guess the world -
fifth series
entries 401 -

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The airlock wheezed asthmatically, and we stepped out upon the soil of the satellite [..........].

A huge mob of natives had gathered around to greet us. They were a weird looking outfit. Sort of like men on horses, you might say, or like those old Centaurs you read about in mythology books. Maybe that's where the legend of Centaurs originated; I don't know. The more man travels the spaceways, the more he discovers races of beings similar to the freaks and curiosities recorded in ancient myths. Lanse Biggs believes that once upon a time, thousands of years ago, before Earth's old moon crashed, destroying the civilization then existent, Man knew the secret of spacetravel, and legend is a record of things once seen and known. But I wouldn't know about that. I'm just a radioman....

Anyhow, these [..........] were sort of like us down to the tummy. But from there on they branched out into the equine family, being endowed with strong, muscular, quadrupedal bodies and postscripted with long, bushy tails.

But they were intelligent. No doubt about that. And surprisingly enough, they seemed friendly! One, their ruler, trotted forward and raised an arm in the cosmoswide gesture of greeting. He addressed us in Universale, the common language of space....

entry 495      [contributed by Lone Wolf]

>>  here's where this is

…To the north, the light in the sky was brighter.  Goddammit, he would have to get over a range of hills.

A small range; but not cushioned by soil or grass like the hills of Earth. 

These, he knew, would be nothing but sharp rock with ice-caps of hydrogen and hydro-glaciers and outcrops of oxygen and nitrogen.  The crystalline gases would be just as hazardous as the rocks themselves.  One heavy fall and his problems would be over.

Somehow, he got over the hills.  He was lucky.  He found a small, narrow pass and trudged up a glacier towards it.  Then the snow came.  But it did not stick to his vizor.

And when he had negotiated the pass, he saw Talbot Field below him…

…Idris began to run towards the control tower – which was a damn silly thing to do, he realised, over hydrogen snow.  He fell twice and almost cracked his vizor.  But he managed to get to the air-lock without killing himself.  It was open and waiting.

He stepped inside.  The manual controls were easy to operate.  He closed the door, waiting for the signal that indicated a perfect seal, then set the controls to pump out the deadly cold helium that was the surface atmosphere of [..........]. 

entry 494      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

I nodded just as Biggs, grinning from ear to ear and back again, lurched into the turret. On his right arm he was carrying a queer looking little squeegee. At first I thought it was a teddy bear. Then it moved, and I realized I was in the presence of a native [..........]. He—or it—was a curious little squirrel-like creature with big, goggling eyes, a huge bushy tail and enormous whiskers.
Biggs chirruped cheerfully, "Here's one of the local boys, folks! Sparks, you speak [..........], don't you? Well—"
(...)

He looked at me with new respect. I smiled. "If my Academy prof wasn't just fooling," I told him, "I can." And I turned to the little rodent, twisting my lips into a series of purring whistles which meant "Greetings!"

"Phwee-twurdle-twurdle-pwwht!" replied the [..........].

Cap Hanson looked at the [..........] disconsolately.

"Needs oilin, don't he, Sparks?"

"Not a bit. That's his native tongue. He said how do you do."

"Yeah? Well, it didn't sound like it to me—"

Biggs suggested, "Ask him, Sparks. Ask him where we can buy or lease some property on [..........]."

So I did. And the answer was encouraging. It seemed the little feller himself chwee-fweeple-twee—meaning he owned some property a few miles outside the capital city—and he'd be glad to sell us this patch of ground for chirp-furdle-foo—

I translated. Cap Hanson turned crimson with rage.

"Four thousand Earth credits! For a hunk of ground you could cover with a handkerchief? Ridiculous! We won't pay any such price—"

"It's no skin off our nose, Skipper," I reminded him. "The Corporation's paying for it."

Hanson nodded slowly.

"We-e-ell, maybe you got something there. We can't do no diggin' for soap without something to dig in. O.Q. Go ahead and make the deal, Sparks."

entry 493      [contributed by Lone Wolf]

>>  here's where this is

Cap Hanson's jaw fell down to his fourth button. A gasp worked its way up out of his lumbar region. "It—it's impossible!" he said. "I—I don't believe it!"

I didn't either. For what we were seeing mirrored on the turret visiplate was something no man in the universe had ever seen before—and lived to tell about it. We were seeing the troposphere, the stratosphere, the surface atmosphere of the massive planet [..........] at easy visual range. And we were drifting to solid ground so gently that we were in no more danger than a parachutist approaching a field full of sofa cushions!

It didn't even occur to me, then, to notice how far off the scientists had been in attributing fantastic characteristics to unstudied [..........]. Because its density was so much less than Earth's, they had envisioned it as a gaseous or semi-liquid planet. Which was so much hogwash. It was a normal-sized core surrounded by blankets, thousands of miles deep, of atmosphere. It was lush, luxuriant, green. Steamy with vapors, riotous with vegetable life. Protected by its swaddling clothes, it was the most likely abode of life Man had ever found outside his native Earth!

entry 492      [contributed by Lone Wolf]

>>  here's where this is

[..........] was no longer cold and lifeless.  Ten years ago the great air machines had been set up.  Torrents of oxygen had already been wrested from the frozen strata of carbon dioxide, and from the silicates of the rocks – even the silicon itself was transmuted – to decompose the poisonous methane and ammonia gases of the original atmosphere, and to make breathing possible here without space armor.  And there was artificial sunlight, now, supplementing the weak rays of the distant Sun.  For a large manmade moon of a moon already swung steadily around [..........]…

Five hundred hours after the landing, Brenda and he drove an ato truck along a valley to an assigned area far out in the wilderness.  Here a stream that had been ice for eons now flowed into a new lake.  In the volcanic ash, seeds specifically cultured for [..........] had been scattered by planes.  Along the lake, they had already grown into low bushes…

entry 491      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

High above the bulbous masses of the gas-plants of the Death Jungle floated the sagging bulk of an enormous balloon, its low slung basket swinging slowly along of the rotund masses of the gas-plants lurking below in deadly, swaying silence. The balloon was descending slowly, its rubber-like fabric sagging in myriad wrinkles like the surface of a punctured gas-plant. Inside the basket, a small, perfectly round sphere of purplish hue clung anxiously to the edge, protruding eye stems wavering alternately over the menacing jungle below and the faltering bag above. Long, sinuous tubes, rubber-like, and three in number, originated at the base of the purplish sphere, ending in clumsy appearing, but magnificently effective suction discs. They were fastened, now, securely to the floor of the basket, which was floored with a glistening, smooth substance that reminded one of the unhealthy skins of the terrible gas-plants below in its iridescent flow of lurid and unhealthy color. Obviously its nature was similar. From the top of the sphere, below the stemmed eyes, three smaller tubes swayed, each ending in seven tiny cup-like discs, also capable of strong suction.

Steepa, for that was the name the [..........] carried, reached down to the floor of the basket and ripped the heavy covering from the intertwining reeds of the basket and flung it down at the jungle. The balloon spurted up for a moment and then again began its steady descent. A thick, vicious breeze was rolling sluggishly along, carrying the balloon further toward the center of the Death Jungle. It sagged with the weight of the only other object in the basket now, other than Steepa himself. A huge metal bar ending in a menacing trident of sharpness. It was tremendously heavy; Steepa could hardly lift it with all the force of his powerful suction tubes. But he flung not a glance at its shining bulk. Why did he not dispose of it and assure the passage of the jungle? Why did he thus risk his life for a piece of senseless metal?

But whatever Steepa’s reason, it was becoming evident that the risk was fast approaching its culmination in actual danger. The basket now nearly grazed the top of a huge gas-plant. Steepa’s eyes flung again toward the gas bag above. It would only last a few minutes longer. A shudder swept through the basket for a moment as it slid jerkily along the top of a gas-plant’s globular mass. Like rubber its friction was. Steepa’s body contracted in alarm, and then expanded as the basket swung free.

Suddenly Steepa flung himself upwards until only one of his nether suction tubes clung to the edge of the basket. The balloon rose a few inches and then sagged again. But Steepa had seen! Just beyond the looming bulk of the adjacent gas-plants was the walled clearing he sought, with its gas-proof glassite covering.

Quickly securing himself to the bag of the balloon itself, and grasping a firm hold on the metal trident, he severed the thongs that held the basket. It plunged on down between two gas-plants and the balloon rose to clear the remaining jungle until it hovered over the glassite of the clearing. Down through its clearness Steepa could see the openings in the ground that led to his rendezvous below, and at intervals in the clearing itself floated many purplish spheres like himself. And he was seen!

entry 490      [contributed by Lone Wolf]

>>  here's where this is

Approaching Ern, the vapors deepened; photographic pictures showed nothing but a brownish haze. Soon this haze was around them. The compressing pumps had to be slowed down. A thousand teens above the surface, the ships moved northward at relatively slow speeds, cruising through metallic vapors as dense as those on Bar-Zee itself. Analysis of the vapors showed that there were present one or two elements not known to the satellites but seemingly non-injurious to life. Fo-Peta ordered the vapor-tight doors of the ships to be thrown open and the voyagers all revelled in the luxury of absorbing all the metallic vapors their bodies craved and spouting it through their gills. But at one mile altitude this absorption became difficult and was accompanied by pains in the middle body, dizziness in the jell brain-case; and though this sickness passed after a time, as the voyagers became acclimated to it, Fo-Peta dared not go lower. The sun was not discernible by day, save as a nebulous blur in the heavens, and at night the moons were invisible.

