Collected fiction, p.282
Collected Fiction, page 282
“A man. Pretty heavy-set, too. Wearing Earth shoes, not sandals like most of ours. Callahan, probably.”
Vanning nodded. “He didn’t come back by this route.”
“He didn’t come back,” Goodenow said shortly. “This is a one-way trail.”
“Well, I’m going after him.”
“It’s suicidal. But—I suppose I can’t talk you out of it?”
“You can’t.”
“Well, come back to town and I’ll find you an outfit. Supplies and a hack-knife. Maybe I can find some men willing to go with you.”
“No,” Vanning said. “I don’t want to waste time. I’ll start now.” He took a few steps, and was halted by Goodenow’s restraining grip.
“Hold on,” the consul said, a new note in his voice. He looked closely into Vanning’s face, and pursed his lips in a soundless whistle.
“You’ve got it,” he said. “I should have noticed before.”
“Got what?”
“The North-Fever, man! Now listen to me—”
Vanning’s headache suddenly exploded in a fiery burst of white pain, which washed away and was gone, leaving his brain cool and . . . different. It was like a—like a cold fever. He found his thoughts were moving with unusual clarity to a certain definite point . . . North. Of course he had to go north. That was what had been wrong with him all day. He had been fighting against the urge. Now he realized that it should be obeyed, instead.
He blinked at Goodenow’s heavy, worried face. “I’m all right. No fever. I want to find Callahan, that’s all.”
“Like hell it is,” the consul said grimly. “I know the symptoms. You’re coming back with me till you’re well.”
“No.”
Goodenow made a movement as though to pinion Vanning’s hands behind his back. The detective writhed free and sent a short-arm jab to Goodenow’s jaw. There was power behind that blow. The consul went over backwards, his head thumping against a white tree-bole.
He lay still.
VANNING didn’t look at the motionless body. He turned and began to follow Callahan’s trail. But he wasn’t watching the footprints. Some instinct seemed to guide him.
North . . . North!
His head no longer hurt. It felt strangely cool, numb and stinging almost pleasantly. The magnetic pull drew him on. Deeper and deeper into the jungle . . .
Distantly he heard Goodenow’s shout, but ignored it. The consul couldn’t stop him. But he might try. Vanning ran for a while, lightly and easily, till the wilderness of Venus had swallowed him without trace. Then he slowed down to a walk. He would have been grateful for a brief rest, but he could not stop. Not Now . . .
The fog closed in. Silver mist veiled the strange, ghostly forest. Then it was torn away as a gust of wind drove down from the upper air. Above, the clouds twisted in tortured writhings; but Vanning did not look up. Not once did he turn his head. He faced north . . . he plodded north . . . he slogged through mushy, stinking swamp that rose at times to his waist . . .
A sane man would have skirted the bog. Vanning floundered across, and swam when he could no longer walk. Somewhere to the left he heard the coughing mutter of a swamp-cat’s engine, but he did not see the machine. His vision was restricted to a narrow circle directly ahead.
Dimly he felt pain. The clinging, soft nettles of Venus ripped at his clothing and his skin. Leeches clung to his legs till they fell off, satiated. Vanning went on. He was a robot—an automaton.
In silence the pale forest slipped by in a fantastic procession. Lianas often made a tangled snare where Vanning fought for minutes before breaking through. Luckily, the vines had little tensile strength, but soon the man was exhausted and aching in every limb. Far above, the clouds had thickened and darkened into what passed for night on fog-shrouded Venus. But the trees gave a phosphorescent light of their own. Weird beyond imagination was the scene, with the bloody, reeling figure of the man staggering on toward the north—
North. Ever north. Until overtaxed muscles refused to bear the burden longer, and Vanning collapsed into exhausted unconsciousness.
He did not know when he awoke. Presently he found himself walking again. Nothing had changed. The jungle was denser, and the cool light from above filtered down once more. Only the light was cool. The air itself was sticky and suffocating.
He went on into hell.
