Read Ebook: Survival by Wells Basil Doolin Joseph Illustrator

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Ebook has 210 lines and 10543 words, and 5 pages

"Ssst," warned Masson peering along a steaming tunnel of vision that a chance breath of moist air had opened. "A raft, and half a dozen Frogs!"

They relayed the word back to the seven smaller craft and four of them swiftly drew abreast of the canoe of Masson and Ellis. The other three canoes remained to guard the cargo boats with their three paddlers.

"We'll investigate," ordered Masson softly. "Unless they attack, do not harm them. With the few words of their language we have learned perhaps we can find where the rocky island is located."

"Fat chance," growled the huge-shouldered scarred young Frog whose name was Dolan. "They attack and talk later."

"Those are orders," said Masson firmly, his eyes boring into those of the other. "When you elected me leader of this expedition I took full control. Suggestions I will listen to, but you must follow orders!"

Dolan's eyes wavered. "I didn't say nothing," he grunted.

Two canoes slipped silently away to the left and the other two sped toward the right. Masson continued straight ahead toward the raft.

Suddenly the mist parted. The foggy outlines of a half-dozen Frogs were revealed. And across the crudely plaited surface of the raft of buoyant thidin stalks lay the bound body of a young female Frog. Masson had time to see that the female wore a brief skirt and confining band of beaten vegetable fiber--a woman stolen from their own village of New Crayton--before the natives hurled their lumpy cudgels of nik-nik at him.

He ducked. The clubs missed, only one of them thudding into the hide-bound gunwale beside him, and then the frog men had plunged into the familiar medium of the warm sea. They swam swiftly toward the two men in the boat, their bone knives in their powerful webbed fists.

Masson hurled his spear at one of them. A gurgling cry of pain attested to the accuracy of his aim. He saw Ellis' spear leap forward and bury itself in the sea, and then his bow was in his hands and the bowstring swiftly nocking into the bone-tipped shaft of an arrow. But the frog men were upon them.

The other canoes converged then. Arrows frothed the water around the swimming savages. Blood dyed the water with shifting red. And the ghastly coils of glistening snake-like things of the deep, attracted by the blood, fought for the bodies. The water boiled into frenzy as shark-like fish came also and battled with the coiling scavengers of the deep. The canoes rocked and threatened to swamp despite the frantic paddling of the men.

All of the Frogs were dead, but their raft bobbed, unharmed, outward from the seething cauldron of fighting monsters. The bound woman watched with fearful eyes as Masson and Ellis paddled closer, and then she cried out with joy as she saw their weapons and the simple breech clouts.

"Thank God," she gasped, as Masson stepped aboard and freed her bonds. She chafed gently at the swollen flesh where her gray-skinned legs and arms had been bound.

Masson swallowed. Hideous though she might have been by any Earthly standards, to him she was beautiful. Her body was firm and shapely and her eyes were soft and liquid. And in his body there coursed the blood of the Frog People. Already he was forgetting the standards of beauty back on Earth. Grace, strength, and the clean-cut planes of the body are the secret of loveliness.

"I cannot blame them for stealing you," he said, thick-tongued. "I have not seen you before in New Crayton. Who are you?"

"Irene Croft," she said, smiling. "And you, I know, are Glade Masson. I saw you working on these canoes before I was captured."

The ex-instructor of history felt his mouth drop open. This most charming of all females he had seen on Venus was Irene Croft? Croft, the slab-sided, bony woman who had taught languages at Crayton College--the fussy old maid without a saving grace or charm save her intelligence and quick understanding? They had been good friends back there on Earth, but now--well, friendship would not be enough.

"Irene," he said enthusiastically, "you're a--a--honey."

His face turned purple as she smiled her gracious acceptance of his compliment. Words gurgled impotently in his throat as he helped her aboard the canoe.

"Son," said Charles Ellis gruffly, "you've got it bad. And," he scowled at the trim figure sitting between them, "I don't blame you."

This time it was Irene's face and neck that purpled delicately.

"Sorry we can't take you back to New Crayton," said Masson, his grin anything but sorry, "but we must be almost to the rocky island we are hunting."

The girl flashed a quick smile at Masson, a smile that would have given the ordinary Earthman a series of nightmares. "You are right about the island," she said. "I have picked up a fair knowledge of the speech of the Butrads."

"So that's what they call themselves," broke in Ellis. "Sorry, Miss Croft. Go on."

"The island is called Tular," she said. "They were taking me there to give me as a bride to the God-From-the-Clouds, as I translated it, but I feel sure that I was to be sacrificed in some ghastly religious fashion."