The vast city lay sprawled on the crest and slopes of a mighty mountain. Daylight – like twilight to their eyes and scarcely daylight at all as they knew it – revealed it to them. Fo-Peta brought the ships to rest in the midst of a mighty square. Towering fern growths, analogous to similar growths on Bar-Zee and Narlone but giant-like in comparison, grew in the square, and through the paths they lined floated hundreds of the city’s inhabitants, tall people with abnormally long teebas propelling them, their single eyes gleaming, their feelers tinged blue with astonishment. Brown they were, like the metallic vapors they moved through, bands of lirum-colored silver and gold round their middle bodies and many of them carried in one feeler what appeared to be long canes. These latter advanced briskly on the space-ships, jell brain-cases glowing hotly with demand. Their speaking mouths, under the jell, opened, and they shouted questions at the voyagers, at Fo-Peta who stood forth as the commander of the expedition.

“Who are you, strangers, and whence do you come in such mysterious fashion?”

The language was foreign in some respects to Fo-Peta’s receiving vents yet he understood the gist of what was said well enough. While lying in Pross Mere-Mer’s prison, awaiting trial, he had amused himself by acquiring the dialect of a fellow prisoner, a savage rebel from the southern wilds of Ern made captive by the Pross Lords, and the speech he now heard was in many ways similar.

“I am Fo-Peta,” he said, “from the Satellite Efrania, and these, my fellow-voyagers, are from Bar-Zee, the ninth moon. We have visited you as you see, in our space ships.”

entry 489      [contributed by Lone Wolf]

>>  here's where this is

[..........] has a freak gravitational power which makes possible the retention of atmosphere and water.

Rich green grass and shrubs and trees, myriads of flowers, and delicious fruits, grow there. The grotto in which they now were gathered was an ideal picnic spot. And as a picnic spot it was being used just now by Curt Newton and two companions.

They had come, ostensibly, to collect and examine specimens of edible plants, which early sketchy tests had shown to contain a new quasi-vitamin useful in prolonging life. But there were other reasons for coming to [..........] — and for spending some time there. And so they lolled and rested, after the last specimen had been carefully packed and slid into a locker…

entry 488      [contributed by Lone Wolf]

>>  here's where this is

They bore down on [..........], matching their speed to its, and swung close to its surface.  It had almost no atmosphere, just a thin layer of the heavier gases.  It was a belted world, without clearly defined continents or surface markings.  Its equatorial zone was one vast featureless belt of darkish-gray.  Its temperate zones were white, with patches of yellow here and there.  But its poles were gray again.

“The satellite’s like a huge ball of thin mud that’s never hardened,” said Burl as they studied the strange terrain.

“The equator’s the softest – it seems to be a river of muddy water, hundreds of miles wide – only it can’t be water.  Probably semisolidified gases holding dust and grains of matter in suspension,” said Russ.  “The temperate zones are the same stuff, only colder, and therefore more stable.  A thin crust of frozen gases over a planet-wide ocean of semiliquid substance…”

…The poles of [..........] were actually two continent-sized islands of shell.  Dry, mudlike stuff, hard as rock, floating on the endless seas of the semiliquid planet…

entry 487      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

...One moment the dusty plain lay bare before them; the next Doug stared up at a scalloped crimson banner that swayed over the sled. It swooped down and he glimpsed a steel-grey head studded with shining black dots before the dust worm struck.

It was huge—a good thirty feet long and eight feet across its armored back. Rings of scarlet tendrils trailed from its satiny underparts. As it settled on the quartz dome of the sled, they spread over it, clinging to the smooth surface, sucking the creature’s body close against it. Almost at once Doug saw the clear quartz misting, dulling, etched by the powerful chemicals of the thing’s digestive glands.

“West!” King was struggling frantically with his bonds. “Let me out of here! We’ve got to kill it—quick—before it breaks through!”

Doug wrenched mightily at the knots; they gave a little and King pulled his hands out and began to search in the sled’s tool kit for something he could use as a weapon. There was a bundle of pointed rock drills on the floor beside the driver’s seat. Snatching up the longest Doug slid out through the door on his side. He went into the dust up to his knees. Pulling himself up on the side of the sled he struck with all his might at the monster’s back.

The drill glanced off and the force of his blow sent him rolling on his back. Panting, he struggled to his feet.

Before he could run the creature was on him. He saw the velvety crimson underside, the lacy tendrils, and then it had him. Powerful muscles clamped the thing’s flat body around him. Fringed suction cups plastered themselves against his helmet. He went down on his knees, struggling in the crushing grip.

“Doug!” King’s voice rang in his ear-phones. Leaping down into the dust the miner dug his gloved fingers under the edges of the dust worm’s armor and pulled. Reluctantly the thing gave way, squirming around to strike viciously at its assailant. King was ready. Snatching a long steel bar from his belt he drove it up into the soft crimson underbody that arched over him, deep into the veined patch of darker color near the center of the first segment. There was a tingling electrical discharge and the scolloper went limp.

entry 486      [contributed by Lone Wolf]

>>  here's where this is

…Gradually, by means of simple drawings and gestures, and even charadelike playlets acted out by the weird vegetable-crystal beings, there emerged the general story of the [..........] and the invaders from [..........].

On [..........] there had been a great civilization covering the entire world, a hard surface lying beneath its thick methane atmosphere.  There were forests and there were animals and intelligent beings.  They did not breathe, but absorbed both their food and liquid gas through rootlike feelers on which they stood and moved.

Then one day, about thirty years ago, they had been invaded by creatures that came in dumbbell-shaped spaceships…

entry 485      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

He saw an ugly and terrifying world…  The surface was baked hard, brilliantly white, covered with long, deep cracks that cut hundreds of miles into the shriveled and burned surface.  There were areas of dark mountain ranges, bare and jagged, whose metallic surface imparted a darker shade to the pervading glare.  And there were patches here and there on the surface that gleamed balefully – probably spots of molten material…

Then Burl found what they were looking for.

A huge canyon tore raggedly across a plain.  There was a jumble of mountains, [..........].  And in a corner, [..........] at a narrow ledge where the mountains came down and the canyon came together, there was a circular structure…

…Cayle stepped off the gangplank onto the soil of [..........].  And stopped.  It was an involuntary reaction.  The ground was as hard as rock.  The chill of it penetrated the soles of his shoes and somehow pierced the marrow of his being.  With ice-cold eyes he surveyed the bleak town of Shardl.  And this time a thought came, a hatred so violent that he shuddered.  A determination so strong that he could feel the ice within him turning to steel.

“Get a move on you – “ A stick prodded his shoulders.  One of the soldiers directing the disembarkation of the long line of sullen men bawled his words, his voice sounding strangely hollow in that rarefied air.

Cayle did not even turn around.  He moved – that was his reaction to the insult and indignity.  He walked along, keeping his place in the line; and with every step he took the chill off the ground penetrated more deeply into his being.  He could feel the coldness of the air now in his lungs.  Ahead of him other men felt the constriction.  They began to run.  Still others broke past him, breathing hoarsely, the whites of their eyes showing, their bodies clumsily responding to the lesser gravity.  The ground was rough and uneven and those who fell cried out as the jagged edges tore at them.  Human blood stained the iron-hard soil of ever-frozen [..........].

entry 483      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

…Masses of slag and lava flowed down the sides of extinct mountains, and fissures like the marks of giants’ swords marred its lowlands.

Dead sea bottoms and barren continents alone suggested life of long ago; these, and certain clusters that might have been cities; masses of granite, blocks of marble and basalt, quartz, and silica, arranged in geometric formations.  Were these ruinous heaps the remains of cities?  Had a civilization flourished here, of a race that had perished, leaving only its works to crumble beneath the everlasting encroachments of time?  What legends and records, achievements and histories might lie beneath those shards?

Duane drew a deep breath.  The answer would never be known to men.  Great as the curiosity was that impelled him to study the riddles of [..........], the dangers were greater, and greater still the goal of his dream.  There was a mystery to all the universe.  What lay beyond?  Where would the end be, if one started off and traveled at random in any direction for as long as space lasted or life permitted?

entry 482      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

A thin layer of cosmic dust lay over the surface, such as would be found on any airless world.  Russ scooped beneath it and came up with a hard chip.

He squeezed it between his gauntleted fingers.  It cracked and broke into powder.  He whistled softly.  “You know what this feels and looks like,” he said as they came close to the frozen creek on the little hillside.  “It feels like dirt – common, Earthly dirt.  Like soil.  And you know what…  I can already tell you one of [..........]’s secrets.”

They stopped at the creek.  It was a layer of frozen crystalline gases.  Haines pushed the alpenstock he was carrying into it and scraped away the gas crystals.  “I think I can guess,” he said, “and I’ll bet there is ice under this gas.”

“[..........] was once a warm world with a thick atmosphere,” said Russ.  “Notice the rounded hills and the worn away peaks of the mountains.  Those are old mountains – weather-beaten.  This hill is round – weather-beaten.  This creek, those rivers of frozen gas – they follow beds that could only be made by real rivers of warm water.  The soil that lies beneath this dust – it could only happen on a world that knew night and day, warmth and light, and rain and wind.  [..........] was once a living world…”

entry 481       [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

Shadowy forms slunk ominously out of sight. Once they saw two large, spidery creatures on long, spindly legs. They charged fiercely into the killing flashes from the electric pistols. Presently, two bird-like animals, resembling bats, circled above them on leathern wings. Long, taloned claws hung beneath them. They swooped low, uttering cries.