Days and nights merged into a fantastic pattern of dull torture. Some distantly sane portion of his brain held back and watched, but could not help. Days and nights. There was no food. There was water, for as Vanning splashed through shallow pools he would bend his head to drink of the foul liquid. Once his feet crunched on the green-moulded bones of a human skeleton. Others had taken this way before him . . .
TOWARD the end, a fleshless, gaunt thing that had once been a man dragged itself laboriously toward a range of mountains that lifted from the swamp toward the north. They extended to left and right as far as he could see, and seemed unscalable. But they were V-shaped, and Vanning headed toward the point of the V—the inner point. The terrible drive within him drove him on relentlessly.
That night a sulphurous crimson glow lit the sky beyond the mountains. Vanning did not see it. He slept.
By morning he was on his way again, staggering into the funnel of the peaks. They were bare rock, eroded by eons of trickling water from the clouds. He could not climb them, even had he possessed the strength. He went on, instead, into the narrowing valley . . .
It ended in a sheer cliff of weathered stone. Vanning reeled toward the barrier. He could not return. The North-Fever drove him on remorselessly. He had to climb that wall of rock, or die. And he could not climb.
He fell, rose, and fell again. In the end he crawled. He crawled to the foot of the cliff and dragged himself upright. He fell forward, as though trying to press his body against the towering wall that lifted to the writhing grey clouds—
Fell—through the stone!
He toppled through the rock curtain as though it were non-existent! Instantly intense blackness closed around him. Hard stone was under him.
His mind was too dulled to wonder. He knew only that the way north was still open. He crept on through darkness, leaving a trail of blood behind him . . .
The ground dropped from under him. He crashed down on a mound of moulded vegetation.
Before the shock had passed, the living dead man was moving again. He crawled forward until his way was blocked by a perpendicular wall. Gasping dry-throated sobs, he clawed at the barrier with broken, bleeding finger-tips.
To left and right, an arm’s length away, were other walls. He was in a pit. The sane part of his brain thought: “Circle around! There may be some way out!”
But Vanning could not circle. He could only move in one direction. That was north. He fumbled blindly at the wall, until unconsciousness came at last . . .
Twice again he awoke, each time weaker, and twice again he slept. The fever, having passed its peak, dwindled swiftly.
At last Vanning awoke, and he was sane. No longer did he feel the relentless urge to turn north. He lay for a little while staring into the blackness, realizing that he was once more in full command of his traitorous body.
There was little life left in him. His tongue was blackened and swollen till it filled his mouth. He was a scarecrow, nearly naked, his bones sharply defined through his skin.
It was an effort even to breathe. But death would not be long in coming—now . . .
II
DYING is an uncomfortable business, unless a man is drugged or insensible. Vanning found it so. Moreover, he wasn’t the sort of man who would give up without good cause. Weak as he was, nevertheless he was still too strong to lie in the dark, waiting.
Laboriously, he got to his hands and knees and commenced a circuit of the pit. He expected nothing. But, at the southern end of his prison, he was astounded to find a hole in the wall easily large enough to admit his body.
Feeling into the blackness, he discovered the smooth floor of a passage. Good Lord! It had been there all the time, during his tortured imprisonment in the pit. If he had only searched before—But he could not have done so, of course. Not with the North-Fever flaming in his veins.
The tunnel might lead anywhere. All the chances were against its leading to safety. Sooner or later, there would probably be a dead end. Nevertheless, there was a chance. That chance grew brighter as Vanning’s fingers discovered that the walls bore the marks of tools.
The tunnel had been made by—perhaps not humans, but at least by some intelligent race!
It grew higher as he went on, but Vanning was too weak to rise. He realized dimly that the passage made a sharp hairpin turn.
Through the dark the distant clangor of a bell roared.
Vanning hesitated, and then resumed his weak crawl. There was nothing else to do.
The ground dropped from beneath him. He went rolling and slipping down an inclined slide, to stop with a jolt against a softly padded surface. The shock was too much for his exhausted mind and body. He felt consciousness leaving him.
