THE STAR-MASTER-6
574 Words
AS THE DAYS PASSED we were allowed a fair freedom of movement. A freedom to plan—what? I must confess that Jim and I had no conception of what we might do in circumstances like these.
Once Venta had whispered to me, “We shall escape from here—it can be done.”
Escape from this Curtmann, join Venta’s grandfather—old Prytan—out there in the Venus Forest City.... Certainly it was all that Jim and I could hope for. And then came that night when the misty lead-grey ball of Venus had grown to a monstrous disc beneath us, with the cone of its shadow blotting out the Sun as we dropped down into the heavy Venus atmosphere. There came a moment when Venta, Jim and I were alone, and from the dim corridor with a little beat of wings, Rhan, the Midge, came to join us. He was carrying an oxohydro heat-torch. Amazing little man-shape. The alumite torch was as big as himself, and heavier. His diaphanous, dragonfly wings struggled with it. Like a giant flying ant, with an ant’s monstrous strength in proportion to its size. Panting, he fluttered heavily and laid it at my feet.
“You, the Great God,” he said. “I serve you. Here it is.”
He stood now by the torch he had brought. The muscles on his broad chest heaved under the sleek bronzed skin with his panting breath.
“For you,” he added. “No one saw me. I got it for you. I did well, Seyla Venta?”
“Oh yes. Thank you, Rhan.” Venta was trembling now with excitement. “When we get lower into the atmosphere, we’ll go to one of the pressure-portes at the bottom of the hull. There are space suits there, if we can get to them.”
“Let’s close this door,” Jim said quickly. “Not so loud, Venta.”
We planned it, as the ship settled down through the heavy, sullen-looking Venus clouds and then burst out into the lower atmosphere with the dark surface of Venus far down beneath us. Rhan watched and reported that Curtmann and most of his men were forward by the control turret. Then Jim, Venta and I were able to get down through one of the dim corridors, down a little catwalk ladder into the lower hull. The metal pressure porte door was locked.
I stood at the bottom of the ladder. Above me the voices of Curtmann’s ruffians were audible. Every moment I expected that we would be missed.
“Hurry it,” I murmured.
The porte doorlock melted as Jim held the torch upon it. We slid into the porte, closed the door after us. Venta, on the voyage to Earth, had been trained by Curtmann in the use of these pressure-suits, and in a moment we stood in them, helmeted, with the air bloating the suits so that we were shapeless monsters.
I opened the outer doorslide. A little at first, and then wider. In the rarified atmosphere of Venus at this fifty mile height, the air of the little porte went out with a rush. It blew us out with it. I had a sickening sensation of falling into nothingness. Then it seemed that my head steadied. I fumbled with a hand upon the anti-gravity mechanisms by which the fall could be guided.
Above me the dark finned shape of Curtmann’s space ship was drawing swiftly upward and away. Head down, with the bloated shapes of Jim and Venta beside me, we plummeted like falling meteorites through the sub-stratosphere darkness.
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