The COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works, page 321
"Maybe," I said, shucking off the ammo belts and groping for my needler. "And maybe not!"
The door reached the end of its worm while he gaped at me as if I'd taken leave of my senses. It swung aside, revealing a great hole in the dark. Painter clambered into the hole as though a thousand devils were after him and started walking along the cut-out in the worm.
I said loudly, "Stand where you are!"
He did not take the slightest notice. Neither did he answer. He knew me well enough to come back with "What the heck's eating you, Sergeant?" or something like that, and if he had done it he'd have got away with it. But he didn't say a word.
For a split second I watched him, unable to credit the evidence of my own eyes, because I could actually see that he was Painter from the hobnails on his boots to the widow's peak in his black hair. He was accurate in every detail, clothes and all. So utterly perfect that I had a horrible fear I was about to commit a cold-blooded murder.
I needled him. The ray caught him square in the guts before he'd come a yard inward.
What happened then stirred my back hairs and made the pair of onlookers feel sick. Something seemed to go click back of my eyes, the vision of Painter disappeared as though cut off from a suddenly extinguished epidiascope. In its place was a violently squirming mass of black rope that tried to tie itself into a million knots. Ends and loops stuck out of the tangle, throbbing and vibrating. There weren't any eyes, nose, ears, or other recognisable organs; nothing but a ball of greasy coils like a dozen pythons knotted in one agonized lump. It rolled backward, fell out just as my ray spiked it again.
"Quick!" I bawled, a trickle of sweat running down my back. "Shut that door!"
They did it sluggishly, like men in a dream. One lugged the lever, the door swung across began to wind into its worm. I stayed there until it had gone all the way and rotation had ceased. There was a faint smell in the airlock, making me think of the time some guppies had roasted a goat without taking the hide off.
Jay Score came along as I was dragging the ammo belts off the floor and heaving them onto my shoulders. He sampled the air, had a look at the self-conscious grease monkeys and knew without being told that there had been dirty work at the crossroads.
"What's been going on?" he demanded.
"Painter came back," I informed. "Only it wasn't Painter."
"You let him in?"
"Yes. And he was Painter beyond all argument. I knew him better than I know my own mother."
"And so ...?"
"But he wouldn't or couldn't talk. He wouldn't answer back. So I took a chance." I thought of it and felt another bead of sweat going down between my shoulder blades. "I rayed him amidships and he turned into something out of a nightmare."
"H'm! Pity I wasn't here myself—it would have provided an opportunity to check on whether I see the same as you see." He thought awhile, went on, "By the looks of it they aren't capable of speech nor of deluding us that they can speak. That simplifies matters a little. Ought to make things easier."
"They were easier on the Venus-run," I remarked with unashamed nostalgia.
Taking no notice, he went on, "We also know that they've actually got Painter and probably Jepson as well, else they wouldn't be able to put over a plausible picture of one of them." He turned to the pair on duty in the lock. "Don't open that door again without first getting permission from the skipper. That's an order!"
They nodded glumly. Jay continued on his way and I went mine. The pinnace was ready within the hour. We piled in, a tight-fitting little mob with no room to dance around. Kli Yang sat with his head-and-shoulder piece exhausted to three pounds pressure, his long, rubbery tentacles sprawling across half a dozen laps. One of his tips rested on my knees, half turned to expose a sucker the size of a small saucer. I had a crazy desire to spit in it for no other reason than because it was sure to annoy him.
The pinnace boomed away into the dark, Bannister piloting as before. Despite intense gloom of night it wasn't difficult to steer a direct course to the lifeboat. We had a powerful searchight in the bow, a full quota of blind-flying instruments. What helped most was the fact that the lifeboat's generators continued to function and its radio channel remained open: all we had to do was pick up the background noise and follow it to its source.
Pretty soon we roared across the alien encampment with our beam making the grounded lifeboat shine like a silver cylinder at one side. The glimpse we got of the collection of pyramidical huts was extremely brief, but I fancied I saw a few dark, shapeless things moving about the camp. Couldn't be sure of it, though.
