The following story is the first in a series set in a kind of alternate history—or, if you’d prefer, an alternate future. It takes place in a solar system governed by a political entity known as the Interplanetary League, in a timeline where Mars and Venus and the other planets are home to strange creatures and even stranger civilizations, and where there is more than enough adventure and opportunity for heroic and ambitious men to test their mettle against an implacable universe.
In short, it’s the perfect setting for good old-fashioned stories of planetary romance—stories in the vein of Leigh Brackett’s Eric John Stark, or C. L. Moore’s Northwest Smith, or Jack Williamson’s heroes of the Legion of Space. As for the genesis of the Interplanetary League and its retro-futuristic universe, all credit must go to the versatile Mythistoricus; he has composed a detailed history of that interesting organization, together with its successors and antecedents, and perhaps someday we’ll serialize it in this publication.
For the time being, however, I hope you enjoy this story of two of the League’s greatest heroes, of how they met, fell in love, and met with thrilling adventure in the jungles of Venus!
—T. J. Quaine
1. Lost on Venus
Niksin Kyboc swore furiously as he exited the wreckage of his atomic jetlighter.
After quickly surveying his surroundings, he spat with much feeling—an unmistakable expression of extreme disgust.
He’d cracked up about a mile topside; a pack of nasty Venusian flyers had attacked him in midair—real ugly customers, these, resembling a cross between some kind of prehistoric pterodactyl and the goddamnedest nightmare you’ll ever have.
“Ain’t this just fantastic,” he swore, kicking viciously—and rather pettishly—at the bulbous, bilious undergrowth of Venusian vegetation.
He’d come right down in an old growth jungle on an unexplored volcanic islet, somewhere in the remoter reaches of the vast Cytherian Archipelago; in other words, he was in a bad way—but at least he was on the same island as his quarry.
Small comfort, but he’d take it, and gladly.
“Damn that woman!” he cursed, not for the first time.
As commander of the Second Venusian Exploratory Expedition, it had fallen to him to go seeking the missing scientist. He’d justified it on the grounds that, of all the members of the expedition, he was the most expendable; in a way, that was true—they were all busy doing something, but he had nothing to do save sit on his ass and see that everyone got along. He was doing a piss-poor job of it, too; he hated administrative work.
So his reasons for going after the missing Dr. Demetria Palaeologina were many and complex. First, he wanted to get out and do some exploring, goddamn it! He was Niksin Kyboc, the famous explorer, adventurer, and the top planetologist in the Interplanetary League—and here he was on Venus, the planet he’d opened up for human conquest, acting the part of babysitter to a bunch of screwball eggheads. He was getting too restless from inaction, and it was either ship out or end up shooting some poor cuss.
The second reason boiled down to the matter of a guilty conscience: he felt responsible for the whole business—after all, he’d signed her papers, requisitioned her an atomic jetcraft, and given her the okay.
That was a mistake. A damned fool mistake.
But she was pretty and sweet and he sympathized with her predicament; he could read the restless look of boredom in her eyes—probably because it exactly mirrored the one in his own. So he’d given her the okay because she was like him and he refused to make her as miserable as he was; misery loves company, sure, but he refused to become a spiteful bastard.
At least…not yet.
Third reason: he liked her—though he’d never admit it to a soul, least of all to himself…and certainly not to her. She was a headstrong young woman (she was Greek, after all), and full of the queerest notions and ideas; trouble was, what she said had made a lot of sense to him. Was Venus the primordial fount of all life in the Solar System? Was it possible that this hot, humid muckball had once supported an advanced civilization…one that was connected to ancient ruins on Earth and Mars and other planets in the System? None of those crusty old codgers in the brand new League Headquarters in the brand new city of Sideropolis Maxima had the damnedest notion of what was what on Venus; their theories were bunk, but hers — strange as they were—made some kind of screwed-up sense. Or at least it seemed she was sniffing in all the right places, so to speak.
