Warren nodded. Morris hoisted himself to his feet. He paused at the door. "Goodbye," he said.
Warren was left with the girl. "Now you've got a chance to win another medal," she said.
"I could live without it. When the Venusian war was over I thought I'd finished with danger."
"You're never finished with danger. It follows a brave man around."
"Maybe," murmured Warren, "but I'm not a brave man. Never was."
Her eyes widened, but she said nothing. She had never met Warren Blackwell before this trip. In fact, she hadn't officially met him on the trip, until she introduced herself a few minutes before. But like everyone else, she had read of him while the war was on. A man who treated bis life as a millionaire might treat a dime he found in his shoe. It wasn't that he was lucky, or so clever that the dangers were always less real than they seemed. He had been wounded scores of times and captured twice. And no one else had escaped from the Greys even once. He would drop out of the news for a couple of months while he was recovering from injury. Then he would be back with some new exploit that made it seem he was determined to get himself killed.
Was that it? she wondered, looking at him as he peered through the big quartz windows. Had he cared so little for life that his courage had really been resignation? She had read that he had come from an orphanage, even a hint that he had been in a reform school. But details like that weren't publicized about a hero.
It wasn't that, she decided. The man beside her was passionately fond of life. She could see it in the way his whole body concentrated on the job in hand. He wasn't trying to save her and the others. If that had been the case he would have been cold and steady. He was trying to save himself— and the rest of them as a sort of afterthought.
He shook himself suddenly and turned from the window. "It'll be a few minutes yet," he said, "and if I watch much longer I'll get jumpy and ring for the jets too soon. You wouldn't like to do a strip act to pass the time?"
"That's not at all funny," she said coolly. He watched her broodingly and saw she thought less of him than she had a moment before. It was that easy to lose admiration and respect.
She was a tough-looking girl, workmanlike rather than pretty. But she was sufficiently versatile to make herself attractive too, for no more reason, perhaps, than that of the man who doesn't intend to go out or see anyone, but still shaves and brushes his hair. She wore dark slacks and a heavy blue shirt, and though her outfit didn't suggest any particular beauty of figure, it didn't absolutely deny it. She had light brown hair and a strong, young face. The features were good, and if they were too full of character for beauty, they were just right for a certain subtle elegance. It was a pity to see a woman like that die. There weren't too many of them.
"What do you do?" he asked.
"I've done a lot of things. At the moment I'm on Government work."
"Which government?"
"UNO. There's nothing secret about it. I'm . . ."
She broke off as Warren turned back to the -window. "I'm beginning to get a feeling about this," he murmured. "We should be somewhere over the Norman Forest. But we were slanting a long time. I think we almost hit an orbit. Maybe we overshot to the Norman Hills. In which case—" his voice sank to nothing—"I should sound the alarm nowl"
Virginia wasn't prepared. Her eyes darted to Warren's hand, pressing hard down on the button, then flashed to the window, where there was a sudden break in the grey mist, a blinding flash, and a glimpse of a whirling black mass outside as the floor kicked up at her. She realized that by luck or divination Warren had picked on the right split-second.
The crash dazed her, but she never lost consciousness. Warren did. She saw him shoot forward toward the window and caught him by one ankle. She didn't stop him, but he crashed against the quartz with less force. Virginia heard a scream of metal on stone that mounted until her ears refused to take it, and told her nothing more.
Then gradually she realized that the ship was down, probably as safely as it could have been. She looked out, but there was nothing but grey mist and black soil. She had been on Venus before, but never out in the open, only in the domed cities. Nevertheless, she knew it was full day. There was about as much light as on a misty moonlit night on Earth, and visibility was about forty yards, which was as light as it ever was on Venus.
Warren was stirring. He wakened as she expected him to waken, quietly, doing nothing until he had had a look around.
"You stopped me crashing through the window," he said. "I'll do something for you sometime."
"You've done it. You got us down."
He rose unsteadily. "We'd better let the others out," he said.
By tacit agreement they looked for the captain first. But he, the second officer, and any other members of the crew who hadn't actually been dead before the landing were crushed in a flat envelope of steel which had once been the drive room. They couldn't get near them, which was perhaps just as well. They made their way to the store-room and unlocked the door.
It hadn't been a bad landing, in the circumstances. There had been fifteen people in the room, and seven of them were still alive, though two would never recover consciousness. As it happened, they would have been safer in the nose with Warren and Virginia, but no one could have known that.
Warren took stock of them, ignoring the moans and screams. He ignored the dead too. If they were dead, it didn't matter whether they were unmarked or a disgusting pulp. It was the living who mattered. Waters, the actor, was bleeding from mouth and ears in a way that showed he was still alive. His wife was breathing, which was rather horrible, for her neck was obviously broken.
The other five were almost unhurt. Fortunately the doctor, Williamson, was on his feet and looked sane and well. Standing beside him, apparently only dazed, was old Martin, who was ninety and had come through the crash as well as anyone. Three others were stirring on the floor, and Smith, with a broken wrist, seemed to be the most seriously injured, though it was the women who were doing most of the screaming and moaning.
