John Star caught his breath with pain as something jabbed into his bare foot, and broke in with a wry smile:
“Here’s one to begin with.
Edge like a razor—warranted!”
He picked up the thing he had stepped on, a wide black shell, with a curving edge.
Jay Kalam examined it seriously.
“Good enough,” he said.
“A useful blade.”
He looked for others, as they walked up the beach, and found one for each of his companions.
Giles Habibula accepted his disdainfully:
“Ah, for life’s sake, Jay!
Do you expect me, with this feeble thing, to cut a way through those frightful daggers and bayonets waiting for us ahead—waiting to slice us into bleeding ribbons?”
He pointed at the black thorn-jungle.
“And so we’re armed,” Jay Kalam told him.
“As soon as we can cut a spear apiece.”
They approached the black, violet-flowering barrier of thorns and spines and hooked spikes.
Many of the blades were ten feet long; the close-grained wood seemed hard and sharp as steel.
Naked and sensitive as their bodies were, it was not easy for the four to get near the blades they had selected; it proved less easy to cut and shape the iron-hard wood with shells.
Weary hours had passed before each of them was equipped with a ten-foot spear, and a shorter, triangular, saw-toothed dagger.
Hal Samdu shaped himself also a great club from a piece of driftwood.
“Ah, so now we set out to cross a whole fearful continent on our bare, blessed feet———” Giles Habibula had begun, with a last regretful look back toward the yellow sea, when his fishy eyes spied something.
He ran heavily back toward the beach. It was their bundle he found, drifted ashore while they worked.
“Our clothes, again!” exulted John Star.
“And real guns!”
“And my blessed bottle of wine!” wheezed Giles Habibula, laboring to open the bundle on the sand.
Their hopes for weapons were dashed.
The package had leaked; then- clothing was sodden, most of the food ruined, the delicate mechanism of the proton guns quite useless from contact with the corrosive yellow water.
Only the bottle of wine was completely undamaged.
Giles Habibula held it up toward the red sun, regarding it with a fond fishy eye.
“Open it,” suggested Hal Samdu.
“We need something———”
Giles Habibula swallowed regretfully, and slowly shook his head.
“Ah, no, Hal,” he said sadly.
“When it’s gone there’ll be no more.
Not a precious drop of wine on the whole evil continent.
Ah, no, it must be preserved for an hour of greater need.“
He set it down firmly but carefully on the black sand.
Discarding the useless proton guns, they finished as much of the food as remained edible, and gratefully donned their half-dry clothing—even under the continual radiation of the near sun and the blanket of heat-absorbing red gas, the atmosphere was far from tropical.
John Star rudely bandaged the lacerations on thigh and ankle that he had sustained on the way ashore.
Giles Habibula stowed the bottle of wine in one of his ample pockets, carefully wrapped against breakage. And they plunged into the jungle.
Thick, fleshy black stems rose close about them, twisted together overhead in an unbroken tangle, bristling with knife-sharp, saw-toothed blades.
The dense roof of thorns hid the crimson sky completely; merely a ghastly blood-hued twilight filtered to the jungle floor.
With infinite caution they picked a way under the tangle of blades, and even caution did not save them.
Clothing suffered; each of them was soon bleeding from a dozen minor cuts that throbbed painfully from the poison of the blades.
And soon they met a danger more appalling.
“One advantage,” Jay Kalam was observing, “is that ft the thorns hinder us, they also hinder any enemies that—ugh!”
A little choking cry cut off his grave voice.
John Star turned to see him carried off the ground by a long purple rope.
Hanging from the crimson gloom above, it had wrapped itself twice about his body, and clapped a flat, terminal sucking-disk to his throat.
Struggling savagely, he was helpless in the contracting, inch-thick tentacle.
Swiftly, it drew him up into the tangle of black thorns.