Planter caught the green shoulders and shook the creature roughly. It was larger than he, but cowered. “I will show,” it yielded, and led him away. In a nearby corridor were huge handles, three of them, like pivoted clinker-bars. Planter seized one, pulled it down. He heard waters roaring. He pulled another.
“You will drain the pool,” protested the Skygor.
“I want to drain the pool,” Planter said.
“Then—” The Skygor caught the third lever and pulled it down.
Planter hurried upstairs again. His prisoner kept at his heels.
“Why did you help me?” he asked it.
“Because you conquer,” was the booming reply. “The conquered must obey.”
“I think you believe that stuff, like the slaves,” Planter sniffed.
“Of course, I believe,” responded the Skygor.
From the upper levels came Hommerson’s voice:
“Planter! These frog-folk are giving up! They haven’t any fight left in them!”
But Planter paused, on a landing. He looked into a small office, where two human figures stood close together.
One was Max. The other was Disbro. Max had Disbro by the throat, not shaking or wrestling him. Only squeezing.
“Max!” called Planter. “Why—”
“Why not?” countered Max plausibly. “Planter, I think maybe you were the thickheaded one. You always tried to get along with Disbro, as if he was honest. I was a crazy-house case, but from the first I knew he was wrong. It took the return of sense to understand that the only thing to do was this.”
He let go, and Disbro fell on the floor like an empty suit of clothes.
Max brushed his hands together, as if to clear them of dust.
“I wonder how long I’ve wanted to do that,” he said. “Let’s go up and watch the final mop-up.”
Out of the mud pool where once a snake-armed krau had pursued Planter, the combined strength of many arms was hoisting the bogged ship. Cables had been woven through pulley-blocks at the tops of the biggest and strongest poolside stems. Free men of Venus, once slaves, hauled on these cables in brief, concerted rhythms. Here and there in the rope-gangs toiled a Skygor, accepting defeat and companionship with the same mild grace. Women—free women—laughed and encouraged, and now and again threw themselves into the tugging labor that was a game, Max oversaw everything.
Near by, machete had hewn a little clearing. Here a waterproof tent over a beehive framework sheltered Planter and Dr. Hommerson. They watched as the ship, its bow-rockets toiling to help the tugging cables, finally stirred out of its bed.
Hommerson smiled. “Time to hold a sort of recapitulation, isn’t it? As in old-fashioned mystery yarns, when the case is solved and the danger done away with? Of course, it all happened suddenly, but we can say this much:
“The Skygor mistake was that of every softened master setup. They had a half-rigged defense against mild dangers, and never looked for real trouble. They beat that Seventeenth Century space-expedition simply because Terrestrials of that day hadn’t the proper weapons. Otherwise, man might have been ruling here for four hundred years and more.”
“The Skygors did have one tremendous device,” observed Planter. “That super-siren that deadens you by sound waves.”
Hommerson laughed. “And which providentially did what all clockwork mechanisms are apt to do—ran down. It’s dismantled now, anyway. We’re a fuel-engine civilization, and the Skygors will have to wonder and admire a while before they steal our new tricks.”
Planter fingered another trophy of the battle, a great brassbound log book, old and yellowed, but still readable. “This answers more riddles,” he put in. “The record of those ancient fugitives from Cromwell. Who’d have thought that their times could produce a successful flight from planet to planet?”
“It was a great century,” reminded Hommerson. “Don’t forget that they also invented the microscope, the balloon, the principle of maneuverable armies. Their century began with Francis Bacon and ended with Sir Isaac Newton. That rocket fuel, which the Skygors only half understood and used for ammunition—”
“Doctor!” broke in Planter. “Do you remember the old Puritan tales of witches, flying on what seemed like broomsticks?”
“And Cyrano de Bergerac, in France about 1640, writing a tale of a rocket to the moon? We simply forgot that they had something then. The real complete knowledge flew here to Venus, and waited for our age to develop it again from the beginning.”
It was so. Planter pondered awhile, and while he pondered one of the expedition came in to make a report.
“We can send back three in this ship when it’s set,” he said to Hommerson. “Who are you taking, sir?”
“These two who survived the earlier flight, Planter and his big, tough friend. The rest of you can wait and develop a landing field.”
Planter spoke: “Did you see the girl called Mara out there?”
“She was watching us,” said the man. “Finally she went into the jungle.”
“With no message for me?”
“No message for anybody.”
“Dr. Hommerson,” said Planter, “pick someone else instead of me. Here I stay.”
Hommerson looked up sharply. “Until the next ship comes?”
“Here I stay,” repeated Planter. “From now on.”
He sought a certain jungle trail, one he had traversed before. “Mara!” he called down it.
She was not hard to catch up with, for she was not walking fast. As he came alongside, she looked at him with eyes too bright to be dry.
“You came to bid goodbye,” she suggested.
He shook his head. The mist seemed less than ever before on Venus. “No. Never goodbye.”
“Isn’t the ship leaving?”
“Leaving, all right. But not with me in it. This is home now.”
She looked down at her sandalled feet, and one hand played with the dagger in her belt. “Methought you would be glad to regain Earth.”
“Earth? Other people gained it long ago.” He pulled her hand away from the dagger-hilt. “Stop fiddling with that stabbing-iron, there’s no fighting to be done just now.
“You said I was yours,” he told her furiously. “You said it just as if you’d won me in a game of some sort.”
“And you brushed it aside without answering me. You had none of it.”
“Hang it, Mara, a man decides those things! And I’ve
