The Leigh Brackett Science Fiction MEGAPACK®

Chapter 5-1

Silence was on the barracks like a lid clamped over tight-coiled springs. Men in rumpled uniforms—outlanders of the Stellar Legion, space-rats, the scrapings of the Solar System—sweated in the sullen heat of the Venusian swamplands before the rains. Sweated and listened.

The metal door clanged open to admit Lehn, the young Venusian Commandant, and every man jerked tautly to his feet. Ian MacIan, the white-haired, space-burned Earthman, alone and hungrily poised for action; Thekla, the swart Martian low-canaler, grinning like a weasel beside Bhak, the hulking strangler from Titan. Every quick nervous glance was riveted on Lehn.

The young officer stood silent in the open door, tugging at his fair mustache; to MacIan, watching, he was a trim, clean incongruity in this brutal wilderness of savagery and iron men. Behind him, the eternal mists writhed in a thin curtain over the swamp, stretching for miles beyond the soggy earthworks; through it came the sound every ear had listened to for days, a low, monotonous piping that seemed to ring from the ends of the earth. The Nahali, the six-foot, scarlet-eyed swamp-dwellers, whose touch was weapon enough, praying to their gods for rain. When it came, the hot, torrential downpour of southern Venus, the Nahali would burst in a scaly tide over the fort.

Only a moat of charged water and four electro-cannons stood between the Legion and the horde. If those things failed, it meant two hundred lives burned out, the circle of protective forts broken, the fertile uplands plundered and laid waste. MacIan looked at Lehn’s clean, university-bred young face, and wondered cynically if he was strong enough to do his job.

Lehn spoke, so abruptly that the men started. “I’m calling for volunteers. A reconnaissance in Nahali territory; you know well enough what that means. Three men. Well?”

Ian MacIan stepped forward, followed instantly by the Martian Thekla. Bhak the Titan hesitated, his queerly bright, blank eyes darting from Thekla to Lehn, and back to MacIan. Then he stepped up, his hairy face twisted in a sly grin.

Lehn eyed them, his mouth hard with distaste under his fair mustache. Then he nodded, and said; “Report in an hour, light equipment.” Turning to go, he added almost as an afterthought, “Report to my quarters, MacIan. Immediately.”

MacIan’s bony Celtic face tightened and his blue eyes narrowed with wary distrust. But he followed Lehn, his gaunt, powerful body as ramrod-straight as the Venusian’s own, and no eye that watched him go held any friendship.

Thekla laughed silently, like a cat with his pointed white teeth. “Two of a kind,” he whispered. “I hope they choke each other!” Bhak grunted, flexing his mighty six-fingered hands.

In his quarters, Lehn, his pink face flushed, strode up and down while MacIan waited dourly. It was plain enough what was coming; MacIan felt the old bitter defensive anger rising in him.

“Look,” he told himself inwardly. “Books. Good cigars. A girl’s picture on the table. You had all that once, you damn fool. Why couldn’t you....”

Lehn stopped abruptly in front of him, grey eyes steady. “I’m new here, MacIan,” he said. “But we’ve been Legion men for five generations, and I know the law; no man is to be questioned about his past. I’m going to break the law. Why are you here, MacIan?”

MacIan’s white head was gaunt and stubborn as Tantallon Rock, and he kept silent.

“I’m trying to help,” Lehn went on, “You’ve been an officer; every man in the barracks knows that. If you’re here for any reason but failure in duty, you can be an officer again. I’ll relieve you of special duty; you can start working for the examinations. No need to waste you in the ranks. Well?”

MacIan’s eyes were hidden, but his voice was harsh. “What’s behind this, Lehn? What the hell is it to you?”

The Venusian’s level gaze wavered; for a moment the boy looked through the man, and MacIan felt a quick stab in his heart. Then all that was gone, and Lehn said curtly.

“If you find the barracks congenial stay there, by all means. Dismissed!”

MacIan glared at him half-blindly for a moment, his fine long hands clenching and unclenching at his sides. Then he ’bout faced with vicious smartness and went out.

Nearly an hour later he stood with the Martian Thekla on the earthworks, waiting. The monotonous pipes prayed on in the swamp; MacIan, looking up at the heavy sky, prayed just as hard that it would not rain. Not just yet. Because if it rained before the patrol left, the patrol would not leave; the Nahali would be on the march with the very first drop.

“And my chance would be gone,” he whispered to himself.

Thekla’s bright black eyes studied him, as they always did; an insolent, mocking scrutiny that angered the Scot.

“Well,” he said dryly. “The perfect soldier, the gallant volunteer. For love of Venus, Thekla, or love of the Legion?”

“Perhaps,” said Thekla softly, “for the same reason you did, Earthman. And perhaps not.” His face, the swart, hard face of a low-canal outlaw, was turned abruptly toward the mist-wrapped swamp. “Love of Venus!” he snarled. “Who could love this lousy sweatbox? Not even Lehn, if he had the brains of a flea!”

“Mars is better, eh?” MacIan had a sudden inspiration. “Cool dry air, and little dark women, and the wine-shops on the Jekkara Low-canal. You’d like to be back there, wouldn’t you?”

