Where the Gods Decide

It was that season when the jungle of Venus turned into a vapid, steaming swamp. Sleet buds glistened like long, thin snakes, and leaves hung limp and wet from the vine-trees. Nicholas Caine felt the sweat prickle upon his forehead and slide down the sides of his face. Fairchild, he noticed, was sweating, too, so that the man's shirt had turned dark, and the close-clipped gray hair curled on his head. Only the woman still looked fresh in her white shirt and shorts.

She was standing beside Caine's jetcopter, drinking plain Scotch from a silver glass. Her husband, Fairchild, was drinking, too, as he sat silently in a folding chair beneath the tip of the ship's left wing.

This is going to be a sweet thing, Caine thought, it really is.

The air was dead of breeze, and soggy clouds hung above them like an immense stifling blanket. The man stared at his knees and the woman swirled the Scotch in her glass. Caine kept his palms flat against the arm rests of his chair.

He watched the woman closely. There was too much brightness inside of her, too much nervousness, as though she were burning inside and she had to keep moving, laughing, insulting, enticing, because she was alive with that burning, and she couldn't stop. It wasn't the liquor, Caine knew, because they had just started that, a few minutes after he had brought the ship down.

They were approximately four-hundred miles from the Colony, and in the wild stretches of this Venusian jungle, four-hundred miles was like the distance from day to night. Here was the dark, the strange, the weird and the wild.

Kiitz birds screamed in the distance, and their sound was like the sound a man makes when he is touched by fire. A thick, muddy river went over a cliff above and behind them, hitting transparent rocks with a steady crashing noise that thrummed against Caine's ears like thunder in a distant sky.

Teewh birds with black wings and curling yellow beaks came out of the sultry sky and skimmed the tips of the trees surrounding the clearing. They screeched when they dove, and they kept harmony with the unseen stationary kiitz birds. A chilling, nerve-racking harmony.

"Thank you, no," Caine said. The woman tipped her head and watched him. Her eyes were very blue and they mocked Caine and taunted him, while her husband just sat there, drinking and watching his bare knees.

This could go to pieces in a hurry, Caine decided, and he rubbed his palms against the arms of the chair.

Because, on the other hand, the husband was too quiet, too brooding, too deliberately unseeing of the way his wife played with Caine, with her eyes and her movements.

Her legs, Caine noticed, were the kind that would look well bare, as they were, or in nylon beneath a skirt, and she had rather full hips, although not too full. Her breasts, Caine could see, were well enough developed.

She bent to rub a finger against her left knee. "Are there insects in this part of the jungle?" she asked Caine.

"Some."

"But no grith cats?" she said, straightening.

"Not here," Caine said.

"Just where we're going tomorrow?"

"Yes." Caine looked back to the man. He was about fifty, Caine judged, at least twenty years older than the woman. His face was lean and sad, and there were thin lines traveling out from the corners of his eyes and mouth that contrasted with the youthful cut of his wiry hair.

These two had come to Caine because his reputation in the Colony was established. He had been flying tourists into the jungle for more than three years, and while he could not predict all of this country, he at least knew the general traits of those sections within a reasonable radius of the Colony.

"Did you ever shoot a grith cat?" the woman asked, looking at Caine over her glass.

"No," said Caine.

"But you've heard that they're pretty horrible and dangerous?"

"Yes." Caine wiped a hand at the sweat on his forehead. The woman was working at the cats, her eyes shifting to look at her husband with every word, to see how he was reacting. So far he had done nothing, said nothing, only sat there and drank.

However, the cats were not the reason the couple were in the Venusian jungle. Hunting animals was a dead sport for them, something done in the past and something which had become boring.

They were looking for bigger game now. The Screece gem. And they had flown all the way from Earth to Mars, from Mars to Venus, to find it. The Screece gem was a myth, Caine was certain, a bit of fantasy out of ancient Venusian lore. But they paid him well for the trip, and he would ask no questions.

The woman stayed with the cats. "How big are these grith cats, Mr. Caine?"

"Eight to ten feet long," Caine said. "About like a large horse."

"Only they're cats, with the claws and the fangs and all."

"Essentially."

Caine felt himself tightening inside a little. The woman was trying to break through her husband's armor, because somewhere, sometime, he must have had trouble hunting a cat-like animal. Tiger. Or panther. The Martian frynx, perhaps. But she had not found her target, yet.

The man raised his head and spoke for the first time since they had landed. "How far away is this temple, would you say, Mr. Caine?"

"Fifty miles," Caine said.

"How close to it can we land?"

"Eight or ten miles, I imagine."

"Can't we get closer than that?" the man asked.

"I don't think so," Caine said. "The temple is on top of a fairly sheer rise of land, and I can't put the ship down there. The nearest clearing we'll find will be about eight or ten miles away."