His fog-hom voice creaked out in a quivering bellow, rose to a crescendo wail, and popped out with a sound like a starting rocket. Lovely song—lovelyl Jerry stuffed him in a pillow and tried to silence him, but without immediate success. If the men in detention wanted to sleep, what of it? Anyway, they were making too much noise themselves.
Who wanted to sleep? Too nice a night to sleep. He executed a remarkable imitation of a steam buzz-saw. Jerry gave up and crawled in beside him, growling unhappily. Ignatz honked reproachfully at the Master, rolled over and snored loudly.
The next morning he awoke to see the guard let the O.M. in, and tried to climb down from the bunk. Something lanced through his head, and he fell back with a mournful bellow. He hadn't felt like that last night.
Jerry grinned at him. "Hangover—what'd you expect?" He turned to Barclay. "The flunky delivered my message, then?"
"He did." The O.M. hadn't been doing much sleeping, from the look on his face. "If your plan involves letting you out, don't bother telling me."
"It doesn't. I've found from experience there's no use trying to change your mind." He jerked back the package of cigarettes as Ignatz dived for it. "But the semiannual mud run is due any day now, and Despondency is hell then. You've got to get her out."
The O.M. nodded; he'd been thinking the same. Jerry went on. "All right. A man can't locate anything smaller than a rocketship up there But a zloaht can. Well, thirty miles north of Minerva's Breasts—the compass points south by southeast, in that neighborhood—there's a village of Ig-natz's people built out in a little lake. They've damned up Forlorn River there, and built their houses on rafts, working with their antennae and practically no raw materials. They grow food along the shores and they've got a mill of sorts to grind it with. Of course, they're not human, but they'll be up alongside us yet, if we don't kill them off first. Highly civilized now."
The O.M. snorted, glanced at Ignatz hunting for butts. "Civilized! Sounds more like beavers to me."
"Okay, have it your way." Jerry was used to man's eternal sense of divine descent—or maybe the word was ascent. "Anyway, they've developed an alphabet of sorts and have tame animals. What's more important, I taught them some English, and they'll do almost anything for chocolate and peanuts."
Barclay caught the idea. "You mean, I'm to send up there, get in touch with them, and have them look for Anne? Sounds pretty farfetched, but I'm willing to try anything once."
Jerry began sketching a crude map. "They can't talk to you, but when one of them comes for the chocolate, you'll know he's found her—they're honest about bargains. Then all you have to do is follow."
The O.M. took the note and started toward the door. "I'll let you know how it works," he promised. "If they find her, I'll even risk shipping you back to Earth." Jerry grunted and turned back to Ignatz, who was rumbling unhappily on the cot, his foot-and-a-quarter body a bundle of raw nerves.
It was three slow, dull days later when Slim brought another note. "Mr. Barclay sent this down to you," he said briefly. Slim had as little to do with the Master as possible.
Jerry opened it eagerly, to find the wording terse and to the point.
Three spinners, trying to make your lake, broke down. Rescue crews out for them now. I'll have nothing more to do with any of your fool plans. He passed it to Ignatz, who read it glumly, then watched hopefully as Jerry shook out a cigarette. Seeing the pack returned to its place, beyond his reach, he snorted his disgust and retired to the comer in sulky silence.
The silence was broken by a reverberating boom that rocked the detention house like a straw in the wind. The floor twisted crazily and the transplon window fell out with a brittle snap. Then the noise quieted and Jerry picked himself up from the floor, grabbed Ignatz and the prospector pack. He wasted no words, but dived toward the open window. Slim came racing down the corridor. "Air-conditioner motor exploded right below," he yelled. "You all right, Lord?" As he saw the two climbing out the window, he grabbed for his needle gun, then rammed it back. "I ain't taking chances with this thing; it'd explode in my hands with you around. The farther you two get, the happier I'll bel"
Sometimes a bad reputation had its uses. Jerry dropped ten feet to the ground, spotted a spinner standing empty and unlocked to the rear of the building, and set out for it. He dived through the door, yanked it shut, and cut in the motor as the guards began streaming out. Ignatz looked at the fuel gauge and was surprised to see it full.
