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beans, put one in his mouth and held out the other to her with his finger-tips.
"For you," he said, foolishly. Her eyes widened. That faint twist of a smile crossed her face as she craned forward, bared gleaming white teeth, and took the bean from his fingers with a neat bite. Then she sat back, and chewed, thoughtfully. And then, in a soft, almost hushed voice, she said, distinctly, "Thank youl"
The pod fell from his fingers and the frail boat rocked perilously, at his shocked surprise. "You spoke! You can talk, and English, too."
"Yes," she said, with careful, odd intonation. "I understand this talk. You, also?"
"But of course!" he said, and then caught himself, for there was no "of course" about it. He was as green as she, with nothing to show that he was anything else. How could she be expected to guess?
This is incredible." He choked and coughed on bean-fragments, gulped them out of the way hurriedly. "How . . . where did you learn? Who taught you?"
"We go on, now," she said, swallowing and putting her hands to the edges.
He shrugged, pushed aside the questions that surged to his mind, and set himself to join her. But there was one thing.
"You have a name? What do I call you?"
"I am called Lov-lee," she said, shaking the long hair back from her face and smiling.
"Lov-lee." He copied her pronunciation, and grinned. I'm with Greenies, he thought, continuing to row. I'm a Greenie . . . I'm accepted. That much is obvious. And, if the rest are like her, then they are intelligent . . . human! Where are we going? How do they find their way? So many questions kept him busy that she had stopped her rowing before he noticed. Then a quick glance over his shoulder showed him that they were gliding into the black mouth of a tunnel at the water-edge. A tangle of vinelike fronds brushed across his back as he bent. He heard Martha mutter, felt her sit up . . . and they were in blackness as tangible as velvet. He could see the twin violet lamps of eyes . . . Lovely's, and then Martha's, as she sat up.
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"Keep very still," he warned. "We're in a tunnel. It's all right."
"We're nearly home, now," she whispered, as if she knew.
"I hope you're right," he said, but so softly that she couldn't hear. A few more moments of the blackness, and then there was the growing light of a pearly glow, and they slid out into thick mist, so that he couldn't see anything, not even Lovely, who was no more than a foot away from his face. The boat jarred, gently, and was still. He felt Lovely scramble out, and her touch on his arm. He crouched, gave his hand to Martha, helped her out, warned her to stand still, then passed her a bag, took one himself, and got out, on to wet warm moss. Blurredly, he saw Lovely seize the leaf-boat, to drag it up high out of the water and turn it over. The mist was patchy, tempting the sight one moment, blanketing it the next. Still, if they were to be afoot, they might as well get into harness. He helped Martha into her pack, shrugged into his own, stuck the sword-leaf into a strap fold, and waited. Lovely loomed up, her hand out
"Come ... 1" she said, simply, and was gone again, into the gray glow.
"Hold on!" he called, keeping his voice as calm as he could. "I've lost you. I can't see a thing." In a moment, she was back, her face close to his in the mist, that puzzled expression in her eyes again.
"You cannot see?"
"Not in this stuff, I can't." And she was gone again, with just the echo of a word. "Stay ... I" And he peered vainly to try to see where she was. Was this his failure? Was he supposed to be able to see, through this stuff? She could, pretty obviously, but how? Did she have a built-in radar, or X-ray eyes, or what? And, as the moments crept by, he wondered if she had gone off and left them? Just as he was beginning to consider this as a possibility, she was back, a dark shape in the gray.
"Hold," she said, and pushed something into his hand. He seized it, a slim, flexible, cord-like something, and gave it a turn round his knuckles. Off she went again, and the cord came taut, pulling him. He took a better grip on Martha's hand.
