Donald A. Wollheim (ed) (18 page)

"Don't forget what I said about—"
Jerry started to shout, and then she was framed in the door.

"Hi, Jerry.
You both four-oh
again?"

Ignatz
grunted, while Jerry stared.
"
Durnall
?"

"He's doing all right." Anne took a
seat beside him, held out her hands. "Now that he's safe, let's forget
him. Pete isn't a bad guy, but I don't like darn fools who get me into messes
like the last one, even when it's half my fault."

Jerry digested it slowly, and
Ignatz
cursed his bandages. Now was the time for him to
slip back into the swamps, where Jerry could never make the mistake of taking
him out again. He could see where the Master was going to need decent breaks
with all the responsibility coming up. But the bandages held him securely.

Anne hauled the little bed closer, ran warm
fingers over
Ignatz's
back. "You'll have to live
out here and commute by spinner, of course, but I'll take care of
Ignatz
while you're gone. He owes us a lot of good fortune,
and we're going to collect it."

"I—" Jerry glanced at
Ignatz
. "You know how your father feels about
him."

She smiled impishly. "Dad figured it all out. You see, I brought
back something with me in my duffel, and when he found I meant to keep it, he
gave up." She reached into a

little
bag
and hauled out the snooty head of another
zloaht
.
"Meet
Ichabod
."

Jerry gulped. "Well, 111 be—" And
suddenly he had a great deal of urgent business.

Ignatz
longed for a cigarette, but he snorted
sofdy
and turned away.

THE
LOTUS EATERS

by
S
tanley
G.
W
einbaum

"
W
hewI
"
whistled "
H
am"
H
ammond
, staring through the right forward
observation port. "What a place for a honeymoon!"

"Then you shouldn't have married a
biologist," remarked Mrs. Hammond over his shoulder, but he could see her
gray eyes dancing in the glass of the port. "Nor an explorer's
daughter," she added. For Pat Hammond, until her marriage to Ham a scant
four weeks ago, had been Patricia
Burlin
-game,
daughter of the great Englishman who had won so much of the twilight zone of
Venus for Britain,
exacdy
as
Crowly
had done for the United States.

"I didn't," observed Ham,
"marry a biologist. I married a girl who happened to be interested in
biology; that's all. R's one of her few drawbacks."

He cut the blast to the
underjets
,
and the rocket settled down gently on a cushion of flame toward the black landscape
below. Slowly, carefully, he dropped the unwieldy mechanism until there was the
faintest perceptible jar; then he killed the blast suddenly, the floor beneath
them tilted
slighdy
, and a strange silence fell like
a blanket after the cessation of the roaring blast.

"We're
here," he announced.

"So
we are," agreed Pat.
"Where's here?"

"It's a point exactly seventy-five miles
east of the Barrier opposite
Venoble
, in the British
Cool Country. To the north is, I suppose, the continuation of the Mountains of
Eternity, and to the south is Heaven knows what. And this last applies to the
east."

"
Which is a good
technical description of nowhere.
" Pat laughed. "Let's turn
off the lights and look at nowhere."

She did, and in the darkness the ports showed
as faintly luminous circles.

"I suggest," she proceeded,
"that the Joint Expedition
ascend
to the dome for
a less restricted view. We're here to investigate; let's do a little
investigating."

"This
joint of the expedition agrees," chuckled Ham.

He grinned in the darkness at the flippancy
with which Pat approached the serious business of exploration. Here they were,
the Joint Expedition of the Royal Society and the Smithsonian Institute for the
Investigation of Conditions on the Dark Side of Venus, to use the full official
title.

Of course Ham himself, while technically the
American half of the project, was in reality a member only because Pat wouldn't
consider anything else; but she was the one to whom the bearded society and
institute members addressed their questions, their terms, and their
instructions.

And this was no more than fair, for Pat,
after all, was the leading authority on
Hodand
flora
and fauna, and, moreover, the first human child
bom
on Venus, while Ham was only an engineer lured originally to the
Venusian
frontier by a dream of quick wealth in
xixtchil
trading in the Hot-lands.

