by William Tenn
A shata. No larger than a terran wolf. But if a brontosaurus can be said to be all body-bulk and very little head, the shata is just the reverse. Twelve rows of teeth, and jaws which open wide enough to admit a sheep. Regretfully and a little uncertainly, Graff holstered the electroblast and balanced the stiletto on his palm. He'd hunted lots of shata in his time, but never with a knife.
He began weaving about, conscious of his awkwardness. The knots in his left side constantly made him misjudge his body and slip off balance. And here he was hoping to take four men at a time—
As he expected, the shata was confused by his peculiar motion. It slowed to a dead stop, then slunk before him, growling. It moved in half-circles, coming in closer each time. Graff waited until it was directly in front of him. He stood still, and immediately the shata sprang, jaws gaping.
The palate. Just behind the palate is the brain. It means sticking half your arm into a fearful set of jaws, but do it right.
Graff let the rigid, distended head slide off the knife and into the mud. He wiped his blade on the green fur, standing out like so many spikes, and grimaced. A nice specimen. Shatas were good eating, too.
Well, he wasn't a hunter any more. He was a dead man looking for a coffin. He was swamp-bait if he collapsed in this weedy muck.
The terry skimmed by with his head turned questioningly.
"I'm fine," Graff reassured him. "How much farther?"
"Vetween one and two of your hours." The lizard-bird curved up and ahead, leathery wings beating slowly.
Graff plodded on. He should arrive with about an hour and a half of life left. That would give him a half-hour to an hour at most in which to operate consciously and more or less effectively. After that, there would be half an hour of writhing agony, leading into unconsciousness. After that, he would be dead.
He'd hate to leave life. It meant leaving the thrill of tracking your quarry on the bracing slope of Mount Catiline where the dodle breeds in the Season of Wind-Driven Rains; it meant leaving a wild new world that was just a-borning as far as humanity was concerned; it meant leaving Greta Bergenson.
It also meant leaving wealth. Now that lobodin had been developed, the colonization of Venus would begin in earnest. He was the last alive of a numerous family who had homesteaded half the Galertan Archipelago into their possession. He was heir to all the rich, fertile, and deserted islands his father and brothers had claimed. With Ricardo's Virus taken care of, future Venusian farmers would pay well for those scattered spots of soil in the Jefferson Sea.
Following the terry, he hit the river again. He started downstream, looking for a ford as he had before. The Black was rather wide at this point, and he wasted fifteen precious minutes before he found a bank that curved near enough to the opposite one to permit a leap. He went into the weeds to get a running start.
A shadow plummeted past him.
"Vack," the terry screamed. "Get vack! Don't jumf here. Gridnik!"
Graff paused and peered across the river. Sure enough, there was the brown and white nest on the opposite bank where he would have landed. As he watched, a single gridnik droned out, looking like a winged red ant but with the size and disposition of a large, cornered rat.
"Thanks, MacDuff," he muttered, moving away. Well, there was no help for it. He didn't have time to look for another ford. He'd have to swim.
He waited on the crumbling bank until a dozen blue flashes swept past under him. "Sardine" schools were usually far enough apart to permit a fast swimmer to get through between them. When the tiny blue fish were fifty feet away, he dived.
The force of the river knocked the breath out of him. He fought his way through the torrent. His flailing hands touched a projecting piece of rock, and he hauled himself painfully up the bank.
Graff noted gratefully that his head was clearer. The gnawing headache had diminished somewhat under the impact of the water.
The pterodactyl alighted near him. "There," it said, pointing ahead with a yellow claw. "Fuvina."
But the hunter was interested in something else. He removed his electroblast and examined its coils ruefully. The tight holster was supposed to be fairly waterproof, but it had not been intended for protecting a weapon in the Black River.
He started to throw it aside, but held it as he remembered how few cards he held in his hand.
