II

Around them was the fantastic skyline. From below, in the teeming

streets, came a rising buzz like the droning activity of a hive

of angry bees. Above, rose the city-wide dome of fused quartz,

its crystalline concavity faintly iridescent as it reflected the

questioning beams of giant searchlights. North, between the fugitives

and the older native quarters of Castarona, were the gigantic systems

of airlocks, and below that, the sprawling tangles of dockland.

Ferris led his companions in a tortuous route that covered miles of

angled and uneven rooftops. Realizing that his ident-cards must have

come through, he knew that police and security officials must be

turning the city inside out in a wild scramble to locate and deal with

him. Speed was essential, and more than his personal safety depended

upon the outcome of the wild chase over the jagged skylines.

Knots of wary policemen and determined security soldiers invaded the

rooftops and began searching the hundreds of square miles. In case the

escaped prisoners had descended from the high levels, even business

blocks were being turned out. The whole city was undergoing systematic

scouring. Officialdom was desperate and badly frightened. Mechanical

trackers had already been sent for. Never before had they been used

so early in the game. The man, or whatever he was, Bat Ferris must be

found at once, slain if possible. The hunt was on, full cry.

After two near brushes with patrols, Ferris finally decided that it

would be safer to descend to the streets. Dragnets spread over the

world above the city, and only luck had kept the trio from being

sighted a dozen times. They were near the edge of the city where the

half-bubble of the dome comes down into a series of cones which are

the great airlocks protecting the city-atmosphere from the troubled

violence and noxious fumes of outer Venus.

Like shadows the fugitives descended, going down darkened spirals of

stairways, stealing elevators, moving furtively among dark, twisting

alleyways, crawling under vast landing stages and skirting heaps of

exotic Venusian produce ready for shipping to the nine inhabited

worlds. In the cluttered dockland areas they collided blindly with an

armed patrol.

Angel, acting on pure instinct, leaped high, then swooped down like a

striking hawk. The rustle of his opened wings was like the flapping of

wind-whipped flames. His outstretched arms gathered two of the four man

patrol and crushed life from them before they sensed danger. Ferris was

almost as quick. He leaped and strangled, and a man died in swift,

deadly silence. Pao Chung, unused to managing his own violence, was

clumsier. A blaster went off. Then Angel took over the difficulty. The

soldier broke and ran, screaming, firing his blaster twice more without

aiming.

The uproar would bring help. But the soldier was beyond help. Angel

soared and dived. There was no fight.

Now armed, the fugitives fled swiftly. Pao Chung took over the lead. By

devious streets and crooked alleys, they went in the extremes of haste.

Further caution was useless. Now that the alarm had been given, speed

was the only hope. Pao Chung knew every secret rat-run in the old

native quarter. He used most of them. If the passage of the fugitives

caused a ripple of excitement among the polyglot denizens of that

forbidding area, they did not know it, nor heed it. All three knew

the natives well enough to be certain that the police could expect no

favors from that source. All Venusians are natural anarchists, born

outlaws and rebels against authority. The trail would die on stubborn

tongues unless mechanical trackers were used.

Even then, unless the police and security squads came in massed force,

there would be incidents to delay pursuit. Natives, and the human

debris of nine worlds which had found refuge in the quarter, had no

reason to love authority. In one sense, the area was an armed camp

within the walls. Uneasy truce at best existed between these motley

dwellers and the intruding minions of the nominal officialdom. While

the hunted could expect no actual help from the guerrilla forces of

Castarona's underworld, there was the certainty of hindrance to the

hunters.

Patrols and searching squads converged on the freight-dock stages,

drawn by radioed reports of a clash. From there a trail of sorts led

straight into the native quarter. As the soldiers and police massed

on the fringes of the area, sparks of trouble began to develop, were

quickly fanned to flame, and quenched only by continuous violence and

the arrival of overwhelming forces.

Pao Chung led his companions into a dark, zigzagging alley.

"Not far now," he gasped hoarsely, struggling for breath.

From close behind came a rising uproar.

* * * * *

The alley ended abruptly against a high, blank, curving wall of

reinforced concrete. Pao Chung's raw, burning throat refused speech,

but he gestured over the wall. There was no gate. Angel sprang lightly

to the top and gave his partners in crime a hand up. They dropped into

darkness on the far side. Light writhed and flickered curiously on the

great dome overhead. Tumult died away behind them as they fled across a

wide open space, then rose to shocking crescendos. Reflections flared

in the dome.

Uproar dwindled to uneasy silence, as if the massed forces of law and

order had found the native quarter stickier going than expected, and

had been forced to retire in disorder.