Before the gun on the roof could be lined up, the spinner was rising smoothly and speeding away. Jerry swung in a half circle and headed north, with the rheostat clear over, and the little ship cut through the air with a whistling rush. Hellas dropped behind, five miles, ten, then fifteen. Ten miles ahead lay the muck of HellonEre, beyond that Despondency.
"Only let me reach the swamps, fellow," Jerry begged. "Don't get us in any funny business now." Ignatz had his antennae curled up in a tight knot, trying by mental concentration to oblige.
Two miles short of the swamps, the engine began to stutter, starting and stopping erratically. Jerry fussed with the controls, but the ship slowed, moving along at an uncertain speed. The first line of the Hellonfire verdure rose through the thin mists as the motor stopped. Jerry's teeth were clenched as he tried to hold the spinner in a flat curve that would carry them clear. But the ground came up steadily as the ship crawled toward the swamp.
By a hair-thick margin they cleared the tangled swamp growth, and were over Hellonfire. And the little motor caught, purred softly, and drove the vanes steadily against the air, lifting them up easily. Ignatz relaxed and Jerry reached over to pat him softly. Now, according to the legend, luck should be good.
It was. They glided along across Hellonfire smoothly, passed over the wreck of the first spinner sent out by the O.M., and headed on. The compass began to waver and twist without good reason, and Jerry was forced to rely on Ignatz's sense of direction. The zloaht held his antennae out as a pointer toward his home village, and the Master followed his direction confidendy.
Hellonfire drifted by under them, and gave place to the heavy tangle of Despondency. Looking down, they could see the slow crawl of the mud-run that made the swamp even more impassable twice a year, and Jerry shook his head. If Anne were out in that, unless she stayed on a high hummock, there was litde hope of finding her. They swept between the Breasts and saw the temporary camp, established as a base for searchers, being dismanded; the men would leave before the mud crept higher.
And then Ignatz hooted, and Jerry looked down to see the little lake glistening below them. Floating rafts covered it, neatly laid out in rows, and thatched over with fine craftsmanship. Zloahts like Ignatz were busily engaged in the huts and canals between them. On the shores of the lake, others were driving their tame zihis, twenty times as large as they were, about in the fields. Now and again, a fog-horn yelp across the lake was answered from the largest raft.
Jerry let down the pontoons and dropped the spinner lightly on the lake. Ignatz ducked out and across the water to the chief's building, dragging a waterproof package of chocolate with him. He was back inside of ten minutes, hooting shrilly, a small bundle in his mouth.
The Master took it. On the coarse papyrus he made out a roughly executed picture of a man and woman, pulled on a narrow raft by two of the zihis. Under it, there were two black squares with one white sandwiched between them, and inside the drawing was a bar of chocolate of a different brand from that which Jerry had sent them.
The Master snapped the rheostat over. "So she left a day and two nights ago, with Durnall. Traded her chocolate for zihis and raft. Know what direction she went?"
Ignatz hooted and pointed south and east, along a sluggish stream that fed into Forlorn River. Jerry turned the spinner and headed that way, searching for signs of them. Zihi travel should average twenty or more miles a day, which would place them some twenty miles out. He slowed up after fifty, noting that the stream was narrowing. If it ended before he reached Anne, it meant ho
urs of scouting, probably hopelessly, in search of her. There were a hundred different courses she could take once she left the Little Hades.
But he sighted her before the stream ended in its twisted little feeders. She had stopped, probably picking her course, and he could see her look up at the sound of his motor and begin signaling frantically. He set the spinner down sharply, jerking it to a short stop within a few feet of the raft and opened the door as she headed the zihis toward him. Durnall was lying on the raft, covered by a poncho.
"Jerry Lord!" Her voice was shrill, tired, her eyes red and sleepless. "Thank heaven! Pete's got the fever—red fever—and we had no feverin in our packs." She grabbed the botde he handed her, poured three tablets down Durnall's throat. "Help me load him in and the duffel—and take us to the hospital, pronto!"
