Part 2

I found myself in a small metal sleeping apartment. Brilliant starlight filtered in through its single bullseye pane. A figure was in the corner on a fabric couch.

"You Kent? Good Lord."

* * * * *

It was Jack Allen. They had pounced on him, back there on Palmetto Key. I sat with him now, telling him of the weird things which had happened to me; telling him of Nereid.

He stared. "Good Lord, Kent--well, I understand it better now."

There were things that he had learned; and as he told them to me, Nereid's only half-coherent story began to clarify.

"That woman Garga," Allen was saying with his ready grin, "I get along fine with her. Pumped a lot of facts out of her."

Physically, Allen and I are of quite different types, which is perhaps why we are such friends. He says I have a romantic, sort of poetic look--from my mother, who was Spanish. And that, he says, goes with a bad temper. However that may be, certainly he was always the opposite. A giant, blond fellow; six feet four; rugged, sun-bronzed, like a young Viking. And he had an almost unfailing good nature. A slow, quiet smile. Slow of movement; usually somewhat lazy. But there were times, rare intervals, when he was angered. His movements were panther-like then, and I wouldn't like to be the one to meet him in a fight.

"That Garga woman likes me," he grinned. He lowered his voice as he leaned toward me. "She looks like a machine, but still she's a woman. Get the idea? If we ever get out of this, that might be the way."

And then he told me what he knew of Nereid's strange Venus world. The realm of the Arones was in a lush forest, the tropic region. Compared to our Earth population, there were not many of the Arones. Half a million perhaps, in little Forest and Water villages, with twenty thousand in the chief city, known as Arron.... How shall I attempt even an outline of the ethnological history of Venus? I can give only the barest suggestion of it. In former ages doubtless there had been millions of humans on this, Earth's sister planet. A civilization rising to great heights of science, with all the planet's surface mastered by man. And then decadence had come. Mankind resting; then drifting backward. Dwindling in number; with science forgotten, put aside as a memory, a tradition. And slowly but inexorably the monstrous animals, insects, the weird vegetation again took primitive possession of most of the globe.

"So that's your Nereid's people," Allen was saying. "Decadent--soft now--trying to accomplish nothing."

Except human happiness. I recalled Nereid's words of her world, living for love and music and beauty. Strange how in all human affairs there are two sides of looking at everything! I said something like that to Allen, and he nodded.

"The trouble with science," he agreed, "is that it can be so easily perverted. Things to benefit mankind, turned into engines of death. That's the recent history of our own world."

And the Arones had gone to the other extreme. Science was banned. Men and women should live for human happiness, with no thought of conquest, or of personal power. And out of this, a few generations ago, had risen the Gorts. They had been for centuries a nomadic race of giants, mere savages roaming the barren parts of the planet. Few in number, and like the savages of our own Earth, apparently doomed to extinction. Banished criminals from the world of the Arones, generations back, had joined them, brought them science--stolen things of science.

And out of this sprang the Gort, Tollgamo. His father had started it: Tollgamo, the son, carried it on. He was a genius, of course. A genius with mad dreams. To mechanize his little world. There were only a few thousand of them now. Men and women making themselves into machines; fed by Tollgamo upon his own mad dreams of Venus conquest.

He had discovered the secret of spaceflight, which before him, on Venus, had never been known. Peters' Earth-signals had attracted him, and quietly he had gone to Earth, and seized Peters and his men; bringing them to Venus so that they might tell him all they knew of their science. It would be useful, that future day when he would attempt to conquer the Arones.

Most, perhaps all, of Peters' men were dead now; killed, possibly by Tollgamo, when their usefulness to him was finished. But Peters had escaped; gone to the Arones. And telling them their danger, had made himself the leader of the revival of their science. All Nereid's life, her father, with a group of men he had trained, had feverishly been working in the city of Arron, to build weapons with which to combat the attack when it came.

All that was known to Tollgamo, of course. He had spies in Arron. Queer how human nature is the same, wherever in the Universe the Creator has planted it! The fatuous, decadent, pleasure-loving leader of the Arones was unwilling to believe that the Gorts could be any menace. The efforts of Peters and his fellow scientists, even now were looked upon with disfavor. Peters and his men were distrusted, even accused of having dreams of conquest of their own. Thousands of the Arones thought it, so that there was an undercurrent of strife in Arron, fostered, of course, by Tollgamo's spies.

