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Title: Parasite Planet
Author: Weinbaum, Stanley G. [Grauman] (1902-1935)
Date of first publication: February 1935
Date first posted: 12 December 2016
Date last updated: 12 December 2016
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1382

This ebook was produced by Al Haines


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.






PARASITE PLANET

by Stanley G. Weinbaum



Luckily for "Ham" Hammond it was mid-winter when the mudspout came.
Mid-winter, that is, in the Venusian sense, which is nothing at all
like the conception of the season generally entertained on Earth,
except possibly, by dwellers in the hotter regions of the Amazon basin,
or the Congo.

They, perhaps, might form a vague mental picture of winter on Venus by
visualizing their hottest summer days, multiplying the heat, discomfort
and unpleasant denizens of the jungle by ten or twelve.

On Venus, as is now well known, the seasons occur alternately in
opposite hemispheres, as on the Earth, but with a very important
difference.  Here, when North America and Europe swelter in summer, it
is winter in Australia and Cape Colony and Argentina.  It is the
northern and southern hemispheres which alternate their seasons.

But on Venus, very strangely, it is the eastern and western
hemispheres, because the seasons of Venus depend, not on inclination to
the plane of the ecliptic, but on libration.  Venus does not rotate,
but keeps the same face always toward the Sun, just as the Moon does
toward the earth.  One face is forever daylight, and the other forever
night, and only along the twilight zone, a strip five hundred miles
wide, is human habitation possible, a thin ring of territory circling
the planet.

Toward the sunlit side it verges into the blasting heat of a desert
where only a few Venusian creatures live, and on the night edge the
strip ends abruptly in the colossal ice barrier produced by the
condensation of the upper winds that sweep endlessly from the rising
air of the hot hemisphere to cool and sink and rush back again from the
cold one.

The chilling of warm air always produces rain, and at the edge of the
darkness the rain freezes to form these great ramparts.  What lies
beyond, what fantastic forms of life may live in the starless darkness
of the frozen face, or whether that region is as dead as the airless
Moon--those are mysteries.

But the slow libration, a ponderous wabbling of the planet from side to
side, does produce the effect of seasons.  On the lands of the twilight
zone, first in one hemisphere and then the other, the cloud-hidden Sun
seems to rise gradually for fifteen days, then sink for the same
period.  It never ascends far, and only near the ice barrier does it
seem to touch the horizon; for the libration is only seven degrees, but
it is sufficient to produce noticeable fifteen-day seasons.

But such seasons!  In the winter the temperature drops sometimes to a
humid but bearable ninety, but, two weeks later, a hundred and forty is
a cool day near the torrid edge of the zone.  And always, winter and
summer, the intermittent rains drip sullenly down to be absorbed by the
spongy soil and given back again as sticky, unpleasant, unhealthy steam.

And that, the vast amount of moisture on Venus, was the greatest
surprise of the first human visitors; the clouds had been seen, of
course, but the spectroscope denied the presence of water, naturally,
since it was analyzing light reflected from the upper cloud surfaces,
fifty miles above the planet's face.

That abundance of water has strange consequences.  There are no seas or
oceans on Venus, if we expect the probability of vast, silent, and
eternally frozen oceans on the sunless side.  On the hot hemisphere
evaporation is too rapid, and the rivers that flow out of the ice
mountains simply diminish and finally vanish, dried up.

A further consequence is the curiously unstable nature of the land of
the twilight zone.  Enormous subterranean rivers course invisibly
through it, some boiling, some cold as the ice from which they flow.
These are the cause of the mud eruptions that make human habitation in
the Hotlands such a gamble; a perfectly solid and apparently safe area
of soil may be changed suddenly into a boiling sea of mud in which
buildings sink and vanish, together, frequently, with their occupants.

There is no way of predicting these catastrophes; only on the rare
outcroppings of bed rock is a structure safe, and so all permanent
human settlements cluster about the mountains.


Ham Hammond was a trader.  He was one of those adventurous individuals
who always appear on the frontiers and fringes of habitable regions.
Most of these fall into two classes; they are either reckless
daredevils pursuing danger, or outcasts, criminal or otherwise,
pursuing either solitude or forgetfulness.

Ham Hammond was neither.  He was pursuing no such abstractions, but the
good, solid lure of wealth.  He was, in fact, trading with the natives
for the spore-pods of the Venusian plant _xixtchil_, from which
terrestrial chemists would extract
trihydroxyl-tertiary-tolunitrile-beta-anthraquinone, the xixt-line or
triple-T-B-A that was so effective in rejuvenation treatments.

Ham was young and sometimes wondered why rich old men--and women--would
pay such tremendous prices for a few more years of virility, especially
as the treatments didn't actually increase the span of life, but just
produced a sort of temporary and synthetic youth.

Gray hair darkened, wrinkles filled out, bald heads grew fuzzy, and
then, in a few years, the rejuvenated person was just as dead as he
would have been, anyway.  But as long as triple-T-B-A commanded a price
about equal to its weight in radium, why, Ham was willing to take the
gamble to obtain it.

He had never really expected the mudspout.  Of course it was an
ever-present danger, but when, staring idly through the window of his
shack over the writhing and steaming Venusian plain, he had seen the
sudden boiling pools erupting all around, it had come as a shocking
surprise.

For a moment he was paralyzed; then he sprang into immediate and
frantic action.  He pulled on his enveloping suit of rubberlike
transkin; he strapped the great bowls of mudshoes to his feet; he tied
the precious bag of spore-pods to his shoulders, packed some food, and
then burst into the open.

The ground was still semisolid, but even as he watched, the black soil
boiled out around the metal walls of the shack, the cube tilted a
trifle, and then sank deliberately from sight, and the mud sucked and
gurgled as it closed gently above the spot.

Ham caught himself.  One couldn't stand still in the midst of a
mudspout, even with bowl-like mudshoes as support.  Once let the
viscous stuff flow over the rim and the luckless victim was trapped; he
couldn't raise his foot against the suction, and first slowly, then
more quickly, he'd follow the shack.

So Ham started off over the boiling swamp, walking with the peculiar
sliding motion he had learned by much practice, never raising the
mudshoes above the surface, but sliding them along, careful that no mud
topped the curving rim.

It was a tiresome motion, but absolutely necessary.  He slid along as
if on snowshoes, bearing west because that was the direction of the
dark side, and if he had to walk to safety, he might as well do it in
coolness.  The area of swamp was unusually large; he covered at least a
mile before he attained a slight rise in the ground, and the mudshoes
clumped on solid, or nearly solid, soil.

He was bathed in perspiration, and his transkin suit was hot as a
boiler room, but one grows accustomed to that on Venus.  He'd have
given half his supply of xixtchil pods for the opportunity to open the
mask of the suit, to draw a breath of even the steamy and humid
Venusian air, but that was impossible; impossible, at least, if he had
any inclination to continue living.

One breath of unfiltered air anywhere near the warm edge of the
twilight zone was quick and very painful death; Ham would have drawn in
uncounted millions of the spores of those fierce Venusian molds, and
they'd have sprouted in furry and nauseating masses in his nostrils,
his mouth, his lungs, and eventually in his ears and eyes.