Jerry grabbed Durnall and loaded him in the back as quickly as he could. Ignatz was giving orders to the zihis to return to the village with the raft, while Anne gathered the duffel and climbed in back. She sank beside the sick man, whose face had the dull brick-red of an advanced case of swamp fever.
"Your father's been worried sick—so have I."
"Have you?" Her voice was flat. "Jerry, how soon can we reach the hospital?"
He shrugged. "Three hours, I guess." Ignatz glanced up at the Master's face and grunted as softly as he could. Of course, Anne had been gone for days, alone with Dumall, and sick men had a way of working on a woman's sympathies. He brushed his antennae lighdy against the Master's ankles.
"How'd you find the village?" Jerry asked. "I've been trying to get a chance to help you, but I was afraid you'd be lost in the mud-run."
She looked up, but went on fussing over Dumall. "When we couldn't find the Burgundy, I remembered your story about getting lost yourself, and how you found the village. We headed the way you said the compass pointed, and holed up there, till I found they understood me. Then I bartered some supplies for their raft and animals. With what you'd told me helping us, we'd have made out all right if Pete hadn't come down with fever; I was lucky, myself, and didn't catch it."
Dumall was groaning and tossing uneasily, and she turned her attention back to him. Jerry bent over his controls, and drove silendy south toward Hellas, watching Despondency change to Hellonfire. Then they were out of the swamps, and he turned back to assure Anne they were almost there.
But his head jerked back sharply. The rotor, which had been circling sweedy overhead, now twanged harshly and dragged back on the motor. Ignatz ducked back to avoid the Master's look and groaned. One of the rotor vanes had cracked off, and the others were unbalanced and moving sluggishly. The ship was coming down much too fast. Jerry cut the motor off, tried to flatten the fall, and failed. He yanked the shock-cushion lever out, and a rubber mattress zipped out behind him, designed to save the passengers from a nose collision in the fog. Before he could reach the pilot's cushion lever, the ship's nose hit the ground and buckled in.
Ignatz saw the Master slump forward over the controls, and then something tore sharply at the zloaht's snout horn, and little lights streaked out. Blackness shot over him hotly.
He swam up through a gray haze, tried to snort, and failed. When he opened his eyes, he saw yards of gauze covering his snout, and Jerry was propped up in bed watching him.
"Major operation, fellow. The doc says he had to cut out half your horn because of something that splintered it. You had me beat by half a day, and the doc says I was out for forty-eight hours." He wiggled in the bed. "I'm still solid enough, though, except for a couple of bones, and a bump on the head."
Ignatz looked around slowly, conscious from his sluggish reactions that they must have given him drugs. He was in a small room, and his bed was a miniature replica of Jerry's. But it wasn't a hospital.
Jerry grinned. "They were afraid you'd be a jinx in the city, and I kept yelling for you, so they put us both up here in a house the O.M. owns just inside Hellonfire. I've been waiting for them to bring you to before we entertained visitors." He raised his voice. "Hey, nurse, tell them all clear here."
With his words, the door burst open and the Old Man hurried in. "Well, it's about time. Look fit as ever."
"Yeah, fit to go back to your lousy detention house."
The O.M. was pleased with himself. "Not this time. I figured out something else. Got the deed to the New Hampshire house still? Good. Well, I'm taking it back, and putting this deed to the swamp house in its place. That pet of yours should be harmless here. And I'm advising you to invest your money in our stock."
"So you won't ship me back to Earth, eh? Afraid I'd get your ship smashed?"
Barclay shook his head. "I'm not worried about the ship. What I'm worried about is a branch manager, and you're it —if you want the job."
Jerry took it calmly. "What's the catch?"
"None. Bad luck or not, you get things done, and you know rockets. That's what I need, you impudent young puppy. Just keep your pet out here and things should go swimmingly." He got up brusquely. "You've got another visi-tor.
"Don't forget what I said about—" Jerry started to shout, and then she was framed in the door.
"Hi, Jerry. You both four-oh again?"
Ignatz grunted, while Jerry stared. "Durnall?"
"He's doing all right." Anne took a seat beside him, held out her hands. "Now that he's safe, let's forget him. Pete isn't a bad guy, but I don't like darn fools who get me into messes like the last one, even when it's half my fault."