To himself, he thought in savage pleasure, “I’ll pay you out, you little scum. You’ve tortured me with what I’ve lost, until I’d have killed you if it hadn’t been against my plan. All right, see if you can take it!”

The slow dusk was falling; Thekla’s dark face was a blur but MacIan knew he had got home. “The fountains in the palace gardens, Thekla; the sun bursting up over red deserts; the singing girls and the thil in Madame Kan’s. Remember the thil, Thekla? Ice cold and greenish, bubbling in blue glasses?”

thilthilHe knew why Thekla snarled and sprang at him, and it wasn’t Thekla he threw down on the soft earth so much as a tall youngster with a fair mustache, who had goaded with good intent. Funny, thought MacIan, that well-intentioned goads hurt worse than the other kind.

A vast paw closed on his shoulder, hauling him back. Another, he saw, yanked Thekla upright. And Bhak the Titan’s hairy travesty of a face peered down at them.

“Listen,” he grunted, in his oddly articulated Esperanto. “I know what’s up. I got ears, and village houses got thin walls. I heard the Nahali girl talking. I don’t know which one of you has the treasure, but I want it. If I don’t get it....”

His fingers slid higher on MacIan’s shoulder, gripped his throat. Six fingers, like iron clamps. MacIan heard Thekla choking and cursing; he managed to gasp:

“You’re in the wrong place, Bhak. We’re men. I though you only strangled women.”

The grip slackened a trifle. “Men too,” said Bhak slowly. “That’s why I had to run away from Titan. That’s why I’ve had to run away from everywhere. Men or women—anyone who laughs at me.”

MacIan looked at the blank-eyed, revolting face, and wondered that anyone could laugh at it. Pity it, shut it harmlessly away, but not laugh.

Bhak’s fingers fell away abruptly. “They laugh at me,” he repeated miserably, “and run away. I know I’m ugly. But I want friends and a wife, like anyone else. Especially a wife. But they laugh at me, the women do, when I ask them. And....” He was shaking suddenly with rage and his face was a beast’s face, blind and brutal. “And I kill them. I kill the damned little vixens that laugh at me!”

He stared stupidly at his great hands. “Then I have to run away. Always running away, alone.” The bright, empty eyes met MacIan’s with deadly purpose. “That’s why I want the money. If I have money, they’ll like me. Women always like men who have money. If I kill one of you, I’ll have to run away again. But if I have someone to go with me. I won’t mind.”

Thekla showed his pointed teeth. “Try strangling a Nahali girl, Bhak. Then we’ll be rid of you.”

Bhak grunted. “I’m not a fool. I know what the Nahali do to you. But I want that money the girl told about, and I’ll get it. I’d get it now, only Lehn will come.”

He stood over them, grinning. MacIan drew back, between pity and disgust. “The Legion is certainly the System’s garbage dump,” he muttered in Martian, loud enough for Thekla to hear, and smiled at the low-canaler’s stifled taunt. Stifled, because Lehn was coming up, his heavy water-boots thudding on the soggy ground.

Without a word the three fell in behind the officer, whose face had taken on an unfamiliar stony grimness. MacIan wondered whether it was anger at him, or fear of what they might get in the swamp. Then he shrugged; the young cub would have to follow his own trail, wherever it led. And MacIan took a stern comfort from this thought. His own feet were irrevocably directed; there was no doubt, no turning back. He’d never have again to go through what Lehn was going through. All he had to do was wait.

The plank bridge groaned under them, almost touching the water in the moat. Most ingenious, that moat. The Nahali could swim it in their sleep, normally, but when the conductor rods along the bottom were turned on, they literally burned out their circuits from an overload. The swamp-rats packed a bigger potential than any Earthly electric eel.

Ian MacIan, looking at the lights of the squalid village that lay below the fort, reflected that the Nahali had at least one definitely human trait. The banging of a three-tiered Venusian piano echoed on the heavy air, along with shouts and laughter that indicated a free flow of “swamp juice.” This link in the chain of stations surrounding the swamplands was fully garrisoned only during the rains, and the less warlike Nahali were busy harvesting what they could from the soldiers and the r****e that came after them.

Queer creatures, the swamp-rats, with their ruby eyes and iridescent scales. Nature, in adapting them to their wet, humid environment, had left them somewhere between warm-blooded mammals and cold-blooded reptiles, anthropoid in shape, man-sized, capricious. The most remarkable thing about them was their breathing apparatus, each epithelial cell forming a tiny electrolysis plant to extract oxygen from water. Since they lived equally on land and in water, and since the swamp air was almost a mist, it suited them admirably. That was why they had to wait for the rains to go raiding in the fertile uplands; and that was why hundreds of Interworld Legionnaires had to swelter on the strip of soggy ground between swamp and plateau to stop them.

MacIan was last in line. Just as his foot left the planks, four heads jerked up as one, facing to the darkening sky.

“Rain!”

Big drops, splattering slowly down, making a sibilant whisper across the swamp. The pipes broke off, leaving the ears a little deafened with the lack of them after so long. And MacIan, looking at Lehn, swore furiously in his heart.

The three men paused, expecting an order to turn back, but Lehn waved them on.