Big Book of Science Fiction

by Groff Conklin

  The cloud-banks lifted behind me, and I experienced a sense of deep disappointment, for below I saw nothing but an endless ocean, heaving slowly under the heavy groundswell and dotted with drops of rain from the clouds I had just left. The planet of mystery was all one vast ocean, then, inhabited by fishes if by anything, and we men of earth were the only intelligent form of life in the solar system, after all.

  I found that I could direct my flight by moving my shoulders and arms, but as I soared across the Venerian ocean, my progress was much slower than it had ever been before. I can only explain this now by the fact that much of the sun’s light was cut off by the omnipresent clouds. Roger Bacon’s drug undoubtedly makes use of some property of light, that form of energy which is so little understood. I do not know what it can be and my scientific friends laugh at the idea.

  But that is wandering from my story. At the time, the slowness of this exploratory voyage gave me no special concern, except that it was becoming monotonous until I perceived in the distance a place where the clouds seemed to touch the surface of the sea. I moved toward it; it soon became clear that this was not the clouds coming down but a thin mist rising up like steam from the surface of a patch of land. But what a land!

  It was a water-logged swamp, out of which coiled a monstrous vegetation of a sickly yellow hue, quite without any touch of the green of earthly growths. Here were gigantic mushrooms, that must have been twenty or thirty feet tall; long, slender reedlike stems that burst out at the top into spreading tangles of branches; huge fungus growths of bulbous shape, and a vinelike form that twisted and climbed around and over the reed-trees and giant fungi.

  There was no clear line where shore and sea met. The swamp began with a tangle of branches reaching out of the ocean and the growths simply became larger and more dense as one progressed. But at last the ground seemed to be rising; I could catch glimpses of something that was not water among the trunks and vines.

  It had occurred to me that where there was such abundant vegetable life, there might be something animal, but up to this point I had seen no sign of anything that might move by its own will under the ceaselessly falling rain and rising mist. But at last I caught sight of a growth resembling the round balls of the fungoids, but too large and too regular to be a fungus. I swung my shoulders toward it; it was a huge ball that seemed made of some material harder and more permanent than the vegetation amid which it rose. I circled the ball; at one side, low down, there was the only opening, a door of some sort. It stood open.

  I slid in. The room in which I found myself was very dim and my progress was slow. The light was a kind of phosphorescence like that on the sea at night, issuing from some invisible source. I looked round; I was in a vast hall, whose ceiling vaulted upward until it reached a vertical wall at the other end. From the looks of the outside I had not realized that it was so large. There was no other architectural feature in the place save a hole in the center of the floor, set round with a curbing of some sort.

  Slanting toward this with some difficulty of movement, I saw that the hole was a wide well, with the sheen of water visible below. Down into this well went a circular staircase, the stairs of which were broad and fitted with low risers.

  From behind the vertical wall at the far end, I was conscious of, rather than heard, a confused shouting, and as I drew near to it I saw that it was pierced by several doors, like the one I had entered by, very thick and heavy. These doors bore horizontal rods which I took to be the Venerian equivalent of doorknobs, and over the terminations of the rods were a series of slits which I took to be approximations of keyholes. I do not know of any sight that would have pleased me more at the moment. Something of the order of cave-men could conceivably have set up such a building; savages might have dug the well and lined it with stairs: but only a fairly intelligent and fairly well-civilized form of life would have doors that locked. We were not alone in the solar system after all.

  One of the doors toward the end was open; I drifted through. I don’t know what I expected to find inside, but what I did find was beyond any expectation. It was another hall, larger if anything than the first, but not as high, since it was roofed over about halfway up. At each corner a circular staircase, with the same wide, low steps as the well ran up to pierce this ceiling.

  The room was filled with an endless range of tables, wide and low, like those in a kindergarten. They were composed of a shimmering metal which may very well have been silver, though it may also have been some alloy of which I am ignorant. At these tables, in high-backed chair-like seats of the same metal sat rows of—the people of Venus. They were busy eating and talking together, like a terrestrial crowd in a busy cafeteria, and their babble was the noise I had sensed.

  The Venerians bore a cartoonist’s resemblance to seals. They had the same short, barrel-like body, surmounted by the same long, narrow head, but the muzzle had grown back to a face and the forehead was high enough to contain a brain of at least the size of our own. The nostrils were wide and very high, so that the eyes were almost behind them. There were no outer ears, but a pair of holes, low down and toward the back, I took to be orifices for hearing.

  The legs of the Venerians are pillar-like muscular appendages, short and terminating in flat, spiny feet, webbed between the four toes. I may mention here that while swimming they trail these feet behind them, using them both for propulsion and changes of direction.