One of them dashed at Hilton, clutching at him. He fired. The second bird attacked from the rear, his talons tearing viciously at Rose Baynes, entangling her clothing, while the huge wings flapped fiercely in an effort to raise her from the ground. Bret Carson seized one of the bird’s six legs. Old Jasper Jezzan courageously seized a wing and held tight. Rose screamed. Claws bit cruelly into Bret’s arm. With his free hand, he beat at the cruel head with its snapping black beak. He dared not use his gun with Jasper and the girl so near.

With a wild scream of pain, the giant bird released the girl and struggled free. Like a shot, it was gone, swooping out of sight through the tangled strands of trailing vines. One of the birds lay dead. Bret nursed a bleeding hand.

(...)

When the feeble rays of the far off sun penetrated the gloom of the fearful swamp, the little party continued its way once more. They anticipated another attack from the winged monsters, but they did not return. The weak light changed to red as [..........]’s dull brilliance lit up the satellite. Presently, the yellow vegetation thinned out and they stood on the swamp’s edge.

Before them lay a broad expanse of lifeless country. The red, barren surface supported no plant life. Curls of smoke arose from scarred depressions and fissures. At the rim of the horizon, beyond the red vista of melancholy wasteland, a yellow line of vegetation was plainly visible, broken in spots by open country.

Above, the sky was a deep purple. The tiny disc of the remote sun shone feebly. Many stars were visible. Three of [..........]’s moons were above the horizon, while [..........] itself represented a magnificent spectacle. 'The enormous globe occupied a large share of the sky [..........].

entry 480      [contributed by Lone Wolf]

>>  here's where this is

Guided by his compass, he started east, toward far-off Sadra. Behind him, plodding steadily and without concern through the blurred dusk of the eternal storm, was Sabakko.

The first half-mile seemed fairly easy to the stout young physique of the Earthman. He crossed the pitted red soil where he and his companions had discovered a rich deposit of radioactive ore—a deposit which would make them all wealthy, if they happened to survive and put in their claim. Thence he led the way into a gloomy gorge.

All the while, the gravity of [..........] was doing its strength-sapping work upon him. Nor was this all that was burning up his vitality. Ponderous thunder roared overhead, to the accompaniment of dazzling flares of lightning. Both, by their constant, tense monotony, frazzled his nerves and weakened his morale. The wind was not so strong here in the gorge, but out of the dim murk around him, long, spiny tendrils belonging to forms of life that were neither animal nor quite plant, groped toward him hungrily.

Once a tentacle encircled his body, and his adventure would have reached an abortive end then and there, had it not been for Sabakko, who leaped into action with cold fury, tearing the rooted devil apart with horny fingers.

There must have been a vast difference between the attitudes of the man and the [..........] toward their present experiences. Sabakko had returned to his native habitat. Comparatively, at least, his surroundings could have held few terrors for him. In fact, he seemed more than a bit puzzled at his human companion’s weakness...

entry 479      [contributed by Lone Wolf]

>>  here's where this is

Gaining the top of the little slope leading to the refuelling station, Smithy paused for a moment. Ahead of him, stretching to the near horizon, was the empty plain, coal black under the terrible cold, marred only by pits and craters where the deadly zinrots, second highest form of [..........] life, had burrowed underground with their claw nails and scissor teeth.

Touching the eastern horizon loomed vast [..........], visibly turning slowly in the cloudless star and moon-riddled sky. To the west stabbed the upper peaks of the Mountains of Excelsior, dominated by the Thunder Molar rearing to 8000 feet. Selby, the Earth explorer, had called it that because it had reminded him of the back tooth of mythical Jove, God of Thunder...

These were familiar sights to Smithy as he started to plod on again, but he had the advantage of knowing that the Excelsiors were not really true mountains, but vast glaciers, flung to their great heights by [..........]'s slight gravity. Upon them rested the whole secret of the satellite's small colonization. By electrolyzing the water frozen into their masses and adding to it an element with scant nitrogen content, both Settlement and refuelling station – by underground pipes of lanium metal – possessed breathable atmosphere. Jong, the Martian engineer, was responsible for the miracle.

entry 478      [contributed by Lone Wolf]

>>  here's where this is

Once our first meal was over Reid strolled some little distance from the camp with old man Brook and they stood talking and looking down the swift river as it coursed into the fantastic jungle. I made it the opportunity to take a walk with Ada and show her the wonders of the [..........] sky and landscape.

To me, the sight from a near-by kopje was not new, but it brought a cry of amazed awe from Ada’s lips as we came to the top of the rise. On every side of us stretched that wild jungle with its dominating shaving-brush trees. Here and there the queer rocket-birds were in view, hurtling up like bullets against the light gravitation. Then when they reached the shallow air 800 feet above ground they opened a membranous umbrella and dropped softly down again. Their prey, in the main, consists of hurtling insects.

In various other directions were the treacherous calcium areas — some of them inert, but others bathed in lambent, flickering fires as the calcium united with ammonia gas from rifts in the ground and produced the swift light of calcium ammonium. [..........] is particularly rich in calcium.

The sky, though, was the main thing that held our attention. [..........] hung directly above us — huge, yellow, overpowering [..........]. Close to him gleamed brilliant little [..........]. Farther away still — disclike and absurd— moved the Sun. Added to this were the hosts upon hosts of stars spewed in a myriad glittering dusts across the dark-purple heaven. It was superb — engrossing.

entry 477      [contributed by Lone Wolf]

>>  here's where this is

“Wait!” Eboni interrupted him sharply, halting. “I hear something!”

They both peered into the ghostly expanses. Selton, too, heard it now — a soft hissing noise like water on the verge of boiling. Abruptly he jerked his head up and stared at a rapidly swelling bubble in the ground not two hundred feet away.

Eboni frowned. “Never saw anything like that before. Looks like a bubble of sorts.”

He stopped short as the bubble suddenly reached maximum size and burst with a sharp pop. The air instantly became filled with warm, showering mud — mud that fell to the ground and wriggled!  Eboni took a step back, staring down in disgust on scores of four-inch objects writhing in the ooze.

“What the deuce are they?” he growled aloud.

“Organisms, of sorts,” Selton said as he looked at them closely. “Too big for animalcules, I'd say — unless everything’s big on this world. Lowform organisms, evidently spawned in the boiling water below surface. Looks as though life here likes things hot.”

“That bubble erupted them, then?”

“Apparently so — maybe a natural way of starting them off in life on the surface.”

entry 476      [contributed by Lone Wolf]

>>  here's where this is

…It was as if he had dipped his fingers into searing acid.  There was a sharp, biting, burning pain…

Grimly Jenner looked down at the break in the stone.  The edges remained bright orange-yellow.

The village was alert, ready to defend itself from further attacks.

Suddenly weary, he crawled into the shade of a tree.  There was only one possible conclusion to draw from what had happened, and it almost defied common sense.  This lonely village was alive.

As he lay there, Jenner tried to imagine a great mass of living substance growing into the shape of buildings, adjusting itself to suit another life form, accepting the role of servant in the widest meaning of the term.

If it would serve one race, why not another?  If it could adjust to [..........], why not to human beings? 

entry 475      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

He turned to advance, but Cynthia stopped suddenly and looked up in surprise. “What’s that?” she whispered.

The others looked above. Brig stared in wonderment at something quivering in the tree branch just over their heads — then suddenly Betts hurtled forward, clutched the girl around the waist in a flying tackle, and bore her to the ground.

Instantly the others fell back, stared in frozen horror at a snakelike object that had abruptly hurtled forward with bullet swiftness and imbedded itself in the tree beside them. It quivered spasmodically, died from the sheer impact of collision.

Brig stared at it in horror. It was a pure ropy organism, bounded with incredibly powerful muscles.

Betts floundered to his feet and dragged the gasping Cynthia up beside him.

“Pardon my roughness, miss,” he apologized. “That object is a[..........] impaler, or more technically, impalia diaboli. It usually kills its prey by behaving like a living javelin — buries its head inside its prey and kills it, absorbing nourishment at the same time. A flesh eater, obviously. If it misses. . . .’’ He glanced significantly at the dead organism.

"Thank God you recognized it in time,” Brig whispered. “How’d you ever come to know about it?”

"Quite simple, sir. I have read the copious notes of Murchinson and Snedley, wherein it is mentioned. There are other things. . . . Really, sir, [..........] interests me immensely. Shall we proceed?”

[Later, elsewhere on that world:]

...He broke off in surprise as Cynthia suddenly gave a violent jerk, a vigorous movement, and waved her arms wildly. She began to kick desperately.

“Call them off!” she screamed frantically. “Call them off!”

It was immediately apparent what was the matter. . . . So absorbed had they all been in their collecting efforts, they had failed to notice a small army of curious, dull gray objects, not unlike fast moving tortoises, gathered around them. Now, governed by sheer curiosity, they were crawling over the boots of the party. It needed no imagination to realize they had come from the depths of the carbon cave.

“Life, here! In a vacuum!” cried Brig, threshing his boots wildly. “How the devil —” 

“Not — not so improbable. . . . Carbon is the element on which all life is built..,. Remember, sir, that the carbon atom forms the basis of an unlimited number of compounds. Its atoms can form long chains, but these are the skeletons to which other life, of infinite complication, attaches itself. . . . Here, apparently, carbon has taken a form rare to our knowledge, but by no means outside probability. Maybe a formation of pure carbon, unconnected with any higher form. Carbon life, eating pure carbon, naturally — Damn! Pardon me, sir. I thought my spacesuit was nearly through.”

