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Ebook has 163 lines and 9271 words, and 4 pages

POISON PLANET

by WILLIAM OBERFIELD

... It was only a muffled gun-shot, deep in the rank, fetid jungles of Venus--a single bullet from the gun of the gaunt, blazing-eyed man called Heinie. But it plunged the crew of the VENUS I into a Hell from which there was no return....

Captain James McBride didn't know exactly what to make of it at first. The first Earthmen ever to set foot on Venus, he and his crew had come armed to the teeth, fully prepared to fight wild elephants, giant tigers, pre-historic monsters or anything an imaginative mind might dream up.

When they found evidence of absolutely no danger at all they stood around with their heavy weapons and felt mighty foolish. The only signs of animal life were the small creatures that scampered right up to the men and chattered at them, unafraid, and birds more evident by sound than by sight. There were no trails made by giant animals, no heavy, frightening sounds in the jungle about them. Only a misty, drowsing calm.

The mist was always there, they were to find out later, steaming up from the wet ground by day and condensing in a blanket of life-giving water by night. Otherwise, Venus resembled mildly tropical Earth without storm and tempest. The lack of these made one think of thunder and lightning as some unseen, unknown entity bound to Earth alone in chains of gravity.

The only really unpleasant note was the condition of the ship in which they had come. The underside was a mass of twisted steel and buckled plates, where it had come down considerably harder than it had ever been intended to come down. It was something that could never take to space again, even if the "H" tanks hadn't been torn loose to gush out their contents.

Communication with Earth was out. A transmitter small enough to fit the ship and yet powerful enough to breach millions of miles of space, as well as penetrate two atmospheres, just wasn't made. The expedition was on its own.

The orders were conditional. If possible, they were to set up an outpost on Venus, as others had done several years before on Mars. Consisting mainly of scientists, the crew was to find out all it could about the new world. In one year the second ship would follow, bringing engineers and laborers. The scientists were to have, by that time, the information required to form the first colony quickly, wisely, and safely.

If confronted with insurmountable obstacles, they were to return at once to Earth with whatever information they might have as to the nature of the obstacles.

McBride grinned in spite of his regret over the loss of his ship and looked at the wreckage. That sort of made the orders unconditional.

Things could have been worse, he thought. Not one of the ten men in the expedition had been lost or even badly injured. And, Venus being the land of plenty that it had turned out to be, it was beginning to look as if the stay here would be a pleasant one.

He was just starting to get some of his old spunk back when Jeff Flaunders came up to him with a worried frown on his face.

Because of the limited space aboard the ship, Flaunders was a combination of several men, as were most of the others. Specially trained for the expedition, he handled anything that went under the heading of botany, biology or zoology.

Now he was looking worried.

"You look a lot like bad news," McBride said as Flaunders drew near. "Might have known there'd be a catch to this world."

"More than a catch," Flaunders said. "I hope none of the men has eaten anything native to Venus."

McBride shook his head. "They haven't if they've followed orders. I told them not to touch anything until you had made a report." He looked at the other questioningly. "Poison?"

"We brought twelve white rats and two monkeys along for experimental purposes," Flaunders said. "Now we have only six rats. Each of the others we fed a different kind of native fruit or meat. That was about five hours ago. In the past hour they've gone into convulsions one after another. Seemed to go blind, too. Died within minutes."

"You tried it on just the six rats and not the monkeys?" McBride asked, and got a nod from Flaunders. "Then that's just six things tested. Maybe something edible will turn up yet."

"Small chance." Flaunders was positive. "Thompson used a little of his chemistry and found a substance he couldn't identify, not only in the stuff we fed the rats but in twenty-some other plants. He even found it in the flesh of the animals we caught. That makes it pretty certain that it will be found in everything. When the rats died we pegged that substance as the poison.

"What to do about it is another question. Since it's entirely new to us it would probably take years to find a way to neutralize it, and it plays such an integral part in the structure of everything on Venus that we'd have one sweet time trying to completely draw it out. Anyway, a lot of needed lab equipment was smashed in the wreck. That makes it even more of a problem."

McBride listened, frowned and rubbed his cheek. "In other words, we might as well give up any idea of living off the fat of the land."

"That's about the size of it," Flaunders agreed. "Our best bet, the way things stand now, would be to try and have a garden going before our supply of food runs out."

"Check," said McBride. "But the seed was brought along just in case the soil and climate should prove suitable for planting. What do you make of that?"