Breathing them wasn't even a necessary requirement; once he'd come upon
a trader's body with the molds springing from his flesh.  The poor
fellow had somehow torn a rip in his transkin suit, and that was enough.

The situation made eating and drinking in the open a problem on Venus;
one had to wait until a rain had precipitated the spores, when it was
safe for half an hour or so.  Even then the water must have been
recently boiled and the food just removed from its can; otherwise, as
had happened to Ham more than once, the food was apt to turn abruptly
into a fuzzy mass of molds that grew about as fast as the minute hand
moved on a clock.  A disgusting sight!  A disgusting planet!

That last reflection was induced by Ham's view of the quagmire that had
engulfed his shack.  The heavier vegetation had gone with it, but
already avid and greedy life was emerging, wriggling mud grass and the
bulbous fungi called "walking balls."  And all around a million little
slimy creatures slithered across the mud, eating each other
rapaciously, being torn to bits, and each fragment re-forming to a
complete creature.

A thousand different species, but all the same in one respect; each of
them was all appetite.  In common with most Venusian beings, they had a
multiplicity of both legs and mouths; in fact some of them were little
more than blobs of skin split into dozens of hungry mouths, and
crawling on a hundred spidery legs.

All life on Venus is more or less parasitic.  Even the plants that draw
their nourishment directly from soil and air have also the ability to
absorb and digest--and, often enough, to trap--animal food.  So fierce
is the competition on that humid strip of land between the fire and the
ice that one who has never seen it must fail even to imagine it.

The animal kingdom wars incessantly on itself and the plant world; the
vegetable kingdom retaliates, and frequently outdoes the other in the
production of monstrous predatory horrors that one would even hesitate
to call plant life.  A terrible world!

In the few moments that Ham had paused to look back, ropy creepers had
already entangled his legs; transkin was impervious, of course, but he
had to cut the things away with his knife, and the black, nauseating
juices that flowed out of them smeared on his suit and began instantly
to grow furry as the molds sprouted.  He shuddered.

"Hell of a place!" Ham growled, stooping to remove his mudshoes, which
he slung carefully over his back.

He slogged away through the writhing vegetation, automatically dodging
the awkward thrusts of the Jack Ketch trees as they cast their nooses
hopefully toward his arms and head.

Now and again he passed one that dangled some trapped creature, usually
unrecognizable because the molds had enveloped it in a fuzzy shroud,
while the tree itself was placidly absorbing victim and molds alike.

"Horrible place!" Ham muttered, kicking a writhing mass of nameless
little vermin from his path.

He mused; his shack had been situated rather nearer the hot edge of the
twilight zone; it was a trifle over two hundred and fifty miles to the
shadow line, though of course that varied with the libration.  But one
couldn't approach the line too closely, anyway, because of the fierce,
almost inconceivable, storms that raged where the hot upper winds
encountered the icy blasts of the night side, giving rise to the birth
throes of the ice barrier.

So a hundred and fifty miles due west would be sufficient to bring
coolness, to enter a region too temperate for the molds, where he could
walk in comparative comfort.  And then, not more than fifty miles
north, lay the American settlement Erotia, named, obviously, after that
troublesome mythical son of Venus, Cupid.

Intervening, of course, were the ranges of the Mountains of Eternity,
not those mighty twenty-mile-high peaks whose summits are occasionally
glimpsed by Earthly telescopes, and that forever sunder British Venus
from the American possessions, but, even at the point he planned to
cross, very respectable mountains indeed.  He was on the British side
now; not that any one cared.  Traders came and went as they pleased.

Well, that meant about two hundred miles.  No reason why he couldn't
make it; he was armed with both automatic and flame-pistol, and water
was no problem, if carefully boiled.  Under pressure of necessity, one
could even eat Venusian life--but it required hunger and thorough
cooking and a sturdy stomach.

It wasn't the taste so much as the appearance, or so he'd been told.
He grimaced; beyond doubt he'd be driven to find out for himself, since
his canned food couldn't possibly last out the trip.  Nothing to worry
about, Ham kept telling himself.  In fact, plenty to be glad about; the
xixtchil pods in his pack represented as much wealth as he could have
accumulated by ten years of toil back on Earth.

No danger--and yet, men had vanished on Venus, dozens of them.  The
molds had claimed them, or some fierce unearthly monster, or perhaps
one of the many unknown living horrors, both plant and animal.

Ham trudged along, keeping always to the clearings about the Jack Ketch
trees, since these vegetable omnivores kept other life beyond the reach
of their greedy nooses.  Elsewhere progress was impossible, for the
Venusian jungle presented such a terrific tangle of writhing and
struggling forms that one could move only by cutting the way, step by
step, with infinite labor.

Even then there was the danger of Heaven only knew what fanged and
venomous creatures whose teeth might pierce the protective membrane of
transkin, and a crack in that meant death.  Even the unpleasant Jack
Ketch trees were preferable company, he reflected, as he slapped their
questing lariats aside.

Six hours after Ham had started his involuntary journey, it rained.  He
seized the opportunity, found a place where a recent mudspout had
cleared the heavier vegetation away, and prepared to eat.  First,
however, he scooped up some scummy water, filtered it through the
screen attached for that purpose to his canteen, and set about
sterilizing it.

Fire was difficult to manage, since dry fuel is rare indeed in the
Hotlands of Venus, but Ham tossed a thermide tablet into the liquid,
and the chemicals boiled the water instantly, escaping themselves as
gases.  If the water retained a slight ammoniacal taste--well, that was
the least of his discomforts, he mused, as he covered it and set it by
to cool.

He uncapped a can of beans, watched a moment to see that no stray molds
had remained in the air to infect the food, then opened the visor of
his suit and swallowed hastily.  Thereafter he drank the blood-warm
water and poured carefully what remained into the water pouch within
his transkin, where he could suck it through a tube to his mouth
without the deadly exposure to the molds.

Ten minutes after he had completed the meal, while he rested and longed
for the impossible luxury of a cigarette, the fuzzy coat sprang
suddenly to life on the remnants of food in the can.




II.

An hour later, weary and thoroughly soaked in perspiration, Ham found a
Friendly tree, so named by the explorer Burlingame because it is one of
the few organisms on Venus sluggish enough to permit one to rest in its
branches.  So Ham climbed it, found the most comfortable position
available, and slept as best he could.

It was five hours by his wrist watch before he awoke, and the tendrils
and little sucking cups of the Friendly tree were fastened all over his
transkin.  He tore them away very carefully, climbed down, and trudged
westward.

It was after the second rain that he met the doughpot, as the creature
is called in British and American Venus.  In the French strip, it's the
_pot  colle_, the "paste pot"; in the Dutch--well, the Dutch are not
prudish, and they call the horror just what they think it warrants.

Actually, the doughpot is a nauseous creature.  It's a mass of white,
doughlike protoplasm, ranging in size from a single cell to perhaps
twenty tons of mushy filth.  It has no fixed form; in fact, it's merely
a mass of de Proust cells--in effect, a disembodied, crawling, hungry
cancer.

It has no organization and no intelligence, nor even any instinct save
hunger.  It moves in whatever direction food touches its surfaces; when
it touches two edible substances, it quietly divides, with the larger
portion invariably attacking the greater supply.

