Beauty, Personal -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories; Venus (Planet) -- Fiction
We met them right away. Three of them had been waiting for us in a
sort of transept. Something--a blunt hatchet probably--bounced off my
shoulder and sent a sharp pain through it. I swung my fist and caught
the assailant in his skeleton midriff, doubling him up. I could only
see the outline of his shape in that gloom, and I didn't like it. It
was out of a nightmare. Harry was having better luck. He shoved the
muzzle of his gun into the Venusian's belly and burned a hole through
him.
The other one tried to run, but he didn't get far.
Harry was breathing hard. He grinned at me. "You okay?" he said.
"I'll have a shoulder that's sore as hell for a while," I said, "but
let's go."
A dozen passageways led from the main one. "Where do we look first?"
Harry wanted to know.
"We'd better split up. That way we can cover more territory."
"I don't like to leave you alone with that bum shoulder."
"Forget it. If there were any more around, they've cleared out by now.
Get going."
I had a pocket light that I used in the darkest passages. Most of the
cloisters and compartments were empty, and didn't look as though they'd
been used in years.
At the end of one passageway I found the rooms of the priests, very
sparsely furnished, and from there I got a glimpse from a narrow
ventilation slit at the garden itself. The colored mists and the weird
trees. But no animate being was moving out there.
In the last room, the door was barred with a crude, vertical bolt. I
blasted off the bar, and opened the door. Behind it I found Sukey Jones.
* * * * *
She stood there looking scared, and not believing that it was really
me. Her eyes were big as dollars.
And when she was sure, the way she threw herself at me and hugged me,
it was embarrassing.
"Chuck, Chuck! I never thought I'd see you again. I never--I'm so--!"
And that was all I got out of her for the next couple of minutes. I
gave her my handkerchief to dab at her eyes, and I got the story at
last.
She had been there two days without food and water, locked in.
They had arrived a week ago, and during that time she had seen nothing
except the interior of this room.
Althea Campbell had heard rumors of the rainbow gardens, and that the
natives, by bathing in the radiation given off by the colored mists,
were able to restore youth and vigor for long periods of time. She had
seen the chance of restoring her own body to its youthful bloom and of
working the miracle that she had sought for so many years on half a
dozen planets. She had sought out Marjud, who alone had contacts that
could get them into the forbidden area.
"I still don't get it," I said. "Where is she now, and why has she got
you locked in here?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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