Bannister let go a string of tiny jelly-bombs just as we cleared the camp. They flopped in a straight line covering four or five hundred yards, burst into fierce, all-consuming flame. We thundered onward, giving the blaze time to work itself out, then made a wide circle that took us over some hills, back across the lake. Finally we topped the huts at a height of fifty feet, shaking every roof in the place, and belly-slid to a landing along the ashy path cleared by the bombs.
Four were picked to stay with the boat and hold it against all comers—which included those going out if they happened to be forgetful! The stayers made careful note of our passwords. Mine was nanijani, which is a rude word on Venus. Being just an ordinary space-sailor, and no intellectual, I learn all the rude words first and remember them longest. But I never thought the day would come when vulgarity would be a survival-factor.
Those preliminaries over, we checked needlers, pocketed a bomb apiece. Brennand opened the airlock, went out, followed by Molders, Kelly, myself, then Kli Yang and Wilson, in that order. I remember staring at the dancing girl tattooed on Kelly's arm as he made his jump to the ground. He had parted from his inevitable spanner and had a needler in his fist for a change. Then I jumped down and the over-eager Kli Yang landed on top of me, rolling me around in a mess of tentacles. Somehow I wriggled out from under him, making suitable remarks about the Red Planet's facility for producing imbeciles.
Darkness was stygian. One could barely discern the skeletal shapes of unharmed trees and bushes beyond the areas of ash. We had powerful hand-beams but didn't use them lest they make us targets of unknown weapons. When you're up against a strange enemy you have to use a modicum of caution, even if it means feeling around like a blind man.
But we knew where the encampment lay with reference to the pinnace, and all we needed to do was follow the ash-track back to its beginning. The first and most logical place to seek Ambrose and McFarlane—or their bodies—was among those huts. So we made toward them, moving quietly and warily, in single file.
TROUBLE started at the end of the ash-track and within twenty jumps of the camp. Before us stood a patch of bushes and trees over which the first jelly-bomb had skipped, and beyond those were some of the outer ring of huts faintly visible in the starlight. I don't think we could have recognized the queer shapes as huts had we not been expecting them and been plodding through the gloom long enough for our eyes to get adjusted.
Brennand stepped cautiously through the first of the trees with Molders a couple of yards behind. Next instant there was a dull thunk! and a startled exclamation from Molders. The big Swede paused a second or two, his eyes seeking Brennand who seemed to have vanished. Then he took a few tentative steps forward, peering into the blackness, and we heard a second thunk!
The third in fine was Kelly, who stopped and whispered hoarsely, "There's something indacent around here. I'm going to show a light."
We crowded up to him as he aimed his hand-beam straight ahead. Its circle of brilliant illumination revealed Brennand and Molders sprawling in the undergrowth like kids gone to sleep in the hay. There was nothing whatever to indicate what had conked them, no sign of alien life, no surreptitious sounds in the dark. For all one could tell they'd both decided to drop dead. But even as we looked, Molders sat up, tenderly felt the back of his turnip, his expression stupefied. Brennand twitched a couple of times and let go a bubbling noise.
Blinking into the strong light, Molders complained, "I got slugged!" He struggled upright, stared around, became filled with sudden fury and exclaimed, "I think it was that tree!"
So saying, he needled a five-foot growth standing alongside. I thought he'd gone crazy. Next instant I wondered whether I'd become a bit cracked myself.
The tree posed there, a nondescript object with long, thin, glossy leaves; manifestly and beyond all doubt a genuine one hundred per cent vegetable. Molders' needle-ray hit it squarely in the trunk and at once it disappeared like a fragmentary dream. In its place was one of those horribly knotted balls I'd seen before.
Right behind the irate Molders stood another, similar growth. Despite the intensity of my concentration upon what was happening, one corner of my eye saw this second object quiver as if about to do something. I don't think I've ever pulled a needler faster. I had it out and flaring in less time than it takes to sniff. And that tree also flashed into a greasy black sphere of madly writhing rope.