It's invulnerable to bullets; nothing less than the terrific blast of a
flame pistol will kill it, and then only if the blast destroys every
individual cell.  It travels over the ground absorbing everything,
leaving bare black soil where the ubiquitous molds spring up at once--a
noisome, nightmarish creature.

Ham sprang aside as the doughpot erupted suddenly from the jungle to
his right.  It couldn't absorb the transkin, of course, but to be
caught in that pasty mess meant quick suffocation.  He glared at it
disgustedly and was sorely tempted to blast it with his flame-pistol as
it slithered past at running speed.  He would have, too, but the
experienced Venusian frontiersman is very careful with the flame-pistol.

It has to be charged with a diamond, a cheap black one, of course, but
still an item to consider.  The crystal, when fired, gives up all its
energy in one terrific blast that roars out like a lightning stroke for
a hundred yards, incinerating everything in its path.

The thing rolled by with a sucking and gulping sound.  Behind it opened
the passage it had cleared; creepers, snake vines, Jack Ketch
trees--everything had been swept away down to the humid earth itself,
where already the molds were springing up on the slime of the
doughpot's trail.

The alley led nearly in the direction Ham wanted to travel; he seized
the opportunity and strode briskly along, with a wary eye,
nevertheless, on the ominous walls of jungle.  In ten hours or so the
opening would be filled once more with unpleasant life, but for the
present it offered a much quicker progress than dodging from one
clearing to the next.

It was five miles up the trail, which was already beginning to sprout
inconveniently, that he met the native galloping along on his four
short legs, his pincerlike hands shearing a path for him.  Ham stopped
for a palaver.

"_Murra_," he said.

The language of the natives of the equatorial regions of the Hotlands
is a queer one.  It has, perhaps, two hundred words, but when a trader
has learned those two hundred, his knowledge of the tongue is but
little greater than the man who knows none at all.

The words are generalized, and each sound has anywhere from a dozen to
a hundred meanings.  Murra, for instance, is a word of greeting; it may
mean something much like "hello," or "good morning."  It also may
convey a challenge--"on guard!"  It means besides, "Let's be friends,"
and also, strangely, "Let's fight this out."

It has, moreover, certain noun senses; it means peace, it means war, it
means courage, and, again, fear.  A subtle language; it is only very
recently that studies of inflection have begun to reveal its nature to
human philologists.  Yet, after all, perhaps English, with its "to,"
"too," and "two," its "one," "won," "wan," "went," "win" "when," and a
dozen other similarities, might seem just as strange to Venusian ears,
untrained in vowel distinctions.

Moreover, humans can't read the expressions of the broad, flat,
three-eyed Venusian faces, which in the nature of things must convey a
world of information among the natives themselves.

But this one accepted the intended sense.  "_Murra_," he responded,
pausing.  "_Usk?_"  That was, among other things, "Who are you?" or
"Where did you come from?" or "Where are you bound?"

Ham chose the latter sense.  He pointed off into the dim west; then
raised his hand in an arc to indicate the mountains.  "Erotia," he
said.  That had but one meaning, at least.

The native considered this in silence.  At last he grunted and
volunteered some information.  He swept his cutting claw in a gesture
west along the trail.  "_Curky_," he said, and then, "_Murra_."  The
last was farewell; Ham pressed against the wriggling jungle wall to
permit him to pass.

Curky meant, together with twenty other senses, trader.  It was the
word usually applied to humans, and Ham felt a pleasant anticipation in
the prospect of human company.  It had been six months since he had
heard a human voice other than that on the tiny radio now sunk with his
shack.


True enough, five miles along the doughpot's trail Ham emerged suddenly
in an area where there had been a recent mudspout The vegetation was
only waist-high, and across the quarter-mile clearing he saw a
structure, a trading hut.  But far more pretentious than his own
iron-walled cubicle; this one boasted three rooms, an unheard-of luxury
in the Hotlands, where every ounce had to be laboriously transported by
rocket from one of the settlements.  That was expensive, almost
prohibitive.  Traders took a real gamble, and Ham knew he was lucky to
have come out so profitably.

He strode over the still spongy ground.  The windows were shaded
against the eternal daylight, and the door--the door was locked.  This
was a violation of the frontier code.  One always left doors unlocked;
it might mean the salvation of some strayed trader, and not even the
most dishonorable would steal from a hut left open for his safety.

Nor would the natives; no creature is as honest as a Venusian native,
who never lies and never steals, though he might, after due warning,
kill a trader for his trade goods.  But only after a fair warning.

Ham stood puzzled.  At last he kicked and tramped a clear space before
the door, sat down against it, and fell to snapping away the numerous
and loathsome little creatures that swarmed over his transkin.  He
waited.

It wasn't half an hour before he saw the trader plowing through the
clearing--a short, slim fellow; the transkin shaded his face, but Ham
could make out large, shadowed eyes.  He stood up.

"Hello!" he said jovially.  "Thought I'd drop in for a visit.  My
name's Hamilton Hammond--you guess the nickname!"

The newcomer stopped short, then spoke in a curiously soft and husky
voice, with a decidedly English accent.  "My guess would be 'Boiled
Pork,' I fancy."  The tones were cold, unfriendly.  "Suppose you step
aside and let me in.  Good day!"

Ham felt anger and amazement.  "The devil!" he snapped.  "You're a
hospitable sort, aren't you?"

"No.  Not at all."  The other paused at the door.  "You're an American.
What are you doing on British soil?  Have you a passport?"

"Since when do you need a passport in the Hotlands?"

"Trading, aren't you?" the slim man said sharply.  "In other words,
poaching.  You've got no right here.  Get on."

Ham's jaw set stubbornly behind his mask.  "Rights or none," he said,
"I'm entitled to the consideration of the frontier code.  I want a
breath of air and a chance to wipe my face, and also a chance to eat.
If you open that door I'm coming in after you."

An automatic flashed into view.  "Do, and you'll feed the molds."

Ham, like all Venusian traders, was of necessity bold, resourceful, and
what is called in the States "hard-boiled."  He didn't flinch, but said
in apparent yielding:

"All right; but listen, all I want is a chance to eat."

"Wait for a rain," said the other coolly and half turned to unlock the
door.

As his eyes shifted, Ham kicked at the revolver; it went spinning
against the wall and dropped into the weeds.  His opponent snatched for
the flame-pistol that still dangled on his hip; Ham caught his wrist in
a mighty clutch.

Instantly the other ceased to struggle, while Ham felt a momentary
surprise at the skinny feel of the wrist through its transkin covering.

"Look here!" he growled.  "I want a chance to eat, and I'm going to get
it.  Unlock that door!"

He had both wrists now; the fellow seemed curiously delicate.  After a
moment he nodded, and Ham released one hand.  The door opened, and he
followed the other in.


Again, unheard-of magnificence.  Solid chairs, a sturdy table, even
books, carefully preserved, no doubt, by lycopodium against the
ravenous molds that sometimes entered Hotland shacks in spite of screen
filters and automatic spray.  An automatic spray was going now to
destroy any spores that might have entered with the opening door.

Ham sat down, keeping an eye on the other, whose flame-pistol he had
permitted to remain in its holster.  He was confident of his ability to
outdraw the slim individual, and, besides, who'd risk firing a
flame-pistol indoors?  It would simply blow out one wall of the
building.

