By JAMES McKIMMEY, Jr.
_In the webbed hands of the stolid, green-faced
ones rests the Screece gem. Some say it's a
fabulous diamond; some an emerald; some a
ruby ... but Caine guessed it was death itself._
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories July 1953.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
_High above the wet plains and muggy jungles, above the slick rocks
and shiny leaves, rests a temple. Like most shrines of ancient order
its narrowing spires point to the sky. Men, Venusian men, walk quietly
through the restricted labyrinth of this temple, green fingers
webbed beneath the long sleeves of their gray capes; green faces
expressionless beneath the sanctity of their gray hoods. There is
movement, and these caped men circle a silver orb that lies in dead
center of the golden walls. They pace, each flat step a soundless
motion. The green fingers unmesh, spread, and come together again.
"Screece," says a flute-like voice. "Screece," says another. The
silver orb rests like a cloudy fist-sized tinsel globe, unsparkling,
while a dozen minds search out through the vastness of Venus, probing
for the cores of evil and purity. Feet pace, faces are immobile, and
through the thick air comes a shrill rising scream from the throat of
a giant black cat with deep orange eyes. The motion ceases, lidless
stares meet. "Grith?" pronounces one. "Grith?" pronounces another. And
the pacing continues, while green lips quirk the slightest bit. Minds
search...._
* * * * *
It was that season when the jungle of Venus turned into a vapid,
steaming swamp. Sleet buds glistened like long, thin snakes, and
leaves hung limp and wet from the vine-trees. Nicholas Caine felt the
sweat prickle upon his forehead and slide down the sides of his face.
Fairchild, he noticed, was sweating, too, so that the man's shirt had
turned dark, and the close-clipped gray hair curled on his head. Only
the woman still looked fresh in her white shirt and shorts.
She was standing beside Caine's jetcopter, drinking plain Scotch from
a silver glass. Her husband, Fairchild, was drinking, too, as he sat
silently in a folding chair beneath the tip of the ship's left wing.
This is going to be a sweet thing, Caine thought, it really is.
The air was dead of breeze, and soggy clouds hung above them like an
immense stifling blanket. The man stared at his knees and the woman
swirled the Scotch in her glass. Caine kept his palms flat against the
arm rests of his chair.
He watched the woman closely. There was too much brightness inside of
her, too much nervousness, as though she were burning inside and she
had to keep moving, laughing, insulting, enticing, because she was
alive with that burning, and she couldn't stop. It wasn't the liquor,
Caine knew, because they had just started that, a few minutes after he
had brought the ship down.
They were approximately four-hundred miles from the Colony, and in the
wild stretches of this Venusian jungle, four-hundred miles was like the
distance from day to night. Here was the dark, the strange, the weird
and the wild.
Kiitz birds screamed in the distance, and their sound was like the
sound a man makes when he is touched by fire. A thick, muddy river went
over a cliff above and behind them, hitting transparent rocks with a
steady crashing noise that thrummed against Caine's ears like thunder
in a distant sky.
Teewh birds with black wings and curling yellow beaks came out of the
sultry sky and skimmed the tips of the trees surrounding the clearing.
They screeched when they dove, and they kept harmony with the unseen
stationary kiitz birds. A chilling, nerve-racking harmony.
* * * * *
"Won't you have a drink with us?" said the woman, her teeth white
between her smiling lips.
"Thank you, no," Caine said. The woman tipped her head and watched him.
Her eyes were very blue and they mocked Caine and taunted him, while
her husband just sat there, drinking and watching his bare knees.
This could go to pieces in a hurry, Caine decided, and he rubbed his
palms against the arms of the chair.
Because, on the other hand, the husband was too quiet, too brooding,
too deliberately unseeing of the way his wife played with Caine, with
her eyes and her movements.
Her legs, Caine noticed, were the kind that would look well bare, as
they were, or in nylon beneath a skirt, and she had rather full hips,
although not too full. Her breasts, Caine could see, were well enough
developed.
She bent to rub a finger against her left knee. "Are there insects in
this part of the jungle?" she asked Caine.
"Some."
"But no grith cats?" she said, straightening.
"Not here," Caine said.
"Just where we're going tomorrow?"
"Yes." Caine looked back to the man. He was about fifty, Caine judged,
at least twenty years older than the woman. His face was lean and sad,
and there were thin lines traveling out from the corners of his eyes
and mouth that contrasted with the youthful cut of his wiry hair.
These two had come to Caine because his reputation in the Colony was
established. He had been flying tourists into the jungle for more than
three years, and while he could not predict all of this country, he at
least knew the general traits of those sections within a reasonable
radius of the Colony.
"Did you ever shoot a grith cat?" the woman asked, looking at Caine
over her glass.
"No," said Caine.
"But you've heard that they're pretty horrible and dangerous?"
"Yes." Caine wiped a hand at the sweat on his forehead. The woman was
working at the cats, her eyes shifting to look at her husband with
every word, to see how he was reacting. So far he had done nothing,
said nothing, only sat there and drank.
However, the cats were not the reason the couple were in the Venusian
jungle. Hunting animals was a dead sport for them, something done in
the past and something which had become boring.
They were looking for bigger game now. The Screece gem. And they had
flown all the way from Earth to Mars, from Mars to Venus, to find it.
The Screece gem was a myth, Caine was certain, a bit of fantasy out
of ancient Venusian lore. But they paid him well for the trip, and he
would ask no questions.
The woman stayed with the cats. "How big are these grith cats, Mr.
Caine?"
"Eight to ten feet long," Caine said. "About like a large horse."
"Only they're cats, with the claws and the fangs and all."
"Essentially."
