Donald A. Wollheim (ed) (23 page)

Pat wouldn't rise when he tugged at her.
"There's no need of it," she murmured, but made no resistance when he
lifted her.

An idea stirred vaguely; he bundled her into
his arms so that her right lamp shot its beam forward, and so he staggered at
last to the circle of light about the rocket, opened the door, and dumped her
on the floor within.

He had one final impression. He saw the
laughing shadows that were the
trioptes
skipping and
skittering across the darkness toward the ridge where Oscar and his people
waited in placid acceptance of their destiny.

The rocket was roaring along at two hundred
thousand feet, because numberless observations and photographs from space had
shown that not even the vast peaks of the Mountains of Eternity project forty
miles above the planet's surface. Below them the clouds glistened white before
and black behind, for they were just entering the twilight zone. At that height
one could even see the mighty curvature of the planet.

"Half cue ball, half eight ball,"
said Ham, staring down. "Hereafter we stick to the cue-ball half."

"It was the spores,"
proceeded
Pat, ignoring him. "We
knew
they were narcotic before, but we couldn't be expected to guess that
they'd carry a drug as
subde
as that—to steal away
your will and undermine your strength. Oscar's people are the Lotus Eaters and
the Lotus, all in one. But somehow I'm sorry for them.
Those
colossal, magnificent, useless minds of theirs!"
She paused.
"Ham, what woke you up to what was happening? What snapped you out of
it?"

"Oh, it was a remark of Oscar's, something about his being only a
square meal for a
triops
."

"Well?"

"Well, did you know we've used up all
our food? That remark reminded me that I hadn't eaten for two days!"

by
L
eigh
B
rackett

L
undy
was flying the
aero-space
convertible by himself. He'd been doing it for a long time. So long that the
bottom half of him was dead to the toes and the top half even deader, except
for two separate aches like ulcerated teeth; one in his back, one in his head.

Thick pearly-grey
Venusian
sky went past the speeding flier in streamers of torn cloud. The rockets
throbbed and pounded. Instruments jerked erratically under the swirl of
magnetic currents that makes the
Venusian
atmosphere
such a swell place for pilots to go nuts in.

Jackie Smith was still out cold in the
copilot's seat. From in back, beyond the closed door to the tiny inner cabin,
Lundy could hear Farrell screaming and fighting.

He'd been screaming a long time.
Ever since the shot of
avertin
Lundy had given him after he was taken had begun to
wear thin.
Fighting the straps and screaming, a hoarse
jarring sound with no sense in it.

Screaming
to be free, because of
It
.

Somewhere inside of Lundy, inside the
rumpled, sweat-soaked black uniform of the Tri-World Police, Special Branch,
and the five-foot-six of thick springy muscle under it, there was a knot. It
was a large knot, and it was very, very cold in spite of the sweltering heat in
the cabin, and it had a nasty habit of yanking itself tight every few minutes,
causing Lundy to jerk and sweat as though he'd been spiked.

Lundy didn't like that cold tight knot in his
belly. It meant he was afraid. He'd been afraid before, plenty of times, and he
wasn't ashamed of it. But right now he needed all the brains and guts he had to
get
It
back to Special headquarters at
Vhia
, and he didn't want to have to fight himself, too.

Fear can screw things for you. It can make
you weak when you need to be strong, if you're going to go on living.
You,
and the two other guys depending on you.

Lundy hoped he could keep from getting too
much afraid, and too tired—because
It
was sitting back
there in its little strongbox in the safe, waiting for somebody to crack.

Farrell was cracked wide open, of course, but
he was tied down. Jackie Smith had begun to show signs before he passed out, so
that Lundy had kept one hand over the
anaesthetic
needle gun holstered on the side of his chair. And Lundy thought,

The
hell of it is, you don't know when
It
starts to work
on you. There's no set pattern, or if there is we don't know it. Maybe right
now the readings I see on those dials aren't there at all . . .

Down below the torn grey clouds he could see occasional small patches of
ocean. The black, still,
tideless
water of
Venus, that
covers so many secrets of the planet's past.

It didn't help Lundy any. It could be right or wrong, depending on what
part of the ocean it was—and there was no way to tell. He hoped nothing would
happen to the motors. A guy could get awfully wet, out in the middle of that
still black water.

Farrell went on screaming. His throat seemed to be lined with
impervium
. Screaming and fighting the straps, because
It
was locked up and calling for help.

"I'm cold," he said.
"Hi, Midget."

Lundy turned his head. Normally he had a round, fresh, merry face, with
bright dark eyes and a white, small-boyish grin. Now he looked like something
the waiter had swept out from under a table at four A.M. on New Year's Day.

"You're cold," he said sourly. He licked sweat off his
hps
. "Oh, fine! That was all I needed."

Jackie Smith stirred slightly, groaned, to
joggle
himself
. His black tunic was open over his
chest, showing the white strapping of bandages, and his left hand was thrust in
over the locked top of the tunic's zipper. He was a big man, not any older than
Lundy, with big, ugly, pleasant features, a shock of coarse pale hair, and a
skin like old leather.

"On Mercury, where I was born," he said, "the climate is
suitable for human beings. You Old-World
pantywaists
..
." He broke off, turned
white under the leathery burn, and said through set teeth, "Oil Farrell
sure did a good job on me."

"You'll live," said Lundy. He tried not to think about how
nearly both he and Smith had come to not living. Farrell had put up one hell of
a fight, when they caught up with him in a native village high up in the
Mountains of White Cloud.

Lundy still felt sick about that. The
bull-meat, the hard boys, you didn't mind kicking around. But Farrell wasn't
that kind. He was just a nice guy that got trapped by something too big for
him.

