Alston hesitated. "You can't do much. If you'll trust me, there's
something I'd like to try. It may not work, but you'll be no worse
off. I'll need a small, fast plane and a pilot with guts. Also a
flame-thrower and some grenades, both incendiary and explosive. A
parachute--"
Hailard's eyes met Alston's in understanding. He nodded, shouting
orders.
Rocket tubes blasting, the tiny plane drew a trail of fire through the
gray sky. Over the city it nosed into a steep power dive, bored down
in thunder, skimming walls and terraces. Over the shadowy courtyard
of the temple enclosure, it pulled out, zoomed swiftly, topped the
near buildings and vanished. Behind it a parachute burst open in white
flowering.
Burdened with the carrying case of grenades and a portable
flame-thrower, Alston dropped like a plummet. Pressing a release, he
slipped from the harness before his feet touched the ground. He landed,
running.
Before him, the flame-thrower belched its roaring scimitar, and snarls
of the knotted greenery withered from his path. Half a moment brought
him to the oval portal. Gouts of fire washed it clear of the tangling
obstructions.
Choking, he kicked through the smoking ashes and burst into the
temple's gloom. The place was alive with menace. Murmurings built into
shrill tumult.
Down the crumbling terraces he stumbled, cutting a wide swath with the
swishing flame. The temple buzzed like an angry beehive. At the pit's
edge, the flame-thrower's reservoir ran dry. It hissed and the fiery
jets died. He flung it into the pressing dark.
Kneeling, he stared into the quivering horror of the pit! The jellied
light within stirred with life, bubbling furiously. With his teeth
Alston drew out the pins of two grenades, dropped them. Two more.
Feverishly, as rapidly as hands could function, he jerked out pins and
hurled the bombs deep into the churning protoplasm in the pit.
From below came a staggered flash, followed by jarring concussions.
The pit was a manifold convulsion of movement. Fans of flame spurted
upward, became fountains of light and uproar. Waves of sound and
pressured air hurled Alston back from the curbing. With the last burst
shot up quivering, ugly chunks of pulpy matter which clung and burned.
Crawling masses of vegetation reached him, struck, broke in myriad
struggling forms. Tentacles and tendrils of vine bore him down,
overwhelming in their clinging embrace. His heat gun burned them
through, loosening their grip. He broke clear.
Something like a fiery whip flicked his face, drawing blood and
shooting rivulets of pain through arms and legs. Vines licked out,
enwrapped him, lashing, constricting. Steel-hard tentacles bound his
arms to his body, crushing. From the surrounding dark came muffled
explosions as spore-pods burst. A fine mist of searing dust powdered
his face. Dust stung nostrils raw, burned into his eyes.
Incredible sound shrieked from the pit. A cry of mortal agony. Vines
and tentacles released suddenly. Alston staggered and slumped to the
floor. Blind, tortured, gasping for breath, he dragged himself. Groping
fingers found the curb and led him to the ramp. Crawling, he inched
his way over its high-flung span, down. Upright again, he stood before
the pedestal, climbed upon it, fingers numbed and bloody. His arms
stretched upward toward the frightful thing upon the web.
Blind, he did not see the swift blight overtake that lovely body. He
did not see the rot which turned the softly molded limbs to dripping
slime, the charnel droplets form and course down the blackened webbing.
He did not see the sudden withering of vines and snake-trunked
treeforms in the temple, the dark, ugly writhings of the stricken
plant-things, the collapse and convulsive death of all the fearsome,
unnatural legions outside. He did not hear the dry, crisp, rustling
fall of dead, shrunken leaves throughout the forest.
Blind and insensible, Alston stood upon the island pedestal in the
ruined temple, arms yearning upward in hopeless supplication to the
monstrous, decaying horror on the veil. He still stood there when a
mopping-up squad of convicts searched the temple and found him. Raving,
he was borne away to the returning ships.
* * * * *
It is another matter that he awakened later in the radiation hospital
at Quanta City. Beautiful Kial Nasron, also suffering from painful
radiation burns, sat beside him on the bed when he tore off the
bandages and opened his eyes upon darkness. She pressed him gently back
to the pillow, told him that he had been freely pardoned, and promised
that he would see again, months later, when the paralysis had left his
optic nerves.
It is also another matter that when Kial and her father returned to
Mars Craig Alston went along, and that a court there reversed its
findings in his case, restoring full civil rights which a man needs to
be married.
In time even a man like Torkeg Nasron can be civilized into a potential
father-in-law. Craig Alston volunteered for the Second Trans-Plutonian
Expedition, and while Kial waits for him, she can work upon her father.
But in the years ahead, she and Alston will rarely speak of Venus
with its age-old mystery, its forgotten cities and strange plants.
And they will try not to think of the temple and the Circean monster
in its sacred well, nor of the thing that hung upon a veil of woven
moonbeams....