"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 reassuring 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 spacious front hall and called:
"Hello! Anybody home? Halloo!"
The only answer was the echo of his own voice, vibrating through the large rooms.
"Funny," muttered the spaceman. "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 sturdily 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 passage 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 passed; 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 butter.
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.
"Think it'll be all right, Astro?" asked Tom. "I'm not anxious to wake up inside one of these critter's stomachs."
"Most of them have never seen fire, Tom," Astro said reassuringly. "It scares them. Besides, we're getting close to the big stuff now. You might see a tyranno or a big bronto any time. And if they come along, you'll hear 'em, believe me. They're about as quiet as a squadron of cruisers on battle emergency blasting off from the Academy in the middle of the night!"
"O.K.," replied Tom. "You're the hunter in this crew." Suddenly he laughed. "You know I really got a bang out of the way Roger jumped back from that waddling ground bird yesterday."
Astro grinned. "Yeah, the one thing in this place that's as ferocious as a kitten and he pulls his ray gun like an ancient cowboy!"
A very tired voice spoke up from the other sleeping bag. "Is that so! Well, when you two brave men came face to face with that baby lizard on a tree root, you were ready to finish your leave in Atom City!" Roger unzipped the end of the bag, stuck his blond head out, and gave his unit mates a sour look. "Sack in, will you? Your rocket wash is keeping me awake!"
Laughing, Astro and Tom nodded good night to each other and closed their sleeping bags. The jungle was still, the only movement being the leaping tongues of flame from the campfire.
An hour later it began to rain, a light drizzle at first that increased until it reached the steady pounding of a tropical downpour. Tom awoke first, opening the flap of his sleeping bag only to get his face full of slimy water that spilled in. Spluttering and coughing he sat up and saw that the campfire was out and the campsite was already six inches deep in water.
"Roger, Astro!" he called and slapped the nearest sleeping bag. Astro opened the flap a little and peered out sleepily. Instantly he rolled out of the bag and jumped to his feet.
"Wake Roger up!" he snapped. "We've got to get out of here!"
"What's the matter?" Roger mumbled through the bag, not opening it. "Why the excitement over a little rain?"
"The fire's out, hotshot," said Astro. "It's as dark as the inside of a cow's number-four belly. We've got to move!"
"Why?" asked Tom, not understanding the big cadet's sudden nervous excitement. "What's the matter with staying right where we are? Why go trooping around in the dark?"
"We can't light a fire anywhere," added Roger, finally sticking his head out of his sleeping bag.
"We've got to get on high ground!" said Astro, hurriedly packing the camping equipment. "We're in a hollow here. The rain really comes down on Venus, and in another hour this place will be a pond!"
Sensing the urgency in Astro's voice, Roger began packing up his equipment and in a few moments the three boys had their gear slung over their shoulders and were slogging through water already knee-deep.
"I still don't see why we have to go tracking through the jungle in the middle of the night," grumbled Roger. "We could climb up a tree and wait out the storm."
"You'd have to wait long after the rain stops," replied Astro. "There is one thing in this place nothing ever gets enough of, and that's water. Animals know it and hang around all the water holes. If a small animal tries to get a drink, he more than likely winds up in something's stomach. When it rains like this, hollows fill up like the one we just left, and everything within running, hopping, and crawling distance heads for it to get a bellyful of water. In another hour our camp will be like something out of a nightmare, with every animal in the jungle coming down for a drink and starting to fight one another."
"Then if we stayed there--" Roger stopped.
"We'd be in the middle of it," said Astro grimly. "We wouldn't last two minutes."
Walking single file, with Astro in the lead, followed by Roger and then Tom, they stumbled through the pitch-black darkness. Astro refused to shine a light, for fear of being attacked by a desperate animal, more eager for water than afraid of the light. They carried their shock blasters cocked and ready to fire. The rain continued, increasing in fury until they were enveloped in a nearly solid wall of water. In a little while the floor of the jungle became one continuous mudhole, with each step taking them ankle-deep into the sucking mud. Their climb was uphill, and the water from above increased, washing down around them in torrents. More than once one of the cadets fell, gasping for breath, into the dirty water, only to be jerked back to more solid footing by the other two. Stumbling, their hands groping wildly in the dark, they pushed forward.
They were reaching higher ground when Astro stopped suddenly.
"Listen!" he whispered hoarsely.
The boys stood still, the rain pounding down on their plastic headgear, holding rifles ready and straining their ears for some sound other than the drumming of rain.
"I don't hear anything," said Roger.
"Shhh!" hissed Astro.
They waited, and then from a distance they heard the faint crashing of underbrush. Gradually it became more distinct until there was no mistaking its source. A large monster was moving through the jungle near them!
"What is it?" asked Tom, trying to keep his voice calm.
"A big one," said Astro. "A real big one. And I think it's heading this way!"
"By the craters of Luna!" gasped Roger. "What do we do?"
"We either run, or stay here and try to blast it."
"Whatever you say, Astro," said Roger. "You're the boss."
"Same here," said Tom. "Call it."
Astro did not answer right away. He strained his ears, listening to the movements of the advancing monster, trying to ascertain the exact direction the beast was taking. The noise became more violent, the crashing more sharply defined as small trees were crushed to the ground.
"If only I knew exactly what it is!" said Astro desperately. "If it's a tyranno, it walks on its hind legs and has its head way up in the trees, and could pass within ten feet of us and not see us. But if it's a bronto, it has a long snakelike neck that he pokes all around and he wouldn't miss us at a hundred feet!"
"Make up your mind quick, big boy," said Roger. "If that thing gets any closer, I'm opening up with this blaster. He might eat me, but I'll sure make his teeth rattle first!"
The ground began to shake as the approaching monster came nearer. Astro remained still, ears straining for some sound to indicate exactly what was crashing down on them.
Above them, the shrill scream of an anthropoid suddenly pierced the dark night as its tree home was sent crashing to the ground. There was a growing roar and the crashing stopped momentarily.
"Let's get out of here," said Astro tensely. "That's a tyranno, but he's down on all fours now, looking for that monkey! Keep together and make as little noise as you can. No talking. Keep your blasters and emergency lights ready. If he discovers us, you shine the light on his face Roger, and Tom and I will shoot. O.K.?"
Tom and Roger agreed.
"All right," said Astro, "let's go--and spaceman's luck!"