“Carbon life, sir,” Betts said, struggling hard to keep the things from puncturing his space-suit...

entry 474      [contributed by Lone Wolf]

>>  here's where this is

We dropped within a mile of Devil’s Nose Rock. The sun was half way to the zenith, just clear of Dawn Edge Mountains, a range entirely encircling the huge valley which forms [..........].

From our position, part of the valley was spread out before us, sweeping down into a deep, verdure-filled cup. Here and there amidst the sprawling green—day vegetation only, withering in the bitter cold of the fortnight long [..........] night— smoked and fumed carbon dioxide geysers, connected by natural shafts to the dying fires of [..........] core. Carbon dioxide, broken down by the plentiful supplies of ephemeral green stuff, formed into breathable oxygen of almost earthly density. Such a thing could only exist in this gravity-drawn valley—for, as science has proved, the [..........] is dead—airless and finished.

Here in the valley the shadows had lost their savage black and white aspect; they were softly tempered as an earth shadow, and through the midst of them swarmed the strange [..........] Flame Bugs —myriads of them, a little larger than dragonflies, sweeping in endless hordes in and out of the glancing, pouring sunshine, levelling in the protracted day. . .

And then there were the Diggers. We couldn’t see them from the ship, but from record—and Pye’s own observations—the place teemed with them—savagely active, molelike creatures, forever burrowing with a seeming blind purposelessness, but probably because being heat lovers they were always trying to get nearer to [..........] still smoldering, internal fires.

entry 473      [contributed by Lone Wolf]

>>  here's where this is

He had such food as the jungle provided; his spaceship water equipment gave him water from the atmosphere. It was just a case of waiting — waiting for the day when he might possibly be rescued from this steamy, saturating wilderness with its thick, murmurous jungle and varying moonlight, primary-light and distant sunlight.

Of course, there were vilictus deposits somewhere to the north of the satellite — metallic compound of enormous value to Earth chemists in the making of explosives. Clark’s ship detectors had revealed the presence of the deposits, but all his searchings had been futile. And the stuff was worth three thousand a gram! If outsiders ever heard of it, there’d be a second Klondike on [..........].

At least, he wasn’t lonely. Basso, the singing plant, was company for one thing, and so were its weird subintelligent, singing contemporaries in the Whispering Forest outside. Then there was Snakehips, a true [............], actually an upright mass of quivering, darting gristle — entirely invertebrate — pretty intelligent so far as he went. His own race had their abode to the south of the little world, but mainly because Clark had once saved him from death at the hands of the blue biters he’d elected to stay with him ever after that.

Clark roused himself from his reflective mood as he thought of these things, ran a troubled hand through his crudely cut black hair. He glanced at the calendar on the wooden wall — 20th July, 2614.

“Wonder how many more Julys are going to come and go on the earth -scale before I get out of this blasted hole?” he muttered. Moodily he studied the sky.

[..........] In the east the ridiculous sun, shedding but 1-300th of the light normal on Earth, was nearly at the zenith. In other directions, at varied distances, [..........] were shedding their differing light-strengths according to their particular albedos.

He glanced toward the fantastic Whispering Forest and listened for a while to the weird, senseless chantings of the talking plants. Behind him, Basso began to wail the bass aria from Isis and Osiris. 

--- Clark twisted round in nervy exasperation.

“Oh shut up !” he screamed furiously. “Basso! Shut up, I tell you!”

entry 472      [contributed by Lone Wolf]

>>  here's where this is

On his way to the Stod Rinnerul he met some of the dominant native [..........]s, the conical Tlel, who gyrated continually as they whizzed by.  In this district of Dromm it was not unusual to meet several dozen of these mysterious and highly intelligent beings as they went about their incomprehensible business.  Most of them topped Hixten in height; all of them exceeded him in weight.  With their four muscular arms and their deep-seated almost invulnerable brains, they could have easily overcome any humanoid in a fight: no punch could stun a Tlel.  Fortunate that they were un-hostile!

He gained the impression that some of them, as they passed him, bestowed on him more piercing glances than usual.  He could not be sure of this since their quartet of eyes whirled round so fast; but it could be that these particular Tlel were surprised to spot a humanoid here in the equatorial zone.  On the other hand, if that was so, they themselves must be strangers in the vicinity, since humanoid staff had occupied the Stod Rinnerual for several hundred days now.  Or another explanation could be that he, Hixten, had become extra important in the past few minutes.

Anyhow here was his destination, where speculation became needless.

Without slackening his pace he walked up a cobbled path.  The house he faced was formed mostly from a pattern borrowed from Earth.  Even the roof seemed thatched, though not from straw but from stringy grey moss.  On the other hand the walls’ glow was indigenous, their blocks shining with the neon nacre of [..........].  To a local humanoid like Hixten, who had never seen Earth and never would, the effects were integrated into one comfortably familiar style...

entry 471      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

…Endless tall, whirling columns of dust walked across the desert’s face.  Broad, viciously driven lines of dust swept over the horizon and hurled themselves upon the lonely trading post, as if they would demolish it and scatter the aluminum sections far and wide, but the shock of the wind’s onslaught was light.  Lacking the weight of a dense atmosphere, the [..........] storm, for all of its violence, was feeble compared to terrestrial standards.  It failed to halt the labors of the natives, who continued to pile bags of borium, a powerful catalytic agent then much in demand on Earth, on the loading platform as fast as it was received from the underground refineries, which extracted the borium direct from the ore body.  Grotesquely magnified by the light and shadow distortions of the haze, they plodded stolidly about their tasks in the gathering murk.  Occasionally one of them came close enough to the window for Farrington to see the dust on fat, blubbery scales covering arms, legs and back…

entry 470      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

As he half dozed, the detector phones brought in a medley of vaguely familiar noises above the wind’s whine, chief amongst which were the weird, half-human twitterings of the ostriloath — strange birdlike creature crossed vaguely between ostrich and sloth — and the deep bass grunting of the feather-sphere, the porcupine of [..........], rolling everywhere at terrific speed like a heavily flaked cannon ball. Familiar sounds all --- 

THEN, suddenly, Cardew jolted violently upright, wide awake, his heart slamming painfully with the sudden intensity of his effort, his ears still ringing with what had definitely been a human shout of fear!

“Damned delusions !” he breathed quickly, staring round and below at the crazy jungle. “Couldn’t have been ---”

He frowned in bewilderment. A scream from inside a helmet would be carried to the amplifier on the helmet exterior; even the slightest cry from anybody would be instantly enormously amplified by the dense atmosphere. But nobody else could be in such a cockeyed spot, surely - 

Cardew broke off in his quick reflections and stared with amazed eyes through the clear patch between the nearest Fishnet trees. The light of [..........] shone down through cloud breaks upon a space-suited figure lying flat on the ground, straggling against the gravity to tug out an oxygen pistol. A little distance away a hideous little-headed sican, violently strong, sheathed in an armor plating of frozen scales, fixed his intended prey with enormous glassy eyes. It was the largest of all [..........] animals, measuring five feet in length and nearly the same in width. Then it began to advance slowly on its six immensely powerful legs.

Almost as quickly as the danger registered in Cardew’s mind, he had dropped violently to the ground and tugged out his own oxygen pistol. With ponderously dragging feet, the ghastly pull of a nightmare’s dragging chains, he tried to run forward — fired his gun as he went.

Immediately a vicious stream of devastating flame spouted through the moonlight, momentarily lighted the mad glade with bluish-yellow fire. The force of the jet struck the sican clean in the center of its body, sent it rearing upward in a sudden paroxysm of searing pain.

Maddened, it twirled round and jumped dangerously near the sprawling, motionless figure. Then, at another vicious cut across its hideous face, it twisted round and travelled at high speed on its enormously strong legs into the jungle fastness.

entry 469      [contributed by Lone Wolf]

>>  here's where this is

…The path was steep and uneven and the light was none too good, for the thin atmosphere failed to break up the starlight and the stars themselves remained tiny, steely points of light that did not blaze or twinkle, but stood primly in the sky like dots upon a map.

The lodge, Sutton saw, apparently sat upon a small plateau, and he knew that the plateau would be the work of man, for nowhere else in all this jumbled landscape was it likely that one would find a level spot much bigger than a pocket handkerchief. 

A movement of air so faint and tenuous that it could scarcely be called a breeze rustled down the slope and set the evergreens to moaning.  Something scuttled from the path and skittered up the rocks.  From somewhere far away came a screaming sound that set one’s teeth on edge.

“That’s an animal,” Herkimer said quietly.  He stopped and waved his hand at the tortured, twisted rock.  “Great place to hunt,” he said, and added, “if you don’t break a leg.”

Sutton looked behind him and saw for the first time the true, savage wildness of the place.  A frozen whirlpool of star-speckled terrain stretched below them…  great yawning gulfs of blackness above which stood brooding peaks and spirelike pinnacles.

Sutton shivered at the sight.  “Let’s get on,” he said.

They climbed the last hundred yards and reached the man-made plateau, then stood and stared across the nightmare landscape, and as he looked, Sutton felt the cold hand of loneliness reach down with icy fingers to take him in its grip.  For here was sheer, mad loneliness such as he had never dreamed…

entry 468      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

In the eternal twilight, the great white stars looked down curiously at the two tiny figures bravely wending their way over the frozen immensity of the heatless planet…

…In his heart, Darl Ailing knew that their attempt was madness, that they had scant chance of finding any fuel-ores on the way. Men from the dome cities had surveyed almost the whole planet, searching out those precious ores and mining them carefully.