Caine felt himself tightening inside a little. The woman was trying to
break through her husband's armor, because somewhere, sometime, he
must have had trouble hunting a cat-like animal. Tiger. Or panther. The
Martian frynx, perhaps. But she had not found her target, yet.
The man raised his head and spoke for the first time since they had
landed. "How far away is this temple, would you say, Mr. Caine?"
"Fifty miles," Caine said.
"How close to it can we land?"
"Eight or ten miles, I imagine."
"Can't we get closer than that?" the man asked.
"I don't think so," Caine said. "The temple is on top of a fairly sheer
rise of land, and I can't put the ship down there. The nearest clearing
we'll find will be about eight or ten miles away."
Mrs. Fairchild walked to her chair and sat down. "That means, then,
that we'll have to go through that much country where the cats are?"
Caine didn't answer, and the man returned to gazing at his knees. Time
moved slowly in the thick wet jungle.
"Show Mr. Caine your scar, Charles," the woman said, her voice sudden
out of the silence.
Fairchild picked up his glass from the arm of his chair and held it
tightly in front of his waist. The muscles along his bare forearms were
ridged and his knuckles paled as he held the glass.
"Don't be bashful," the woman said, smiling. "I'm sure Mr. Caine would
like to see what a cat can do."
She looked at Caine as though she were about to tell him a delightfully
domestic story that had been, until now, nurtured between just her
husband and her. "This was a leopard, Mr. Caine. A long vicious
leopard. Mr. Fairchild, you see, didn't hit him right, and so he got
Charles from about here," she tapped herself just below the neck, "to
here." She touched her waist. "It's a long scar, Mr. Caine. Isn't it,
Charles? About three inches wide, and...."
The man brought his glass down against the arm of the chair. "Shut up,
Janet. I'll tell you nicely. Just shut up!"
"_Charles_," she said, blinking in exaggerated surprise. "I just wanted
to tell Mr. Caine, because he's hunted, too, and while I don't know if
these grith cats are anything like leopards...."
The man's eyes had become wide and angry. "I won't tell you again,
Janet."
"I'm sorry, Charles." She smiled at him assuringly and blinked again.
"We're just excited about tomorrow, I guess, aren't we?"
Fairchild returned his stare to his glass, noticed it was empty, and
filled it.
"Can't I interest you in a drink, yet, Mr. Caine?" Mrs. Fairchild said.
"Not right now," Caine said.
"Oh." Her voice pouted. "But I think we should celebrate. Here Charles
and I have come all this way to find the Screece gem, and we're sitting
within fifty miles of it, and I think we all ought to celebrate."
* * * * *
Fairchild spoke to Caine without raising his head. "Maybe Mr. Caine
doesn't really believe in the existence of the Screece gem. Do you, Mr.
Caine?" he said, looking up.
Caine took a cigarette from a package in his shirt. "I'm just paid to
get you to a temple, not to think."
"You're evading the question," Fairchild said. His eyes were narrow
now, and a bit glazed.
Caine lit his cigarette and blew smoke into the damp air. He kept his
voice non-committal. "I've heard about it. Everybody in the Colony has
heard about it."
"Correction," said Fairchild. "Everybody in the System has heard about
it."
"It's a very popular myth," Caine agreed.
The man stood up. "It is not a myth, Mr. Caine. It exists and it's in
that temple, do you hear me? There is no dammed myth about it, just
cold hard fact, and I'm going to find it and take it out of there! Is
that clear?"
Caine watched the man's taut figure. He inhaled his cigarette. "I told
you, Mr. Fairchild, I'm just paid to fly the ship and I'm not paid to
think. I'm responsible for getting you to the temple. That's all."
"Listen," Fairchild said, crossing to Caine and reaching for the front
of Caine's shirt. "Don't get insolent with me...."
Caine slapped the man's hand away.
"Charles!" the woman said.
The man blinked and touched his slapped hand against his chest. "Sorry,
Mr. Caine," he said, finally. "Didn't mean to fly off that way. Little
nervous, you see. All that time in space, searching around this way.
We're just this close, and I'm getting too nervous." He turned back to
his chair and sat down. His face became very sad again, and the lines
about his mouth and eyes seemed deeper.
The woman laughed lightly. "You don't want to pay any attention to
Charles when he's this way," she said to Caine. "It's just that this
means so much to him, finding the Screece gem. It's worth the wealth of
the System, they say, and so Charles has to have it, Mr. Caine. Because
he hasn't got any more money."
"For heaven's sake, Janet," the man pleaded.
"Are you ashamed of being poor?" she asked with false concern. She
stood up and began pacing back and forth, and Caine noticed the easy
way she moved, her hips swaying, the muscles of her long legs rippling.
"No, he's not ashamed of being poor," she said, looking at Caine. "He's
_afraid_ of it, aren't you, Charles?"
Fairchild tipped his glass to his lips, and when he brought it down,
Caine could see that it was empty again.
The man refilled the glass and held it in front of him, looking into
it, as though he might find another world there, a peaceful world,
where there weren't any cats or beautiful women with reddish hair, a
world where there might be peace and no fear. He raised the glass,
trying to taste of that world. His eyes were getting filmy.
"I'll tell you why he's afraid of being poor, Mr. Caine," the woman
went on. "It's because not only is Charles a yellow punk when it comes
to cats, but he's frightened of losing his wife, aren't you, Charles?"
Caine felt himself tensing under the cutting lilt of the woman's voice.
He was observing something, he knew, that should have been contained in
the seal of marital privacy. But here he was, caught in the middle of
it, while the woman swung back and forth, and the man seemed to crumple
further into his chair, hanging on to the glass of Scotch, as though
that were all he had left to hang on to.
And tomorrow they had ten miles of grith country to span on foot.
Sweet, Caine repeated to himself, really sweet.