The 22nd Golden Age of Science Fiction Read online

  Like the last remnant of a picture puzzle fitting together, something clicked in Thompson’s mind. “And Kurkil. While we were out of the ship something bit him.”

  Silence again. His eyes went from Neff to Fortune. “Did—”

  They shook their heads.

  “Then that ties up the package,” Thompson whispered. “This creature carried the virus, or poison, or whatever it was. Without being bitten, the virus cannot spread. We’ve found the cause. We’ve got it licked.”

  He was aware of sweat appearing on his face, the sweat of pure relief. He sank back into his chair. Buster, recovering from his indignity at the outrage he had suffered, jumped to the top of the desk, settled down with his nose against the glass, watching the dead creature inside the bell jar.

  “He caught one of those things right in this cabin,” Thompson whispered. A shudder passed over him and was gone. He had been so close to death, and had not known it. Buster had saved him.

  Instead of seeking protection from him, the cat, in a sense, had been protecting him. His gaze centered fondly on the cat.

  “What if there are more of those things in the ship?” Fortune spoke.

  “We can solve that one,” Thompson spoke. “Space suits. And, now that we know what we’re looking for, we can clean out the ship. If we don’t, Buster will do it for us.”

  “Space suits!” As if he had heard no more than those two words, Fortune ran from the room. He returned with three suits. They hastily donned them.

  “No damned bug can bite through one of these things,” Neff said exultantly. “Say, what about Grant? Hadn’t we better take him a suit too?”

  “I should say so. Fortune.…” But Fortune was already leaving the room on his errand. Thompson snapped open the intercom system. “Grant?”

  “Yes, what is it?”

  “We’ve found the cause and we’ve got the disease licked.”

  Grant’s voice a shout coming back from the control room. “Thank God. I’ve been sitting here watching Sol grow bigger and bigger.…” His voice suddenly choked, went into silence, then came again, asking a question. “Is it all right to change course now?”

  “Definitely it’s all right,” Thompson answered. “In fact, it’s an order.”

  An instant later, the ship groaned as the direction of flight was shifted. Thompson took a deep breath, was aware that Neff was staring at him. “What was that he said about watching Sol grow bigger and bigger? Say, what course were we on?”

  “Collision course with the sun,” Thompson answered.

  “What?” Neff gasped. “Do you mean to say that you were going to throw the ship into the sun?”

  Slowly Thompson nodded. “I didn’t know whether we would be alive or not but I didn’t want this ship to enter Sol Cluster and turn loose there the virus that had already depopulated a planet.”

  He spoke slowly, with the sure knowledge of a desperate danger safely passed. Neff stared at him from round and frightened eyes.

  On the desk top Buster gave up his vigil, meowed, and jumped into the captain’s lap. With the thick gloves of his space suit clad hands, Thompson fondly stroked him.

  Buster arched his back in grateful appreciation and began to purr.

  PUBLICITY STUNT

  Other Worlds, March 1953.

  “Just go right ahead and start chewing on me!” Molock briskly invited the Venusian, Shad Brisbee. “When you get a square meal, I’ll get a lunch!”

  Rita Morgan didn’t turn a hair at the challenge but I thought Captain Wilkerson, who was officially in charge of us, was going to faint. “No, no, NO!” Wilkerson screamed. “Molock, you’re getting us all into trouble. You’re—”

  “Sheddap!” Molock said to Wilkerson. He turned again to the Venusian, Shad Brisbee. “You heard what I said. If you want to try to start carving on me with one of those frog stickers you’ve got stuck in your belt, hop right to it. But remember, by Harry, while you’re doing your carving, I’m going to be doing a little light whittling myself.”

  Except for the needle pistol in his pocket, Molock was unarmed. Lifting hands as big as hams, he looked Shad Brisbee square in all of the Venusian’s eyes that happened to be turned toward him at the moment. Molock had the full attention of all six of those eyes. The expression on Shad Brisbee’s face indicated that if he had had six more eyes, he would have been concentrating all of them on the antics of this mad human.