So he set about opening his mask, removing food from his pack, wiping
his steaming face, while his companion--or opponent--looked on
silently.  Ham watched the canned meat for a moment; no molds appeared,
and he ate.

"Why the devil," he rasped, "don't you open your visor?"  At the
other's silence, he continued: "Afraid I'll see your face, eh?  Well,
I'm not interested; I'm no cop."

No reply.

He tried again.  "What's your name?"

The cool voice sounded: "Burlingame.  Pat Burlingame."

Ham laughed.  "Patrick Burlingame is dead, my friend.  I knew him."  No
answer.  "And if you don't want to tell your name, at least you needn't
insult the memory of a brave man and a great explorer."

"Thank you."  The voice was sardonic.  "He was my father."

"Another lie.  He had no son.  He had only a----"  Ham paused abruptly;
a feeling of consternation swept over him.  "Open your visor!" he
yelled.

He saw the lips of the other, dim through the transkin, twitch into a
sarcastic smile.

"Why not?" said the soft voice, and the mask dropped.

Ham gulped; behind the covering were the delicately modeled features of
a girl, with cool gray eyes in a face lovely despite the glistening
perspiration on cheeks and forehead.

The man gulped again.  After all, he was a gentleman despite his
profession as one of the fierce, adventurous traders of Venus.  He was
university-educated--an engineer--and only the lure of quick wealth had
brought him to the Hotlands.

"I--I'm sorry," he stammered.

"You brave American poachers!" she sneered.  "Are all of you so valiant
as to force yourselves on women?"

"But--how could I know?  What are you doing in a place like this?"

"There's no reason for me to answer your questions, but"--she gestured
toward the room beyond--"I'm classifying Hotland flora and fauna.  I'm
Patricia Burlingame, biologist."

He perceived now the jar-inclosed specimens of a laboratory in the next
chamber.  "But a girl alone in the Hotlands!  It's--it's reckless!"

"I didn't expect to meet any American poachers," she retorted.

He flushed.  "You needn't worry about me.  I'm going."  He raised his
hands to his visor.

Instantly Patricia snatched an automatic from the table drawer.
"You're going, indeed, Mr. Hamilton Hammond," she said coolly.  "But
you're leaving your xixtchil with me.  It's crown property; you've
stolen it from British territory, and I'm confiscating it."

He stared.  "Look here!" he blazed suddenly.  "I've risked all I have
for that xixtchil.  If I lose it I'm ruined--busted.  I'm not giving it
up!"

"But you are."

He dropped his mask and sat down.  "Miss Burlingame," he said, "I don't
think you've nerve enough to shoot me, but that's what you'll have to
do to get it.  Otherwise I'll sit here until you drop of exhaustion."

Her gray eyes bored silently into his blue ones.  The gun held steadily
on his heart, but spat no bullet.  It was a deadlock.

At last the girl said, "You win, poacher."  She slapped the gun into
her empty holster.  "Get out, then."

"Gladly!" he snapped.

He rose, fingered his visor, then dropped it again at a sudden startled
scream from the girl.  He whirled, suspecting a trick, but she was
staring out of the window with wide, apprehensive eyes.


Ham saw the writhing of vegetation and then a vast whitish mass.  A
doughpot--a monstrous one, bearing steadily toward their shelter.  He
heard the gentle _clunk_ of impact, and then the window was blotted out
by the pasty mess, as the creature, not quite large enough to engulf
the building, split into two masses that flowed around and remerged on
the other side.

Another cry from Patricia.  "Your mask, fool!" she rasped.  "Close it!"

"Mask?  Why?"  Nevertheless, he obeyed automatically.

"Why?  That's why!  The digestive acids--look!"

She pointed at the walls; indeed, thousands of tiny pinholes of light
were appearing.  The digestive acids of the monstrosity, powerful
enough to attack whatever food chance brought, had corroded the metal;
it was porous; the shack was ruined.  He gasped as fuzzy molds shot
instantly from the remains of his meal, and a red-and-green fur
sprouted from the wood of chairs and table.

The two faced each other.

Ham chuckled.  "Well," he said, "you're homeless, too.  Mine went down
in a mudspout."

"Yours would!" Patricia retorted acidly.  "You Yankees couldn't think
of finding shallow soil, I suppose.  Bed rock is just six feet below
here, and my place is on pilons."

"Well, you're a cool devil!  Anyway, your place might as well be sunk.
What are you going to do?"

"Do?  Don't concern yourself.  I'm quite able to manage."

"How?"

"It's no affair of yours, but I have a rocket call each month."

"You must be a millionaire, then," he commented.

"The Royal Society," she said coldly, "is financing this expedition.
The rocket is due----"

She paused; Ham thought she paled a little behind her mask.

"Due when?"

"Why--it just came two days ago.  I'd forgotten."

"I see.  And you think you'll just stick around for a month waiting for
it.  Is that it?"

Patricia stared at him defiantly.

"Do you know," he resumed, "what you'd be in a month?  It's ten days to
summer and look at your shack."  He gestured at the walls, where brown
and rusty patches were forming; at his motion a piece the size of a
saucer tumbled in with a crackle.  "In two days this thing will be a
caved-in ruin.  What'll you do during fifteen days of summer?  What'll
you do without shelter when the temperature reaches a hundred and
fifty--a hundred and sixty?  I'll tell you--you'll die."

She said nothing.

"You'll be a fuzzy mass of molds before the rocket returns," Ham said.
"And then a pile of clean bones that will go down with the first
mudspout."

"Be still!" she blazed.

"Silence won't help.  Now I'll tell you what you can do.  You can take
your pack and your mudshoes and walk along with me.  We can make the
Cool Country before summer--if you can walk as well as you talk."

"Go with a Yankee poacher?  I fancy not!"

"And then," he continued imperturbably, "we can cross comfortably to
Erotia, a good American town."

Patricia reached for her emergency pack, slung it over her shoulders.
She retrieved a thick bundle of notes, written in aniline ink on
transkin, brushed off a few vagrant molds, and slipped it into the
pack.  She picked up a pair of diminutive mudshoes and turned
deliberately to the door.

"So you're coming?" he chuckled.

"I'm going," she retorted coldly, "to the good British town of Venoble.
Alone!"

"Venoble!" he gasped.  "That's two hundred miles south!  And across the
Greater Eternities, too!"




III.

Patricia walked silently out of the door and turned west toward the
Cool Country.  Ham hesitated a moment, then followed.  He couldn't
permit the girl to attempt that journey alone; since she ignored his
presence, he simply trailed a few steps behind her, plodding grimly and
angrily along.

For three hours or more they trudged through the endless daylight,
dodging the thrusts of the Jack Ketch trees, but mostly following the
still fairly open trail of the first doughpot.

Ham was amazed at the agile and lithe grace of the girl, who slipped
along the way with the sure skill of a native.  Then a memory came to
him; she was a native, in a sense.  He recalled now that Patrick
Burlingame's daughter was the first human child born on Venus, in the
colony of Venoble, founded by her father.

Ham remembered the newspaper articles when she had been sent to Earth
to be educated, a child of eight; he had been thirteen then.  He was
twenty-seven now, which made Patricia Burlingame twenty-two.