"And now Tollgamo seems to be about ready for his attack," Allen was telling me. "Peters probably has no weapons of any importance with which to oppose him. And so Peters made an effort to get help from Earth. Tollgamo found it out, and sent this ship to follow the girl so as to keep her from giving the secret of spaceflight to Earth."

The barred metal door of our little cubby suddenly opened. A Gort man stood there. Allen and I stared. Like the other Gorts, he was encased in shining mailed garments. But he was crippled, bent and twisted, with one shoulder higher than the other and a lump on his bent back. On him, the metal garments were grotesque. He came sidling in, grinning at us with his ugly, puffed and bloated grey-skinned face.

"I am Borgg," he said. "You will have food and drink soon. You hungry?"

"I want to see the Peters girl," I retorted. "Take me to her."

He shook his head. "Garga will take care of her. She is safe."

His glowing, dark-eyed gaze roved us. Out in the corridor there was a man's voice--one of the other Gorts passing. And the weird, shambling hunchback suddenly burst into guttural laughter. "So the Earthmen are afraid of me? Afraid of Borgg, who wants only to amuse people?"

He suddenly backed away from us, hurling what seemed a stream of invective at us in the guttural syllables of his own language. Then he backed through our door, slammed it upon us and bolted it.

We stared at each other blankly. "Well I'll be damned," Allen muttered. "What could that mean?"

* * * * *

I can only sketch the weird events of that voyage to Venus. My first spaceflight. You who read this can anticipate taking one soon, of course. And you are naturally familiar with the glowing words of description the newscasters have used. With the mechanical details of Interplanetary traveling, the more scientific-minded among you must be thoroughly familiar. I think all that need have little place in my narrative. Human motives; human conflicts. The things of actuality which happened to me, to Jack Allen, to little Nereid--with those things only am I concerned here.

There were some ten men and five of the grim Gort women, here on the space vehicle. By Earth routine of living, it could have been five or six days. After the first time of sleep, Allen and I were given a fair freedom of movement. Much of it we spent in the control turret, with Rhool, the leader here. Tollgamo's lieutenant was well pleased with himself. He was bringing Nereid back. He had learned from her that her little space-cylinder was lost at the bottom of the sea on Earth. What Tollgamo had ordered, Rhool had accomplished, with efficiency which would bring him commendation. And he was bringing Allen and me back, Earthmen whom Tollgamo doubtless would very much want to question.

"You tell him much--he treat you well," Rhool assured us with his heavy leer. He was, I could see, far more impressed with Allen than with me; Allen who now was winning his confidence, pretending that there was much he could tell Tollgamo; hinting even that he and I would not be averse to joining the great Master of the Gorts in his schemes of conquest.

Nereid was unharmed. The woman Garga was caring for her; and on the third day from Earth, Allen persuaded Garga to bring Nereid to the turret. After that, Nereid was often with us, and her fragile, delicate beauty here among the grey, metal-clad Gorts made her seem ethereal indeed. She came to my side, with her face lighting up.

"I was afraid they had killed you," she whispered. "Bad time for us all, my Earth-friend. I--I did very badly on my adventure to Earth."

She told us then that her father had built the little cylinder, intending to send one of his men in it. But Nereid, who had learned its operation, had stolen it.

Then suddenly she was whispering to us, that the Gorts in the turret might not hear. "I have a brother--my twin--his name is Leh. Tollgamo does not know there is such a person." She shot a furtive glance around the turret. "For several years he has been living with the Gorts. Pretending he is one of them. From him, father has gotten much information of Tollgamo's plans. It would be death to Leh if who he is were known. And now I will tell you--Leh is--"

A guttural shout from Rhool at the control table checked her.

"He says, stop whispering," she murmured. "That other thing I will tell you later.... I speak the English," she said to Rhool. "You speak it too? Then we talk it here, so that these Earthmen may understand?"