  The greatest shock was to see their arms—or rather, the appendages that served them for arms, since they really had no arms at all. Instead there were tentacles in groups; two groups beginning at the place where the short, thick neck joined the trunk, on the sides, and a third, smaller set springing from the center of the back, high up. These tentacles reached nearly to the floor when a full-grown Venerian was standing at his height of nearly four feet. Each of the three groups contained four tentacles; all the tentacles were prehensile and capable of independent action, giving the Venerian not only an excellent grip on anything, but also the power of picking up as many as twelve objects at a time. I am inclined to think that the tentacles at the back were less functional than the rest; only once did I see a Venerian use one of them.

  The Venetians in the hall were entirely innocent of clothing, and all were covered with rough, coarse hair, except for their faces, and of course, the tentacles. Most of them were wearing a type of bandolier, or belt, supported by a strap around the neck, and in turn carrying a series of pocket-like pouches, held shut by clasps. When a Venerian wished to open one, he thrust two of his tentacles into slits in the clasps; I do not know how they operated.

  Some of them carried weapons in their belts; short spears or knife-blades, with the handles set T-shape for better grasping in Venerian tentacles. There were also what I later found to be explosive weapons, with a tube springing out from the T-shaped handle. Every tool and weapon was of metal; clearly there could be little wood in this world where the clouds were never broken.

  The Venerians were eating with little metal spades, sharpened at the outer end for cutting. Their food came up to them from beneath, through the tables, when they pulled handles set in front of them. The food itself seemed to be the same throughout the hall, some kind of stew, with solids floating in sauces.

  I had come in to find the meal nearly over, with Venerians all over the room rising to leave the table and move down the hall with quick, shambling steps. I followed a pair of the weapon-bearers who were talking animatedly together. They went straight to the door into the other hall, crossed it to the well, which they descended till they were about waist-deep, then turned suddenly and dived. I hesitated, then followed; in my envelope of light there was no sense of wetness, and below I found the well turning into a long underwater passage, lit by the same dim radiance that illuminated the hall.

  The dimness made it difficult for me to keep up with the Venerians, who were evidently water-livers as we are creatures of the land, for they were amazing swimmers. Abruptly the passage widened, and the
light became enough stronger for me to catch up with the pair ahead.

  They directed their course upward through the water, came to the surface (where I saw we were well beyond the swamp belt) and took fresh gulps of air through their elevated nostrils. Then, diving beneath the surface again, they coasted along slowly. I caught a flash of something silvery ahead in the water. So did the Venerians. One of them snatched the tube-weapon from his belt, the other jerked out his spear; both swam faster.

  Their quarry was a huge fish, its head and body covered with scaly plates. A long tail projected backward from this coat of mail and two big paddles hung near the beast’s head. I’m no biologist, but I just happen to have taken my girl to the museum one afternoon, and we saw something just like it. I remember kidding about the tag, which described it as an “ostracoderm.”

  It had seen the Venerians, and evidently had a well-developed respect for them, for it fled down the watery path like an arrow—but not fast enough.

  The Venerian with the spear gained more rapidly than his companion, heading the fish off with its barbed point, and herding it around. The other lifted his tubed weapon; there were two muffled thuds, like the blows of a padded hammer, and the seven-foot fish’ wavered, then stopped, its paddles moving convulsively. The Venerian with the spear ranged alongside dodged the reflex swing of the long tail, and thrust his weapon in where the bony plate of the head met the cuirass of the body. The big fish heaved once more, then slowly began to sink, but the two Venerians, each wrapping his tentacles round the fish’s tail, began to tow him back toward the hall of the well.

  Neither of them rose to the surface during all this period. They were marvellously adapted to staying under water.

  They were evidently regular, professional hunters by the manner in which they went about their business. It occurred to me that a race which could divide labor in this fashion, which could produce the explosive weapons, and organize life with the ingenuity shown in the common dining-hall, with its ingenious arrangements for service of food, must possess other and interesting establishments of some kind in the swampy land that represented continents on this planet.

  Filled with a desire to see them, I took to the air once more and hurried back to the building. The door was still open, and the hall held an assortment of Venerians, some merely standing and talking, some diving into the well to swim off somewhere, and some passing through the portal out into the jungle of fungi. I had seen the sea-hunters; now I followed a party of those who remained on the surface.

  They blinked as the brighter light of the out-of-doors struck their eyes, and I wondered what they would do in the dazzling illumination of an earthly day. After a moment or two to accustom their eyes to the light, they struck out up the gentle slope behind the ball-shaped building. The vegetation was a perfect tangle, and 1 wondered how the Venerians would manage if they left the path they were following until I saw one of them blunder against the trunk of one of the yellow trees. It was all of twenty-five feet high, but his impact sent it crashing to the ground as though it were made of tissue-paper.

  The slope became steeper as the Venerians pushed on, kicking the big, soft stems out of their way when they had fallen to block the path. At last the track encountered a buttress of outcropping stone, the first I had seen on the planet. The Venerians paused. Two of them produced tube-weapons from their belts and, walking with some care, took the lead in the group, which had suddenly grown silent.

