Battle on Venus Read online

  “I agree,” said the Captain. “And there’s still some gas in there: you can see it. You did the right thing, mister, stopping us at the door. We’re still in a spot, though. Now our expert is dead, how are we going to tell if the atmosphere outside is breathable or not?”

  “I don’t think it’s harmful, sir—at least, not poisonous,” said the mate. “Take a look along here.”

  He led them down the passage to a place where there was another rent in the outer wall. It was maybe five centimetres wide and you could see Venus through it.

  “I guess that hit us after we’d got below the clouds,” said the mate. “But it don’t seem to have made any difference to us.”

  George put his fingers over the hole. He could feel a steady inflow. He put his nose near the aperture and sniffed.

  “Careful,” Freiburg warned.

  “I think it’s all right; as near enough to our kind of air to be acceptable. There’s a bit of a tang to it, and it’s certainly denser than Earth’s atmosphere: it’s pouring through to even up the pressure in here.”

  “Well, that’s something on the credit side at last. Looks like we may not need spacesuits… How’s the radio, mister? Has Sparks got through again, yet?”

  “No, sir. That… um… crash-landing loused the set up quite a bit. He’s working on it.”

  “Aw, hell.” The closer they’d got to the sun and the wavering streams of electrons it emitted, the worse radio communication with Earth had become. Finally, static had drowned it altogether. Freiburg was barred from the qualified triumph of announcing the landing on Venus. Still, on the other hand, he hadn’t to announce what a mess he’d made of the landing. He said, between relief and irritability: “Let’s go outside and assess the damage.”

  The air out there was breathable, all right, but the tang made you cough. And the density was somewhat oppressive. You could feel the air pressing against your eardrums and everyone seemed to be speaking annoyingly loud. These things, and the gray light and the scowling clouds, did much to offset the slight lift which the lesser gravitation gave you.

  Freiburg regarded the crumpled tail-fins glumly.

  “More than a week’s work to put that back in shape,” he said. George had brought his collapsible telescope and was staring around the horizon through it. “High mountains in that direction,” he reported. “Around sixty kilos away, I’d say. So far as I can see, all of the rest of this area looks pretty much the same as where we’re standing—one darn great plain.”

  “A plain,” grunted the Captain. “Yes, and a battlefield too, I guess. These depressions in the ground look pretty much like shell craters to me. And fairly new ones, too. Well, I was hopeful of finding intelligent life on Venus, but now it looks doubtful if we shall. Oh, yes, there must be Venusians, all right—who else could have fired at us—but they must be around the level of the nuts who were running things back on Earth going on a century ago. We may be lucky if we got off this damn planet alive.”

  George snapped his telescope shut, frowning. He didn’t like this kind of defeatism. They’d only just arrived on Venus and already the skipper was talking about getting away from it.

  Three more of the crew came climbing down the ship’s ladder, curious to sample Venus. That left the radio operator alone in the ship, still struggling with his set. Everyone started wandering around inspecting the terrain. The Captain searched in one of the bigger craters and found metal fragments of shell or bomb casing. There had been a war on around here, sure enough. From way off, George suddenly shouted and beckoned him. The Captain went over. George, pointing, said: “And what d’you make of that?”

  There was a perfectly straight slit along the ground, only three or four centimetres wide. It seemed to be endless; it led off unbroken in either direction as far as the eye could see, straight as a ruled line.

  “I’ve followed it way out. It just goes on,” said George.

  “Queer,” he commented. “Looks as though someone’s drawn a giant knife across the landscape. Are there any parallel marks of any kind?”

  “I can’t see any.”

  “Then how the devil does the knife hold up? I mean, if it were some kind of plow, there should be the marks of wheels or—or something around here.”

  “I still can’t see any, Skip.”

  “What’s it supposed to be? A boundary line? A frontier?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. I guess the only way to find out is to follow the line until we bump into whatever made it.”

