Part 2

A distant and alien world the battered craft must have come from, for the corridors and cabins were too small for the froglike bodies of the Earthmen to pass. Yet the space ship was gigantic by any standard--a quarter of a mile in diameter. There were strange corroded weapons and machines whose use the Earthmen could not fathom. There was sealed cargo--food that even yet was edible after long years of exposure to the heat and humidity of the Venusian upland.

The ship was a veritable storehouse of precious metals and equipment. Ellis set to work at once designing a dynamo and drew plans for a machine shop to be set up in a nearby cavern. Masson took two of the men and examined the defensive possibilities of the crater's upper rim--he feared the reaction of the Frogs when they learned of this desecration of the God-From-The-Clouds. Irene put two of the men at work clearing out another cave for a kitchen and sleeping rooms, and Gilroy, who had been a farmer, cruised the rich lava-fed flat along the lake's rain-speckled shore.

Busy days and nights passed. They lost all track of time. No word came from New Crayton but they were so busy they paid no heed. The waterfall that fed the crater lake now turned a dynamo, and electricity worked its magic. At the two passes that permitted descent into the crater guards were now posted, armed with crude muskets and grenades, and the signal that was to mark the approach of the party from New Crayton was three spaced shots.

"They are coming at last," cried Irene. The third shot echoed soddenly through the thick air. She tugged at Masson's arm. "We must go to meet them."

Laughing they raced up the trail from the crater's green depths to the high wall where the sentry stood guard. They stood beside him, breathless, for a moment. Then Masson's hand went out impulsively to the shoulder of the man.

"Gilroy, man!" he cried. "What is it?"

The guard's drooping shoulders straightened. Bitterly his webbed hand pointed.

A handful of Butrads, men from New Crayton by their arms and clothing, tramped wearily nearer. Masson counted them--thirty-three men. As he watched one of them dropped suddenly, an arrow in his back. Then for the first time did he see the misty shapes of the pursuers of this exhausted band.

They raced forward, hundreds of them, the naked froglike savages of the lower river villages. Another of the hunted men dropped and Masson jerked the gun from Gilroy's hands and trained it on the horde of charging Butrads.

He fired. The sound of the shot, rather than the bullet, arrested the enemy advance momentarily. From the harried little knot of men a faint cheer lifted and their pace quickened. A moment later Gilroy swung open the thick narrow gate and was helping the first of them through. Masson lobbed a grenade far out toward the island Frogs and they shrank yet farther away.

"Did our best." That was Reppart sobbing out his story. "Three hundred of us ... rest of them decided to live easy back on the island.... Maybe they wasn't too dumb either....

"Anyhow the Frogs hit us at the first waterfall.... Finished off most of the women and children there.... We fought them all along the river ... rest of the women died there.... Eighty of us reached the plateau."

"And thirty of you are left," finished Masson soberly. His round eyes blazed hot. "Fifty of us to conquer a watery jungle world. Fifty men against a planet."

He shook a knotted gray fist at the hostile natives. "There'll be no more contact with New Crayton," he said. "We cannot risk more of our manpower in futile warfare if we are to build a worthy civilization for our children. This crater must be our world for many years."

One of the men laughed bitterly, and then great racking sobs shook his stocky gray body.

"Children!" he cried. "All our children lie out there, unborn. Among us all there is only your woman."

Glade Masson swept his arm out toward the seething mob of the Butrads. "There are your children," he said. "The natives have daughters and sisters. Their blood is that of our own bodies. They will bear us children. We and our children will conquer and rule the water wastes of Venus." He paused for a long moment.

"To survive," he said flatly, "we must fight with all means at our command. We must steal, we must kill, and we must work. If we do not steal the females of the Butrads, Earth's culture and wisdom will shortly vanish. If we do not kill we will be killed."

The round dark eyes of the listening Earthmen brightened with new hope. Croaking sounds of approval issued from their ugly slashes of mouth. And hopeless sloping shoulders straightened.