Jerry digested it slowly, and Ignatz cursed his bandages. Now was the time for him to slip back into the swamps, where Jerry could never make the mistake of taking him out again. He could see where the Master was going to need decent breaks with all the responsibility coming up. But the bandages held him securely.
Anne hauled the little bed closer, ran warm fingers over Ignatz's back. "You'll have to live out here and commute by spinner, of course, but I'll take care of Ignatz while you're gone. He owes us a lot of good fortune, and we're going to collect it."
"I—" Jerry glanced at Ignatz. "You know how your father feels about him."
She smiled impishly. "Dad figured it all out. You see, I brought back something with me in my duffel, and when he found I meant to keep it, he gave up." She reached into a
little bag and hauled out the snooty head of another zloaht. "Meet Ichabod."
Jerry gulped. "Well, 111 be—" And suddenly he had a great deal of urgent business.
Ignatz longed for a cigarette, but he snorted sofdy and turned away.
THE LOTUS EATERS
by Stanley G. Weinbaum
"WhewI" whistled "Ham" Hammond, staring through the right forward observation port. "What a place for a honeymoon!"
"Then you shouldn't have married a biologist," remarked Mrs. Hammond over his shoulder, but he could see her gray eyes dancing in the glass of the port. "Nor an explorer's daughter," she added. For Pat Hammond, until her marriage to Ham a scant four weeks ago, had been Patricia Burlin-game, daughter of the great Englishman who had won so much of the twilight zone of Venus for Britain, exacdy as Crowly had done for the United States.
"I didn't," observed Ham, "marry a biologist. I married a girl who happened to be interested in biology; that's all. R's one of her few drawbacks."
He cut the blast to the underjets, and the rocket settled down gently on a cushion of flame toward the black landscape below. Slowly, carefully, he dropped the unwieldy mechanism until there was the faintest perceptible jar; then he killed the blast suddenly, the floor beneath them tilted slighdy, and a strange silence fell like a blanket after the cessation of the roaring blast.
"We're here," he announced.
"So we are," agreed Pat. "Where's here?"
"It's a point exactly seventy-five miles east of the Barrier opposite Venoble, in the British Cool Country. To the north is, I suppose, the continuation of the Mountains of Eternity, and to the south is Heaven knows what. And this last applies to the east."
"Which is a good technical de
scription of nowhere." Pat laughed. "Let's turn off the lights and look at nowhere."
She did, and in the darkness the ports showed as faintly luminous circles.
"I suggest," she proceeded, "that the Joint Expedition ascend to the dome for a less restricted view. We're here to investigate; let's do a little investigating."
"This joint of the expedition agrees," chuckled Ham.
He grinned in the darkness at the flippancy with which Pat approached the serious business of exploration. Here they were, the Joint Expedition of the Royal Society and the Smithsonian Institute for the Investigation of Conditions on the Dark Side of Venus, to use the full official title.
Of course Ham himself, while technically the American half of the project, was in reality a member only because Pat wouldn't consider anything else; but she was the one to whom the bearded society and institute members addressed their questions, their terms, and their instructions.
And this was no more than fair, for Pat, after all, was the leading authority on Hodand flora and fauna, and, moreover, the first human child bom on Venus, while Ham was only an engineer lured originally to the Venusian frontier by a dream of quick wealth in xixtchil trading in the Hot-lands.
It was there he had met Patricia Burlingame, and there, after an adventurous journey to the foothills of the Mountains of Eternity, that he had won her. They had been married in Erotia, the American settlement, less than a month ago, and then had come the offer of the expedition to the dark side.
Ham had argued against it. He had wanted a good terrestrial honeymoon in New York or London, but there were difficulties. Primarily there was the astronomical one; Venus was past perigee, and it would be eight long months before its slow swing around the Sun brought it back to a point where a rocket could overtake the Earth.
Eight months in primitive, frontier-built Erotia, or in equally primitive Venoble, if they chose the British settlement, with no amusement save hunting, no radio, no plays, even very few books. And if they must hunt, Pat argued, why not add the thrill and danger of the unknown?
Donald A. Wollheim (ed) Page 11