  “Yes, George, and we might bump into whoever’s behind those guns. Don’t be too hasty about dashing off to explore. We’d better stick together here for a while, and wait and see if the natives approach us. They don’t seem over-friendly. We may need all hands to beat off an attack. We’ll set up a command post in one of these craters; I’ve a notion we may be safer below ground level, and if—”

  The Captain broke off. From somewhere far off came a thin, keening wail, getting louder. The crew started to shout and point. There was something moving out there on the plain.

  “Your telescope!” snapped the Captain, and George passed it to him. Even through the telescope the thing racing towards them was not easy to see in the poor light, especially as it was almost edge on. Captain Freiburg had once seen the wheel of a racing car come off and go bowling on by itself at a hundred miles an hour. Something like that was coming along the ground in their direction at about the same speed, but it was all of seven metres in diameter. An unattached wheel of solid, gleaming metal tapering down from the hub to an edge of extreme thinness. It was like the wheel off an enormous bacon-slicer, run amok.

  “Everybody down the craters!” bawled Freiburg.

  The rising scream of the wheel’s approach all but drowned his voice. He waved frantically, and the crew began to run for the holes. When he saw they’d taken shelter, he ran, with George at his side, to the nearest crater. It was pretty shallow, but if the wheel came their way its speed might carry it to the far lip of the crater without touching them. He had no doubt that this frightening thing had cut that track, but he remembered that the track wasn’t very deep. The scream of the wheel made the air quiver now, and the ground seemed to be shaking in sympathy. In one respect, Freiburg was glad of that; it camouflaged his own trembling.

  The two lay there, faces in the dirt, waiting for the wheel to pass them by. But the howling went on and on, accompanied by a secondary swishing noise, like that of an electric fan.

  And still it went on.

  Cautiously, they raised their heads and peeped out of the crater. The wheel was running in a wide circle around them and the whole group of craters. It pursued its circular course so swiftly that there appeared to be dozens of blurred wheels chasing themselves around, forming a hazy, glimmering barrier seven metres high.

  Their space-ship stood near enough exactly at the center of the circle. George shouted in the Captain’s ear: “That darn wheel’s gotten itself stuck in a groove!”

  Freiburg ignored the humor. “Follow me.” And he started running back to the ship. George was surprised, but jumped out of the crater and ran across the quivering earth after the Captain. Heads popped out of craters here and there and regarded them inquiringly. Freiburg waved them back. Inside the ship it was a little quieter.

  “Get hold of Sparks! Bring him down to the armory,” said the Captain, breathlessly.

  George nodded. So much for hope, he thought, as he climbed towards the radio room.

  There had been some controversy concerning whether the first expedition to Venus should be an armed one or not. Much nonsense had been talked, considering that nobody knew whether Venusians were warlike or peaceful, human or non-human, monsters or insects—or if they existed at all. There was general agreement on one point: no atomic weapons should be taken. Their use could start something nobody could finish. On the other hand, it wouldn’t be fair to the crew to risk putting them in the spot of fighting off, say, carnivorous dinosaurs with their bare fists.
A light, portable but potent weapon seemed the golden mean. The old bazooka was finally chosen. It was simple to operate, and every man in the crew soon passed the test in its use.

  And everyone hoped it would never be needed.

  George found Sparks staring out of his porthole and trying to make sense of what was happening out there. On the way down he did his best to put him in the picture.

  The Captain had unpacked the tripod and barrel of a bazooka.

  “I’ll take this,” he said. “You two get a box of shells each.”

  The boxes had been heavy on Earth and were still quite heavy enough here. As George staggered after Freiburg with his, he called: “Did you spot any Venusians, Skip?”

  “No. But we can try to knock out that blasted wheel.”

  The fearsome shriek of the wheel hit their ears with full power again as they quitted the ship. The Captain began setting up the tripod a few metres away. George and the radio operator dumped their boxes, opened them, and prepared the fuses of the rocket shells.

  It may have been his fancy, but George thought the wheel had slackened speed a trifle. At least, there didn’t seem to be quite so many wheels whirring around the perimeter. But that perimeter was still plainly impassable. However fast you tried to dash across it, before you were over the groove that flashing wheel would have run full circle and sliced you in two. The skipper was having trouble with the tripod, but waved away George’s proffered help impatiently.