Max Pubina's hideout was a large prefabricated job that must have cost a medium-sized fortune to import from Earth across some thirty million miles of empty space. The outlaw's house covered the top of a rise, and the soil around it was sufficiently high over the swamp proper to resemble the fine farmland of New Kalamazoo. Rich jungle growths were held at bay by a patch of sandy ground completely surrounding the house. It made it impossible for anyone or anything to creep up to the walls unobserved. Graff Dingle knew how expensive it must have been to sterilize so large an area of ground.
Crime does not pay, he mused. Except on Venus.
He reconnoitered the place cautiously, keeping well under cover. The man-made yard was empty. There was no one outside the house or the rocketship hangar attached to it. He could see the blunt nose of Pubina's sleek craft in the otherwise-deserted hangar. But they probably had guards posted at the windows.
A long white line traced a curve in his path. Graff stepped over it gingerly, glancing to the left. Sure enough, hidden in thick bushes was the mass of white filaments that was the bulk of the sucking ivy. Touch the trigger-vine, however gently, with your foot...
He came back to the terry. "Listen, MacDuff," he said, "I want you to stay out of trouble as long as possible. When I need you, I'll need you bad. Meanwhile, on the wing or on the ground, you're a sucker for an electroblast with that wingspread. But you could be useful as a lookout. I wouldn't like to be outflanked."
A grave nod of the narrow beak. "This I do." The reptile soared up in a high spiral over the house.
Now. He had to get into the house across thirty-five feet of open ground, under the electroblasts of four highly proficient murderers. How?
The headache returned, stronger than ever, and Graff swayed dizzily. Red roaring fires tore up and down his left side. He'd never make it. Swamp-bait, that's all he was, bait for the mud of the Black.
He straightened then and laughed. Bait? Well, that was one way to hunt.
The hunter strode toward the house, across the creeper of sucking ivy, counting each step. He stopped under cover of a sweeping fern just outside the sandy expanse.
"Pubina!" he yelled. "I've come for the Bergensons."
There was a flicker at one of the windows. "Who are you?"
"Graff Dingle of New Kalamazoo. Listen, Pubina, I'll trade the rest of our lobodin for Greta Bergenson and her father."
A pause while they digested this. Then: "Send one of your men in, and we'll talk it over, Dingle."
"Can't. I'm alone. Send one of your men out with the Bergensons, and I'll give you the lobodin."
No reason for Pubina to be certain that the Bergenson lobodin represented the first and only shipment. And what he claimed to have would raise the quantity to the point where all of the outlaws could be vaccinated.
The terry came down behind him and whispered gently, "Three men leave house from rear. Two coming around on left, one on right. Man on right has clearer fath, so will ve here first."
Graff gestured assent with the electroblast. He heard the terry take off again.
Pubina was being safe and cozy. Sending his henchmen while he held the fort himself!
He heard a soggy clump to the right and grinned. Why, the man was making more noise than a dryhorn freshly arrived from Terra! When he saw the black waterproof jumper through the high weeds, he stepped out from under the fern and moved backwards. He held the electroblast out, as if it worked.
The outlaw's face, lined with years of dunging inhalation, broke into a lunatic smile. Since Graff wasn't looking at him, he deduced Graff hadn't seen him. Pubina's henchman took larger steps. Graff backed.
H
e counted as he retreated. He counted slowly, taking steps that were uniform and even, looking off to the side of the outlaw, trying to keep his tortured body from making a deadly misstep.
There! He breathed gustily as he saw he'd passed the white line. The outlaw crept forward, crouching, trying to get close enough for a certain blast. He too noticed the trigger-vine and stepped daintily across it.
Graff whirled to face him then, electroblast at the ready. The man jumped—and one boot dug into the creeper!
He barely had time to scream. A haze of white tendrils whipped around him, each armed with thousands of microscopic suckers. A moment later, the bloodless husk that had been a human was being dropped from the sucking ivy's clutches, rattling like so much paper.
The scream had been heard. Graff's jungle-trained ears caught the whispers of the other two men on his left as they conferred worriedly. If only he had a decent weapon. Anything besides the stiletto! He could take such dryhorns with an old-fashioned pistol!
