World Without Chance: Classic Pulp Science Fiction Stories in the Vein of Stanley G. Weinbaum. John Russell Fearn
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Jove had all these attributes.
Cardew stopped only once, to nourish himself, on his journey toward the jungle. He moved a switch on his helmet and a spring, releasing itself, dropped into his open mouth a vitamin pellet, following it with a rejuvenating drink-essence tablet. Neither of them were more than quarter of a centimeter in size, but so potent in effect that he felt renewed strength surge into his aching limbs.
He rose up again from the rock against which he had been lounging and staggered on—onward all through the drab afternoon, battling the eternal wind, muttering threats, in good American, upon Jupiter and all it contained.
As he had calculated, he reached the outskirts of the Fishnet at dusk. The twilight was brief, dimmed from murky drabness into night, relieved only slightly by the clouded glow of the attendant moons.
With lackluster eyes he peered into the shadows beneath the Fishnet trees. In every direction about their boles sprouted the weird, below-zero forms of Jovian plants, bearing not the vaguest relation to Earthly vegetation, but patterned in some incomprehensible surrealist style, full of bars, cubes, oblongs, and angles, more crystal than vegetational in form. Flowers there were none. Jovian vegetation, in the main, reproduced itself by fission and lived in the slow, creeping style of the unicell. There was something almost disgusting about the way the growths occasionally popped noisily and became two, growing with extreme slowness thereafter toward maturity and further reproduction. Cardew heard them bisect quite distinctly through his sensitive external helmet detector as he plodded onward—
Until he gained a Fishnet tree with branches lower than the rest— To scramble into them, though they were only six feet from the ground, demanded enormous effort—took thirty minutes of muscle-wrenching strain. But once he was in their firmly spread, bed-like mass he relaxed with a sigh, satisfied that he was safe from the weird ammoniacal crawlers.
Beyond a wish that he could get out of his space suit and have a real breath of honest fresh air, he had no regrets. So far, so good. His eyes closed with leaden weariness; the tree branch moved up and down in the grip of the tycane slowly, ceaselessly—
As he half dozed, the detector phones brought in a medley of vaguely familiar noises above the wind’s whine, chief amongst which were the weird, half-human twittering of the ostriloath—strange, birdlike creature crossed vaguely between ostrich and sloth—and the deep bass grunting of the feather-sphere, the porcupine of Jove, rolling everywhere at terrible speed like a heavily flaked cannon ball. Familiar sounds all—
Then, suddenly, Cardew jolted violently upright, wide awake, his heart slamming painfully with the sudden intensity of his effort, his ears still ringing with what had definitely been a human shout of fear!
“Damned delusions!” he breathed quickly, staring round and below at the crazy jungle. “Couldn’t have been—”
He frowned in bewilderment. A scream from inside a helmet would be carried to the amplifier on the helmet exterior; even the slightest cry from anybody would be instantly enormously amplified by the dense atmosphere. But nobody else could be in such a cockeyed spot, surely—
Cardew broke off in his quick reflections and stared with amazed eyes through the clear patch between the nearest Fishnet trees. The light of Europa shone down through cloud breaks upon a space-suited figure lying flat on the ground, struggling against the gravity to tug out an oxygen pistol. A little distance away a hideous little-headed sican, violently strong, sheathed in an armor plating of frozen scales, fixed his intended prey with enormous glassy eyes. It was the largest of all Jovian animals, measuring five feet in length and nearly the same in width. Then it began to advance slowly on its six immensely powerful legs.
Almost as quickly as the danger registered in Cardew’s mind, he had dropped violently to the ground and tugged out his own oxygen pistol. With ponderously dragging feet, the ghastly pull of a nightmare’s dragging chains, he tried to run forward—fired his gun as he went.
Immediately a vicious stream of devastating flame spouted through the moonlight, momentarily lighted the mad glade with bluish-yellow fire. The force of the jet struck the sican clean in the center of its body, sent it rearing upward in a sudden paroxysm of searing pain.
Maddened, it twirled round and jumped dangerously near the sprawling, motionless figure. Then, at another vicious cut across its hideous face, it twisted round and traveled at high speed on its enormously strong legs into the jungle fastness.
Cardew felt the sweat of relief suddenly start to pour down his face. He replaced his gun and clumped slowly forward against the raging wind, turned over the prostrate figure with considerable effort. Jerking out his torch, he flashed the beam through the dense face glass, then started back in astonishment at beholding the perspiration-dewed face of a girl, eyes closed, hair raven-dark, lips pale with unconsciousness.
“Where in Heaven’s name did you drop from?” he said in bewilderment. Then he turned industriously to his first-aid kit and set to work with her helmet trappings. Swiftly he uncapped the triple valve socket connected to her respirator, screwed the heavy metal tube to the top of his smelling-salt container.
Immediately the powerful aromatic ammonia fumes surged into her helmet, set her lips moving with sudden revulsion, forced her clear, dark eyes to open in sudden alarm.
“Better?” Cardew whispered into her external receiver, as he recapped her respirator and laid the salts container beside him.
She nodded weakly. “Yes—I think so. I—I don’t know where you’ve come from, but it certainly was opportune.” She spoke rather shakily in a voice that was pleasantly mellow. “I thought I was going to make a perfect target for the sican!”
“Not with my oxygen pistol in good order.” He smiled. Then, locking his arms round her metal-clad waist he heaved her to her feet. Her face was clearly relieved and grateful in Europa’s murky light.
“I guess that was good of you,” she said warmly. “You risked your life. Probably you’re thinking I’m an awful fool to pass out like that? Suppose we call it plain fright?”
He ignored her apologies. “American?” he questioned eagerly.
She nodded. “By inheritance, yes—but born on this ghastly planet through no fault of my own. I’m Claire Mason, daughter of Hubert Mason, the settlement governor.”
He stared at her in amazement; her gaze, too, was one of polite inquiry.
“I’ve heard of you, of course.” He hesitated. “Like the rest of the people on this ghastly world, you’re its prisoner. But that doesn’t explain what you’re doing here all the same.”
She laughed shortly. “That’s easy! If you’d been born here because your father and mother’s social position demanded that they give up all thought of Earthly life and devote their lives to this planet, what would you do on seeing a private, small-sized space machine fall two hundred miles to the east? You’d head for it, of course! Well, that’s what I’m doing. I reckon about three weeks before pressure wipes it out. Naturally, there are no small ships at the settlement—only the useless, heavy prison machines, and they’re about crushed to powder.”
She paused and regarded him rather naively. “I know you can’t be Dr. Livingstone,” she said demurely. “But just the same, I suppose you have a name?”
“I did have a number,” he growled; then, more sociably, “James Cardew’s my name—escaped prisoner trying to get back to Earth to prove my innocence. I’m heading the same way as you are.”
“Really?” Her voice seemed a little cool. She seemed to sense there was something not quite right about hobnobbing with an escaped prisoner.
“I suppose, since the governor’s place is twenty miles from the settlement, you took a wider route to this jungle?” he asked.
“Obviously,” she said calmly. Then, tossing aside her uncertain manner, she went on earnestly, “I want to see the world I belong to, feel natural instead of artificial gravity, breathe fresh air, see fields and great cities—New York in particular.