  Sparks was staring fascinatedly at the wheel. Suddenly, he shouted: “It’s closing in on us!”

  George took a good look at the base of the blurred wall. It was true enough. The groove had widened to a shallow trench, and was steadily widening yet towards them. The keen edge of the wheel was paring its way inwards. He remembered Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum, and was no happier for the memory.

  The skipper tugged at his ankle, and roared: “The shells, man! Quick-firing drill.”

  George quickly laid eight shells in a line, and fed the first into the tube. The bazooka had an automatic firing device.

  Freiburg was aiming at the center of the moving, yet seemingly stationary, wall. He wanted to hit the hub.

  Whizz! Trailing fire and smoke the first shell darted out of the magic circle. Whizz! Whizz! Whizz! Three more followed it..

  All four passed through the wall as if itself were but smoke, and fell to the ground and burst half a kilo beyond it.

  Whizz! Whizz! Whizz! Whi- Crash!

  They glimpsed a mid-air explosion and flung themselves flat as bits of shrapnel moaned and whirred about them and thudded into the earth. The very last shell had scored a hit. Instantly, the howling had lost half its power. They looked up cautiously. The wall of steel was still there, but not quite so solidly. You could glimpse the huge disk spinning with a band of daylight encircling the hub now. They’d blown a hole through the wheel near the hub: the rotary motion made it look like a continuous band.

  And the wheel had been blasted back against the far side of the trench it was cutting.

  Before anyone could say a word, there was a roar like a rocket-plane taking off. Suddenly, a great cloud of black smoke materialized with a splintering concussion somewhere behind them. Shell fragments ripped fiercely through the air.

  It was uncomfortably close.

  Freiburg abandoned the bazooka. “Take cover!” He was first into the nearest crater.

  Then hell broke loose.

  Whole salvoes of shells came shrieking down. The ground vibrated like a beaten bass drum. The three men were shaken in their crater like dice in a box. Thick clouds of pungent yellow gas came swirling into the depression and made them cough helplessly. The smell of burnt powder was everywhere. The shrapnel fell like hail.

  It stopped at last, but their ears went on ringing from the battering they’d received. Only slowly they became aware again of the sound of the wheel. It had fallen in pitch to a mere whirring drone.

  George wiped tears and sweat from his cheeks.

  “Welcome to Venus, Planet of Love,” he said, hoarsely. Sparks said nothing. He’d bitten his lip badly and was dabbing at it with a bloody handkerchief.

  Freiburg inched his nose over the lip of the crater, and tried futilely to wave some of the yellow gas away. “Can’t see a damn thing…”

  Presently: “It’s clearing a bit now… There’s something moving out there. Got your telescope, George?”

  George handed it up to him. There was a distant grinding sound, audible above the wheel’s drone.

  “Tanks,” said the skipper, peering. “Well, that beats everything. Old-fashioned tanks, with guns on ’em—? straight from the Dark Ages.”

  He swung the telescope slowly, scanning every direction.

  “We’re surrounded by them,” he reported. “They’re closing in on us. Coming in for the kill.”

  II

  GEORGE SHOUTED “I’ll get the bazooka.”

  “No use,” mumbled Sparks, indistinctly. “It got a direct hit. It’s in fifty pieces.”

  “There’s another in the ship,” said George, starting up,

  “Stay where you are,” said Freiburg. “Or you’ll be in fifty pieces if that barrage comes down again. It’s not worth a try. I’ve counted twenty-five tanks out there, and there’s a real monster of a fighting machine in back of them. Take a look.”

  George squinted through the telescope. The wheel, continually passing across the line of vision like the shutter of a movie projector, made everything look flickery. But he could see the circle of tanks, less than a kilo off. They were low built, with wide caterpillar treads and squat turrets, and gave the impression they were hugging the ground. They were slowly converging and every one of their gun muzzles was aiming straight at the ship.