Rhool laughed. His heavy dark gaze roved her. "You very beautiful," he said. "See--I talk English. Come sit by me. The starshine makes you beautiful, girl of Arron."

I tensed, with my heart pounding as I saw his darkly leering gaze rove over her again.

"Easy!" whispered Allen. "Don't start anything."

Then at last Venus had grown to a full-round, glowing silver disk before our bow. After the next time of sleep it was a monstrous ball, filling half the firmament, mottled with clouds so that its surface configurations were only vaguely apparent. Heavy, thick Venus atmosphere. Within another day of our living routine we dropped into it, sliding diagonally downward, with slackening velocity now and rocket streams of fluorescent gases to check and guide us.

With Rhool and Nereid I was in the starlit turret. It was night here, the Venus night of atmospheric fog. Rhool had been drinking from a little gourd at his belt, and was flushed with his triumph and the liquor.

"A few hours," he said to Nereid. "Then I give you to Tollgamo." His arm went suddenly around her waist, drawing her against him. What he was muttering in his own language I had no idea; but as she cried out, struggling with him, I jumped.

"That's enough from you--let her alone!" I rasped.

* * * * *

He cast her off, leaped to his feet. Rage darkened his heavy face so that it seemed to blacken. My lunging jab struck his mailed chest, but my swing at his face missed him. He jumped backward, with a hand going to a weapon at his belt. I have no doubt that I would have been dead in another few seconds. But there were shouts behind me; the woman Garga and Allen coming from the corridor. Garga's guttural remonstrance checked the angry Rhool. And then Borgg, the weird little hunchback, came shambling forward.

"Stop it!" Allen shouted at me. "Easy there, you idiot!"

Borgg grabbed me. As I fought, his mouth jabbed against my ear. His voice was a sibilant whisper. "Fight me--not too hard! I am Leh--her brother!"

Nereid's brother! Spy among the Gorts, for years masquerading in this grotesque guise of half-demented hunchback jester! I struggled with him now as he cuffed me, while Nereid stared terrified and Rhool laughed with coarse ribald amusement, appeased that I was being beaten.

And then Leh shoved me from the turret, dragged me down the corridor, slammed me into my sleeping cubby. Again his mouth was to my ear.

"Later tonight, I will try and turn you loose. And your friend Allen, and my sister."

In a swift whisper he told me his plans. At the ship's lower exit porte he had hidden a small anti-gravity platform, and three pressure suits. We could escape from there. He shoved the door upon me, barred it and was gone.

I sat tense in the darkness, those last hours. Through the bullseye window the Venus clouds were an opalescent haze of weird glowing luminosity, like phosphorescence in tropic water. It seemed inherent to the cloud-vapours; but more than that I could see that it was radiating up from below. Venus-shine. Pale and weirdly beautiful light inherent to the planet herself.

And then our little ship sank below the clouds, and the surface of Venus lay spread some ten thousand feet below me. It was an amazing world of lush shining forests and gleaming, rippling opalescent water. We were near the country of the Arones; but for just a moment, beyond the shining sea, tiers of black metal mountains were visible which I knew to be the country of the Gorts.

The rasp of my door softly opening made me turn. The grotesque hunched form of Nereid's brother stood there, with a hand in a silencing gesture to his mouth.

"Most of them are in the forward control turret. You go down into the hull to the exit porte. My sister and Allen will join you."

He shoved me. Then he softly closed my door, barred it, and shambled forward toward the turret, grinning, mumbling an inane little tune. I ducked into a doorway; went down an incline ladder. The hull corridor was dark, with just a small hooded light of green glow. Tense, alert, I came to the pressure porte doorway. And suddenly a figure stirred in the shadows.

"Kent!" It was Nereid, crouching here, waiting for me. I gripped her.

"Where's Jack?"

"My brother said he would send him down. But he has not come."

Then we heard faint footsteps on the incline. And suddenly from up there in the dimness, came Allen's voice:

"Why--why hello, Garga. I didn't see you."

And the Gort woman's voice: "Where you go, Jack Allen?"

"Why--why Rhool said he didn't mind my moving around the ship. Come into the turret, Garga. I want you to show me your world. Don't you think I am going to like it?"

