_Port o' Porno_
The pirate port of Porno is of course dead now, replaced by the clean
lawfulness of Port Midway, but a hundred years ago, in the days before
the patrol-ships came, she roared her bawdy song through the farthest
reaches of the solar system. For crack merchant ships and dingy space
trading tramps alike, she was haven; drink and drugs, women and
diversions unspeakable lured to her space ports the cream and scum,
adventures and riffraff of half a dozen worlds. Sailors and pirates paid
off at her and stayed as long as their wages lasted in the Street of the
Sailors; not a few remained permanently, their bodies flung to the
beasts of the savage jungle that rimmed the port. There only the cunning
and strong could live. Ray-guns were the surest law. Modern scientific
progress stood side by side with murderous lawlessness as old as man
himself.
The hell town had grown with the strides of a giant, rising rapidly from
a muddy street of _tio_ shacks to a small cosmetropolis. She was
essentially a place of contrasts. Two of the big Earth companies had
modern space-ship hangars there, well-lighted, well-equipped, but under
their very noses was a festering welter of dark, rutted byways extending
all the way to the comparative orderliness of the short, narrow Street
of the Merchants, itself flanked by the drunken bedlam of the Street of
the Sailors. It can be understood why these men who flew, who needed a
whole solar system for elbow room, disdained setting to order the measly
few acres of dirt they stopped at, but it is a mystery why, when used to
living through vast leagues of space, they endured such narrow streets
and cluttered houses. Probably, tired from their long cramped cruises,
impatient for their fling, they just didn't care a whoop.
The whole jumble that was this famous space port rested in the heart of
Satellite III's primeval jungle.
* * * * *
Tall electric-wired fences girdled Port o' Porno to keep the jungle
back. It was equivalent to a death sentence to pass unarmed outside
them; the monstrous shapes that lived and fought in the jungle's swampy
gloom saw to that. Hideous nightmare shapes they were, some reptilian
and comparable only to the giants that roamed Earth in her prehistoric
ages. Eating, fighting, breeding in the humid gloominess of the
vegetation shrouded swamps, their bellows and roars sometimes at night
thundered right through Porno, a reminder of Nature yet untamed.
Occasionally, in the berserk ecstasy of the mating season, they hurled
their house-high bodies at the guarding fences; and then there was panic
in the town, and many lives ripped out before a barrage of rays drove
the monsters back.
They were not the only inhabitants native to Satellite III. Deep
underground, seldom seen by men, lived a race of man-mole creatures,
half human in intelligence, blind from their unlit habitat, but larger
than a man and stronger; fiercer, too, when cornered. Their numbers no
one knew, but their bored tunnels, it had been found, constituted a
lower layer of life over the whole satellite.
Probably more vicious than these native "Three's" of Porno were the
visiting bipeds, man himself, who thronged the _kantrans_--which may be
defined as dives for the purveying of all entertainments. In them were a
score of snares for the buccaneer with money in his pocket and dope in
his blood. The open doors on the Street of the Sailors were all
loud-speakers of drunken oaths and laughter, pierced now and then by a
scream or cry as someone in the sweating press of bodies inside knew
rage or fear.
* * * * *
One interplanetarily notorious kantran made a feature of swinging its
attractions aloft in gilded cages, where all of them, young and old,
pale and painted, giant and dwarf, ogled the arrested passers-by and
invited sampling of their wares.
Of all kinds and conditions of men were these passers-by. Earthling
sailors, white, negro, Chinese and Eurasian, most of them in the drab
blue of space-ship crews, but each with a ray-gun strapped to his waist;
short, thin-faced Venusians, shifty-eyed, cunning, with the planet's
universal weapon, the skewer-blade, sheathed at their sides; tall,
sweaty Martians, powerful brutes, wearing the air-rarifying mask that
was necessary for them in Satellite III's Earthlike atmosphere. Business
men and sight-seers, except the most bold, were apt to stay in their
houses after their first visit to the Street of the Sailors. Each face
on the street or in the kantrans that lined it bore the mark of drink,
or the contemptuous, insolent expression bred by Porno's favorite drug,
isuan.
Around Porno was the constant threat of savage life; below it were
half-human savagery and mystery; above, in the very shadow of their
mighty engines of space, were the most vicious animals of all--degraded
men.
This was the Port o' Porno of a hundred years ago.
This was the Port o' Porno where Master Scientist Eliot Leithgow for
very good reasons had told Hawk Carse he would meet him. 574. The house
of his friend.
* * * * *
Night descended suddenly on the outlaw space-port that day the elderly
exile waited in vain for his comrade in arms Hawk Carse to show up.
There were six hours when the blasting heat received by Satellite III
from near-lying Jupiter would be gone, and in its place a warm, cloying
tropical darkness, heavy with the odors of town and exotic products and
the damp, lush vegetation of the impinging jungle. The night would be
given over to carousing; for these six hours the Street of the Sailors
came to life. It was a time to keep strictly in hiding.
In the middle of that night, when the pleasures of Porno were in full
stride, there emerged suddenly, from one of the dark, crooked byways
that angled off the Street of the Sailors, a squad of five men whose
disciplined pace and regular formation were in marked contrast to the
confusion around them. They were slant-eyed men, with smooth saffron
faces, and strongly built, and they were armed, each one, with both a
ray-gun and a two-foot black, pointed tube. But it was not their
numbers, formation or weapons that caused the carousing crowd to fall
silent and hastily get out of their path. It was, rather, the insignia
embroidered on the breasts of the gray smocks they wore. The insignia
represented an asteroid in a circle of the ten planets, and the Street
of Sailors knew that sign and dreaded it.
The squad pressed along rapidly. A still-comely woman, new to Porno,
plucked smirking at the leader's sleeve; but his pace did not slacken,
and she fell back, puzzled and afraid because of her feeling of
something lifeless, dumb, machinelike in the man. Ahead, an
isuan-maddened Earthling fell foul of a Venusian; a circle cleared in
the mob, a ray-gun spat and missed, and the Venusian closed, the gleam
of a skewer-blade playing around him. This was combat; this was
interesting; but none of the squad's five men gave the fight a glance,
or even turned his head when, as they passed, the butchered Earthling
coughed out his life.
* * * * *
So they passed, and soon they were gone down another black-throated
byway.
They padded noiselessly along in the darkness to turn again presently,
pausing finally before a low, steel-walled house, typical of the
strongholds of prudent merchants of the port. No lights were visible
within it; all seemed asleep.
Silence filled the narrow street, and unrelieved darkness. Occasionally
a desultory breeze brought sounds of a burst of revelry from the Street
of the Sailors; once the ports of an outbound space-ship flashed
overhead for an instant. But there was mainly silence and darkness, and
in it the five men, parleying close together in toneless whispers.
After a little they separated. On cat's feet four of them stole around
the sides of the house. The fifth, drawing the black, pointed tube from
his slash, crept up to the front entrance-port and held the tip to it.
Blue light sparkled fantastically, revealing his impassive face,
outlining his crouching body. Then, quite suddenly, the port appeared to
melt inward, and he disappeared into the blackness of the interior.
Presently there came a stir of movement, a whisper, a rustle from
inside. A challenge, shouts volleying forth, a scream, another, and the
peculiar rattling sound that comes from a dying man's throat. Then again
silence.
Five shadows melted from the front entrance-port. They were carrying
something black and still and heavy between them.
The errand was done....