  Behind them a sort of huge torpedo on wheels was skirmishing around. It was quite fifty metres long. The nose of its cylindrical body was sharply pointed. The thing was made of some dull metal, had back-projecting fins, and the wheels on which it moved so swiftly were sheathed.

  A thin and short streamer of white hot gas kept shooting from its tail.

  “Rocket-propelled,” George observed. “At a guess I’d say it’s a highly mobile armored H.Q., directing operations well forward on the battle-field. Why, the darn thing looks almost as big as our ship!”

  “Think you’re right, George,” said Freiburg. “We’re up against a whole mechanized army. We haven’t got a chance. We’d better raise the flag of truce and try for a parley, I’d like to know what they’ve got against us before they wipe us out, anyhow… Hey, they’ve all stopped advancing. What’s the idea?”

  They waited, tensed up. The wheel’s note, which had been falling, died away to nothing. Even the secondary swishing sound, made by the wheel’s keen edge slicing the air, fell to a mere sighing. The wheel was bowling ever more slowly around. It began to wobble as it ran. They could see the hole in it distinctly now.

  Then it keeled over and fell on its side, all momentum gone. It lay still.

  “It’s served its purpose,” said the Captain, taking off his jacket. “And that was to keep us pinned down in the target area until all the guns could be brought to bear on us at close range. Did you notice the air flutes on the hub? We blew them off on the near side, but the ones on the other side stayed intact. That’s where the howl came from—to petrify and demoralize us: the old Japanese war-cry— Banzai!”

  “I don’t think I’m gonna like these Venusians,” said Sparks, slowly and with care—his lip had stopped bleeding and he didn’t want to start it off again.

  “Nor me,” said Freiburg. “All the same, we have to be reasonable. Like it or not, we’ve got to try to be friendly. Getting tough isn’t going to help us get any place.”

  George was skeptical. “That’s a purely terrestrial gesture. It can’t mean a thing here.”

  Bank! Bang! Bang! Three tanks shells, on a flat trajectory, arrived before the sound of their passage. They burst near the base of the ship. The skipper sn
atched his shirt back. “It means something. Obviously, the wrong thing.”

  Sparks made an inarticulate noise, and gasped: “The ship!”

  They swung around. The shells had burst near the battered fins of the ship and loosened them from the earth. The ship groaned and began to cant. It was like the Tower of Pisa pulling away from its foundations.

  “Timber!” exclaimed George. But they were lucky. In relation to them it was falling sideways. It came down with an almighty crash, bounced once and rolled a couple of metres. The dust billowed up around it in a wide, brown cloud, then slowly settled. After that, nothing moved. The fallen ship lay as still as the fallen wheel.

  The skipper used his shirt more effectively to mop his brow.

  “The finishing touch,” he said. “You might as well write off your set now, Sparks.”

  The radio-op nodded. His lower lip was bleeding again; he’d bitten it in the same place.

  Then they all jerked their heads the other way, because a roaring sound had started way out on the plain.

  “Gosh, this is no place for a rest cure,” said Freiburg. “I’m beginning to get the jitters. What the hell is it now?”

  George said, looking hard: “It’s the armored H.Q. It’s coming this way—like a bullet.”

  And indeed the great torpedo was hurtling head on towards them with its jet roaring. They could see only its blind, sharp nose. It sped through the ring of stationary tanks and the ground began to shake under its spinning metal wheels.

  “Down,” said Freiburg, dazedly, wearily. He was getting tired of existence in a sort of recurring earthquake, bobbing up and down like some kind of jack-in-the-box; of continually being assailed by ear-shattering noises and uninvited missies. The collapse of the ship, his once proud charge, had brought the last of his failing spirits down with it. That was the last straw. He fell into a state of cynical despair.

  The roaring ended, was supplanted by a nerve-tearing squealing, like powerful brakes being applied. Came a silence. And then the grinding of twenty-five tanks moving in unison grated through the heavy air. George caught Freiburg’s glazing eye. He grinned at him wryly. Freiburg tried to respond in kind, but failed. His expression asked dismally: How long can this go on?