Masson belched. This strange new body of his had dined on fish he
discovered, and probably very overripe fish at that. He flexed his
thick gray arms, admiring the ripple of sleek hard muscle. Blood was
pumping and throbbing through his body with the excitement of the
moment. For almost the first time in his forty years of myopic boyhood
and timid manhood Glade Masson felt alive.
Luxuriantly the man from Earth stretched. He saw an expression that he
took to be amazement cross the strange being's features. The purple
deepened around the other male's sunken nostrils.
"I," the frog man said, "am Doctor John Lawler!"
Masson's mouth dropped open. What must have happened back there in
Crayton? His last memory was of a horrible wrenching at his delicate
stomach, and then an abrupt blacking out of the auditorium. Apparently
his ego, and that of Doctor Lawler as well, had by some mysterious
means been exchanged with that of these froglike beings.
Suddenly he smiled. This was probably another of his nightmares. He
would shut his eyes, pinch himself hard, and command himself to awaken.
He pinched. He heard Lawler screech in terror. Slowly he opened his
eyes.
An ugly beast, a reptilian monster of scales and gaping tooth-lined
snout, came lumbering toward him on stubby crooked legs. Ten feet in
length was the alligator-like saurian, its lumpy black plates sprouting
an ugly ridge of yellowish spines along its back down to its broad flat
tail.
Masson took to his heels. He bounded away across the springy carpet of
water-logged vines after the fading sounds of the Doctor's spurting
webbed feet.
Fog closed in around him. Twice he fell into seemingly bottomless pools
of water and his alien body surfaced him instinctively and dragged
him ashore so he could continue his flight. No longer did he hear the
running feet of Doctor Lawler; yet he continued to run.
So it was that he came into a section of the vine-floored mistiness
where stubby leafy-boled shrubs grew from the spongy soil, and as he
approached closer to the pale-leaved little trees, he heard the excited
babble of slurred half-familiar words. He looked more closely at the
trees then, to discover that just above his head a thatch of living
vines, leaves and grasses topped each pulpy yellowish trunk.
Gray faces, hideous and limp of ear, peered down at him. He had come
across a village of the frog people! From the trees of this sunless
foggy jungle they had fashioned shelters of a sort.
As his breathing eased he could hear them more plainly. No wonder their
speech sounded familiar, he realized, they were speaking English!
Lawler and he were not alone then. Probably all of Crayton was
here--possibly all of Ohio!
"I tell you," that was Charles Ellis, the chemistry department head,
"I'm positive this is not Earth. May sound crazy to you, but I'm sure
this is the planet Venus."
Masson nodded his head in agreement, but some of the other men snorted
their disgust.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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