Rex Sinclair smiled as he maneuvered the sleek black space yacht in a tight circle a thousand feet above the Titan crystal roof of his luxurious home in the heart of the wild Venusian jungle.
"She's built out of Venusian teak," said Sinclair. "Everything but the roof. I wanted to keep the feeling of the jungle around me, so I used the trees right out of the jungle there." He pointed to the sea of dense tropical growth that surrounded the house and cleared land.
The ship nosed up for a thousand yards and then eased back, smoothly braked, to a concrete ramp a thousand yards from the house. The touchdown was as gentle as a falling leaf, and when Sinclair opened the air lock, a tall man in worn but clean fatigues was waiting for them.
"Howdy, Mr. Sinclair," he called, a smile on his lined, weather-beaten face. "Have a good trip?"
"Fine trip, George," replied Sinclair, climbing out of the ship. "I want you to meet some friends of mine. Space Cadets Tom Corbett, Roger Manning, and Astro. They're going to stay with us during their summer leave while they hunt for tyranno. Boys, this is my foreman, George Hill."
The boys shook hands with the thick-set, muscular man, who smiled broadly. "Glad to meet you, boys. Always wanted to talk to someone from the Academy. Wanted to go there myself but couldn't pass the physical. Bad eyes."
Reaching into the ship, he began lifting out their equipment. "You chaps go on up to the house now," he said. "I'll take care of your gear."
With Sinclair leading the way, the boys slowly walked up a flagstone path toward the house, and they had their first chance to see a Venusian plantation home at close range.
The Sinclair house stood in the middle of a clearing more than five thousand yards square. At the edges, like a solid wall of green vegetation, the Venusian jungle rose more than two hundred feet. It was noon and the heat was stifling. They were twenty-six million miles closer to the sun, and on the equator of the misty planet. While Astro, George, and Sinclair didn't seem to mind the temperature, Tom and Roger were finding it unbearable.
"Can you imagine what it'll be like in the house with that crystal roof!" whispered Roger.
"I'll bet," replied Tom. "But as soon as the sun drops out of the zenith, it should cool off some."
When the group stepped up onto the porch, two house servants met them and took their gear. Then Sinclair and the foreman ushered the cadets inside. They were surprised to feel a distinct drop in temperature.
"Your cooling unit must be pretty large, Mr. Sinclair," commented Tom, looking up at the crystal roof where the sun was clearly visible.
Sinclair smiled. "That's special crystal, mined on Titan at a depth of ten thousand feet. It's tinted, and shuts out the heat and glare of the sun."
George then left to lay out their gear for their first hunt the next morning, and Sinclair took them on a tour of the house. They walked through long corridors looking into all the rooms, eventually winding up in the kitchen, and the three boys marveled at the simplicity yet absolute perfection of the place. Every modern convenience was at hand for the occupant's comfort. When the sun had dropped a little, they all put on sunglasses with glareproof eye shields and walked around the plantation. Sinclair showed them his prize-winning stock and the vast fields of crops. Aside from the main house, there were only four other buildings in the clearing. They visited the smallest, a cowshed.
"Where do your field hands live, Mr. Sinclair?" asked Tom, as they walked through the modern, spotless, milking room.
"I don't have any," replied the planter. "Do most of the work with machinery, and George and the houseboys do what has to be done by hand."
As they left the shed and started back toward the main house they came abreast of a small wooden structure. Thinking they were headed there, Roger started to open the door.
"Close that door!" snapped Sinclair. Roger jerked back. Astro and Tom looked at the planter, startled by the sharpness in his voice.
Sinclair smiled and explained, "We keep some experiments on different kinds of plants in there at special low temperatures. You might have let in hot air and ruined something."
"I'm sorry, sir," said Roger. "I didn't know."
"Forget it," replied the planter. "Well, let's get back to the house. We're having an early dinner. You boys have to get started at four o'clock in the morning."
"Four o'clock!" exclaimed Roger.
