Fletcher Pratt

by Alien Planet

  The night side of the planet was toward us; beyond it the sun, a greater and more glorious sun than any person of Earth ever sees, was just emerging from the planet's shadow, tossing huge red flames of blinding radiance millions of miles high. It hurt my eyes, and I turned away, but Ashembe, noting my trouble, threw a switch of some kind and the radiance was dimmed. Then I saw Venus as she is—a great dark shield of a planet, picked out all round the edge with a glow of unearthly radiance where the sun is reflected from her cloudy surface.

  Out beyond her a star or two burned in the heavens, and down across the picture sprayed the stream of sparks from the big motor at the prow, now working at full speed to check our momentum before we reached the planet's atmosphere. Ashembe floated beside me working energetically with observational instruments of one sort and another, prominent among which was a small spectroscope.

  "Correct for your astronomers," he murmured as he bent over the instrument. "Rate of revolution of this planet is very slow, if upper atmosphere forms any criterion. Hence it will be well to turn the Shoraru upon arrival in upper atmosphere and land at point within sunlit hemisphere. Otherwise we might spend considerable period in the dark in a bad place. I do not like the same." He fell silent, turning the adjusting arrangements on his instruments. "And still I do not like to do the same. It too rapidly uses up much-needed fuel. Efficiency of all fuel is fifty per cent less in atmosphere than in a vacuum."

  "What is Venus like?" I asked. "Can you tell anything about it from your instruments?"

  "No, certainly not," he answered promptly. "Am I a saint? No, you call that kind of prophet—am I a prophet? The upper atmosphere is deficient in water vapor and oxygen as compared with our worlds and has much carbon dioxide, but what else? We can tell when we arrive."

  A silence fell upon us; Ashembe was busy with his instruments and I with my thoughts as we watched the planet grow slowly larger on our sight. Now it had completely blotted out the sun from our sight and filled the whole of the central heavens for us—a great disc of black, rimmed round with light on which no mark or feature was visible. One by one the stars were swallowed up in that wall of blackness as we drew closer, and it seemed as though we had slowly changed our course in some way and were now falling down toward it instead of approaching it along the same straight path we had been following.

  I began to feel once more the blessed sensation of weight. I had been holding to the racks near the peak of the projectile and now it seemed as though we had been tilted forward and I was sliding down a steeply inclined plane toward the huge dark planet that rose up to meet us. A pencil from my vest pocket fell out, striking the edge of one of the racks with a tinkling sound. With an effort, for my muscles had become cramped during the hour or more we must have been there, I reversed position. Ashembe lay on his side, consulting a perfect congress of instruments.

  I noted that the sparks from, our bow motor had taken on a greenish tinge, quite unlike their previous color and that we seemed to be moving more slowly. Pointing an inquisitive finger at the sparks, I demanded, "What is it?"

  "Now entering—atmosphere of planet—" he replied jerkily, working the keys of his instruments. "Must check progress. No—quickly!" he shouted, springing to his feet and bracing himself against the racks. He began to pull from one of them the atotta suit we had made—how many aeons ago was it?—at Joyous Gard.

  "Here," he said, pulling the suit on. "Unlock door of this chamber and each other for me. Fear I must explode whole of fuel in outer chamber to check progress and assure landing on other face of planet.... Lock outer door after me and return to next chamber within. When I give the signal, admit me." I did not stop to learn what the signal might be, but began climbing along the racks to where the door, like the transom over a window, now stood some twelve feet above my head. It was a difficult job, made harder by the fact that the Shoraru had begun to rock in the most alarming manner, and when I reached it, I thought I would never get the lock open.

  Ashembe, tightly buckled in his atotta suit, followed, urging me to speed by jabbing me with an instrument he carried. Together we tumbled through the narrow opening; I nearly fell to the bottom of the next chamber in doing it, but managed to catch one of the racks in time and to navigate around its walls as if on a mountain ledge.

  The rocking motion increased and was accompanied by a sibilant whistle, low and monotonous.

