by Don Wilcox
Then the vividness of his dream swept over him again and he wondered. He touched his eyelids, just as the dream had done. A little of the mist feeling was still there. He looked at his fingertips. Little touches of pinkish white dust were on them.
Pinkish white powder.
It was like the dust from the petal of a flower. He touched his eyelids again. A little more of the dust clung to his fingertips.
He stared, utterly mystified. All he could say was, “Dream dust . . . Dream dust. . . And all the time she was whispering . . .”
For several minutes he sat, pondering the mystery. Then a great roar of thunder shook him out of his reverie and he laughed at himself.
“I must be balmy to let a dream run away with me.”
The storm was coming on rapidly. To the north he could see the purple curtain of rain moving down over the dark green mountain sides. He began moving his equipment back into the inner corners of the cave. The floor was dry warm earth, but he could see that it had been beaten and packed by previous rain and windstorms. It was well to prepare for the worst.
The most important thing was to fasten some protection over the six-foot entrance. The small canvas tent he had brought filled the bill. He drove stakes into the cracks between stones and fastened the canvas to them.
Next, he picked up several loose rocks and stacked them to make two dry platforms above the level of the floor, in case the water should beat in. One was for his goods, the other for his bed.
“All right, bring on your storm, Venus,” he said aloud, though he could hardly hear himself against the roar of the approaching rain.
A streak of lavender lightning flashed through the sky, and the gray waves to the south were suddenly close and vivid, then gone again.
“If I could only sketch such a picture,” Stupe thought.
With his packet of colored crayons and a sketch pad, he sat in the entrance of the cave, the canvas drapery slapping his shoulder.
Another flash of lightning. There was something luminous on his crayons. Pink dust. Dream dust. Only now it was glowing faintly. And when the lightning came again, be saw that the dust spots flashed like mirrors.
“On which two pencils?” Stupe was suddenly on fire with excitement. “Which two?”
It was dark enough that he applied his flashlight to make sure. Yes, the orange and the red.
That wasn’t all. Stupe was certain, as he examined the pencils by flashlight that the visitor of his dreams had left not only “dream dust” but also fingerprints.
It was all very curious. A thousand questions fought back and forth in Stupe’s mind. Who? What? Why? His guesses only confused him. The mysteries of Venus were playing tricks upon his reason. What were the secrets of this land? What were the rules? How was he to know what was real and what was unreal?
He stared at the purplish black clouds, rolling closer, gathering power as they came.
If he could have had his wish just then, the clouds would have parted to give him a glimpse of the clear sky. Somehow he yearned to know that a certain planet called the earth was still up there somewhere.
But now the first raindrops came thudding down, beating up a wave of dust, barely visible in the growing darkness.
“Wingmen!”
The lightning highlighted a small flock of flying forms racing down from the northeast. Six or seven of them.
“Trying to outrun the rain!”
The thought was exciting. The opaque curtain of rain was driving them. They were coming fast, all right. The dark blotch was growing.
Another flash. They were coming straight toward him.
“They’re after this cave!” Stupe suddenly realized. “Of course. They know this spot. They’re coming here for shelter.”
Raindrops were battering the canvas curtain, its loose ends flapping. Back of it, he watched through a loop, and waited.
Another flash. The six or seven wingmen were just above his door, beating their wings for a landing.
CHAPTER XI
Until he had heard their squawking voices, Stupe did not know what he was going to do.
“Veek-lo-grakie-grakie!”
“Kimme-seebo-seebo-vanno-veeklo!”
Their words were nothing he could understand. But their shrill, clattering tenpin sounds were something to be remembered. On the previous night, when the three angry winged creatures had invaded the dining room, he had caught the weird metallic overtones that had characterized their squawks. Although they had, on that occasion, used some words of English along with their native jabber, their tones had been as different from human voices as a fire gong from cathedral chimes.
They beat the air with their wings, their bare feet thumped to a landing. One of them gave a shrill cry of surprise. He had bumped into the canvas that blocked the way into the cave.
It was then that Stupe, crouched within the canvas curtain, played his strategy.
“Gr-r-rowl-l-l-l!” He yelled with all his voice. “Br-r-our-r-r-uff!”
He rattled the canvas, growling like a mad animal.
“Eee-vee-eek!” One of the wingmen screamed. Or was it a winged woman? Other terrified screeches joined in. Wings beat the air. Male and female voices squawked against the roar of the storm as the whole band of them instantly took to their wings.
Scared out! A loud voice had done it. It might never work again, but it had turned the trick this time. Yes, they were flying away. Stupe watched through a look in the canvas. A flash of lightning highlighted their wet, half-clad bodies.
They were beautiful all right, Stupe thought. His glimpse of a graceful female flying away with a winged infant in her arms was a picture that stuck in his mind. The little fellow’s wings were crushed tight against his mother’s body, his shiny knees drawn up against the single arm that held him, his bright eyes were looking down as the ground went spinning away beneath him. His mother’s wings stroked wide and full, her string-like hair blew back from her forehead, her back was arched a trifle like as if in a swan dive.