Not a word passed between them until at last the girl swung about in
exasperation.

"Go away," she blazed.

Ham halted.  "I'm not bothering you."

"But I don't want a bodyguard.  I'm a better Hotlander than you!"

He didn't argue the point.  He kept silent, and after a moment she
flashed:

"I hate you, Yankee!  Lord, how I hate you!"  She turned and trudged on.

An hour later the mudspout caught them.  Without warning, watery muck
boiled up around their feet, and the vegetation swayed wildly.
Hastily, they strapped on their mudshoes, while the heavier plants sank
with sullen gurgles around them.  Again Ham marveled at the girl's
skill; Patricia slipped away across the unstable surface with a speed
he could not match, and he shuffled far behind.

Suddenly he saw her stop.  That was dangerous in a mudspout; only an
emergency could explain it.  He hurried; a hundred feet away he
perceived the reason.  A strap had broken on her right shoe, and she
stood helpless, balancing on her left foot, while the remaining bowl
was sinking slowly.  Even now black mud slopped over the edge.

She eyed him as he approached.  He shuffled to her side; as she saw his
intention, she spoke.

"You can't," she said.

Ham bent cautiously, slipping his arms about her knees and shoulders.
Her mudshoe was already embedded, but he heaved mightily, driving the
rims of his own dangerously close to the surface.  With a great sucking
gulp, she came free and lay very still in his arms, so as not to
unbalance him as he slid again into careful motion over the treacherous
surface.  She was not heavy, but it was a hairbreadth chance, and the
mud slipped and gurgled at the very edge of his shoe-bowls.  Even
though Venus has slightly less surface gravitation than Earth, a week
or so gets one accustomed to it, and the twenty per cent advantage in
weight seems to disappear.

A hundred yards brought firm footing.  He sat her down and unstrapped
his mudshoes.

"Thank you," she said coolly.  "That was brave."

"You're welcome," he returned dryly.  "I suppose this will end any idea
of your traveling alone.  Without both mudshoes, the next spout will be
the last for you.  Do we walk together now?"

Her voice chilled.  "I can make a substitute shoe from tree skin."

"Not even a native could walk on tree skin."

"Then," she said, "I'll simply wait a day or two for the mud to dry and
dig up my lost one."

He laughed and gestured at the acres of mud.  "Dig where?" he
countered.  "You'll be here till summer if you try that."

She yielded.  "You win again, Yankee.  But only to the Cool Country;
then you'll go north and I south."


They trudged on.  Patricia was as tireless as Ham himself and vastly
more adept in Hotland lore.  Though they spoke but little, he never
ceased to wonder at the skill she had in picking the quickest route,
and she seemed to sense the thrusts of the Jack Ketch trees without
looking.  But it was when they halted at last, after a rain had given
opportunity for a hasty meal, that he had real cause to thank her.

"Sleep?" he suggested, and as she nodded: "There's a Friendly tree."

He moved toward it, the girl behind.

Suddenly she seized his arm.  "It's a Pharisee!" she cried, jerking him
back.

None too soon!  The fake Friendly tree had lashed down with a terrible
stroke that missed his face by inches.  It was no Friendly tree at all,
but an imitator, luring prey within reach by its apparent harmlessness,
then striking with knife-sharp spikes.

Ham gasped.  "What is it?  I never saw one of those before."

"A Pharisee!  It just looks like a Friendly tree."

She took her automatic and sent a bullet into the black, pulsing trunk.
A dark stream gushed, and the ubiquitous molds sprang into life about
the hole.  The tree was doomed.

"Thanks," said Ham awkwardly.  "I guess you saved my life."

"We're quits now."  She gazed levelly at him.  "Understand?  We're
even."

Later they found a true Friendly tree and slept.  Awakening, they
trudged on again, and slept again, and so on for three nightless days.
No more mudspouts burst about them, but all the other horrors of the
Hotlands were well in evidence.  Doughpots crossed their path, snake
vines hissed and struck, the Jack Ketch trees flung sinister nooses,
and a million little crawling things writhed underfoot or dropped upon
their suits.

Once they encountered a uniped, that queer, kangaroolike creature that
leaps, crashing through the jungle on a single mighty leg, and trusts
to its ten-foot beak to spear its prey.

When Ham missed his first shot, the girl brought it down in mid-leap to
thresh into the avid clutches of the Jack Ketch trees and the merciless
molds.

On another occasion, Patricia had both feet caught in a Jack Ketch
noose that lay for some unknown cause on the ground.  As she stepped
within it, the tree jerked her suddenly, to dangle head down a dozen
feet in the air, and she hung helplessly until Ham managed to cut her
free.  Beyond doubt, either would have died alone on any of several
occasions; together they pulled through.

Yet neither relaxed the cool, unfriendly attitude that had become
habitual.  Ham never addressed the girl unless necessary, and she in
the rare instances when they spoke, called him always by no other name
than Yankee poacher.  In spite of this, the man found himself sometimes
remembering the piquant loveliness of her features, her brown hair and
level gray eyes, as he had glimpsed them in the brief moments when rain
made it safe to open their visors.

At last one day a wind stirred out of the west, bringing with it a
breath of coolness that was like the air of heaven to them.  It was the
underwind, the wind that blew from the frozen half of the planet, that
breathed cold from beyond the ice barrier.  When Ham experimentally
shaved the skin from a writhing weed, the molds sprang out more slowly
and with an encouraging sparseness; they were approaching the Cool
Country.

They found a Friendly tree with lightened hearts; another day's trek
might bring them to the uplands where one could walk unhooded, in
safety from the molds, since these could not sprout in a temperature
much below eighty.

Ham woke first.  For a while he gazed silently across at the girl,
smiling at the way the branches of the tree had encircled her like
affectionate arms.  They were merely hungry, of course, but it looked
like tenderness.  His smile turned a little sad as he realized that the
Cool Country meant parting, unless he could discourage that insane
determination of hers to cross the Greater Eternities.

He sighed, and reached for his pack slung on a branch between them, and
suddenly a bellow of rage and astonishment broke from him.

His xixtchil pods!  The transkin pouch was slit; they were gone.

Patricia woke startled at his cry.  Then, behind her mask, he sensed an
ironic, mocking smile.

"My xixtchil!" he roared.  "Where is it?"

She pointed down.  There among the lesser growths was a little mound of
molds.

"There," she said coolly.  "Down there, poacher."

"You----"  He choked with rage.

"Yes.  I slit the pouch while you slept.  You'll smuggle no stolen
wealth from British territory."

Ham was white, speechless.  "You damned devil!" he bellowed at last.
"That's every cent I had!"

"But stolen," she reminded him pleasantly, swinging her dainty feet.

Rage actually made him tremble.  He glared at her; the light struck
through the translucent transkin, outlining her body and slim rounded
legs in shadow.  "I ought to kill you!" he muttered tensely.

His hand twitched, and the girl laughed softly.  With a groan of
desperation, he slung his pack over his shoulders and dropped to the
ground.

"I hope--I hope you die in the mountains," he said grimly, and stalked
away toward the west.

A hundred yards distant he heard her voice.

"Yankee!  Wait a moment!"