"Why?" asked Tom.
"We have to go deep into the thicket," Astro explained, using the local term for the jungle, "so that at high noon we can make camp and take a break. You can't move out there at noon. It gets so hot you'd fall on your face after fifteen minutes of fighting the creepers."
"Everything stops at noon," added Sinclair. "Even the tyrannosaurus. You have to do your traveling in the cool of the day, early and late. Six hours or so will take you far enough away from the plantation to find tracks, if there are any."
"Tell me, Mr. Sinclair," asked Roger suddenly, "is this the whole plantation?" He spread his hands in a wide arc, taking in the clearing to the edge of the jungle.
Sinclair grinned. "Roger, it'd take a man two weeks to go from one corner of my property to another. This is just where I live. Three years ago I had five hundred square miles under cultivation."
Back in the house, they found George setting the table on the porch and his wife busy in the kitchen. Mrs. Hill was a stout woman, with a pleasant face and a ready smile. With very little ceremony, the cadets, Sinclair, George, and his wife sat down to eat. The food was simple fare, but the sure touch of Mrs. Hill's cooking and the free use of delicate Venusian jungle spices added exotic flavor, new but immensely satisfying to the three hungry boys, a satisfaction they demonstrated by cleaning their plates quickly and coming back for second helpings. Astro, of course, was not happy until he had polished off his fourth round. Mrs. Hill beamed with pleasure at their unspoken compliment to her cooking.
After the meal, Mrs. Hill stacked the dishes and put them into a small carrier concealed in the wall. Pressing a button, near the opening, she explained, "That dingus takes them to the sink, washes them, dries them, and puts everything in its right place. That's the kind of modern living I like!"
As the sun dropped behind the wall of the jungle and the sky darkened, they all relaxed. Sinclair and George smoked contentedly, Mrs. Hill brought out some needle point, and the three cadets rested in comfortable contour chairs. They chatted idly, stopping only to listen to the wild calls of birds and animals out in the jungle as George, or Sinclair, identified them all. George told of his experiences on tyrannosaurus hunts, and Astro described his method of hunting as a boy.
"I was a big kid," he explained. "And since the only way of earning a living was by working, I found I could combine business with pleasure. I used to hitch rides over the belt and parachute in to hunt for baby tyrannos." He grinned and added, "When I think back, I wonder how I ever stayed in one piece."
"Land sakes!" exclaimed Mrs. Hill. "It's a wonder you weren't eaten alive! Those tyrannos are horrible things."
"I was almost a meal once," confessed Astro sheepishly, and at the urging of the others he described the incident that had cured him of hunting alone in the jungles of Venus with only a low-powered shock blaster.
"If I didn't get it at the base of the brain where the nerve centers aren't so well protected with the first shot, I was in trouble," he said. "I took a lot of chances, but was careful not to tangle with a mama or papa tyrannosaurus. I'd stalk the young ones. I'd wait for him to feed and then let him have it. If I was lucky, I'd get him with one shot, but most of the time I'd just stun him and have to finish him off with a second blast. Then I'd skin him, take the hams and shoulders, and get out of there fast before the wild dogs got wind of the blood. I'd usually hunt pretty close to a settlement where I could get the meat frozen. After that, I'd just have to call a couple of the big restaurants in Venusport and get the best price. I used to make as much as fifty credits on one kill."
"How would you get the meat to Venusport?" asked Roger, who, for all his braggadocio, was awed by his unit mate's calm bravery and skill as a hunter.
"The restaurant that bought it would send a jet boat out for it and I'd ride back with it. After a while the restaurant owners got to know me and would give me regular orders. I was trying to fill a special order on that last hunt."
"What happened?" asked Tom, equally impressed with Astro's life as a boy hunter.
"I had just about finished hunting in a section near a little settlement on the other side of Venus," began the big cadet, "but I thought there might be one more five-hundred-pound baby around, so I dropped in." 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."
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 space-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 compass 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.
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 passage.
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.
