by J F Bone
But there was life—plenty of it—and the biggest, deadliest and most indestructible form was the swampsucker. Imagine, if you can, a hundred meter length of suction hose, two meters in diameter, armored with ten centimeter thick chitin plates, and possessing a rudimentary intelligence and highly developed sense organs that can detect disturbances in water pressure up to a half kilometer away. Now endow that hose with a voracious appetite and a digestive system that can handle anything from leaves to animal protein and you have the swampsucker. Its toothless maw, fully a meter and a half in diameter, is ringed with hairlike stinging cells whose long processes, tipped with barbs containing a potent cytotoxin can reach out a full ten meters in any direction. Behind the mouth are two large collapsible muscular sacs set along the gullet. These can be dilated with extreme rapidity causing a violent suction that engulfs any prey paralyzed by the stinging cells. Food and water are forced down the gullet and the excess water removed through a sievelike valve in the stomach. The food remains to be digested, absorbed and excreted through the long gut filling most of the posterior two-thirds of the animal. The nervous system consists of a series of ganglia connected by a doral nerve trunk. Each ganglion supports a number of sense organs roughly comparable to eyes and ears—and pressure receptors like those along the sides of earthly fishes. It is a formidable beast, that like the fabled Choggemugger, doesn’t die all at once, and until men came to Venus was the undisputed lord and master of the entire planet. It isn’t now. It had met a smarter, more voracious, more greedy life form and was rapidly being exterminated. If it only had brains it might have held its world, but ganglia are no match for a functioning cerebrum—and Venus was rapidly becoming man’s world.
TO FIND a swampsucker and record its voice would take a full-fledged expedition, since the giant wormlike creatures had been driven from the polar and temperate regions to a thin strip of the subtropics girdling the planet where the temperature was too high for humans. Venerean life existed there in relative comfort, but even air conditioning and insulation couldn’t make it comfortable for man.
It would require an expedition which Martinelli reluctantly agreed to finance. It took a considerable amount of his share of the industrial diamonds to procure the necessary swampcats, men, and materiel. And since Venerean colonists are by nature dilatory and haggling, it took considerably more time. I didn’t like this latter aspect since we had little better than two months to complete the contract and return to Earth, and time was running short. So I spent some of my own share of the bort to speed things along. At that, it took better than a week to accumulate the necessary gear—a task that could have been done on Earth or Mars in less than a day.
For some reason, Martinelli had become morose and unapproachable. He kept to himself and discouraged conversation and company. At best he hadn’t been too gregarious. After nearly nine months in the close confinement of a spaceship, men normally get to know each other pretty well, but none of us really knew Martinelli. He was an island to himself, a closed system that none of us could enter. Not even I, who was closer to him than any other man on the “Queen” could figure out precisely what made him operate. Lately he had taken to chumming with Bellini, the survivor of the two “experts” he had brought aboard, and pointedly ignored me.
I suppose I had it coming after that exhibition on Mercury—but why he should choose Bellini as a companion was beyond me. The fellow knew his way around Venus all right, but from an intellectual point of view he simply wasn’t. He was a cultural cipher, his conversation limited to women and occasional monosyllabic grunts. The crew had milked him dry in less than four months, and while they tolerated him, they didn’t exactly encourage his company. Possibly, I speculated wryly, it was a case of two misogynists getting together.
We set out in two swampcats—combination boats and track layers twenty meters long, armored and gunned heavily enough to discourage even the most ferocious life on this ferocious planet. A Venerean colonist named Riley, a big red bearded brute of a man, commanded one boat, and Bellini had charge of the other. And for the first time Martinelli didn’t come with me. He went with Riley and I with Bellini. We kept to the waterways, watching the dank yellowish green vegetation slip by, and listening to the pounding rain that clattered intermittently on our metal roof and the peaceful hum of the nuclear engine in its safety well amidships.
Five days found us well in the subtropic zone and the temperature was rapidly becoming uncomfortable. We pushed on more slowly—separated about two miles apart, twisting our way through the tortuous waterways, looking for swampsuckers. We saw one on the second day of our search, a young male, scarcely twenty meters long. The little fellow had guts if not good sense for he came at us with every intent of swallowing us, paused as he sensed that our size was somewhat larger than his own, and vanished in a pall of greasy black smoke as Bellini incinerated him with the semi-portable in the turret on the roof.
“They grow up,” Bellini said coldly as he safetied the guns.
WE KEPT in close radio contact since we couldn’t see each other, and continued to head southward. The ambient temperature rose steadily. Our Kallik feather insulation was set nearly at full negative. It kept the temperature bearable, but even so, it was miserable since the feathers did nothing about the humidity. Only Bellini seemed to be able to keep control of his temper. The remaining three of us, myself, Ward O’Banion—the Solar Union man—and Karl Albertini our native engineer, snapped and snarled at each other as the misty silence chewed at our nerves.