He neither paused nor glanced back, but strode on.


Half an hour later, glancing back from the crest of a rise, Ham
perceived that she was following him.  He turned and hurried on.  The
way was upward now, and his strength began to outweigh her speed and
skill.

When next he glimpsed her, she was a plodding speck far behind, moving,
he imagined, with a weary doggedness.  He frowned back at her; it had
occurred to him that a mudspout would find her completely helpless,
lacking the vitally important mudshoes.

Then he realized that they were beyond the region of mudspouts, here in
the foothills of the Mountains of Eternity, and anyway, he decided
grimly, he didn't care.

For a while Ham paralleled a river, doubtless an unnamed tributary of
the Phlegethon.  So far there had been no necessity to cross
watercourses, since naturally all streams on Venus flow from the ice
barrier across the twilight zone to the hot side, and therefore had
coincided with their own direction.

But now, once he attained the table-lands and turned north, he would
encounter rivers.  They had to be crossed either on logs or, if
opportunity offered and the stream was narrow, through the branches of
Friendly trees.  To set foot in the water was death; fierce fanged
creatures haunted the streams.

He had one near catastrophe at the rim of the table-land.  It was while
he edged through a Jack Ketch clearing; suddenly there was a heave of
white corruption, and tree and jungle wall disappeared in the mass of a
gigantic doughpot.

He was cornered between the monster and an impenetrable tangle of
vegetation, so he did the only thing left to do.  He snatched his
flame-pistol and sent a terrific, roaring blast into the horror, a
blast that incinerated tons of pasty filth and left a few small
fragments crawling and feeding on the debris.

The blast also, as it usually does, shattered the barrel of the weapon.
He sighed as he set about the forty-minute job of replacing it--no true
Hotlander ever delays that--for the blast had cost fifteen good
American dollars, ten for the cheap diamond that he had exploded, and
five for the barrel.  Nothing at all when he had had his xixtchil, but
a real item now.  He sighed again as he discovered that the remaining
barrel was his last; he had been forced to economize on everything when
he set out.

Ham came at last to the table-land.  The fierce and predatory
vegetation of the Hotlands grew scarce; he began to encounter true
plants, with no power of movement, and the underwind blew cool in his
face.

He was in a sort of high valley; to his right were the gray peaks of
the Lesser Eternities, beyond which lay Erotia, and to his left, like a
mighty, glittering rampart, lay the vast slopes of the Greater Range,
whose peaks were lost in the clouds fifteen miles above.

He looked at the opening of the rugged Madman's Pass where it separated
two colossal peaks; the pass itself was twenty-five thousand feet in
height, but the mountains outtopped it by fifty thousand more.  One man
had crossed that jagged crack on foot--Patrick Burlingame--and that was
the way his daughter meant to follow.

Ahead, visible as a curtain of shadow, lay the night edge of the
twilight zone, and Ham could see the incessant lightings that flashed
forever in this region of endless storms.  It was here that the ice
barrier crossed the ranges of the Mountains of Eternity, and the cold
underwind, thrust up by the mighty range, met the warm upper winds in a
struggle that was one continuous storm, such a storm as only Venus
could provide.  The river Phlegethon had its source somewhere back in
there.

Ham surveyed the wildly magnificent panorama.  To-morrow, or rather,
after resting, he would turn north.  Patricia would turn south, and,
beyond doubt, would die somewhere on Madman's Pass.  For a moment he
had a queerly painful sensation, then he frowned bitterly.

Let her die, if she was fool enough to attempt the pass alone just
because she was too proud to take a rocket from an American settlement.
She deserved it.  He didn't care; he was still assuring himself of that
as he prepared to sleep, not in a Friendly tree, but in one of the far
more friendly specimens of true vegetation and in the luxury of an open
visor.

The sound of his name awakened him.  He gazed across the table-land to
see Patricia just topping the divide, and he felt a moment's wonder at
how she had managed to trail him, a difficult feat indeed in a country
where the living vegetation writhes instantly back across one's path.
Then he recalled the blast of his flame-pistol; the flash and sound
would carry for miles, and she must have heard or seen it.

Ham saw her glancing anxiously around.

"Ham!" she shouted again--not Yankee or poacher, but "Ham!"

He kept a sullen silence; again she called.  He could see her bronzed
and piquant features now; she had dropped her transkin hood.  She
called again; with a despondent little shrug, she turned south along
the divide, and he watched her go in grim silence.  When the forest hid
her from view, he descended and turned slowly north.

Very slowly; his steps lagged; it was as if he tugged against some
invisible elastic bond.  He kept seeing her anxious face and hearing in
memory the despondent call.  She was going to her death, he believed,
and, after all, despite what she had done to him, he didn't want that.
She was too full of life, too confident, too young, and above all, too
lovely to die.

True, she was an arrogant, vicious, self-centered devil, cool as
crystal, and as unfriendly but--she had gray eyes and brown hair, and
she was courageous.  And at last, with a groan of exasperation, he
halted his lagging steps, turned, and rushed with almost eager speed
into the south.


Trailing the girl was easy here for one trained in the Hotlands.  The
vegetation was slow to mend itself, here in the Cool Country, and now
and again he found imprints of her feet, or broken twigs to make her
path.  He found the place where she had crossed the river through tree
branches, and he found a place where she had pause to eat.

But he saw that she was gaining on him; her skill and speed outmatched
his, and the trail grew steadily older.  At last he stopped to rest;
the table-land was beginning to curve upward toward the vast Mountains
of Eternity, and on rising ground he knew he could overtake her.  So he
slept for a while in the luxurious comfort of no transkin at all, just
the shorts and shirt that one wore beneath.  That was safe here; the
eternal underwind, blowing always toward the Hotlands, kept drifting
mold spores away, and any brought in on the fur of animals died quickly
at the first cool breeze.  Nor would the true plants of the Cool
Country attack his flesh.

He slept five hours.  The next "day" of traveling brought another
change in the country.  The life of the foothills was sparse compared
to the table-lands; the vegetation was no longer a jungle, but a
forest, an unearthly forest, true, of tree-like growths whose boles
rose five hundred feet and then spread, not into foliage, but flowery
appendages.  Only an occasional Jack Ketch tree reminded him of the
Hotlands.

Farther on, the forest diminished.  Great rock outcroppings appeared,
and vast red cliffs with no growths of any kind.  Now and then he
encountered swarms of the planet's only aerial creatures, the gray,
mothlike dusters, large as hawks, but so fragile that a blow shattered
them.  They darted about, alighting at times to seize small squirming
things, and tinkling in their curiously bell-like voices.  And
apparently almost above him, though really thirty miles distant, loomed
the Mountains of Eternity, their peaks lost in the clouds that swirled
fifteen miles overhead.

Here again it grew difficult to trail, since Patricia scrambled often
over bare rock.  But little by little the signs grew fresher; once
again his greater strength began to tell.  And then he glimpsed her, at
the base of a colossal escarpment split by a narrow, tree-filled canyon.

She was peering first at the mighty precipice, then at the cleft,
obviously wondering whether it offered a means of scaling the barrier,
or whether it was necessary to circle the obstacle.  Like himself, she
had discarded her transkin and wore the usual shirt and shorts of the
Cool Country, which, after all, is not very cool by terrestrial
standards.  She looked, he thought, like some lovely forest nymph of
the ancient slopes of Pelion.

