Chapter IV

There are no adventures in space. Either a space-flight is safe monotony, or quick death. But as the two Guardsmen approached the vast mysterious dome of S.S.C. somewhere in the Mesozoic nightmare, the vaporous, steaming, endlessly stretching rain-forest of Venus, they stumbled with wracking weariness. Reptile-infested swamps and steaming seas, foul-smelling, rotten--it was an incredibly perilous planet.

For five hours they had burned their way through giant flora and fauna and sweat, H-guns hot with almost steady usage. And then Venard finally parted some phosphorescent, glowing lichen and there the gigantic dome rose up and up and lost itself in thick mist. But between them and their goal was a hellish nightmare barrier, spilling stinking muck into a placidly steaming sea.

Larson mopped at mud and sweat-slimed face, stared in fearful awe. Venard swore. They were blocked by a moat, a green, oozing mud-river, flowing oilily. From out of it, projected huge spines, ribs, and warts covering towering, brilliant, multi-colored mounds--that _moved_! Scaly mountains of shifting, radioactive lime. "Giant mollusc bed!" gasped Venard. Low tide now, but during high tide the sea on their right would back up this far. But high tide was hours distant.

There were thousands of the molluscs, every size, shape and color. Venard's head went quickly to either side. "It goes out of sight both ways, Kewpie Doll. Into the sea and into the swamp. Trapped!"

Larson squirmed, muttering, "Them bivalves are flesh-eaters. Look!"

A _gruoon_, a flying reptile, had started a dive across the thick air toward the fungus-covered dome of S.S.C. A giant bivalve, at least fifty meters wide, snapped open. Its lifting shell-half dripped an avalanche of tendrils and muddy slime. A pliable snout whipped upwards. On its end, a formless pliant mouth full of row after row of rasp-like teeth, closed on the _gruoon_, sucked it into the pallid grey pulsating interior of the bivalve. Its shells closed with slow certainty on the writhing, screaming _gruoon_.

"We can't make that trek on foot, Kewpie Doll. Got to get back to the ship. We landed on the wrong side. Got to rush things though, and get the Zharkon's brain before the Marties try illegal entry and ruin everything. Come on. I'll get you inside S.S.C., don't worry."

"I'll worry either way--hey, listen!" He froze. His eyes rolled up and followed the sound droning invisibly above the impenetrable envelope of mist--the long _hissshowwww_ of a decelerating Martian war-ship.

"That's the boys," growled Venard darkly. His jaw knotted. "Not time to go back to the ship. Probably five hours--if we made it at all." His eyes studied the hundred meter-wide barrier of quivering, snapping, hungry molluscs. "I wonder," he murmured, "if we could do it?"

But Larson, moaning and trembling, was already waist-deep in the iridescent slime. Venard grinned and followed jerkily. "We'll try to crawl from one to the other," he managed to say. "So keep your remaining hand free. Don't draw your blaster unless you have to."

Followed by Larson, now behind him, Venard started climbing gingerly up the jagged, weirdly-glowing mollusc. Larson puffed painfully, swearing. They were half way across the shell before it shifted. They crouched down, hanging on desperately. Around them, shells snapped open and shut hungrily. Mouthed probosci were snaking about, dragging things out of the air.

"If we can stay on these things," gasped Venard. "Haven't seen any of them interested in each other. This baby has a keen sense of taste and smell; not much sense of touch, though."

Their shell suddenly rocked violently. The two Guardsmen squeezed themselves between two roughly porous spines for support, drew their blasters. The top half of the bivalve was slowly lifting.

They clung precariously by friction alone while the shell shook, rose higher and higher. It shifted, and fell so that its hinge was uppermost. Larson yelped, slipped, almost fell within reach of the pulsing pink-tissued maw. His face was dead white.

The gigantic pinkish foot of the mollusc was oozing out and out, away from them toward the opposite embankment. It stopped almost across the bed; and when it withdrew toward them, in short contracting jerks, it left behind, cemented against the shell of another mollusc, a long strand of fleshy cable as big around as Larson's arm.

The mussel's foot contained a narrow groove ending at a gland which exuded a sticky substance, much like liquid glue. This hardened almost instantly when exposed to air. Their shell had placed this foot against the other mollusc, and the sticky material was forced along the groove, touched the other mollusc, adhered and hardened. Then by slowly drawing back the foot, their own shell had, with astounding speed, spun a strong cable almost across the moat.

"An anchor," shuddered Larson. "It's put out an anchor just like a ship."

