Astounding Science Fiction Stories Vol 1

by Anthology

  The trader stared, thunderstruck. In those days of advanced plastic surgery, feminine beauty wasn't rare but even Strike's unpracticed eye knew that here was the real thing. No synthetic blonde baby-doll here but a natural beauty untouched by the surgeon's knife-spun-gold hair, intelligence lighting dark eyes, a hint of passion and temper in the curve of mouth and arch of nostrils. In short, a woman.

  But Miss Carlyle's voice was an ice-water jet to remind the trader of earthside manners.

  "You don't seem enthusiastic over meeting your temporary employer, Mr. Strike. Something wrong about me?"

  Strike flushed, angry at himself and his own embarrassment. "Oh oh, no." He fumbled for words. "That is, I'm surprised that you're a woman. I -- we expected to find a man in-well, in your position. It's more like a man's job."

  Sub-pilot Barrows could have warned the trader that this was a touchy point with Gerry Carlyle but he had no chance. The young woman drew herself up and spoke coldly.

  "There isn't a man in the business who has done nearly as well as I. Name a half-dozen hunters. Rogers, Camden, Potter -- they aren't in the same class with me. Man's job? I think you needn't worry about me, Mr. Strike. You'll find I'm man enough to face anything this planet has to offer."

  Strike's eyebrow twitched. An arrogant female, withal. Terrific sense of her own importance, willful, selfish. He decided he didn't like her and rather hoped she had come looking for Murris. If so, she would learn one or two bitter lessons.

  There followed a five-minute interlude of scurrying about and shouting and unloading, all done to the tune of Gerry Carlyle's voice, which could crack like a whiplash when issuing commands.

  Then Strike found himself leading a small party back to the trading post. Now surprisingly Miss Carlyle showed a flattering attention to him.

  First she wished to know about the business of the trading post.

  "It isn't very exciting," its proprietor told her. "Mostly we sit around being bored stiff, playing cards or fiddling with the bum radio. Several times during a Venusian day our natives bring in a load of some of the medicinal plants we want. Occasion a rough gem of one kind or another, though Venus is very poor in minerals. The only stone really worth much to be found here is the emerald."

  "Surely there isn't enough profit in medicinal plants, considering transportation costs, to persuade a young man like you to bury himself here." She waved her hand around disparagingly.

  "There's profit all right." Strike shrugged. "The drugs distilled from some of the Venusian growths are plenty valuable. And then there's the adventure angle." He smiled wryly.

  "Plenty of young bucks are willing to sign a three-year contract for the thrills of living on Venus -- if they don't know a thing about it beforehand. But it does take an awful lot stuff to bring a freighter our way. We seldom see a ship more often than three or four Earth-months apart!"

  "What in the world -- or in Venus are those?" She directed his attention to the thousands of fungi now springing up through moist soil with almost visible movement. They were shaped somewhat like the human body and so pale that they might be a host of tiny corpses rising from their graves.

  The trader grimaced. He had never liked those things. Reminded him constantly that battle and destruction were watchwords in this hellhole, where the fang of every creature was turned upon its neighbor and even the plants had poison thorns while the flowers gave off noxious gases to snare the unwary.

  "Fungi mostly," he answered. "They grow and propagate amazingly fast. Many of the smaller life-forms here exist on a single day -- they are born, live and die in one hundred seventy hours. Naturally their life cycle is speeded up. In hours all these puffballs will begin popping at once to spread their spores around. It's a funny sight. During the long night, of course, the spores lie dormant. And most of the larger creatures hibernate from the intense cold. Our night life up here is nil. This is strictly a nine-o'clock planet."

  She sniffed noting what all newcomers to Venus learn. Although the view is a drab almost colorless one, an incredible multiplicity of odors assails the nostrils -- sweet, sharp, musklike, pungent, spicy, with many unfamiliar olfactory sensations to boot.

  Strike explained. On Earth flowering plants are fertilized by the passage of insects from one bloom to another, they develop petals of vivid colors to attract bees and butterflies and other insects. But on Venus, where perpetual mist renders impotent any appeal to sight, plants have adapted themselves to appeal to the sense of smell, therefore give off all sorts of enticing odors.