But he realized that it was no longer dark. Through a pale, luminous twilight he caught a glimpse of a mask hovering over him—the mask of no human thing. Noseless save for tiny slits, gap-mouthed, round-eyed, the face was like that of a fish incredibly humanized—fantastically evolved. A patina of green scales overlaid the skin.
The gong thundered from nearby. The monstrous mask dissolved into the blackness that swept up and took Vanning to its heart. Nothing existed but pain, and that, too, was wiped out by the encompassing dark . . .
HE was very sick. Complete exhaustion had almost killed him. He was lying on a soft pallet, and from time to time the stinging shock of a needle in his arm told him that he was being fed by injection. Later, water trickled down his throat. His swollen tongue resumed its normal shape. Sleep came, tormented by dreams. The mask of the fish-like thing swam at him from gray shimmering light. It gave place to a great bell that roared deafeningly.
Then the face of a girl, pale, lovely, with auburn ringlets clustering about her cheeks. Sympathetic blue eyes looked into his. And that, too, was gone . . .
He awoke to find—something—standing above him. And it was no nightmare. It was the thing of his dreams—a being that stood upright on two stocky legs, and which wore clothing, a shining silver tunic and kirtle. The head was fish-like, but the high cranium told of intelligence.
It said something in a language Vanning did not know. Weakly he shook his head. The fish-being launched into the Venusian dialect.
“You are recovered? You are strong again?”
Vanning sought for words. “I’m—all right. But where am I? Who—”
“Lysla will tell you.” The creature clapped its huge hands together as it turned. The door closed behind its malformed back, opening again to reveal the auburn-haired girl Vanning recognized.
He sat up, discovering that he was in a bare room walled with gray plastic, and that he was lying on a pallet of some elastic substance. Under a metallic-looking but soft robe, he was naked. The girl, he saw, bore over her arm a bundle of garments, crimson as the kirtle she herself wore.
Her smile was wan. “Hello,” she said, in English. “Feel better now?”
Vanning nodded. “Sure. But am I crazy? That thing that just went out—” Horror darkened the girl’s blue eyes. “That is one of the Swamja. They rule here.”
“Here? Where’s here?”
Lysla knelt beside the bed. “The end of the world—for us, Jerry Vanning.”
“How do you know my name?”
“There were papers in your clothes—what was left of them. And—it’ll be hard to explain all this. I’ve only been here a month myself.”
Vanning rubbed his stubbly beard. “We’re on Venus?”
“Yes, of course. This is a—a valley. The Swamja have lived here for ages, since before Earthmen colonized Venus.”
“I never heard of them.”
“None ever return from this place,” Lysla said sombrely. “They become slaves of the Swamja—and in the end they die. New slaves come, as you did.” Vanning’s eyes narrowed. “Hold on. I’m beginning to understand, a little. The Swamja—those fish-headed people—have a secret city here, eh? They’re intelligent?”
She nodded. “They have great powers. They consider themselves the gods of Venus. You see—Jerry Vanning—they evolved long before the anthropoid stock did. Originally they were aquatic. I don’t know much about that. Legends . . . Anyway, a very long time ago, they built this city and have never left it since. But they need slaves. So they send out the North-Fever—”
“WHAT?” Vanning’s face grayed. “Lysla—what did you say? The fever’s artificial?”
“Yes. The virus is carried by microscopic spores. The Swamja send it out to the upper atmosphere, and the great winds carry it all over Venus. The virus strikes very quickly. Once a man catches it, as you did, he goes north. These mountains are a trap. They’re shaped like a funnel, so anyone with the fever inevitably heads into the pass, as you did. They are drawn through the mirage, which looks like a wall of rock. No one who wasn’t—sick—would try to go through that cliff.”
Vanning grunted, remembering. “Keep talking. I’m beginning—”
“There isn’t much more. The victims fall into the pits, and stay there till the fever has run its course. The Swamja run no risks of being infected themselves. After the sickness has passed, it’s easy to find the way out of the pits—and all the tunnels lead to this place.”
“God!” Vanning whispered. “And you say this has been going on for centuries?”