Of course, it certainly didn’t hurt that she was the prettiest woman on Venus; and, to top that off, that she was so goddamned beautiful—no matter what cursed planet you were on—that it hurt your eyes just to look at her.
No sir…that didn’t hurt one little bit.
Well, what else was there to say? He felt awful about the whole business. He should have nixed the thing, or dispatched a reconnaissance force along with her; but she wanted none of it, and those dark, beautiful eyes of hers could be so damned persuasive. So she’d left to chase down some fool notion of hers, and he’d green-lighted the whole damned thing; that was over three days ago, and now they’d lost radio contact with her. And on Venus that didn’t bode well one goddamned bit.
And now here he was—his jetlighter cracked up in a hostile (everywhere on Venus was hostile) jungle on an unexplored island in an unexplored archipelago in the furthest reaches of an unexplored ocean.
He examined his gear. Two standard issue N-ray pistols, field variety; a few tins of dehydrated L-rations; a collapsible shelter dome; some extra rebreather filters, and miscellaneous other sundries incidental to surviving on the heaven-abjured hell they called Venus.
“Time to get moving, Kyboc,” he said to himself, grunting as he lifted the survival pack and settled it upon his shoulders. He fastened the holster and N-ray pistol about his waist, gripped a makeshift staff of a sturdy Venusian sapling in his left hand, and set off to seek the missing scientist.
The Sun was a distorted thing, scarcely visible—a huge, bloated monstrosity shining with suppressed fury through the foggy atmosphere of Venus. It was slowly disappearing in the east—Venus has a retrograde rotation, contrary to just about everything else in the System (but very much in keeping with its feminine nature)—and he could clearly make out the great, white disc of the swollen daystar, and even distinguish a few black sunspots marring its seething surface.
Things were like that on Venus. You could stare at the Sun, unblinkingly, because though it was much nearer—and therefore brighter and hotter—its light was so filtered by the humid Venusian atmosphere that on certain occasions, as now, when you could actually see it, it was possible to gaze at its huge face without harm.
For the umpteenth time that day, Kyboc swore and spat furiously. He’d been trudging through the black Venusian jungle for hours, and he hadn’t found a trace of the confounded woman he sought.
This is where her jeftcraft had been downed—no doubt of it. But where in the name of all the hells had that damn fool woman gotten too?
He sat down on a black, basaltic bench of rock, and slipped the heavy pack off his shoulders; it was hot, and humid, and miserable, and he was sweating profusely—he must have lost a gallon of water already. He produced his thermal canteen, and sucked a few prodigious draughts from it until the thing was empty; then he set it down on the rock, toggling the switch for the atmospheric condenser.
The nice thing about Venus was that water wasn’t hard to come by—a simple atmospheric condenser screwed onto the cap of any canteen was enough to distill as much water as you needed from the atmosphere. But that was the only stuff you could drink—don’t even think about swilling from any other source on this godforsaken planet. No sir, that was death, and sure quick; it wasn’t a matter of dysentery or illness, but straight death—horrible to watch and even more horrible to experience—and in an hour or two at most. Venusian microorganisms did not agree with Earthmen. You could maybe drink from the glacier-fed streams on the highest peaks of Ishtar Terra, at the North Pole; even then, you’d only want to risk it in midwinter.
But nowhere else.
No way in hell.
Kyboc mopped his brow with a strip of synthetic stuff he’d torn off a patch of parachute material amidst the wreckage of his radium jetlighter. The Sun was sinking, no doubt about it; night was not far off. That meant a slight, barely perceptible lessening of the heat; to tell the truth, it made scarcely any difference. But the night was black and awful on Venus—there was no Moon to reflect the hidden Sun’s light, as on Earth; nor was there even the meager comfort of starlight. Just a thick shroud of black settled upon the world.
He little relished the idea of being stuck out at night in this strange place.
