Never have I heard such anguish in his tone. "Gregg, she isn"t...."
"One of them bit her. Help me."
He floundered up with her, a hundred feet above the tree-tops of that horrible forest. The little lanterns of eyes down there had all winked out. The open starlight was over us.
Anita came swimming, then Venza stirred. She murmured, "... all right."
She had fainted. It seemed nothing more; but I found her upper arm swelling. She tried to bend her body and sit up; but it threw us all out of balance.
"Lie straight," Snap murmured. "Venza, are you all right?"
"Yes. Why not?" And then she laughed. It sent a shuddering chill over me. "What"s the fuss about? Let"s get away from here. Somebody will be coming."
She was swimming now and we let her loose, but stayed close by her.
The reddish firmament was like an inverted bowl. The curving Wandl surface gave us a narrow little vista, the forest rolling up from the horizon in front. Then we saw where the forest seemed to end. Water was beyond it: a ribbon like a broad river, and beyond that, frowning mountains, terraced and spired with jagged peaks.
Snap and I suddenly recalled the gravity ray projectors. We tried them; found that they would fling little beams of two varieties.
Pencil points of radiance, they seemed to have an effective range of no more than a few hundred feet.
I let myself drift downward, experimenting. The tiny beam struck the forest-top. I felt the projector pulling violently downward in my hand. I clung to it. I was being drawn swiftly down by the attractive gravity force of the ray. The forest rose rapidly under me: I was all but flung upon it before I could find the other controls.
Then the ray altered its nature; the projector in my hand pulled me steadily up. But after a few hundred feet, I felt I was mounting only of my own momentum, with gravity and air-friction r.e.t.a.r.ding me.
Snap had tried similar experiments. We rejoined the swimming girls. I stared into Venza"s face; it was pale but she did not seem distressed.
She winked at me.
"How"s your arm, Venza?"
"It hurts, but I guess it"s all right."
I turned to Snap. "I guess we can work these things. Get Venza to cling to you."
Our progress now was far less difficult. Venza clung to Snap"s ankles and Anita to mine. With the repulsing rays directed downward, we had a strong upward and forward thrust. We went forward with great thousand-foot bounds. The forest rolled back under us. We came over the gleaming river. It seemed several miles broad. It appeared to have a swift current.
I saw sunlight upon the mountain ahead. The darkness had been paling.
Now day suddenly burst upon us. The sun, smaller than on Earth, mounted swiftly up. It was a flattened, distorted, dull-red disc, blurred by Wandl"s strange atmosphere. We were in a dim red daylight.
Anita twitched at my ankles. "Look back of us!"
We were going up. Venza and Snap, behind us, were in a descending arc.
Above them, far back in the direction from which they had come, two blobs were visible up against the reddish day sky.
Pursuit? It seemed so. The blobs went down, but came up again, traveling with rays, like ourselves.
I called to Snap, "Someone after us! Two figures back there!"
He was shouting, "Gregg! Gregg, help!"
My gaze had been on the distant figures. I saw now that at the bottom of his arc, and starting upward again, Snap had lost Venza. The impulse of his ray had twitched his ankle from her grasp. Or had she let loose? He was about a hundred feet above the river, and Venza, with acceleration downward unchecked, was falling into it.
"Gregg, help! Venza, swim up!" His frenzied call reached me as I used the attractive ray and Anita and I whirled over and lunged downward.
"Gregg, help! Venza use your arms! Swim!"
She was lying inert, making no effort to keep from falling. Her body turned slowly, end-over-end. She struck the swiftly-flowing river surface but did not sink; instead, she half emerged, came up and lay in a crumpled heap; and with its rapid current, the river carried her away.
It was several minutes before we could reach Venza. Snap was already there, floundering on the water, awkwardly maintaining his balance, bending over Venza. "Gregg, she"s unconscious. Fainted again."
The bite of that insect! The thought of it turned me cold.
The river surface was like a very soft rubber mattress. The water clung to us, wet us. We could not kneel or stand erect; but in sitting down only a few inches of our bodies were submerged. We floated like corks, we were so light, and so little water did we displace.
We struggled with Venza across the gluey river surface. She had fallen near the further sh.o.r.e. Rocks, crags and strewn boulders were pa.s.sing as the current swept us along at a speed of about ten miles an hour.
She lay in our arms, eyes closed, her face pallid but calm. She seemed to breathe rapidly; but that on Wandl was normal.
We landed on the rocky sh.o.r.e. It was still daylight. The blurred sun was winging across the zenith so swiftly that its movement was visible. Wandl had been suddenly endowed with axial rotation. Even in these few minutes, the day was past its noon. On the distant mountain peaks looming above the nearby horizon; it seemed that the sheen of coming night was mingled with the red sunlight.
Anita and Snap laid Venza on the rocks. I suddenly remembered the two blobs in the sky behind us, which had seemed to be following. I stood gazing across the river. The red sky there seemed empty.
"Thank G.o.d, she"s reviving!" Snap called at me and I joined them.
Venza was stirring. Color was coming into her cheeks. Her lips were murmuring as though she were talking in her sleep.
Then she opened her eyes. Her gaze fixed on us as we bent over her.
"Why, what"s the matter? Where are we? I thought we were in the tree-tops. Snap, don"t look at me like that, dear. I"m all right--only confused."
She could remember nothing since that gruesome thing bit into her arm, but the attack of its poison in her veins seemed definitely over. We sat with her, soothing her, explaining what had happened. And she was wholly rational. Her strength came back; her mind cleared.
The brief red day came to its close. The sun plunged below the horizon; the stars winked into being. The red-purple Wandl night again was here. And now we saw that the whole firmament was swinging, the rotation made visible.
The darkness leaped around us. Shadows filled the rock hollows. The caves and recesses of this rocky sh.o.r.e turned black with darkness. And in the sky now we saw another of those familiar opalescent beams. This was the one from Mars: we could identify the red disc of the planet.
And then, from the mountains ahead of us but still below our horizon, the Wandl control station shot its attacking beam upward. Again there was that conflict in the sky. The axis of Mars was being altered, its rotation slowed.
We could see now that we were much nearer than before to the control station. It seemed only about twenty miles ahead of us. The scream from it was deafening.
The Wandl beam died presently. The electrical scream from the control station was stilled.
The Earth"s axis had been altered. Now Mars; and next would be Venus.
A few more of these gravitational attacks and then the helpless planets, with rotation checked, would be towed away by Wandl, out into the deadly cold of interstellar s.p.a.ce.
Anita abruptly gave a startled outcry. The four of us, sitting in a group, had no time to rise. From behind a dark crag nearby, two figures appeared. The starlight showed them clearly.
Molo and Wyk! They lunged forward at us.
14