Donald A. Wollheim (ed) (19 page)

"I don't know," replied Pat, and her voice took on a queer
tinge of nervousness. "I just mean—look at it this way, Ham. A lizard is
more intelligent than a fish, but not enough to give it any advantage. Then
why
did the lizard and its descendants keep on developing intelligence?
Why—unless all life tends to become intelligent in time? And if that's true,
then there may be intelligence even here—strange, alien, incomprehensible
intelligence."

She shivered in the dark
against him. "Never mind," she said in suddenly altered tones.
"It's probably just fancy. The world out there is so weird, so
unearthly—I'm tired, Ham. It's been a long day."

He followed her down into the body of the
rocket.
As the lights flicked on, the strange landscape
beyond the ports was blotted out, and he saw only Pat, very lovely in the
scanty costume of the Cool Country.

"Tomorrow,
then," he said. "We've food for three weeks."

Tomorrow, of course, meant only time and not
daylight. They rose to the same darkness that had always blanketed the sunless
half of Venus, with the same eternal sunset green on the horizon at the
barrier. But Pat was in better humor, and went eagerly about the preparations
for their first venture into the open. She brought out the parkas of inch-thick
wool sheathed in rubber, and Ham, in his capacity as engineer, carefully
inspected the hoods, each with its crown of powerful lamps.

These were primarily for vision, of course,
but they had another purpose. It was known that the incredibly fierce
trioptes
could not face light, and thus, by using all four
beams in the helmet, one could move, surrounded by a protective aura. But that
did not prevent both of them from including in their equipment two blunt blue
automatics and a pair of the terrifically destructive flame pistols. And Pat
carried a bag at her belt, into which she proposed to drop specimens of any
dark-side flora she encountered, and fauna, too, if it proved small and
harmless enough.

They grinned at each other through their masks.

"Makes you look fat," observed Ham
maliciously, and enjoyed her sniff of annoyance.

She turned, threw open the door, and stamped
into the open.

It was different from looking out through a
port. Then the scene had some of the unreality and all of the immobility and
silence of a picture, but now it was actually around them, and the cold breath
and mournful voice of the Under-wind proved definitely enough that the world
was real. For a moment they stood in the circlet of light from the rocket
ports, staring awe-struck at the horizon where the unbelievable peaks of the
Greater Eternities towered black against the false sunset.

Nearer, for as far as vision reached through
that sunless, moonless, starless region, was a desolate tumbled plain where
peaks, minarets, spires, and ridges of ice and stone rose in indescribable and
fantastic shapes, carved by the wild artistry of the
Underwind
.

Ham slipped a padded arm around Pat, and was
surprised to feel her shiver. "Cold?" he asked, glancing at the dial
thermometer on his wrist. "It's only thirty-six below."

"I'm not cold," replied Pat.
"It's the scenery; that's all." She moved away. "I wonder what
keeps the place as warm as it is. Without sunlight you'd think—"

"Then you'd be wrong," cut in Ham. "Any engineer knows
that gases diffuse. The Upper Winds are going by just five or six miles over
our heads, and they naturally carry a lot of heat from the desert beyond the
twilight zone. There's some diffusion of the warm air into the cold, and then,
besides, as the warm winds cool, they tend to sink. And, what's more, the
contour of the country has a lot to do with it."

He paused. "Say," he went on
reflectively, "I shouldn't be surprised if we found sections near the
Eternities where there was a down draft, where the Upper Winds slid right along
the slope and gave certain places a fairly bearable climate."

He followed Pat as she poked around the
boulders near the edge of the circle of light from the rocket.

"Ha!" she exclaimed. "There it
is, Ham! There's our specimen of dark-side plant life."

She bent over a gray bulbous mass. "
Lichenous
or
fungoid
," she
continued. "No leaves, of course; leaves are only useful in sunlight. No
chlorophyl
for the same reason.
A very
primitive, very simple plant, and yet—in some ways—not simple at all.
Look, Ham—a highly developed circulatory system
I"

He leaned closer, and in the dim yellow light from the ports he saw the
fine tracery of veins she indicated.

"That," she proceeded, "would
indicate a sort of heart and —I wonder!"
Abrupdy
she thrust her dial thermometer against the fleshy mass, held it there a
moment, and then peered at it. "Yes! Look how the
needle's
moved, Ham. It's warm!
A warm-blooded plant.
And when
you think of it, it's only natural, because that's the one sort of plant that
could live in a region forever below freezing. Life
must
be lived in liquid water."

She tugged at the thing, and with a sullen plump it came free, and dark
driblets of liquid welled out of the torn root.

"Ugh!" exclaimed Ham. "What a disgusting thing
! '
And tore the bleeding
mandragore
,'
eh? Only they were supposed to scream when you uprooted them."

He paused. A low, pulsing, wailing whimper came out of the quivering
mass of pulp, and he turned a startled gaze on Pat. "Ugh!" he grunted
again.
"Disgusting!"

"Disgusting? Why, it's a beautiful
organism! It's adapted perfectly to its environment."

"Well, I'm glad I'm an engineer,"
he growled, watching Pat as she opened the rocket's door and laid the thing on
a square of rubber within. "Come on. Let's look around."

Pat closed the door and followed him away from the rocket. Instantly the
night folded in around them like a black mist, and it was only by glancing back
at the lighted ports that Pat could convince herself that they stood in a real
world.