They trudged on toward the icehills. Walking in the heavy suits was a slow business. No sound broke the vast, dusky immensity of the black plain, for there was no air to carry sound…

…A hundred yards away a thing was moving slowly, ponderously, in the dusk. A nightmare, grotesque animal… with a squat, huge body on four thick legs, and massive shapeless head surmounted by a tremendously thick, sharp tusk. The thing’s body was gray, with the flexible, yet mineraline look of asbestos.

Nature, the unconquerable… had produced, by myriad experimental mutations, creatures that needed no air, and that could maintain their life by feeding on the radio-active ores present in the crust [……….].

The creature was engaged in the activity which had given it its name — with eyeless, massive head lowered, it was digging into the frozen plain with that great tusk, searching for the precious radio-active ores that were its food and life, and that it spent its life hunting.

“Darl, there are others - there beyond it — see!” Urla whispered tensely, her fingers tightening convulsively on his hand.

Darl Ailing perceived that beyond this nearest rooter, away off in the somber dusk, were a whole herd of the creatures, digging or moving fitfully over the frozen plain.

“It’s scented us!” he rasped suddenly. “Those beasts can sense fuel for miles away!”

The nearest rooter had ceased digging and raised its head…

They ran desperately, for they could feel the plain under them vibrating to the heavy tread of the lumbering monster. It had scented the fuel in their heaters and would rip them open to get it…

...Darl picked a way through the icy canyons and chasms, heading always east. He was laboring for breath himself, his lungs aching, when they emerged finally on the other side of the icy range.

…Before them, beyond a frozen black rock shore, lay the vast, bluish expanse of the sea of liquid air, shimmering spectrally in the shrouding dusk, a waveless, weird ocean stretching out of sight beneath the white stars…

entry 467      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

Snap, snap went the beaks as the clankers picked at a scatter of faint red rings which tinged the icy ground.

Their little circumscribed lives were about to extend in scope and potential.  Soon, when the big things were gone, when the tree-giants were crushed by the oblong bolts of force which would arrive within minutes from now, small beings would get their chance to become the dominant thrivers on [..........]; so he guessed.  And he, Hixton, might with some complacency take credit for that.  The thought made him all the more inclined to rest on his self-awarded laurels and do nothing more but wait for the end.

On the other hand – he could sense it about to happen - moods have a tendency to rebound. 

Thus, when the voice came at him, he said to himself: I knew it, I knew the kind of knock that was on the way.

The ball of meaning was suddenly inside his head, but thrown from a long way off, all the way from the horizon in fact: thrown at him by the giant feathery trees, the lords of [..........].  The ball said:  Come and talk to us before the end.

entry 466      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

The ghastly climate of [..........] —that was the thing that got into him, particularly here on the North Equatorial Belt where the opius plants flourished. It wasn’t so bad over at Green City, the civilized [..........] quarter — but here. . . ! He was becoming wearied — wearied of the myriads of childish Minitor workers on the plantation, the seasonal mudflows from [..........]’s fifty-mile distant volcanic area, the senseless drivelling of the mimical birds, the alternating lights of the arcing [..........], the wild glimpses of the [..........] moons ever and again through heavens that were almost eternally wreathed in green clouds.

In the higher levels, the air was unfit to breathe, but down here a preponderance of breathable oxygen remained. Unlike the penal world of Jupiter, where the vast pressures had crushed out all the oxygen, [..........] still possesses some, in percentage high enough to support life of an Earthly standard.

And the heat — all internal. An almost unvaried temperature of 116 degrees Fahrenheit. . . .

Lanning grunted with discomfiture and mopped his streaming neck and face. Then, arising from his musing, he went outside to the short ladder propped against the doorway. His hut was on stilts to raise it above the periodic mud-flows.

Steadily he descended the ladder and sank the accustomed two inches into the spongy loam of the clearing. He nodded in satisfaction as he beheld the Minitors at work again, dwarfed by the weird fern-like plants whose seeds they collected.

entry 465      [contributed by Lone Wolf]

Unquestionably the great spaceport at [..........] is an epitome of the aspirations and limitations of man.

Here, in breathtaking beauty, the shimmering traffic-tower rises into the night, pointing like a shining finger at the distant planets and the far more distant stars toward which the great ships take off with thunderous crash of rockets.  Watching those ships go out, one can believe man is a god.

But leave the spaceport and walk through the sordid huddle of shabby streets around it, and you see the god’s feet of clay.  Beyond the ring of mountainous warehouses [............] lies the zone known as the “Belt.”

The Belt is a shabby slum battening upon spacemen, adventurers, merchants and less-identifiable characters who flow into [..........] through the spaceport.

It has seemed incongruous to more than one observer that men who have known the beauty and wonder of the starways should find relaxation in the tawdry drinking-places and amusements of this place.

But human nature changes slowly, too slowly to match the swift, rising beat of a star-conquering civilization….

entry 464      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

If it had been hot in the city, despite man’s best air-conditioning efforts, it was murderously hot in the bogs.  The sun burned down on the dome and through it; the irrigation water evaporated rapidly, so rapidly that the dehumidifiers could not carry it away quickly enough.  As a result, the bogs were not only terribly hot, but humid as the inside of a Turkish bath.  Jansen felt washed out before he’d even begun his work.

The swamp buggies took them to a field of chlorella, the valuable plant growing like a thick coating of slime on the bogs.  The men, moving slowly to conserve energy in the heat, climbed down from the buggies and attacked the chlorella by sweeping the surface of the bogs with their muscle-powered harvesters.

Jansen smiled to himself.  Agricultural methods five thousand years old!  It couldn’t be helped on [..........], of course…

entry 463      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

…She was, before she became a hostage, a reporter for Interplanetary Video.  She had been granted the final pre-execution interview with Adam Slade and she had looked forward to it a long time but it had not worked out as planned…

…Slade, only hours from the execution chamber with absolutely nothing to lose, had splattered the guard’s brains around the inside of his cell and marched outside with a frightened Marcia Lawrence. 

Outside.  Outside the cell block while other condemned prisoners roared and shouted and banged tin cups on bars and metal walls and judas-hole grills.  Outside the prison compound and across the dome-enclosed city which served the prison.

Then outside the dome.

Outside the dome there was rock.  Rock only, twisted and convoluted and thrusting and gigantic like monoliths of a race of giants.  Rock alone under the awesome gray sky.  Steaming rock…

entry 462      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

…Roofless towers and shattered walls, wide courts choked with fallen stones and broken statues, rooms full of drifted sand, black holes dropping to forgotten cellars where a man would die before he could ever get out again.  And the wind, hudging the old stones and saying, “Remember?”

Farrel hated the place.  He watched and listened for a time from a place above the valley.  Then he set his eyes on a cluster of three marble towers about a quarter of a mile from the edge of the city, and made for them along what had been at one time a broad avenue connecting with a road that came southward through the hills.  There was no more road, and the city gate was gone, and Farrel’s boots sank deep in the quiet dust…

entry 461      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

“What do you want?”  The man, Courtney saw, was a mine official.

“I’m looking for Boss Charlie.  Tell me where his office is or I’ll sizzle your nerves.”

“You poor sucker!  Don’t you know Thurston’ll spot you a dozen yards away?  You can’t get anywhere trying to knock him off!”

“What do you mean?” Courtney asked, gesturing with the nerve whip.

“Why, he’s got some kind of telepathic [..........] beast in that box of his.  Some sort of heat-leech the robots found on [..........].  It tips him off ahead of time on things.  How many miners do you think have tried to kill him in the last ten years?”

So that’s it, Courtney thought.  So that’s how he knew I was SSP!

“I’ll take my chances,” he said.  “Where’s his office?”

entry 460      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

[..........] is unpleasantly cold.  It gets no heat from its major, since [..........]'s average temperature is 180 degrees below zero F.  But there are occasional vocanic areas, and in one of these, amid geysers and steaming lakes, is the only settlement of humans on [..........], New Macao, a roaring bordertown.

Most of [..........] remains unexplored.  There are continents and islands and iron-cold seas whose vast depth as well as the tidal pull of [..........] keep unfrozen.  Maps on [..........] are mostly blank, with the outlines of the continents sketched in and a few radar-located landmarks indicated.  Perhaps two dozen mining companies work some of the volcanic regions.

…Spongy pumice crackled under their feet.  A bellow of crashing ice thundered from the snowy ramparts to the west.  It died and there was silence.  No movement stirred in the valley.  Quade peered from under his palm.

“There’s a lake,” he said.  “The Zonals are amphibious.  Let’s try it.”

If the surface of [..........] seemed a bleak desert, the waters [..........] provided a strange contrast.  The lake was an oval nearly a mile long.  Its surface seethed and bubbled with glowing light – no wonder Udell had wanted to experiment with dyes!  Plant-life made islands on the surface. There was ceaseless activity in the water and, every few moments, a bulky glistening body would appear briefly and vanish again…

entry 459      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

Mart turned and caught sight of Emmot and Walbrook sitting a little distance off, looking behind them in blank astonishment. Mart turned again and winced as his head swam.

“Say, what — what the — ?" he began blankly, and Eda cut in quickly:

“They’ve been waiting for you to recover,” she explained anxiously. “They talk— talk English!"

“Th-the devil they do!" he stammered back, and stared in amazement at a group of twenty men and women, all of them but scantily attired, practically Earthly in general development save that the lesser gravity had given them shorter stature and more highly efficient biceps. All the men were white bearded.

Their faces were strikingly childlike and docile, differing but little from good tempered Earth boys and girls of some ten years of age. The only oddity lay in the slit, catlike pupils of their innocent misty blue eyes — pupils which visibly dilated and contracted under the changing lights of [..........] and the various moons.