Pao Chung stopped as if checking directions, then led off at a sharp

tangent. The way went through fields. Diffused light from the tall

city-buildings filtered in here and gave some sense of the ground

surface, which was fortunate. Numerous small fences of wire hummed

and sputtered on insulator-posts. Electrified guard-fences. Pao Chung

hurdled them carefully, but they were low enough to trip and incinerate

an incautious trespasser, unaware of their existence and unused to

their spacing.

Oppressive silence brooded over the place. Atmosphere was thick with

pungent and exotic odors that lingered with unpleasantly alien tang in

the nostrils.

Ahead loomed a high stockade of chrome-steel pilings, pierced by a

single monstrous gate.

Pao Chung ran up and hammered on the gate. Its reverberations roused

thunderous echoes in the night. A curious echo persisted and increased

in volume.

On Venus, if one climbs a fence, rings a doorbell, or bangs on a locked

gate at night, it is adventure. You never know who or what will answer

your summons. The door swings slowly open, and you brace yourself to

look. Will it be maid or monster--or both?

This was Khaljean's....

The gate swung open a scant double handspan, checked by a short length

of sturdy chain. A head poked through the aperture. An interesting

head, even in the difficult light. Details were obscure, but there was

a flash of curd-white skin, fine-modeling of feature, a delicate oval

face framed in a swinging bell of dark hair.

In this case, the summons was answered by, presumably, a maid.

Khaljean's daughter, Teucrete, herself something of a legend.

A woman can be described in terms of anatomical rhapsody. Or one may

dwell endlessly upon sweetness of disposition, upon quaint and unique

charms of personality. A potential lover may fashion poetic conceits

upon the lilting moonbeam qualities in her voice, compare her skin to

flower-petals, her eyes to gemfires, liken the graceful movements of

limbs and body to the liquid symphonies of swirling water. Or these

matters may be left wholly to the imagination and the girl described

obliquely by reference to her effect upon the male population in her

immediate vicinity.

The effect was jarring enough.

"Go away!" she said inhospitably. She leaned further through the

opening to snarl fluent imprecations in Venusian billingsgate at the

nocturnal callers.

Pao Chung braved the storm. "Shut up!" he said evenly.

Teucrete's eyes fixed on him savagely, and she took a sharp breath with

the obvious intention of renewing her tirade. Then she thought better

of it and restrained her outrage long enough to throw a taunt in his

face.

"Is Pao Chung so desperate for money that he comes now in the middle of

the night? You're two days early for your payment. Come back then."

"Call your father," ordered the Venusian.

"Khaljean is not here. He's ... hunting. Come back after noon tomorrow

if you must see him."

The head withdrew inside. The gate crashed shut. Bolts grated.

"Shall I fly over the stockade and throttle her?" asked Angel, rippling

his wings.

Pao Chung hammered the gate again. As before, the racketing animal

chorus repeated the sound, with variations. Pao Chung kept pounding

until the gate was opened again. This time the head did not appear,

but a wiry female voice addressed them from the inside darkness.

"Still here? The police must be hunting you."

"They are."

"Good! I will point you out and stay to watch the kill."

Pao Chung chuckled evilly. "Do that. The record of Khaljean's

background and illegal activities is in my safe. My will provides for

publication of all such papers upon my death."

The voice hesitated. "It might be worth humiliation or disgrace to be

rid of you permanently."

"It might," agreed Pao Chung. "Many people have thought so. I wonder if

Khaljean will be one of them."

With a scrape of bare metal, bolts retreated into sockets and the chain

was removed. Crack widened enough to permit entrance.

"Come in, then," Teucrete said wearily. "I will let my father decide

when he returns. For tonight, you can stay. But I won't answer for your

safety. The animals are roused and nervous. I am not sure I can control

them with strangers here."

* * * * *

Beastly cacophonies greeted the entrance of the fugitives. An

atmosphere of alien and indescribable uneasiness pervaded the vast

compound with its rows and piled banks of cages. The atmosphere was the

emotion of night-hauntings, and the sound was its voice.

No sign above the gate proclaimed, _Here Dwells Nightmare_, nor,

_Through These Portals Pass the Most Incredible Life-Forms in the Known

Universe_. There was no circus atmosphere. Just a nameless blending of

sounds and smells and alien vibrations that stirred the imagination

like evil flames licking at forgotten folk memories. On Venus, the term

_unearthly_ has naturally lost meaning, but here was a hint of dreadful

abysses beyond even the exotic fecundity of the cloud-veiled planet.

Here were half-audible chords beyond all the known octaves. Here,

in the troubled darkness one sensed symbols of instincts, minds and

feelings that man was never meant to know or understand. Here was the

final question mark of evolution--whence, and to what dreadful purpose?

