_Though he carried with him the loot of the ages, who in The
Pass--that legalized city of vice and corruption--would dare
risk his neck to help Russell, the Hard Luck Man of the
Swamps?_
* * * * *
He came up out of the Great Sea-Swamp of Venus like old Father
Neptune. He was covered with mud and slime. Seaweed hung from his
cheap diving-suit. Brine dripped from his arms that hung limp and
weary; it ran from his torso and made a dark trail in the sand.
[Illustration: _A flash of intuition hit Russell. He knew now how to
win this fight._]
Without even looking back, he stood for a moment as if fighting to
keep on his feet, while the brine made a small puddle in the green
sand. Finally he unscrewed the helmet and took it off. He turned
around slowly and looked back across the two hundred miles of deadly
swamp, at the flaming craters of the Red Lava Range from which he had
come.
With fingers that would hardly function from weariness he took off his
diving-suit and straightened up. His stooping shoulders were free of
that weight for the first time in forty days. He was a small man,
hardly over four feet tall, and not well formed. It seemed incredible
that he had crossed the Great Sea-Swamp on foot.
And as he looked back at the distant rim of green fire that marked the
mountains it seemed incredible to him too. A great sigh of relief and
gratefulness shook his unsymmetrical body, and all the nerve and
colossal will-power that had carried him for six months, suddenly
flowed out of him in a single wave and left him empty. He forgot about
the ordeal that still lay ahead. He forgot everything. He pitched
forward on his face in the sand, and slept.
Some hours later a whistling noise awoke him. He rolled over, awake
instantly, for in past months his ears had saved his life as often as
had his eyes. High in the sky he picked out a cannibal fish from the
Acid Sea. It had set its great wings in a dive.
He raised his heat-gun, fired once, saw the feathers burst into blue
flame, saw it falling; then he rolled over and went back to sleep. Not
even the thud of its heavy body on the sand disturbed him, but an hour
later he heard another warning--a rasping sound--and through the
stench of the ancient swamp he smelled a fetidness that meant danger.
This time as he turned he rolled to his feet. He saw the huge coils of
the Venusian water-constrictor. One lidless phosphorescent eye gleamed
evilly at him, but its great jaws were spread and the dead fish was
half-way down its bone-plated throat.
Grant Russell relaxed. Ordinarily he would have been scared to death
to be within miles of the big saurian. But now for a few hours, with
the fish in its throat it would be comparatively harmless.
Grant rubbed his eyes and stretched. How wonderful sleep could be! For
six weeks he had been in the swamp where he never had dared to take
off his diving-suit even when he was resting on a clump of floating
grass, for fear it would suddenly sink and drop him into a hundred
feet of brown water; six weeks walking through mud sometimes over his
head, with the brown, infested water above that; six weeks pitting all
his swamp lore against sudden death in a thousand forms, with only the
light gravity of Venus to aid him, and his indomitable determination
to keep him going. But now he felt like a million.
No man had ever crossed the Great Swamp alone on foot before. Few had
crossed it in any fashion. Few would have tried it but Grant Russell
because few wanted to do it as much as he did. In spite of his small
size and his scrawny muscles, in spite of Venus which catered to big
men and strong men, he had done it.
* * * * *
The food problem alone would have stopped most men, but Grant had
spent a lot of time around the swamps of Venus. Often he had gone
prospecting with food enough for only one week because he couldn't buy
more, and he had stayed four, five, six weeks.
To do that he had had to experiment. He'd eaten all sorts of things.
Sometimes he had been ill but he had acquired immunity to certain
poisonous plants that contained food values.
The oxygen problem for a diving-suit for forty days would have stopped
most men but Grant had solved that too. If he had not, he never could
have gone to the Red Lava Range after the fabulous gizzard-stones of
Venus's prehistoric echindul.
For oxygen, he had discovered a plant that grew in the bottom of the
swamp. You could cut its stalk into sections and put them in a
container and they would exude oxygen for several hours. But he had to
carry at least one extra stalk all the time, and he had to keep his
eyes sharp for more. Sometimes it had been close.
Grant looked at the Red Lava Range and felt the precious leather bag
inside his shirt and smiled. Yes, he'd done it. He'd found one of the
fabulous nests of the echindul--and it had been loaded with stones,
just as ancient Venusian legend insisted.
The extinct echindul had been a sort of flying lizard that had nested
in the mysterious, almost inaccessible Red Lava Range. Every echindul
had had two gizzard-stones, and each matched pair of stones had an
unusual property.
Grant reached in his watch-pocket and brought out the one he had kept
out of the bag. He held it up and watched the sunlight, filtering
through Venus's thick clouds, and the firelight, reflected from Red
Lava Range two hundred miles away, play on the chatoyant interior of
the stone as if they were chasing each other.
Those stones would be worth forty thousand Earth dollars a pair if he
could get them to a reputable dealer in Aphrodite, Venus's largest
city. Therein lay Grant Russell's next problem, and in spite of the
satisfaction he felt at emerging from the Great Swamp, he knew that
getting safely to Aphrodite might be an even more serious problem.
