping from the poisonous sprays, already paling from brilliant hues to drab. The nearer segment had already been nearly flattened and Sam could see across it, and across the crushed avenue beyond, into the distant wedge of standing trees where the crusher was plowing methodically forward.
It was a monstrous thing, heavily mailed, lurching on its caterpillar treads with a ponderous, rhythmic gait not inappropriate to this jungle it moved through. The giant saurians of Venusian landside moved with the same vast, lurching tread, heaving their mailed sides through the trees no less majestically than the man-made juggernaut that had come to destroy them.
Vines wreathed it, hung in great swathes and matted tangles from its shoulders and sides. Some of the vines still feebly writhed against the metal, striking with fang-like thorns at the unyielding plate.
Sam could hear faintly the rumble and roar of the crusher lumbering on its way; the crack of breaking tree trunks came sharply through the air, and now the distant shouting of men running forward to watch the excitement was clear and thin over the distance between.
Then a flash of color just ahead of the crusher caught Sam's eye, and for an instant it seemed to him that all his senses paused. He did not hear the sounds from below or feel the binoculars pressed to his eyes or smell the heavy discomfort of the landside air, which he was still unaccustomed to breathe. There was only that flare of color that glowed almost in his face and then faded and blurred to another color more exquisite than the first.
Sam stood motionless while the two blended together and slid into a third hue clouded all over with paler tints whose motion as they coalesced was hypnosis itself. The colors were almost painful to see.
Abruptly he lowered the binoculars and looked questioningly at Hale. The Free Companion was smiling a little, and there was admiration in his face.
"You're a good man," he said with some reluctance. "You're the first person I've ever seen look away from a siren web that quickly. Most can't. You'd be a bad hypnosis subject."
"I am," Sam said grimly. "It's been tried. What is that thing down there?"
"A distant cousin of the happy-cloak organism, I imagine. You remember they make happy-cloaks from a submarine thing that subdues its prey through a neuro-contact and eats it alive—only the victim doesn't want to get away once it's sampled the pleasures of the cloak. The siren web works in the same way, only with a landside variation. Look and you'll see."
-
Sam looked again. This time he adjusted the binoculars to bring the colored thing into very near focus. It was impossible for a moment to see what the siren web really was, for again he experienced that stasis of the senses and could only gaze with painful delight at the motion of its colors.
Then he wrenched his mind free and looked at it objectively. It was a very large web, probably an old one as age goes in these ravening jungles. Judging by the men who still ran toward it behind the crusher, he saw it must be nearly ten feet in diameter. It was stretched between two trees in a little clearing, like a spider web, anchored by strong interlacing cables to branches above and vines below. But in the center it was a solid thing, like fine membrane stretched taut, vibrating slightly with a motion of its own, and flushing with color after color, each more enthralling than the last, pumping faster and faster over the shivering web.
A faint twang of sound floated across the distance to Sam's ears, coming more slowly than sight so that though he saw each sound created by the vibrating cables and membrane, he heard it superimposed upon the next visible vibration. The sound was not music as human beings know it, but there was all the rhythm of music in it, and a thin, singing shrillness that touched the nerves as well as the ears, and made them vibrate ecstatically to the same beat.
The thing was exerting all its siren powers to lure the crusher to destruction. It flashed its most exquisite colors hypnotically in the faceless muzzle of the machine, it shrilled irresistible hypnosis to disrupt the synapses of the wire-linked nerves and paralyze the juggernaut tread.
And for a moment it seemed impossible that even a creature of steel and impervium could withstand the onslaught of that wonderful hypnosis.
If it had not withstood the siren, the men who were running forward now would have been lost. All Sam caught was a distant echo of the humming, but it made his brain work only in flashes, and in the flashes the color of the web wrought its paralysis of the mind. He knew that if he were running with those men behind the crusher he would probably run blindly too, to throw himself into the outstretched embrace of the siren.
"It's happened before," he told himself dazedly. "A long time ago in Greece, and Homer wrote the story."
The whole thing was over in a matter of seconds. To the last the siren flamed and shrilled, spreading out its web in a wide-flung promise of rapture. Then the nose of the crusher lurched forward and touched the center of the web.
In a flash the membrane leaped forward and closed about it. The cables drew thin and fine, screaming with a last vibration o
f triumph. And there may have been some faint electrical impulse to shock and paralyze the prey, for even the crusher seemed to hesitate for an instant as the glowing wings of the thing infolded its muzzle. Even the crusher seemed to tremble in every plate and wiry filament at the ecstasy of the siren's touch.
Then the juggernaut lurched on.
The cables drew thinner, thinner, tauter, paling from brilliance to translucent white at the increasing tension. They sang so shrilly the ear could no longer hear, but the nerves felt their last agonized vibration high up in the supersonic chords.
The cables snapped. The siren web clutched convulsively in one last spasm at its metal destroyer, colors flamed over it in impossible discords. Then it went flaccid and dropped limply forward, sliding down the mailed muzzle. The grinding treads caught it, carried it remorselessly to the ground, trampled it under into the debris.
And the thing that slid groundward was an enchanted web, a Nessus-shirt of burning color. But the thing the caterpillar treads crushed into the green melee beneath them was an ugly, rubbery gray mat that squirmed convulsively when the cleats caught it.
Sam let out his breath in a long sigh. He lowered the binoculars. For a moment he said nothing. Then he stepped forward, laid the glasses on Hale's camp table, and proved anew that he was no fit subject for hypnosis of any kind.
"About the Harker interview," he said, "when can you get away for the trip?"
Hale sighed, too.
"I can't," he said.
Sam frowned. "It's important. It's something nobody but you is really fitted for. I wish you could manage it, Hale."
"There's only one place where I'm really indispensable, Reed. Right here. Nobody else knows landside as I do. I'm no diplomat. You're our contact man. I'm sorry."
There was more to it than that. Sam felt perfectly sure of it. Hale was disassociating himself resolutely from every aspect of this game of deceit except one—the profit. The man power. That he would accept. The rest was up to Sam. And there was nothing whatever that Sam could do about it.