  Through the next door we went and the next—would those infernal rooms never come to an end?—and then finally into one so much hotter than the rest that the perspiration started out on my face. With his hand at my chest, Ashembe motioned me to go back and began to lower himself down the racks toward the peak of the projectile.

  "Explode whole of fuel," he had said. That meant danger-near and pressing. I slid the door into position and turned the lock, climbing round the racks to reach the next door. What if he were killed in the explosion—or injured? What a position for a bond salesman, I thought, clinging to a rack which held a jar of liquid hydrogen, to steady myself against the alarming pitching of the car. At that moment there came a great burst of sound and a pitch so violent that it jerked loose my hold and hurled me downward half a dozen feet to what had been the ceiling and had become the floor of the chamber.

  It was lined with atotta and I lit on what is supposed to be the least sensitive portion of man's anatomy, but the bump was severe, and I had no more than gotten to my hands and knees when there came a second explosion and another pitch that flattened me against the side of the chamber, knocking the wind from my body.

  It was several minutes before I recovered myself sufficiently to stand upright. The pitching had ceased as had the whistling sound without. The bow seemed higher too —the space-ship was traveling at an angle that now made one of her sides the floor. But there was no sign of Ashembe.

  Taking advantage of our change of course, I walked along the side of the car among the racks and placed my ear against the door. Silence. The suspense was agonizing. There was no sense of motion now, no sound whatever, nothing but the soft light from the sensitized quartz and the silent racks filled with materials for an interplanetary voyage. I squatted down, hanging to one of the racks with both hands, fearful of another abrupt change of direction. An age passed by.

  Finally, just as I had made up my mind to climb back to the central chamber and get into one of the other atotta suits and dare the dangers of whatever lay beyond the locked door, there came three measured metallic taps against it; a pause, and then again three taps. Fumbling with haste, I threw back the complex lock to look down into the outer chamber, now directly below me, and meet a breath of icy air. There he was, hanging to the racks near the door by his hands. I reached down, gripped his arm and pulled amain, and in a moment he was beside me.

  Together we climbed to the door of the next chamber, being aided by the slight slant the Shoraru now took. For all the fact that he was loaded with the atotta suit, it was Ashembe who got through first, pulling me up after him, and it was he who preceded me all the way to the inner chamber. We hurried down the side to the nickel screens.

  At first I thought there was something wrong with them. They showed nothing but a whirling, indistinct mass, shadowy gray in hue, behind which, as behind a curtain, there was a dim, red light. The gray mist seemed to be flashing past at tremendous speed, and after a moment I realized we were among the clouds that perpetually encircle the planet, just emerging into the daylight zone. The rain of sparks from the motor at the bow had ceased. I found my voice.

  "It's all right then. What did you do?"

  "I exploded the helium in the outer chamber," answered Ashembe, who had flung back the hood of his suit and was now busy with his instruments again, "thereby lifting the forward end of the Shoraru and giving us direction more tangential to surface of the planet. But alas! We are now deficient in fuel. I desire greatly to find pleci in this atmosphere or in combination in surface formations. No further great distance can we go without liberal supply of fuel�
��Attend!" He pointed suddenly to the screen.

  I just caught a fleeting glimpse of the surface of the planet through the rolling clouds. A surface of steaming moisture, with long, irregular blots across it—nothing more. And then we were again swallowed up in the clouds. The light behind them was stronger now, like that on a day filled with both sunshine and mist. I turned to Ashembe, opened my mouth to speak—and suddenly we met ground with a rending crash that threw me off my feet again and rattled the cylinders in their beds. We had landed on Venus.*

  * It is only fair to mention that Professor Appleyard, one of the members of the expedition which gave this narrative to the world, thinks the amount of time consumed in passing through the atmosphere of Venus is, according to Schierstedt's account, excessive. From measurements by astronomers we know that the atmosphere cannot be so deep as the account would seem to indicate. But it should be remembered that in such moments the human memory is apt to occupy itself with many details of experience which make an account seem long, but which actually are passed through in a few seconds.