But he didn't have a pistol. All he had was twenty-seven years of experience on Venus as a native-born citizen. So he began to run.
He stopped after a moment and listened. The crashes behind him indicated he was being pursued. If he was afraid, the outlaws had evidently decided, he was weak enough to chase. Graff ran toward the Tuscany.
By the time he reached the river, he was weaving from side to side and sobbing. The exertion magnified his pain a thousand fold. His pursuers were getting closer. Desperately, he trotted downstream.
They were quite close now. He heard them chuckling and calling to each other triumphantly—but there was the gridnik nest!
He waited just a moment, poised on the bank of the river, until they broke into the clear, almost within electroblast range. Then, as they caught sight of him and increased their speed, he hurled his useless weapon into the striped little dome—and jumped.
—|—
When he came threshing out of the water, twenty feet further down the bank, the hideous swarm of insects were still gorging themselves. Graff crept away, nauseated. He rubbed his eyes against the darkness welling within them.
"MacDuff!" he called, his voice crackling with agony. "MacDuff!"
The terry swept down to his side.
"Listen, pal, I haven't got much time left, so we'll have to hurry. No more fancy stuff. Think you can fly in the rear windows or something, by way of diversion? It'll give me time to cross the sandy stretch."
Without a word, the lizard-bird went away. Graff came to the edge of the arid soil surrounding the pre-fab and waited.
He saw the enormous shadow tilt down behind the house and heard the crash of breaking glass. He threw himself forward. Sand boiled away from his boots. His head wobbled as if his neck had ceased to exist. Must be getting close to deadline time, Graff decided. A few minutes more at most before he caved in completely. He drew the stiletto out, holding it with difficulty in a twitching hand.
There was a yell inside the house and the sizzle of an electroblast bolt. As he smashed into the door, he heard the electroblast go off again.
He saw a huge cage holding a fluttering pterodactyl as he tottered into the living room. Dr. Bergenson and Greta were tied to chairs with long coils of fongool vine. Greta's pink overall-jumper was ripped, and there was the mark of a man's hand on her face. Pubina stood under a charred hole in the ceiling where his first blast had gone wild. At his feet, a hole neatly burned in one wing, writhed MacDuff, awaiting the finisher.
Pubina whirled to face Graff, his electroblast coming up swiftly. The hunter staggered toward him, fully conscious of his lack of speed, his almost infantile weakness. Knots of pain pulled at his knees.
The Heatwaver's forefinger flicked down on the firing button. MacDuff lifted himself on his one good wing and lunged at the boot before him. His long beak closed on Pubina's ankle. There was a horrible bony crunch, and the outlaw cursed, turning to beat down at the reptile.
Graff reached them, almost falling against Pubina. For a moment, he couldn't coordinate his arm muscles enough to use the stiletto; then, sinking his teeth deep into his own lip, he drove the thin blade ahead. Pubina shrieked and fell, the stiletto throbbing in his side.
Deciding to let MacDuff finish him, even if the terry was making a mess of it, Graff bent over clumsily and retrieved the electroblast Pubina had dropped. He almost went over backwards as he straightened.
Placing one foot in front of the other intently, he walked to the Bergensons. He slid like a man walking on banana skins. Darkness roiled all about him now, and every cell in his body seemed to writhe.
The bottle containing the vaccine was on a table, he noticed. It was still full; the shining hypodermic beside it was empty. Good.
Very carefully, he burned off the fongool vine with the electroblast at low power. Greta rushed toward him, but he slipped and fell at her feet.
"Darling," he heard her sob; it sounded as if her voice were on the other side of the Jefferson Sea. "You're infected! Oh, Graff, Graff! The lobodin won't work on an infected case!"
"I know," he muttered thickly, and let his head loll round to where the terry was inching along the floor to the cage in the corner. The last thing he saw was the neat little hole in the wing.
"Be seeing you, MacDuff," Graff whispered as the darkness came down, pin-pointed with multitudes of exploding yellow dots...
That was why he was so surprised when he opened his eyes to see the terry perched by his bed with a neat patch of gauze taped to one wing.
