Grant whipped the bag of stones from inside of his jacket and tied the leather thong to one leg of the fish. He made sure he had the one single stone in his watch-pocket. That one he had to keep to be able to find the others. He went back to the edge of the swamp and waited until he saw an eye come up, whereupon he flipped another handful of sand at it.
He stayed there for two hours, until the bag of stones was well down the saurian’s throat. Then he set out for The Pass. He was painfully hungry now, but he was lighthearted. Never again would he have to risk the death that infested the Great Sea-Swamp. Within thirty days he would be home—home on Earth. He and Beth would get a little house out in the country and have a little garden, and he could relax and watch his daughter grow up. She was only seven now. It wasn’t too late.
It was dark when he got to The Pass, the sinister city where he’d seen men killed for a twenty-dollar bill, where girls had been sold over the counter for fifty. He knew better than to go directly to Netse, for the Jovian and the Uranian had a sort of throat-cutting partnership in the underworld, and while Grant was sure Netse would help him directly to get a bigger cut, he knew also that Netse wouldn’t want to be too obvious about it.
So Grant, by this time weary in the shoulders from carrying his equipment, turned down Thorium Avenue toward Nellie’s Boarding House. But under the first streetlight he was stopped by a grimy boy. This was notable, because the boy was an Earthman. There weren’t too many Earthmen in The Pass.
“Where you been, Hard-Luck Russell?” the boy asked insolently.
Grant’s throat was dry. He knew what that meant. Nobody who knew Hard-Luck Russell would bother to stop him unless they had orders to do it—orders that came from Relegar.
“In the Swamp,” Russell said, swallowing hard.
The kid stared at the diving-suit in Grant’s hand, stared at Grant’s face with a sharp, penetrating, unashamed inquisitiveness that made Grant use all of his willpower to stare back. The kid suddenly disappeared.
Grant forced himself not to walk faster. The kid had put the finger on him. It was the first time Relegar had ever done that. Those damned eyes! Relegar must know what Grant had found, and the knowledge that the Uranian knew about the stones made him weak. Relegar was a bad spider.
Grant’s impulse was to run but he forced himself to be steady. Now he didn’t dare go straight to Netse. He went on to Nellie’s place and hammered on the door. “Oh, it’s you. Come on in.” Nellie opened the door. Nellie was a Martian, a century-plant, and nobody knew whether it was he or she or whether it made any difference, but they called it “she” and they called it “Nellie.”
Grant went in. Nellie’s leaves rustled and that queer whispery voice came from her. “Do you want a cot?”
“I’ll have a room this time,” said Grant. “How much?”
“A buck,” said Nellie’s leaves. “Pay now.”
She collected. He took his diving-suit to the room. He didn’t like the smell of cabbage and garlic, and the fumes of chlorine were so strong he nearly choked. A Saturnian must be pickling insects somewhere up on the second floor. He sat down. He was starved but he didn’t want to go outside until he had a chance to figure things out. He thought maybe the first thing to do was to see Netse.
From the sounds he thought the two girls across the hall were getting ready to go out. He lay down on the bed to rest.
At ten o’clock they left, jabbering. It was good to hear Earth-people talk, even if it was French, which he didn’t understand. As soon as the front door closed after the girls he tiptoed across the hall and tried the doorknob. It was locked. He opened it with his skeleton key. The room was dark and he did not turn on a light. He opened the window and dropped softly to the ground in a narrow space between two buildings.
A grating voice said, “Where you going, punk?”
Grant froze. He wanted to run but couldn’t. He turned. Back at the alley, in the light, was a medium-size, solidly built man with black hair and a long scar on his left cheek. Grant wheeled, but stopped short. In front of him, at the street end, was a huge Neptunian. It was ten feet high. Grant shuddered. He didn’t want that thing too close to him with its razor-sharp teeth and its fondness for blood. He walked toward the Earthman.
They took him into a snow-joint over on Chloride Street. The man led, the Neptunian followed. They went down many flights of stairs carved in the solid purple lava and finally into an elevator. They went farther down.
This, then, was Relegar’s headquarters. The Uranian couldn’t stand radiation for any length of time. Out on Uranus they had almost none, and so Venus, with its very heavy clouds that filtered the sunlight, was one of the few planets where a Uranian could live. Even so, the Uranians on Venus, having an instinctive dread of sunlight because sunlight usually meant radiation, preferred to stay underground. Perhaps it was more like their native world that way, for they lived underground even on Uranus.
They got out of the elevator in a rock cavern and walked a hundred feet. They passed two guards and went through a steel door. They were in a big room, dimly lighted by red bulbs. Giant didn’t like the dimness and he didn’t like the smell. He tried to see.
“Here he is,” said the man.
There was an odd bass rambling which Grant recognized as the voice of a Uranian. He shivered. Then there were