"Maybe. And if Tollgamo like you, Jack Allen--"

Their voices receded. Allen would make no attempt now to join us, that was obvious. With Garga eager always to be with him, his attempt would be futile.

I whispered it to Nereid.

"We are close to my country now," she murmured. "Too late for us to escape successfully, if we wait much longer."

We did not need the pressure suits which Leh had hidden here, thinking he might find an opportunity for us to disembark while still above the atmosphere. The anti-gravity platform was an oblong, raft-like metallic thing, with its mechanisms under a hood in its bow. Nereid understood its workings. She lay flat upon it as I slid it through the porte and jumped beside her.

We went like a sliding rocket, with a rush of wind that stopped our breath. But the hooded bow partially shielded us, so that presently we could breathe. Behind us, and over us now, the gleaming shape of the spaceship was seemingly sliding upward and backward. Beneath us the shining sea with a glowing shoreline off at the horizon seemed rocking with a crazy sway. And then at last we steadied.

"Did it!" I gloated. "We made it, Nereid. Evidently they didn't see us rocketing off."

There was no sign of any alarm from the ship and presently it had dwindled high above us and was gone.

Amazingly swift, that downward glide. The wind whistled past us with a screaming whine. At five hundred feet Nereid leveled us as we headed for the glowing shoreline. I could see artificial illumination there now, a myriad little dots of colored lights. And then little colored beams were waving.

"My city--the city of Arron," Nereid said.

It was a few miles back in the forest, where a great shining lagoon opened. A riot of glowing, prismatic color burst upon us; and as Nereid saw it, she sucked in her breath with a little gasp.

"The love festival," she murmured. "Oh why--why would they have that in times like these? With Tollgamo so ready to attack us?"

I stared down with awed amazement at the scene of weird sensuous beauty spread now so close beneath us.

* * * * *

Allen's first sight of the country of Gorts, as he afterward told me, was a line of terraced hills that rose steeply up from the shore of the placid sea. He was in the controlroom of the Spaceship with Rhool, and with the grim woman Garga beside him. It had been a tense time for Allen, when the escape of Nereid and myself was discovered. But he had been allowed a measure of freedom, whereas I was locked in my cubby. Allen was not suspected, nor, fortunately, was Leh. Two of the Gorts came in for Rhool's wrath.

"Tollgamo will deal with you," he said.

Then Allen spoke up, denouncing me as a traitor to him; claiming that I had agreed to join Tollgamo. "That Peters girl bewitched him," Allen said.

Whether it fooled the big, leering Rhool or not, Allen couldn't tell. Perhaps it did, for Allen now was taken more as one of them, than a prisoner.

The Country of the Gorts! To Allen, as he stared down through the turret window of the spaceship, those terraces of grey metal rock were as grim and forbidding as the Gort people themselves. In the glowing night-sheen, the barren wastes near the shore seemed utterly without life. And then Allen saw weird vegetation in little patches; and occasionally roaming wild things with round eyes which stared up at the ship. Some of them incuriously stared; others, frightened, scuttled away.

The ship now was following a broad, gleaming inlet of the iridescent sea. Ten Earth-miles or so, to its head where lights gleamed on a terraced hillside. It was Tollgamo's little city. Allen had only a brief glimpse as the ship swooped down and settled into the rack of a metal landing stage. Rows of blue and green lights were strung in half a dozen rows on the terraces, one above the other to mark the streets, with metal ladders vertically connecting them. Metal and stone little houses, polished, grey-blue, lined the streets. At one end of the lower street, close by a promontory bluff where beyond a bridge-like metal ladder a smaller kiosk overlooked the inlet, there was a larger, square building, terraced into three stories. Round spots of dull purple light marked its four corners. On its roof, metal-garbed figures paced back and forth.

"Tollgamo the Master--that is his house," the woman Garga murmured to Allen.

Green-yellow, turgid smoke belched from a chimney-like opening in the cliff, where doubtless, partly underground, a factory was in operation. Figures moved in the grim weird glow of the bleak streets; apparatus was being dragged along one of them. Men and women working; and in the doors and windows of the cubical houses, the figures of children stood peering.