“We’re getting into the area where the big ones hang out,” Bellini said as our swamp cat churned slowly through a weed-choked waterway. “They don’t come into these shallows—can’t push their weight through them—which is why we have the weeds. They need enough water to support them. But when we reach a clear channel—look out. There’ll be one in the area.”
We went forward slowly, partially on our tracks and partly on propellors, leaving a broad trail of dirty gray mud and torn vegetation behind us. The sunlight, filtered and diffused by the hazy atmosphere and the impenetrable cloud blanket overhead, turned the whole area into a misty nightmare where one direction was the same as another. A man outside would have no chance of finding his way back to Venus City. Even if he managed to avoid the deadly life in the swamps, the heat and humidity would quickly boil the life from him. It takes a trip to Equatorial Venus for one to realize how dependent man is on temperature and humidity. Our protective mechanisms of sweat glands and evaporation would be no help at all in this enormous steam bath.
I looked at the outside temperature indicator. A hundred and fifty—nearly at the boiling point of water on Venus. Farther south the water did boil—contributing clouds of steam to the hothouse effect that made Venus habitable only at the Polar regions. Men were at work terra-forming Venus. They had been at work for nearly two hundred years, but their labors had shown precious small result. The scientists figured that perhaps another century would see the breakpoint, when the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere was reduced to the point where the hothouse cycle could be broken. Earth plants, bred for Venerean conditions were doing their bit to absorb the excess gas in the air, and were doing it well—but the effects weren’t apparent yet—nor would they be until the critical point was reached. The rains would come then. Enormous rains like those once seen on Earth in the days of her youth. And there would likely be floods—enormous floods that would put the stories of Noah’s Ark to shame. And when it was all over, Venus would have a climate approximating that of Earth, and on the island continents rising above the shallow seas, Earthmen could live in relative comfort and build a new future. But that was centuries away and now men clung here rather than stood, and existed rather than lived.
I didn’t like Venus. I hated its heat, its heavy oxygen-starved air, its swamps and insensately ferocious life. I would be happy when this trip was over and we were again in the clean blackness of space with the stars gleaming in unwinking splendor about us and th
e sun dazzling with its prominences and corona. And I would be more happy back on Earth with this Odyssey completed and Martinelli’s fee in my pocket. A year was a long time to be on the flit, and like all sailors from time immemorial I would be glad to see the home port again.
Our vehicle tipped forward into a broad scoured channel of black water.
“Here’s a lair,” Bellini said. “Check the ports and see if we’re buttoned up. A sucker can get his stingers through an open port as easily as you can walk through a door. Check the ventilator screens, and see that every hole and opening is sealed.”
I spread the word and the two crewmen and I checked the craft and satisfied ourselves that she was as tight as a spacer.
“All secure,” I reported.
“Good!” Bellini said. “I’ll start the oscillator now.”
“Eh?”
“It’s just an ordinary oscillator,” Bellini explained. “The vibrating diaphragm is under water. We found out that it’s the best gadget to attract them when we cleaned out the temperate zones.” He flipped a switch arid slowly turned the knob of the rheostat back and forth, listening intently as he did so.
I HEARD it almost as soon as he did. Or rather, I felt it. You don’t hear most of the sounds an adult sucker makes. You feel them. They start in the subsonic range and rise to a ululating shriek that practically lifts the top off your head. O’Banion snapped on his recording apparatus and bent over his dials, fiddling with them for a moment until he got the mix right. He pushed back his headset and looked at me.
“Weird, isn’t it?” he asked. “It gets you,” I admitted. And frankly I was understating. Subsonics depress me. Some people are terrified by them. Others become morbid, and still others can be shocked into unconsciousness. There are a whole range of responses that can be triggered by low frequency sound. Personally, I don’t like them.
“Cut the engines,” Bellini ordered. “Quiet. Don’t move. Don’t make a sound. There’s two of them out there.”
The whole vehicle was vibrating as two fat smooth waves came toward us from each end of the weedless channel. We crouched near the portholes watching the waves approach. From each of them came crimson glints as the dull light struck the upper edges of the giant mouth orifices.
“If those two are males,” Bellini whispered, “you’ll see something that you can tell your grandchildren. If one of them is a female, you’ll see something you can’t tell anyone.” He chuckled, the sound a harsh whisper in the damp stillness that surrounded us.
Sweat broke out on my face as the two waves rushed together—and the water exploded!
A giant geyser erupted beside the boat and from the center of the boiling foam we could catch glimpses of the gargantuan snakelike armored bodies writhing and twisting beside us.
“Males!” Bellini said in a tone of satisfaction a3 the water boiled and heaved. An armored body crashed against the side of our vehicle, hurling us sideways through the water. The shock knocked me from my feet and as I scrambled to get up I saw Bellini slide into the gunner’s seat and grasp the controls of the semi-portable in the turret on the roof.
“Don’t!” I yelled, but Bellini was past hearing. His heavy features were convulsed with hate as he twisted the twin blasters to bear on the boiling water beside us. And the guns added their din to the roaring and bellowing outside.