Mrs. Martin could hardly be blamed, for like most of those in the room she had lost some of her clothes in a blast of air which must have swept the room, and was probably screaming more at finding herself half-naked in company at the age of seventy-five than anything else. But the Glamour Girl, whose name Warren didn't know, was screaming only because she always screamed when anything happened. Warren had met girls like her before, and had not been impressed.
At the evidence of a blast of air Warren looked round quickly and sniffed. But the ship was airtight. There was no hiss of escaping air, and the pressure was high—tpo high, if anything. Perhaps there had been a rift which had immediately been sealed by the weight and momentum of the ship. There were cracks and holes in the inner walls, but they were not as strong as the hull.
"All right, doctor?" he asked. "You take over."
"Doesn't look as if there's much I can do," said Williamson wryly.
"Don't be modest," Warren said. The doctor stared blankly, and Virginia shot a quick glance at Warren. He had gone down in her estimation again, he decided.
Glamour was tugging at his lapel and screaming: "Get me out of here! Get me out!"
"Into the open?" he asked coolly. "You'd die in eight hours. But long before that the Greys would have got you."
She hadn't heard him. She was still screaming, "Get me out of here!" Her dress had a spectacular plunging neckline as if rent open by the blast, but it was natural. Her hair wasn't even disheveled. She was completely unmarked and very beautiful, which was a pity, Warren thought, for she didn't deserve to be. Better people had died in the crash.
Virginia pulled her gently away from him. "You said something about the Norman Hills. Do you know where we are?"
"It's only a guess," he admitted, "but I think I do. Almost exactly, if I'm anywhere near right at all."
"How's that?"
"We're lying up a bare slope, on soft soil. But we hit rock first, and if we came down roug
hly straight we just missed the forest. That puts us somewhere on a narrow belt twenty to thirty miles from City Four—Cefor for short." "And how are our chances?"
He looked round at the others, now silent and hanging on his words, even Glamour and Mrs. Martin, whose husband had wrapped her in his jacket. There was no point in letting it out slowly. Might as well get it over with.
"Our chances must be better now than they were when we were coming down," he said deliberately. "But you'd need a slide-rule and a lot of figures to prove it."
There was a moment's silence while they worked out his meaning. Then Glamour threw herself at him, screaming and scratching at his face, as though he personally were responsible for their plight.
Virginia seized his arm as he was fending Glamour off, none too gendy, and pulled him away. "Let's go and check up," she said. He grinned. Her opinion of him might be dropping, and would probably drop more very soon, but after all he was the only one with whom she could talk seriously. The safety of them all depended on him and her.
She led him back to the observation room.
"It can't be as bad as you made out," she said.
"Why not?"
"Surely they must have seen us come down. There's bound
to be a search. Or at worst, surely one of us can get through
if it's only twenty miles." *
"I'm not just deliberately being pessimistic," he said. "I want to live too. But let's take it from the beginning. The captain would corroborate if he were here. One, they couldn't see us in Cefor. We didn't come over it, we were pointing roughly toward it. And they couldn't see a flaming meteor at five miles, let alone us at twenty. Radar doesn't work in this soup any more than in water. And a seismograph wouldn't help because there are so many quakes on
Venus no one will be even interested in the shock we made on landing.
"Two, we were bound for New Paris in the other hemisphere of Venus, and when a search starts in about twenty-four hours from now they'll concentrate around there first. At a rough guess it will be six months before they find this ship. Remember, they've got to explore almost every inch of ground. A helicopter has to be within a stonesthrow before it can see us."
The girl stared. "But any time there's a forced landing the passengers are picked up before there's any real danger-even if the ship is breached and they have to breathe that poison outside. I always thought the only danger was getting down safely."
"Yes," said Warren gendy, "usually. But usually the radio doesn't crack up first—before the ship. Ours did. So no one knows where we are."
"Oh. I see. But we can't wait six months. We'll all be dead in a week. They don't carry much in the way of stores on these ships."
He nodded. "That's about the size of it."
She shrugged. "Well, we just have to get on the way to Cefor, then."
"Not me. If I'm going to die, I'll die here."
She shot a puzzled glance at him. "I don't understand you. You used to be a hero. You've done harder things than this trek to Cefor. You got medals for it."
He smiled bleakly. "No, you don't understand. I told you I was no hero. Before the war I was nothing, nobody. I'd tried a few things and failed in them all. I tried crime two or three times, and failed in that too. When the war started I realized it was my last chance. In peace I had nothing to look forward to but starvation or jail. So I thought I'd buy me a job. I became a professional hero. I didn't give a damn if I died. But if I got through I was pretty sure of some sort of job. Civilians aren't grateful for long, but a collection of every medal they mint ought to be a recommendation just after the war, I thought. And I was right. I had my choice of jobs. I joined an importing firm and I've done well.
"I was a hero once, but that was when I had to risk my life to buy a life worth living. I bought it and paid for it. But when you gamble like that, you do it only once. I'm not going to throw away all I worked for trying to get through to Cefor. Sure, I know the Greys. I beat them before. But that was then. Now I'd rather stay here and take my chance of being rescued than give them another crack at me."
