by Ruthven Todd
“It’s just as they thought,” he remarked. “There’s plenty of ammonia here.”
One of the dials beside the Colonel was designed to show how far away they were from the surface of Venus. It was a very special kind of instrument and it was most necessary for their safety, as they could still see nothing through the port except swirling purplish clouds. The clouds were charged with ammonia and the dial that showed this had a needle which flickered on the mark of one hundred.
The Colonel did not look too cheerful, for he knew that men could not live in an atmosphere of ammonia. It looked as though their long journey in search of a place where men could live was not going to have any real result.
The Halley was getting closer to the surface all the time.
Then, quite suddenly, they were clear of the clouds, in light that, while not bright with sunshine, still managed to be bright with a strange, pale violet color. The feeling that both of them had was rather the same as that they had known when flying airplanes on Earth. There one might be high above the clouds, in bright sunshine, and then go down through the clouds to find that, for quite some distance from the surface, it was clear.
The Colonel was watching the dials with an astonished expression on his face. The flickering needle which had showed the amount of ammonia in the atmosphere was slowly dropping back toward zero. He tapped at it as a man taps at a barometer, but the needle continued its journey back toward its starting place.
He shook his head solemnly and joined Flyball in gazing out of the port. Miles and miles below them lay the surface of Venus. So far as they could see, and they could see nearly the whole of their side of Venus, there were no high mountains, but there certainly were a great number of seas, or great lakes, while all the surface was a mixture of different shades of green.
Fred Stone whistled softly to himself. “That’s odd,” he said. “I wouldn’t have expected green plants under this light. We’ll just have to suppose that the clouds allow all the necessary light-rays to filter through.”
The waters of the seas or lakes were an extraordinary deep blue in color. As they came lower, with the Colonel punching buttons as if they were the stops on an organ, firing alternate jets ahead of them, to slow them down, they saw, through the bursts of flame, that what would have been gold or silver sand on the shores of Earth was here a vivid blue, streaked in places with a bright rich red.
All this time Fred Stone had been keeping an eye on the dial which showed them how high up they were from the surface of the planet.
“Well, Flyball,” he said at last, “for better or worse, the time has come to try to make a landing. Steady yourself for the bump, boy!”
It seemed as though it took hours for the great rocket-ship to turn its tail toward Venus, and then it seemed to stand still in the air as the rockets pulsed noisily.
For now that they were in an atmosphere the noise was really tremendous, as the rockets had been almost silent in the vacuum around the Moon. They seemed to hang motionless for a long time, but really they were falling, getting slower all the time as the rockets acted as brakes, toward the edge of one of the seas.
Then, with a thud that jarred them in spite of all that foam-rubber and high-tension springs could do, the Halley settled on the surface of Venus. She shuddered once or twice as if about to fall over, and both of them held their breaths as if they were afraid that a single puff or sigh might blow her off balance. Then she was steady. They had made a perfect landing and the ship stood ready to take off again once they had collected the information which was the purpose of their journey.
“Made it, Flyball!” The Colonel let go a great sigh of relief. “At least we’ll be able to get away if we don’t like what we find here!”
CHAPTER
THREE
Colonel Fred Stone, clumsy in his space-suit, went carefully round the Halley, checking everything, and making certain that nothing had been damaged in the thud of their landing. In the crook of his left arm he carried Flyball, who had never really learned to like a space-suit, curled as comfortably as possible.
The Colonel stopped for a long time before the dials which were supposed to show exactly what kind of atmosphere there was outside the ship and how it was different from that of Earth. Every single dial had its needle pointing at “zero,” showing, or so it might be supposed, that the air outside was fit for man and cat to breathe.
It was little wonder that the Colonel looked puzzled and would have scratched his head, if he could have done so through the goldfish-bowl of his helmet.
“All I can think, Flyball,” he said at last, “is that all the dials have gone on the blink together. Too much ammonia, or something like that. Still,” he paused, looking at them more closely, “they shouldn’t have done that. They all have separate leads and aren’t tied together in any way. All the same, whatever the answer may be, we won’t take any chances. We’ll go out in our space-suits and I’ll take the chemicals with me and test the atmosphere that way.”
From a locker he took a large square box with a handle. The two of them then went through a door and stood in the air-lock. When the Colonel had closed the door behind them, he swung a lever and opened a door in front of them.
The Halley had sunk in the blue ground almost up to the door. The sand, which really was little round clear blue pebbles rather than sand, was now only a couple of feet from the bottom of the door.
Flyball, eager as ever, wriggled out of the Colonel’s arm. It certainly was not a long drop, but he hit the ground with a thud which knocked the wind out of him. He lay there for a moment.
“Miaow,” he managed at last, most indignantly but rather feebly. Being a spacecat was a fine occupation but it certainly did have its troubles. One moment one was as light as a feather and the next one felt as though made of solid lead.
“Miaow!” he said again, but more strongly this time.
