its fastenings, shoved me in and banged it upon me.

I found myself in a small metal sleeping apartment. Brilliant starlight filtered in through its single bullseye pane. A figure was in the corner on a fabric couch.

"You Kent? Good Lord."

It was Jack Allen. They had pounced on him, back there on Palmetto Key. I sat with him now, telling him of the weird things which had happened to me; telling him of Nereid.

He stared. "Good Lord, Kent—well, I understand it better now."

There were things that he had learned; and as he told them to me, Nereid's only half-coherent story began to clarify.

"That woman Garga," Allen was saying with his ready grin, "I get along fine with her. Pumped a lot of facts out of her."

Physically, Allen and I are of quite different types, which is perhaps why we are such friends. He says I have a romantic, sort of poetic look—from my mother, who was Spanish. And that, he says, goes with a bad temper. However that may be, certainly he was always the opposite. A giant, blond fellow; six feet four; rugged, sun-bronzed, like a young Viking. And he had an almost unfailing good nature. A slow, quiet smile. Slow of movement; usually somewhat lazy. But there were times, rare intervals, when he was angered. His movements were panther-like then, and I wouldn't like to be the one to meet him in a fight.

"That Garga woman likes me," he grinned. He lowered his voice as he leaned toward me. "She looks like a machine, but still she's a woman. Get the idea? If we ever get out of this, that might be the way."

And then he told me what he knew of Nereid's strange Venus world. The realm of the Arones was in a lush forest, the tropic region. Compared to our Earth population, there were not many of the Arones. Half a million perhaps, in little Forest and Water villages, with twenty thousand in the chief city, known as Arron.... How shall I attempt even an outline of the ethnological history of Venus? I can give only the barest suggestion of it. In former ages doubtless there had been millions of humans on this, Earth's sister planet. A civilization rising to great heights of science, with all the planet's surface mastered by man. And then decadence had come. Mankind resting; then drifting backward. Dwindling in number; with science forgotten, put aside as a memory, a tradition. And slowly but inexorably the monstrous animals, insects, the weird 

 Prev. P 11/48 next