The Revolt on Venus Part 10

Astro paused and grinned. "I didn't find a baby, I found his mother! She must have weighed twenty-five or thirty tons. Biggest tyranno I've ever seen. She spotted me the same time I saw her and I didn't even stop to fire. I never could have dented her hide. I started running and she came after me. I made it to a cave and went as far back inside as I could.

She stuck her head in after me, and by the craters of Luna, she was only about three feet away, with me backed up against a wall. She tried to get farther in, opened her mouth, and snapped and roared like twenty rocket cruisers going off at once."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "_She tried to get farther into the cave._"]

Tom gulped and Roger's eyes widened.

"I figured there was only one thing to do," continued Astro. "Use the blaster, even though it couldn't do much damage. I let her have one right in the eye!" Astro shook his head and laughed. "You should have seen her pull her head out of that cave! I couldn't sleep for months after that. I used to dream that she was sticking her head in my window, always getting closer."

"Did the blaster do any damage at all?" asked Sinclair.

"Oh, yes, sir," said Astro. "I was close enough for the heat charge from the muzzle to get her on the side of the head. Nothing fatal, but she's probably still out there in the jungle more ugly than ever with half a face."

The group fell silent, each thinking of how he would have reacted under similar conditions; each silently thankful that it hadn't happened to him. Finally Mrs. Hill rose and said good night, and George excused himself to take a last look at the stock. Remembering their early call for the next morning, the cadets said good night to Sinclair and retired to their comfortable rooms. In bed at last, each boy stretched full length on his bed and in no time was sound asleep.

It was still dark, an hour and a half before the sun would burst over the top of the jungle, when Sinclair went to the cadets' room to rouse them. He found them already up and dressed in their jungle garb. Each boy was wearing skin-tight trousers and jerseys made of double strength s.p.a.ce-suit cloth and colored a dark moldy green. A hunter dressed in this manner and standing still could not be seen at twenty paces. The snug fit of the suit was protection against thorns and snags that could find no hold on the hard, smooth-surfaced material.

After a hearty breakfast the three cadets collected their gear, the paralo-ray pistols, the shock rifles, and the small shoulder packs of synthetic food and camping equipment. Each boy also carried a two-foot jungle knife with a compa.s.s inlaid in the handle. A helmet of clear plastic with a small mesh-covered opening in the face covered each boy's head. Dressed as they were, they could walk through the worst part of the jungles and not get so much as a scratch.

"Well," commented Sinclair, looking them over, "I guess you boys have everything. I'd hate to be the tyranno that crosses your path!"

The boys grinned. "Thanks for everything, sir," said Tom. "You've been a lot of help."

"Think nothing of it, Tom. Just bring back a pair of tyranno scalps!"

"Where are Mr. and Mrs. Hill?" asked Astro. "We'd like to say good-by to them."

"They left before you got up," replied Sinclair. "They're taking a few days off for a visit to Venusport."

The boys pulled on their jungle boots. Knee-length and paper-thin, they were nonetheless unpenetrable even if the boys should step on one of the needle-sharp ground thorns.

They waved a last good-by to their host, standing on the steps of the big house, and moved across the clearing to the edge of the jungle wall.

As the cadets approached the thick tangle of vines, the calls and rustling noises from the many crawling things hidden in the forbidding thicket slowly died down. They walked along the edge of the tangle of jungle creepers until they found an opening and stepped through.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _They were completely surrounded by the jungle_]

After walking only ten feet they were completely surrounded by the jungle and could not even see the clearing they had just left. It was dark, the network of vines, the thick tree trunks and rank growing vegetation shutting out the sun, leaving the interior of the jungle strangely plunged in gloom. Astro moved ahead, followed by Roger, with Tom bringing up the rear. They followed the path they had entered, as far as it went, and then began cutting their way through the underbrush, stopping only to cut notches in the trees to mark their pa.s.sage.

Their long-bladed knives slicing through vines and brush easily, Tom, Roger, and Astro hacked their way deeper and deeper into the mysterious and suffocating green world.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

CHAPTER 6

"I guess that's the Sharkey place over there," mumbled Major Connel to himself, banking his jet launch over the green jungles and pointing the speedy little craft's nose toward the clearing in the distance. The Solar Guard officer wrenched the scout around violently in his approach.

He was still boiling over the Venusian Delegate's indifference toward his mission.

The launch skimmed the jungle treetops and glided to a perfect stop near the largest of a group of farm buildings. Cutting the motors, Connel sat and waited for someone to appear. He sat there for ten minutes but no one came out to greet him. Finally he climbed out of the launch and stood by the hatch, peering intently at the buildings around him, his eyes squinting against the glare of the fiery sun overhead. The plantation seemed deserted. Reaching back into the launch and pulling out a paralo-ray gun, he strapped its rea.s.suring bulk to his side and stepped toward the building that was obviously the main house. Nothing else moved in the hot noon sun.

As he strode purposefully toward the house, eyes alert for any sign of life, he thought for a moment everyone might be taking a midday nap.

Many of the Venusian colonists adapted the age-old custom of the tropics to escape the intense heat of midday. But he dismissed the thought immediately, realizing that his approach in the jet would have awakened the deepest of sleepers.