He hurried as she moved into the canyon.  "Pat!" he shouted; it was the
first time he had spoken her given name.  A hundred feet within the
passage he overtook her.

"You!" she gasped.  She looked tired; she had been hurrying for hours,
but a light of eagerness flashed in her eyes.  "I thought you had--I
tried to find you."

Ham's face held no responsive light.  "Listen here, Pat Burlingame," he
said coldly.  "You don't deserve any consideration, but I can't see you
walking into death.  You're a stubborn devil, but you're a woman.  I'm
taking you to Erotia."

The eagerness vanished.  "Indeed, poacher?  My father crossed here.  I
can, too."

"Your father crossed in midsummer, didn't he?  And midsummer's today.
You can't make Madman's Pass in less than five days, a hundred and
twenty hours, and by then it will be nearly winter, and this longitude
will be close to the storm line.  You're a fool."

She flushed.  "The pass is high enough to be in the upper winds.  It
will be warm."

"Warm!  Yes--warm with lightning."  He paused; the faint rumble of
thunder rolled through the canyon.  "Listen to that.  In five days that
will be right over us."  He gestured up at the utterly barren slopes.
"Not even Venusian life can get a foothold up there--or do you think
you've got brass enough to be a lightning rod?  Maybe you're right."

Anger flamed.  "Rather the lightning than you!" Patricia snapped, and
then as suddenly softened.  "I tried to call you back," she said
irrelevantly.

"To laugh at me," he retorted bitterly.

"No.  To tell you I was sorry, and that----"

"I don't want your apology."

"But I wanted to tell you that----"

"Never mind," he said curtly.  "I'm not interested in your repentance.
The harm's done."  He frowned coldly down on her.

Patricia said meekly: "But I----"

A crashing and gurgling interrupted her, and she screamed as a gigantic
doughpot burst into view, a colossus that filled the canyon from wall
to wall to a six-foot height as it surged toward them.  The horrors
were rarer in the Cool Country, but larger, since the abundance of food
in the Hotlands kept subdividing them.  But this one was a giant, a
behemoth, tons and tons of nauseous, ill-smelling corruption heaving up
the narrow way.  They were cut off.

Ham snatched his flame-pistol, but the girl seized his arm,

"No, no!" she cried.  "Too close!  It will spatter!"




IV.

Patricia was right.  Unprotected by transkin, the touch of a fragment
of that monstrosity was deadly, and, beyond that, the flash of a
flame-pistol would shower bits of it upon them.  He grasped her wrist
and they fled up the canyon, striving for vantage-way enough to risk a
shot.  And a dozen feet behind surged the doughpot, traveling blindly
in the only direction it could--the way of food.

They gained.  Then, abruptly, the canyon, which had been angling
southwest, turned sharply south.  The light of the eternally eastward
Sun was hidden; they were in a pit of perpetual shadow, and the ground
was bare and lifeless rock.  And as it reached that point, the doughpot
halted; lacking any organization, any will, it could not move when no
food gave it direction.  It was such a monster as only the
life-swarming climate of Venus could harbor; it lived only by endless
eating.

The two paused in the shadow.

"Now what?" muttered Ham.

A fair shot at the mass was impossible because of the angle; a blast
would destroy only the portion it could reach.

Patricia leaped upward, catching a snaky shrub on the wall, so placed
that it received a faint ray of light.  She tossed it against the
pulsing mass; the whole doughpot lunged forward a foot or two.

"Lure it in," she suggested.

They tried.  It was impossible; vegetation was too sparse.

"What will happen to the thing?" asked Ham.

"I saw one stranded on the desert edge of the Hotlands," replied the
girl.  "It quivered around for a long time, and then the cells attacked
each other.  It ate itself."  She shuddered.  "It was--horrible!"

"How long?"

"Oh, forty or fifty hours."

"I won't wait _that_ long," growled Ham.  He fumbled in his pack,
pulling out his transkin.

"What will you do?"

"Put this on and try to blast that mass out of here at close range."
He fingered his flame-pistol.  "This is my last barrel," he said
gloomily, then more hopefully: "But we have yours."

"The chamber of mine cracked last time I used it, ten or twelve hours
ago.  But I have plenty of barrels."

"Good enough!" said Ham.

He crept cautiously toward the horrible, pulsating wall of white.  He
thrust his arm so as to cover the greatest angle, pulled the trigger,
and the roar and blazing fire of the blast bellowed echoing through the
canyon.  Bits of the monster spattered around him, and the thickness of
the remainder, lessened by the incineration of tons of filth, was now
only three feet.

"The barrel held!" he called triumphantly.  It saved much time in
recharging.

Five minutes later the weapon crashed again.  When the mass of the
monstrosity stopped heaving, only a foot and a half of depth remained,
but the barrel had been blown to atoms.

"We'll have to use yours," he said.

Patricia produced one, he took it, and then stared at it in dismay.
The barrels of her Enfield-made weapon were far too small for his
American pistol stock!

He groaned.  "Of all the idiots!" he burst out.

"Idiots!" she flared.  "Because you Yankees use trench mortars for your
barrels?"

"I meant myself.  I should have guessed this."  He shrugged.  "Well, we
have our choice now of waiting here for the doughpot to eat himself, or
trying to find some other way out of this trap.  And my hunch is that
this canyon's blind."

It was probable, Patricia admitted.  The narrow cleft was the product
of some vast, ancient upheaval that had split the mountain in halves.
Since it was not the result of water erosion, it was likely enough that
the cleft ended abruptly in an unscalable precipice, but it was
possible, too, that somewhere those sheer walls might be surmountable.

"We've time to waste, anyway," she concluded.  "We might as well try
it.  Besides----"  She wrinkled her dainty nose distastefully at the
doughpot's odor.


Still in his transkin, Ham followed her through the shadowy half dusk.
The passage narrowed, then veered west again, but now so high and sheer
were the walls that the Sun, slightly south of east, cast no light into
it.  It was a place of shades like the region of the storm line that
divides the twilight zone from the dark hemisphere, not true night, nor
yet honest day, but a dim middle state.

Ahead of him Patricia's bronzed limbs showed pale instead of tan, and
when she spoke her voice went echoing queerly between the opposing
cliffs.  A weird place, this chasm, a dusky, unpleasant place.

"I don't like this," said Ham.  "The pass is cutting closer and closer
to the dark.  Do you realize no one knows what's in the dark parts of
the Mountains of Eternity?"

Patricia laughed; the sound was ghostly.  "What danger could there be?
Anyway, we still have our automatics."

"There's no way up here," Ham grumbled.  "Let's turn back."

Patricia faced him.  "Frightened, Yankee?"  Her voice dropped.  "The
natives say these mountains are haunted," she went on mockingly.  "My
father told me he saw queer things in Madman's Pass.  Do you know that
if there is life on the night side, here is the one place it would
impinge on the twilight zone?  Here in the Mountains of Eternity?"

She was taunting him; she laughed again.  And suddenly her laughter was
repeated in a hideous cacophony that hooted out from the sides of the
cliffs above them in a horrid medley.

