"Graff Dingle of New Kalamazoo. Listen, Pubina, I'll trade the rest of
our lobodin for Greta Bergenson and her father."
A pause while they digested this. Then: "Send one of your men in and
we'll talk it over, Dingle."
"Can't. I'm alone. Send one of your men out with the Bergensons, and
I'll give you the lobodin."
No reason for Pubina to be certain that the Bergenson lobodin
represented the first and only shipment. And what he claimed to have
would raise the quantity to the point where all of the outlaws could be
vaccinated.
The terry came down behind him and whispered gently: "Three men leave
house from rear. Two coming around on left, one on right. Man on right
has clearer fath, so will ve here first."
Graff gestured assent with the electroblast. He heard the terry take
off again.
Pubina was being safe and cozy. Sending his henchmen while he held the
fort himself!
He heard a soggy clump to the right and grinned. Why, the man was
making more noise than a dryhorn freshly arrived from Terra! When he
saw the black waterproof jumper through the high weeds, he stepped out
from under the fern and moved backwards. He held the electroblast out,
as if it worked.
The outlaw's face, lined with years of dunging inhalation, broke into
a lunatic smile. Since Graff wasn't looking at him, he deduced Graff
hadn't seen him. Pubina's henchman took larger steps. Graff backed.
He counted as he retreated. He counted slowly, taking steps that were
uniform and even, looking off to the side of the outlaw, trying to keep
his tortured body from making a deadly mis-step.
There! He breathed gustily as he saw he'd passed the white line. The
outlaw crept forward, crouching, trying to get close enough for a
certain blast. He too noticed the trigger-vine, and stepped daintily
across it.
Graff whirled to face him then, electroblast at the ready. The man
jumped--and one boot dug into the creeper!
He barely had time to scream. A haze of white tendrils whipped around
him, each armed with thousands of microscopic suckers. A moment later
the bloodless husk that had been a human was being dropped from the
sucking ivy's clutches, rattling like so much paper.
The scream had been heard. Graff's jungle-trained ears caught the
whispers of the other two men on his left as they conferred worriedly.
If only he had a decent weapon. Anything besides the stiletto! He could
take such dryhorns with an old-fashioned pistol!
But he didn't have a pistol. All he had was twenty-seven years'
experience on Venus as a native-born citizen. So he began to run.
He stopped after a moment and listened. The crashes behind him
indicated he was being pursued. If he was afraid, the outlaws had
evidently decided, he was weak enough to chase. Graff ran toward the
Tuscany.
By the time he reached the river, he was weaving from side to side and
sobbing. The exertion magnified his pain a thousandfold. His pursuers
were getting closer. Desperately, he trotted downstream.
They were quite close now. He heard them chuckling and calling to each
other triumphantly--but there was the Gridnik nest!
He waited just a moment, poised on the bank of the river, until they
broke into the clear, almost within electroblast range. Then, as they
caught sight of him and increased their speed, he hurled his useless
weapon into the striped little dome--and jumped.
* * * * *
When he came threshing out of the water, twenty feet further down the
bank, the hideous swarm of insects were still gorging themselves. Graff
crept away, nauseated. He rubbed his eyes against the darkness welling
within them.
"MacDuff!" he called, his voice crackling with agony. "MacDuff!"
The terry swept down to his side.
"Listen, pal, I haven't got much time left, so we'll have to hurry. No
more fancy stuff. Think you can fly in the rear windows or something,
by way of diversion? It'll give me time to cross the sandy stretch."
Without a word, the lizard-bird went away. Graff came to the edge of
the arid soil surrounding the pre-fab and waited.
He saw the enormous shadow tilt down behind the house and heard the
crash of breaking glass. He threw himself forward. Sand boiled away
from his boots. His head wobbled as if his neck had ceased to exist.
Must be getting close to deadline time, Graff decided. A few minutes
more at most before he caved in completely. He drew the stiletto out,
holding it with difficulty in a twitching hand.
There was a yell inside the house and the sizzle of an electroblast
bolt. As he smashed into the door, he heard the electroblast go off
again.
He saw a huge cage holding a fluttering pterodactyl as he tottered into
the living room. Dr. Bergenson and Greta were tied to chairs with long
coils of fongool vine. Greta's pink overall-jumper was ripped and there
was the mark of a man's hand on her face. Pubina stood under a charred
hole in the ceiling where his first blast had gone wild. At his feet, a
hole neatly burned in one wing, writhed MacDuff, awaiting the finisher.
Pubina whirled to face Graff, his electroblast coming up swiftly. The
hunter staggered toward him, fully conscious of his lack of speed, his
almost infantile weakness. Knots of pain pulled at his knees.
The Heatwaver's forefinger flicked down on the firing button. MacDuff
lifted himself on his one good wing and lunged at the boot before him.
His long beak closed on Pubina's ankle. There was a horrible bony
crunch and the outlaw cursed, turning to beat down at the reptile.
Graff reached them, almost falling against Pubina. For a moment he
couldn't coordinate his arm muscles enough to use the stiletto; then,
sinking his teeth deep into his own lip, he drove the thin blade ahead.
Pubina shrieked and fell, the stiletto throbbing in his side.
Deciding to let MacDuff finish him, even if the terry was making a mess
of it, Graff bent over clumsily and retrieved the electroblast Pubina
had dropped. He almost went over backwards as he straightened.
Placing one foot in front of the other intently, he walked to the
Bergensons. He slid like a man walking on banana skins. Darkness roiled
all about him now and every cell in his body seemed to writhe.
The bottle containing the vaccine was on a table, he noticed. It was
still full; the shining hypodermic beside it was empty. Good.
Very carefully, he burned off the fongool vine with the electroblast at
low power. Greta rushed toward him, but he slipped and fell at her feet.
"Darling," he heard her sob; it sounded as if her voice were on the
other side of the Jefferson Sea. "You're infected! Oh, Graff, Graff!
The lobodin won't work on an infected case!"
"I know," he muttered thickly, and let his head loll round to where the
terry was inching along the floor to the cage in the corner. The last
thing he saw was the neat little hole in the wing.
"Be seeing you, MacDuff," Graff whispered as the darkness came down,
pinpointed with multitudes of exploding yellow dots....
That was why he was so surprised when he opened his eyes to see the
terry perched by his bed with a neat patch of gauze taped to one wing.
"How in hell did you pull through, MacDuff?" he asked.
"The same way as you," the lizard-bird told him. "We are voth natives
of Venus."
"Huh?" He raised himself waveringly on one elbow. He was lying in the
Bergenson home in New Kalamazoo. They must have used Pubina's rocket
ship to fly back. "What do you mean--_native_?"
"Just what he says, Graff." Greta pushed open the screen-door and
bustled in with a pile of linen. "You were both born on Venus. Father
says that you must have had all kinds of skin abrasions as an infant:
your body developed a natural immunity to Ricardo's Virus. We'll still
use the vaccine on everybody else, including the children, just to be
on the safe side. But Father has felt for a long time that the blood of
the pioneers would adjust to its environment. When you got sick, but
didn't die, you proved it."
"Well, I'd like to point out," Graff said, as he sat up to permit Greta
to change his sheets, "that I am very, very happy to have given your
father a chance to prove that theory."
MacDuff closed a lidless eye in an assenting reptilian wink.