I kept the needler going and Molders did likewise. There were two features of these squirming bunches of outlandish life that gave me the willies. Firstly, they took the rays in utter silence, without so much as a yelp. Secondly, I sliced off loose ends and projecting loops, whereupon the main body continued to wriggle as though unconscious of its loss while the severed bits jumped and twisted hither and thither with an eerily independent lift of their own.
Well, we sliced them up into a couple of hundred pieces that continued to hump around like sections of giant black worm. Nothing chipped in to stop us and other treelike things nearby stood impassive, unmoving. Maybe they were real trees. Of that, I'll never be sure.
By the time we'd finished, Brennand was on his feet and delicately fingering an egg on his cranium. He took a poor view of the situation, was inclined to be liverish about it.
Giving Kli Yang the sour eye, he said, "You saw those things." He motioned at the squirming pieces. "How did they look to you?"
"I regret to say that they resembled trees," admitted Kli Yang, resenting being duped along with mere Terrestrials.
"Shows the functional superiority of swivel-eyes, doesn't it?" commented Brennand, acidly. He felt his head again, kicked aside a six-inch length of writhing rope. "Come on!"
For some reason or other we broke into a run, reached the first hut and crowded into it together. The edifice proved a lot bigger than it looked from the air: about three times the size of an average room in an Earth-house. It wasn't subdivided but it was furnished according to somebody's outlandish ideas.
The walls and roof were made of reeds woven in complicated patterns so close that they were reasonably wind-proof and watertight, the whole being mounted on a frame of tough, resilient poles resembling bamboo. The floor was completely covered by a thick grass mat also woven in a theme of repeated curlicues. At one side stood three circular tables a foot high by four in diameter. I call them tables but they might have been chairs or beds for all I know.
A number of peculiar utensils hung from the roof's crosspoles, some of them carved out of solid wood, others of dull, lead-coloured metal. Most of these had thin, curved spouts pierced with a fine hole about large enough to be stoppered with an ordinary pin. Seemed to me that the creature who used these things would suck at them with a mouth as small as a vest button.
What drew our united attention as Brennand's beam focused upon it was an instrument on the wall opposite the door. It had a circular dial marked around the edge with forty-two dots. Another disc bearing one dot on its rim was mounted over this, and while we watched it shifted with almost imperceptible slowness, gradually aligning its own dot against the one on the outer circle. Obviously some kind of clock, though we could not hear it ticking or detect any sound from it at all. However, it served to prove one thing: that we were up against things higher than mere savages, things with a certain amount of cerebral ingenuity and manual dexterity.
Nobody occupied this hut. It stood devoid of inhabitants while its alien clock silently measured alien hours upon the wall. Our beams went over the whole place, not missing a corner, and manifestly it was deserted. At that moment I'd have taken my most binding oath that the hut was vacant, completely vacant—though I did notice a faint goatish smell which I attributed to the stale atmosphere or maybe the effluvia of the late tenants.
Hut number two proved the same. Empty of aliens. It held a bit more furniture differently arranged and had five of the circular tables or beds. Also two clocks. But no owners. We gave it a thorough once-over with six pairs of eyes including Kli Yang's independently swivelling optics, and there wasn't a living thing in evidence.
By the time we'd completed our search of the outer circle by examining hut number thirty, it appeared certain that the encampment's occupants must have beaten it into the bush when first the pinnace roared over, but had left a couple of guards to test our capabilities. Well, we'd shown them a thing or two.
All the same, I didn't feel any too happy about this unopposed stroll around somebody else's home town. Creatures who could make metal utensils and clocklike instruments ought to be able to construct weapons a good deal more formidable than bows and arrows. And that meant that perhaps we'd yet to get a taste of what they had to offer.