What incredible virtuosity of the Unknown Creator had brought these

unthinkable beings into multiform existence? And why? What purpose did

they serve in the plan of Creation? Or was there any purpose? Was there

even a plan?

Bat Ferris remembered such thoughts from his lonely, monastic youth on

Mars, and during the schooling period on Earth. One had time for long

unhappy thoughts in such a segregated childhood and some of them still

reverberated deep inside him.

The girl drew back to let them enter, flashing the beam of a hand

radilume on each in turn. Her glance flicked each of them in

examination sharp enough to draw blood. She received them in silence,

for Teucrete's mind was not on the duties of a hostess to unexpected

guests.

"Wait here," she ordered crisply. Then she went among the tangled

avenues between cages and spoke soothingly to the caged brutes. Her

voice crackled, purred, coughed, roared, hissed.

The bird people were the first to heed. Their bright, nervous

chittering subsided into occasional geysers of chirping. Surly sand

leopards from Mars paced their cages and vented sounds like needles

caught in the grooves of antique disc recordings. Partially gaseous

life forms from Saturn had no vocal apparatus, but showed their uneasy

displeasures by flaring into sullen crimsons and bruised purples of

luminosity.

Ferris followed the girl closely on her rounds, his eyes staring in

wonder at the caged monsters revealed when her light bathed the barred

cubicles. Some cages were not cages in the ordinary sense at all.

Behind barriers of streaming light crouched protoplasmic entities of no

set form. Moondogs sported aimlessly in pools of ionized gas. Wireflies

battered themselves against invisible net barriers. Complex mysteries

of Plutonian life-forms floated in magnetic fields. Metallic crystals

built themselves into coral-like colonies resembling miniature castles.

Less _outre_ creatures inhabited the myriads of cell-blocks--the

ordinary and extraordinary varieties of apes and cats and dogs, the

bovines and marsupials, the squeaking rats and trumpeting elephants,

the endless species of sea-creatures, the tree-haunters and the desert

dwellers, the burrowers and the flyers. There were supposedly extinct

saurians, and examples of tomorrow's freaks and mutants. There were

brute clowns and tragedians. There were--

But Khaljean's has been described often enough in magazine articles,

sometimes with tri-dimensional pictures in color. Any reader so

inclined may look into the back files of _Inter-Planetary Magazine_ and

stupefy himself with the famous issue of July, 2091.

Teucrete sensed that she was followed, but with pointed insolence,

ignored Ferris and continued her rounds. Gradually, her eerie tones

brought calm to the multiform excitements of the compound. She returned

eventually to Pao Chung and Angel.

"I will take you back through the laboratories to the inner maze," she

said irritably. "Move quietly and do not stumble in the dark. Some of

the protection barriers are fragile, and a few exist only in the minds

of the creatures in them. If excited too much, they can break through.

Many are man-killers."

"One man-killer runs loose in here," observed Angel drily.

Teucrete disposed of the intended compliment with a sneer. "Pao Chung

has long had such ideas. Through pressure on my father he has tried

to ... to buy or barter for me. Such disposal is mine to make, not my

father's. I have my price, but it is high."

It is evidence of Teucrete's more obvious charms that three masculine

minds went into gear, calculating resources.

Teucrete laughed viciously. "The first item is Pao Chung's head on a

platinum platter."

"A platinum platter is not unobtainable," said Angel speculatively.

Pao Chung was not offended. He chuckled unpleasantly. "Such fire as

yours would bring a high price in the slave marts of Yabn," he said.

"My head would bring more, locally. Should we not move further from

the gates? A scanner could pierce several layers of metal as thin as

this stockade. Perhaps I can bring your price down, or my offer up. But

another occasion for bargaining would suit both of us better."

"If there are other occasions for any of us," Ferris put in bitterly.

From outside came the sounds of many movements, the rustle and clatter

of questing men, hoarse shouts and a confusion of crowd sounds. Above

all, like a thin thread of sound, binding the other noises together,

was a high, ear-piercing, nerve-wracking drone.

Angel flittered to the top of the stockade and peered warily through

the razor-edged metal pilings. He swooped down to his companions with

whispered verification of their suspicions.

"The mechanical trackers," he said.

"Perhaps there is still a deal open," muttered Pao Chung. He bowed with

sardonic malice toward Teucrete. "We have one possession of greater

value than my head or your body. My young friend here--"

Teucrete snorted contemptuously. "Him!" But her glance lingered on

Ferris momentarily. "What do you mean?"

"Ferris is a gamma-man," said Pao Chung. Even Angel gasped with shock.

Teucrete's eyes widened in incredulity, horror and fear.