Gradually, so gradually he could not determine when it started, he
began to hear a new word whispered around the city.
"_Demon!_"
"The demons are not all dead!"
"The demons have returned!"
"The demons gather to attack us!"
"Only Komso can save us from the demons!"
"Is he--?"
"Perhaps her father, Soren Who Died Accursed, was a--"
"Have they found--?"
"Will the demons--?"
A shuddering uneasiness spread insidiously among the people, and their
attitude changed. Venusian men watched the Earthman with hostile
speculation in their eyes and hands close to weapon hilts. Women moved
aside as he approached, dragging their children with them.
Although not a single individual mentioned demons to Barry's face he
knew he was somehow concerned.
"Just what are these demons?" he demanded of Xintel.
He expected her to refer to some superstition, but she surprised him
with a definite answer.
"They were the last of my race to live in the Above--not devil-spirits
or supernatural beings at all. But they were outlaws and killers, and
so were not permitted to pass through the Place Of Change. Over this
there was great bitterness, and the Last Days were filled with hatred
and slaughter that is still remembered. But they are all long since
dead."
"You mean your people came here from the Above deliberately?" Barry
asked incredulously. "Why?"
Xintel nodded. "We--my forefathers--were to have come to the Here for
a short time only, for sanctuary. But our way back was closed when the
Place Of Change was destroyed. And the Chosen, gaining power, saw that
misfortune overtook those who knew the secret of the Place."
She smiled tremulously. "I hoped that you could lead us back. But you
too had lost the way of return."
"But why? What made your people come to the Here?"
The pain of ancient tragedy was in Xintel's eyes as she told the story.
"Around us nearly everywhere are creatures, living creatures, small
beyond all normal sight," she explained.
"There." She pointed to the light. "And another sort live in the paste
which produces gas. My people were always clever at making use of them.
"In the Above live many more types of these unseen creatures. My people
became too clever--but they were not as clever as they thought."
She glanced at Barry and spoke with earnest seriousness. "Some of them,
incredibly tiny as they are, are deadly. They get inside a person,
causing him to sicken and die, killing as surely as a spear thrust."
She hesitated as though expecting the Earthman to hoot in derision at
such an idea, and continued only when he nodded slowly.
"There were quarrels among factions of my people, breaking out again
and again with increasingly vicious fury.
"Ordinary weapons were not enough. With their skill my people took the
unseen things--they understood, then, a way to see them--and made them
change their natures to become more deadly still."
Barry shuddered as he guessed the rest. He remembered talk on Earth of
developing mutant, hypervirulent strains for bacterial warfare.
"The ancients used the special unseen creatures they had created to
fight their battles, and the slaughter was horrible beyond belief.
But then the creatures turned against their masters. The other tiny
creatures with which the ancient protected themselves failed, became
ineffective, and Death walked the entire Above unhindered."
It hadn't happened on Earth yet but Barry could picture bacterial
warfare out of control, spontaneous mutations loose, and no vaccines
or antitoxins to combat them. The warm, eternally moist atmosphere of
Venus offered ideal conditions. Perhaps that was why the Colony had
found only insects and quasi-reptiles. Infection could have spread from
homo Venusians to all related, warm-blooded life forms, blasting them
into extinction.
"Against that deadly smallness there was no way to fight," Xintel
continued. "And there was but one place to flee. So the Place Of Change
was built by the wisest of my race. But by the time it was completed
only a few remained to use it."
* * * * *
Barry had no doubts who was fomenting talk of the demons. Komso.
But if the Venusians had once been air-breathers and had deliberately
become water-breathers there was still a chance that somehow he
could become completely human again. At least his condition was not
completely hopeless.
He could escape. His practice sessions had taught him to remain out of
water nearly three hours, as nearly as he could judge, and that should
be sufficient to re-establish contact with the Colony. But escaping
alone, leaving Xintel behind, was something he knew he could never do.
"How did the Place Of Change work?" he asked. "On what principles? Did
your Ancients actually understand how to generate Sigma radiations on
the surface of a planet? Or was the change accomplished in other ways?"
Xintel shook her head. "That knowledge has fallen into the hands of
the Chosen and been destroyed. Knowledge, except for themselves, is
according to the Chosen against the will of the Gods."
"Is there nothing left?" Barry insisted, grasping at straws.
"The Place still remains amid the ruins of Last City," Xintel answered
unexpectedly. "But it is wrecked and useless."
"How do you know?"
Xintel smiled sadly. "I have been there, twice. Soren once took me as a
little girl, and once I went alone."
"But how?"
"Long since have the creatures of deadly smallness exterminated each
other. Soren knew, and I know, and Komso knows. But Komso will not tell
the people that one can go to the Above for a short time and not die."
Immediately Barry wanted to see for himself the remains of Last City
and particularly the Place Of Change, but the Venusian girl demurred.
The trip was perilous, she said, and if they were to leave Tana now,
going into the Outside and toward the Above, it would only confirm in
the minds of the people that Barry was a demon. Anything that would
precipitate open action before they were able to take countermeasures
against Komso's plots would be a fatal mistake.
Reluctantly Barry put the idea aside, but he did not abandon it.
Instead he doubled his practice sessions in the oxygen at the top of
the cavern, driving himself until his chest burned and throbbed. He was
still a member of the Five Ship Plan whose duty was to the colony, and
besides he had a frightening surety that without outside help Komso
would eventually encompass his death.
* * * * *
One day when they were returning from the fields in the far reaches of
the cavern they saw a man swimming away from their house. Barry put on
an angry burst of speed, but the distance was great and the furtive
figure vanished.
Xintel went through the three rooms inch by inch, checking all her
possessions--but nothing was missing and nothing seemed to have been
disturbed.
