From among those leaves glowed for an instant a sort of splinter of yellow light. A small object sang over Planter’s helmeted head like a bee, and struck behind him with a little chock. It must have found lodgment against the hall-tree thing, which paused in its pursuit to flop and spatter the mud with its tentacles. Planter blessed the diversion, whatever it was, and strove nearer to the shore.
The forest was alive, he suddenly decided. Out of its misty tangle a great leafy branch swung knowingly toward him. He clutched at it, brought away a fat, moist handful of strange-shaped leaves. His other hand made good its hold on the branch itself, and with the last of his strength he dragged himself to where roots hummocked above the mud.
Then he saw where the branch had come from. A slim, active figure stood among the stems, pressing with both hands upon the base of the branch to make it move into the open. As Planter scrambled to safety, the figure relaxed its helpful shoving, and the branch moved back toward the perpendicular.
Planter gazed in utter lost unbelief at this stranger.
It was a woman, young, fair, fine-limbed. She wore the briefest of garments, belted around with strange weapons, and her feet were shod in cross-gartered buskins. Upon her tumble of golden curls rode a metal helmet that reminded him of Grecian antiquity. Her bare arms, round but strong, cradled something with a stock and butt of a musket, but with a short, tight-strung bow at its muzzle—surely the pattern of a medieval crossbow.
Her face was of a flawless pink-and-white beauty, just now stamped with utter disdain. Its short, rosy mouth opened, and formed words.
Words that Planter understood!
“You fool,” said the girl with the crossbow. “You scurvy fool.”
Disbro, barely able to stir for shock and weariness, climbed only a few hand’s breadths out of danger before he must stop and wheeze for breath. At last he could make himself heard:
“Max! You pighead, help me!”
“Uhh,” came the grunt of assent from above, as the big fellow slid down in turn. He slipped a thick arm around Disbro, hoisting the tall, slender body as if it were a bundle of old clothes, and slid it across a shoulder like the jut of a crag. Then Max scaled the rope once again, to the safe top of the nosed-over rocket ship.
Disbro found his own feet, and shakily wiped his clear-cut face, still pale from exertion and terror. “That was close.”
“Say,” ventured Max, “Mr. Planter, he’s gone.”
Disbro looked around. The mud expanse around them was stirred up as if by boiling struggles, but there was no sign of Planter or the thing with the tentacles.
“That thing got him,” decided Disbro, but Max shook his heavy head.
“Huh-uh,” he demurred. “No. The girl, she got him.”
“Girl?” echoed Disbro, and scowled.
“What girl?”
Max pointed with a finger like the haft of a hammer. “She was in the trees. Got him.”
Disbro peered at the trees, then at Max. His scowl deepened. “What are you drivelling about?”
“The girl,” said Max.
Disbro snorted and skinned his teeth in scorn.
“How,” he demanded of the misty skies, “do I get mixed up with minus quantities like this? A girl, the man says! Here on Venus!”
“A girl,” repeated Max firmly.
Disbro wheeled upon him.
“Come off of that!” he commanded sharply. “Planter’s gone. Dead. You’re all I have to associate with. You’ll act sane, whether you are or not.”
Max’s big, pained eyes faltered before the glittering accusation of Disbro’s gaze. “All right,” he conceded.
“There wasn’t any girl there, you idiot!”
Max nodded. “I saw—”
“Shut up!” Disbro cut him off. “No girl, I said!”
“No girl,” repeated Max obediently.
Rain began to fall, fat drops the size of marbles.
“Back inside,” commanded Disbro. “There’ll be lots of this kind of weather. We’ll have something to eat, then study another way to reach the trees yonder.”
“No girl,” said Max. “But I saw.”
The rain that drove Disbro and Max back into their shelter filtered through layers of leafage, beginning to wash the mud from Planter’s clothing. He stared again at his rescuer.
“I seem to have understood what you said,” he managed at last.
“Isn’t so strange, that?” she flung back, in words somehow run together. “E’en though you’re mad enow to sport with yonder muck-worm,” and her wide, bright blue eyes flicked toward the danger he had lately avoided, “you’ll have the tongue of mankind. Art no man?”
“Man enough, young woman,” rejoined Planter, a little nettled. “I suppose it’s like the fantasies—we can read each other’s minds, or something.”
“Something,” she echoed, as if humoring a child.
“And I owe you thanks for saving my life.”
“Oh, ’twas no great matter.” She shouldered the crossbow. “Come, for the Skygors will be about our heels.”
She picked her way rapidly among the steam, with the surest and cleverest of feet. Women on Earth were never so graceful or sure, decided Planter, hurrying after. He was aware that he did not step on the muddy surface of Venus, but upon a matted over-floor, of roots, fallen stems, ground-vines, sometimes great sturdy leaves like lily-pads grown to the size of double mattresses. “Wait, young lady,” he called, “who are the Skygors, you mentioned and why should they be after us?”
She halted again, swung and studied him with more of that disdainful curiosity. “ ’Tis a gruel-brained idiot,” she decided, as if to herself. “For that they cast him out. Methought ’twas strange that a man should flee, of himself,