  VI

  IT WAS with a kind of subconscious surprise that I gazed around after I had put on one of the atotta suits and followed Ashembe through the intricate passages of the space ship. All around us was a fog, thick and yellow-gray in color, like the famous pea-soup fogs of London. Behind it a large but sickly and strangely prolate sun gave the dull illumination of a frosted electric globe.

  I looked down. We were in a swamp, up nearly to our knees in the ooze. Around our legs and as far as we could see across this universal slough, an intricate tangle of pale, slimy, almost gelatinous vegetation coiled. Its clinging tendrils hampered our movements, but only here and there did it project a leaf above the surface and then feebly, as though it lacked the strength to stand upright.

  Beside us the curved flank of the Shoraru rose up and away, glimmering wetly in the dulled rays of the sun. It lay on its side, its point slightly down, half-submerged, like some wallowing monster. The door through which we had left it stood just above the surface of the swamp, and but for this one object there was nothing to see but swamp, fog and sun.

  I turned to look at Ashembe. With detached scientific calm, he was busy filling an emptied liquid hydrogen cylinder with the swamp water, snipping off and cramming in with it samples of the vegetation. This done, he handed me the container, produced a bottle from a pocket in his suit and waved it around in the air for a moment or two—to take a sample of the atmosphere, I imagined. While I was taking both containers back to deposit them in the Shoraru, he busied himself with some instrument he had brought, taking an observation of the sun.

  We returned together, helping each other through the door, which Ashembe bolted behind us.*

  *But Schierstedt specifically mentions that on leaving Earth, this outer door was welded shut. Evidently Ashembe must have unsealed it—a fact which our traveler fails to mention.

  I began to open the next door inward, but he halted me with a gesture.

  "Give pause," he said, his voice sounding deep and muffled through the telephonic apparatus of the suit. "This atmosphere may be poisonous, in which case it would be bad for us to carry with us into inner chambers. I will create a vacuum. Seize something."

  At the base of the car (now become the side in the position in which it lay) just over where the propulsive tubes passed through the shell, was a row of keys. Hooking one arm through a rack, Ashembe began to turn them rapidly.

  I heard a whirring sound, and felt strong winds pluck at me. The dimness of the chamber (the fog had followed us in) decreased, became nonexistent. The cylinder of swamp water rolled from the place where I had dropped it, and accompanied by the bottle of air, banged against the base of the car, and Ashembe began to turn off the keys again.

  As soon as he had opened one of the cylinders of liquid air he had prepared at Joyous Gard and the released gas had restored the pressure in our outer chamber to normal, we penetrated deeper into the car. Ashembe fell at once to analyzing the samples he had brought, while I, unable to help him with this, was reduced to the state of enforced idleness of our journey.

  "You perceive," he explained, "I could not do thus when landing on your planet. Upon arrival I was practically without fuel, running-upon inertia. Consequently I lacked power to check my progress through your atmosphere. The progress was too rapid and friction not only severely damaged my Shoraru, but rendered it impossible to open at the door, door being fused into place. Therefore I had to cut my way through the base of the Shoraru." "My God," I said. "You're lucky that you didn't land in an ocean or on a mountain."

  "Truthful. So are we this time."

  I shuddered a little. "What if we had?"

  "Not hard to escape. Simply by blowing out more fuel through peak of the Shoraru. But difficult is that we have not much fuel."

  "What about the revolution of the planet?"

  "Very slow from observation," was the reply. "One revolution in six hundred seventy-four of your hours— about twenty-eight days. Me, I am not entirely certain of this result, but it is accurate within two or three hours.

  We have nearly twenty days before, it becomes dark at this point."

  "Why," I said, "then everything ought to be frozen here, hadn't it? At our poles where they have long periods of light and dark like this, the ice forms so deeply during the dark that the sun can't melt it again."