It
was there he had met Patricia Burlingame, and there, after an adventurous
journey to the foothills of the Mountains of Eternity, that he had won her.
They had been married in
Erotia
, the American
settlement, less than a month ago, and then had come the offer of the
expedition to the dark side.

Ham
had argued against it. He had wanted a good terrestrial honeymoon in New York
or London, but there were difficulties. Primarily there was the astronomical
one; Venus was past perigee, and it would be eight long months before its slow
swing around the Sun brought it back to a point where a rocket could overtake
the Earth.

Eight months in primitive, frontier-built
Erotia
, or in equally primitive
Venoble
,
if they chose the British settlement, with no amusement save hunting, no
radio, no plays, even very few books. And if they must hunt, Pat argued, why
not add the thrill and danger of the unknown?

No one knew what life, if any, lurked on the
dark side of the planet; very few had even seen it, and those few from rockets
speeding over vast mountain ranges or infinite frozen oceans. Here was a chance
to explain the mystery, and explore it, expenses paid.

It took a multimillionaire to build and equip
a private rocket, but the Royal Society and the Smithsonian Institute, spending
government money, were above such considerations. There'd be danger, perhaps,
and breath-taking thrills, but—they could be alone.

The last point had won Ham. So they had spent
two busy weeks provisioning and equipping the rocket, had ridden high above the
ice barrier that bounds the twilight zone, and dashed frantically through the
storm line, where the cold
Underwind
from the sunless
side meets the hot Upper Winds that sweep from the desert face of the planet.

For
Venus, of course,
has
no rotation, and hence no alternate
days and nights. One face is forever sunlit, and one forever
dark,
and only the planet's slow liberation gives the twilight zone a semblance of
seasons. And this twilight zone, the only habitable part of the planet, merges
through the
Hotlands
on one side to the blazing
desert, and on the other side ends
abrupdy
in the ice
barrier where the Upper Winds yield their moisture to the chilling breaths of
the
Underwind
.

So
here they were, crowded into the tiny glass dome above die navigation panel,
standing close together on the top rung of the ladder, and with just room in
the dome for both their heads. Ham slipped his arm around the girl as they
stared at the scene outside.

Away off to the west was the eternal dawn—or
sunset, perhaps—where the light glistened on the ice barrier. Like vast
columns, the Mountains of Eternity thrust themselves against the light, with
their mighty peaks lost in the lower clouds twenty-five miles above. There, a
little south,
were
the ramparts of the Lesser
Eternities, bounding American Venus, and between the two ranges were the
perpetual
Ughtnings
of the storm line.

But around them, illuminated dimly by the
refraction of the sunlight, was a scene of dark and wild splendor. Everywhere
was ice—hills of it, spires, plains, boulders, and cliffs of it, all glowing a
pallid green in the trickle of light from beyond the barrier.
A world without motion, frozen and sterile, save
for the
moaning of the
Underwind
outside, not hindered here
as the barrier shielded it from the Cool Country.

"It's—glorious!"
Pat murmured.

"Yes," he agreed, "but cold,
lifeless, yet menacing. Pat, do you think there is life here?"

"I should judge so. If life can exist on
such worlds as Titan and
Iapetus
, it should exist
here. How cold is it?" She glanced at the thermometer outside the dome,
its column and figures self-luminous. "Only thirty below zero, Fahrenheit.
Life exists on Earth at that temperature."

"Exists, yet.
But it couldn't have developed at a temperature below freezing. Life
has to be lived in liquid water."

She
laughed softly. "You're talking to a biologist, Ham. No, life couldn't
have
evolved
at thirty below zero; but suppose it
originated back in the twilight zone and migrated here? Or suppose it was
pushed here by the terrific competition of the warmer regions? You know what
conditions are in the
Hotlands
, with the molds and
doughpots
and Jack

Ketch
trees,
and the millions of
litde
parasitic things, all eating each other."

He considered this. "What sort of life should you
expect?"

She chuckled. "Do you want a prediction?
Very well.
I'd guess, first of all, some
sort
of vegetation as a base, for
ani
mal
life can't keep eating itself without some added fuel. It's like the story of
the man with the cat farm, who raised rats to feed the cats, and then
when he
skinned the cats, he fed the bodies to the
rats, and then fed
more
rats to the cats. It sounds
good, but it won't work."

