The Collected Stories

by Earl

  We were on guard with our rifles and submachine-gun. We didn’t know exactly what his intentions were. At the time, we hardly cared what would happen. That morning Greaves had served us our usual small rations and announced that it was the last of our canned food stores. Starvation faced us. We were almost itching for a fight, hoping they would attack. We could at least go out in a blaze of glory.

  We were, I think, just a little mad. The “king” looked us over. Back of him were thousands upon thousands of the oily-skinned, half-aquatic Venusians, all armed. We knew they still considered us invaders, the van of killing hordes, as had happened once before when the builders of the pyramid had come—so their legends went, anyway.

  They had us, even if they didn’t know it. Our ammunition would eventually run out. Retreating to our ship, they could besiege us and we would starve. There was not one of us at that moment who believed we could be saved.

  But a miracle happened. Beside the king waddled his young son. Eagerly pushing forward, as youths of any race or world might, his father thrust him back. Quite accidentally, the young Venusian stumbled back against the point of a dried pincher-weapon, held by another native. The gash made instantly discolored, with death-mold.

  The king of the Venusians whirled with a cry of anguish. We pitied him. As the grimly necessary custom was, on this world of superswift life and death, his son would have to be killed on the spot. His body would have to be tossed into the sea, so that its quick decay wouldn’t taint them all with the horrible death-mold.

  The king raised his hand in a signal, and one of his retinue raised a spear, to kill the youngster. The latter, in their tradition of stoicism, hung his head and waited for the death-blow. We could see the king hesitate, holding back the signal that would kill his son.

  At that moment, Parletti ran forward. He took us all by surprise, natives included. Parletti grasped the boy’s hand and yanked him toward our sheet-aluminum house. Swinerton ran to help and they disappeared within. The rest of us still faced the natives, expecting any moment they would charge. But they didn’t. Their curiosity dominated their antagonism.

  Parletti and Swinerton reappeared ten minutes later, leading the dazed Venusian youth by the hand. They had irradiated his wound with ultraviolet rays, driven away the death-mold, and then taped bandages soaked with strong antiseptic over it. They had saved the youth’s life.

  IT was magic, of course, to the natives. Instantly their attitude changed. The king yelled out a few words and their weapons were thrown in the mud. To be brief, the natives were from then on our friends. Parletti essayed by gestures that we needed food. Promptly they brought from their ships fresh meat, edible roots and a breadlike material.

  “Men,” said Captain Atwell, summing it up, “that was an eleventh hour reprieve from the electric chair!” And that’s exactly how we felt. We drank a toast, in rain water, to Parletti for his quick-witted act.

  The natives have since shown us their secret of preserving fresh food from the greedy molds. They wrap it in the leaves of a certain herb which the molds shun.

  And so, through kind Providence, our darkest hour passed. From then on, two of our problems were solved—food and the natives. Barring other unforeseen things, we could survive on this planet indefinitely. The main concern left was to dehydrate our fuel, for a return to Earth.

  But this was a knottier problem, by far. Venus is mostly ocean, its atmosphere moisture-choked. It rains every five hours. Water, water everywhere. How to dehydrate tons of rocket fuel, in that dripping environment? Distillation within the ship was out of the question, as we had no vacuum apparatus for low temperature boiling. High temperature boiling simply meant explosion.

  Will continue tomorrow. Batteries low.

  FOUR Hundred Fifty-Ninth Day.

  Before we had much chance to discuss this pressing matter, night fell.

  I recall that in my previous reports, I said we were almost certain Venus kept one face always toward the sun. Markers had figured out, from rainbow effects, where the invisible sun was, behind the eternal sky mist, and it didn’t seem to move. But it does slowly. Or rather, Venus rotates slowly. A Venusian day is fifty-six Earth-days long. It therefore rotates only four times during a Venusian year. This has been the dragging effects of the powerful tides caused by the near sun.

  We noticed a gradual darkening—“twilight”—descending upon us. Finally true night fell. We wondered what the night of twenty-eight Earth days would be like. Can you imagine a steady rainfall for that length of time? Yes, it rained, interminably, from the moment the sun’s last glow vanished, to the day it reappeared.