A nice guy, crazy blind in
love with somebody that didn't exist.
A decent hardworking guy with a wife and two
kids who'd lost his mind, heart, and soul to a Thing from outer space, so that
he was willing to kill to protect
It
.

Oh, hell!
thought
Lundy wearily,
won't he ever stop screaming?

The
rockets beat and thundered. The torn grey sky whipped past. Jackie Smith sat
rigid, with closed eyes, white around the lips and breathing in shallow, careful
gasps. And
Vhia
still a long way off.

Maybe
farther off than he knew. Maybe he wasn't heading toward
Vhia
at all. Maybe
It
was working on him, and he'd never know it
till he crashed.

The
cold knot tightened in his belly like a cold blade stabbing.

Lundy cursed. Thinking things like that was a
sure way to punch your ticket right straight to blazes.

But you couldn't help thinking, about
It
.
The Thing you had caught in a special net of tight-woven metal mesh, aiming
at something Farrell could see but you couldn't. The Thing you had forced into
the
glassite
box and covered up with a black cloth,
because you had been warned not to look at
It
.

Lundy's hands tingled and burned, not
unpleasantly. He could still feel the small savage Thing fighting him, hidden
in the net. It had felt vaguely cylindrical, and terribly alive.

Life.
Life from outer space, swept out of
a
cloud of cosmic dust by the
gravitic
pull of
Venus. Since Venus had hit the cloud there had been a wave of strange madness
on the planet. Madness like
Farrell's, that
had led to
murder, and some things even worse.

Scientists had some ideas about that life
from Out There. They'd had a lucky break and found one of The Things, dead, and
there were vague stories going around of a crystalline-appearing substance
that wasn't really crystal, about three inches long and magnificently etched
and fluted, and supplied with some odd little gadgets nobody would venture an
opinion about.

But the Thing didn't do them much good, dead.
They had to have one alive, if they were going to find out what made it tick
and learn how to put a stop to what the telecom-
mentators
had chosen to call The Madness from Beyond, or The Vampire Lure.

One thing about it everybody knew. The guys
who suddenly went
sluggy
and charged off the rails
all made it clear that they had met the ultimate Dream Woman of all women and
all dreams. Nobody else could see her, but that didn't bother them any. They
saw her, and she was—
She.
And her eyes were always
veiled.

And
She
was
a
whiz
at hypnosis and mind-control. That's why
She
,
or
It,
hadn't been caught alive before. Not before
Lundy and Smith, with every scientific aid Special could give them, had tracked
down Farrell and managed to get the breaks.

The breaks.
Plain fool luck.
Lundy moved his throbbing head stiffly on his aching neck, blinked sweat out of
his bloodshot eyes, and wished to hell he was home in bed.

Jackie Smith said suddenly, "Midget, I'm
cold. Get me a blanket."

Lundy
looked at him. His pale green eyes were half open, but not as though they saw
anything. He was shivering. "I can't leave the controls, Jackie."

"Nuts. I've got one hand. I can hang onto this lousy tin fish that
long."

Lundy scowled. He knew Smith wasn't kidding
about the cold. The temperatures on Mercury made the first-generation
colonists sensitive to anything below the range of an electric furnace. With
the wound and all, Smith might wind up with pneumonia if he wasn't covered.

"Okay." Lundy reached out and
closed the switch marked A. "But 111 let Mike do the flying. He can
probably last five minutes before he blows his guts out."

Iron Mike was just a
pattycake
when it came to
Venusian
atmosphere flying. The
constant magnetic compensation heated the robot coils to the fusing point in practically
no time at all.

Lundy thought fleetingly that it was nice to
know there were still a couple of things men could do better than machinery.

He got up, feeling like something that had
stood outside rusting for four hundred years or so. Smith didn't turn his head.
Lundy growled at him.

"Next time, sonny, you wear your long
woolen
undies
and let me alone!"

Then he stopped. The knot jerked tight in his stomach.

Cold
sweat needled him, and his nerves stung in a swift rush of fire.

Farrell
had quit screaming.

There was silence in the ship. Nothing touched it. The rockets were
outside it and didn't matter. Even Jackie Smith's careful breathing had
stopped. Lundy went forward slowly, toward the door.
Two
steps.

It opened. Lundy stopped again, quite still.

Farrell was standing in the opening.
A nice guy with a wife and two kids.
His face still looked
like that, but the eyes in it were not sane, nor even human.

Lundy had tied him down to the bunk with four
heavy straps.
Breast, belly, thighs, and feet.
The
marks of them were on Farrell. They were cut into his shirt and pants, into his
flesh and sinew, deep enough to show his bare white ribs. There was blood.
A lot of blood.
Farrell didn't mind.

"I broke the straps," he said. He
smiled at Lundy. "She called me and I broke the straps."

He started to walk to the safe in the corner of the cabin. Lundy gagged
and pulled himself up out of a cold black cloud and got his feet
to
moving.

Jackie Smith said quietly, "Hold it,
Midget. She doesn't like it there in the safe. She's cold and she wants to come
out."

Lundy
looked over his shoulder. Smith was hunched around in his seat, holding the
needle-gun from Lundy's holster on the pilot's chair. His pale green eyes had a
distant, dreamy glow, but Lundy knew better than to trust it.

He said, without
inflection, "You've seen her."

"No.
No, but—I've heard her." Smith's heavy lips twitched and parted. The
breath sucked through between them, hoarse and slow.

Farrell
went down on his knees beside the safe. He put his hands on its blank and
glearning
face and turned to Lundy. He was crying.

"Open it. You've got to open it. She
wants to come out. She's frightened."