"Come on," he said. "We start walking, now." The un-
89derfoot was slippery and wet, and, by the feel of it, led slightly up hill. He had the feeling of a slope on either side, as if they were climbing the valley of a little stream. And it seemed hotter than ever, or was that just an illusion, because of the thick soupy mist? He plodded on, heavily, with Martha a gende drag on his left hand, and that enigmatic cord dangling in front, coming up taut every time he slowed down the least bit. He imagined the slim, lithe green girl striding on ahead, setting this cracking pace, and marveled. She must be every bit as worn as he was, yet she didn't let up. And she was quick in the wit, too. He knew, as positively as if she had shouted it, that she had been surprised by his inability to see in this soupy stuff. It must have been a completely new problem to her. Yet she had met and solved it in a matter of moments.
He felt the thing in his hand, investigating it with his finger-tips. It was a root, or a creeper of some kind. Not a "made" thing, anyway. And that gave him something to think about in real earnest. Intelligent people, anywhere, made things. Tools, weapons, ornaments, clothing, artifacts of some kind . . . didn't they? Or was that just one land of intelligence? And could you call that boat a "made" thing . . . or not? And, come to think of it, what had he ever made?
Onward, still uphill, and steeper now, but no let up in the pace. He urged his weary limbs to keep going, one step after another, feeling Martha as a growing drag, but the girl on the forward end of that cord had sinews like wire and leather, and no idea of the word "rest."
"I'm tired," Martha whimpered. "Can't we stop, now?" But the dangling cord showed no inclination to stop.
"Damn this place," he mumbled. "We've been on the move every blasted minute since we landed . . . going, going, all the time, and never getting anywhere. . . . No sense in it . . ." And he was just in time to check himself from blundering into Lovely, who had stopped, ahead of them. "What now?" he demanded, blearily, as she turned and touched him.
"Now we go down," she said, pantingly. "The path is small, and I cannot be with you. But I will wait, at the bottom." Then she stooped into a crouch, and seemed to vanish into the mist at his feet. The cord in his hand was limp.
"Can we rest, now?" Martha whispered, sagging where she stood. "I'm tired, Tony. I want to rest!"
"All right," he said, backing off a bit. "You squat here and rest, while I investigate."
He slipped out of his pack, holding on to the cord and looping it. It was about nine feet long. Casting it out in front, he followed, cautiously, and went on his knees when it seemed to tug at him. Then his groping hand found an edge, and a blank. He felt down, getting down on his chest. A rough wall-face. A cliff! But where was the path? He swung the cord, felt it touch something. The swirling mist-veil parted a moment, and he saw it, no more than four feet down, and no more than eighteen inches wide, either. He lay still, visualizing it long after the vapor had closed in, and liking it less every minute.
But, he told himself, grimly, the more I think about it, the less I'm going to like it . . . and there isn't any other way but down there. So we might as well get on with it. He coiled up the creeper again, wriggled back to where Martha sat.
"There's a path," he told her. "And it will be all right, if we're very careful. I'll fasten our packs together."
He freed the straps, made a belt of one, buckled it about her waist, made another for himself, linked the remaining two, hauled them tight around the two bags, and took up the creeper. Threading it through the bag-straps, he knotted one end to her belt and the other to his own.
"Now," he said, "we'd better start. Come on." He urged her to her feet, led her cautiously until she reached the edge, made her kneel, and then wriggle backwards, while he held her wrists. To his immense relief, she found firm footing while still breast-high to the edge.
"All right, now. Stay still." He moved along, lowered himself over and got his feet set. The path dipped sharply, as he scrambled along, dr
agging the bags. "Follow the rope!" he called, and waited until she was close to him. "Now, hang on and keep still again, until I've moved and got set." And so they went, alternately, groping and fumbling, down into the mist. To his relief, what had seemed nightmarish in prospect, became monotony in effect after the first few minutes. In that mist, they lost all sense of height. Their world shrank to a small thing, a bubble in
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space, bounded by a rough wall and a jagged path. He shuffled on, half-turned, and his shoulder met solid rock. A dead end. He waited for her, until there was a loop of cord, and gently lowered the bags over the edge, crouching down. They rested on something. He turned, let himself over, groping, and found another ledge, zig-zagging back from the first. Helping her down, he went on again, meeting and parting from her in the mist.
