_On mist-shrouded Venus, where hostile
swamp meets hostile sea ... there did
Barry Barr--Earthman transmuted--swap
his Terran heritage for the deep dark
waters of Tana; for the strangely
beautiful Xintel of the blue-brown skin._
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories May 1954.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Evil luck brought the meteorite to those particular space-time
coordinates as Number Four rode the downhill spiral toward Venus. The
football-sized chunk of nickel-iron and rock overtook the ship at a
relative speed of only a few hundred miles per hour and passed close
enough to come within the tremendous pseudo-gravatic fields of the
idling drivers.
It swerved into a paraboloid course, following the flux lines, and was
dragged directly against one of the three projecting nozzles. Energy
of motion was converted to heat and a few meteoric fragments fused
themselves to the nonmetallic tube casing.
In the jet room the positronic line accelerator for that particular
driver fouled under the intolerable overload, and the backsurge sent
searing heat and deadly radiation blasting through the compartment
before the main circuit breakers could clack open.
The bellow of the alarm horn brought Barry Barr fully awake, shattering
a delightfully intimate dream of the dark haired girl he hoped to see
again soon in Venus Colony. As he unbuckled his bunk straps and started
aft at a floating, bounding run his weightlessness told him instantly
that Number Four was in free fall with dead drivers.
Red warning lights gleamed wickedly above the safety-locked jet
room door, and Nick Podtiaguine, the air machines specialist, was
manipulating the emergency controls with Captain Reno at his elbow. One
by one the crew crowded into the corridor and watched in tense silence.
The automatic lock clicked off as the jet room returned to habitable
conditions, and at Captain Reno's gesture two men swung the door open.
Quickly the commander entered the blasted jet room. Barry Barr was
close behind him.
Robson Hind, jet chief of Four and electronics expert for Venus Colony,
hung back until others had gone in first. His handsome, heavy face had
lost its usual ruddiness.
Captain Reno surveyed the havoc. Young Ryan's body floated eerily in
the zero gravity, charred into instant death by the back-blast. The
line accelerator was a shapeless ruin, but except for broken meter
glasses and scorched control handles other mechanical damage appeared
minor. They had been lucky.
"Turnover starts in six hours twelve minutes," the captain said
meaningfully.
Robson Hind cleared his throat. "We can change accelerators in two
hours," he declared. With a quick reassumption of authority he began to
order his crew into action.
It took nearer three hours than two to change accelerators despite
Hind's shouted orders.
At last the job was completed. Hind made a final check, floated over to
the control panel and started the fuel feed. With a confident smile he
threw in the accelerator switch.
The meter needles climbed, soared past the red lines without pausing,
and just in time to prevent a second blowback, Hind cut the power.
"_There's metal in the field!_" His voice was high and unsteady.
* * * * *
Everyone knew what that meant. The slightest trace of magnetic material
would distort the delicately balanced cylinder of force that contained
and directed the Hoskins blast, making it suicidal to operate.
Calmly Captain Reno voiced the thought in every mind.
"It must be cleared. From the outside."
Several of the men swore under their breaths. Interplanetary space
was constantly bombarded, with an intensity inverse to the prevailing
gravitation, by something called Sigma radiation. Man had never
encountered it until leaving Earth, and little was known of it
except that short exposure killed test animals and left their bodies
unpredictably altered.
Inside the ship it was safe enough, for the sleek hull was charged with
a Kendall power-shield, impervious to nearly any Sigma concentration.
But the shielding devices in the emergency spacesuits were small
and had never been space-tested in a region of nearly equalized
gravitations.
The man who emerged from the airlock would be flipping a coin with a
particularly unpleasant form of death.
Many pairs of eyes turned toward Robson Hind. He was jet chief.
"I'm assigned, not expendable," he protested hastily. "If there were
more trouble later...." His face was pasty.
Assigned. That was the key word. Barry Barr felt a lump tightening
in his stomach as the eyes shifted to him. He had some training in
Hoskins drivers. He knew alloys and power tools. And he was riding Four
unassigned after that broken ankle had made him miss Three. He was the
logical man.
"For the safety of the ship." That phrase, taken from the ancient
Earthbound code of the sea, had occurred repeatedly in the
indoctrination manual at Training Base. He remembered it, and
remembered further the contingent plans regarding assigned and
unassigned personnel.
For a moment he stood indecisively, the nervous, unhumorous smile
quirking across his angular face making him look more like an untried
boy than a structural engineer who had fought his way up through some
of the toughest tropical construction camps of Earth. His lean body,
built more for quick, neatly coordinated action than brute power,
balanced handily in the zero gravity as he ran one hand through his
sandy hair in a gesture of uncertainty.
