We’re men. I though you only strangled women.”
The grip slackened a trifle. “Men too,” said Bhak slowly. “That’s why I had to run away from Titan. That’s why I’ve had to run away from everywhere. Men or women—anyone who laughs at me.”
MacIan looked at the blank-eyed, revolting face, and wondered that anyone could laugh at it. Pity it, shut it harmlessly away, but not laugh.
Bhak’s fingers fell away abruptly. “They laugh at me,” he repeated miserably, “and run away. I know I’m ugly. But I want friends and a wife, like anyone else. Especially a wife. But they laugh at me, the women do, when I ask them. And....” He was shaking suddenly with rage and his face was a beast’s face, blind and brutal. “And I kill them. I kill the damned little vixens that laugh at me!”
He stared stupidly at his great hands. “Then I have to run away. Always running away, alone.” The bright, empty eyes met MacIan’s with deadly purpose. “That’s why I want the money. If I have money, they’ll like me. Women always like men who have money. If I kill one of you, I’ll have to run away again. But if I have someone to go with me. I won’t mind.”
Thekla showed his pointed teeth. “Try strangling a Nahali girl, Bhak. Then we’ll be rid of you.”
Bhak grunted. “I’m not a fool. I know what the Nahali do to you. But I want that money the girl told about, and I’ll get it. I’d get it now, only Lehn will come.”
He stood over them, grinning. MacIan drew back, between pity and disgust. “The Legion is certainly the System’s garbage dump,” he muttered in Martian, loud enough for Thekla to hear, and smiled at the low-canaler’s stifled taunt. Stifled, because Lehn was coming up, his heavy water-boots thudding on the soggy ground.
*
Without a word the three fell in behind the officer, whose face had taken on an unfamiliar stony grimness. MacIan wondered whether it was anger at him, or fear of what they might get in the swamp. Then he shrugged; the young cub would have to follow his own trail, wherever it led. And MacIan took a stern comfort from this thought. His own feet were irrevocably directed; there was no doubt, no turning back. He’d never have again to go through what Lehn was going through. All he had to do was wait.
The plank bridge groaned under them, almost touching the water in the moat. Most ingenious, that moat. The Nahali could swim it in their sleep, normally, but when the conductor rods along the bottom were turned on, they literally burned out their circuits from an overload. The swamp-rats packed a bigger potential than any Earthly electric eel.
Ian MacIan, looking at the lights of the squalid village that lay below the fort, reflected that the Nahali had at least one definitely human trait. The banging of a three-tiered Venusian piano echoed on the heavy air, along with shouts and laughter that indicated a free flow of “swamp juice.” This link in the chain of stations surrounding the swamplands was fully garrisoned only during the rains, and the less warlike Nahali were busy harvesting what they could from the soldiers and the rabble that came after them.
Queer creatures, the swamp-rats, with their ruby eyes and iridescent scales. Nature, in adapting them to their wet, humid environment, had left them somewhere between warm-blooded mammals and cold-blooded reptiles, anthropoid in shape, man-sized, capricious. The most remarkable thing about them was their breathing apparatus, each epithelial cell forming a tiny electrolysis plant to extract oxygen from water. Since they lived equally on land and in water, and since the swamp air was almost a mist, it suited them admirably. That was why they had to wait for the rains to go raiding in the fertile uplands; and that was why hundreds of Interworld Legionnaires had to swelter on the strip of soggy ground between swamp and plateau to stop them.
MacIan was last in line. Just as his foot left the planks, four heads jerked up as one, facing to the darkening sky.
“Rain!”
Big drops, splattering slowly down, making a sibilant whisper across the swamp. The pipes broke off, leaving the ears a little deafened with the lack of them after so long. And MacIan, looking at Lehn, swore furiously in his heart.
The three men paused, expecting an order to turn back, but Lehn waved them on.
“But it’s raining,” protested Bhak. “Well get caught in the attack.”
The officer’s strangely hard face was turned toward them. “No,” he said, with an odd finality, “they won’t attack. Not yet.”
They went on, toward the swamp that was worse in silence than it had been with the praying pipes. And MacIan, looking ahead at the oddly assorted men plowing grimly through the mud, caught a sudden glimpse of something dark and hidden, something beyond the simple threat of death that hung always over a reconnoitering patrol.
*
The swamp folded them in. It is never truly dark on Venus, owing to the thick, diffusing atmosphere. There was enough light to show branching, muddy trails, great still pools choked with weeds, the spreading liha -trees with their huge pollen pods, everything dripping with the slow rain. MacIan could hear the thudding of that rain for miles around on the silent air; the sullen forerunner of the deluge.
Fort and village were lost in sodden twilight. Lehn’s boots squelched onward through the mud of a trail that rose gradually to a ridge of higher ground. When he reached the top, Lehn turned abruptly, his electro-gun seeming to materialize in his hand, and MacIan was startled by the bleak look of his pink, young face.
“Stop right there,” said Lehn quietly. “Keep your hands up. And don’t speak until I’m finished.”
He waited a second, with the rain drumming on his waterproof coverall, dripping from the ends of his fair mustache. The others were obedient, Bhak a great grinning hulk between the two slighter men. Lehn went on calmly.
“Someone has sold us out to the Nahali. That’s how I know they won’t attack until they get the help they’re waiting for. I had to find out, if possible, what preparations they have made for destroying our electrical supply, which is our only vulnerable point. But I had a double purpose in calling this party. Can you guess what it is?”
MacIan could. Lehn continued:
“The traitor had his price; escape from the Legion, from Venus, through the swamp to Lhiva, where he can ship out on a tramp. His one problem was to get away from the fort without being seen, since all leaves have been temporarily cancelled.”
Lehn’s mist-grey eyes were icy. “I gave him that chance.”
Bhak laughed, an empty, jarring road. “See? That’s what the Nahali girl said. She said, ‘He can get what he needs, now. He’ll get away before the rains, probably with a patrol; then our people can attack.’ I know what he needed. Money! And I want it.”
“Shut up!” Lehn’s electro-gun gestured peremptorily. “I want the truth of this. Which one of you is the traitor?”
Thekla’s pointed white teeth gleamed. “MacIan loves the Legion, sir. He couldn’t be guilty.”
Lehn’s gaze crossed MacIan’s briefly, and again the Scot had a fleeting glimpse of something softer beneath the new hardness. It was something that took him back across time to a day when he had been a green subaltern in the Terran Guards, and a hard-bitten, battle-tempered senior officer had filled the horizon for him.
It was the something that had made Lehn offer him a chance, when his trap was set and sprung. It was the something that was going to make Lehn harder on him now than on either Bhak or Thekla. It was hero-worship.
MacIan groaned inwardly. “Look here,” he said. “We’re in Nahali country. There may be trouble at any moment. Do you think this is the time for detective work? You may have caught the wrong men anyway. Better do your job of reconnoitering, and worry about the identity of the traitor back in the fort.”
“You’re not an officer now, MacIan!” snapped Lehn. “Speak up, and I want the truth. You, Thekla!”
Thekla’s