Some day there will be a legend like this.
Some day, from steamy Venus or arid Mars,
the shaking, awe-struck words will come
whispering back to us, building the picture
of a glory so great that our throats will
choke with pride--pride in the Men of Terra!
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Spring 1950.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The Commander's voice went droning on, but Hague's fatigued brain
registered it as mere sound with no words or meaning. He'd been dazed
since the crash. Like a cracked phonograph, his brain kept playing
back the ripping roar of jet chambers blowing out with a sickening
lurch that had thrown every man in the control room to the floor.
The lights had flickered out, and a sickening elevator glide began as
Patrol Rocket One smashed down through the Venusian rainforest roof,
and crashed in a clearing blasted by its own hurtling passage.
Hague blinked hard and tried to focus his brain on what hard-faced
Commander Devlin was saying, something about the Base and Odysseus,
the mother ship.
"We've five hundred miles before we'll be in their vicinity, and every
yard of it we walk. Hunting parties will shoot food animals. All water
is to be boiled and treated with ultra-violet by my section. The
photographers will march with the science section, which will continue
classifying and writing reports. No actual specimens will be taken. We
can't afford the weight."
To Hague, the other five men seated around the little charting table
appeared cool, confidently ready to march through five hundred, or a
thousand miles of dark, unexplored, steaming Hell that is Venusian
rainforest. Their faces tightset, icily calm, they nodded in turn as
the Commander looked at each one of them; but Hague wondered if his own
face wasn't betraying the fear lurking within him. Suddenly Commander
Devlin grinned, and pulled a brandy bottle from his pocket, uncorking
it as he spoke: "Well, Rocketeers, a short life and a merry one. I
never did give a damn for riding in these tin cans." The tension broke,
they were all smiling, and saying they'd walk into the base camp with
some kind of a Venusian female under each arm for the edification of
Officers' Mess.
Leaden doubt of his own untried abilities and nerve lay icy in Hague's
innards, and he left after one drink. The others streamed from the
brightly lighted hatch a moment later. The Commander made a short
speech to the entire party. Then Navigator Clark, a smiling, wiry
little man, marched out of the clearing with his advance guard. Their
voices muffled suddenly as they vanished down a forest corridor that
lay gloomy between giant tree holes.
Commander Devlin slapped Hague cheerfully on the shoulder as he moved
past; and the second section, spruce and trim in blue-black uniforms,
with silver piping, followed him. Crewmen Didrickson and Davis followed
with rifles and sagging bandoliers of explosive bullets crossing their
chests; and then Arndt, the lean craggy geologist, his arm in a sling,
and marching beside him was rotund, begoggled Gault, the botanist.
The little whippet tank clattered by next with Technician Whittaker
grinning down at Hague from the turret.
"It pains me somethin' awful to see you walkin' when I'm ridin',"
Whittaker piped over the whippet's clanking growl.
Hague grinned back, then pinched his nose between two fingers in the
ageless dumb show of disgust, pointed at the tank, and shook his head
sadly. The two carts the whippet towed swayed by, and the rest of the
column followed; Bachmann, the doctor and Sewell, his beefy crotchety
assistant. The two photographers staggered past under high-piled
equipment packs, and Hague wondered how long they would keep all of
it. Lenkranz, Johnston, Harker, Szachek, Hirooka, Ellis--each carried
a pack full of equipment. The rest filed by until finally Swenson, the
big Swede technician, passed and the clearing was empty.
Hague turned to look over his own party. In his mind's eye bobbed the
neatly typed "Equipment, march-order, light field artillery" lists he'd
memorized along with what seemed a thousand other neatly typed lists at
Gunnery School.
The list faded, and Hague watched his five-man gun-section lounge
against their rifles, leaning slightly forward to ease the heavy
webbing that supported their marching packs and the sectioned pneumatic
gun.
"All right," Hague said brusquely. He dredged his brain desperately
then for an encouraging speech, something that would show the crew he
liked them, something the Commander might say, but he couldn't think
of anything that sounded witty or rang with stirring words. He finally
muttered a disgusted curse at his own blank-headedness, and said
harshly, "All right, let's go."