When the next flash of lightning came, the winged party was out of sight. Stupe wondered. How long had that mother being racing ahead of the storm, carrying her child, trying to reach this very cave before the cloudburst caught her?
The more he thought of it, the more uncomfortable he felt. Did he have any right to take possession of wingmen’s caves? He would return the favor some time he thought.
It was a good cave. It kept him warm and dry through the night until the storm was spent.
The morning sun brought him his first sight of the huge red snails.
“Two-ton snails,” the Ambassador had called them. “They sleep in the shade in dry weather and go traveling when it rains.”
This morning they were traveling. Stupe found it interesting to watch them through his binoculars. He counted more than fifty of them moving along the hillsides. They were going too slowly to be going anywhere, he thought. And much too slowly to make any trouble for a fleet-footed human like himself. Let them go where they pleased, so long as they didn’t interfere with his plan to hike over the fingers.
From a distance they showed as shiny red rings of gelatin with white centers.
Later in the day, Stupe came upon three of them at close range. He had slipped along the mountainside from one hiding place to another, ever on the watch for wingmen. Coming over a rise, he saw three of the two-ton snails, only twenty-five yards ahead of him. They looked more than ever like immense mounds of red gelatin, each carrying a giant biscuit on top. The cream colored biscuits were shells into which the whole mass of gelatinous substance could draw in case of danger.
But they were slow about drawing into their protective houses, and were therefore easy victims for hungry wingmen.
Stupe ducked for a hiding place. Fifteen wingmen flying in a graceful squadron, swooped down as casually as if for a drink of water. They landed near the three huge snails and each grabbed for himself a handful of the red gelatin. Then they took to the air again, chatteri
ng as they went, and munching their food.
“The food problem is simple in this land,” Stupe thought.
The shapeless red creatures had evidently felt the attack. For minutes after the wingmen had gone on, the ground creatures were still contracting. When at last all of their gelatinous bodies had been drawn inside their shells, they might have appeared from a distance as three round yellow rocks.
Minutes later they began to come out again, and resumed their slow gliding locomotion.
“No faces, no eyes, no mouth, no arms or legs,” Stupe observed. “Just a mass of protoplasm. I wonder what they taste like.”
As they moved along they left a trail through the mountain-side vegetation that resembled the path of a seven-foot lawn mower. They were absorbing all the puffy little green plants they encountered, evidently digesting them by some simple chemical process.
Stupe’s curiosity got the better of him. He ran past the nearest snail and grabbed a handful of its substance. It was cool and sticky to his hand, like red jell. To his taste it was not sweet, as he had somehow expected. The flavor sickened him.
He tried again, three or four times that afternoon, to learn to eat the stuff, but it seemed to act as a poison for him. After losing his food, he made his way back to the cave for several hours of fasting.
He was disappointed. If he could have endured red snail flesh, he would have had no food problem to worry about.
Two days later, as it happened, food became the most important of all problems. For some time during his absence from his cave some winged visitors must have dropped in to pay their respects. And not finding anyone at home they had made away with everything they could find. The food had been hidden well enough, he had believed, but their sense of smell must have led them to it.
Crippled for supplies, Stupe nevertheless embarked on his hike westward toward the tenth finger.
“I’m chasing dreams,” he kept telling himself.
There was no longer any luminous dust on his colored pencils. His eyelids had long since lost the touch of mist. There was very little, in fact, to persuade him that it had not all been an elaborate hallucination.
But there were still the colored circles on his map.
It was his purpose to walk far enough to look out upon that spot in the sea again. Two days to go. Two days to return. He should be back by the week’s end when the plane was scheduled to arrive again with Hefty and the others.
“Hunger, however, has changed many a plan,” Stupe Smith said to himself on the afternoon of his second day of hiking.
In his many hours alone, he found it helpful to talk to himself, and he was doing his best to temper his hunger with philosophy.
“Down through the ages hunger has changed the fates of men and nations. Some day it may determine the fates of planets.”
He pondered over this as he paced along the mountainside. He had ascended to the crest of the eleventh finger and was following it toward the sea. By night he hoped to reach the point. Then, if he could find food and regain his strength, he might swim across to the tenth point at dawn.
“If earth man can learn to eat the flesh of the giant snails,” he continued, “he may readily adapt himself to Venus. But if he can’t, the winged men may outlast him in this land. They will borrow his tools and his speech. If they are clever enough to organize in great numbers, they may learn to suppress the powers of earth man and dominate him. If I live to see that day—”
The thought did not appeal to him. The if was too painful to consider. He had stumbled twice in the past hour, and not from awkwardness.
Late that night, dead tired and hungrier than he had ever been before in all his twenty-eight years, he discovered quite by accident, a new source of food.
It happened when he tripped and rolled for a short distance down a steep slope. He barked his hand on the root of a tree, and put the injured knuckle to his lips. In doing so he tasted something sweet. A bit of puffy cookie-shaped grass leaf had stuck to his hand.