As the ship settled lower, Allen realized that both above and below ground it was a beehive of activity now. And presently he could hear sounds; the clank of metal machinery; the grind of gears; the voices of the workers.

Beside him Allen was suddenly aware of the grotesque, hunched form of Nereid's brother, Leh. Neither of them spoke; and then Leh, with a surreptitious gesture, indicated the shining inlet. Down on the opposite shore of it, a tunnel mouth showed, with a red-yellow glare back under the opposite cliff. A crowd of metal-clad workers, goggled against the glare so that they looked like huge beetle-eyed insects, were struggling with apparatus which they were pulling out.

Leh was tense. Then a moment came where he was able to whisper furtively to Allen. "I will try later to get us to that cliff. Do you see that Kiosk? If we can get there, we will dive to the water. From there I have a way of escaping."

That was all. Allen had only time to murmur assent. The ship landed. With Rhool half guarding, half leading him, he was taken along the lower street. The workers stood grim, impassive, until they recognized Rhool. Then like machines they stood stiff, with a hand touching the metal insignia of their helmets until Rhool had passed. Even the children stood rigid, saluting. Little bodies drilled to efficiency; impassive childish faces. But in their eyes still there was childhood--excited, wondering childhood.

Rhool and Allen passed the guards at the entrance to Tollgamo's home. In the dim blue-green glow of a metal room Allen was told by Rhool to stand, and Tollgamo would come. Then Rhool was gone. Unseen eyes were watching Allen. He sensed it; and stood stiffly against one wall, awaiting the coming of the Master. It was a strange, square apartment. Blue-lit, so that its richly tiled floor and ceiling glistened like polished steel. The furniture was square, glistening in the light-sheen. At one end of the room a huge polished table with a single big chair at its end, held a variety of small apparatus, a bank of levers and little buttons as though for signalling commands. And there was a neat stack of what seemed to be charts and mathematical data.

A murmur outside the room brought Allen back from his contemplation of his surroundings. Men's voices; a guttural command. Then Rhool came in, walking with stiff, pseudo mechanical tread. On his heavy face was a grinning leer. Behind him there was a Gort man and woman. Allen recognized them; both had been on the spaceship and both were blamed by Rhool for the escape of Nereid and me. They came now marching stiffly erect. Their faces were impassive, but terror was in their eyes and in the tense set of their lips.

* * * * *

And then at last came Tollgamo. Involuntarily Allen gasped at sight of him.

He was a giant figure of a man, six feet six, at least. Unlike the square, robot appearance of his menials, his garments of grey metal-fabric were soft, and clinging. A flowing tunic fell from his powerfully broad shoulders to below his waist, with a wide, glistening metal belt; trousers which sheathed his powerful, shapely legs; shoes with padded soles so that he moved soundlessly. He was bareheaded, and his black hair, closely clipped, came to a peak at his forehead. His skin was the familiar Venus grey, but there was a saffron cast to it. His high-bridged nose was hawk-like, his chin protruding, but square--the firm jaw completely characteristic of determination and power.

His thin-lipped mouth, as he came quietly in and surveyed Allen with dark-eyed gaze, was faintly smiling. Allen, standing rigid, silently met the stare. It was then that he felt, far more than in Tollgamo's commanding aspect, the power of the man's personality. A dominant force seemed to radiate from him, so that no one could be in his presence an instant without feeling it. An aura of command that made Allen suddenly feel like a child. Helpless; and with a vague, indefinable shudder within him.

And then Tollgamo spoke. Suave, gentle voice of careful, cultivated English, meticulously correct, yet with a strange foreign intonation.

"So you are one of the Earthmen, Jack Allen?"

"Yes," Allen said; and then remembered Rhool's instructions, so that after a moment he added, "Yes, Master. I give you service."

Tollgamo's faint ironic smile broadened; his glittering dark eyes seemed to hold a twinkle of sardonic amusement, "You learn fast." His gaze darted away; went to Rhool, and then to the Gort man and woman from the spaceship who stood with terror in their eyes.

"I hear that you need punishment," he said gently. "This Earthman will learn from it." His tone, almost drab, was casual, with a slow finality.