II

The first thing Lundy knew about was the stillness. A dead feeling, as

though everything in creation had stopped breathing.

The second thing was his body. It hurt like hell, and it was hot, and

it didn't like the thick, foul air it was getting. Lundy pushed himself

into a sitting position and tried to boot his brain into action. It was

hard work, because someone had split his head open four ways with an

axe.

It wasn't really dark in the cabin. A wavering silver glow almost like

moonlight came in through the ports. Lundy could see pretty well. He

could see Farrell's body sprawled out on the floor, and a mess of junk

that had once been equipment.

He could see the safe.

He looked at it a long time. There wasn't much to look at. Just an open

safe with nothing in it, and a piece of black cloth dropped on the

floor.

"Oh, Lord," whispered Lundy. "Oh, my Lord!"

Everything hit him at once then. There wasn't much in him but his

stomach, and that was tied down. But it tried hard to come up.

Presently the spasms stopped, and then Lundy heard the knocking.

It wasn't very loud. It had a slow, easy rhythm, as though the knocker

had a lot of time and didn't care when he got in. It came from the

airlock panel.

Lundy got up. Slowly, cold as a toad's belly and as white. His lips

drew back from his teeth and stayed there, frozen.

The knocking kept on. A sleepy kind of sound. The guy outside could

afford to wait. Sometime that locked door was going to open, and he

could wait. He wasn't in a hurry. He would never be in a hurry.

Lundy looked all around the cabin. He didn't speak. He looked sideways

out of the port. There was water out there. The black sea-water of

Venus; clear and black, like deep night.

There was level sand spreading away from the ship. The silver light

came up out of it. Some kind of phosphorescence, as bright as moonlight

and faintly tinged with green.

Black sea-water. Silver sand. The guy kept on knocking at the door.

Slow and easy. Patient. One--two. One--two. Just off beat with Lundy's

heart.

Lundy went to the inner cabin, walking steadily. He looked around

carefully and then went back. He stopped by the lock panel.

"Okay, Jackie," he said. "In a minute. In a minute, boy."

Then he turned and went very fast to the port locker and got a quart

bottle out of its shock cradle, and raised it. It took both hands.

After a while he dropped the bottle and stood still, not looking at

anything, until he stopped shaking. Then he pulled his vac-suit down

off its hook and climbed into it. His face was grey and quite blank.

He took all the oxygen cylinders he could carry, emergency rations,

and all the benzedrine in the medicine kit. He put the limit dose

of the stimulant down on top of the brandy before he locked his

helmet. He didn't bother with the needle gun. He took the two Service

blasters--his own, and Smith's. The gentle knocking didn't stop.

He stood for a moment looking at the open safe and the black cloth

dropped beside it. Something cruel came into his face. A tightness, a

twitching and setting of the muscles, and a terrible look of patience.

Being under water wouldn't bother a Thing from outer space. He reached

up and lifted the net of tight-woven metal-mesh down off its hook and

fastened it on his belt. Then he walked over and opened the airlock

door.

Black water swirled in around his weighted boots, and then the door

opened wide and Jackie Smith came in.

He'd been waiting in the flooded lock chamber. Kicking his boots

against the inner door, easy, with the slow breathing of the sea. Now

the water pushed his feet down and held him upright from behind, so he

could walk in and stand looking at Lundy. A big blond man with green

eyes, and white bandages strapped under his open black tunic, looking

at Lundy. Not long. Only for a second. But long enough.

Lundy stopped himself after the third scream. He had to, because he

knew if he screamed again he'd never stop. By that time the black water

had pushed Jackie Smith away, over to the opposite wall, and covered

his face.

"Oh, Lord," whispered Lundy. "Oh Lord, _what did he see before he

drowned_?"

No one answered. The black water pushed at Lundy, rising high around

him, trying to take him over to Jackie Smith. Lundy's mouth began to

twitch.

He shut his teeth on his lower lip, holding it, holding his throat. He

began to run, clumsily, fighting the water, and then he stopped that,

too. He walked, not looking behind him, out into the flooded lock. The

door slid shut behind him, automatically.

He walked out across the firm green-silver sand, swallowing the blood

that ran in his mouth and choked him.

* * * * *

He didn't hurry. He was going to be walking for a long, long time. From

the position of the ship when it fell he ought to be able to make it to

the coast--unless _It_ had been working on him so the figures on the

dials hadn't been there at all.

He checked his direction, adjusted the pressure-control in his

vac-suit, and plodded on in the eerie undersea moonlight. It wasn't

hard going. If he didn't hit a deep somewhere, or meet something too

big to handle, or furnish a meal for some species of hungry Venus-weed,

he ought to live to face up to the Old Man at H.Q. and tell him two men

were dead, the ship lost, and the job messed to hell and gone.