Aphrodite's only approach over the Lead Vapor Mountains from the
southern hemisphere was through The Pass, a legalized city of vice. On
one side The Pass was flanked by the Bubbling Zinc Pits and on the
other side it was skirted by the Fluoride River, and man had not yet
devised any way to navigate either of these. It was doubtful, even,
that any species native to Venus could cross those two areas, but on
this authorities did not agree for in the year 2542 Venus and its
natives were still largely unknown.
Not so far unknown, however, that Grant Russell failed to recognize
the single luminous eye that had risen out of the water on a long,
slender stalk. "A fish," he thought, or as some would have said, a
Venusian. It saw that he was looking at it, and it dropped out of
sight. There was the swirl of brown water that marked its
under-surface progress. It swam like a fish, but it wasn't really a
fish. It was one of Venus's four dominant species and the most "human"
of all.
The swirl moved fast across the surface of the water and disappeared
in the direction of Aphrodite but Grant knew that its place would be
taken within a few minutes by another. And if Grant had had any
forlorn hope that he might be able to slip through The Pass, he gave
it up, for he knew now that his movements were reported hourly and
that his possession of the fabulous stones was undoubtedly known to
Relegar, the Uranian.
Relegar was the master of The Pass. He was no human and he had no
human feelings. Killings and stealing were a business to him, and he
had the most efficient spying system on any planet. It was well known
unofficially that he kept an underground factory busy extracting a
drug from the stamen of the swamp-orchid. The drug was labeled
"Venus-snow," and Relegar found it highly profitable to trade it to
the fish in the Sea-Swamp on the southwest and to the semi-aquatic
people in the great Gallium Bogs to the southeast--some called them
"frogs"--for information.
Relegar's spy-system was a monopoly by reason of a peculiar fact: the
fish-people talked in a high sound-range that no solar being but a
Uranian could hear; no Uranian trusted another Uranian, and so Relegar
was the only entity in The Pass who knew the dialect of the
fish-people. Seldom did any person or any entity find anything of
value in the bottom half of Venus that was not promptly reported to
the Uranian.
Therefore Grant Russell did not dare enter The Pass with the stones on
his person. This was a quick way to lose them--and perhaps his life.
Some day, thought Grant wishfully, some big-shot would come along and
clean out The Pass and then the little honest men would be safe. On
the rare occasions when a prospector did find something of value and
get back to land he would be allowed to keep it. Grant wished he had a
lot of power or a lot of money. He'd take over the clean-up job. But a
fellow like him, without friends, without influence, without money,
didn't have a chance.
* * * * *
Grant had thought about that a good many times on his long trip across
the swamp, but he had worried more about how to dispose of his own
stones before Relegar got hold of him. He would of course have to use
deception. But how? If he could hide the stones some place he could go
on into The Pass empty-handed and pretend that he'd had the usual lack
of luck. Then he could see Netse, the Jovian fence, and make a deal
for protection. He'd have to give up half, but that was the easiest
way out, for Relegar would keep hands off if Netse got there first.
But where could he hide the stones? There was too much continual
volcanic subterranean activity in the swamp, and on what little dry
land Venus had it was doubtful that any hiding-place could be called
permanent. It might be solid today and swallowed by an earthquake
tomorrow.
The only real solution was to have somebody else keep them for a
while, Grant thought, and that was a discouraging thought, for whom
could he trust in The Pass even if he could reach them? For that
matter, who in The Pass would risk his life to help out Grant Russell,
the Hard-Luck Man of the Swamp?
He'd been known as a hard-luck man as far back as he could remember.
His parents had been killed in a rocket crash on a trip to Mars; he'd
been raised by one relative after another and they'd each one gotten
rid of him as soon as they could. Finally he had married a nice girl
and they had been happy until their daughter was born. Then the mother
had died.
Grant had gone to pieces for a while. When he came to, he was broke,
hungry, ragged. Then when it was too late he had become frantic over
the safety of his small daughter, Beth. He found that she was safe in
a child welfare home in New Jersey, but they would not release her to
him until he could pay what he owed for her care and have enough left
over to establish himself as a substantial citizen.
He had told her goodby. She was the image of her mother, and she had
held onto his hand as long as she could and said between sobs, "Daddy,
can we have a farm some day, and raise strawberries, and have just us
two? I don't want to be an orphan." He had gulped and said, "Sure,"
and then he had come to Venus. It was a new planet, largely
unexplored, full of opportunity.
That had been three years ago. Things had been tough at times but now
he could afford to smile. He'd hit the jackpot--a million-year-old
nest of the echindul, with sixteen pairs of stones. He put the one
stone safely back in his watch-pocket. He was keeping that one. When
he sold the others he would have the dealer pick out the mate to this
one, and he and Beth would keep this pair. They would be well able to
afford it.