Why the delay in kicking our pants? Thinking it over, I realised that one could pick haphazardly on umpteen Terrestrial villages that didn't hold a soldier or a gun. When troops are needed they're summoned by telephone or radio. Maybe we had landed on a bunch of comparative hicks who'd run for help from someplace else. In that event, the fun had yet to come.
I was wrong there. We were having our hair pulled and didn't know it.
Exiting moodily from the thirtieth hut, Brennand said, "I reckon we're wasting our time here."
"You took the words out of my mouth," endorsed Wilson.
"Just what I was thinking," added Molders.
"Me, too," agreed Kelly.
I didn't put in my spoke. It wasn't necessary, with them voicing my own sentiments. I stepped out of the hut and into the dark convinced that all this fiddling around was futile, that it would be best to return to the pinnace and take it away.
"What about the lifeboat?" asked Kli Yang.
"Let it lay," said Brennand, indifferently.
"Well, what about Ambrose and McFarlane?" persisted the Martian, his goggle eyes staring at two of them simultaneously.
"Two needles in a planet-sized haystack," declared Brennand. "We could fumble around for them until we'd got white beards a yard long. Let's go back."
Kli Yang said, "Then what'll we tell McNulty?"
"That we can't find them because they aren't here."
"We don't know that."
"I do!" asserted Brennand, peculiarly positive.
"Do you?" There was a pause while Kli Yang stewed this over. Then he asked the others, "Do you feel the same way?"
We all nodded. Yes, me with them—like the dope I am.
"That's strange," observed Kli slowly and with emphasis. "Because I don't!"
"So what?" said Kelly, roughly.
Kli Yang turned to him. "My mind is different from yours. My eyes can be fooled—but not something else!"
"What else?"
"Whatever part of my mind is non-visual."
Brennand chipped in with, "Look, what are you trying to say?"
Holding his needler ready in one tentacle-tip and a hand-beam in another, Kli glanced warily around and said, "We came solely to find Ambrose and McFarlane, if they can be found. Now all of a sudden you say the heck with it. You are of one accord." His eyes again tried to probe the night. "Remarkable coincidence, is it not? I think the desire to throw up the search is being imposed upon you—and that means somebody's here!"
Boy, it gave me a major jolt! For a couple of heartbeats my mind went into a confused whirl as it tried to cope with two violently opposing concepts. I couldn't see the others' faces more than dimly, but Wilson stood near enough to give me a picture of a man in a mental tangle. Further search was useless: I knew that as surely as I knew I'd got boots on my feet. We were being kidded that further search was useless: I knew that too, with equal certainty.
Then came a kind of snap in my brain as fact triumphed over fancy. It must have happened to the rest at precisely the same moment because Molders let out a loud short of self-disgust, Kelly voiced a hearty curse and Brennand spoke in irritated tones.
"We'll rake through every hut in this place!"
So without further delay we started on the next inner circle. It would have been a good deal quicker if we had dealt with a hut apiece, thus inspecting them six at a time, but we had strict orders to stick together and were beginning to learn sense. A couple of times I found myself on the point of suggesting that we speed up the business by splitting, but on each occasion I bit the words back because the notion might not be truly my own. If I could help it I wasn't taking orders from ropey monstrosities lurking nearby in the dark.
WE REACHED the twelfth hut of this inner row and Brennand went in first, his hand-beam shining ahead of him. By this time we were well-nigh conditioned to expect nobody inside but still held ourselves ready to be proved wrong. Somehow I'd become last in the patrol. I was about to follow Wilson into the hut when from the deep gloom on my right there came a faint sound. I stopped at the door, aimed my beam rightward.
It revealed Ambrose outside the third hut farther along. He waved at my light though it must have been impossible for him to see who was holding it. He didn't seem mussed up in any way and posed there for all the world as if he'd married the daughter of a chief and decided to go native.
Of course I let out a yelp of excitement and called to those in the hut, "One of them is out here."
They poured through the door, got an eyeful of what my beam was showing.
"Hi, Ammy!" called Brennand, starting forward.
"Hi!" said Ambrose, clearly and distinctly, then turned and went into his hut.