  Shad Brisbee was seven feet tall, he must have weighed close to 300 pounds. Molock’s six feet, 185 pound frame was a pygmy beside the Venusian. Shad Brisbee fingered the knives in his belt as if he was considering accepting Molock’s invitation, then suddenly spread his hands. Protesting sound bellowed out of him.

  “But you ’ave landed right in the middle of our dancing ground!”

  “Then, by Harry, dance somewhere else!” Molock shouted.

  I thought at first that Shad Brisbee was going to explode. He puffed himself up until he looked to be eight feet tall. Indignation turned him green. Each of his six eyes turned yellow and he glared at Molock out of all of them.

  “Molock, his dancing ground is sacred!” Wilkerson croaked.

  “And to me, staying alive is sacred,” Molock answered. “Which is the sacredest, my staying alive or his dancing ground?”

  “But the way you’re acting now, you’re going to get us all killed!” Wilkerson screamed.

  “Am I?” Molock answered. “Watch this!” He turned again to Shad Brisbee. “Listen, you six-eyed baboon. We landed in the middle of your dancing ground by accident but we’re going to stay right where we are as long as we damn well please. Get it? We’re going to stay here as long as we damn well please. And neither you nor any other of your six-eyed tribe is going to do anything about it.”

  I was holding my breath. Wilkerson looked as if he was about to faint. Only Rita seemed to be enjoying this scene. Perhaps she had illusions that two brawny giants were battling for her, which was a big mistake on her part. Shad Brisbee wouldn’t have had her, or any other human woman, in his harem as a gift. If she was inspiring Molock to put on his act, then maybe he was battling for her sake. I had the impression that if Wilkerson had thought that she was inspiring Molock to this act, the captain would have drowned her in the nearest mudhole, publicity department or no publicity department. And I would have helped him.

  Shad Brisbee puffed himself up until he looked as if he weighed 400 pounds. He fingered his knives in his belt, shifted his weight on his bare splayed feet. He extended two of his eyes and looked backward at the jungle behind him as if he was desperately hoping that some of his tribe would turn up to help him dispose of this brash human. The other four eyes continued to glare at Molock.

  “There’s none of your tribe around to help you,” Molock stated, waving his fists. “It’s just you and me.”

  Shad Brisbee shifted uncomfortably. He didn’t know quite what to make of us. We were humans. Since he was a “tame” Venusian, he knew quite a lot about humans. We had landed right in the middle of the huge cleared space that his tribe used as a dancing ground. This in itself was sufficient reason for him to destroy us utterly. Each of his six eyes revealed quite clearly that he longed to destroy us and that only Molock was keeping him from doing it.

  “Well?” Molock said, waving his fists. “If you’re ready to start getting that square meal, I’m ready to start eating my lunch.”

  Shad Brisbee took a deep breath. Somewhere inside of him he made up his mind.

  “It is all right for you to land on our dancing ground,” he said. The way he spoke, the words hurt him.

  Wilkerson, Rita, Molock, and I all beamed.

  “But you must be gone in one zonar!” Shad Brisbee snarled. “Or I will tear you all to pieces with my own bare hands.” Saying these words didn’t hurt him. He enjoyed every one of them. Judging from the way his hands worked as
he spoke, he would enjoy even more translating his words into action. “Be gone in one zonar—or else!” Turning, he stalked into the jungle.

  I quit breathing again. The smile went from Wilkerson’s face. Rita looked a little perturbed. Only Molock was unconcerned even though he knew that a zonar was less than an hour and he wouldn’t be gone from this place in two weeks, and then only if we were lucky.

  “Did you see me out-bluff him?” Molock said, grinning. “Did you see me run a sandy on that six-eyed idiot?”

  “You were marvelous, simply marvelous,” Rita murmured.

  “Oh, hell!” Wilkerson shouted. If there had been a stone wall handy for him to butt his head against, I’m sure he would have felt much better. “Yaas, you bluffed him. You bluffed him so goddamned good that we’ll all be dead before we get out of this place. Remember, this is his country, this is his tribal dancing ground—”

  “Captain, I’m sure you are taking much too negative a view,” Rita interrupted.