He felt the bag at his side. The stones didn't weigh much, perhaps a
couple of ounces apiece, but the famous telepathic stones of Venus
were well known on Earth. Wealthy young lovers would carry a pair, if
they could get them, so that each could know what the other was
thinking.
Scientists said the stones were matched crystals so that each pair, in
effect, was tuned in together. They said also that the stones were
little more than nature's ultimate extension of man's feeble attempts
at radio communication.
Grant Russell knew little about that. What he did know was that those
stones were worth half a million dollars. He gathered up his patched
diving-suit and packed it, from long habit. He raised his head and saw
another eye watching him from the swamp. He watched the eye and
listened to the rasping of the bone-plates in the constrictor's
throat.
Ordinarily he would have tried to kill the big saurian, for its skin
had the property of turning slightly radioactive after death and it
was worth a couple of hundred dollars delivered in Aphrodite, but a
thought occurred to him. He watched the saurian and began to smile.
The constrictor could be worth a lot more than two hundred dollars to
him.
He flipped a handful of green sand at the eye in the swamp and it
withdrew abruptly into the water. He ran, making a wide circle around
the constrictor's powerful tail. He darted in to the head and stood
above the lidless eye. Three years ago he would not have walked this
close to a _dead_ constrictor, but now--well, he'd learned not to be
scared until there was need of it. He bent down. The fish was well
inside the saurian's mouth. The constrictor's jaws were distended and
it was helpless.
Grant whipped the bag of stones from inside of his jacket and tied the
leather thong to one leg of the fish. He made sure he had the one
single stone in his watch-pocket. That one he had to keep to be able
to find the others. He went back to the edge of the swamp and waited
until he saw an eye come up, whereupon he flipped another handful of
sand at it.
He stayed there for two hours, until the bag of stones was well down
the saurian's throat. Then he set out for The Pass. He was painfully
hungry now, but he was light-hearted. Never again would he have to
risk the death that infested the Great Sea-Swamp. Within thirty days
he would be home--home on Earth. He and Beth would get a little house
out in the country and have a little garden, and he could relax and
watch his daughter grow up. She was only seven now. It wasn't too
late.
* * * * *
It was dark when he got to The Pass, the sinister city where he'd seen
men killed for a twenty-dollar bill, where girls had been sold over
the counter for fifty. He knew better than to go directly to Netse,
for the Jovian and the Uranian had a sort of throat-cutting
partnership in the underworld, and while Grant was sure Netse would
help him directly to get a bigger cut, he knew also that Netse
wouldn't want to be too obvious about it.
So Grant, by this time weary in the shoulders from carrying his
equipment, turned down Thorium Avenue toward Nellie's Boarding House.
But under the first streetlight he was stopped by a grimy boy. This
was notable, because the boy was an Earthman. There weren't too many
Earthmen in The Pass.
"Where you been, Hard-Luck Russell?" the boy asked insolently.
Grant's throat was dry. He knew what that meant. Nobody who knew
Hard-Luck Russell would bother to stop him unless they had orders to
do it--orders that came from Relegar.
"In the Swamp," Russell said, swallowing hard.
The kid stared at the diving-suit in Grant's hand, stared at Grant's
face with a sharp, penetrating, unashamed inquisitiveness that made
Grant use all of his will-power to stare back. The kid suddenly
disappeared.
Grant forced himself not to walk faster. The kid had put the finger on
him. It was the first time Relegar had ever done that. Those damned
eyes! Relegar must know what Grant had found, and the knowledge that
the Uranian knew about the stones made him weak. Relegar was a bad
spider.
Grant's impulse was to run but he forced himself to be steady. Now he
didn't dare go straight to Netse. He went on to Nellie's place and
hammered on the door. "Oh, it's you. Come on in." Nellie opened the
door. Nellie was a Martian, a century-plant, and nobody knew whether
it was he or she or whether it made any difference, but they called it
"she" and they called it "Nellie."
Grant went in. Nellie's leaves rustled and that queer whispery voice
came from her. "Do you want a cot?"
"I'll have a room this time," said Grant. "How much?"
"A buck," said Nellie's leaves. "Pay now."
She collected. He took his diving-suit to the room. He didn't like the
smell of cabbage and garlic, and the fumes of chlorine were so strong
he nearly choked. A Saturnian must be pickling insects somewhere up on
the second floor. He sat down. He was starved but he didn't want to go
outside until he had a chance to figure things out. He thought maybe
the first thing to do was to see Netse.
From the sounds he thought the two girls across the hall were getting
ready to go out. He lay down on the bed to rest.
At ten o'clock they left, jabbering. It was good to hear Earth-people
talk, even if it was French, which he didn't understand. As soon as
the front door closed after the girls he tiptoed across the hall and
tried the doorknob. It was locked. He opened it with his skeleton key.
The room was dark and he did not turn on a light. He opened the window
and dropped softly to the ground in a narrow space between two
buildings.