“It can’t be poison,” he thought. “Those red snails were eating cookie-grass.”
A moment later he was feasting on the same sort of vegetation he had been trampling underfoot all day.
“Food,” he murmured philosophically, “can turn the fortunes of men and nations . . . Tomorrow I’ll swim across to the tenth finger.”
CHAPTER XII
It would be approximately a two-mile swim. If Stupe had known that Hefty and two others had taken off from the capital that morning and were on their way with an important message, he wouldn’t have made the plunge.
It was a perilous swim. Not because Stupe wasn’t good for two miles. He was good for four times that distance on a calm sea. It was perilous because this morning’s visibility at sea level was about eighteen yards.
“I should have a fog-horn,” he said aloud. The fog was so dense that he felt as if he were speaking in a small room—yet there was no telling how far his voice might carry or who might be within hearing.
Would the wingmen swim close to the water’s surface on foggy mornings? He kept a sharp lookout for trouble.
The little three-foot raft which he towed was riding smoothly. It was drawn by a line attached to his belt. He had built it with a tripod of three-foot poles upon which he was able to hang his clothes (with the exception of his trunks and belt) and such portable equipment as his ax, his binoculars, and his pistol.
Abruptly he ceased talking aloud. He had a distinct feeling that someone had heard him.
The goods must be watched closely, he thought. He took up to little slack in the tow-line, and kept turning to make sure it was following safely.
He swam on silently. When would the shore come in sight? Had he turned in his course? There, wasn’t that the bank ahead—that large white stone?
It was shaped like a horse. A bundle of mist in the shape of a horse—with a rider—a girl—
No, he was only seeing things. For it was gone and there was only the fog. There was no shore at all, only the smooth gray water.
There was the white mist again—now in another direction. The shore must be that way.
Stupe swam with a swifter stroke. There must be land just ahead. That dim gray outline—could it be that which Stupe had dreamed feverishly of seeing—a horse and rider in the sea?
Again they were gone. A sort of luminous glow hung in the fog where Stupe had thought he had seen them. Luminous like the dream dust he had found on his pencils.
Where now? The apparition had come and gone twice, each time too dim in detail for Stupe to be certain it wasn’t a figment of his imaginings. His heart was thumping wildly. Could it be?
He paused, treading water, and the little raft drifted up to touch his elbow. He took the binoculars and tried to penetrate the gray mist. His efforts were useless. The flashlight might do better.
He shined the beam into the grayness, turning it slowly like a beacon. At the same time he called.
“Hello-o-o-o!”
He listened, he called three times. Then listening, he was startled to hear something strangely familiar. It was not a response to his call—far from it. It was the low drone of an airplane sailing over, high above the fog.
“Hefty!” he thought. “He’s come to look for me. And here I am, somewhere in the sea—lost.”
CHAPTER XIII
Hefty Winkle was not the worrying type. His good fists were so dependable that he rarely felt incompetent. But on the previous afternoon he had sensed that there were too many invisible troubles in the air. The sort that he did not know how to combat.
“We’re missin’ out on something,” he had said to Velma Stevens. “Does anyone know what caused all that ruckus the other night?”
“I’m no mind reader,” Velma said. “Why don’t you ask the captain?”
“By George, I will. My pal Stupe is out there on his own, trustin’ that we are back of him. It’s my business to find out what goes on.”
“If you learn anything, tell me.�
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Hefty would have stormed the fortress of the captain if an attendant had not dissuaded him. The captain was said to be in a serious condition. No visitors were allowed.
Hefty’s next move was to call upon the Ambassador. He waited in the outer office for an hour and was at last admitted. He was not used to conferring with the dignitaries and he shuffled awkwardly before the Ambassador’s desk.
“I just got a few questions maybe you can answer.”
Ambassador Jewell, for all his austerity, seemed to welcome the conference.
“I have a few questions for you, too, Mr. Winkle. Would you like to take a walk with me across the spaceport?”
Hefty took long strides trying to keep pace with the tall Ambassador. This was an event in his life. Here he was hobnobbing with the most important Man in Venus. Stupe should see him now.
The Ambassador talked casually at first. He spoke of the future developments of this land. This spaceport would accommodate a huge volume of traffic in the future years. The great financiers of America were sure to watch this planet with interest.
“Gee!” All this important talk made Hefty feel like a potential millionaire. Then the Ambassador came to the point.
“I want to ask you, Mr. Winkle, what you know about the purpose of this expedition. Not Stupe Smith’s purpose, but the Captain’s.”
They walked in silence a moment before Hefty could comprehend this question. Then—
“You mean that Stupe and the captain aren’t here for the same reason?”
“That’s what I am wondering.”
Their path took them past the warehouses and hangars. As usual, the scene was humming with activity. A few official planes were being serviced. The Wellington spaceship stood near the farthest hangar and the Fiddle brothers were at work loading the two Venus planes nearby. Owing to the presence of Thelma Stevens they were dawdling at their work.
Another member of the Wellington party, Dick Bracket, leaned against the corner of the hangar observing the workers with an air of detachment.