the end of a long series of the smoothest journeying either had ever known. The Willard network was perfect over the three planets and the colonized satellites beyond, and over the ships that ply the spaceways. This neat little exploring vessel, with its crew of three coarse-faced, sullen slavers, had awaited them at the end of their journey outward from Lakkdarol, fully fitted with supplies and every accessory the most modern adventurer could desire. It even had a silken prison room for the hypothetical sirens whom they were to carry back for the Willard approval and the Willard markets if the journey proved successful.
'It's been easy so far,' observed Smith, squinting downward over the little Venusian's shoulder. 'Can't expect everything, you know. But that is a bad-looking place.'
The dull-faced pilot at the controls grunted in fervent agreement as she craned her neck to watch the little world spinning below them.
'Damn' glad I'm not goin' out with you,' she articulated thickly over a mouthful of tobacco.
Yarola flung her a cheerful Venusian anathema in reply, but Smith did not speak. She had little liking and less trust in this sullen and silent crew. If she was not mistaken—and she rarely made mistakes in her appraisal of men—there was going to be trouble with the three before they completed their journey back into civilization. Now she turned her broad back to the pilot and stared downward.
From above, the moon seemed covered with the worst type of semi-animate, ravenous super-tropical jungle, reeking with fertility and sudden death, hot under lurid Jupiter's blaze. They saw no signs of human life anywhere below as their ship swept in its long curve over the jungle. The tree-tops spread in an unbroken blanket over the whole sphere of the satellite. Yarola, peering downward, murmured,
'No water. Somehow I always expect sirens to have fishtails.'
Out of her queer, heterogeneous past Smith dragged a fragment of ancient verse, '——gulfs enchanted, where the sirens sing ...' and said aloud,
'They're supposed to sing, too. Oh, it'll probably turn out to be a pack of ugly savages, if there's anything but delirium behind the story.'
The ship was spiraling down now, and the jungle rushed up to meet them at express-train speed. Once again the little moon spun under their searching eyes, flower-garlanded, green with fertile life, massed solid in tangles of ravening growth. Then the pilot's hands closed hard on the controls and with a shriek of protesting atmosphere the little spaceship slid in a long dive toward the unbroken jungle below.
In a great crashing and crackling they sank groundward through smothers of foliage that masked the ports and plunged the interior of the ship into a green twilight. With scarcely an impact the jungle floor received them. The pilot leaned back in her seat and heaved a tobacco-redolent sigh. Her work was done. Incuriously she glanced at the forward port.
Yarola was scrambling up from the floor-glass that now showed nothing but crushed vines and branches and the reeking mud of the moon's surface. She joined Smith and the pilot at the forward port.
They were submerged in jungle. Great serpentine branches and vines like cables looped downward in broken lengths from the shattered trees which had given way at their entrance. It was an animate jungle, full of hungry, reaching things that sprang in one wild, prolific tangle from the rich mud. Raw-colored flowers, yards across, turned sucking mouths blindly against the glass here and there, trickles of green juice slavering down the clear surface from their insensate hunger. A thorn-fanged vine lashed out as they stood staring and slid harmlessly along the glass, lashed again and again blindly until the prongs were dulled and green juice bled from its bruised surfaces.
'Well, we'll have blasting to do after all,' murmured Smith as she looked out into the ravenous jungle.' No wonder those poor devils came back a little cracked. I don't see how they got through at all. It's—'
'Well—Pharol take me!' breathed Yarola in so reverent a whisper that Smith's voice broke off in mid-sentence and she spun around with a hand dropping to her gun to front the little Venusian, who had sought the stern port in her exploration. 'It's a road!' gasped Yarola. 'Black Pharol can have me for dinner if there isn't a road just outside here!'