She paled; it was Patricia who was frightened now.  They stared
apprehensively up at the rock walls where strange shadows flickered and
shifted.

"What--what was h?" she whispered.  And then: "Ham!  Did you see that?"

Ham had seen it.  A wild shape had flung itself across the strip of
sky, leaping from cliff to cliff far above them.  And again came a peal
of hooting that sounded like laughter, while shadowy forms moved,
flylike, on the sheer walls.

"Let's go back!" she gasped.  "Quickly!"

As she turned, a small black object fell and broke with a sullen pop
before them.  Ham stared at it.  A pod, a spore-sac, of some unknown
variety.  A lazy, dusky cloud drifted over it, and suddenly both of
them were choking violently.  Ham felt his head spinning in dizziness,
and Patricia reeled against him.

"It's--narcotic!" she gasped.  "Back!"

But a dozen more _plopped_ around them.  The dusty spores whirled in
dark eddies, and breathing was a torment.  They were being drugged and
suffocated at the same time.

Ham had a sudden inspiration.  "Mask!" he choked, and pulled his
transkin over his face.

The filter that kept out the molds of the Hotlands cleaned the air of
these spores as well; his head cleared.  But the girl's covering was
somewhere in her pack; she was fumbling for it.  Abruptly she sat down,
swaying.

"My pack," she murmured.  "Take it out with you.  Your--your----"  She
broke into a fit of coughing.

He dragged her under a shallow overhang and ripped her transkin from
the pack.  "Put it on!" he snapped.

A figure flitted silently far up on the wall of rock.  Ham watched its
progress, then aimed his automatic and fired.  There was a shrill,
rasping scream, answered by a chorus of dissonant ululations, and
something as large as a man whirled down to crash not ten feet from him.

The thing was hideous.  Ham stared appalled at a creature not unlike a
native, three-eyed, two-handed, four-legged, but the hands, though
two-fingered like the Hotlanders', were not pincerlike, but white and
clawed.

And the face!  Not the broad, expressionless face of the others, but a
slanting, malevolent, dusky visage with each eye double the size of the
natives'.  It wasn't dead; it glared hatred and seized a stone,
flinging it at him with weak viciousness.  Then it died.

Ham didn't know what it was, of course.  Actually it was a _triops
noctivivans_--the "three-eyed dweller in the dark," the strange,
semi-intelligent being that is as yet the only known creature of the
night side, and a member of that fierce remnant still occasionally
found in the sunless parts of the Mountains of Eternity.  It is perhaps
the most vicious creature in the known planets, absolutely
unapproachable, and delighting in slaughter.

At the crash of the shot, the shower of pods had ceased, and a chorus
of laughing hoots ensued.  Ham seized the respite to pull the girl's
transkin over her face; she had collapsed with it only half on.

Then a sharp crack sounded, and a stone rebounded to strike his arm.
Others pattered around him, whining past, swift as bullets.  Black
figures flickered in great leaps against the sky, and their fierce
laughter sounded mockingly.  He fired at one in mid air; the cry of
pain rasped again, but the creature did not fall.

Stones pelted him.  They were all small ones, pebble-sized, but they
were flung so fiercely that they hummed in passage, and they tore his
flesh through his transkin.  He turned Patricia on her face, but she
moaned faintly as a missile struck her back.  He shielded her with his
own body.


The position was intolerable.  He must risk a dash back, even though
the doughpot blocked the opening.  Perhaps, he thought, armored in
transkin he could wade through the creature.  He knew that was an
insane idea; the gluey mass would roll him into itself to
suffocate--but it had to be faced.  He gathered the girl in his arms
and rushed suddenly down the canyon.

Hoots and shrieks and a chorus of mocking laughter echoed around him.
Stones, struck him everywhere.  One glanced from his head, sending him
stumbling and staggering against the cliff.  But he ran doggedly on; he
knew now what drove him.  It was the girl he carried; he had to save
Patricia Burlingame.

Ham reached the bend.  Far up on the west wall glowed cloudy sunlight,
and his weird pursuers flung themselves to the dark side.  They
couldn't stand daylight, and that gave him some assistance; by creeping
very close to the eastern wall he was partially shielded.

Ahead was the other bend, blocked by the doughpot.  As he neared it, he
turned suddenly sick.  Three of the creatures were grouped against the
mass of white, eating--actually eating!--the corruption.  They whirled,
hooting, as he came; he shot two of them, and as the third leaped for
the wall, he dropped that one as well, and it fell with a dull gulping
sound into the doughpot.

Again he sickened; the doughpot drew away from it, leaving the thing
lying in a hollow like the hole of a giant doughnut.  Not even that
monstrosity would eat these creatures.[*]


[*] Note: It was not known then that while the night-side life of Venus
can eat and digest that of the day side, the reverse is not true.  No
day-side creature can absorb the dark life because of the presence of
various metabolic alcohols, all poisonous.


But the thing's leap had drawn Ham's attention to a twelve-inch ledge.
It might be--yes, it was possible that he could traverse that rugged
trail and so circle the doughpot.  Nearly hopeless, no doubt, to
attempt it under the volley of stones, but he must.  There was no
alternative.

He shifted the girl to free his right arm.  He slipped a second clip in
his automatic and then fired at random into the flitting shadows above.
For a moment the hail of pebbles ceased, and with a convulsive, painful
struggle, Ham dragged himself and Patricia to the ledge.

Stones cracked about him once more.  Step by step he edged along the
way, poised just over the doomed doughpot.  Death below and death
above!  And little by little he rounded the bend; above him both walls
glowed in sunlight, and they were safe.

At least, he was safe.  The girl might be already dead, he thought
frantically, as he slipped and slid through the slime of the doughpot's
passage.  Out on the daylit slope he tore the mask from her face and
gazed on white, marble-cold features.


It was not death, however, but only drugged torpor.  An hour later she
was conscious, though weak and very badly frightened.  Yet almost her
first question was for her pack.

"It's here," Ham said.  "What's so precious about that pack?  Your
notes?"

"My notes?  Oh, no!"  A faint flush covered her features.  "It's--I
kept trying to tell you--it's your xixtchil."

"What?"

"Yes.  I--of course I didn't throw it to the molds.  It's yours by
rights, Ham.  Lots of British traders go into the American Hotlands.  I
just slit the pouch and hid it here in my pack.  The molds on the
ground were only some twigs I threw there to--to make it look real."

"But--but--why?"

The flush deepened, "I wanted to punish you," Patricia whispered, "for
being so--so cold and distant."

"I?"  Ham was amazed.  "It was you!"

"Perhaps it was, at first.  You forced your way into my house, you
know.  But--after you carried me across the mudspout, Ham--it was
different."

Ham gulped.  Suddenly he pulled her into his arms.  "I'm not going to
quarrel about whose fault it was," he said.  "But we'll settle one
thing immediately.  We're going to Erotia, and that's where we'll be
married, in a good American church if they've put one up yet, or by a
good American justice if they haven't.  There's no more talk of
Madman's Pass and crossing the Mountains of Eternity.  Is that clear?"

She glanced at the vast, looming peaks and shuddered.  "Quite clear!"
she replied meekly.






[End of Parasite Planet, by Stanley G. Weinbaum]
