It may be bothering you that we did not use our weapons on the Venusian guards and make a bid for escape. The reason is simple—we had not the slightest hope of injuring them, because their bodies, except at two vulnerable spots, the armpits and the fingers, were much tougher than the plastic bullets, whose killing power was small. As for the automatics Sharp and Honey had carried, we hadn't seen them since our second session with Serag.

  But the Venusian guns killed seals okay.

  As soon as we got in, we were allowed to take off our heavy clothes again and then pushed down the tunnel to the screen room for our usual interview with Serag.

  We were by now quite accustomed to the technique. We sat down and operated our helmets for ourselves. Serag was not yet in his place, and I amused myself, when the screen had built itself up, with a few nostalgic pictures that amused Sharp and Honey considerably, especially one of old Masters at the university.

  There seemed less strength to the impulses I was giving than usual, and, I became conscious of two things at the same time. One was the thought of Caren, the second that I had given away to a Venusian our most preciously guarded secret—that I did not need the helmet and its attendant amplifiers to read a Venusian's mind.

  Caren's thought came in just first. He said, "But, Paul Shay, there is no connection yet!"

  Simultaneously, I cursed myself. There was no connection! The mental currents were not yet on! Yet I had not only put pictures on the screen with a little extra effort, as a Venusian would have done. I had been caught at it by a Venusian who knew now that I did not need the connection and could converse mentally without it.

  Swallowing my vexation and terror, I thought sharply, "Who are you, Caren?" His name, as was usual, had come with his first thought.

  I would have doubted and feared longer, if a Venusian had been able to lie. But none of them could, which is why there was never any Venusian art or literature. Or so most people think.

  What he said, compressed into a few seconds, was this.

  "I am a scientist of my people, and I am old. I have not long to live. But I am here on your planet, aiding in a plan I do not like. Serag is the author of it, and though he knows I hate him, compels me and a few others who also retain the sanity that all our race possessed before a few hundred years ago, to help with this monstrous task we have here, of conquering and converting a world for which we have no use.

  "You must understand that our race is much like yours. Our intelligence, too, is hampered by legacies from primitive days, the lust to destroy, the urge for self-preservation, the lust for power above all. But ours has never been a very large race. Unlike yours, which evolved simultaneously and in many different forms all over your planet, all more or less intelligent and all capable of interbreeding, our race evolved in a small area of our northern hemisphere, and never reached more than fifty million beings.

  "I have watched the screen with Serag, and I know you fully realise the horrors that can come by inbreeding of intelligent animals. Your very social system reveals that fact. In a race as small as ours, inbreeding has been a necessity for ten thousand generations. And we are gone, we are spent, we are worthless.

  "There is now a section of the population that is completely mad. About a million. The remainder are on the verge of madness. Serag and the almost mindless tenders of the heating shafts are examples. And there are a few—pitifully few, now—who remain truly sane.

  "And Serag initiates this monstrous plan to overcome a planet for which we have no use nor need. We should recognise that inbreeding has destroyed our race. Ten thousand generations ago we could have used your world to expand our population to a point where inbreeding could have been staved off another few millennia. But our race was too small.

  "Now we are at an end. I and some few more know it, but Serag does not. He is all for power and glory, the adulation of the mob."

  That was as far as he got before Serag arrived and the current was turned on for another session. Just before it started, I heard Serag say quietly, "Caren, have you been talking to the monster Paul Shay?"

  I held my breath in anguish, for a Venusian could not lie at all. But I had forgotten, or never known, that between members of their own race they could at least hide unwanted thoughts. Caren sidestepped neatly.

  "The current was not on, Serag," he said. Serag was satisfied.

  Then I and Serag were in contact, and the session proper was under way. I kicked off by complaining about the ultra-violet in our cell, and received a shocking answer.

