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Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from Planet Stories July 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
The WEALTH OF ECHINDUL
By NOEL LOOMIS
_Though he carried with him the loot of the ages, who in The Pass--that legalized city of vice and corruption--would dare risk his neck to help Russell, the Hard Luck Man of the Swamps?_
* * * * *
He came up out of the Great Sea-Swamp of Venus like old FatherNeptune. He was covered with mud and slime. Seaweed hung from hischeap diving-suit. Brine dripped from his arms that hung limp andweary; it ran from his torso and made a dark trail in the sand.
_A flash of intuition hit Russell. He knew now how towin this fight._]
Without even looking back, he stood for a moment as if fighting tokeep on his feet, while the brine made a small puddle in the greensand. Finally he unscrewed the helmet and took it off. He turnedaround slowly and looked back across the two hundred miles of deadlyswamp, at the flaming craters of the Red Lava Range from which he hadcome.
With fingers that would hardly function from weariness he took off hisdiving-suit and straightened up. His stooping shoulders were free ofthat weight for the first time in forty days. He was a small man,hardly over four feet tall, and not well formed. It seemed incrediblethat he had crossed the Great Sea-Swamp on foot.
And as he looked back at the distant rim of green fire that marked themountains it seemed incredible to him too. A great sigh of relief andgratefulness shook his unsymmetrical body, and all the nerve andcolossal will-power that had carried him for six months, suddenlyflowed out of him in a single wave and left him empty. He forgot aboutthe ordeal that still lay ahead. He forgot everything. He pitchedforward on his face in the sand, and slept.
Some hours later a whistling noise awoke him. He rolled over, awakeinstantly, for in past months his ears had saved his life as often ashad his eyes. High in the sky he picked out a cannibal fish from theAcid Sea. It had set its great wings in a dive.
He raised his heat-gun, fired once, saw the feathers burst into blueflame, saw it falling; then he rolled over and went back to sleep. Noteven the thud of its heavy body on the sand disturbed him, but an hourlater he heard another warning--a rasping sound--and through thestench of the ancient swamp he smelled a fetidness that meant danger.
This time as he turned he rolled to his feet. He saw the huge coils ofthe Venusian water-constrictor. One lidless phosphorescent eye gleamedevilly at him, but its great jaws were spread and the dead fish washalf-way down its bone-plated throat.
Grant Russell relaxed. Ordinarily he would have been scared to deathto be within miles of the big saurian. But now for a few hours, withthe fish in its throat it would be comparatively harmless.
Grant rubbed his eyes and stretched. How wonderful sleep could be! Forsix weeks he had been in the swamp where he never had dared to takeoff his diving-suit even when he was resting on a clump of floatinggrass, for fear it would suddenly sink and drop him into a hundredfeet of brown water; six weeks walking through mud sometimes over hishead, with the brown, infested water above that; six weeks pitting allhis swamp lore against sudden death in a thousand forms, with only thelight gravity of Venus to aid him, and his indomitable determinationto keep him going. But now he felt like a million.
No man had ever crossed the Great Swamp alone on foot before. Few hadcrossed it in any fashion. Few would have tried it but Grant Russellbecause few wanted to do it as much as he did. In spite of his smallsize and his scrawny muscles, in spite of Venus which catered to bigmen and strong men, he had done it.
* * * * *
The food problem alone would have stopped most men, but Grant hadspent a lot of time around the swamps of Venus. Often he had goneprospecting with food enough for only one week because he couldn't buymore, and he had stayed four, five, six weeks.
To do that he had had to experiment. He'd eaten all sorts of things.Sometimes he had been ill but he had acquired immunity to certainpoisonous plants that contained food values.
The oxygen problem for a diving-suit for forty days would have stoppedmost men but Grant had solved that too. If he had not, he never couldhave gone to the Red Lava Range after the fabulous gizzard-stones ofVenus's prehistoric echindul.
For oxygen, he had discovered a plant that grew in the bottom of theswamp. You could cut its stalk into sections and put them in acontainer and they would exude oxygen for several hours. But he had tocarry at least one extra stalk all the time, and he had to keep hiseyes sharp for more. Sometimes it had been close.
Grant looked at the Red Lava Range and felt the precious leather baginside his shirt and smiled. Yes, he'd done it. He'd found one of thefabulous nests of the echindul--and it had been loaded with stones,just as ancient Venusian legend insisted.
The extinct echindul had been a sort of flying lizard that had nestedin the mysterious, almost inaccessible Red Lava Range. Every echindulhad had two gizzard-stones, and each matched pair of stones had anunusual property.
Grant reached in his watch-pocket and brought out the one he had keptout of the bag. He held it up and watched the sunlight, filteringthrough Venus's thick clouds, and the firelight, reflected from RedLava Range two hundred miles away, play on the chatoyant interior ofthe stone as if they were chasing each other.
Those stones would be worth forty thousand Earth dollars a pair if hecould get them to a reputable dealer in Aphrodite, Venus's largestcity. Therein lay Grant Russell's next problem, and in spite of thesatisfaction he felt at emerging from the Great Swamp, he knew thatgetting safely to Aphrodite might be an even more serious problem.
Aphrodite's only approach over the Lead Vapor Mountains from thesouthern hemisphere was through The Pass, a legalized city of vice. Onone side The Pass was flanked by the Bubbling Zinc Pits and on theother side it was skirted by the Fluoride River, and man had not yetdevised any way to navigate either of these. It was doubtful, even,that any species native to Venus could cross those two areas, but onthis authorities did not agree for in the year 2542 Venus and itsnatives were still largely unknown.
Not so far unknown, however, that Grant Russell failed to recognizethe single luminous eye that had risen out of the water on a long,slender stalk. "A fish," he thought, or as some would have said, aVenusian. It saw that he was looking at it, and it dropped out ofsight. There was the swirl of brown water that marked itsunder-surface progress. It swam like a fish, but it wasn't really afish. It was one of Venus's four dominant species and the most "human"of all.
The swirl moved fast across the surface of the water and disappearedin the direction of Aphrodite but Grant knew that its place would betaken within a few minutes by another. And if Grant had had anyforlorn hope that he might be able to slip through The Pass, he gaveit up, for he knew now that his movements were reported hourly andthat his possession of the fabulous stones was undoubtedly known toRelegar, the Uranian.
Relegar was the master of The Pass. He was no human and he had nohuman feelings. Killings and stealing were a business to him, and hehad the most efficient spying system on any planet. It was well knownunofficially that he kept an underground factory busy extracting adrug from the stamen of the swamp-orchid. The drug was labeled"Venus-snow," and Relegar found it highly profitable to trade it tothe fish in the Sea-Swamp on the southwest and to the semi-aquaticpeople in the great Gallium Bogs to the southeast--some called them"frogs"--for informati
on.
Relegar's spy-system was a monopoly by reason of a peculiar fact: thefish-people talked in a high sound-range that no solar being but aUranian could hear; no Uranian trusted another Uranian, and so Relegarwas the only entity in The Pass who knew the dialect of thefish-people. Seldom did any person or any entity find anything ofvalue in the bottom half of Venus that was not promptly reported tothe Uranian.
Therefore Grant Russell did not dare enter The Pass with the stones onhis person. This was a quick way to lose them--and perhaps his life.Some day, thought Grant wishfully, some big-shot would come along andclean out The Pass and then the little honest men would be safe. Onthe rare occasions when a prospector did find something of value andget back to land he would be allowed to keep it. Grant wished he had alot of power or a lot of money. He'd take over the clean-up job. But afellow like him, without friends, without influence, without money,didn't have a chance.
* * * * *
Grant had thought about