There were things that he had learned; and as he told them to me,
Nereid's only half-coherent story began to clarify.
"That woman Garga," Allen was saying with his ready grin, "I get along
fine with her. Pumped a lot of facts out of her."
Physically, Allen and I are of quite different types, which is perhaps
why we are such friends. He says I have a romantic, sort of poetic
look--from my mother, who was Spanish. And that, he says, goes with a
bad temper. However that may be, certainly he was always the opposite.
A giant, blond fellow; six feet four; rugged, sun-bronzed, like a young
Viking. And he had an almost unfailing good nature. A slow, quiet
smile. Slow of movement; usually somewhat lazy. But there were times,
rare intervals, when he was angered. His movements were panther-like
then, and I wouldn't like to be the one to meet him in a fight.
"That Garga woman likes me," he grinned. He lowered his voice as he
leaned toward me. "She looks like a machine, but still she's a woman.
Get the idea? If we ever get out of this, that might be the way."
And then he told me what he knew of Nereid's strange Venus world. The
realm of the Arones was in a lush forest, the tropic region. Compared
to our Earth population, there were not many of the Arones. Half a
million perhaps, in little Forest and Water villages, with twenty
thousand in the chief city, known as Arron.... How shall I attempt
even an outline of the ethnological history of Venus? I can give only
the barest suggestion of it. In former ages doubtless there had been
millions of humans on this, Earth's sister planet. A civilization
rising to great heights of science, with all the planet's surface
mastered by man. And then decadence had come. Mankind resting; then
drifting backward. Dwindling in number; with science forgotten, put
aside as a memory, a tradition. And slowly but inexorably the monstrous
animals, insects, the weird vegetation again took primitive possession
of most of the globe.
"So that's your Nereid's people," Allen was saying. "Decadent--soft
now--trying to accomplish nothing."
Except human happiness. I recalled Nereid's words of her world, living
for love and music and beauty. Strange how in all human affairs there
are two sides of looking at everything! I said something like that to
Allen, and he nodded.
"The trouble with science," he agreed, "is that it can be so easily
perverted. Things to benefit mankind, turned into engines of death.
That's the recent history of our own world."
And the Arones had gone to the other extreme. Science was banned. Men
and women should live for human happiness, with no thought of conquest,
or of personal power. And out of this, a few generations ago, had risen
the Gorts. They had been for centuries a nomadic race of giants, mere
savages roaming the barren parts of the planet. Few in number, and like
the savages of our own Earth, apparently doomed to extinction. Banished
criminals from the world of the Arones, generations back, had joined
them, brought them science--stolen things of science.
And out of this sprang the Gort, Tollgamo. His father had started it:
Tollgamo, the son, carried it on. He was a genius, of course. A genius
with mad dreams. To mechanize his little world. There were only a few
thousand of them now. Men and women making themselves into machines;
fed by Tollgamo upon his own mad dreams of Venus conquest.
He had discovered the secret of spaceflight, which before him, on
Venus, had never been known. Peters' Earth-signals had attracted him,
and quietly he had gone to Earth, and seized Peters and his men;
bringing them to Venus so that they might tell him all they knew of
their science. It would be useful, that future day when he would
attempt to conquer the Arones.
Most, perhaps all, of Peters' men were dead now; killed, possibly by
Tollgamo, when their usefulness to him was finished. But Peters had
escaped; gone to the Arones. And telling them their danger, had made
himself the leader of the revival of their science. All Nereid's life,
her father, with a group of men he had trained, had feverishly been
working in the city of Arron, to build weapons with which to combat the
attack when it came.
All that was known to Tollgamo, of course. He had spies in Arron. Queer
how human nature is the same, wherever in the Universe the Creator
has planted it! The fatuous, decadent, pleasure-loving leader of the
Arones was unwilling to believe that the Gorts could be any menace.
The efforts of Peters and his fellow scientists, even now were looked
upon with disfavor. Peters and his men were distrusted, even accused of
having dreams of conquest of their own. Thousands of the Arones thought
it, so that there was an undercurrent of strife in Arron, fostered, of
course, by Tollgamo's spies.
"And now Tollgamo seems to be about ready for his attack," Allen was
telling me. "Peters probably has no weapons of any importance with
which to oppose him. And so Peters made an effort to get help from
Earth. Tollgamo found it out, and sent this ship to follow the girl so
as to keep her from giving the secret of spaceflight to Earth."
The barred metal door of our little cubby suddenly opened. A Gort man
stood there. Allen and I stared. Like the other Gorts, he was encased
in shining mailed garments. But he was crippled, bent and twisted, with
one shoulder higher than the other and a lump on his bent back. On him,
the metal garments were grotesque. He came sidling in, grinning at us
with his ugly, puffed and bloated grey-skinned face.
"I am Borgg," he said. "You will have food and drink soon. You hungry?"
"I want to see the Peters girl," I retorted. "Take me to her."