"Climate ought to be just about perfect," Flaunders grunted. "As to the soil, Thompson and I will check on that right away."

In another day a few things had been learned. There was now no doubt about the poisonous nature of Venus. The infuriating thing about it was that the creatures native to Venus thrived about them on food that would put out the lights for good for any Earth-born animal.

But that was not quite so hard to take when they found that the soil was suitable for Earth crops. That left nothing to get excited about.

So they thought, until Venus turned stubborn.

No one knew exactly how stubborn Venus could get until the garden location was being cleared of weeds. They had gone over about fifty feet of the clearing, working earnestly and not bothering to look back, when one of the men--a lanky individual called Henry Higgins--turned to look back, put one grimy fist on his hip, hunched his shoulders, stuck out his chin and hollered, "Damn!"

The others turned and looked surprised. Not that Higgins' well-known exaggerative ways any longer surprised them, but what Higgins was looking at might surprise anyone, including the botanist in Flaunders.

The eight-or-ten feet of ground directly behind the men was clear of weeds. But at the far edge of this cleared space little green shoots were thrusting inquisitive noses above the ground. Beyond these were one-inch plants, then two-inch, and four and six and eight, on up. They formed a slope up to the edge of the clearing.

"Damn!" Higgins said again, and tossed away his spade.

Someone laughed uncertainly. The others scratched their heads, cast blank stares at one another and forgot how to keep their mouths closed.

"Just what in blazes do you make of that?" McBride asked of Flaunders.

Flaunders could be quite an optimist when he wanted to; he was one of those rare persons who seem to grow stronger with each failure. At least on the surface.

"Only what I see," he replied, not willing to show consternation. "Amazingly rapid growth, but they're still only weeds. It's just going to take a little applied science."

"Maybe." McBride didn't like it. "But I've done a little farming in my time; know what it is to worry a chunk of farmland out of the raw. And the nature of Earth is dead compared to this."

"Bunk!" Flaunders scoffed. "Work, certainly. But we'll be eating fresh corn in two months!"

It started out like that. Two weeks of hacking and digging, of specially prepared weed-killer and the aid of every trick known to science, and there was a strip of dark, rich ground all ready for planting. It looked like things were really beginning to roll. They did roll. Right up against a blank wall.

A few days after the planting, Flaunders was looking at a handful of black spider-things and swearing under his breath. The shriveled spider-things were seeds brought from Earth. They were shot through with hairlike roots, and that was the strange thing. It was strange because the roots were not their own.

It took several more days for Flaunders to understand. When he did he took on an attitude faintly remindful of a cornered rat. In a spot, but frustrated to fighting anger. The ship had contained enough food for only about two months to begin with, and more than two weeks had now come out of that. Starvation was becoming a very real possibility in his mind.

"We're up against something big," he said, peeved with himself for having to admit it. "We're fighting millions of years of evolution."

McBride sensed something disturbing in the other's voice. Maybe a trace of fear. "What do you mean?" he said.

Flaunders enlarged. "A very long time ago a war started here on Venus. It was a war among plants. You find the same thing on Earth, too, but not on this scale. There must have been certain 'aggressive' plants which threatened to force out all others. The others, in order to survive, had to evolve into something even more deadly to other plants. Once started, it had to keep going. Now, after millions of years, they've evolved into things capable, of vicious little tricks you'd never be able to count.

"What happened to our seeds is one of them. Some of the roots extend into microscopic threads hardly more than streaks of single molecules. You can't dig them out and they escape all the ordinary weed-fighting methods. One of their cute little tricks is to attach themselves to other plants and seeds and absorb them, strangely enough not harming their own species. Add to that the rapid growth, almost comparable to the motion of the minute hand of a clock, and planting anything from Earth among them is something like throwing a housecat into a den of wild lions."

"A very pretty picture," McBride groaned. "We can't go back to Earth for a year, everything on Venus is poison and we have less than two months' supply of food. Now you as much as admit that there will be no garden. I'm suddenly getting a headache."

That was a sane enough statement. They had the seeds and they had the soil. With good health and the will to work, what was to stop them?

Only weeds.

"Only weeds," McBride said ten weeks later. "They couldn't be responsible for this! Ten weeks of breaking our backs and losing our minds, and you can't even tell that we've done anything. It must be a nightmare!"

Flaunders was a man all washed out, a man badly stung. How hard for an optimist to face defeat!

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