"How in hell did you pull through, MacDuff?" he asked.
"The same as you," the lizard-bird told him. "We are voth natives of Venus."
"Huh?" He raised himself waveringly on one elbow. He was lying in the Bergenson home in New Kalamazoo. They must have used Pubina's rocketship to fly back. "What do you mean—native?"
"Just what he says, Graff." Greta pushed open the screen-door and bustled in with a pile of linen. "You were both born on Venus. Father says that you must have had all kinds of skin abrasions as an infant: your body developed a natural immunity to Ricardo's Virus. We'll still use the vaccine on everybody else, including the children, just to be on the safe side. But Father has felt for a long time that the blood of the pioneers would adjust to its environment. When you got sick but didn't die, you proved it."
"Well, I'd like to point out," Graff said, as he sat up to permit Greta to change his sheets, "that I am very, very happy to have given your father a chance to prove that theory."
MacDuff closed a lidless eye in an assenting reptilian wink.
THE PUZZLE OF PRIIPIIRII
The bravely questing light of Hartwick's helmet beam disclosed the tunnel abruptly becoming five more as it dipped sharply down. He halted, perplexedly scratching his transparent visor with a metal-gloved hand.
Unable to stop short, Boule, the expedition's photographer, tripped into him, cursed, and cursed again as the three scientists piled up against his back with weirdly echoing crashes of spacesuit against spacesuit.
"Careful, Hartwick, careful!" Lutzman's bass voice warned into their headsets from the rear. "Another tangle like that, and we'll rip the line to Bhishani."
The guide nodded abstractedly at the bioareologist. He spent a long, careful glance at the faintly fluorescing cable connecting the loops in their suits and stretching lengthily behind them through corridor after intersecting corridor to the assistant archaeologist on the surface. The cable was their link with life.
"Five more branchings," he stated at last, pointing ahead.
"An honest-to-Minotaur labyrinth," Punnello, the senior archaeologist, muttered as he extricated himself from between Boule and Lutzman and peered over Hartwick's shoulder. "We differ from Theseus only in that we use an insulated wire instead of a spool of thread."
"And that we won't find a Martian version of the bull-man monster in the heart of this neurotic temple," the bioareologist pointed out. "Not that I look forward to it; he'd be rather hungry after—how long
?"
Punnello shrugged his shoulders resoundingly. "At least a quarter of a million years since Priipiirii had a worshipper. No, from those wall friezes we've been passing, I'd say he was as crustacean as the race which conceived him."
"Which isn't very crustacean according to Earth standards," Lutzman observed. "Why does he continually change his sex? When we dug away the sand and stepped through that first trapdoor on the roof, there was a large statue of him as a male in front of the cross-passage. After the first level, there were only female representations; they became hermaphrodite and later neuter. Down here, he shifts back and forth through all four in each frieze. And yet the Priipiirii ideogram on each of his pictures is unmistakable.
"Why, for that matter, isn't there an occasional hint of the daily life of the average mortal, such as we found in the other temples? They showed their gods being worshipped and occasionally disregarded; here, there is a steady reiteration of Priipiirii only—Priipiirii at work and at play, as it were. Odd, that business of play, considering how evil other Martians thought him."
"Don't you?" Boule asked suddenly. "I've been snapping flash shots of this jovial character in all his phases, and I like him less all the time. I don't know why ancient Mars tabooed him, but he sure radiates the impression of happy executioner. Frankly, I'm sorry I came on this jaunt. I don't relish wandering around in the place where the Martian devil was worshipped, and I still haven't accepted those trapdoors on the roof of the temple—as if the inhabitants knew it would be buried by the desert one day."
Hartwick paused in the middle of an impatient gesture at the five tunnels ahead of them and swept his helmet light through the gloom until it came to rest on Boule's visored face. Back in Bubbleburg, when he'd been commissioned to lead an expedition to the fabled temple of Priipiirii, the Martian Archaeological Foundation had assured him that the scientists of the party would all be picked, psycho-certified men.