Chapter 2: Three Figures in the Dawn

The fourth night after the Hawk had met his friends at Ban Wilson’s was sunless and Jupiter-less, nor was there the slightest breath of wind; and in the humid, dank jungle surrounding on three sides the isuan ranch of the Venusian Lar Tantril the sounds of night-prowling animals burst full and loud, making an almost continuous babel of varied and savage noise.

In the midst of this dark inferno, Tantril’s ranch was an island of stillness. Within the high guarding fence, the long low buildings lay quiet and were [illegible] brushed periodically by the light from the watch-beacon high overhead as it swept its shaft over the jungle smother and then around over the black glassy surface of the Great Briney Lake, bordering the ranch enclosure on the fourth side. And, vigilantly, the eyes of three Venusian guards followed the ray.

They stood on the three lookout towers which reared at equal intervals up above the circumference of the ranch; and though the buildings below seemed deserted, in reality wide-awake men were stationed at posts within them, waiting for the clang of the alarm which the pressing of a button in any one of the lookout towers would effect. Lar Tantril’s ranch was not asleep. It was as alert and wary as the beasts tracking through the jungle outside its fence, and all its defensive and offensive weapons were at the ready.

No one within the ranch knew it, but within two hundred yards lay the foe Lar Tantril and his men feared most.

Regularly around the watch-beacon swept, slicing the blackness with an oval white finger, the farthest edge of which reached a hundred and fifty yards. Over the “western” lake--and its inky ripples sparkled somehow ominously. Over the jungle’s confusion--and trees, great bushes, spiky vines and creeper-growths leaped into momentary visibility, and then were again swallowed up in the tide of night. Here a cutlas-beaked bird, spotlighted for an instant, froze into surprised immobility with the pasty, bloated worm it had seized twisting and dangling from its mouth, to flap squawking away as the ray glided on: there the coils of a seekan, in ambush on a tree limb, glittered crimson for the sudden moment of illumination; or a nameless huge-eyed pantherlike creature was glimpsed as it clawed at a nest of unfledged haris, while the frantic, screaming mother beat at it with wings and claws...

But all this was usual and unalarming, merely the ordinary routine of the jungle at night. Could the beacon have reached out another fifty yards, the guards on their towers would have seen that which was not usual--and would have summoned every weapon of the ranch beneath.

Or could the guards have heard, besides the cries and crashings and yowls of the jungle folk, the man-made sounds which sped silently back and forth across the ranch within their tight and secret radio beams--then, too, the alarm would have clanged.

Had the beacon suddenly stretched its path outward another fifty yards, it would have fallen upon a massive, leafy watrari tree, taller than most: and the guards, looking close, might have caught in one notch of the tree’s many limbs a glint of metal: might have seen, had the light held on that glint, a bloated monster of metal and fabric braced there, hiding behind a screen of leaves.

This giant, not native to the jungle, was posted due “north” from the ranch. Another waited to the “south,” in a similarly large tree; and another to the “east.”

Hawk Carse and his friends were abroad again and waiting to strike.

Ban Wilson, hot, itching and uncomfortable inside the heavy space-suit that he wore, and supremely aware of his consequent awkwardness, watched the ranch’s beacon sweeping past him thirty or more yards away, and again sought relief from the tedium in conversation.

“Jupiter should be rising soon, Carse. It’s the darkest hour--seems to me he’ll come now if he comes at all. What do you think?”

He was the one posted in a watrari tree “south” of Tantril’s ranch. Flung on the tight beam of his helmet-radio, which had been tuned and adjusted by Eliot Leithgow so as to reach only two other radios, the words rang simultaneously in the receivers of Friday, who was “east” of the ranch, and Carse, who was “north.”

The Hawk responded curtly:

“I don’t know when he’ll come; I suspect not before full morning.”

Ban Wilson grunted at receipt of this discouraging opinion, and then once more, as he had been doing regularly all through the night, raised to his eyes the instrument that hung by a cord from the neckpiece of the suit. Through it he scanned slowly and methodically the portion of black heaven that had been assigned to him. The instrument would have resembled a bulky pair of electro-binoculars with its twin tubes and eyepieces, had not there been, underneath the tubes, a small, compact box which by Leithgow-magic revealed the world through infra-red light by one tube, and ultra-violet the other.

“Nothing!” Ban muttered to himself, lowering the device. “And damn Ku Sui for makin’ these space-suits so infernally uncomfortable! Might as well have made ‘em space-ships, while he was at it! ... Say, Carse,” he began again aloud into his microphone, “maybe Dr. Ku’s come already. I know my men said no one had arrived at the ranch in a suit like these we’ve got on--but, hell, if his whole asteroid’s invisible, why couldn’t he make his space-suit invisible, too?”

“I don’t think he’s done that. Otherwise he would have--” The adventurer’s level tone raised incisively. “Now, both of you, still! Conceal yourselves with great care--Jupiter’s rising!”

The “western” horizon, a moment before indistinguishable, was now faintly flushed, a flush which deepened quickly into glowing, riotous crimson, causing long streamers to shoot out over the surface of the Great Briney, tingling it, sparkling it. The light reached the jungle: and when the first faint reflected rays filtered down through the matted gloom of tree and vine and bush the creatures that had tracked for prey all night looked to their lairs: and gradually, the tenor of the jungle noises waned off into a few last screams and muttered growls, and then died altogether into the heavy, brooding hush that comes always with dawn over the jungles of Satellite III.

Jupiter thrust his flaming arch upwards over the horizon, and climbed with his whole vast blood-blotched bulk into a sky turned suddenly blue. Lake and jungle shimmered under the rapidly dissipating night vapors. The ranch-beacon paled into unimportance. Day had come.

And now the three bloated figures of metal and fabric that were men crouched closely back beneath the leaves of the trees that concealed them, and waited tensely, not daring at first to move for fear of discovery. Each one could see, through the intervening growth, the watch-towers of the ranch; but Friday, from his post in the tree to the “east,” could see the area best, and it was Friday to whom Carse’s next words were addressed.

“Eclipse?” his terse voice asked. “Do the guards in the towers seem to notice anything?”

The big Negro strained cautiously for a better view.

“No, suh, Cap’n Carse. Sure they can’t see us at all. Just pacin’ round on their towers, kind of fidgety.”

“Anyone else in sight?”

“No, suh ... Oh, now there’s somethin’. Two of the guards are looking below, cupping their ears. Someone down there must be tellin’ them somethin’. Now they’re lookin’ up to the sky--the northern sky. Yes, suh! All three of ‘em! They’re expectin’ someone, sure enough!”