Colonel Stone was laughing, most unkindly. “Poor old Flyball,” he said at last, as he stooped to pick up his winded friend. “Of course you couldn’t be expected to know that the gravity of Venus is very nearly the same as that of the Earth. You’ve gotten so used to the Moon that you’ve even forgotten what it was like back on Earth! I weigh around a hundred and sixty pounds on Earth and only twenty-five on the Moon. Here I weigh around a hundred and thirty-six pounds. Supposing that you weigh eight pounds on Earth, you are about one and a quarter pounds on the Moon, and nearly seven pounds here. Try to get that into your noggin. You’re nearly the same as Earth weight here!”
This information did little to comfort Flyball, who was thinking that all planets and moons should have the same gravity.
Fred Stone put him down on his feet again, and he found that walking was not as bad as he had feared it might be after his tumble. He was pleased to note, in fact, that he was still a lighter cat than he had been on Earth, even if he was not quite so much of a thistledown-weight as he had been on the Moon. The blue pebbles upon which he was now walking with such careful dignity were clear and round and shiny, about the size of peas.
Colonel Stone picked up a small handful of the pebbles in his gloved hand and let them trickle idly through his fingers while he looked up the beach toward the deep green beyond it.
Nearest to the edge of the shore there were some trees. They looked rather like the palm-trees of Earth, but their leaves were far more filmy and feathery. In fact they were as delicately lacy as the fronds of asparagus. Then, too, the trunks of these trees were not rough like the trunks of palm-trees at home. They were smooth and appeared polished, shining as if they had been carefully made from ebony and ivory, arranged in diamond-shaped patterns. Beneath these trees a thick jungle made a riot of different shades of green, splashed with brilliant colors, but they were too far away to see what the different plants looked like.
Colonel Stone opened the box he had been carrying and, crouching down over it, started to do experiments with chemicals, while Flyball watched him gravely. He lit a little alcohol lam
p and his expression as he did so was surprised. The flame burned with a clear blue and yellow flame, exactly as it would have done back on Earth. Fred Stone shook his head and started mixing different chemicals which he measured out of bottles into test-tubes. He whistled softly to himself as he worked and the sound echoing out of his space-helmet was very odd indeed.
He repeated each experiment several times, but at last, it seemed, he was contented with the results he had found. He put all the test-tubes and bottles back in their places in the box, which had been made of magnesium for the sake of lightness. Then he straightened up.
He paused for a long moment and then, with a quick and sudden movement, started to loosen the wing-nuts which held his helmet in place. He hesitated for another second and then lifted the helmet from his head and took a deep breath of the pure air of Venus.
He turned his head this way and that, breathing evenly, as if waiting to be knocked over by some unknown poison in the air. Nothing happened, so he stooped down and removed Flyball’s helmet.
Flyball was delighted. He had never, in spite of all his flights through space, learned to like either his space-suit or his helmet. Globes, such as the helmets were, might be all right for silly creatures such as goldfish, but they really were rather out of place on a sensible cat.
The next thing the Colonel did was to unzip both their suits and take them back into the Halley, through the air-lock. There he hung them neatly in their closet.
“It would never do, Flyball,” he said seriously as he closed the door of the closet, “for us to come back and find that something had damaged our suits. I suppose we might make out all right without them, but I don’t want to try it!”
Walking up the beach, feeling just a little bit lighter than they would have done on Earth, they nearly stumbled over one of the surprising red streaks which they had noticed before they landed on Venus. It turned out to be the edge of a piece of clear deep red crystal, with smooth surfaces which shone as if they had been polished with diamond-dust on a jeweler’s wheel.
Fred Stone tried to scratch the surface of the red crystal with the point of the big knife he carried strapped to his belt. The knife made no mark at all.
“Hard, eh, Flyball?” he asked, as he took an object rather like a fountain-pen out of a box from his hip-pocket. He unscrewed the cover and showed Flyball a tiny point. “Well, we’ll see what a diamond will do to it!”
The diamond had no more effect than the knife had had. In the end the fine point of the testing-tool snapped off. The Colonel smiled.
“That’s it, Flyball, we’ve found something that’s harder than a diamond, and that’s the hardest thing on Earth!” he exclaimed. “But how we’re to cut off a sample to take back home with us beats me!”
Flyball had no ideas on the subject and, as a matter of fact, was much more interested by the pale, glowing, violet sky, without a sun, which, so many miles up, tented the whole of the planet Venus from the rest of the Universe. He felt slightly uneasy under such a strange-colored sky.
If anything lived on Venus it was obvious that that thing would naturally think that its home was the only planet, and the only world, for it could never have seen the others shining in the night sky. Flyball wondered whether, under the green leaves, he would be able to find birds against whom to pit his wits.
Just think of it! Venusian birds who had never heard of the cleverness of cat, let alone that of a much superior spacecat!
The truth of the matter, however, was that, although he had chased them on Earth often enough, Flyball had never actually managed to catch a bird. From his point of view, birds were impertinent creatures which challenged him to do his best in a long jump and then gave out sneering twitters as they flew just a little farther than his best jump.
