Seas of Venus(118)

The pain in his ankle no longer registered. Wilding drifted on a cloud as pink as sunset. When he rounded the roots of the fallen ebony, the air was thick with the odors of barakite and pulverized dirt.

The explosion had not been enough to destroy the gigantic cypress, but it had caused the tree to destroy itself. Despite its thick trunk, the cypress was as carefully poised as a skyscraper. The blast shattered the support structures on one side while giving the enormous mass a violent shove in the opposite direction.

Gravity did the rest. When the cypress overbalanced, it ripped out the remainder of its roots and slid two thousand feet down an angle-of-repose slope into the bay beneath. The air above the track was gray with dust, pulverized life, and creatures leaping and swooping to gain advantage in the sudden No-man's-land.

The water boiled where cypress branches thrust into the shallows. Sea life was quick to accept the bounty which chance had thrust into its jaws.

"Move," Wilding whispered. "Move. . . ."

Every time Wilding's right foot touched the ground, the world became sepia-toned. Full color returned when he took his weight on his left leg and the makeshift crutch. Still he felt no pain.

The cypress, like most trees growing in thin jungle soils, had wrapped its roots across the surface instead of driving them deep into rock that was bare of nourishment. Even so, the giant took a great bite of ridge line along when it fell. Boulders shook free of the roots which gripped them and bounded in separate arcs through the jungle. The crew of K67 skirted the left side of the crater.

"Hey!" somebody cried. Wilding heard the crewmen's voices shifted up several octaves, by fever or by the ear-punishing blast. "There's a boat down there!"

At first glance, Wilding's heart leaped with hope that gilded what he saw. He shifted the magnifying function of his helmet visor to x20 and looked again.

It was still a boat, a hovercraft. But there was no hope at all.

The vessel was beached—almost beached—several hundred feet west of the seething ruin which the cypress had torn to the bay. It rode very low. Its skirts grounded where the water off the shelving beach was still three feet deep, and the crew had been unable or unwilling to bring their craft ashore.

Instead, the shore had come to them.

Honeysuckle ruled the low ground behind the belt of salt-drenched sand on this side of the island. The foliage moved softly, turning toward the opportunity provided by the cypress' clearing operation. A bridge of vines was arched across the sand to the hovercraft.

The vessel appeared undamaged to the naked eye. Magnification showed that honeysuckle covered all the plastic surfaces in a thin mat. The leaves were brown and shrunken. The colonizing vine had become dormant while it awaited further sustenance.

"Sir, did they come for us?" squealed a foolish, hopeful voice. "Are they going to pick us up?"

Dust settled along the track of the cypress. The flailing roots had dragged torn-up material along, depositing it in a series of clumps and valleys like an oscilloscope pattern. Because the slope still vibrated with the tree's impact, the mounds continued to settle.

Something moved near the bottom of the track. It was big enough to be a shifting mass of vegetation, but it was coming uphill.

"Caffey, set up a tight perimeter," squeaked Ensign Brainard. "We're in the open here, and that's not entirely good. Leaf—"

Wilding stepped closer to the edge. His helmet enhanced as well as magnifying the image. Mimosa fronds waved in the middle of the slope, but Wilding could not see what was beyond them.

No herbivore was likely to be racing to inspect the site of an explosion.

The ridge dropped sharply for a hundred feet, then splayed outward in a marshy knob where water seeped through a fold in rock layers. The cypress had hung there for a moment. When it continued its long slide to the sea, the tree scraped the knob to mud.

Two hundred feet below the smear of flattened marsh, a pile of broken alders shuddered. A forked, black-and-yellow tongue, as long as a man was high, flicked over the wrack to sample the air.

"Get back!" Wilding screamed. His own voice was only the upper sideband of human speech. "Run! Something's coming!"

The head of a monitor lizard, the dominant land predator of the planet, twisted over the alders. The pile of debris scattered beneath the monster's eight-ton weight. Its tongue continued to slip in and out like light quivering over a swordblade.

Wilding stared into the lizard's magnified jaws. The cone-shaped teeth were six inches long, and the yellow gullet was large enough to swallow a man whole.

"Get back!" he screamed, but this time he was speaking to himself. The soil gave way beneath his left foot; his right held for a moment. When the right ankle buckled, the officer-trainee began to float effortlessly, through the air—