The six men filed silently out of the clearing battered in the forest
by Patrol Rocket One, and into damp gloom between gargantuan trunks
that rose smoothly out of sight into darkness. Behind them a little
rat-like animal scurried into the deserted slot of blasted trees, its
beady black eyes studying curiously the silver ship that lay smashed
and half-buried in the forest floor.
* * * * *
Base Commander Chapman shuffled hopelessly through the thick sheaf of
onion-skin papers, and sank back sighing. Ammunition reports, supply
reports, medical reports, strength reports, reconnaissance reports,
radio logs, radar logs, sonar logs, bulging dossiers of reports, files
full of them, were there; and elsewhere in the ship efficient clerks
were rapping out fresh, crisp battalions of new reports, neatly typed
in triplicate on onion-skin paper.
He stared across his crowded desk at the quiet executive officer.
"Yes, Blake, it's a good picture of local conditions, but it isn't
exploration. Until the Patrol Rocket gets in, we can send only this
local stuff, and it just isn't enough."
Blake shrugged.
"It's all we've got. We can send parties out on foot from the base
here, even if we do lose men, but the dope they'd get would still be on
a localized area."
The Commander left his desk, and stared through a viewport at the
plateau, and beyond that at the jungled belt fringing an endless
expanse of rainforest lying sullenly quiet under the roof of racing
grey clouds.
"The point is we've got to have more extensive material than this when
we fire our robot-courier back to earth. This wonderful mountain of
papers--what do they do, what do they tell? They describe beautifully
the physical condition of this Base and its complement. They describe
very well a ten mile area around the Base--but beyond that area they
tell nothing. It's wonderful as far as it goes, but it only goes ten
miles, and that isn't enough."
Blake eyed the snowy pile of papers abstractedly. Then he jumped
up nervously as another bundle shot into a receiving tray from the
pneumatic message tube. He began pacing the floor.
"Well, what can we do? Suppose we send the stuff we have here, get it
microfilmed and get it off--what then?"
The Commander swore bitterly, and turned to face his executive.
"What then?" he demanded savagely. "Are we going into that again? Why,
the minute every other branch of the services realize that we haven't
got any kind of thorough preliminary report on this section of Venus,
they'll start pounding the war drums. The battleship admirals and the
bayonet generals will get to work and stir up enough public opinion to
have the United States Rocket Service absorbed by other branches--the
old, old game of military politics."
Blake nodded jerkily. "Yes, I know. We'd get the leftovers after the
battleships had been built, or new infantry regiments activated, or
something else. Anyway we wouldn't get enough money to carry on rocket
research for space explorations."
"Exactly," the Commander cut in harshly. "These rockets would be
grounded on earth. The generals or admirals would swear that the
international situation demanded that they be kept there as weapons of
defense; and that would be the end of our work."
"We've got to send back a good, thorough report, something to prove
that the Rocket Service can do the job, and that it is worth the doing.
And, until the patrol rocket gets back, we can't do it."
"Okay, Commander," Blake called as he went through the steel passage
opening onto the mother ship's upper corridor, "I'll be holding the
Courier Rocket until we get word."
* * * * *
Seven hours later it lightened a little, and day had come. Hague and
the Sergeant had pulled the early morning guard shift, and began
rolling the other four from their tiny individual tents.
Bormann staggered erect, yawned lustily, and swore that this was worse
than spring maneuvers in Carolina.
"Shake it," Brian snarled savagely. "That whistle will blow in a
minute."
When it did sound, they buckled each other into pack harness and swung
off smartly, but groaning and muttering as the mud dragged at their
heavy boots.