"That cable's more than just an anchor, Kewpie Doll. Evolution's given him such a weak foot compared to its body weight; it has to throw out a cable and drag itself from one place to another."

The cable was tightening. The pitted shell to which they miraculously clung began to shift slightly as the cable stretched taunt. "This is too lucky a break," groaned Larson. "Getting a free ride across like this. There's a catch to it, somewhere. Venus ain't operatin' no free ferry service."

"And that's the catch!" Venard pointed. "We fastened to that other mollusc. Instead of us moving, we're pulling that other oyster out of its bed!"

Their living anchor base lifted upward slowly with a long sucking sound. Their own mollusc wasn't making enough headway even to pull himself up over other shells. Its anchor base was too weak. But not passive. It reacted violently.

"Watch out!" screamed Larson, shrinking.

The mollusc to which the cable was fastened suddenly opened its giant shells, snapped them shut with a thunderous crack. The effect was to send its great weight in a flying jump to the right about fifteen meters. The cable parted with a sighing whine, whipped out, round and back in a deadly arc. Larson screamed again. Only once. The cable swept him away into the mud. Multicolored, squid-like faces sprouting thousands of powerful filaments, writhed hungrily toward him as he struggled briefly.

A choking, helpless horror went through Venard as he saw the bivalve snap open, and then, a snaking proboscis with the filamented mouth whip out and close on Larson's twisting body to jerk him down with lightning swiftness into that pulsating abyss of hungry flesh.

It had happened awfully fast to the toughest little guy in the System.

* * * * *

Too fast for Venard even to try against invincible odds to avert his death. Eaten alive by a clam. He tried to think of things that would compensate as the mollusc spun another cable. He concentrated his eyes and thought on the taut flesh cable the bivalve had spun, the one remaining link with S.S.C. and the fulfillment of Jhongan's unknown plan. First Jhongan, then the Kewpie Doll.... He had to keep on to make their sacrifice seem worth while. Theirs and billions of others throughout the System.

The mollusc had reached the end of the cable. Its unpredictable nerve centers had decided, however, to settle down right there. Its migration was over, maybe for years. And Venard was still about fifty feet from the other side of the moat.

Acting on impulse, Venard hooked his arms over the cable and leaped toward the bank. He slid wildly, with little friction, along the new slickness of the cable strands, plopped into the mud. He crawled frantically up onto the thick vegetation just as a univalvular mouth missed him by inches, tried again. He burned it and the charred snout curled away.

He was across, lying against the mossy slimy uprising shell of S.S.C. But so what? He had two hands. Larson, their entry ticket, was gone. He steeled himself, didn't let himself think about it anymore. He brought the H-gun on down in a quick savage gesture across his left wrist....

He didn't lose consciousness. It was just a quick, jabbing, burning agony. He looked at the charred stub--and then quickly swallowed five para-pills. They calmed him, enabled him to climb to his feet and follow the elevated ramp until he came to the ingress to the scanning chamber.

He stood inside, before the wall, his legality being checked. The chromoplex room was barren except for the telescreen and the opening of the tubecar that would plunge him through the magnetized vacuum tube into the heart of S.S.C.--and to what?

Tendrils of a vague fear oozed insidiously into his mind. He couldn't shake free from a superstitious sensing of evil hidden danger. He heard the faint murmuring of concealed photo-electric mechanisms and relays. He was being thoroughly scanned.

A milky opalescense filled the screen, and coalesced; a misty outline solidified, looked stoically at Venard. Recognition shocked the Guardsman. It was Bronlen, greatest Solar physicist Terra had ever produced. Bronlen had been summoned to S.S.C. ten years ago to become its Director. Consequently, like all who came here, he had dropped out of all sight and sound. But how he had changed! Only a few among the allied worlds had ever come to S.S.C. for a long time now, even for such a vitally needed thing as a body part transplantation. S.S.C. had become a place of mystery and strange fear. A place shunned and hated.

The austere, smoothly-aged face seemed, somehow, not human. Unalive, a dull conscienceless face that shouldn't be Bronlen at all. The bloodless lips parted.

"You may enter, barbarian. You are entitled to have your left hand replaced, thought it's too bad you decided to annoy us, and didn't resign yourself to your barbaric fate of one-handedness like most other barbarians of the System have wisely decided to do. However, upon completion of the transplantation, you will be transported immediately and directly back out of S.S.C. Now the tubecar will take you directly to the hetero-transplant ward."

The screen faded and Venard, boiling with inner rage and hatred, entered the tubecar. Then, desperate helplessness as he felt the tingling numbness settling over his brain. Concealed hypnotic frequencies. They were blanking him out!