  So it went, question and answer, the pleasant business of getting acquainted, until the all-too-short walk to the station was over. But Strike was not deceived by the woman's sudden change of attitude.

  He knew that an interplanetary hunter of Gerry Carlyle's experience would certainly have read up on Venus before ever coming there. And he suspected she knew the answers already to every question she asked.

  She must have noticed Strike's disapproving eyebrow during the first moments of their meeting and had deliberately set out to ingratiate herself to promote harmony during her brief stay on the cloudy planet. The trader was willing to be friendly but he looked upon the woman with caution and distaste. Her aggressiveness was not to his taste.

  Chapter II.

  The Huntress

  Gerry Carlyle was decidedly a woman of action.

  "No time to waste," she declared incisively as they reached the post. "Earth and Venus are nearing conjunction and I want to be ready to take off as soon after that date as possible. I've no wish to bang around in space waiting for Earth to catch up to us with a cargo of weird specimens raising Hades in the hold. If you've no objections, Mr. Strike, we'll make our first foray at once."

  Strike nodded, staring at this disturbing young woman, who could be one instant so warm and friendly, the next imperious and dominating.

  "Sure," he agreed. "Be with you in a moment."

  He ran up the metal stairway to where Roy Ransom's face hung over the porch rail like an amazed bearded balloon and the two vanished into the house. Strike returned shortly with a tiny two-way radio.

  "Ransom sends out a radio beam for us to travel on. I tell him which way to turn it in case we deviate from a straight line. It's the only possible way to cover any distance in this murk." He adjusted a single earphone, slipped receiver and broadcaster unit into a capacious pocket.

  Next he insisted on painting the insides of everyone's nostrils with a tarry aromatic substance.

  "Germ-killer," he smiled. "For each dangerous animal on this planet there are a hundred vicious bacteria to knock off an Earthman in twenty hours. I guess that finishes the preliminaries. Shall we go? I ought to warn you that the sense of hearing is well developed up here, so it'll help if you move as quietly as possible."

  "One moment." Gerry Carlyle's cool voice struck in abruptly. "I want two things thoroughly understood. First, I'm the sole leader of this party and what I say goes." She smiled with icy sweetness. "No complaints, of course, Mr. Strike, but it's just as well to forestall future misunderstandings.

  "Secondly, you must know that the main object of this expedition is to catch one or more Murris and return with them alive. We'll take a number of other interesting specimens, of course, but the Murri is our real goal."

  She looked around challengingly, as if expecting a dissenting reaction. And she was not disappointed. Strike glanced up at the porch to exchange a significant look with Ransom.

  When he smiled wryly, Gerry Carlyle's temper flared.

  "What is the mystery about this Murri, anyhow? Everywhere I go, on Venus, back on Earth among members of my own profession, if the word Murri is mentioned everyone scowls and tries to change the subject. Why?"

  No one answered. The Carlyle party shifted uneasily, their boots making shucking sounds. Presently Strike offered, "The fact is, you'll never take back a Murri alive. But you wouldn't believe me if I told you the reason, Miss Carlyle. I --"

  "Why not? What's the matt
er with them? Is their presence fatal to a human in some way?"

  "Oh. no."

  "Are they so rare or so shy they can't be found?"

  "No, I think I can find you some before you take off."

  "Then are they so delicate they can't stand the trip? If so, I can tell you we've done everything to make hold number three an exact duplicate of living conditions here:'

  "No, it isn't that either," the trader sighed.

  "Then what is it?" she cried. "Why all the evasions and secretive looks? You're acting just like Hank Rogers when I caught him one day in the Explorers' Club.

  "He came up here awhile back to get a good Murri specimen. But he returned empty-handed. I asked him why, and he refused to tell me. Actually acted embarrassed about something. What's it all about?"

  Tommy Strike shook his head firmly.

  "It can't be explained, Miss Carlyle. It's just something you'll find out for yourself."

  And on that note of dissatisfaction the party struck off through the mist. The half-dozen crew members from The Ark were surprised to find the going comparatively easy.