At midday, four hours later, there was no halt, and they marched
steadily forward through steaming veils of oppressive heat, eating
compressed ration as they walked. They splashed through a tiny creek
that was solidly slimed, and hurried ahead when crawling things
wriggled in the green mass. Perspiration ran in streams from each face
filing past on the trail, soaked through pack harness and packs; and
wiry Hurd began to complain that his pack straps had cut through his
shoulders as far as his navel. They stopped for a five minute break
at 1400, when Hurd stopped fussing with his back straps and signalled
for silence, though the other five had been too wrapped in their own
discomfort to be talking.
"Listen! Do you hear it, Lieutenant? Like a horn?" Hurd's wizened rat
face knotted in concentration. "Way off, like."
Hague listened blankly a moment, attempted an expression he fondly
hoped was at once intelligent and reassuring, then said, "I don't hear
anything. You may have taken too much fever dope, and it's causing a
ringing in your ears."
"Naw," with heavy disgust. "Listen! There it goes again!"
"I heard it." That was Sergeant Brian's voice, hard and incisive,
and Hague wished he sounded like that, or that he would have heard
the sound before his second in command. All of the six were hunched
forward, listening raptly, when the Lieutenant stood up.
"Yes, Hurd. Now I hear it."
The whistle blew then, and they moved forward. Hague noticed the
Sergeant had taken a post at the rear of the little file, and watched
their back trail warily as they marched.
"What do you think it was, sir?" Bucci inquired in the piping voice
that sounded strange coming from his deep chest.
"The Lord knows," Hague answered, and wondered how many times he'd be
using that phrase in the days to come. "Might have been some animal.
They hadn't found any traces of intelligent life when we left the Base
Camp."
* * * * *
But in the days that followed there was a new air of expectancy in the
marchers, as if their suspicions had solidified into a waiting for
attack. They'd been moving forward for several days.
Hague saw the pack before any of his men did, and thanked his guiding
star that for once he had been a little more alert than his gun-section
members.
The canvas carrier had been set neatly against one of the buttressing
roots of a giant tree bole and, from the collecting bottles strapped in
efficient rows outside, Hague deduced that it belonged to Bernstein,
the entomologist. The gunnery officer halted and peered back into the
gloom off the trail, called Bernstein's name; and when there was no
reply moved cautiously into the hushed shadows with his carbine ready.
He sensed that Sergeant Brian was catfooting behind him.
Then he saw the ghostly white bundle suspended six feet above the
forest floor, and moved closer, calling Bernstein's name softly. The
dim bundle vibrated gently, and Hague saw that it hung from a giant
white lattice radiating wheel-like from the green gloom above. He
raised his hand to touch the cocoon thing, noted it was shaped like a
man well-wrapped in some woolly material; and on a sudden hunch pulled
his belt knife and cut the fibers from what would be the head.
It was Bernstein suspended there, his snug, silken shroud bobbing
gently in the dimness. His dark face was pallid in the gloom, sunken
and flaccid of feature, as though the juices had been sucked from his
corpse, leaving it a limp mummy.
The lattice's thick white strands vibrated--something moved across it
overhead, and Hague flashed his lightpak up into the darkness. Crouched
twenty feet above him, two giant legs delicately testing the strands
of its lattice like web, Hague saw the spider, its bulbous furred body
fully four feet across, the monster's myriad eyes glittering fire-like
in the glow of Hague's lightpak, as it gathered the great legs slightly
in the manner of a tarantula ready to leap.
[Illustration: _It gathered the great legs slightly ... ready to leap._]
Brian's sharp yell broke Hague from his frozen trance. He threw himself
down as Brian's rifle crashed, and the giant arachnid was bathed in a
blue-white flash of explosive light, its body tumbling down across the
web onto Hague where he lay in the mud. The officer's hoarse yells rang
insanely while he pulled himself clear of the dead spider-beast, but he
forced himself to quiet at the sound of the Sergeant's cool voice.
"All clear, Lieutenant. It's dead."
"Okay, Brian. I'll be all right now." Hague's voice shook, and he
cursed the weakness of his fear, forcing himself to walk calmly without
a glance over his shoulder until they were back on the trail. He led
the other four gunners back to the spider and Bernstein's body, as a
grim object lesson, warned them to leave the trail only in pairs. They
returned their weary footslogging pace down the muddy creek marked by
Clark's crew. When miles had sweated by at the same steady pace, Hague
could still feel in the men's stiff silence their horror of the thing
Brian had killed.
