Wind | Page 4

him had a strange color to it. Jan, watching for
the cliff he had to skirt and scale, had picked up speed over some fairly
even terrain, but now he slowed again, puzzled. There was something
wrong ahead. He couldn't quite figure it out.

Diego, beside him, had sat quietly so far, peering eagerly through the
windshield, not saying a word. Now suddenly he cried in a high thin
tenor:
"Cuidado! Cuidado! Un abismo!"
Jim saw it at the same time and hit the brakes so hard the groundcar
would have stood on its nose had its wheels been smaller. They skidded
to a stop.
The chasm that had caused him such a long detour before had widened,
evidently in the big quake that had hit earlier. Now it was a canyon,
half a kilometer wide. Five meters from the edge he looked out over
blank space at the far wall, and could not see the bottom.
Cursing choice Dutch profanity, Jan wheeled the groundcar northward
and drove along the edge of the abyss as fast as he could. He wasted
half an hour before realizing that it was getting no narrower.
There was no point in going back southward. It might be a hundred
kilometers long or a thousand, but he never could reach the end of it
and thread the tumbled rocks of Den Hoorn to Oostpoort before the
G-boat blastoff.
There was nothing to do but turn back to Rathole and see if some other
way could not be found.
* * * * *
Jan sat in the half-buried room and enjoyed the luxury of a pipe filled
with some of Theodorus Neimeijer's mild tobacco. Before him, Dr.
Sanchez sat with crossed legs, cleaning his fingernails with a scalpel.
Diego's mother talked to the boy in low, liquid tones in a corner of the
room.
* * * * *
Jan was at a loss to know how people whose technical knowledge was

as skimpy as it obviously was in Rathole were able to build these
semi-underground domes to resist the earth shocks that came from Den
Hoorn. But this one showed no signs of stress. A religious print and a
small pencil sketch of Señora Murillo, probably done by the boy, were
awry on the inward-curving walls, but that was all.
Jan felt justifiably exasperated at these Spanish-speaking people.
"If some effort had been made to take the boy to Oostpoort from here,
instead of calling on us to send a car, Den Hoorn could have been
crossed before the crack opened," he pointed out.
"An effort was made," replied Sanchez quietly. "Perhaps you do not
fully realize our position here. We have no engines except the
stationary generators that give us current for our air-conditioning and
our utilities. They are powered by the windmills. We do not have
gasoline engines for vehicles, so our vehicles are operated by hand."
"You push them?" demanded Jan incredulously.
"No. You've seen pictures of the pump-cars that once were used on
terrestrial railroads? Ours are powered like that, but we cannot operate
them when the Venerian wind is blowing. By the time I diagnosed the
Venus Shadow in Diego, the wind was coming up, and we had no way
to get him to Oostpoort."
"Mmm," grunted Jan. He shifted uncomfortably and looked at the pair
in the corner. The blonde head was bent over the boy protectingly, and
over his mother's shoulder Diego's black eyes returned Jan's glance.
"If the disease has just started, the boy could wait for the next Earth
ship, couldn't he?" asked Jan.
"I said I had just diagnosed it, not that it had just started, señor,"
corrected Sanchez. "As you know, the trip to Earth takes 145 days and
it can be started only when the two planets are at the right position in
their orbits. Have you ever seen anyone die of the Venus Shadow?"

"Yes, I have," replied Jan in a low voice. He had seen two people die of
it, and it had not been pleasant.
Medical men thought it was a deficiency disease, but they had not
traced down the deficiency responsible. Treatment by vitamins, diet,
antibiotics, infrared and ultraviolet rays, all were useless. The only
thing that could arrest and cure the disease was removal from the dry,
cloud-hung surface of Venus and return to a moist, sunny climate on
Earth.
Without that treatment, once the typical mottled texture of the skin
appeared, the flesh rapidly deteriorated and fell away in chunks. The
victim remained unfevered and agonizingly conscious until the
degeneration reached a vital spot.
"If you have," said Sanchez, "you must realize that Diego cannot wait
for a later ship, if his life is to be saved. He must get to Earth at once."
* * * * *