  What were they afraid of? Some grisly amphibian monster of the swamps, I fancy. At all events, one of them suddenly lifted his weapon and fired it in among the crowding growths. I caught a glimpse of a pair of huge eyes, heard the thud of the fall of a big mushroom and that was all. The Venerians with the weapons crouched and peered; there were a few words, and then they pushed on again. On that steaming planet, the ordinary individual must live far closer to the terrors of the beast-world than he does on earth.

  The Venerians followed their path down a little dip till it ended at another bulbous building like the hall of the food and the well. Its door was open; within it had the same cold and feeble illumination as the other. All about the outer room of this place were shelves filled with tools, and a Venerian in attendance. At the back another of the thick doors gave on a room in which I glimpsed pulsating machinery. They were that high up the scale.

  The party I had followed received tools from the attendant in the outer hall, and came out again, following another path to the hillside behind. There, where a cliff towered out of the swamp, they entered a hole that had been dug in the stony face of the hill, and drawing from the pouches at their belts some balls that emitted the same light I had seen indoors, they plunged in.

  I followed them. It was injudicious, no doubt, but I only found that out later. At the time, I had only noticed that my movements were sometimes faster, sometimes slower, and I had not worked out the rationale of what turned out to be a very dangerous business. It also turned out to be an interesting business, though one that had no particular meaning for me, and has not had since.

  It was a mine. The Venerians worked it by means of a shafted tool, which is attached by a metal cord to a box about two feet square, the box standing on the floor behind the miner and evidently furnishing the power for the operation. At the working end of the shafted head is a circle of metal teeth, and beneath the teeth a basket of woven metal. The Venerian presses the tool against the rock he is mining. The teeth spring into motion with the pressure, the rock is pulverized and falls into the basket as a powder. When the basket is filled, the miner takes it to the power box, empties it in and pulls a small rod. Immediately, the box emits a strong red glow, and in a minute or two a bar of shining metal is discharged at the back, and a little ball of waste material falls beside it.

  When a pile of the metal bars has accumulated, the miner picks them up and carries them back to the tool-hall, where he turns them in, receiving in exchange a metal token which he deposits in one of his pouches.

  I watched the Venerian miners carefully and for a long while, hoping to learn the secret of their power box. Eventually, I thought something would go wrong with one of them, or it would need a re-charge, and the miner would open it. If I could get an inkling of that, and tell it to some of my engineering friends, it would not only be a proof of my strange experience, but it might also be worth—well, a great deal.

  So much interested in the project did I become, that I failed to notice the passage of time, and during one of the miner’s visits to the hall of the machines, as I waited for him to return, I suddenly realized that it had grown dark. The miner, too, seemed to be gone for an extraordinarily long time. If he had finished his assigned task for the day, there was no sense remaining where I was. I started to leave—and found I could not move an inch.

  It was at this point I realized the implications of the fact that Roger Bacon’s drug enabled the use of the power of light. There was no light; and there I was, bound by motionlessness, as though in a nightmare; marooned on a planet millions of miles from home, from my own body even, and with no means of returning. I could hear the crash of some beast through the vegetation and the patter of the eternal Venerian rain. That was all; I was alone.

  At such moments, in spite of the statements of some writers, one does not rave and storm, or review the mistakes of a past life. I thought of my body back in the room on Bank Street, Earth, and what the old man would do as it sat there in the chair, lifelessly. Would he dare to call the police or a doctor? Would he try to dispose of part of “me”? Was there any antidote to the drug mandragoreum that he could apply? Suppose I finally obtained some kind of release, with the coming of the Venerian dawn, and came rushing home to find my body beneath the waters of the Hudson or on a dissecting table in the New York morgue?

  Or perhaps I would remain as a disembodied brain there on Venus throughout eternity? The creatures of this planet had taken no notice of me, and I had made no attempt to communicate with them. Could I if I wished? It was a
pretty academic problem. I remembered Jack London’s remark that the blackest thing in nature was a hole in a box. That was what I was in—a hole in a box.

  From that point, I turned to wondering how long it would be before dawn on Venus. For all I knew it might not come for fifty or sixty hours—quite enough time for anything on earth to happen to my body. It would begin to need nourishment, even if nothing more drastic happened to it. There it sat, in what resembled a hypnotic trance. How long could people stay alive in such a state? I tried to remember and could not recall ever having heard anywhere. Every time I tried to review my knowledge on the subject it turned out to be too sketchy to be helpful.

  I was aroused from this reverie by a grunting sound like that made by a wallowing pig, and looking toward the mouth of the cave, saw a pair of phosphorescent eyes gleaming at the entrance. Apparently the animal, who had no outline in that absolute black, was disturbed by the smell of the place, for the grunts changed into a grinding bellow and it backed out. Perhaps I could communicate with the Venerians after all— provided my mind did not die with my distant body.