  "Case is different. One difference is that sun is twice as hot here as at your planet. Another is perhaps the difference in chemical composition of the atmosphere and liquids. Perchance it is not water. I am now determining." He fell silent for a moment, fiddling with his reagents and apparatus. Then: "This air is not good for us," he announced. "It is highly deficient in oxygen—only about four per cent of that in your or our atmosphere. I find also that it has high percentage of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, also small proportion of hydrogen sulphide and much dust ..."

  Somewhere in the back of my head a memory from some book stirred. "Why, that's almost exactly what our scientists predicted from observations!"

  "Truthful. Your scientists are backward in many points, but their spectroscopic work is well done ... They are correct about this being the early planet also. The dust which is very much in the air is composed of silica, alumina, oxides of iron and titanium and compounds of calcium, sodium and potassium. This is exactly the formula for matter flowing from volcanic action, and gases in atmosphere, especially carbon dioxide, indicate the same thing. There must be very intense volcanic activity throughout this Venus. Very dangerous to remain there any time." "Then the whole of Venus is like this?"

  "Question. Entire of your planet is not like the place where I landed? But all this planet may be more like this place because it is the younger and more homogeneous world. For certainly, the atmosphere is altogether like it is here—thick and heavy and bad. Of the rest it is mostly impossible to tell unless we make journeys here and there, but I think it is much like this place. For one thing water is very plentiful here."

  "Oh, the swamp liquid is water, then?" I interrupted. "Yes, but with very little salt therein. Water is plentiful here, but there is extremely small amounts of water in the atmosphere. This would show that water is almost absent from most portions of the planet, though the atmosphere is so heavily saturated with carbon dioxide vapor and dust - that it could hardly take up much. Come."

  He was putting away the chemical apparatus.

  "What about the chances for getting your pleci?" Ashembe shook his head. "I am in doubt. Not very promising, although this is a young world and may have it in volcanic vapor or in combination in volcanic rocks." He began to pull on his atotta suit again, and I did likewise.

  When we reached the outside of the car, he paused to fix above the door one of the light-giving quartz rocks from the interior, and we set off together, plunging our way through the slimy vegetation of the swamp.

  Fifteen minutes of amphibian progress brought us to a place where the vines thinne
d out and the water became shallower. I noticed that to right and left and occasionally straight ahead vague spots were visible here at the edge; three-foot circles of changing color like the iridescence that is formed on the surface of water by a drop of oil. I pointed to one of them in 'question, but Ashembe merely shook his head without deigning to speak.

  A little farther along one of these agglomerations lay directly before us and we paused to look at it. It was apparently a solid structure, a flat, deep object floating just below the surface of the swamp, pulsating gently with a motion of its own.

  "What is it?" I asked.

  "An algal growth of some kind perchance," said Ashembe. "They are common on early worlds."

  He turned away, but I held back and with the same impulse that makes one kick at a hat in the street, poked my foot into it. It met nothing solid at all; just as though I had kicked a jelly. But swifter than thought, before I could withdraw the foot, the whole iridescent, purple and green mass flowed forward around the offending member and then around my other foot, and held both in a soft, firm grip. I tried to draw loose, to run. The thing clung, creeping slowly upward. I bent to tear it loose with my fingers and my hand, like my feet, was seized in a steady, paralyzing grip. I could not move, struggle as I would. A chill of horror went over me.

  "Ashembe!" I called after my companion's retreating form, and with a vast effort, heaved the imprisoned arm up a few inches. The growth came up with it, like a great pancake, then fell back with a solid plop as I could no longer hold its weight. It gripped my legs all the tighter for the interruption. I almost pitched onto my face in the slimy mass.

  "Ashembe!" I cried again, struggling to retain my balance, and out of the corner of my eye, caught sight of his arm as he brought the destructive heat-ray into sudden action. I heard the warning hum, saw the gleam of fierce light, and a great plume of steam sprang up and obscured the lenses that covered my eyes. The tugging at my arm ceased, and though my fingers were still caught, I could draw the hand loose and raise it. About my feet the water toiled, furiously. Steam covered everything. Then Ashembe's arm was about me, pulling me loose.