Part 2

The headache returned, stronger than ever, and Graff swayed dizzily. Red roaring fires tore up and down his left side. He'd never make it. Swamp-bait, that's all he was, bait for the mud of the Black.

He straightened then and laughed. Bait? Well, that was one way to hunt.

The hunter strode toward the house, across the creeper of sucking ivy, counting each step. He stopped under cover of a sweeping fern just outside the sandy expanse.

"Pubina!" he yelled. "I've come for the Bergensons."

There was a flicker at one of the windows. "Who are you?"

"Graff Dingle of New Kalamazoo. Listen, Pubina, I'll trade the rest of our lobodin for Greta Bergenson and her father."

A pause while they digested this. Then: "Send one of your men in and we'll talk it over, Dingle."

"Can't. I'm alone. Send one of your men out with the Bergensons, and I'll give you the lobodin."

No reason for Pubina to be certain that the Bergenson lobodin represented the first and only shipment. And what he claimed to have would raise the quantity to the point where all of the outlaws could be vaccinated.

The terry came down behind him and whispered gently: "Three men leave house from rear. Two coming around on left, one on right. Man on right has clearer fath, so will ve here first."

Graff gestured assent with the electroblast. He heard the terry take off again.

Pubina was being safe and cozy. Sending his henchmen while he held the fort himself!

He heard a soggy clump to the right and grinned. Why, the man was making more noise than a dryhorn freshly arrived from Terra! When he saw the black waterproof jumper through the high weeds, he stepped out from under the fern and moved backwards. He held the electroblast out, as if it worked.

The outlaw's face, lined with years of dunging inhalation, broke into a lunatic smile. Since Graff wasn't looking at him, he deduced Graff hadn't seen him. Pubina's henchman took larger steps. Graff backed.

He counted as he retreated. He counted slowly, taking steps that were uniform and even, looking off to the side of the outlaw, trying to keep his tortured body from making a deadly mis-step.

There! He breathed gustily as he saw he'd passed the white line. The outlaw crept forward, crouching, trying to get close enough for a certain blast. He too noticed the trigger-vine, and stepped daintily across it.

Graff whirled to face him then, electroblast at the ready. The man jumped--and one boot dug into the creeper!

He barely had time to scream. A haze of white tendrils whipped around him, each armed with thousands of microscopic suckers. A moment later the bloodless husk that had been a human was being dropped from the sucking ivy's clutches, rattling like so much paper.

The scream had been heard. Graff's jungle-trained ears caught the whispers of the other two men on his left as they conferred worriedly. If only he had a decent weapon. Anything besides the stiletto! He could take such dryhorns with an old-fashioned pistol!

But he didn't have a pistol. All he had was twenty-seven years' experience on Venus as a native-born citizen. So he began to run.

He stopped after a moment and listened. The crashes behind him indicated he was being pursued. If he was afraid, the outlaws had evidently decided, he was weak enough to chase. Graff ran toward the Tuscany.

By the time he reached the river, he was weaving from side to side and sobbing. The exertion magnified his pain a thousandfold. His pursuers were getting closer. Desperately, he trotted downstream.

They were quite close now. He heard them chuckling and calling to each other triumphantly--but there was the Gridnik nest!

He waited just a moment, poised on the bank of the river, until they broke into the clear, almost within electroblast range. Then, as they caught sight of him and increased their speed, he hurled his useless weapon into the striped little dome--and jumped.

* * * * *

When he came threshing out of the water, twenty feet further down the bank, the hideous swarm of insects were still gorging themselves. Graff crept away, nauseated. He rubbed his eyes against the darkness welling within them.

"MacDuff!" he called, his voice crackling with agony. "MacDuff!"

The terry swept down to his side.

"Listen, pal, I haven't got much time left, so we'll have to hurry. No more fancy stuff. Think you can fly in the rear windows or something, by way of diversion? It'll give me time to cross the sandy stretch."

Without a word, the lizard-bird went away. Graff came to the edge of the arid soil surrounding the pre-fab and waited.

He saw the enormous shadow tilt down behind the house and heard the crash of breaking glass. He threw himself forward. Sand boiled away from his boots. His head wobbled as if his neck had ceased to exist. Must be getting close to deadline time, Graff decided. A few minutes more at most before he caved in completely. He drew the stiletto out, holding it with difficulty in a twitching hand.

There was a yell inside the house and the sizzle of an electroblast bolt. As he smashed into the door, he heard the electroblast go off again.

He saw a huge cage holding a fluttering pterodactyl as he tottered into the living room. Dr. Bergenson and Greta were tied to chairs with long coils of fongool vine. Greta's pink overall-jumper was ripped and there was the mark of a man's hand on her face. Pubina stood under a charred hole in the ceiling where his first blast had gone wild. At his feet, a hole neatly burned in one wing, writhed MacDuff, awaiting the finisher.

Pubina whirled to face Graff, his electroblast coming up swiftly. The hunter staggered toward him, fully conscious of his lack of speed, his almost infantile weakness. Knots of pain pulled at his knees.

The Heatwaver's forefinger flicked down on the firing button. MacDuff lifted himself on his one good wing and lunged at the boot before him. His long beak closed on Pubina's ankle. There was a horrible bony crunch and the outlaw cursed, turning to beat down at the reptile.

Graff reached them, almost falling against Pubina. For a moment he couldn't coordinate his arm muscles enough to use the stiletto; then, sinking his teeth deep into his own lip, he drove the thin blade ahead. Pubina shrieked and fell, the stiletto throbbing in his side.

Deciding to let MacDuff finish him, even if the terry was making a mess of it, Graff bent over clumsily and retrieved the electroblast Pubina had dropped. He almost went over backwards as he straightened.

Placing one foot in front of the other intently, he walked to the Bergensons. He slid like a man walking on banana skins. Darkness roiled all about him now and every cell in his body seemed to writhe.

The bottle containing the vaccine was on a table, he noticed. It was still full; the shining hypodermic beside it was empty. Good.

Very carefully, he burned off the fongool vine with the electroblast at low power. Greta rushed toward him, but he slipped and fell at her feet.

"Darling," he heard her sob; it sounded as if her voice were on the other side of the Jefferson Sea. "You're infected! Oh, Graff, Graff! The lobodin won't work on an infected case!"

"I know," he muttered thickly, and let his head loll round to where the terry was inching along the floor to the cage in the corner. The last thing he saw was the neat little hole in the wing.

"Be seeing you, MacDuff," Graff whispered as the darkness came down, pinpointed with multitudes of exploding yellow dots....

That was why he was so surprised when he opened his eyes to see the terry perched by his bed with a neat patch of gauze taped to one wing.

"How in hell did you pull through, MacDuff?" he asked.

"The same way as you," the lizard-bird told him. "We are voth natives of Venus."

"Huh?" He raised himself waveringly on one elbow. He was lying in the Bergenson home in New Kalamazoo. They must have used Pubina's rocket ship to fly back. "What do you mean--_native_?"

"Just what he says, Graff." Greta pushed open the screen-door and bustled in with a pile of linen. "You were both born on Venus. Father says that you must have had all kinds of skin abrasions as an infant: your body developed a natural immunity to Ricardo's Virus. We'll still use the vaccine on everybody else, including the children, just to be on the safe side. But Father has felt for a long time that the blood of the pioneers would adjust to its environment. When you got sick, but didn't die, you proved it."

"Well, I'd like to point out," Graff said, as he sat up to permit Greta to change his sheets, "that I am very, very happy to have given your father a chance to prove that theory."

MacDuff closed a lidless eye in an assenting reptilian wink.