"So
there ought to be vegetation.
Then what?"

"Then?
Heaven knows.
Presumbaly
the dark-side life, if it exists, came originally from the weaker strains of
twilight-zone life, but what it might have become—well, I can't guess. Of
course, there's the
triops
noctivivans
that I discovered in the Mountains of Eternity—"

"You
discovered!" He grinned. "You were
out as cold as ice when I carried you away from the nest of devils. You never
even saw one!"

"I examined the dead one brought into
Venoble
by the hunters," she returned imperturbably.
"And don't forget that the society wanted to name it after me—the
triops
Patri-ciae
."
Involuntarily a shudder shook her at the
memory of those
Satanic
creatures that had all but destroyed the two
of them. "But I chose the other name—
triops
noctivivans
,
the
tliree
-eyed
dweller
in
the dark.

"Romantic name for a devilish beast!"

"Yes, but what I was getting at is this:
it's probable that
triops
—or
triopses
—say,
what is the plural of
triops
?"

"
Trioptes
," he grunted.
"Latin
root."

"Well, it's probable that
trioptes
, then, are among the creatures to be found here on
the night side, and that those fierce devils who attacked us in that shadowed
canyon in the Mountains of Eternity are an outpost, creeping into the twilight
zone through the dark and sunless passes in the

mountains
. They can't stand light; you saw that
yourself."
"So what?"

Pat laughed at the Americanism.
"So this.
From their form and structure—six limbs,
three eyes, and all—it's plain that the
trioptes
are
related to ordinary native
Hodanders
. Therefore, I
conclude that they're recent arrivals on the dark side; that they didn't evolve
here, but were driven here quite lately, geologically speaking. Or geologically
isn't quite the word, because
geos
means earth.
VenusologicaUy
speaking,
I should say."

"You shouldn't say.
You're substituting a Latin root for a Greek one. What you mean is
aphrodisiologically
speaking."

She chuckled again. "What I mean, and
should have said right away to avoid argument, is
paleontologically
speaking, which is better English. Anyway, I mean that
trioptes
haven't existed on the dark side for more than twenty to fifty thousand Earth
years, or maybe less, because what do we know about the speed of evolution on
Venus? Perhaps it's faster than on the Earth; maybe a
triops
could adapt itself to night life in five thousand."

"I've seen college students adapt
themselves to night life in one semester!" He grinned.

She ignored this. "And therefore," she proceeded, "I
argue that there must have been life here before
triops
arrived, since it must have found something to eat when it got here or it
couldn't have survived. And since my examination showed that it's partly a
carnivorous feeder, there must have been not only life here, but animal life.
And that's as far as pure reason can carry the argument."

"So you can't guess
what sort of animal life.
Intelligent, perhaps?"

"I don't know. It might be. But in spite
of the way you Yankees worship intelligence, biologically it's unimportant. It
hasn't even much survival value."

"What? How can you say that, Pat? What except human intelligence
has given man the supremacy of the Earth—and of Venus, too, for that
matter?"

"But
has
man the supremacy of the Earth? Look here, Ham, here's what I mean about
intelligence. A gorilla has a far better brain than a turtle, hasn't it? And
yet which is the more successful—the gorilla, which is rare and confined only
to a small region in Africa, or the turtle, which is common everywhere from the
arctic to the
antarctic
? And as for man —well, if you
had microscopic eyes, and could see every living thing on the Earth, you'd
decide that man was just a rare specimen, and that the planet was really a
nematode world—that is, a worm world—because the nematodes far outnumber all
the other forms of life put together."

"But that isn't supremacy, Pat."

"I didn't say it was. I merely said that
intelligence hasn't much survival value. If it has, why are the insects that
have no intelligence, but just instinct, giving the human race such a battle?
Men have better brains than corn borers, boll weevils, fruit flies, Japanese
beetles, gypsy moths, and all the other pests, and yet they match our
intelligence with just one weapon—their enormous fecundity. Do you realize that
every time a child is born, until it's balanced by a death, it can be fed in
only one way? And that way is by taking the food away from the child's own
weight of insects."

"All that sounds reasonable enough, but
what's it got to do with intelligence on the dark side of Venus?"