  Wilson, with his meteorological knowledge, says it is the natural result of the cooling of a whole hemisphere. The clouds over Venus are perhaps fifty miles thick. There may be as much vaporized water in them as would fill the Atlantic Ocean hollow. Countless trillions of tons. And this comes pouring, smashing down through the long night without one second’s intermission!

  We were nearly flooded out. We had to desert our metal hut for the waterproof ship. The natives brought us food, sloshing through the muddy current with evident delight. We played cards and chess until we were sick of them. For twenty-eight Earth days, nothing but the monotonous patter of rain, as if it would keep up forever. Tarnay went out for exercise once and came back in half drowned. Outside, it was as black as pitch—no moon or stars. There was only one blessing—the temperature dropped to a comparatively cool ninety degrees.

  We have passed through five such confining “nights.” We veterans of the Mars Expedition think the Martian winter of ten months hardly more trying. To keep our nerves in check, we instituted a continued story, carried on by each man in turn. Our hero—we named him Hezekiah—equipped with a space ship far better than ours, ran through some quite remarkable adventures before we were through. Books would have been a godsend. In the future of space travel, we hope ships will be able to carry more than the grim, basic necessities of life.

  But dawn came, after each night, as it must on Venus as well as on Earth. We cheered the day periods, though it meant rising temperature.

  Thanks for that great recital you sent us. However, we hardly expected the world’s dozen greatest musical artists to dedicate their talents to us. It is an honor we appreciate. Their music was superb.

  FOUR Hundred Sixtieth day. Captain Atwell, with the natives friendly and food available, allowed the men to indulge their itch for scientific studies. No solution of the fuel problem had been reached. But we philosophically waited for inspiration. In the meantime, Venus and its strange mysteries lay before us, a new world to look over.

  Parletti, with his shovel and electroscope, found three separate deposits of radio-active ore within a half mile of camp. He makes the conservative estimate that fifty million dollars worth of radium lies out there, at our feet. Somehow, that thought doesn’t stir us. Future industrial groups will undoubtedly fight over them.

  We have discussed the matter, impartially, and think the Council of Nations should begin now to make radium exploitation a governmental rather than private project. Else there will be endless bickering, market manipulation and badly snarled finances.

  Greaves, with his compact little electron-microscope, soon catalogued a hundred new organic compounds unknown on Earth. Some are amazing.

  There is a type of molecule in a plant, for instance, that contains every protein, fat and sugar necessary for nutrition. It is a food-concentrate of nature’s devising. Cultivated on Earth, the plant may in the future feed millions from a few acres of ground.

  Markers has been taking color pictures of the periodic rainbow effects. He has managed to catch some of their grand spectacle—hundreds of brilliant bands of color lacing the sky. If we brought nothing else back from Venus, they would be a worthwhile prize. It is heart-stopping beauty.

  Tarnay and Karsen have made complete records of the ionic content of the air, and predict that ion-generators on this planet could in one year turn out more elec
tricity than all the coal Earth ever had. Thus, Venus would be kind to industrial projects, except for its damnable climate.

  Wilson has worked out a tentative new theory of cosmic-rays, because of the fact that they penetrate Venus’ thick blanket of air. He says the world of physics will be astounded.

  Captain Atwell, Swinerton and myself have done some scouting around. Heavily armed, we have penetrated the jungle part way. The great ten-foot killer-bears with pincher claws charged now and then, but we’ve found a simple way to stop them. One good shot at their legs brings them down like ten-pins. Their enormous weight topples them at the slightest weakening of their pedal support.

  Swinerton, biologist to the core, finds the rampant jungle life a thrilling, unexplored domain. We have to drag him away. He says all Venusian animal life is semi-aquatic, and always will be. As he has pointed out, every queer creature we see has flippers as well as limbs, or flipper-limbs combined.

  The oddest thing we saw was a deerlike cuss with hoofs at the end of flipper-like legs. It bounded swiftly away, like a startled antelope, and then jumped in a narrow river to swim away at scarcely less speed. Further down, two great crocodile jaws clamped over it. This water monster then calmly climbed a tree, with clawed fins, and slept off its meal.