"Should we light our helmet lamps?" asked Ham. "We'd
better, I suppose, or risk a fall."

Before either could move farther, a sound
struck through the moaning of the
Underwind
, a wild,
fierce, unearthly shrieking like laughter in hell, hoots and howls and mirthless
chuckling noises.

"
It's
trioptsl
"
gasped Pat, forgetting plurals and grammar alike.

She was frightened; ordinarily she was as courageous as Ham, and rather
more reckless and daring, but those uncanny shrieks brought back the moments
of torment when they had been trapped in the canyon in the Mountains of
Eternity. She was badly frightened and fumbled frantically and ineffectually at
light switch and revolver.

Just as half a dozen stones hummed fast as
bullets around them, and one crashed painfully on Ham's arm, he flicked on his
lights. Four beams shot in a long cross on the glittering peaks, and the wild
laughter rose in a crescendo of pain. He had a momentary glimpse of shadowy
figures flinging themselves from pinnacle and ridge, flitting
specterlike
into the darkness, and then silence.

"Oh-o-
ohl
"
murmured Pat. "I—was scared, Ham." She huddled against him,
then
continued more strongly: "But there's proof.
Triops
noctivivam
actually is a night-side creature, and those
in the mountains are outposts or fragments
that've
wandered into the sunless chasms."

Far off sounded the hooting
laughter.
"I wonder," mused Ham, "if that noise of theirs is in the nature
of a language."

"Very probably.
After all, the
Hotland
natives are intelligent, and these creatures are a related species. Besides,
they throw stones, and they know the use of those smothering pods they showered
on us in the canyon—which, by the way, must be the fruit of some night-side
plant. The
trioptes
are
doubdess
intelligent in a fierce, bloodthirsty, barbaric fashion, but the beasts are so
unapproachable that I doubt if human beings ever learn much of their minds or
language."

Ham agreed emphatically,
the more so as a viciously cast rock suddenly chipped glittering particles
from an icy spire a dozen paces
away. He twisted his head,
sending the beams of his helmet lamps angling over the plain, and a single
shrill cachinnation drifted out of the dark.

"Thank Heaven the lights keep '
em
fairly out of range," he muttered.

But Pat was again engaged in her search for
specimens. She had switched on her lamps now, and scrambled agilely in and out
among the fantastic monuments of that bizarre plain. Ham followed her, watching
as she wrenched up bleeding and whimpering vegetation. She found a dozen
varieties, and one little wriggling cigar-shaped creature that she gazed at in
perplexity, quite unable to determine whether it was plant, animal, or neither.
And at last her specimen bag was completely filled, and they turned back over
the plain toward the rocket, whose ports
glearned
afar like a row of staring eyes.

But a shock awaited them as they opened the
door to enter. Both of them started back at the gust of warm, stuffy, putrid,
and
unbreathable
air that gushed into their faces
with an odor of carrion.

"What—" gasped Ham, and then laughed. "Your
mandra-gorel
" He chuckled. "Look at it!"

The plant she had placed within was a mass of
decayed corruption. In the warmth of the interior it had decomposed rapidly and
completely, and was now but a
semiliquid
heap on the
rubber mat. She pulled it through the entrance and flung mat and all away.

They clambered into an interior still
reeking, and Ham set a ventilator spinning. The air that came in was cold, of
course, but pure with the breath of the
Underwind
,
sterile and dustless from its sweep across five thousand miles of frozen oceans
and mountains. He swung the door closed, set a heater going, and dropped his
visor to grin at Pat.

"So that's your beautiful organism!" he chuckled.

"It was.
It
teas
a beautiful organism, Ham.
You can't blame
it because we exposed it to temperatures it was never supposed to
encounter." She sighed and slung her specimen pouch to the table.
"I'll have to prepare these at once, I suppose, since they don't
keep."

Ham grunted and set about the preparation of
a meal, working with the expert touch of a true
Hotlander
.
He glanced at Pat as she bent over her specimens, injecting the
bichloride
solution.

"Do you suppose," he asked,
"that the
triops
is the highest form of life on
the dark side?"

"Beyond doubt," replied Pat.
"If any higher form existed, it would long ago have exterminated those
fierce devils."

But she was utterly wrong.

Within the span of four days they had
exhausted the possibilities of the tumbled plain around the rocket. Pat had
accumulated a variegated group of specimens, and Ham had taken an endless
series of observations on temperature, on magnetic variations, on the direction
and velocity of the
Underwind
.

So they moved their base, and the rocket
flared into flight southward, toward the region where, presumably, the vast and
mysterious Mountains of Eternity towered across the ice barrier into the dusky
world of the night side. They flew slowly, throttling the reaction motors to a
bare fifty miles an hour, for they were flying through night, depending on the
beam of the forward light to warn against looming peaks.

Twice they halted, and each time a day or two sufficed to indicate that
the region was similar to that of their first base.
The same
veined and bulbous plants, the same eternal
Underwind
,
the same laughter from bloodthirsty
trioptic
throats.

But on the third occasion, there was a
difference. They came to rest on a wild and bleak plateau among the foothills
of the Greater Eternities. Far away to the westward, half the horizon still
glowed
green with the false sunset, but the whole span south
of the due-west point was black, hidden from view by the vast ramparts of the
range that soared twenty-five miles above them into the black heavens. The
mountains were invisible, of course, in that region of endless night, but the
two in the rocket felt the colossal nearness of those incredible peaks.