Entering the house, he stopped in the s.p.a.cious front hall and called:

"h.e.l.lo! Anybody home? Halloo!"

The only answer was the echo of his own voice, vibrating through the large rooms.

"Funny," muttered the s.p.a.ceman. "Why is this place deserted?"

He walked slowly through the house, opening doors and looking into all the rooms, searching the whole place thoroughly before returning to the clearing. Going to the nearest of the outbuildings, he opened one of the wide doors and stared into the gloomy interior. With his experienced eye he saw immediately that the building had been used to house a large jet craft. There was the slightly pungent odor of jet fuel, and on the floor the tire marks of a dolly used to roll the craft out to the launching strip. He followed the tracks outside and around to the side of the building where he saw the dolly. It was empty.

Shaking his head grimly, Connel made a quick tour of the remaining buildings. They were all deserted but the last one, which seemed to be built a little more st.u.r.dily than the others. Unlike the others, it was locked. He looked for a window and discovered that the walls were solid.

There were no openings except the locked door. He hesitated in front of the door, looking down at the ground for a sign of what might have been stored in the building. The surrounding area revealed no tracks. He pulled out a thick-bladed pocketknife and stepped to the lock, then suddenly stopped and grinned.

"Great," he said to himself. "A Solar Guard officer about to break into private property without a warrant. Fine thing to have known back at the Academy!"

He turned abruptly and strode back to the scout. Climbing into the craft, he picked up the audioscriber microphone and recorded a brief message. Removing the threadlike tape from the machine, he returned to the house and left it on the spool of the audioscribe-replay machine near the front door.

A few moments later the eerie silence of the Sharkey plantation was once again shattered by the hissing roar of jets as the launch took off and climbed rapidly over the jungle. Air-borne, Connel glanced briefly at a chart, changed course, and sent the launch hurtling at full speed across the jungle toward the Sinclair plantation.

"How far do you think we've come?" asked Tom sleepily.

Astro yawned and stretched before answering. "I'd say about fifteen miles, Tom."

"Seems more like a hundred and fifteen," moaned Roger who was sprawled on the ground. "I ache all over. Start at the top of my head and work down, and you won't find one square inch that isn't sore."

Tom grinned. He was tired himself, but the three-day march through the jungle had been three of the most exciting days in his life. Coming from a large city where he had to travel two hours by monorail to get to open green country, the curly-haired cadet found this pa.s.sage through the wildest jungle in the solar system new and fascinating. He had seen flowers of every color in the spectrum, some as large as himself; giant shrubs with leaves so fine that they looked like spider webs; Venusian teakwood trees fifty to a hundred feet thick at the base with some twisted into strange spirals as their trunks, shaded by another larger tree, sought a clear avenue to the sun. There were bushes that grew thorns three inches long, hard as steel and thin as needles; jungle creepers, vines two and three feet thick, twisting around tree trunks and strangling them. He saw animals too, all double the size of anything on Earth because of the lighter Venusian gravity; insects the size of rats, rats the size of dogs, and wild dogs the size of ponies. Up in the trees, small anthropoids, cousins to the monkeys of Earth, scampered from limb to limb, screaming at the invaders of their jungle home.

Smooth-furred animals that looked like deer, their horns curling overhead, scampered about the cadets like puppies, nuzzling them, nipping at their heels playfully, and barking as though in laughter when Astro roared at them for getting in the way.

But there were dangerous creatures in the jungle too; the beautiful but deadly poisonous brush snakes that lurked unseen in the varicolored foliage, striking out at anything that pa.s.sed; animals resembling chipmunks with enlarged razor-sharp fangs, whose craving for raw meat was so great that they would attack an animal ten times its size; lizards the size of elephants with scales like armor plate that rooted in swampy ground for their food, but which would attack any intruder, charging with amazing speed, their three horns poised; and, finally, there were the monsters of Venus--giant beasts whose weights were measured in tons, ruled over by the most horrible of them all--the tyrannosaurus.

Fights to death between the jungle creatures were common sights for the boys during their march. They saw a weird soundless fight between a forty-foot snake and a giant vulture with talons nearly two feet across and a beak resembling a mammoth nutcracker. The vulture won, methodically cutting the reptile's body into sections, its beak slicing through the snake as easily as a knife going through b.u.t.ter.

More than once Astro spotted a dangerous creature, and telling Roger and Tom to stand back, he would level his shock rifle and blast it.

So far they had seen nothing of their prey--the tyrannosaurus. Tracks around the steaming swamps were as close as they had come. Once, late in the evening of the second day they caught a fleeting glimpse of a plant-eating brontosaurus lumbering through the brush.

All three of the boys had found it difficult to sleep in the jungle. The first two nights they had taken turns at staying on guard and tending the campfire. Nothing had bothered them, and on the third night out, they decided the fire would be enough to scare off the jungle animals.

It was risky, but the continual fight through the jungle underbrush had tired the three boys to the bone and the few hours they stood guard were sorely missed the next day, so they decided to chance it.

Roger was already asleep. Astro had just finished checking his rifle to be ready for instant fire, when Tom threw the last log on the campfire and crawled into his sleeping bag.