  Since she was a woman, Wilkerson couldn’t slug her. But woman or not, he looked as if he was about to do it.

  “I’m not taking nearly as negative a view as Shad Brisbee will take when he comes back and wants his dancing ground,” Wilkerson said, bitterly.

  For a moment, Molock looked worried.

  “You were yelling for a light lunch,” Wilkerson said. “You may find you have bitten off more than you can chew. Now I’m going into that ship and get headquarters on the radio and see if I can get some help out here in time to save our necks. In the meantime, by thunder, you get ready to take care of Shad Brisbee.”

  Turning, Wilkerson stalked toward the ship. Indignation bristled in every step he took. We followed him with reluctance.

  Beneath my breath I cursed Trans-Space, Inc., its publicity department, and George Cooper. Cooper was head of the publicity department. It was his brilliant idea that had landed us here in the middle of Venus, where Shad Brisbee was giving us one zonar to get off of his dancing ground—or else.

  Of course, you know that Trans-Space, Inc., has a monopoly on carrying passengers and freight to and from Venus, but what you probably don’t know is that from the financial end, things have been a little tough for the company. Now don’t go getting your sympathy aroused about this poor suffering corporation being down to its last billion credits. Let Trans-Space sympathize with itself, it’s quite capable of doing the job very competently. It is also capable of hiring boys like George Cooper to help it sympathize with itself. Cooper had dreamed up the idea that the way to help the financial situation was to encourage human colonizing on Venus. If they could get several thriving human colonies settled on the Veiled Planet, the line would not only pick up revenue from transporting the colonists to Venus but it would also pick up some profitable freight business. In the long run, they foresaw a very happy increase in traffic.

  One joker they ran into right from the start was that nobody but a damned fool wanted to go to Venus and argue with six-eyed apes like Shad Brisbee over the rights to their dancing grounds. Also, nobody wanted to put up with the fog flies and the flying snakes and the what-nots.

  Cooper knew how to change all that. “We’ll make films, write books, publish pamphlets—all of them emphasizing the good points of Venus. We’ll make this planet look and sound like a seed catalogue. We’ll soon have thousands, maybe millions of people, coming here. Build Venus up. Make people see Venus maybe not quite as good as heaven but at least as wonderful as Eden!”

  This was where Wilkerson and Molock and Rita Morgan and yours truly, Sam Crane got into the act. Rita, who was the apple of Cooper’s eye, got the assignment of taking the three dimensional movies in full color and full sound that would make Venus attractive. Of course, on the sound side we had Cooper’s permission to dub out the screams of any Venusian getting swallowed by a forty-foot boa constrictor. Wilkerson, Molock, and I were included to fly the ship and help Rita.

  In other words, it was our job to dig up the raw material that the publicity department could use to sell a bill of goods to suckers back on Earth who could be flim-flammed into making the big hop to Venus.

  In getting these pictures of Eden in the Sky, we had hunted up the tamest of all tame Venusians, Shad Brisbee. We knew him, he knew us. To my mind, the fact that he knew us was not to our advantage. In some ways, I would have preferred taking our pictures among some of the wilder tribes, who didn’t know us. But Know-All George Cooper had decided that the tame Shad Brisbee was just the lad for us. He had loaded the ship with trade goods and had told us where to go. All of this might have worked out fine, if we had not damaged the drive and had to make a forced landing right in the middle of Shad Brisbee’s tribal dancing ground.

  You may not know it, but these Venusians are funny about dancing. They don’t go in for cultural amusements, there isn’t a ball park or a library on the planet, a pin ball machine, a golf course, or anything else that might make life more cultivated. But every Venusian has his private dancing ground and every tribe has a big one. For amusement, the Venusians dance. They dance in the morning and in the afternoon. They dance to celebrate the beginning of a spell of wet weather and the end of it. The male Venusians dance as their squaws go out in the morning to gather fruits and vegetables, they dance in the afternoon when the squaws come home. At night, the squaws join in and everybody, big and little, old and young, dances.