It was beautiful down there. Like the dream-worlds you see when you're

doped or delirious. The phosphorescence rose up into the black water

and danced there in wavering whorls of cold fire. Fish, queer gaudy

little things with jewelled eyes, flicked past Lundy in darts of

sudden color, and there were great stands of weed like young forests,

spangling the dark water and the phosphorescent glow with huge burning

spots of blue and purple and green and silver.

Flowers. Lundy got too close to some of them once. They reached out and

opened round mouths full of spines and sucked at him hungrily. The

fish gave them a wide berth. After that, so did Lundy.

He hadn't been walking more than half an hour when he hit the road.

It was a perfectly good road, running straight across the sand. Here

and there it was cracked, with some of the huge square blocks pushed up

or tipped aside, but it was still a good road, going somewhere.

Lundy stood looking at it with cold prickles running up and down his

spine. He'd heard about things like this. Nobody knew an awful lot

about Venus yet. It was a young, tough, be-damned-to-you planet, and it

was apt to give the snoopy scientific guys a good swift boot in their

store teeth.

But even a young planet has a long past, and stories get around.

Legends, songs, folk tales. It was pretty well accepted that a lot of

Venus that was under water now hadn't been once, and vice versa. The

old girl had her little whimsies while doing the preliminary mock-up of

her permanent face.

So once upon a time this road had crossed a plain under a hot

pearl-grey sky, going somewhere. Taking caravans from the seacoast,

probably. Bales of spices and spider-silk and casks of _vakhi_ from the

Nahali canebrakes, and silver-haired slave-girls from the high lands

of the Cloud People, going along under sultry green _liha_-trees to be

sold.

Now it crossed a plain of glowing sand under still black water. The

only trees that shadowed it were tall weeds with brilliant, hungry

flowers, and the only creatures that followed it were little fish

with jewelled eyes. But it was still there, still ready, still going

somewhere.

It was headed the same way Lundy was. It must have made a bend

somewhere and turned to meet him. Lundy licked cold sweat off his lips

and stepped out on it.

He stepped slow and careful, like a man coming alone down the aisle of

an empty church.

He walked on the road for a long time. The weeds crowded in thicker

along its edges. It seemed to run right through a dense forest of them

that spread away as far as Lundy could see on either side. He was glad

of the road. It was wide, and if he stayed in the middle of it the

flowers couldn't reach him.

* * * * *

It got darker, because of the weeds covering the sand. Whatever made

the phosphorescence didn't like being crowded that way, and pretty soon

it was so dark that Lundy had to switch on the light in the top of his

helmet. In the edges of the beam he could see the weed fronds moving

lazily with the slow breathing of the sea.

The flowers were brighter here. They hung like lamps in the black

water, burning with a light that seemed to come out of themselves.

Sullen reds and angry yellows, and coldly vicious blues.

Lundy didn't like them.

The weeds grew in thicker and closer. They bulged out from their roots,

in over the stone edges. The flowers opened their bright hungry mouths

and yearned at Lundy, reaching.

Reaching. Not quite touching. Not yet. He was tired. The brandy and the

benzedrine began to die in him. He changed his oxygen cylinder. That

helped, but not much. He took more dope, but he was afraid to go heavy

on it lest he drive his heart too hard. His legs turned numb.

He hadn't slept for a long time. Tracking Farrell hadn't been any

breeze, and taking him--and _It_--had been plain and fancy hell. Lundy

was only human. He was tired. Bushed. Cooked. Beat to the socks.

He sat down and rested a while, turning off his light to save the

battery. The flowers watched him, glowing in the dark. He closed his

eyes, but he could still feel them, watching and waiting.

After a minute or two he got up and went on.

The weeds grew thicker, and taller, and heavier with flowers.

More benzedrine, and damn the heart. The helmet light cut a cold white

tunnel through the blackness. He followed it, walking faster. Weed

fronds met and interlaced high above him, closing him in. Flowers bent

inward, downward. Their petals almost brushed him. Fleshy petals,

hungry and alive.

He started to run, over the wheel-ruts and the worn hollows of the road

that still went somewhere, under the black sea.

Lundy ran clumsily for a long time between the dark and pressing walls.

The flowers got closer. They got close enough to catch his vac-suit,

like hands grasping and slipping and grasping again. He began using the

blaster.

He burned off a lot of them that way. They didn't like it. They began

swaying in from their roots and down from the laced ceiling over his

head. They hurt. They were angry. Lundy ran, sobbing without tears.

The road did him in. It crossed him up, suddenly, without warning. It

ran along smoothly under the tunnel of weeds, and then it was a broken,

jumbled mass of huge stone blocks, tipped up and thrown around like

something a giant's kid got tired of playing with.