  And so we catalogued the phenomena of this sister world of Earth’s, feeling like children in some strange fairy land.

  TO give an anecdote of that time, showing we are still human even on Venus, Markers and Tarnay had a quarrel. It was a surprisingly trivial thing. Markers casually asking Tarnay to help scrape mud off his—Markers’—boots. Tarnay declined, casually.

  The matter should have ended there, but Markers, adopting a superior attitude because he was a veteran of the Mars expedition, insisted the younger Tarnay should comply. Both rather hot-tempered, with the irking humidity to egg them on, they exchanged bitter words.

  Captain Atwell stepped in. It might lead to a fight, which would be dangerous, both because of the death-mold, and the bad effect on our unified spirit. With his usual sagacity, Atwell laid the blame on Markers—and banished him from camp!

  Markers stubbornly packed up and left. We all thought Atwell had been too drastic. But he knew men. Markers went a hundred yards, turned, and came back, thoroughly ashamed of himself.

  He apologized to Tarnay and since then they’ve been like brothers. And the incident has knit us all more closely together, for we realize our human foibles have no place in this grim stand against an alien world.

  OUR Hundred Sixty-First Day. But in all our activities, one thing loomed in our minds. The pyramid. Strange as Venusian things may be, it is stranger still to see such a familiar object.

  It had been in our minds and conversations continuously. Old Egypt on Venus! The vague connection with an ancient Venusian legend, and with dead Martian civilization, only added to the wonder.

  At last Captain Atwell gave the word. He had been holding off visiting it, since it was a considerable distance away. Not till we were assured the natives were no danger, nor ferocious beasts, did he give in to our impatience.

  “Parletti, Tarnay, Markers and Gillway,” he picked us out, grinning at our eagerness. “You others guard camp. You’ll get your chance later. We’ll only be gone a few hours. Danger signal—three shots in succession, as usual. Let’s go!”

  We sloshed through mud a foot deep in our knee-boots. Each carried a rifle, pistol and bandolier of ammunition. It was the farthest we had gone from our ship, since landing on this super-prolific planet of rapid death and decay. Nothing molested us on the way and we finally stood before the great stone edifice.

  Parletti, geologist, took one look at the pitted, weather-worn stone.

  “Twenty thousand years old, at the very least!” he said.

  Thus, again, it precedes recorded human history on Earth. We stared at it, awed, wondering what historical pageant lay behind it.

  Walking completely around it, measuring the steps, Parletti estimated it as 1000 feet on a side and 700 feet high, as compared to Earth’s largest, the Cheops Pyramid, 756 and 500 respectively. We had been hoping to find an entrance.

  Parletti was in a fever to get inside, perhaps to find ancient records. Bordeaux had been that way before the sealed pyramid on Mars.

  This one too, seemed locked from us, when suddenly “Baronkhee!! sounded in our ears and Jimmy appeared from nowhere, gesturing us to follow. Jimmy is the name we had given the king’s son whose life we had saved to replace his unpronouncable one.

  He led the way up one side of the pyramid, perhaps a hundred feet off the ground. The rough, cracked stone blocks afforded us foot and hand holds for climbing. Jimmy pointed out a narrow passageway leading into the structure!

  Captain Atwell, ever cautious, stationed Tarnay and Markers outside as guards and the rest of us went in. Jimmy led the way with a half-scared air about him. The long passage, leading slightly up to keep out rains, ended finally in a large central chamber, in the heart of the pyramid. Captain Atwell swept a hand-flash around. Against the walls were stacked stone tablets, with heiroglyphic writing on them.

  I’ll never forget that moment. The air was dry, musty, age-old. Hoary antiquity surrounded us. Parletti trembled as he ran his fingers over the chiseled indentations of the heiroglyphics. They must be records of pre-human civilization—Martian, undoubtedly—stretching into a remote past.

  WHILE Neolithic man on Earth was first learning the use of fire, the Martians had roamed space and left their mark in these pyramids. Space travel has opened Earth’s eyes to a vastly broadened outlook. There is a history of the Solar System we know nothing about.