* * * * *

So it was that they raided the villages of the Frogs again and again. The females of the surrounding uplands proved to be intelligent, and shortly most of them were happy in the safety and comfort of the building town of the Earthmen.

They mated with the men and learned the strange customs and speech of their captors.

But there was trouble looming ahead. As the months passed and the eggs of the females failed to hatch Masson and Ellis realized that their little colony was doomed to extinction.

"The women tell the same story, Glade," said Ellis, his nervous webbed fingers drumming at the table in his tiny office.

Masson looked out through the window at the men moving about their tasks in the factory and further down beside the lake, in the fields. They worked listlessly, hopelessly. What was there to work for now?

"So the old women of the tribes carried the eggs away and hid them?" Masson rubbed the unlovely flesh of his jowls thoughtfully. "They were forbidden to follow. Taboo or something of the sort. And then the old females brought back the young ones?"

"Could be, of course," said Ellis doubtfully, "that they are concealing the truth. Lying to us." He shook his head. "But I doubt it. Most of them are glad to be safe here where raiding tribes and the more vicious saurians cannot reach them. They learn fast, too," he added.

"Nothing to do," Masson said grimly, "but for me to trail the old women. I'll take Dolan. He's never satisfied unless he's prowling the jungles outside the crater."

"I'm going, too," Ellis began, but Masson shook his head.

"Your knowledge of chemistry and metallurgy are needed here," he said. "If I am lost you can carry on, but you are the only living text book available."

And he overrode the other's protests.

Later in the day Masson and Dolan slipped out through the barrier at the crater's rim and made their way toward the nearest Butrad village. They took with them plenty of ammunition and supplies, for they expected to be gone for many days.

"There they go, Glade!" Joe Dolan's scarred face twisted in a hideous parody of a grin.

They lay in the lush oozy bed of rotted growth above the shallow ravine where the Frog village lay. Nik-nik brush and giant broad-leaved grass of mottled yellow and green concealed them from the eyes of the Butrads in the ugly huddle of elevated huts below.

"Ten old females," went on Dolan. "Maybe they can carry twenty eggs apiece in their baskets." He whistled. "That'd be two hundred."

"How," asked Masson, "can you whistle with a mouth like that? I've tried dozens of times."

Dolan chuckled. "It's a gift," he said, and came to his hands and knees.

"Take your time," cautioned Masson. "Just so we keep them in sight."

The ravine narrowed and became a vertical-walled tunnel of thidin vines and scaly gray rock. Masson and Joe Dolan lost sight of the slow-moving party of Frogs at times as they moved along the rim of the deep slot. And as they followed, the floor of the ravine fell further away beneath them; they were climbing high into the stunted cliffs and peaks of Tular's interior.

Night came and they slept above the stopping place of the ten Butrad ancients. And with morning they pushed upward through the soupy fog again.

Abruptly the upward slanting slope ended. They looked out over a roughly oval bowl of slowly writhing mist and cloud.

Dimly they saw the floor of the cavity. Several hundred acres of jungle-clad raggedness. Miniature buttes, mesas, and cliffs split the bowl into a hell of broken terrain, and here and there, near the black pocks of caverns in the rimming cliff walls, there showed little huddles of Butrad huts.

"The Place of Birth," Masson said slowly. "All the tribes of the island must come here."

Dolan nodded and rubbed the palm of his hand over the whetted edge of his hunting knife. "Plenty of guards stationed around the only entrances," he said, "just as you expected. I'll have to kill them off."

Masson shook his head. "That would warn them. I may need weeks to learn the secret of their system of hatching the eggs." His webbed gray hand swept in a short arc.

"Some of those caves must have other entrances. From the rim perhaps. That's what we'll look for."

Dolan shrugged. "Right you are," he agreed.

"My theory is," Masson said, "that Venus was formerly much warmer than it is now. For that reason the incubation temperature must be artificially raised. The question is: how much and how long must the eggs be artificially warmed. And do they use pools of all-but boiling water, or is the heat comparatively dry?"

