Part 2 (1/2)

”I want you to a.s.sure me safe pa.s.sage to your office. I will give you three-fourths of them,” Grant blurted. He had not meant to make an offer like that. He had intended to let Netse ask but the delicacy of his situation hit him abruptly and fully and he was weighed down with sudden desperation.

”How can you find the others?” asked Netse.

”I--” Grant got cautious. ”I have provided for that.”

The b.u.t.terfly fluttered to the top of the dome and hung upside down for a moment. Then the whistling came again. ”I am sorry. I do not see where I can be of any a.s.sistance.”

Grant was stunned. He held out both hands. ”But--”

The lights went out. The Earthman was at his side, leading him out. He was given his heat-gun. ”But what--why?--I don't understand,” Grant said, bewildered.

His escort looked at him, opened his mouth, and showed Grant he was tongueless. He positioned Grant on the square and a moment later Grant was back on the sidewalk.

Discouragement was on him like a great weight. It deadened him. It smothered him. He paced the streets and eventually found himself before a restaurant. He remembered then that he had not eaten for a long time. He went in and ordered oysters. That was about the only meat you could buy in The Pa.s.s and be sure of not eating some sentient being. Then, waiting, he sat in a booth with his head between his hands.

It was apparent they didn't want him to have any part of his stones--the stones he had spent six months and risked his life for--the stones that meant so much to him and to Beth. They wanted all of his stones. The dirty Shylocks. They weren't willing to take half, or two-thirds, or three-fourths. They wanted all. They weren't willing for him to have any part of them. He would have settled for ten per cent, which would have been over fifty thousand dollars, but they didn't offer him ten per cent. They offered nothing. They wanted all.

Netse must have been contacted by Relegar and told to keep hands off.

That was why Grant had wanted to see Netse first. But he had not dreamed that Netse would refuse him entirely. He had thought it would be merely a matter of the price.

Now what could he do? He didn't dare let the constrictor have more than three day's head-start, for the saurian would finish digesting the fish in about five days. That meant Grant would have to start back to the swamp tomorrow. But Relegar's spies would report every move.

The minute he set out, Relegar would be notified. And Relegar would come after him. Grant shuddered. Where his hands touched his face his finger tips were cold.

Relegar would find him. The spider had a locator sense that was infallible. He could set out days later and find Grant unerringly. And how could one fight the Uranian when they met? Relegar's nervous system was so constructed that he was practically impossible to kill.

You could boil him or freeze him without injuring him. Uranians had been boiled alive in prussic acid for forty hours without ill effects.

You could cut off legs and even sever the head and they would still live. So what could a man do?

There was only one thing Grant knew. That was to go after the stones.

They were his and he would never give them up. They might take the stones away from him, but he would never give them up.

So the next morning he overhauled his suit and patched it. He got fresh oxygen and bought a meager supply of food. He had one more good meal and started out south again with the single stone in his watch-pocket.

It took him seven hours to reach the place where he had left the constrictor. It was gone, of course. How far, he could not know. He took the one telepathic stone from his pocket. He found a spot where he could sit in the open, cross-legged, with his eyes fixed on the stone. From the corner of his eye he saw a brown detached eye on a stalk pop up from the surface of the water, but he paid no attention.

He concentrated on the stone.

The stone had a fair polish. He looked at its surface and shut out all the normal sounds from his ears. The stone seemed to be in motion on the inside, and presently that motion communicated itself to his mind.

He had a picture of a constrictor, lying sleepily in a pool of brown water surrounded by heavy, deep gra.s.s that hung over the banks and grew down into the water.

He heard now the distant bellow of a swamp-ox, the buzzing of aquatic bees. Slowly he turned the stone on its edge and revolved it carefully. When the picture was clearest in his mind he picked out an orientation point in the distant mountains. Then, well pleased, he put the stone in his pocket, got into his diving-suit, screwed on the helmet, adjusted the oxygen, and stepped off into the brown water of the swamp.

The bottom here was steep but it was good. It was hard and not more than knee-deep in mud. He traveled carefully, freezing on occasion when huge shadows moved above him. He was in fifty feet of water and he liked that better because it was easier to go unnoticed. He avoided a patch of electric cactus, for the spines would have electrocuted him even through the suit, and he went far around an area of white bull-root, shaped like women's legs, because he knew the bull-root was always infested with swamp-razors that would cut through the seams of his diving-suit.

When he came out of the water he found his orientation point and kept going. He came to a wide stretch of water, and with the wind at his back, made fast time by climbing on an island of floating gra.s.s and going straight across. This was important. He needed to find the constrictor by the time Relegar started after him.

The spider could travel much faster than Grant for it walked on water where Grant was forced to wade on the bottom. But Relegar would wait a while. He wouldn't want to be on the surface of Venus any longer than necessary, even for half a million dollars, so he would give Grant plenty of time, since there was no danger of his getting away.

Grant was encouraged by the fact that the constrictor did not appear to be far away. Everything here depended on his reaching the saurian two days ahead of Relegar. Not that he expected to run. That was hopeless. But he did have a partial plan. He thought he knew how to recover the stones and to face the Uranian without being immediately killed. And he hoped for some now unforeseen development that subsequently would help him to get through The Pa.s.s.