So Friday--our ultimate authority--remembered little of the transit.
He had bad short periods of wakefulness, when the recurring agony of
his body woke and racked him afresh, and only during these did he see
the other two grotesque figures, sometimes widely separated, sometimes
close, dazzlingly half-lit by Jupiter's light. But he was conscious
that one of the three was keeping them more or less together, though
only later did he know that this one was Carse--Carse, who hardly
slept, who drove off unconsciousness and fought through nausea to keep
at his task of shepherding, failing which they would have drifted
miles apart and become hopelessly separated. He was able to maintain
them in a fairly compact group by his discovery of a short metal
direction rod on the breast of the suit, which gave horizontal
movement in the direction it was pointed when its button was pressed.
* * * * *
But though it seemed endless, the journey was not; Satellite III grew
and grew. Its pale circle spread outward; dark blurs took definition;
a spot of blue winked forth--the Great Briney Lake. The globe at last
became concave, then, after they entered its atmosphere, convex. This
last stretch was the most grueling.
Friday remembered it in vivid flashes. Time after time he dropped into
confused sleep, each time to be awakened by Carse jarring into him,
shouting at him through the suits' small radio sets, keeping him--and
Leithgow--attentive to the job of decelerating. The man's efforts must
have been terrific, taxing all his enormous driving power, for he at
that time was without doubt more exhausted than they. But he
succeeded, and he was a haggard-faced, feverish shell of himself when
at last he had them in a dangling drunken halt in the air a hundred
feet from the surface.
Primal savagery lay stretched out below, and there seemed to be no safe
spot whereon to land. The foul, deep swamp that reached for miles on
every side, the towering trees that sprouted their spiny trunks and
limbs from it, the interlaced razor-edged vines and creeper-growths--all
was a stirring welter of tropic life, life varied and voracious and
untamed. From the tiny poisonous bansi insects layers deep on the
nearest tree to the monster gantor that crouched in a clump of weeds,
gently sawing his fangs back and forth, all the creatures of this world
were against man.
Carse scanned the scene wearily. They had to land; had to sleep under
normal conditions, and eat and drink, before they could go further.
But where? Where was haven? He snapped out the direction rod, moved
away a short distance, and then glimpsed, below and to the left, a
small peninsula of firm soil which seemed safe and uninhabited. And
there was a pool of fairly clear water before it, containing nothing
but an old uprooted stump. He came back to the others, shook them, and
led them down to the place he had discovered.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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