"That's for you to find out," said Dolan. "Me, I'm nothing but a truck driver. I ain't no college-brain guy."

"You do all right," said Masson, grinning. "You seem to find your way around the jungle easy as a native."

"Huh," snorted Dolan. "Ten years hammering the pavements and dodging traffic does that. You gotta have a quick eye and remember what you're doing."

Masson got to his feet and moved back from the brink.

"Let's start hunting," he suggested.

* * * * *

They crouched together in the dark shadows of the tunnel that opened a dozen feet above the floor of the large cavern. Down there, in the gray half-light that filtered in through the outer entrance, they saw three small heaps of vegetation steaming silently and the two old females who tended them.

From time to time one of the old females filled a hollow husk from the nik-nik fruit with water and sprinkled it over the three mounds. The eggs they had seen the ancient ones bury so carefully were soaking up the moist warmth.

Masson jogged Dolan's elbow, and they crawled carefully back along the low-roofed passage toward the vine-festooned entrance five hundred feet above. Water and gray ooze sloshed underfoot as they walked along level reaches of the way, and always the wet rock was slippery.

"We know how the eggs are hatched now," he said, "and with experience we can learn to gauge the proper temperature. But until we have perfected the procedure our families will not increase very rapidly."

Dolan gulped. "I dunno if I want one of them ugly looking things we saw in that side pen," he said.

"They're no uglier than you are, Joe," chuckled Masson. "Hunt up a pool of clear water and look at yourself sometime." He gripped Dolan's arm.

"But that's what I was thinking about," he went on. "About that side pen in the cave where the newly hatched Butrads are kept. We kidnaped the Frogs' women, so...."

"Why not their kids?" Dolan laughed. "We seem to be going in for crime in a big way."

"The young ones will have a better chance for living to adulthood," argued Masson. "We're doing them a favor. And the Frogs can't know whose children are gone and whose are left."

"Sounds all right the way you put it," agreed Dolan. "Maybe because I want to believe it. But will the little brats have brains enough to soak up education?"

"I'm sure of it, Joe. All they need is opportunity."

"So I'm to go back and get ten or twelve other guys," said Dolan, "and we'll clean out this Frog nursery."

"Right. I'll stay here and watch the whole procedure. Don't hurry back. Maybe a week or so will be better."

"Okay, Glade," said the scarred giant, moving at a crouch along the low-roofed way. "Be seeing you."

A turn in the ascending tunnel smothered the last low-spoken words, and Masson was left alone.

The blind men came into the cavern at the direction of the wrinkled old hags. They carefully stripped away layer upon layer of vegetation from the smallest and brownest mound.

Masson leaned further out over the rim of the hole above the cavern floor to watch. He had feared that the party of men from the crater would arrive before he could see the uncovering of a mound and the hatching of the Frog eggs.

The last layer of thidin and grass came away and perhaps a hundred of the leathery bluish ovoids lay revealed on their steaming warm nest. They were shapeless and limply alive now, that leather-hard outer shell rendered soft and rotten by the steady warmth of the heating vegetation. Masson saw two tiny monsters already free from their outgrown prisons as the blind men began scooping them up and carrying them to the empty pen beside the ones already occupied.

The young Butrads set up a throaty, hoarse bellowing that made the cave vibrate. It was not their feeding time but the excitement had aroused them and they knew but this one way to express their displeasure. Masson started to crawl back from the passage's outer lip even as the two old females started throwing thidin shoots and scraps of raw fish to the screeching young ones.

And the rotten gray rock betrayed him. A dozen times in the past eight days he had leaned out over the rim to watch, and a dozen times the rock had supported his weight. But this time it went scaling away, a great slab of it, and with it went the Earthman.

* * * * *

The blind men whirled from the half-full pen and came lunging at him. The old females screeched throaty harsh orders. And Masson raised the gun that he somehow had managed to cling to.