Then, dully, he noticed that they were not parting any more. He could still see her, right out to the full stretch of the cord. The mist was thinning. Again the path broke and doubled back on itself, giving him a moment to look down. There, below and out, was a haze of colors, of blurred glowing lines and patches. Down they went, yard by yard, to see that these were trees, and then there was no mist at all, but a clear, faintiy-tinted glow, a haze. The tree-tops came near, until they seemed close enough, almost, to touch, and the down-dropping track, angling to and fro, brought them into a different kind of world from any they had seen, so far. They stood and looked across into a network of fiery beams and struts, branches and great flat leaves . . . and life, running and leaping, crawling and chattering.
They began the trail once more, weary despite the brief rest. They had descended, below the level of the lower branches. The scene had opened out into haze-color distance, and Anthony could see a huge valley, with standing fire-trees, the distant glint of waves on a lake-shore, a dark mossy slope . . . and people. Green people, a great host of them down there.
Straight down, as much as he dared to look over, the foot of the cliff gave on to a gende slope, about thirty feet or so below, and there were people here, too, a dozen of them, stretched out, resting. He could discern great bundles, net-like, containing various-colored fruits and berries— at least, they looked like berries—all in a pile. He straightened up, thoughtfully. That might be the party they had come with, those mysterious ones in the other boats. Lovely ought to be there, but it was impossible to identify her, at this distance. All at once, he was impatient to be down, but he fought the impulse. This would be a damn silly time to slip, to make a mess of things. He waited for Martha to inch her way close.
"Hang on," he said. "Don't look now, but we have an audience. Keep still a minute while I unfasten this line. I think it will be safe to let the bags drop the rest of the way." He took the two ends of the creeper, slid the bean-bags over the side, let them hang steady, then released them, watching them go down with a slap on the dark green turf. One bounce, and they were still.
"Now"—he gave her a grin—"let's go, with a bit of style!"
"There must be nearly a hundred of them" she gasped. "All watching us!" He went ahead of her, as steadily as he could manage, until the track was no more than a small jump down to the turf. That jump cost him the last bit of starch in his legs and he swayed as he turned to help her down. Then in a silence that he could feel, he led her to where their packs had fallen. He saw the dark hollow of a cave-mouth, and an old man squatting before it. An old green man, his skin still glossy, but his face lined and grooved with the toll-marks of much living, his hair faded until it was the color of antique silver, his great purple eyes broodingly calm.
A girl crouched by his side. Anthony recognized her at once, and was grateful for her smile, but his gaze came back to the old man, and was held there in fascination. Those eyes held nothing of a smile, or welcome, or anything except deep curiosity. And power. Anthony stared, and the ground under his feet suddenly began to tilt and reel. Feeling control slipping away, he tried to speak, but his mouth refused to work, his throat was dry, and the ground came up and hit him in the face.
He was stretched out in the dark, flat on his back. Voices grunted close by. As he came more awake he felt a headache unlike any he had ever known. Just for a moment he had the image of probing fingers that had reached inside his skull, seeking for what they might find. The vision went as quickly as it had come. He stirred, got to his knees, and saw the dimness of the cave-mouth, began crawling towards it over a mossy surface. His hand brushed and fell on a soft bundle, like a plastic sack of some kind, with odd angular objects inside. He groped awhile, then abandoned the thing, whatever it was, and crawled on, out into
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the glowing light. The scene outside was changed only in that the gathering of green people had dispersed. The old man sat where he had been, as if he had become part of the picture. And Lovely sat by the old man's knee. Anthony paused in the cave-mouth to listen, but he could make nothing of what they said, and he added this mystery to the growing total of disjointed information about his own people.
For he was more than ever convinced, now, that they were a people. In the past hours he had seen too much to believe otherwise. Now, obviously, he was listening to them speaking their own language. But that girl had spoken English every bit as good as his own, if oddly accented. He moved, crept out of the cave-mouth and stood. The girl turned, smiled, and waved him to come close. The old man's eyes shifted, following him as he went the few steps, and settled down on a knee. Anthony made a bold but natural assumption, and put it into one word.