  "The forms of ultra-violet that CO2 lets through are essential to the existence of us Venusians. We are replacing the oxygen in the high levels of the atmosphere with it, to allow the beneficent radiation to pass. We have long known that too much carbon dioxide will smother you, but we suspected that the radiation would save us much of that time. Now we know it will; but we will do nothing to alleviate the u/v because we want to know roughly how long the process takes."

  We all three murmured in horror at Serag's deliberate callousness, and I caught a thread of Caren's that showed his agreement. I liked Caren at once.

  But the effects of u/v poisoning, especially the resultant cancers, did not seem too pleasant a prospect. Sharp and Honey knew more about that than I did, but the thoughts I caught from them were nothing if not upsetting. Sharp said some vituperative things to Serag, only to be cut short by a negligent click of the amplifier switch.

  That shocked me! I tried to blank my mind, scared stiff lest Serag should wake up to what I had inadvertently let Caren know. I must have achieved what I wanted, for after a while the switch came on again, and Serag amused himself with pictures of the more horrific portions of Venus. He trotted out one or two things that still remain in terrestrial zoos—there's a crawlylox in the Bronx, in an atmosphere like the Venusian, and a complete tribe of humming annyapes behind a sound-proof wall in Britain's Regent's Park. The humming, of course, never affected the Venusians, but it made us all three a little ill. Psychologists say it vibrates in sympathy with certain synapses intimately related to sadism and cruelty in the human brain. Anyway, I loathed it.

  I didn't want to carry on after it, but the way Serag was gloating over our discomfort made me very angry. I thought a hot red wave of hatred at him, felt him writhe as it swamped his mind. Sharp was up and in behind me, thinking, and Honey, too. Between us, we beat down Serag until he was numb and immobile.

  The screen was still lit with its bright shimmer. I let Honey and Sharp hold down the weakened Venusian, and thought frantically for something that should be real to Serag—so real that he could not endure it. Poison? Disease? Pain—that was it. The Venusians had no knowledge of pain, as I had perceived when the one who had brought our seal had torn his hand. No pain—then he'd get a shock!

  I'd once had a toothache that lasted three days, a migraine and a broken wrist at the same time. I remembered that—distinctly! That was probably the only time I'd ever experienced the limit of physical pain—the full seven and a half dols they say one can feel. But I recalled it, so vividly I almost relived it.

  Serag was screaming now, like a thin, red-hot wire across the top of my brain. It was full of all the hatred he knew, all the things he wanted to do to the race of men who hadn't been inbred into a vicious people who couldn't think sanely any more, the pleasure he would get from watching us die under u/v, the sheer distilled essence of all the loathing I ever thought I could know.

  Now he was learning what it was to feel pain—

  Chapter Nine

  "Crater Battle"

  THEN HE WENT.

  I don't know quite when, but suddenly we woke up to the fact that there was a sort of gap somewhere.

  I relaxed my mind from concentrating on pain, sighed with relief, and probed tentatively into blackness. Here could be no doubt. Serag had gone.

  We had killed him, by the combined pressure of our minds.

  The screen was dull and lifeless now, and folded irregularly preparatory to collapsing into the floor again. A pair of techs appeared from behind it as it fell. They stared blankly at us. One of them slipped across to Serag, tried to rouse him. It was useless. The screen went down altogether, and a heard a rasping note of command. It was Caren.

  "Polym!" he said. "You and Fennil dispose of the body of Serag. Agmek!" He turned to the leader of the guard who had brought us in. "Return these three aliens to their room. They seem to be responsible for Serag's death. I shall have to examine them. Take them away quickly."

  We felt the helmets snap up from our heads. Then, a little stiffly, we climbed out of our chairs, followed the guards along the black tunnel to the main hall. In our minds was a strange mixture of jubilation and exasperation. The momentary yielding to impulse had rid us of a dangerous opponent, but had simultaneously rendered our lives almost certainly forfeit, unless Caren could swing something. And since, by his own admission, he was only here on sufferance and the perverse delight that Serag had taken in his presence at an undertaking he did not approve of, it was at least unlikely that he could sway the situation in our favour. Though perhaps in the general stupefaction caused by the sudden demise of the key man of the expedition—

  We would see.