"From-Clouds," Ellis was musing. "Probably a meteorite." His face brightened. "A meteorite may mean iron!" he cried.

Masson's paddle dipped steadily into the murky waters of the cast sea that covers all Venus. Floating miniature islets of thidin swirled past, islets that some day might grow to be huge, matted sub-continents of green life. Ghostly islands of thidin, their swampy floors giving root to the stocky trees and shrubs of the Venusian jungle growth, loomed out of the endless blanket of fog. The throaty deep roar of the scaly vallids and the splash of their bodies broke the thick silence.

"And iron means machines, and weapons," he said thoughtfully, without turning around. "Machines--and plows. Weapons--and hoes. We will build factories, but we will also build homes."

Irene's voice cut across their musings. "Supposing the meteor is not iron?" she demanded.

"The sea is full of metal," said Ellis doggedly. "We will take magnesium from it. We did it on Earth. And the island will contain metal--it must."

"Spears!" called Masson unexpectedly, and then, tersely, "vallids just ahead."

The canoes slowed and sheered off from the pulpy underwater shelf of the island Masson had almost rammed. Hundreds of the scaly monsters floated sleepily in the water, their yellow spines and bulging eyes carpeting the shallow depths for several acres. Ashore dozens of others crawled about on their stubby bowed legs searching for the tasty vegetable tidbits that their saurian palates desired.

Luckily none of the vallids saw them, or if they did they were not interested, and they backed water until the eternal low-lying clouds of the wet planet shielded their ungainly craft from view. They commenced paddling cautiously away toward the right only to again encounter the shore of an island swarming with the ugly snouted saurians.

At intervals they attempted to proceed again in the direction they had been heading but always they encountered more vallids and the low-lying shore of an island. An idea was beginning to dawn in Masson's gray-skinned skull. This must be a larger island than any they had before encountered.

"Perhaps," he said, as the other canoes drew abreast, "this is the shore of Tular. There would be swamplands and mud flats if it were. Thidin would grow up about the central mountain."

A slim-faced frog man named Reppart nodded. "Probably you're right," he agreed. "Never saw so many vallids before." He shrugged his shoulders. "But how do we get through them to the land?"

"Should be a river." Ellis was dipping out the water that the ceaseless heavy mist of rain poured into the boat. He gestured with the hollow gourd-shaped husk of a nik-nik fruit. "We follow the river in."

"But we have found no river," sneered Dolan. "What now, General Masson?"

Irene Croft's softer voice cut across their conversation.

"You're right," cried Masson exultantly. He picked up his paddle and sent the canoe probing forward into the thick murk of the cloudy wall ahead.

Three, or perhaps four miles the men from Earth paddled upstream along a mile-wide channel that carried the steady surge of the river seaward. They came at last to the first waterfall, a low rocky shelf that lifted but five feet above the green floor of swampy thidin vines and the grayish ooze that floored them.

The firmness of rock was welcome underfoot. The slow darkness of the Venusian night was falling and so they made their camp on a level shelf of rock a few hundred feet back from the waterfall's muted roar.

And with morning they pushed onward up the river.

The stream forked a mile above the first waterfall. They chose the larger stream on the right and paddled between low sullen black cliffs of basalt for perhaps another three miles. Here a lake spread outward fanwise from three giant cataracts that boomed and frothed as they poured over a sheer hundred-foot precipice.

"Power," said Masson. "Power enough for a dozen Pittsburghs. Power to light all the cities of Earth."

"This is a large island," Ellis nodded. "Such a volume of water requires an enormous watershed." He smiled confidently. "There will be metal here. This will be the home of our children."

Masson found his hand had unconsciously clasped that of Irene. He pressed the velvety softness of the webbed fingers and the woman's eyes lifted curiously to his own. A steady, intense glow burned far back in their depths. Her lips parted, unsmiling.

"Our children," he whispered softly, and her eyes dropped as purple spread slowly upward from her rounded firm neck.

She pressed his hand timidly; dropped it, and started up the rocky ledge that led from the lake's left-hand shore. And behind her climbed the frog men from the village of New Crayton.

Their canoes they had concealed in the tangled jungle growth. From here their feet would have to serve--their feet and the tough sandals of vallid hide that they now donned for the first time.

The sheer escarpment gave way to a vast level plain of jungle growth and swampy reeds. The jungle was almost impenetrable and so they decided to swim up the river. The eternal clouds of Venus seemed to have thinned as they climbed for now they stood within a grayish dome that extended a hundred feet or more on every hand.

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