She looked steadily at him for a long time. Then she shook her head. "Maybe I'm wrong to say it," she murmured, "but you weren't twisted before. You're only twisted now. You've gone soft."
"Sure I've gone soft. I risked my life time and again so that one day I'd have a chance to go soft."
"Well, if you won't go, I must."
He shrugged his shoulders. "Please yourself."
She made a gesture of disgust. "Heaven knows I never thought I'd appeal to chivalry. I never cried off or made excuses because I'm a woman. But—"
"It doesn't matter. The Greys will get whoever tries it."
"I thought the war was over."
"Sure it is. But out there you won't find the civilized Greys. The Greys who will get you never signed any treaty. They won't attack the cities, but they'll attack anything or anyone outside."
She turned to the closet that contained the oxygen suits. "I might as well go now."
Warren watched her as she shook out the plastic envelope, obviously unfamiliar to her, and tried to climb into it. Then he put his hand on her arm.
"I can't let you go without telling you exacdy why you shouldn't," he said.
She shook his arm off and struggled with the suit.
"First of all, though it's only a detail," he remarked, "you don't wear heavy clothes under that. You'd sweat off pounds before you'd gone a hundred yards. Most of us used to wear nothing but the suit, but if you don't like that, wear something light and loose."
She began to take off the suit again.
"You'll have no difficulty in finding the city," he said. "It's right up the hill. Keep on the incline and you can't go wrong. If you have to make a detour, just get back on the slope as soon as you can."
He paused. "You'll have even less difficulty in finding the Greys."
She waited for him to go on, hating him but utterly dependent on his knowledge of Venus.
"No native Venusians have any sense of smell," he said. "So to replace scent in hunting they have a sense that feels thought."
He saw her start, and grinned. "They can locate anything that thinks. They're not telepaths. They don't know what you think, any more than dogs hearing voices know what's being said. They just know there's thinking going on in such-and-such a direction, and from the land of thinking they know the kind of creature that's doing it. So it doesn't matter what you think about, they'll pick you up."
He smiled again, cruelly, she thought. "When they do find you, they won't kill you right away. They'll follow you and let you catch a glimpse of one of them now and then and harry you and frighten you half to death. But they'll let you get right to the gates of Cefor. Ever seen a cat torturing a mouse? The Greys are just like that. At the very last minute, when you think you're safe, they'll drag you off into the forest and torture you to death. Maybe they'll let you escape two or three times. But at last they'll tire."
She twisted from him angrily, certain she had heard all that would be of any use to her. She left the room to go to her cabin and change her clothes. But as silently as a cat he had followed her.
"Listen carefully to what happens then," he said, "for it's very important."
She tried to pass him, but he leaned with one arm on either side of her, holding her against the wall.
"They won't let you die. They'll mutilate you with their knives so that you're bound to die, so that the best doctors on Earth, Venus and Mars couldn't save you, so that you're in agony but will still live quite a while. Then they'll take you to the nearest city—in this case, Cefor. They'll leave you there. It amuses them that we humans don't kill our own people, even when they want to die. You'll die in a hospital bed, heavily drugged but still not enough to stop all the pain."
He let her go, for she was listening again, in horrified fascination. "But that isn't important," he said casually. "What is important is that you can tell them about us. We'll all be grateful to
you. We may erect a statue to you. You'll die, but in dying you can save us."
He turned and left her then. She stared after him in horror, her horror for the Greys a little less strong than her horror for him.
Warren was waiting at the airlock as she came back. He grinned at her. She was almost literally sick. The worst of it was that he was almost certainly right. She had to make the effort, as no one else would make it. He knew that. He could afford to let her do it. And he would be saved. She would tell them at Cefor about the ship. He wasn't alone. There were other lives to be saved.
Warren surveyed her and nodded. "You're all right," he said. "Can you use a gun?"
She nodded involuntarily. "Take another," he said. "They won't give you time to reload." He gave her a gun, which she slipped in her belt. She had changed into lounging pajamas which were enveloping but so thin she shivered in the normal temperature of the ship. Over them the plastic suit covered her loosely, completely, held firmly by the belt that contained her weapons.
Unwillingly she addressed him. "Is there no way of screening thoughts from the Greys?"
"Only by thinking like a Grey yourself. Only about half a dozen people ever learned to do it—and they can't keep it up for long."
She fought a shrieking urge in her to beg him to go instead of her. She believed all he had said—she expected to die. But she also believed that if she stayed where she was she would die. No one else would go.
"Good luck," said Warren.
Blindly, insanely she struck at him. But he evaded her blow and helped her into the airlock.
When she went out, the heat met her as if an oven door had been swung open. The ship's hull was insulated against both cold and heat. Usually it was cold it kept out, but on Venus it was damp warmth. Virginia's suit was supposed to afford some sort of insulation, but before she was out of sight of the ship she was wet all over with sweat.
She took one last look at the ship as she climbed up the slope. It was only fifty yards away. She could still turn and go back. She was beginning to realize something that stemmed from what Warren had said. She could always find Cefor—but she couldn't find the ship again once she lost sight of it. Going downhill might land her anywhere along the perimeter once she had lost all sense of direction—which would be almost at once.
Donald A. Wollheim (ed) Page 6