  Once more we were allowed to enter our bubble room. This time, however, someone followed us, and the wall blanked to its usual translucent red. I turned in alarm, but a quick thought reassured me. It was Caren, using breathing apparatus. He was also carrying a big pot of something that looked black in the reddish light of the walls. The latter he put down with a bang and a sigh of relief.

  He said hurriedly, "Which is the one that can talk without the amplifier?" Of course, it was as difficult for him to tell us apart as it is for us to tell one Chinese among several.

  I stepped forward.

  Caren said, "I only have two or three minutes before someone gets Holda here from Engineering—he's the second in command, and will take over Serag's place. You did the world a service by killing Serag—I don't pretend to understand how you did it, but he's indubitably dead—but your own lives are worth nothing now. Serag was amused by you, but I've an idea Holda isn't even prepared to let you live to see how long you endure the radiation. So I did bring you this." He indicated his pot of black liquid.

  "You were quite right, whichever of you knew that ultra-violet cannot penetrate the thick glass of the wall here. There is also truth in the statement that you must have been exposed to it continually to change your skin tincture so widely. You have. The walls here are all treated with an atomically mutated plastic that fluoresces ultra-violet when exposed to red light and heat—that's why the hall is lit with red light; the screen room has it laid on direct, but you can't do that in a room this size." He nodded at the hall. "You're under the same influence here. So," he gestured at the pot of liquid, "I brought you some liquid plastic that is treated the opposite way and reflects u/v as harmless—to you—blue light. Coat yourselves with it. I have also," here he produced a small box, "lenses for your eyes, such as I thought necessary. Not plastic, but leaded glass. The plastic is sufficiently adhesive to stick them in place. Finally, your own weapons I could not get hold of, but I have two pistols, and the only blinding beam the expedition possesses, which emits photons at a tremendous rate. A Venusian has no defence against it, not having eyes to shut, and can be blinded for about five minutes with it, but if you hold your hand in front of your lenses it cannot harm you."

  We had already started to spread our bodies with the plastic, which set on coming on contact with our skin, forming a thin elastic covering about a sixteenth of an inch deep. We found that the lenses were plain glass, not magnifying or distorting, so Honey took the lenses from his spectacles and gummed them inside the bigger eye socket covering ones that Caren had brought, using a line of plastic round the rims to hold them in place. The u/v could no longer touch us.

  "The covering will harden and fall off in flakes if you touch it with snow or ice when you get out," said Caren conversationally.

  "Get out?" I said.

  "Certainly," Caren affirmed. "My life is no longer worth preserving. I am going to let you out of here. When you are well clear, I shall do something to prevent you being followed. If you put on your heavy boots and remain standing, the covering will remain intact. It preserves heat, as well as insulating you against ultra-violet, until it is touched by frozen water, when, as I said, it cracks and flakes. I can guide you to your flying machine, or, if you would prefer it, to a ground exit. I see there is little fuel left for the former."

  We exchanged glances. No fuel for the plane meant it was just plain useless. We chose the ground exit, in spite of the fact that once we were out we stood even then very little chance of doing anything worthwhile.

  But the wall changed to transparency with shocking suddenness, and a tall guard entered. Caren spun round with what would have been a gasp of horror. The guard wore a gun—not one of the flimsy lightweight arrangements we had used on the seals, but a weapon that looked as if it meant business.

  Then I saw the wall go red again, then white, then red, then white. I got it! Caren was telling me the command to alter the consistency of the wall. I nodded vigorously to signify he had gotten it across. Then the guard dragged him through the wall, with a jerk, before we could move, and suddenly, before the wall went red, there was no Caren—only a pool of fine white plastic. At least, I think it was white. Then the wall went red again.

  I caught the mind of the guard as he went away. Through it I gleaned that Holda was now issuing frantic orders, not least important of which was that we were to undergo a further examination, which would probably result in our deaths.

