Laughing, she cast him down into the hideous
depths, beneath the seas of flaming gas, to
where dead blossoms swayed, whispering, over
strangely jumbled ruins.... But there he found
the secret of her power, and came surging back--up
from the depths, up from the seas, the tortured
swamps--to storm her forbidding shrine and seek
her within, death like a gift in his hands....
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Fall 1949.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The ship moved slowly across the Red Sea, through the shrouding veils
of mist, her sail barely filled by the languid thrust of the wind. Her
hull, of a thin light metal, floated without sound, the surface of the
strange ocean parting before her prow in silent rippling streamers of
flame.
Night deepened toward the ship, a river of indigo flowing out of the
west. The man known as Stark stood alone by the after rail and watched
its coming. He was full of impatience and a gathering sense of danger,
so that it seemed to him that even the hot wind smelled of it.
The steersman lay drowsily over his sweep. He was a big man, with skin
and hair the color of milk. He did not speak, but Stark felt that now
and again the man's eyes turned toward him, pale and calculating under
half-closed lids, with a secret avarice.
The captain and the two other members of the little coasting vessel's
crew were forward, at their evening meal. Once or twice Stark heard a
burst of laughter, half-whispered and furtive. It was as though all
four shared in some private joke, from which he was rigidly excluded.
The heat was oppressive. Sweat gathered on Stark's dark face. His shirt
stuck to his back. The air was heavy with moisture, tainted with the
muddy fecundity of the land that brooded westward behind the eternal
fog.
There was something ominous about the sea itself. Even on its own
world, the Red Sea is hardly more than legend. It lies behind the
Mountains of White Cloud, the great barrier wall that hides away half
a planet. Few men have gone beyond that barrier, into the vast
mystery of Inner Venus. Fewer still have come back.
Stark was one of that handful. Three times before he had crossed the
mountains, and once he had stayed for nearly a year. But he had never
quite grown used to the Red Sea.
It was not water. It was gaseous, dense enough to float the buoyant
hulls of the metal ships, and it burned perpetually with its deep inner
fires. The mists that clouded it were stained with the bloody glow.
Beneath the surface Stark could see the drifts of flame where the lazy
currents ran, and the little coiling bursts of sparks that came upward
and spread and melted into other bursts, so that the face of the sea
was like a cosmos of crimson stars.
It was very beautiful, glowing against the blue, luminous darkness of
the night. Beautiful, and strange.
There was a padding of bare feet, and the captain, Malthor, came up to
Stark, his outlines dim and ghostly in the gloom.
"We will reach Shuruun," he said, "before the second glass is run."