Padding up the beach behind Fred Stone, Flyball, his grey tail stuck up in the air, congratulated himself that he was a cat and so was not expected to carry all sorts of things. The Colonel was hung around like a Christmas tree with equipment. He had a camera, of course, but he was also slung with little boxes into which he expected to put samples of anything he could find. One purpose of their expedition was to bring home strange objects. The scientists back on Earth were waiting eagerly for their return. Everything they carried back with them would be tested and men would try to see where it fitted in relationship to the things of their own world.
As they had expected, looking up from the beach, the jungle under the odd trees was made up of unfamiliar plants. There were vines with smooth purple stems, twisted and turned around one another, which reached up to offer enormous yellow flowers, the size of soup-plates. In the center of each of these flowers was a glowing scarlet ball, spotted with dark brown. Then there were great tall stems of gold with the most extraordinary eight-sided pods which spiralled round the stems rather like the pods of milkweed on Earth, except that the pods, instead of being silvery-grey, were a most beautiful orange in color, with black ribs down the angles.
Rather shorter than these were the emerald-green pompons of a plant with leaves rather like those of iris, silver and cream flowers a bit like columbines, pineapple-like objects with deep purple thorns tipped with bunches of pale violet spurs, and curly green grass which had brighter green flowers.
The oddest thing about the plants, however, was not their appearance but their behavior. As Fred Stone and Flyball drew near them they swayed out of the way as if to avoid being trampled upon. They seemed to be able to pull their roots aside through the ground. And the ground itself was strange; it had a tough rubbery surface, but the plants seemed to find no difficulty in pulling through it, leaving no cracks behind.
It was almost as though the plants were opening a path before them; as if the plants were determined to lead them in one particular direction.
Flyball’s whiskers winked briskly, his nose crinkled and every hair on his neck stood up as if he had a bristly collar. There was something most odd about this world and he was not quite sure that he liked it. There was none of the humming of bees, the chirping of crickets or the chomp-chomping of little tree-frogs which he had known on Earth. There was nothing. It was a world of dull plants.
Colonel Stone, also, felt the strangeness of this silent world, but he had a job to do and had unslung his camera. He was intent on taking photographs of all this newness. He did not seem to notice, as Flyball did, that the plants were guiding them. Flyball, knowing that they were going no place in particular, did not think there was any reason why he should draw the Colonel’s attention to the swaying and drawing-aside of the strange plants.
In spite of the fact that he was a trifle lighter than he would have been on Earth, Flyball did not cavort or gambol as he usually would have done. In the silence which surrounded him, he had a strange feeling that something was watching him, and, even odder, that people were talking about him. He sniffed but he could smell nothing except the unfamiliar perfumes of the plants. He tried to nibble a piece of grass, as he had done at home, but somehow the grass would not stay there to be nibbled.
Flyball scratched beneath his chin.
Very well, if the grass did not want to be nibbled, he would leave it alone. After all, he was no vegetable-eater.
He tried to rub his side against one of the thin golden stems but that, too, bent out of the way just as he thought he had touched it. An odd world, this, he thought to himself, but then what could one expect of a place that had no real sunshine!
He was trying to persuade himself that everything was as it should be, in spite of the lack of things he knew. When he listened with his sharp ears, and Flyball had very good hearing, he could make nothing out. But, when he stopped listening, there was a curious buzzing noise inside his head. That buzzing had not been there down on the beach, so Flyball knew that it had nothing to do with his having been shut up in the Halley or in a space-helmet.
He decided that he would see what happened if he left the path which the obliging plants were opening up before them. He looked hopefully at
an opening and made toward it. Before he got there, however, the opening was filled with the pineapple-like plants. Flyball looked at the violet spurs and realized that they were at least as sharp as his own claws. He turned his back on them and pretended he had not thought of leaving the path. Then he turned round suddenly. The opening was there again. He plunged for it, but not too eagerly. It was just as well that he had been cautious for the violet spurs were there again, ready for him. He sniffed haughtily. If they did not want him to leave their silly old path, that was all right by him!
The light that trickled through the filmy fern-trees was pale violet and the Colonel, paying as little attention as possible to his own feelings of strangeness, kept putting different filters on his camera. He took each photograph several times and made a careful note after each exposure. He was trying to find out which filter would compensate for the light which was so different from that of Earth, or even of the Moon.
He seemed to be terribly excited by the strange appearance of the plants. Flyball could see nothing to get excited about. He, himself, was rather bewildered and annoyed than excited. The plants seemed to be shutting him in and when he looked back behind him he could no longer see the path down which they had come. It occurred to him that, if the plants wanted to do so, they could well prevent the two of them from finding their way back to the Halley. The plants were so tall that Colonel Stone would not be able to see over them. From his own experience Flyball knew that they could make a wall almost impossible to get through.
Then he cheered up. The plants did not know that Fred Stone was carrying a large and sharp knife on his hip. This would hack a way through the stoutest plants on Earth, and it should do the same on Venus.
Flyball gave a snooty snort at the plants nearest to him. It sounded terribly loud in the utter silence and the plants shuddered slightly. Ah, ha, Flyball thought, they know that we can get the better of them if we want to! He sauntered a little farther up the path after Fred Stone, waving his beautiful grey tail and purring softly to himself, just to show the plants that he did not care and that he had got their number.