"Chief?"
For one breathless moment there was no response, then the old face broke into a stare of utter amazement, transforming it entirely from its age-old calm. Those deep eyes blinked and grew wide.
"You, also, speak this tongue?"
"It's the only one I know."
"As I told you," the girl said. "And they were wandering, not knowing, when we found them. Are they not a great wonder?"
"Indeed!" the old man nodded. "The woman also speaks thus? But her eyes are as ours. Yours are not." He looked at Anthony. "Never have I heard of, nor seen, one of our people with eyes of that strange tint. What are you?"
"I wish I knew," Anthony sighed. "There's such a lot I don't know. I feel that I am one of you, and yet I can't be sure. My father was an Earthman. At least, that's what I've always been led to believe. And I don't know how much you understand of what I'm saying, anyway. You know what an Earthman is—a human?"
The girl smiled and said, "Earth is a planet of the Solar System very similar to this one, which the humans call Venus. The humans came here with much difficulty in strange boats to be friendly with us and to teach us, also learn
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from us. But this atmosphere"—she pronounced the word with great care, and made a sweeping gesture around and above—"is not good for them. They call it hot, and it makes them quickly tired. Many of them die. We think they will go away when they are all tired."
She said it very simply, like a child reciting a lesson, but her words were enough to chum Anthony's wits into hopeless confusion. The implications, alone, made him reek
"Who told you all that?"
"It is a true saying?"
"Some of it is, yes. But the rest of it is utterly false. Who told you? Who taught you to talk like this?" He half-knew the answer before the old man spoke, and yet the words were like blows.
"There was a human here. He lived with us. He was a friend, and he taught us to speak his tongue because he could not learn ours. He died."
"Died? When? How long ago?"
"What is long?" the old man asked, his old face calm again now. "This was a great mystery to us, when Doctor spoke of it. Of days and weeks and time. This we do not understand. Before this one was a child, Doctor came." He indicated Lovely with a grave nod. "With him, also, came a woman. His woman. Both were very tired always, but they talked much, and taught us to talk to them. Then the woman began to swell with child, as our women do, and it was a bad thing for her, just as it is with
our women. Doctor said we should hunt the bean for her, and we did, because she was good. Always, before that, we had given the bean only to men and women, never to young ones, or any who fall sick, or are with child, because it would be waste, and beans are few. But Doctor told us to crush beans and make juice of them, for the sick and weak. And it was a good thing. Now we do it always. You have brought many beans, in the two bags."
"Oh those!" Anthony had almost forgotten his treasure. "You can have them. Share them out among the rest of the people."
"That is good." Lovely smiled. Anthony returned her smile, but was impatient to hear the rest.
"The human woman had her child, but it was dead," the old man went on. "This happens also with us, many
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times. Doctor was angry. Other humans came in a machine, with special things to eat, but the woman was sick in her head, I think. Two of our women were with child. This was one of them—" he nodded to Lovely again. "The other one would have died, because the woman died as she delivered. But Doctor was there, and took the baby and gave it to his woman to care for. Then he gave the child some of the special things to eat, and became pink, like a human. This was a great wonder to us."
"Wait! Wait!" Anthony implored, trying desperately to fill in the gaps in the laconic narrative. "The human woman took a green baby and gave it something to eat that made it white, you say? A boy baby?"
"No. It was a female, like this one."
Anthony was dashed for a moment, but only a moment. Memories flooded back, enough to tell him the rest of it. "The white woman became well enough to be able to leave, to return to the other humans, didn't she?"
"That is right." The old man nodded. "But Doctor stayed with us. He was very sick, and there was not enough space in the machine for him. He stayed. The machine was to come again for him, later. But it did not come. Then, when this one was become a woman, ready for mating, he died."
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