* * * * *
Hours, and then days, rolled past, drudging nightmares through which
they plowed in mud and steamy heat, with punctually once every sixteen
hours a breathtaking, pounding torrent of rain. Giant drops turned the
air into an aqueous mixture that was almost unbreathable, and smashed
against their faces until the skin was numb. When the rain stopped
abruptly the heat came back and water vapor rose steaming from the mud
they walked through; but always they walked, shoving one aching foot
ahead of the other through sucking black glue. Sometimes Bormann's
harmonica would wheedle reedy airs, and they would sing and talk for
a time, but mostly they swung forward in silence, faces drawn with
fatigue and pale in the forest half light. Hague looked down at his
hands, swollen, bloody with insect bites, and painfully stiff; and
wondered if he'd be able to bend them round his ration pan at the
evening halt.
Hague was somnambulating at the rear of his little column, listening
to an ardent account from Bormann of what his girl might expect when
he saw her again. Bucci, slowing occasionally to ease the pneumatic
gun's barrel assembly across his shoulder, chimed in with an ecstatic
description of his little Wilma. The two had been married just before
the Expedition blasted Venusward out of an Arizona desert. Crosse was
at the front end, and his voice came back nasally.
"Hey, Lieutenant, there's somebody sitting beside the trail."
"Okay. Halt." The Lieutenant swore tiredly and trotted up to Crosse's
side. "Where?"
"There. Against the big root."
Hague moved forward, carbine at ready, and knew without looking that
Sergeant Brian was at his shoulder, cool and self-sufficient as always.
"Who's there?" the officer croaked.
"It's me, Bachmann."
Hague motioned his party forward, and they gathered in a small circle
about the Doctor, seated calmly beside the trail, with his back against
a root flange.
"What's the matter, Doc? Did you want to see us?"
"No. Sewell seems to think you're all healthy. Too bad the main party
isn't as well off. Quite a bit of trouble with fever. And, Bernstein
gone of course."
Hague nodded, and remembered he'd reported Bernstein's death to the
Commander three nights before.
"How's the Commander?" he inquired.
The Doctor's cherubic face darkened. "Not good. He's not a young man,
and this heat and walking are wrecking his heart. And he won't ride the
tank."
"Well, let's go, Doc." It was Brian's voice, cutting like a knife into
Hague's consciousness. The Doctor looked tired, and drawn.
"Go ahead, lads. I'm just going to sit here for a while." He looked up
and smiled weakly at the astonished faces, but his eyes were bleakly
determined.
"This is as far as I go. Snake bite. We've no anti-venom that seems
to work. All they can do is to amputate, and we can't afford another
sick man." He pulled a nylon wrapper from one leg that sprawled at an
awkward angle beneath him. The bared flesh was black, swollen, and
had a gangrenous smell. Young Crosse turned away, and Hague heard his
retching.
"What did the Commander say?"
"He agreed this was best. I am going to die anyway."
"Will--will you be all right here? Don't you want us to wait with you?"
The Doctor's smile was weaker, and he mopped at the rivulets of
perspiration streaking his mud-spattered face.
"No. I have an X-lethal dosage and a hypodermic. I'll be fine here.
Sewell knows what to do." His round face contorted, "Now, for God's
sake, get on, and let me take that tablet. The pain is driving me
crazy."
Hague gave a curt order, and they got under way. A little further on
the trail, he turned to wave at Doctor Bachmann, but the little man was
already invisible in forest shadows.