Beyond them there stood a rather makeshift city of dried mud; yet remarkably enough it looked as though it was meant to resemble modem New York — a miniature version of it in mud flung here amidst the wilds of [..........]. There were recognizable edifices, even streets, but there was a complete lack of unity and careful planning.

Behind it was again the evidence of that enigmatic, multi-colored aurora, while to the right, lifting to a height of some 800 feet, and smoking sullenly, stood a squat but none-the-less deadly volcano. . . .

entry 458      [contributed by Lone Wolf]

>>  here's where this is

“…This stuff is after me and I can’t get back to the boat!”

Arne leaped through the control-room, shot down the tiny elevator, ran out between empty fuel tanks.

Hugo was a hundred yards away, facing the boat but walking backward.  He was backing up from something.  Arne didn’t see what it was at first.  All he could see was the substance of [..........], a black material seamed with silvery streaks.  But Hugo kept backing away and firing his heatgun at the ground.

Then Arne realized that the ground was moving!  Blocks of it had detached themselves from the surface in chunks and were jerking along toward Hugo like huge pebbles in a vibrating screen.

“Great moons of Mars!” Arne roared.  “The stuff’s alive!”

…The chunks were without eyes or ears or heads or legs.  They rocked along, moving slowly but with increasing speed.  Before long the whole plain was advancing on them.

Hugo’s face had grown white.

“What is it?” he asked.

“I think I know,” said Arne.  “That stuff is a type of animated coal…  I’ve seen samples… in the Interplanetary Museum.”

entry 457      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

The ship… came down on [..........] in the middle of that fabulous valley.

Wearing space-armor the three men stepped forth…  It was early morning here.  The frost on the rocky ground was not of water – it was part of the thin atmosphere which had congealed during the fearfully cold night.

Nitrogen, carbon-dioxide, methane – threads of white vapor, rising under the feeble warmth of the far-off sun, coiled around their weird attire and made a thin stratified layer of fog at knee level.  Through it loomed great metal piers that must have supported something massive – something that must have been removed, since it could not otherwise have vanished without a trace.

And there were tracks in the dusty soil – like the prints of caterpillar treads.  Here, on an all-but-dead world with little weather, they could have lasted for centuries – but no more.  The evidence of some great migration was plain to see.

From the dust, full of broken crystal shards, Carpenter picked up what may have been a piece of petrified wood – relic of a time when [..........], looming gigantic on the horizon, had radiated heat, almost like the sun, to a system of living moons…

entry 456      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

…Slih Drin put one of the dream-spools into the machine, and started it.  Stanton felt the black dream-sleep sweep over his brain.  He sank into darkness.  Then rapidly he came back to a dream-consciousness that seemed utterly real.

He was lying in the bottom of an enormous, dark chasm on an alien world.  His legs had been broken by a terrific fall.  He could crawl, but not walk.  Now he felt an awful throb of fear as slithering, rustling shapes stole through the shadows towards him.

Man-spiders!  He was on [..........]!  Those horrible arachnids with the near-human heads, most ferocious and fearful of [..........]’s creatures, were coming toward him.  He crawled frantically to escape them.  But they overtook him.  A monstrous pair of glowing, faceted eyes glared down into his as the first of the creatures seized him in hairy limbs.  Its beak tore his side open…

entry 455      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

…Somehow they looked queerly like men – and somehow queerly different.

They were bipeds, and they clung to straps fastened to the top of the vehicle, swaying exactly like strap-hangers in the noisy tube-trains of New Chicago.  Some of them were seated, and these stared out of the broad windows.  They had the familiar bored look of tired travelers everywhere.  Their heads and their features were almost human, but not quite.

Their hairless bodies were naked, except for a sort of light harness to which odd little implements and pouches were clipped.  Their smooth skins had a polished luster, as if they were covered with invisibly fine scales, Jeremy thought.  They were mottled with bright hues of red, green and orange splashed haphazardly all over them.

But there was something else, something that made Jeremy shudder.

A strong odor reached him, forced up his nostrils by the wind rushing around the vehicle.  It was the same mustiness he had distastefully noticed before…

entry 454      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

…There were a good many [..........] on hand.  From overhead, the innumerable clumps of grass had seemed without life.  [..........]grass grew thirty feet high in semi-floating islands that were roughly two hundred feet across.  In between the clumps was swamp.  The [..........] lived in what amounted to borrows in their floating islands, and progressed from one grass patch to another in queer, skittering hops startlingly like the running steps of a heavy bird just about to take off upwind.

They had a civilization of sorts, but nobody could gather more than minor information about it.  Questioned, they either answered exactly and literally, or else ignored the questioner.  They had no manners at all by earth standards, and their morals were not matters of interest to anybody who had ever seen a [..........] female.

Ordinarily there would be one family group to a grass-clump, and one grass-clump to a family group.  Here, though, there were very many on hand…

entry 453      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

Nearly an hour later June, who had been walking around the edge of the lake bed, noticed that the muddy ground began to boil and stir.

“Tom! Dad!” she shouted. “There’s an earthquake or something out here!” She started back toward the house, but stopped in petrified amazement. There was a loud, liquid “pop,” and a dripping head emerged from the mud almost at her feet. Before she had time to take in this phenomenon, another head, and another, popped up, until the entire lake bed was dotted with them.

“Frogs!” exclaimed Tom, who had just come up with his father.

“Frogs, nothing!” June objected. “Look!”

As the three watched, the strange creatures pulled themselves from the sticky mud, chattering delightedly. The astonished Tarrants noted that, covered with mud though they were, they were distinctly human. The [..........], of whom there were two or three hundred, gazed in wonder at the dusty, cloudless sky. Then they caught sight of the sprays of water shooting upward from the rows of pipes. Expertly paddling through the mud on huge flat, webbed feet, they examined the sprinklers in astonishment.

Then, evidently recalled to themselves by a sharp order from the leader, they all wheeled toward the striped yellow bulk of Saturn, stared steadfastly a moment, and abruptly turned their backs to it. Next, in perfect unison, they raised their left arms and, ducking their heads sidewise, solemnly peered from under their lifted arms at the great planet. There was something so inexpressibly droll in the solemnity with which these strange little folk performed their ridiculous rite, that the three watchers burst into shouts of laughter.

Abruptly the [..........] whirled in their direction, stared in stupefaction, and fell prostrate in the mud. Jim Tarrant, long used to dealing with natives of many worlds, stepped to the edge of the lake bed and began speaking in quiet, reassuring tones. Fearfully the little people (the largest were hardly five feet tall) rose and stood still, knee-deep in the ooze. Then, reassured by the friendly smiles of the visitors, and overcome with curiosity, they climbed from the lake bed and surrounded them, chattering and jabbering in excitement. They pointed to the water and then to the Tarrants, who nodded vigorously.

The natives immediately broke into ludicrous, flat-footed capers, dancing round and round the Earth-people, who were gasping with laughter. They peered with awe at the synthesizer, but refused to enter the shed. When Tom turned off the water, they broke into loud wails, instantly silenced when he turned it on again tor a moment. Jim finally broke up the rejoicings by pointing to the silent village on the other side of the lake. Instantly they halted their wild gyrations and, beckoning eagerly to their visitors, plunged into the mud and began paddling across to the far shore...

entry 452      [contributed by Lone Wolf]

>>  here's where this is

…Causing the arms and legs of his armor to move gently he swam forward through the thick stuff around him.  It seemed to consist of a combination of fluid and slush – liquefied gases, part of which had even congealed.  Yet he knew from his last glance at his thermometer that it was a little warmer down here than at higher levels.  After all it was unreasonable to suppose that a mass as great as [..........] could have cooled all the way to its center.  In fact its core, heated by radioactive elements, must still be flaming hot.

He wondered again about the grinding drone on a certain radio wavelength, that coincided in point of origin with the mound-shadow as revealed by radar.  The drone was too even to be a signal.  So he concluded once more that it must be just an incidental part of the functioning of some machinery.  Many electrical devices produced radio noise.  So the droning was probably of no importance.

Gradually the darkness lessened ahead, becoming at last a definite glow, which brightened to a great formless wall of bluish light…

entry 451      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

The extract I had put here on 2nd August was from Edmond Hamilton's The Harpers of Titan.  Although when choosing it I thought I had checked through What To See on Titan to make sure I hadn't already used this story, in actual fact I can't have checked properly, for an extract is already there - see Re-embodied on Titan.  Oops.  Better seek another "entry 451".  Anyway, meanwhile, I've positioned the passage as an addendum to the story's other extract, under the title Lichen forest on Titan.

…We followed the scrabbled tracks…  sometimes there was no spoor at all.  perhaps a more recent upheaval of dust had blotted them out.  But, following Joe, we were always able to pick up the trail again…  …a string of handholds – that were not quite handholds, since they did not comfortably fit our human hands – chipped out of the glassy rock.  We topped the brim of the barrier…  We came down in a congealed inferno of tortured rock outside [….]

Five miles out Joe Whiteskunk found trail’s end.  It was a confused circular patch of tracks in the dust – as new as yesterday in appearance.  Trampled markings full of violence and drama – an inconceivably ancient arena for two.  And at the center of it lay the vanquished.

The being’s weapon was as new and gleaming as yesterday.  A small bright tube, which Colonel Kopplin picked up for us to stare at…

The trigger-button – the tiny but terrifically stout pressure-chamber, in which a minute droplet of substance that was like that of the Sun’s heart could be produced to yield energy.  Atomic fusion…  And the barrel, which must have been lined with pure force to stave such heat away from weak metal, to direct such a blast of death.