Gouts of black smoke leaped from the nearest body mixed with puffs of steam as the bolts struck and incinerated whole sectiuxis of the monster. It was dead at the first blast, but its decentralized rudimentary nervous system didn’t realize the fact. But it did realize we were present from the vibrations of our guns. A score of filaments leaped from the water and snapped around the turret as the severed mouth parts of the monster attempted to seize and paralyze the half inch armor plate of the turret.
Bellini twisted the gun controls, his face a mixture of rage and fear. Overloaded servos whined and a thin curl of smoke came from beneath the seat, and then the safety relays clicked as the overload became too great.
In that instant we were disarmed.
I LOOKED outside at the thick bundle of filaments and the ghastly nacreous pink of the two meter wide, roughly circular mouth orifice hanging from our topside, and as I watched the filaments tightened convulsively as the front end of the monster died.
“Where’s the other one?” I snapped at Bellini.
He looked past me. He hadn’t heard a word I’d said. His eyes were fixed on the mass of protoplasm hanging from our topside. We were listing dangerously, our upper deck perilously near the muddy water as the weight of the front parts of the sucker dragged us down.
“Bellini!” I shouted, putting every ounce of authority I possessed into my voice.
He looked at me, his glazed eyes focussing slowly. “Yeah—what’s the matter?” he said thickly. “What’s going on?”
“You damned fool!” I raved. “What in hell were you trying to do—kill us? Where’s the other sucker?”
“What other sucker?” His voice was thick with shock.
“The one you weren’t shooting at—” I stopped. He wasn’t getting it. Something had snapped inside his mind. For the moment, at least, he was merely an automaton. I clambered painfully to my feet. O’Banion was lying on the deck, bleeding from a gash over his temple. He was out cold. I looked down the engine room well. Albertini was sitting on the deck next to the reactor, his leg twisted oddly beneath him.
“You all right?” I asked.
“I think it’s broken,” Albertini said, gesturing at his leg. “I fell down the hatch when the sucker hit us. What happened up there?”
“Bellini blasted one of the suckers,” I said. “Its front parts are wrapped around the turret. Bellini’s in shock. O’Banion’s knocked cold, and we’re damn near capsized.”
“That’s no news,” the engineer said, gesturing at the slanted deck beneath him. Point is—what are you going to do about it. We can’t travel like this.”
“First, maybe I’d better set your leg.”
“That can wait. We’d better get straightened up and get out of here. Without guns we haven’t a chance. You’ll have to free that turret.”
“Me and who else?” I asked “I’m not going out there alone.”
“Me,” a voice said above me. I looked up. Bellini was standing in the hatchway. “I got us into this, and I’ll get us out.” His leathery face wore its usual normal stupid expression and his eyes were clear.
“What happened to the other sucker?” I asked.
“It’s busy. It won’t bother us. It’s eating the one I killed. Oughta keep it busy for days.” He grimaced. “Guess I sorta made a fool of myself up there, but I hate those critters. One of them ate my brother.”
“Oh,” I said. Actually there wasn’t anything more to say. “Well—what do we do about the piece that’s hanging on us?”
“We cut it off. Careful. Those stingers are still loaded. They’ll stiffen anyone who touches them.”
“What’ll they do to a man?”
“I don’t know. Nobody that’s had anything to do with them ever came back to tell about it.”
“Oh fine,” I said. “You do the cutting. I’ll hold.”
He grinned at me. “We’ll both cut,” he said. “You may be skipper on the ‘Queen’, but you’re crew here. This is my show.”
I had to admit that he was right. We went back topside and I checked O’Banion. He was all right, but still dazed. In an hour or so he’d probably be as good as ever except for a headache.
WE TOOK brush axes, big broad-bladed things with razor edges, made for hacking through the tough rubbery growth on Venus’ surface, and cautiously made our way out the after hatch to the slanting deck.
Filaments were everywhere, tipped with rows of fat, spindle-shaped excrescences armed with needle-like prongs.
“Stay away from those,” Bellini said. “Chop ‘em loose and rake ‘em overboard. Once we get rid of those stingers we can start on the rest of the mess. He
looked over the side at the gaping, corrugated, six-foot funnel of rubbery flesh. Dead, it was gray. Its nacreous red color had vanished but it was, if possible, even more horrible than it had been alive. I looked down at the fringe of wrist-thick cilia surrounding its outer rim and shivered.
We worked slowly and carefully, cutting our way through the mass of interlacing filaments covering the deck, working slowly forward to the dense mesh-work of pallid strands that virtually hid the turret.
“God! What a beast!” I muttered as my axe sliced through the rubbery flesh.
“You don’t know the half of it,” Bellini panted beside me as his axe sliced through two thick filaments. The gaping mouth below us sagged a little and the swampcat rolled sluggishly in the water. “Another four or five and I think we’ll be able to clear the turret.” He drove his axe into the nearest fiber.
“Yeah—looks like we’re going to make it all right,” I said.
“You never can tell—we just might be attracting another with all the noise we’re making,” Bellini said.