The pilot reached for a noxious Martian cigarette and stretched luxuriously, quite uninterested. But Smith had reached the Venusian's side before she finished speaking, and in silence the two stared out upon the surprising scene the stern port framed. A broad roadway stretched arrowstraight into the dimness of the jungle. At its edges the hungry green things ceased abruptly, not encroaching by so much as a tendril or a leaf into the clearness of the path. Even overhead the branches had been forbidden to intrude, their vein-looped greenery forming an arch above the road. It was as if a destroying beam had played through the jungle, killing all life in its path. Even the oozing mud was firmed here into a smooth pavement. Empty, enigmatic, fhe clear way slanted across their line of vision and on into the writhing jungle. 'Well,' Yarola broke the silence at last, 'here's a good start. All we've got to do is follow the road. It's a safe bet there won't be any lovely ladies wandering around through this jungle. From the looks of the road there must be some civilized people on the moon after all.'
'I'd be happier if I knew what made it,' said Smith. 'There are some damned queer things on some of the moons and asteroids.'
Yard's cat-eyes were shining.
'That's what I like about this life,' she grinned. 'You don't get bored. Well, what do the readings say?'
From her seat at the control panel the pilot glanced at the gauges which gave automatic report on air and gravity oufc side.
'O.K.,' she grunted. 'Better take blast-guns.'
Smith shrugged off her sudden uneasiness and turned to the weapon raclc.
'Plenty of charges, too,' she said. 'No telling what we'll run into.'
The pilot rolled her poisonous cigarette between thick lips and said, 'Luck. You'll need it,' as the two turned to the outer lock. She had all the indifference of her class to anything but her own comfort and the completion of her allotted tasks with a minimum of effort, and she scarcely troubled to turn her head as the lock swung open upon an almost overwhelming gush of thick, hot air, redolent of green growing things and the stench of swift decay.
A vine-tip lashed violently into the opened door as Smith and Yarola stood staring. Yarola snapped a Venusian oath and dodged back, drawing her blast-gun. An instant later the eye-destroying blaze of it sheered a path of destruction through the lush vegetable carnivora straight toward the slanting roadway a dozen feel away. There was an immense hissing and sizzling of annihilated green stuff, and an empty path stretched before them across the little space which parted the ship's outer lock from the road. Yarola stepped down into reeking mud that bubbled up around her boots with a stench of fertility and decay. She swore again as she sank knee-deep into its blackness. Smith, grinning, joined her. Side by side they floundered through the ooze toward the road.
Short though the distance was, it took them all of ten minutes to cover it. Green things whipped out toward them from the walls of sheared forest where the blast-gun had burned, and both were bleeding from a dozen small scratches and thorn-flicks, breathless and angry and very muddy indeed before they reached their goal and dragged themselves onto the firmness of the roadway.
'Whew!' gasped Yarola, stamping the mud from her caked boots. 'Pharol can have me if I stir a step off this road after this. There isn't a siren alive who could lure me back into that hell again. Poor Cembre!'
'Come on,' said Smith. 'Which way?'
Yarola slatted sweat from her forehead and drew a deep breath, her nostrils wrinkling distastefully.
'Into the breeze, if you ask me. Did you ever smell such a stench? And hot! Gods! I'm soaked through already.'
Without words Smith nodded and,turned to the right, from where a faint breeze stirred the heavy, moisture-laden air. Her own lean body was impervious to a great variation in climate, but even Yarola, native of the Hot Planet, dripped with sweat already and Smith's own leather-tanned face glis
tened and her shirt clung in wet patches to her shoulders.
The cool breeze struck gratefully upon their faces as they turned into the wind. In a gasping silence they plodded muddily up the road, their wonder deepening as they advanced. What had made the roadway became more of a mystery at every step. No vehicle tracks marked the firm ground, no footprints. And nowhere by so much as a hair's breadth did the forest encroach upon the path.
On both sides, beyond the rigid limits of the road, the lush and cannibalistic life of the vegetation went on. Vines dangled great sucking disks and thorn-toothed creepers in the thick air, ready for a deadly cast at anything that wandered within reach. Small reptilian things scuttled through the reeking swamp mud, squeaking now and then in the toils of some throny trap, and twice they heard the hollow bellowing of some invisible monster. It was raw primeval life booming and thrashing and devouring all about them, a planet in the first throes of animate life.
But here on the roadway that could have been made by nothing less than a well-advanced civilization that ravening jungle seemed very far away, like some unreal world enacting its primitive dramas upon a stage. Before they had gone far they were paying little heed to it, and the bellowing and the lashing, hungry vines and the ravenous forest growths faded