Seas of Venus(123)

He patted Brainard's knee, but his grip grew momentarily fierce. "Believe me," Dabney rasped in a bleak voice. "We all have them."

"Oh God," Brainard repeated.

The lieutenant twitched. "Look," he went on, his tone cheerful, reasonable, "don't worry about K44. They took a direct hit. Hell, they probably got caught in the secondary explosions when the Wiesel went up. Instantaneous. A lot better than what happens to civilians, dying by inches in a bed while the medics cluck."

He patted Brainard again and stood up.

"Thanks, sir," Brainard said. "I'm fine. But—" He shrugged. "But that isn't what happened to K44's crew," he went on. "They beached their ship. And when the sun came up, the vines got moving."

Brainard smiled. It would have been a friendly expression if his eyes had been focused.

Dabney licked his lips. "Yeah," he said. "Well, if you're okay. . . ."

He reached for the door handle. Before he touched it, he turned and said, "Look, Ensign . . . this isn't exactly my business, but I've been in the Herd longer than you have."

Brainard nodded.

Dabney looked up at the ceiling. He cleared his throat and went on, "Cabot Holman, he's a good officer, don't get me wrong. But he'd always taken care of his kid brother even though there wasn't but three years between them. Ah, nobody's going to think anything's wrong with you if you decided to transfer out of hovercraft. Or. . . ." Dabney met Brainard's eyes. He relaxed visibly to see that the ensign's expression was normal again. "Or look, you could just transfer to some four-boat element besides the one that Holman commands. Okay?"

Brainard stood up. "No, that's okay," he said. "I appreciate what you're saying, but I'll do the job in front of me. Understand?"

Nobody could misunderstand the sudden crispness of Brainard's voice.

"Sure," agreed Dabney with a false smile. He opened the door, stepped through it, and closed it behind him in the same fluid motion.

Brainard sighed. He turned and unpolarized his outside window.

The sky was opalescent. Hafner Base was to the west of the Gehenna Archipelago. Dawn would have broken over the myriad small islands there half an hour earlier.





16


May 18, 382 AS. 1103 hours.




"Beautiful," said Officer-Trainee Wilding. He balanced cautiously on his left foot so that he could gesture with his new crutch toward the creatures wheeling in the bright sky. "Aren't they the most beautiful things you've ever seen, Mr Leaf? Technician Leaf."

Wilding felt the motorman force down his right arm; gently at first, but with increasing firmness as the officer-trainee resisted. "Come on, sir," Leaf muttered. "We don't wanna stop just yet."

Wilding giggled. "Nope, we can't afford to stop," he said. "We've got to keep the common people interested, but we can't give them anything real to be interested in. Isn't that right? We can't stop!"

A facet of Wilding's mind knew that he was raving, but that facet was in charge only during brief flashes. The last of the analgesics had worn off hours earlier, but Wilding still felt no pain; only pressure. Pressure that seemed to swell his skin to the bursting point.

"C'mon, sir," said Leaf. "Just a little farther, and it's all on the flat now."

Wilding let himself be guided by the motorman's arm. They were on sand, so it was hard to walk. The muzzle of the rifle Wilding used as a crutch dug into the yielding surface, punching divots and threatening to let him overbalance.

Wheelwright had burned the interior of his rifle barrel smooth with the long bursts he poured into the monitor lizard. Wilding used that weapon as a crutch, and Wheelwright carried the spare that had been Bozman's rifle. . . .

The beach was about fifty feet in width at this stage of the solar tide. The remainder of K67's crew stood in the middle of the strip of sand, staring from a safe distance at the hovercraft and its tracery of honeysuckle.

"I say we just run across it," suggested Caffey. "The vines, they're dead, but they'll hold us till we get to the ship. Just like they was a bridge."

"No," said Ensign Brainard.

The cypress lay in the surf a hundred yards from the humans. A school of flying frogs swept back and forth over the tree's path down the slope.

There were never less than two of the vividly-colored amphibians in the air at any one time. At least a dozen were involved, but after a few passes each frog sailed back to the shadows to wet itself in the pools at the heart of spiky bromeliads. Generally the frogs would not venture into sunlight filtered only by the atmosphere, but the disaster had put up enormous numbers of small insects on which the frogs fed.