The Vanishing Venusians
Copyright© 2024 by Leigh Brackett
Chapter 4
The black birds darted at Harker, but the compulsion that sent them flickered out too soon. The ferns and creepers shook, and then were still, and the birds flew heavily away. Matt Harker stood up.
He thought he might have a little time. The flower-people probably kept in pretty close touch mentally, but perhaps they wouldn’t notice Button’s absence for a while. Perhaps they weren’t prying into his own thoughts, because he was Button’s toy. Perhaps...
He began to run, toward the cliffs where the finish-place was. He kept as much as possible in the open, away from shrubs. He did not look again, before he left, at what lay by his feet.
He was close to his destination when he knew that he was spotted. The birds returned, rushing down at him on black whistling wings. He picked up a dead branch to beat them off and it crumbled in his hands. Telekinesis, the power of mind over matter. Harker had read once that if you knew how you could always make your point by thinking the dice into position. He wished he could think himself up a blaster. Curved beaks ripped his arms. He covered his face and grabbed one of the birds by the neck and killed it. The other one screamed and this time Harker wasn’t so lucky. By the time he had killed the second one he’d felt claws in him and his face was laid open along the cheekbones. He began to run again.
Bushes swayed toward him as he passed. Thorny branches stretched. Creepers rose like snakes from the grass, and every green blade was turned knife-like against his feet. But he had already reached the cliffs and there were open rocky spaces and the undergrowth was thin.
He knew he was near the finish-place because he could smell it. The gentle withered fragrance of flowers past their prime, and under that a dead, sour decay. He shouted McLaren’s name, sick with dread that there might not be an answer, weak with relief when there was one. He raced over tumbled rocks toward the sound. A small creeper tangled his foot and brought him down. He wrenched it by the roots from its shallow crevice and went on. As he glanced back over his shoulder he saw a thin white veil, a tiny patch in the distant air, drifting toward him.
He came to the finish-place.
It was a box canyon, quite deep, with high sheer walls, so that it was almost like a wide well. In the bottom of it bodies were thrown in a dry, spongy heap. Colorless flower-bodies, withered and grey, an incredible compost pile.
Rory McLaren lay on top of it, apparently unhurt. The two packs were beside him, with the weapons. Strewn over the heap, sitting, lying, moving feebly about, were the ones who waited, as Button had put it, to stop. Here were the aged, the faded and worn out, the imperfect and injured, where their ugliness could not offend. They seemed already dead mentally. They paid no attention to the men, nor to each other. Sheer blind vitality kept them going a little longer, as a geranium will bloom long after its cut stalk is desiccated.
“Matt,” McLaren said. “Oh, God, Matt, I’m glad to see you!”
“Are you all right?”
“Sure. My leg even feels pretty good. Can you get me out?”
“Throw those packs up here.”
McLaren obeyed. He began to catch Harker’s feverish mood, warned by Harker’s bleeding, ugly face that something nasty was afoot. Harker explained rapidly while he got out one of the ropes and half hauled McLaren out of the pit. The white veil was close now. Very close.
“Can you walk?” Harker asked.
McLaren glanced at the fleecy cloud. Harker had told him about it. “I can walk,” he said. “I can run like hell.”
Harker handed him the rope. “Get around the other side of the canyon. Clear across, see?” He helped McLaren on with his pack. “Stand by with the rope to pull me up. And keep to the bare rocks.”
McLaren went off. He limped badly, his face twisted with pain. Harker swore. The cloud was so close that now he could see the millions of tiny seeds floating on their silken fibres, thistledown guided by the minds of the flower-people in the valley. He shrugged into his pack straps and began winding bandages and tufts of dead grass around the bone tip of a recovered spear. The edge of the cloud was almost on him when he got a spark into the improvised torch and sprang down onto the heap of dead flower-things in the pit.
He sank and floundered on the treacherous surface, struggling across it while he applied the torch. The dry, withered substance caught. He raced the flames to the far wall and glanced back. The dying creatures had not stirred, even when the fire engulfed them. Overhead, the edges of the seed-cloud flared and crisped. It moved on blindly over the fire. There was a pale flash of light and the cloud vanished in a puff of smoke.
“Rory!” Harker yelled. “Rory!”
For a long minute he stood there, coughing, strangling in thick smoke, feeling the rushing heat crisp his skin. Then, when it was almost too late, McLaren’s sweating face appeared above him and the rope snaked down. Tongues of flame flicked his backside angrily as he ran monkey-fashion up the wall.
They got away from there, higher on the rocky ground, slashing occasionally with their knives at brush and creepers they could not avoid. McLaren shuddered.
“It’s impossible,” he said. “How do they do it?”
“They’re blood cousins. Or should I say sap. Anyhow, I suppose it’s like radio control—a matter of transmitting the right frequencies. Here, take it easy a minute.”
McLaren sank down gratefully. Blood was seeping through the tight bandages where Harker had incised his wound. Harker looked back into the valley.
The flower people were spread out in a long crescent, their bright multi-colored heads clear against the green plain. Harker guessed that they would be guarding the pass. He guessed that they had known what was going on in his mind as well as Button had. New form of communism, one mind for all and all for one mind. He could see that even without McLaren’s disability they couldn’t make it to the pass. Not a mouse could have made it.
He wondered how soon the next seed-cloud would come.
“What are we going to do, Matt? Is there any way...” McLaren wasn’t thinking about himself. He was looking at the valley like Lucifer yearning at Paradise, and he was thinking of Viki. Not just Viki alone, but Viki as a symbol of thirty-eight hundred wanderers on the face of Venus.
“I don’t know,” said Harker. “The pass is out, and the caves are out ... hey! Remember when we were fighting off those critters by the river and you nearly started a cave-in throwing rocks? There was a fault there, right over the edge of the lake. An earthquake split. If we could get at it from the top and shake it down...”
It was a minute before McLaren caught on. His eyes widened. “A slide would dam up the lake...”
“If the level rose enough, the Swimmers could get out.” Harker gazed with sultry eyes at the bobbing flower heads below.
“But if the valley’s flooded, Matt, and those critters take over, where does that leave our people?”