  Although the great amount of water on Venus would presuppose profuse jungle growth, there is insufficient sunlight to support much more than the tallest varieties of trees, which shoot hundreds of feet up into the curtain of the mist, their broad-bladed leaves spread wide to treasure every stray sunbeam that filters through.

  Undergrowth -- which is confined to a sprawling, cactuslike shrub with poisonous spines and to a great many species of drably flowering plants with innumerable odors and perfume -- is laid out almost geometrically in order to catch the dilute sunshine without interference from the occasional Ion trees.

  "The main danger in travel," as Strike explained, "is in losing the radio beam. Sometimes we have to circle a bog and we've got to be pretty careful not to let the signal fade."

  The party, with Strike and Gerry Carlyle in the lead, hadn't been five minutes away from the station when the restless quiet was shattered by a terrific grunting and coughing like that of a thousand hogs at feeding time. The noise was intermittent, rumbling for a few seconds somewhere ahead, then stopping abruptly to be succeeded by slopping and smacking sounds.

  The entire party paused for an instant at that blast of strange thunder. Startled by the sound out of nowhere.

  The trader grinned. "Shovel-mouth," he explained. "Not very dangerous."

  Gerry Carlyle glanced at her guide catching his implication. "We prefer 'em dangerous, as a matter of fact. Though I hardly expected to find anything interesting this close to-er-civilization."

  Strike grinned at the thrust and a little prickle of excitement crawled up his spine as he watched the Carlyle party slip into their smooth routine. Her crisp commands detailed one man to remain with the bulky equipment. Two more loaded a pair of cathode-bolt guns, baby cannons beside the pistol the trader carried for emergencies.

  Two of the others, including Gerry, selected weapons resembling the old-fashioned rifles-now to be seen only in museums. Barrows was to work the camera.

  "Allen," Gerry snapped, "you circle around to the left. Kranz to the right. As usual, hold your fire unless it's absolutely necessary to prevent the specimen's escape. We'll give you three minutes to get into position."

  The two flankers were already moving off into the mist when Strike woke up.

  "Wait!" he cracked out. "Come back here. No one must get out of visual touch with me! It's too easy to get permanently lost. Sounds carry far, naturally, but it's impossible for an untrained car to tell which direction they're coming from in this fog."

  Gerry Carlyle's eyes flashed in momentary anger as her commands were countermanded but the plan of action was amended to permit the two flankers to remain within sight of the main body.

  Strike had thought that Miss Carlyle's assistants were rather a colorless lot, stooges automatically going through letter-perfect roles, and wondered if they'd be any good if they found themselves suddenly without a leader. But when the party spread out with military precision for the stalk Tommy Strike had to admit to himself that he had never witnessed a more competent movement.

  Not a single unnatural sound broke the quiet. Not a stick snapped, not a fungus squelched beneath an incautious heel. Even the sucking noises from marshy spots were missing. In sixty seconds they slipped into a little clearing and stood gazing with professional curiosity at the doomed shovel-mouth.

  The creature was worth a second look. Fifty feet long and nearly twenty feet wide, it had three pairs of squat powerful legs ending in enormously spatulate discs. Its hide was a thick, tough gray stuff that gleamed dully with a wet slickness in the half light.

  But the most surprising feature was the creature's head which, instead of tapering to a point, broadened into a mammoth snout extending several feet horizontally from mouth-corner to mouth-corner. Flattened against the ground it had a ludicrous similarity to a fan-tail vacuum cleaner attachment.

  The shovel-mouth stared at the party disinterestedly out of muddy eyes, then lowered his head and waddled across the clearing. Its mouth plowed up a wide shallow furrow as it ate indiscriminately the numerous fungi, low-lying bushes, sticks and mud.

  "Herbivorous," Strike murmured. "Its main article of diet is fungus growths but it takes so much for a meal that the creature has to spend most of its waking hours eating everything it can get its mouth on."

  Evidently the animal had been dining for some time, for the clearing looked as if a drunken farmer had been trying to plow it up. Gerry signaled, and her crew moved into position like soldiers. She slipped up on the creature's blind side and aimed her curious rifle at the soft, inner portion of the shovel-mouth's leg.