"We must have frightened him away before he could steal anything,"
Barry commented.
The girl frowned and bit her lip. "No. I do not think thievery was his
object."
"What then?"
"I--I do not know," she admitted uneasily.
Komso finally took official cognizance of the talk of demons. He
selected ten young men, not of the Chosen, and led them forth to
reconnoiter in the Above. The men went heavily armed, but still
superstitious dread would have prevented them from venturing to the
myth-haunted surface without the high priest's mystic protection.
Barry grew acutely uneasy when he heard of the expedition. It boded
no good for anyone except Komso. Hour after hour the underwater city
hummed with speculation. For Barry and Xintel it was a nerve-wracking
wait.
Then Komso returned--and with him came only three of the ten.
With lightning rapidity the story spread. There were demons in the
Above, and despite Komso's great powers they had turned overwhelmingly
potent weapons against them.
The mates of the slain were loud in their lamentations, and as though
following prepared instructions, the Chosen spread the rumor that
Barry, and Xintel too, were responsible for the slaughter. Barry was a
demon spy, and Xintel had turned against her own people to mate with
him.
Barry felt certain the priest had deliberately led his men into
disaster for the psychological effect. He had been building hatred, and
to one of Komso's mentality, seven deaths would be a negligible price
for this crowning touch.
Drawn together by a spreading terror the people massed near the center
of the city, each seeking company to stem their rising panic of
helplessness. Their mutterings increased, their mood grew uglier.
But with dramatic suddenness Komso appeared in the doorway of his
cave-temple and swam slowly forward. The murmuring died, then broke
out again with a questioning undertone. The priest raised his arms so
the sacred bracelets of office on his thick wrists flashed in the cold
yellow light. Then slowly, deliberately he began to speak.
He expressed regret for the deaths of those who had followed him aloft.
He had underestimated the malignancy of the demons, he admitted.
A shocked silence fell over the crowd, broken only by the grief
stricken sobs of one of the widows. He glared at the woman, and his
eyes made her cower.
The peril was dire, he warned. One demon had already penetrated the
sacred boundaries of Tana and others were gathering in the Above. Soon
they would descend and overwhelm the city unless the people of Tana
followed his leadership unquestioningly.
But the mission had not been in vain. Komso had discovered the demons'
plans--and their vulnerability.
"We killed one demon!" he boasted.
Barry gasped. Komso was too clever to tell an outright lie when there
were three surviving witnesses to check his story.
"Kill the demons! Kill all the demons!" A Chosen One began the chant,
and it was taken up and echoed by the crowd.
It sounded so absurd that a group of aquatic semi-savages could hope
to attack a surface settlement defended by the finest weapons of Earth
that Barry almost laughed. But he remembered Xintel's account of the
Venusian downfall, and was not so sure. Komso's forces would not
have to breach the defense perimeter of the colony to achieve their
objective. Bacterial warfare ineffective under water, could render the
surface uninhabitable again.
And the colony had no inkling of such a threat.
"Damn him," Barry thought. It was all so stupid and useless.
He fumed while Komso's words calmed, influenced, and finally controlled
with hypnotic completeness the emotions of his listeners.
"The demons shall die!" Komso orated. "I, Komso, shall call upon the
powers of the Gods Of The Deeps. Beasts of the marshlands shall come at
my command, smashing and overturning the houses and forts of the demons
in the Above! And then shall the Unseen Death smite them!"
The people roared their approval, and while they were still shouting
the priest turned away in abrupt dismissal.
Barry and Xintel looked at each other, their faces white and set, each
wondering what they could do.
A hundred thoughts flashed through Barry's mind at once, dominated
by the knowledge it was his duty to warn the colony. He had become
a freak through accident, but he was still an Earthman. But to make
his warning really valuable he must know more of Komso's methods. He
thought momentarily of invading the cave-temple to steal information or
even assassinate the priest, but discarded the notion. Komso would be
expecting such an attempt and have his Chosen Ones waiting.
* * * * *
They were still discussing the situation hours later when Xintel
suddenly raised her hand for silence. A puzzled frown appeared on her
face and she dropped to the lower room. Barry, watching her peer around
the door curtain, saw her body grow tense. He listened, and his ears
caught a confused sound of voices.
"What is it?" he demanded.
"Men are coming this way, and they are led by Sanlan, the brother of
that Czerki."
"Komso's work?"
"Naturally."
Barry reached for a spear. "They won't touch you as long as I'm alive,"
he promised.
The sounds outside grew louder.
"Go in through the door," he heard a voice command. "Chase the demon
and his woman upward and out. Lart and I will attend to them."
Xintel leaped to the upper room and began tossing down baskets.
"Block the hatchway," she directed. "We will hold the middle room."
Quickly Barry piled them across the opening, thrusting extra spears
through the wovenwork and into the material of the floor. It was a
flimsy barricade but better than nothing.
Xintel loaded her crossbow. Barry stood beside her with a spear ready.
"Now!" the voice outside boomed.
Men poured into the lower room, shouting to keep up their courage.
Xintel, her face pale, squinted along her crossbow and thumbed the
trigger. A man screamed. A spear thwacked upward into the baskets as
the girl put her strength against her weapon's reloading ratchet.
"Can you hold them off a minute?" Barry whispered.
She nodded, and he leaped to the upper room. One basket remained, and
he found that by standing on it his head was just below the roof's
lower surface. With his knife he began cutting into the matted fibers
of the roof. He was nearly through when a whisper from above made him
pause.
"Psst! Lart, be very sure your thrust misses."
That was Sanlan, Barry guessed.
The other Venusian growled under his breath.
"Komso will have your skin if you disobey," Sanlan warned.
"But why?"