* * * * *
The tenth day after the crash of Patrol Rocket One, unofficially known
as the Ration Can, glimpses of skylight opened over the trail Clark's
crew were marking; and Hague and his men found themselves suddenly in
an opening where low, thick vines, and luxuriant, thick-leaved shrubs
struggled viciously for life. Balistierri, the zoologist, slight wisp
of a dark man always and almost a shadow now, stood wearily beside the
trail waiting as they drew up. Their shade-blinded eyes picked out
details in the open ground dimly. Hague groaned inwardly when he saw
that this was a mere slit in the forest, and the great trees loomed
again a hundred yards ahead. Balistierri seized Hague by the shoulder
and pointed into the thick mat of green, smiling.
"Watch, all of you."
He blew a shrill blast on his whistle and waited, while Hague's gunners
wondered and watched. There was a wild, silvery call, a threshing
of wings, and two huge birds rose into the gold tinted air. They
flapped up, locked their wings, and glided, soared, and wheeled over
the earth-stained knot of men--two great white birds, with crests of
fire-gold, plumage snowy save where it was dusted with rosy overtones.
Their call was bell-like as they floated across the clearing in a
golden haze of sunlight filtered through clouds.
"They're--they're like angels." It was Bormann, the tough young
sentimentalist.
"You've named them, soldier," Balistierri grinned. "I've been trying
for a name; and that's the best I've heard. Bormann's angels they'll
be. In Latin, of course."
Unfolding vistas of eternal zoological glory left Bormann speechless
and red-faced. Sergeant Brian broke in.
"I guess they would have made those horn sounds. Right, Lieutenant?"
His voice, dry and a little patronizing, suggested that this was a poor
waste of valuable marching time.
"I wouldn't know, Sergeant," Hague answered, trying to keep dislike out
of his voice, but the momentary thrill was broken and, with Balistierri
beside him, Gunnery Officer Hague struck out on the trail that had been
blasted and hacked through the clearing's wanton extravagance of greedy
plant life.
As they crossed the clearing, Bucci tripped and sprawled full length
in the mud. When he tried to get up, the vine over which he'd stumbled
clutched with a woody tendril that wound snakelike tightly about his
ankle; and, white-faced, the rest of the men chopped him free of the
serpentine thing with belt knives, bandaged the thorn wounds in his
leg, and went on.
The clearing had one more secret to divulge, however. A movement in the
forest edge caught Brian's eye and he motioned to Hague, who followed
him questioningly as the Sergeant led him off trail. Brian pointed
silently and Hague saw Didrickson, Sergeant in charge of Supplies,
seated in the lemon-colored sunlight at the forest edge, an open food
pack between his knees, from which he snatched things and swallowed
them voraciously, feeding like a wild dog.
"Didrickson! Sergeant Didrickson!" the Lieutenant yelled. "What are you
doing?"
The supply man stared back, and Hague knew from the man's face what
had happened. He crouched warily, eyes wild with panic and jaw hanging
foolishly slack. This was Didrickson, the steady, efficient man who'd
sat at the chart table the night they began this march. He had been the
only man Devlin thought competent and nerveless enough to handle the
food. This was the same Didrickson, and madder now than a March hare,
Hague concluded grimly. The enlisted man snatched up the food pack,
staring at them in wild fear, and began to run back down the trail,
back the way they'd come.
"Come back, Didrickson. We've got to have that food, you fool!"
The madman laughed crazily at the sound of the officer's voice,
glanced back for a moment, then spun and ran.
Sergeant Brian, as always, was ready. His rifle cracked, and the
explosive missile blew the running man nearly in half. Sergeant Brian
silently retrieved the food pack and brought it back to Hague.
"Do you want it here, Lieutenant, or shall I take it up to the main
party?"
"We'll keep it here, Sergeant. Sewell can take it back tonight after
our medical check." Hague's voice shook, and he wished savagely
that he could have had the nerve to pass that swift death sentence.
Didrickson's crime was dangerous to every member of the party, and the
Sergeant had been right to shoot. But when the time came--when perhaps
the Sergeant wasn't with him--would he, Hague, react swiftly and coolly
as an officer should, he wondered despairingly?
"All right, lads, let's pull," he said, and the tight-lipped gun crew
filed again into the hushed, somber forest corridors.