  Plop! The beast jerked, nipped at the wound momentarily, then continued to feed. Twenty seconds later it reeled dizzily about and fell to the ground, unconscious.

  Just like that -- simple, efficient, no fuss at all. Tommy Strike felt a sense of anticlimax.

  "What a disappointment," he said ruefully. "I expected a terrific battle and a lot of excitement with maybe one or two of us half killed for the sake of the movies!"

  "With Mr. Strike heroically rescuing Gerry Carlyle from the jaws of death?" She smiled as the trader winced. "Sorry, but this is a business, Mr. Strike, and I find it pays to play safe and sane and preserve my crew intact."

  "I value them too much to risk their lives for the sake of a bunch of cheap thrill seekers back home. No. We have excitement and adventure only when someone makes a mistake. Carlyle parties make a minimum of mistakes."

  That was the arrogant and cocksure Gerry Carlyle speaking and Strike did not try to dispute her. "I suppose you used a sort of hypodermic bullet in that rifle of yours. But I thought you'd be using more scientific weapons than that. It seems sort of -- sort of primitive."

  Gerry smiled.

  "I know. You're wondering about the anesthetic gases. Or the wonderful new paralysis ray. Well, there're a lot of inventions that work fine under controlled lab conditions that are flops in the field.

  "The paralysis ray is just a toy, totally impracticable. It's unreliable because each species of animal requires a different amount of the ray to subdue him and we seldom have time to fool around experimenting in my work.

  "It may also prove fatal if the victim gets too much of a jolt. As for knockout gas, it necessitates the hunters wearing masks and it is difficult to control in the proper dosages between unconsciousness and death."

  Strike nodded understanding and turned to be surprised by the activity behind him. While he and the woman talked, the party had prepared the motionless shovel-mouth for transportation back to The Ark. Broad bands of bluish metal had been fastened around legs and neck and the crew had even managed to slide two or three underneath the huge body and encircle it.

  Wires led from each piece of metal to a common source, a compact boxlike affair vaguely resembling a battery case with two dials on its face. A throw of a switch energized the metal and gradually the mighty b
ulk of the shovel-mouth rose from the ground. It hung in the air, suspended like a grotesque toy balloon. To tow it back to the ship would be a simple matter.

  "Anti-gravity," explained Gerry. "We give the metal bands a gravity charge of slightly more than one. Like repelling magnetic charges, they rise from the ground and carry the animal with them."

  The equipment-bearer simply lashed a rope round his waist to pull the shovel-mouth along behind and the party resumed the hunt.

  "I think," said Gerry Carlyle, "that we're too likely to bump into something without warning in this mist. If you'll bring out the electronic telescope, Mr. Barrows --"

  Barrows at once produced one of the most interesting gadgets that Strike had yet seen, a portable model of the apparatus used on all the modern centrifugal flyers. It consisted of a power unit carried by one of the men, and a long glass tube to be carried by the observer.

  The front of it presented a convex surface covered with photoelectric material, to capture the electron streams of all kinds of light, from ultra-violet to infra-red.

  As the light particles entered the tube, they passed through a series of three electrostatic fields for focusing, and then through another field for magnification. At the rear of the tube they struck a fluorescent screen and reproduced the image. Looking through the baby telescope gave the impression of gazing down a tunnel in the mist for as far as the eye could reach.

  By keeping in constant touch with Ransom at the post, who kept the beam moving slowly around like the spoke of a wheel, Strike enabled the party to move laterally.

  Through the telescope they picked up many of the smaller and shyer life-forms not ordinarily seen -- lizards, crawling shapes, crablike forms, even two or three of the scaly man-things native to Venus, slithering silently through the fog with sulky expressions on their not-too-intelligent fishlike faces.

  Strike and Gerry became so interested in watching this teeming life through the 'scope that they walked into real danger.

  Without warning a rushing sound filled the air at their left, and a round gray ball rolled swiftly into view. It crossed their path dead ahead -- propelling itself with dozens of stout cilia sprouting indiscriminately from all sides -- then paused abruptly.