Donald A. Wollheim (ed) Read Online Free Page B

Basin, it was possible to forget that
those places were on the same Earth with Los Angeles or London or New
Delhi—possible even to get the impression that the inhabitants weren't really
human beings at all.
    More than anything else, the receiving
station area of Venus looked like an obscure corner of Earth on a mildly
unusual day. It was very cloudy, which was to be expected, and the air was like
thick gray fog. It was warm and damp, and the atmosphere tasted artificially
sweet and heady. Gray-green vegetation circled the station like a choking wall,
and the hush in the air was a thick and heavy oil.
    But the really alien aspects of Venus—the diffuse colonies of oxygen-breathing organisms that
webbed the higher clouds, the strange temperature currents that precipitated
the water vapor before it could rise to the four-mile carbon dioxide bands—were
invisible.
    While the doctor and the perfectly humanoid
robots unloaded the babies, Keith and Carrie started across to the dome-shaped
station house. Mark Kamoto spotted them before they
had taken ten steps. He ran up to them, waving and hollering.
    "Hey!" he yelled. "Welcome to
the Underwater Kingdom!"
    Four
hours and two pots of coffee later, they were still talking full blast, in that
inevitable outburst of verbiage which occurs whenever long-separated friends
are reunited.
    Keith
grinned at Mark, who looked thinner and tougher than when he had left Earth
three years before. "We'd like to get out and look at it," he said
finally.
    "We've
got some work to do first," Mark said, "so I think we'd better wait
until tomorrow. That'll be about eleven Earth-days yet."
    "Don't play pioneer and greenhorn with
us, old boy," Keith said. "We know how long the night is."
    "That's what you think," Mark told him. "You know it on a
clock; wait till you Live it!"
    By the time the night had come and gone and
the gray light of day had rolled around again, Keith was ready to admit that
Mark had been right. The ten Earth-days of the Venusian night had been busy and full, and spiced with the exoticism of the truly new.
    Still,
they were long, long days.
    It rained a good fifty per cent of the time—a
hard, steady, monotonous rain that drummed into the jungle with unholy
steadiness. The clouds glowed with a pale phosphorescence. To a man bom and raised on Earth,
the effect was disconcerting. It was as if you somehow slept through every
day, and whenever you woke up it was always a cloudlighted midnight, and whenever you went to bed it was midnight still.
    With Mark piloting the copter, they took off
into the morning fog and soon left the station clearing far behind them. Four
babies, comprising the quota for Halaja , shared the
back of the cabin.
    One of them, a solemn-eyed child with long curls and a pug nose, would
be Keith's son until he returned to Earth.
    "Look
at the birds," Carrie said.
    There were thousands of them, as large as
hawks and brilliantly colored. They swarmed above the gray-green jungles in
plumed squadrons, slanting down occasionally to snare tiny lizard-like reptiles
that lived on the broad leaves at the top of the forest. More than anything else,
they resembled the aquatic birds over the seas of Earth, diving after fish.
    The copter flew due west, in a lane between
the swollen mountains of the clouds and the rolling roof of the jungle. Once
they passed an open plain, crisscrossed with small streams and dotted with
grazing animals. There were many swamps and bogs, but few hills. "Hang
on," Mark said.
    Venus promptly exhibited her favorite stunt:
raining. It got just a trifle darker, and then the sponges of gray clouds began
to drip. The copter cut wetly through the downpour, wobbling slightly when it
ran into semi-rivers in the sky. There were no high winds, however. There was
no lightning and no thunder.
    In
eight hours they reached Halaja .
    From the air, half hidden through a drizzle
of rain, the village of Halaja looked like a faded
photograph of an ancient frontier fort