And the weeds had found places to stand in between them.

Lundy tripped and fell, cracking his head against the back of his

helmet. For a moment all he could see was bright light flashing. Then

that stopped, and he realized he must have jarred a connection loose

somewhere because his own light was out.

He began to crawl over a great tilted block. The flowers burned bright

in the darkness. Bright and close. Very close. Lundy opened his mouth.

Nothing came out but a hoarse animal whimper. He was still holding the

blaster. He fired it off a couple of times, and then he was on top of

the block, lying flat on his belly.

He knew it was the end of the line, because he couldn't move any more.

The bright flowers came down through the dark. Lundy lay watching them.

His face was quite blank. His dark eyes held a stubborn hatred, but

nothing else.

He watched the flowers fasten on his vac-suit and start working. Then,

from up ahead, through the dark close tunnel of the weeds, he saw the

light.

It flared out suddenly, like lightning. A sheet of hot, bright gold

cracking out like a whipped banner, lighting the end of the road.

Lighting the city, and the little procession coming out of it.

Lundy didn't believe any of it. He was half dead already, with his

mind floating free of his body and beginning to be wrapped up in dark

clouds. He watched what he saw incuriously.

The golden light died down, and then flared out twice more,

rhythmically. The road ran smooth again beyond the end of the tunnel,

straight across a narrow plain. Beyond that, the city rose.

Lundy couldn't see much of it, because of the weeds. But it seemed to

be a big city. There was a wall around it, of green marble veined with

dusky rose, the edges worn round by centuries of water. There were

broad gates of pure untarnished gold, standing open on golden pintles.

Beyond them was a vast square paved in cloud-grey quartz, and the

buildings rose around it like the castles Lundy remembered from Earth

and his childhood, when there were clouds of a certain kind at sunset.

That's what the whole place looked like, under the flaring golden

light. Cloud-cuckoo land at sunset. Remote, dreaming in beauty, with

the black water drawn across it like a veil--something never destroyed

because it never existed.

The creatures who came from between the golden gates and down the road

were like tiny wisps of those clouds, torn free by some cold wandering

breeze and driven away from the light.

They came drifting toward Lundy. They didn't seem to be moving fast,

but they must have been because quite suddenly they were among the

weeds. There were a lot of them; maybe forty or fifty. They seemed to

be between three and four feet tall, and they were all the same sad,

blue-grey, twilight color.

Lundy couldn't see what they were. They were vaguely man-shaped, and

vaguely finny, and something that was more than vaguely something else,

only he couldn't place it.

He was suddenly beyond caring. The dull black curtain around his mind

got a hole in it, and fear came shrieking through it. He could feel the

working and pulling of his vac-suit where the flowers were chewing on

it as though it were his own skin.

He could feel sweat running cold on his body. In a minute that would be

sea water running, and then....

Lundy began to fight. His lips peeled back off his teeth, but he didn't

make any noise except his heavy breathing. He fought the flowers,

partly with the blaster, partly with brute strength. No science, no

thought. Just the last blind struggle of an animal that didn't want to

die.

The flowers held him. They smothered him, crushed him down, wrapped him

in lovely burning petals of destruction. He seared a lot of them, but

there were always more. Lundy didn't fight long.

He lay on his back, his knees drawn up a little toward a rigid, knotted

belly, blind with sweat, his heart kicking him like a logger's boot.

Cold, tense--waiting.

And then the flowers went away.

They didn't want to. They let go reluctantly, drawing back and snarling

like cats robbed of a fat mouse, making small hungry feints at him. But

they went.

* * * * *

Lundy came nearer fanning off for keeps then than he ever had. Reaction

wrung him out like a wet bar-rag. His heart quit beating; his body

jerked like something on a string. Then, through a mist that might have

been sweat, or tears, or the edge of the Hereafter, he saw the little

blue-grey people looking down at him.

They hovered in a cloud above him, holding place with membranes as

fluttering and delicate as bird-calls on a windy day. The membranes

ran between arm- and leg-members, both of which had thin flat

swimming-webs. There were suckers on the legs, about where the heels

would have been if they'd had feet.

Their bodies were slender and supple, and definitely feminine without

having any of the usual human characteristics. They were beautiful.

They weren't like anything Lundy had even seen before, or even dreamed

about, but they were beautiful.

They had faces. Queer little pixie things without noses. Their mouths

were round and tiny and rather sweet, but their eyes were their

dominant feature.

Huge round golden eyes with pupils of deep brown. Soft eyes, gentle,

inquiring, it made Lundy feel like crying, and so scared that it made

him mad.

The flowers kept weaving around hopefully. When one got too close to

Lundy, one of the little people would slap it gently, the way you would

a pet dog, and shoo it away.

"Do you live?"