  We did not stay long the first time. Captain Atwell was apprehensive, in the midst of those thousands of tons of crushing rock. He murmured something about secret doors falling, trapping tis. Parletti was dragged out by main force. On the way back to camp, he wheedled Captain Atwell into letting him go back the next day, for examination of the stone records.

  Tonight, we are all a little stunned, just having received your message from the Council of Nations. If we got it straight, the Council has ceded to us and our heirs the full value of the radio-active deposits near our ship. Fifty million dollars divided among eight men! We all agree we hardly deserve it, pioneers of space travel though we may be, as President Mason put it. We can only say—thanks! We have voted shares to the relatives of Domberg and Greaves. I mentioned the fact that Greaves is dead in my first broadcast but I will explain the circumstances later.

  FOUR Hundred Sixty-Second Day.

  Parletti went back to the pyramid the next day, with Greaves, Karsen and Wilson, and many more days after that. The pyramid began to have a druglike fascination for him. Each day, when he came back, we’d all listen breathlessly.

  He had found a key to the Martian heiroglyphics. On one tablet, underneath a line of Martian writing, was a line of Egyptian heiroglyphics—a sort of Rosetta Stone. From that, slowly and laboriously, Parletti gleaned a few facts.

  The Martians had temporarily colonized Venus, perhaps fifty thousand years ago. They had been rather ruthless with the natives, to all indications, bearing out the ancient Venusian legend. We can hardly blame the Venusians for first attacking us, thinking we were the same sky raiders. Parletti’s timely act of life-saving was our only salvation. Legends of a merciless race must fade before a plain act of kindness.

  Excitable little Parletti claimed also that there were references to Martian doings on Earth! He insists that both Atlantis and Neanderthal Man are mentioned. That the domineering Martians killed off Neanderthal and later warred on Atlantis. It’s a fantastic story. Still, the vanishment of Neanderthal Man has always been an anthropological mystery. And the legend of Atlantis’ destruction persists, despite debunkers’ claims that such a land never existed.

  However, we suspect that Parletti has let his imagination supply unwarranted details. Those ancient records cannot be read in a few days. It will take years and years of patient research, b
y expert archeologists, before the true story unfolds.

  Parletti made a still more outrageous statement. He says the records indicate that there are Martian pyramids on Mercury, too! And perhaps on Jupiter’s moons. The Martians had been everywhere. Nor, he says, had their pyramids been constructed only as record-crypts. There was some greater purpose behind them, something involving Martian rule of the Solar System, in that long-gone time while man was in the Stone Age!

  However, all that to the side, our pressing problem still remained of drying our fuel. Conjunction time was fast approaching. Somehow, we had to dehydrate our fuel.

  Will resume tomorrow.

  FOUR Hundred Sixty-Third Day.

  In desperation, Captain Atwell finally agreed to let Greaves, Markers and Tarnay try out distillation. They worked in the metal hut alone, rigging up a big retort of sheet alumalloy, lined with tar. There was an explosion the second day that sent the retort up through the roof. By a miracle, Markers and Tarnay were unharmed, swathed in mud-packs. Greaves was killed, his head half blown off.

  We buried his body quickly, before the decay-molds could get at it. And thus has gone the sixth of the original ten men who first left Earth for another planet—Mars. Proosett, Cruishank, Alado, Dordeaux and Charles Swinerton—brother of the Swinerton with us here—and now Greaves. Only four of us left of that expedition to Mars—Captain Atwell, Markers, Parletti and myself. It was like part of us dying, when Greaves went. We had all been through so much together, on Mars and the Moon, as well as Venus. We caught ourselves listening for Greaves’ deep-toned laugh, for days afterward—a sound we would never hear again. Even Domberg’s death had not meant as much to the four of us—for he had not been with us for so long—and of course it was something we could not quite explain to the new men with us on this Venus Expedition. They also felt badly about Greave’s death, of course.

  We were back where we started, then. Though we had kept up our morale before the accident unnerved us. We forgot how to smile, and Earth seemed an unattainable goal.