  That necessitated a big hurry. Fortunately we still had the guns Caren had brought, even though they could not be used on Venusians, and the photon beam to blind them with. Further, we knew the combination, so to speak, to open the 'door', and we were protected against the u/v. What was going on outside?

  I concentrated, got a rough idea. There was no particular activity except near the mouth of the tunnels. It seemed like a good enough time to break out. The problem of our heavy clothes worried us. They could now make no difference to our sweating bodies—the plastic kept us at even temperature—but it was a question of freedom of movement.

  We decided in the end that it was by far the safest to put on our light clothing and our gloves, to prevent the plastic from coming into contact with the ice and snow, and dump the heavy stuff.

  Thus decided, we made ready. We took the straps off our flying suits and fastened our masks in front of our faces, after recharging the cylinders. Then I cautiously blanked the wall to transparency, holding the photon beam, designed for use by Venusian two-fingered hands, in front of me. We even stepped through, turning on our oxygen valves as we did so.

  At once there was commotion. I snapped the catch on the photon beam, shutting my eyes as I did so, but even then the merciless glare penetrated my eyelids and half-dazzled me. When I looked around again, every visible Venusian was wandering aimlessly around. They were blind, for the moment at any rate.

  We rushed towards the entrance through which we had first been brought. Here, however, we met with an unexpected obstacle. The blinded guard at its mouth had yet managed to erect one of the glass barriers in front of it, and it did not respond to the same code as ours. We hurried back across the broad hall to our only remaining hope of salvation—the hemispherical place where the eight or nine tunnels converged.

  All but two were closed by the same glass barriers. One of these was the one the trucks came up. We plunged down the other open one, found it as dark as hell. I turned the photon beam to five per cent, or so, sent a faint reddish light along it. We went on.

  Finally it opened out into a big hall, not nearly the size of the main one we had just left, but large enough, where there were rows on rows of—well, flying saucers. That startled us a bit. It also startled the working techs who dropped their work and made towards us. I mouthed a warning to Sharp and Honey, let the Venusians have it full power, until none of them could see six inches.

  Our plane was there, at the back of the hall, but as soon as we got there we checked the fuel and found it lacking. There were maybe ten gallons in the tank. We couldn't fly to South America on that. Those jets kicked like a mule, but they used their fuel like nobody's business.

  That left us one way out. Sharp jumped up beside one of the flying saucers, where it lay on its ramp, and sought the door. He chose the biggest and nearest. When the door sprang open, there was room in it for all three of us and then to spare. Sharp got aboard in a big hurry. I saw the techs were beginning to see again, so I dosed them with ten seconds of the photon beam, and they sat down resignedly, or thought frantically for help.

  A jerk and a lift from the flying saucer knocked me to the ground, and when it settled again. Sharp clambered out. He pulled his handkerchief from his pocket, tried to wipe his forehead, but of course couldn't, owing to the plastic. At the same time he spilt again the packet of seeds he had dropped before. This time the long-suffering bag burst, and he kicked it away without interest.

  "She works," he said. "There's no skill in the controls. The whole thing's done by a sort of glorified Millikan oildrop experiment—the whole saucer bears an innate electro-static charge, and just floats along. Get on board little chillun!" He laughed behind his mask, a sort of spluttering noise.

  We did, though first I turned on the photon beam for a moment. Then, "How do we get out of here?" I asked. Sharp shut the door, made the roof transparent by turning a switch comprehensibly labelled with two discs of glass, one opaque and one clear.

  "That flume," he indicated one near the roof, about ten feet high and thirty-five wide, elliptical in shape, "leads into the crater of the fake volcano. Up we go."

  He shifted the only control, a lever something like the stick of an airplane, and the saucer rose drunkenly ten feet in the air. We prayed audibly, but Sharp didn't get a pilot's licence for nothing. He had mastered that saucer by sheer intuition, and he flew it like a genius.

 

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