Yet the being who had owned such a weapon had lost the fight, perhaps to a greater science.

The eerie corpse lay there…  it looked like a blackened old tree-stump with a thousand roots still contorted with agony…

entry 450      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

The city lay in a shallow bowl beneath two spurs of a range so worn by the scuffing ages that it was now little more than a line of hills.  Under the red glow of [..........] the lordly towers slept in a sanguine mist that softened the scars of the broken stone.  The cool light filled the roofless colonnades, the grand and empty avenues, and touched with a casual pity the faceless monuments that had long outlasted their forgotten victories.

Curt Newton stood in a still and shadowy street and listened to the silence.

On the near side of the ridge he could see the outworld settlement near the spaceport – infinitely farther away in time than it was in distance.  There were the brilliant lights, the steel and plastic buildings of today, crowned by the white façade of the resort hotel.  They had a curiously impermanent look.  He took three steps along the winding way and they were gone.

The paving stones were hollow under his feet, rutted by the tread of a myriad generations.  The walls of the buildings rose on either side, some mere shells with the coppery planet-light shining through their graceful arches, others still tolerably whole with window-places like peering eyes, showing here and there a gleam of light.

Otho, moving catlike at Curt’s side, lifted his shoulders uneasily.  “My back itches,” he said.

Curt nodded.  “We’re being watched.”

entry 449      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

…The ground levelled out – the end of the course.  I raised an arm in victory and looked back at Scott as I snow-plowed my skis to slow down…

“Look out!” Scott’s voice crackled over the radio.

Too slow, I swiveled my head to face front.  A waist-high four-legged robot was directly in my path…

…the robot had recovered itself and was waving its four arms at us, trying to get our attention.  The robot’s body looked like a pair of inverted cones surfaced with highly reflected glass, one cone nested partially inside the other, like a shiny, upside-down Christmas tree.  Its arms and legs sprouted from rings around the widest part of each cone – four legs from the lower cone’s ring and four arms from the upper cone.  Atop the upper cone was its squat, cylindrical head, which was also mirrored glass except for a short antenna…

…(I keep calling it a robot.  The truth is that the [..........] are much stranger than robots, but they look outwardly like robots so, like most tourists on [..........], I tended to think of them that way.)

entry 448      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

Shereh and Raul walked outside on the plains where the great spilanthes flowers, [..........] lobelia and dagger grass dance in the cold wind.  Raul veered towards the path by the odd pink phosphorescent stream that flowed by, and Shereh let him lead the way.  They walked in silence, Raul looking up in the dark sky filled with many moons slowly turning in the pale [..........] day.  Dully, he regarded the great city of blue glowing stone, the domiciles cut like honeycomb into the mountain, the cliffs veering upwards into the vast [..........] sky.  Be honest, he thought to himself.

“I was…foolish to come here,” offered Raul nervously; “it was our mission to pirate the great spilanthes.  There are many addicts on Earth, many rich addicts.  It’s a euphoric stimulant that allows for lovers to connect psychically…” 

entry 447      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

It had been several days since we had noticed signs of human habitation, and naturally supposed we were crossing an uninhabited portion of the country; but being anxious to let no opportunity pass without adding to our stock of information, we concluded to alight in the valley just beyond the hills and investigate. On viewing the surrounding country from our elevated position we were surprised to find the valley, which circumference, dotted here and there with groups of human beings not like ourselves, but of dark-blue color and very large. We alighted on the shore of a small lake. Our appearance in the air had been noticed by this strange people before we had seen them, and as we descended we could hear them calling to each other. But what seemed curious, when we reached the ground, not a single one was visible; every one had disappeared, as though the ground had opened and swallowed them. We were not kept long in suspense, for before we could realize whence he came, a very large man appeared before us. In height he was about ten feet, but he did not appear so tall, owing to the immense girth of his body; across his shoulders was not less than five feet and around his waist was equal in proportion; his hands were very large, his limbs comparing to the rest of his body in size; the color if his skin was of a bluish black; his hair was red, with a slight inclination to curl; but the strangest part about him was his eye, for he had but one, and that was in the center of the forehead and set far back as though to screen itself from observation. He was entirely naked, with the exception of a strip of bark, which hung about the waist and extended about half way down the thighs. He held in his hand what appeared to be a large cane with a bright yellow metal ball attached to one end. As we drew near he seemed to be holding a conversation with some person concealed beneath the ground.

entry 446      [contributed by Lone Wolf]

>>  here's where this is

…There had been a colony of about seven thousand people on [..........] before the disaster.  That didn’t seem many now, but it had been a lot when [..........] was a dead world, a mere research station for astronomers, physicists, metallurgists, geologists, archaeologists, botanists and scores of other ists.

With all the people that the regular spaceships and the life-ships had been able to bring from the doomed Earth in the time available, there still weren’t many more than twenty thousand people on [..........], including all the ists…

…The sun was bright, surrounded and diffused by a soft haze.  [..........] would always have a lot of dust in the atmosphere.  It was warm, but not unbearably hot; the air generally was so dry that people could be comfortable at much higher temperatures than could have been borne on Earth…

The sky was deep, luminous blue – deeper than it had ever been on Earth.  The ground was colourful, though flat and almost featureless – red, yellow, green and brown.  Most of the rocks near the surface had been worn long ago into sand and dust.  But here and there were little ridges of rock and stone, eroded to mere remnants of the mountains they must once have been.

…The only native form of life was plant life, lichen and a few varieties of moss.  There was plenty of that…

entry 445      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

After perhaps half a minute the creamy blankness outside thinned away and through its last wisps Resken beheld the panorama which he had waited out his millennia to see.

No human eyes would have been able to judge its distance or its scale, but Resken’s hard orbs, with their inbuilt equivalent of radar, ascertained that the planet lay spread out fifty miles below him.  He was permitted to gaze his fill – which made good sense, for why not let him see everything since his likelihood of return to his Terran fortress was zero?

[..........]’s surface, diffusely bathed in its orange glow, undulated with enormous but shallow gradients, mottled with grey-hazed patches which he guessed (setting his gaze to highest magnification) to be jungle.  Five or six locations showed higher topography, with what resembled steeper volcanoes at the summits of lazier cones, as if Earth’s Mount Fuji had been placed atop Mars’ Olympus Mons.  Valleys and swales were streaked with phosphorescent orange rivers (or roads?) which must supply some of the illumination, while the rest of the available light either spilled up from molten vents or filtered down through the clouds, or both.  Resken wondered whether the darkness of night ever came to the surface of this world.  Perhaps some areas knew blackness, but this one might be a sleepless capital district.  “Guess on, guess on,” he encouraged himself; “there’s naught else to do.”

entry 444      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

[..........] is a cold ocean world, its watery surface kept liquid by the tidal energy imparted by its massive moon [..........], so landing a conventional rocket on [..........]’s surface (or blasting off again) is problematic.  [..........] does have numerous floating “islands” made of accreted biological matter on which the snake-like natives live, but these pseudo-islands have been deemed too ecologically delicate for rocket launchings or landings.  Instead, rockets dock at the space station, and aerospace shuttles (with special pontoons to let them take off from and alight upon the water, like seaplanes) ferry visitors from orbit to [..........] and back again…

…The space-station’s hatch irised open.  I jumped, startled.  A huge snake-man was standing right there in the shadows on the other side.  From where its body/tail rested on the floor to the top of its three-eyed head, it stood eight feet tall, easy.  The snake-man wore only a utility belt, from which dangled a ray-gun, a truncheon, and some other, less readily identifiable, implements.

“Greetings,” whispered the three-armed snake-man…

entry 443      [contributed by Zendexor]

…Everywhere were great cliffs of jagged rock, huge solitary boulders eroded into twisted crazy shapes by the thin atmosphere of partially ionised gasses.  The ground, if one could call it that, was littered with millions of rock splinters cracked from the cliffs and boulders… Treacherous ponds of powdered rock alternated with pits of molten lead…

Duntov lead his men through a narrow defile between two sheer cliffs, sidestepping a pool of lead that bubbled torpidly just beyond the mouth of the canyon…

The [……….] surface, Duntov thought, the most inhospitable place in the Solar System that men could walk on.  Only the surface of a gas giant could be more deadly…

…He reached the far end of the canyon, and looked down and across a broad, saucerlike plain – perhaps what was left of some huge impact crater.  In the center of the huge depression, amidst giant eroded boulders, pits of molten lead, millions of rock splinters, like a great pearl in a garbage heap, sat the hemispherical permaglaze environment that was the sole habitation of men on [……….]…

entry 442      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

The crater seemed endless in length. I had plumbed its depth for miles when suddenly I shot down into a vast, spherical cavern. My body bobbed back and forth across this subterranean cavity like a pendulum, finally coming to rest in the very center. I floated free, as if in space. The crater had brought me into the very center of [..........]. I shouted my discovery to Rourke. He replied — then his voice was cut off by a sharp click.

Shadowy forms closed in upon me. Something seized my neck in a tight grip. Raising my atomic pistol, I fired into a hideous face which stared into mine. Dismal creatures on leathern wings flew all about me. Once again I fired my atom gun, this time over my shoulder. The clutch on my neck was released. I became aware of a strange atmosphere about me. A horny beak snapped at me as a dark form flapped past.