  They hold elaborate contests to determine who is the best tribal dancer. He’s the chief, the big shot, the boss. They hold contests between tribes, everybody gets drunk, everybody dances. Personally, I’ll say one thing for the Venusians, it always seemed to me that dancing contests were a better way to settle personal and tribal problems than war, but the Venusians are just benighted, ignorant natives with no knowledge of the finer things of life. This doesn’t mean they can’t and won’t fight—they fight alligators and flying snakes and blue tigers—but they just don’t fight each other. Any personal or private quarrels they settle by dancing it out.

  I’ve heard learned professors from Earth lecture on the vast satisfaction to be derived from expressing the kinesthetic sense, the rapture that goes with movements of the body, the sweet pure flame of mood expressed by body movement and gesture. All of this may mean something, to the professors. So far as I’m concerned, the Venusians just like to dance.

  If you want to start a ruckus—and but good—just suggest to one of the males that things would be a lot better around the home place if he spent more of his time working and less dancing. If you want to start a real fracas, just come between a Venusian and his dancing. Hell hath no fury—

  I know, this is not the way it is written up in the books. The authors usually speak of the “quaint” Venusian dancing customs, but this is the way it is.

  Shad Brisbee might be a tame Venusian to the publicity department, but when we landed right in the middle of his tribe’s dancing ground, you could guarantee he would revert to the wild state.

  With Wilkerson stamping the ground ahead of us, we moved toward the ship.

  Whuuuuuup!

  An arrow eight feet long came out of the jungle behind us, passed between us, whammed into the open lock of the ship ahead of us.

  It beat us to our destination, but it didn’t beat us much. I don’t know who led the way but it was my opinion that Wilkerson damned near beat that arrow into the ship. Jumping into the ship, we slammed the lock.

  “Whew!” Wilkerson said, mopping sweat from his face.

  “Just an arrow,” Molock said. “Heck, they’re nothing. Shad Brisbee and his boys will never get anywhere with arrows. And they haven’t got any weapons except spears, clubs, knives.” He sounded very comfortable about the situation.

  “But we haven’t even got a gun, except for your spring pistol!” Wilkerson said. For several minutes, he spoke freely and movingly about George Cooper. It had been Cooper’s idea that we go unarmed. “Treat t
hese natives with friendliness and they’ll treat you with friendliness. No guns!” Cooper had decreed.

  “Wait until I get that damned Cooper on the radio!” Wilkerson said, stalking into the control cabin.

  “There won’t be anything to this,” Molock said. “Cooper will send out a couple of ships and blow these idiots to hell and gone. Or scare ’em to death. Let’s go into the galley and have a beer.”

  * * * *

  We were starting on our second can of beer when Wilkerson stumbled into the galley. He had a glazed look in his eyes and he was waving his hands and sort of frothing at the mouth. Snatching up the can of beer Molock had just opened, he drained it.

  “When will the ships be here?” Molock asked.

  Wilkerson blew foam from his lips. “They won’t!” he said.

  “What?” Molock gasped. “Do you mean those dirty dogs are going to leave us here to be murdered by a bunch of six-eyed apes?”

  “Cooper was mad as hell because we had crash landed. He wanted to know what the hell I meant by damaging company property. From the way he sounded, the cost of the repairs was coming out of his lunch money.”

  “I’ll kill that Cooper!” Molock screamed. “Doesn’t he know our lives are in danger?”

  “He seemed to think that maintaining peaceful relations with the Venusians was more important than our necks,” Wilkerson explained. “He said that if Shad Brisbee wanted to knife us for landing on his dancing ground, it was all right with Trans-Space and with him.”

  “But Rita is here!” Molock raged. “Doesn’t he see he’s risking the life of a woman?”

  “He said that Trans-Space doesn’t discriminate between its employees because of sex,” Wilkerson answered. “Open me another can of beer, somebody. I feel faint.”

  “Let me at that radio!” Molock screamed. “I want to talk to that Cooper.”