"Go back," he ordered in the language of the Butrads, "go out of the cave before I kill."

"He is but one," croaked the ancient ones, "destroy the desecrator of the Place of Birth."

Now Masson could see that the eyes of the four Frog males had been neatly gouged from their sockets in days past. Probably they were blinded that they might not see the forbidden magic of the eggs that became Frogs. Or perhaps they were blinded that they might not escape from the birth caves into the outer jungles.

Yet in the semi-gloom of the cave they were not at too great a disadvantage. They listened for the movement of Masson's body, and the breath of his lungs guided them. The young of the Butrads were silent, too. The sudden quiet was a roar in his ears.

They closed in, great chunks of stone clenched in their fists. A Frog with but a club or a crude spear would have been beaten. But the puny hollow tube of metal that the Earthman carried held the strength of many heavy clubs and many huge rocks in its miniature pebbles of shaped copper.

Masson fired and a Frog went down. The other three came on uncertainly, and he fired again. The two remaining Butrads stopped.

"There are many of them, Old Ones," one of them cried. "They have struck down Trew and Brun with thunder."

"There is only one!" cried the wrinkled old females. "Kill him! Strike him down!"

"Do not listen to the Old Ones," Masson warned. "I have captured the thunder. With it I strike you down."

The blind men hesitated, and Masson sent a bullet smoking between their legs. They backed away toward the entrance, the females with them. And a moment later Masson was piling fragments of rock and crumbling shale into a barricade before the cavern's mouth.

He could hold them off for a time he knew, until night at least, even though they brought the guards from the outer entrances to the bowl to aid the blind men.

Again and again the guards had attacked the cave where Masson lay holed up. All that day they had come crawling through the dense matted growth to launch their arrows and spears at him. Fifty or sixty of them there had been, he estimated, and at least forty blood-hungry Butrads still faced him. These were the outer guards.

With the coming of night the blinded workers of the caves would join them, and with their uncanny sense of hearing and touch they would overrun the cave. The Frogs were not a cowardly race, and his invasion into this, their most taboo and sacred place, made them all the more fanatical in their hatred.

Masson had until night. After that, unless he escaped back through the tunnel, he would die. And if he left the young Frogs behind he would never again be able to raid this cavern. Already they were hungry, their throaty shrilled cries beating at his droop-tipped ears.

Perhaps the din from within dulled his hearing. For tough naked hide scraped on rock and the heavy breathing of the wounded blind man should have been clearly audible otherwise. Masson must have heard him approaching at the last for he was half-turned when the rough fragment of grayish shale came thudding down. He twisted away from the weighty missile, but even so it grazed along his skull and he went down into the blackness of nothingness for a time.

He awakened to look into the hot dark eyes of a Frog who had crept to within a few paces of his barricade.

The rifle was yet in his grip and through blinding flashes of pain he somehow found the strength to aim and squeeze trigger. The ugly gray face vanished and he painfully fed another cartridge into the rifle's single chamber. The weight across his back did not go away, and twisting his head he saw that the blind Butrad's body had slumped across his own.

Masson slid the weight off but the blackness came again; so he rested for a time. And this time the blackness had come to stay for it was night. The sun had finally been swallowed by the cloud layers that swath Venus eternally.

He tried to crawl back toward the tunnel, but how he was to climb the sheer wall to the escape passage he did not know. He could not raise his body from the ground on the level.

Once again the pain in his head returned and pain flashed its lightning. His eyes clenched themselves shut and he fought off the giddy waves of weakness. After a time he could feel again, and see.

There was light in the cave, light and the grayish flabby-hided bodies of Butrads. He tried to raise the rifle and a webbed hand knocked it from his grasp.

"None of that, now," a voice ordered, and his unbelieving ears recognized that of Joe Dolan.

Rifles cracked at the cave entrance and he saw the larger young ones of the Butrads being hoisted up to the escape tunnel. And he grinned weakly up at Dolan's hideous scarred face.

The future of the Earthmen on the Watery World was safe now.