“Damn!” he swore again. “Damn…damn!”
He looked around at the black jungle. It was a hateful place, and the eerie, black-leaved vegetation did little to soothe his foul mood. The dark leaves did an excellent job of soaking up the far red and infrared solar radiation that was about all that made it through Venus’ thick cloak of steamy atmosphere; but it was weird and alien to earthly eyes. It didn’t look like any proper kind of plant life, Kyboc thought; it was just too damned off and uncanny.
“Ah, hell—ain’t I a kick in the pants,” he laughed softly to himself.
That was another problem. You started talking to yourself too much out here; it just became too damned comfortable to start holding conversations with the only thing in a thousand miles—or ten thousand miles—that could listen.
Suddenly, shockingly, Kyboc felt himself being jerked violently into the air; it snatched the breath right out of his lungs, and in another instant he found himself fighting for his life against an unknown Thing that had come at him in the gathering dark and stillness of the Venusian dusk. He had enough presence of mind to reflect that he had been awfully careless, just sitting there like a fool greenhorn on a rock, heeding not a damned thing around him.
In a moment, though, his thoughts were decidedly more occupied. He was being squeezed, compressed, and constricted by a multitude of wet, spongy tentacles or tendrils; it felt like being in the grip of a hundred pythons all at once, or so he imagined.
His chest was being slowly crushed, and he couldn’t suck in enough air to fill his lungs—and they were rapidly being squeezed to a smaller and smaller size with each exhalation of what precious little air was left. He couldn’t reach his N-ray pistol; damn it to hell!—his arms were pinned to his sides. Yes sir, he was up the proverbial shit’s creek, in what might fairly be considered as FUBAR a situation as there ever was.
He coughed, gasped, tried to breathe…couldn’t. The tendrils turned him around; his face was purple, his consciousness was swimming, but he could see the Thing that had gotten him. It was a Yog tree, goddamn it! One of the flesh-eating, semi-intelligent, motile trees that Venus was famous for.
“Oh what a damned fool you are!” Kyboc had enough free brain cells left to tap out on the swirling chaos of his dying mind.
He saw the gaping maw of the horror draw closer; no, that’s not quite true. He was being drawn closer to the gaping maw—in another instant, he’d be inside that thing, to be slowly digested in the fermentation vat of plant acids that served the monster for a belly.
Suddenly, there was a flash of blinding light…followed by a crash and a sensation of falling.
He was free—the tendrils had fallen from him! With a gasp like the death-rattle of a drowning man, he sucked in whole lungfuls of moist, reeking Venusian air at a time; the still-functioning filter fans of his helmet unit whirred protestingly to purify the air of spores and microorganisms.
Meanwhile, a figure—a human figure—impinged remotely upon his swimming consciousness; it stood in the forest, an N-ray pistol clutched in one hand, and watched the violent death-throes of the Yog tree that the pistol had blown to pulp.
In another moment, the figure was by his side, helping him to his feet, assuring him that all was well and admonishing him to take it slow.
It was a soft, feminine voice—and Niksin Kyboc recognized it immediately.
“Dr. Palaeologina, I presume?” he rasped, a lopsided, goofy grin springing to his lips.
The figure started, and seemed to peer intently at his face in the gathering Venusian dusk.
“Captain Kyboc? Is that you?” she breathed, her voice still tinged with that wonted inflection of awe that always stole into it when she addressed the famous explorer and leader of the only two Venusian expeditions in League history—an awe she very plainly still felt, even out here, deep in the trackless Venusian jungle, and even after she had just saved his life.
“Well who the hell else d’you think’d come out here to rescue a damned fool greenie, sister?” he barked, still bitterly angry at himself for permitting her to come out here alone—and inexpressibly relieved at finding her alive.
“You’re goddamned right it’s me!”
[Don’t miss the second installment of “The Metamorphic Men of Venus” in the next issue of The Florilegium of Phantasy!]