An Earthman on Venus (Originally titled "The Radio Man")Farley, Ralph Milne
Science
An Earthman on Venus (Originally titled "The Radio Man")
Farley, Ralph Milne
Life on other planets -- Fiction; Science fiction; Venus (Planet) -- Fiction
Two horns projected upwardly from the tail of the beast, one of which
Doggo proceeded to stroke with his paw; and to my surprise, a green
liquid spouted from the animal, quickly filling the bowl. So that is
where my breakfast had come from! Green milk from green cows! Strange!
And yet how much more logical than on earth, where a red cow eats green
grass under a blue sky and produces white milk, from which we get yellow
butter.
Shortly after lunch I heard the hum of a motor, and presently Satan
landed near us with a new plane. This strange plane of the ant-men
stopped abruptly, hovered for a moment, and then settled just where it
was, like a helicopter.
Doggo carried me aboard, and we started, Satan at the levers and Doggo
standing guard over me. But whether this was to protect me from Satan,
or to keep me from falling out again, I could not say.
We cruised along for several hours over much the same sort of country as
I had seen before, except that we crossed several rivers, and once a
small lake.
At last the ship hovered and landed on top of what seemed to be a
helter-skelter pile of exaggerated toy building blocks, exactly in
keeping with the size of the ants. As far as the eye could see on all
sides, these blocks were heaped. They resembled a group of Pueblo Indian
dwellings.
Doggo and the fierce ant-man whom I called Satan now picked me up in
their jaws, the former gently and the latter not so gently, and carried
me out of the airplane and down an inclined runway into the interior of
the edifice. The passage was long, narrow, dark and winding, but
presently we emerged into a room about thirty feet square by ten feet
high, lighted by narrow windows opening toward the western sky. That is,
I call it “western,” for it was in this direction that the sky turned
pink at eventide.
In this room I was laid on the floor. The unpleasant ant-man departed,
and Doggo placed himself on guard in the doorway.
Presently two strange ant-men entered, carrying a couch, which they set
down in one corner of the room. Then they walked several times around
me, viewing me from all sides with evident interest, until, at a
stiffening and quivering of Doggo’s antennae, they hurriedly left the
room. I noticed that Doggo no longer carried the green weapon, which
seemed strange, as he was evidently on guard.
Then I fell to wondering about the couch. It was a simple affair, and
yet quite evidently intended for a bed. Upholstered with some kind of
dark blue cloth, at that!
“What need have ants of a bed?” I mused. “Certainly they cannot lie
down; and, even if they could, such a couch as this would be of little
use to one of them, for this is only a man-size couch, whereas these
ants are about ten feet in length!”
My perplexity was tinged with a hope that there might be human beings
here.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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