He knew that not even the captain would order him through the airlock.
But the members of the Five Ship Plan had been selected in part for a
sense of responsibility.
"Nick, will you help me button up?" he asked with forced calmness.
For an instant he thought he detected a sly gleam in Hind's eyes. But
then the jet chief was pressing forward with the others to shake his
hand.
Rebellious reluctance flared briefly in Barry's mind. Dorothy Voorhees
had refused to make a definite promise before blasting off in Three--in
fact he hadn't even seen her during her last few days on Earth. But
still he felt he had the inside track despite Hind's money and the
brash assurance that went with it. But if Hind only were to reach Venus
alive--
* * * * *
The blazing disc of Sol, the minor globes of the planets, the unwinking
pinpoints of the stars, all stared with cosmic disinterest at the tiny
figure crawling along the hull. His spacesuit trapped and amplified
breathing and heartbeats into a roaring chaos that was an invitation
to blind panic, and all the while there was consciousness of the
insidiously deadly Sigma radiations.
Barry found the debris of the meteorite, an ugly shining splotch
against the dull superceramic tube, readied his power chisel, started
cutting. Soon it became a tedious, torturingly strenuous manual task
requiring little conscious thought, and Barry's mind touched briefly on
the events that had brought him here.
First Luna, and that had been murderous. Man had encountered Sigma
for the first time, and many had died before the Kendall-shield was
perfected. And the chemical-fueled rockets of those days had been
inherently poor.
Hoskins semi-atomics had made possible the next step--to Mars. But men
had found Mars barren, swept clear of all life in the cataclysm that
had shattered the trans-Martian planet to form the Asteroid Belt.
Venus, its true surface forever hidden by enshrouding mists, had been
well within one-way range. But Hoskins fuel requirements for a round
trip added up to something beyond critical mass. Impossible.
But the Five Ship Plan had evolved, a joint enterprise of government
and various private groups. Five vessels were to go out, each fueled
to within a whiskered neutron of spontaneous detonation, manned by
specialists who, it was hoped, could maintain themselves under alien
conditions.
On Venus the leftover fuel from all five would be transferred to
whichever ship had survived the outbound voyage in best condition.
That one would return to Earth. Permanent base or homeward voyage with
colonists crowded aboard like defeated sardines? Only time would tell.
Barry Barr had volunteered, and because the enlightened guesses of the
experts called for men and women familiar with tropical conditions,
he had survived the rigorous weeding-out process. His duties in Venus
Colony would be to refabricate the discarded ships into whatever form
was most needed--most particularly a launching ramp--and to study
native Venusian materials.
Dorothy Voorhees had signed on as toxicologist and dietician. When the
limited supply of Earth food ran out the Colony would be forced to
rely upon Venusian plants and animals. She would guard against subtle
delayed-action poisons, meanwhile devising ways of preparing Venusian
materials to suit Earth tastes and digestions.
Barry had met her at Training Base and known at once that his years of
loneliness had come to an end.
She seemed utterly independent, self-contained, completely intellectual
despite her beauty, but Barry had not been deceived. From the moment
of first meeting he had sensed within her deep springs of suppressed
emotion, and he had understood. He too had come up the hard way, alone,
and been forced to develop a shell of hardness and cold, single-minded
devotion to his work. Gradually, often unwillingly under his
insistence, her aloofness had begun to melt.
But Robson Hind too had been attracted. He was the only son of the
business manager of the great Hoskins Corporation which carried
a considerable share in the Five Ship Plan. Dorothy's failure to
virtually fall into his arms had only piqued his desires.
The man's smooth charm had fascinated the girl and his money had opened
to her an entirely new world of lavish nightclubs and extravagantly
expensive entertainments, but her inborn shrewdness had sensed some
factor in his personality that had made her hesitate.
Barry had felt a distrust of Hind apart from the normal dislike of
rivalry. He had looked forward to being with Dorothy aboard Three, and
had made no secret of his satisfaction when Hind's efforts to have
himself transferred to Three also or the girl to Four had failed.
But then a scaffold had slipped while Three was being readied, and with
a fractured ankle he had been forced to miss the ship.
He unclipped the magnetic detector from his belt and ran it inch by
inch over the nozzle. He found one spot of metal, pinhead-sized, but
enough to cause trouble, and once more swung his power chisel into
stuttering action.
Then it was done.
As quickly as possible he inched back to the airlock. Turnover had to
start according to calculations.
* * * * *
Barry opened his eyes. The ship was in normal deceleration and Nick
Podtiaguine was watching him from a nearby bunk.
"I could eat a cow with the smallpox," Barry declared.
Nick grinned. "No doubt. You slept around the clock and more. Nice job
of work out there."