“Very many centuries. First the natives, and now the Earthpeople as well. The Swamja need slaves—none live long here. But there is always a supply trickling in from outside.”
Thousands of helpless victims, through the ages, drawn into this horrible net, dragged northward to be the slaves of an inhuman race . . . Vanning licked dry lips.
“Many die,” the girl said. “The Swamja want only the strongest. And only the strongest survive the trip north.”
“You—” Vanning looked at Lysla questioningly.
She smiled sadly. “I’m stronger than I look, Jerry. But I almost died . . . I still haven’t completely recovered. I—was much prettier than I am now.”
Vanning found that difficult to believe. He couldn’t help grinning at the girl’s very feminine admission. She flushed a little.
“Well,” he said at last, “you’re not Venusian, I can see that. How did you come to get sucked into this?”
“Just bad luck,” Lysla told him. “A few months ago I was on top of the world, in New York. I’ve no parents. My father left me a trust fund, but it ran out unexpectedly. Bad investments, I suppose. So I found myself broke and needed a job. There weren’t any jobs for unskilled labor, except a secretarial position in Venus Landing. I was lucky to get that.”
“You’ve got nerve,” Vanning said.
“It didn’t help. The North-Fever hit me, and the next thing I knew, I was . . . here. A slave.”
“How many Earthmen are there here?”
“About a hundred. Not many are strong enough to reach the pass. And about the same number of Venusian natives.”
“How many Swamja?”
“A thousand, more or less,” Lysla explained. “Only the highest classes have slaves. Most of the Swamja are trained for the military.”
“So? Who the devil do they fight?”
“Nobody. It’s a tradition with them—part of their religion. They believe they’re gods, and the soldiers serve as the Valkyries did in the Norse Valhalla.”
“Two hundred slaves . . . What weapons do the Swamja have?”
Lysla shook her head. “Not many. A paralysis hand-projector, a few others. But they’re invulnerable, or nearly so. Their muscles are much tougher than ours. A different cellular construction.” Vanning pondered. He could understand that. The human heart-muscle is much stronger and tougher than—say—the biceps.
The girl broke into his thoughts. “Rebellion is quite useless. You won’t believe that now, but you’ll understand.”
“Maybe,” Vanning said tonelessly.
“Anyhow—what’s next on the program?”
“Slavery.” Her voice was bitter. “Here are your clothes. When you’re dressed, you’ll find a ramp leading down outside the door. I’ll be waiting.” She detached a metal plaque from the wall and went out. Vanning, after a scowling pause, dressed and followed.
THE corridor in which he found himself was of bare plastic, covered with a wavy bas-relief oddly reminiscent of water’s ripples, and tinted azure and gray. Here and there cold lamps, using a principle unfamiliar to the man, were set in the walls. Radioactivity, he theorized, or the Venusian equivalent. He saw a ramp, and descended it to enter a huge low-ceilinged room, with doors at intervals set in the curving walls. One of the doors was open, and Lysla’s low voice called him.
He entered a cubicle, not large, with four crude bunks arranged here and there. The girl was fitting the metal plaque into a frame over one. She smiled at him.
“Your dog-license, Jerry. You’re 57-R-Mel. It means something to the Swamja, I suppose.”
“Yeah?” Vanning saw a similar plaque over each of the cots. “What’s this place?”
“One of the dormitories. Four to an apartment is the rule. You’ll be lodged with three men who arrived a little while before you did—two Earthmen and a Venusian.”
“I see. What am I supposed to do?”
“Just wait here till you’re summoned. And Jerry—” She came toward him, placing her palms flat on his broad chest, her blue eyes looking up into his appealingly. “Jerry, please don’t do anything foolish. I know it’s hard at first. But—they—punish rebellious slaves rather awfully.” Vanning smiled down at her. “Okay, Lysla. I’ll look around before I do anything. But, believe me, I intend to start a private little revolution around here.” She shook her head hopelessly, auburn curls flying. “It isn’t any use. I’ve seen that already. You’ll see it, too. I must go now. And be careful, Jerry.”