Barry unhitched his straps and sat up.
"Say," he asked anxiously. "What's haywire with the air?"
Nick looked startled. "Nothing. Everything checked out when I came off
watch a few minutes ago."
Barry shrugged. "Probably just me. Guess I'll go see if I can mooch a
handout."
He found himself a hero. The cook was ready to turn the galley inside
out while a radio engineer and an entomologist hovered near to wait on
him. But he couldn't enjoy the meal. The sensations of heat and dryness
he had noticed on awakening grew steadily worse. It became difficult to
breathe.
He started to rise, and abruptly the room swirled and darkened around
him. Even as he sank into unconsciousness he knew the answer.
The suit's Kendall-shield had leaked!
Four plunged toward Venus tail first, the Hoskins jets flaring ahead.
The single doctor for the Colony had gone out in Two and the crewmen
trained in first aid could do little to relieve Barry's distress.
Fainting spells alternated with fever and delirium and an unquenchable
thirst. His breathing became increasingly difficult.
A few thousand miles out Four picked up a microbeam. A feeling of
exultation surged through the ship as Captain Reno passed the word, for
the beam meant that some Earthmen were alive upon Venus. They were not
necessarily diving straight toward oblivion. Barry, sick as he was,
felt the thrill of the unknown world that lay ahead.
Into a miles-thick layer of opacity Four roared, with Captain Reno
himself jockeying throttles to keep it balanced on its self-created
support of flame.
"You're almost in," a voice chanted into his headphones through
crackling, sizzling static. "Easy toward spherical one-thirty. Hold it!
Lower. Lower. CUT YOUR POWER!"
The heavy hull dropped sickeningly, struck with a mushy thud, settled,
steadied.
Barry was weak, but with Nick Podtiaguine steadying him he was waiting
with the others when Captain Reno gave the last order.
"Airlock open. Both doors."
Venusian air poured in.
"For this I left Panama?" one of the men yelped.
"Enough to gag a maggot," another agreed with hand to nose.
It was like mid-summer noon in a tropical mangrove swamp, hot and
unbearably humid and overpowering with the stench of decaying
vegetation.
But Barry took one deep breath, then another. The stabbing needles in
his chest blunted, and the choking band around his throat loosened.
The outer door swung wide. He blinked, and a shift in the encompassing
vapors gave him his first sight of a world bathed in subdued light.
Four had landed in a marsh with the midships lock only a few feet above
a quagmire surface still steaming from the final rocket blast. Nearby
the identical hulls of Two and Three stood upright in the mud. The
mist shifted again and beyond the swamp he could see the low, rounded
outlines of the collapsible buildings Two and Three had carried in
their cargo pits. They were set on a rock ledge rising a few feet out
of the marsh. The Colony!
Men were tossing sections of lattice duckboard out upon the swamp,
extending a narrow walkway toward Four's airlock, and within a few
minutes the new arrivals were scrambling down.
Barry paid little attention to the noisy greetings and excited talk.
Impatiently he trotted toward the rock ledge, searching for one
particular figure among the men and women who waited.
"Dorothy!" he said fervently.
Then his arms were around her and she was responding to his kiss.
Then unexpected pain tore at his chest. Her lovely face took on an
expression of fright even as it wavered and grew dim. The last thing he
saw was Robson Hind looming beside her.
By the glow of an overhead tubelight he recognized the kindly, deeply
lined features of the man bending over him. Dr. Carl Jensen, specialist
in tropical diseases. He tried to sit up but the doctor laid a
restraining hand on his shoulder.
"Water!" Barry croaked.
The doctor held out a glass. Then his eyes widened incredulously as his
patient deliberately drew in a breath while drinking, sucking water
directly into his lungs.
"Doctor," he asked, keeping his voice low to spare his throat. "What
are my chances? On the level."
Dr. Jensen shook his head thoughtfully. "There's not a thing--not a
damned solitary thing--I can do. It's something new to medical science."
Barry lay still.
"Your body is undergoing certain radical changes," the doctor
continued, "and you know as much--more about your condition than I do.
If a normal person who took water into his lungs that way didn't die of
a coughing spasm, congestive pneumonia would get him sure. But it seems
to give you relief."
Barry scratched his neck, where a thickened, darkening patch on each
side itched infuriatingly.
"What are these changes?" he asked. "What's this?"
"Those things seem to be--" the doctor began hesitantly. "Damn it, I
know it sounds crazy but they're rudimentary gills."
Barry accepted the outrageous statement unemotionally. He was beyond
shock.
"But there must be--"
Pain struck again, so intense his body twisted and arched
involuntarily. Then the prick of a needle brought merciful oblivion.