With the reaction attachment on my suit, I propelled myself back in the direction of the shaft. The bat creatures attacked me viciously so that often I was hard set. My blazing atomic pistol cleared a way for me, and I shot up the shaft, the winged terrors of [..........] in pursuit. They followed only a short distance, however. In the upper reaches of the crater, the atmosphere in which they lived became thin, eventually dying away into vacuum.

entry 441      [contributed by Lone Wolf]

…Out there on the barren plain stood a city.  A city of white buildings, completely enclosed and roofed and bounded by the great shimmering bubble of a transparent dome.

They looked and looked, savoring the exquisite delight of relief.  They could see no movement in that domed city at this distance, but just to see it was enough.

Then, slowly, Hubble said, “There are no roads.  No roads across the plain.”

“Perhaps they don’t need roads.  Perhaps they fly.”

Instinctively both men craned their necks to examine the bleak heavens, but there was nothing there but the wind and the stars and the dim Sun with its Medusa crown of flames.

“There aren’t any lights, either,” said Hubble.

“It’s daytime,” said Kenniston.  “They wouldn’t need lights.  They’d be used to this dusk.  They’ve had it a long time…”

entry 440      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

The [..........] had created the Vortex for human settlement.

Within the limits of what was possible on [..........], with a 10.5 hour day, the [..........] had created the perfect environment.  The atmosphere, the oxygen, the gravity, had all been adjusted to provide optimal human living conditions.  Plants and vegetables were provided or modified to flower and fruit in the shorter daylight environment. 

And although the plants that could be grown on [..........] and most details of the growing conditions were different from Earth’s, it was all adaptable to human requirements, with effort and experience.

The [..........] surreptitiously helped the humans in their cultivation endeavors.  They were the invisible hand that assured a successful planting and harvest.  They wanted to ensure that the isolated humans on [..........] thrived.  They believed isolation would allow these humans to evolve more quickly and perceive the [..........], while at the same time retaining their ability to communicate with Earth humans, when Earth eventually reconnected…

entry 439      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

An idea occurred to Mansonby. “Professor Mella, these peoples of the Hot Lands — the Vulnos: I don’t quite locate them. Where do they come in? They surely cannot be descended from - ”

“No. I understand you, Mr. Mansonby. You are right. They are not from the common father people. They are the inhabitants who were here when the father people came. They were never quite overcome, but were driven north into the Hot Lands, which were unfit for the use of the father people, and they were left there to themselves.”

Mara Mella said these Vulnos, the dread creatures of the Hot Lands, were as much animal as human. They walked erect, were immensely powerful, and covered with hair like gorillas. They possessed a strange, crude language, made up of howls, barks, screams, and wails, and were of frightful aspect. Beasts in the matter of mating, any male took possession of any female he could muster the force to take, and carried her away to his cave or other rude shelter, where he kept her until he tired of her, or some stronger one came and took her away from him. No offspring seemed ever to result from contact with the human females they abducted, marking them as of a separate and distinct genus, and not human at all. Even their blood was of a different chemical composition, as had been learned by examination of those slain in their battles.

Yet they were shrewd enough to see the value of the inventions of the higher races, and had enough intelligence to use to some extent what they could not evolve or make for themselves. This they contrived mostly by compelling their male prisoners to operate them for them. He had been told there were a few instances where they had been known to operate an air or ether vessel themselves, but personally seemed to be skeptical about it. At any rate, they had not enough wit to achieve any advancement for their own race, if indeed they desired any. In short, while possessing a modicum of human mentality, and some human or near-human traits, they were for the most part downright animals — beasts.

MANSONBY reminded the [..........] of the urgency of their mission and was advised to go to the capital to start his campaign against the Vulnos…

entry 438      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

“I am serious, Sheriff!”

“Right, right, I believe you,” Gilma waved.  “A big monster would interest an animal person like you – only, you’re not from here, are you?  [..........], I mean?”

The Ringmaster eyed her quizzically.  “I hail from New Memphis, on Ganymede.”

The sheriff nodded.  “I thought so.  Look, Mikkel, sounds like someone’s got your rocket.  The Colossus isn’t real.”

“Not real?”

“I’m afraid not.  The only things apart from people on [..........] are fish.  Now, I’ll admit, some of those fish get pretty colossal…  But a great, ten-foot-tall, fish-stealing, snow-white beast with fangs and claws and glowing eyes – it’s an icefisher’s tale.  Admittedly, it’s a new one, I hadn’t even heard it ‘til a month ago, so you can’t really be blamed for falling for it.”

“But it’s not a myth, ma’am.  I’ve seen it.”

entry 437      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

…he walked towards a silent watcher, a humanoid figure, one of a half-dozen visible on the sides of the pass.

The figure looked not much different from a tall, strangely-attired Earthman.  He wore a black-green leathery suit, a dark shapeless hat, and what looked like boxing gloves.  The air pressure up at this height was far too low for Seth Hurst to breathe, yet the [..........] wore no helmet, his face open to the sky.

As he approached, Seth scrutinised the man’s neck but saw no translator tube.  But it hardly seemed worth the trouble to worry about communication – was not everything being taken care of?

The problem was indeed resolved when Seth halted two yards from the [..........] who then spoke in Tsvairp, the harsh though splendid tongue of the Titanic blowpots, which – minus the whistle – had acquired currency as the lingua franca of the Saturnian moons.

High-pitched due to the thinness of the air, yet projected with sufficient force to be clear, the meaning of the greeting was unmistakable.  Seth like the first word – pity about the rest of the sentence.

“Welcome!  Another Earthman-volunteer from the Great World, sent here to the summits of Khurrn, to participate in our experiments…”

entry 436      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

In an eldritch twilight a smooth plain extended, visibly curved to conform to the outer contour of the tiny planet. The ground was covered with heaps and drifts of a white substance, which on a warmer world would have been the constituent oxygen and nitrogen of an atmosphere. From the aurora-illumined sky, snow sifted down swiftly. It was congealed hydrogen. The remote Sun was little more than a great star, shining mistily through the thick atmospheric blanket of [..........].

And yet in this incredibly desolate landscape, there still was life. At the edge of the smooth plain was a narrow valley hemmed in by fantastically formed crags of ice, which were as permanent and unchangeable as the mountains of Earth. At the bottom of the valley were twisted shapes formed like great frosty crystals. Their long, glassy stems swayed gently with a ghoulishly animate motion, and from some proceeded an intermittent green light that flickered eerily on the ice crags.

Far down the valley was a city. Like monster beehives the buildings loomed up, constructed from roughhewn blocks of ice. The architecture was solid and strong, for, because of the enormously heavy core of neutronium, the gravity of [..........] was half again as great as that of Earth, in spite of its small size.

In the topmost chamber of one of these buildings, two members of the dominant race were in heated argument. The room was domed by a huge hemisphere of crystalline ice, through which shone the aurora and the foggy stars. In the center of the floor a big engine, wrought from tempered mercury, worked steadily, its pistons pushed by the pressure of expanding hydrogen.

The pair of [..........] crouched before a black cabinet to which various pieces of apparatus were attached. They were like the vegetation of their world. Their bodies were roughly cylindrical, and from them projected queer, crystalline limbs.

Elfin tinklings, like fairy bells, proceeded from one of the creatures. His accompanying gestures were slow and deliberate.

The other responded with the quick comeback of youth. There was a sharp note of renunciation and reproof in what he said. Without more ado he opened the door of the cabinet and entered. There was a humming sound and a sudden rush of purple light.

Far up in the foggy sky a gigantic meteor blazed suddenly; but like all meteors passing through the thick atmosphere of [..........], it was burned to nothingness many miles above the ground.

The older creature turned wearily away.

entry 435      [contributed by Lone Wolf]

>>  here's where this is

“Now!” breathed Oul Vorn. “All together!”

Young Stephen Drew obeyed the command. He hurled his thought at the rearing rock-dragon, as powerfully as he could.

This was [..........] hunting. It was hunting by hypnotism. On faraway Earth there were snakes that could conquer a prey by hypnotism. That faculty had been developed by Nature to a far greater degree in almost every [..........] animal.

This rock-dragon trapped sand-cats by hypnotism, and sand-cats in turn caught small rodents and moon-owls by hypnotic attack.

The rearing rock-dragon resisted their combined hypnotic assault with all its faculties. The beast could probably have opposed one or even two of them. But the simultaneous hypnotic attack of the five youths so distracted it that it could not concentrate.

“Relax! Sleep!” vibrated the mental command in Stephen Drew’s mind, hurled at the red-eyed, hissing creature before them.

Drew had developed his hypnotic hunting technique until he was almost as good as his [..........] comrades. He had practiced it since childhood with them. For Stephen Drew had been born here in southern [..........].

The rock-dragon’s gray head was sagging, its red eyes beginning to shut. Its massive, leathery body settled to the sand. The combined hypnotic assault was beating down its fierce will.

The five young hunters advanced nearer the beast, their nooses and swords raised.

“Sleep—sleep—” thought Stephen Drew, over and over.

Then came disastrous interruption. From the desert behind them echoed a distant, shrill voice.

“Ark Avul!” it called faintly. “Your father needs you—Avul Kan sends for you!”

Stephen Drew half turned, then too late remembered the rock-dragon. The interruption had momentarily broken his concentration and had weakened the hypnotic attack of the hunting band.

The rock-dragon, temporarily freed from the full power of that mental attack, uncoiled its full length and charged. Drew realized instantly that his startled comrades could not regain control in time…

entry 434      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

Twisted, tumbled, tom and shattered rocks met his eye. Mosses, lichens, a few tough, low-growing plants. It looked like a picture of hell, but it was a prospector’s paradise, for the rocks of [.......] were shot through with veins of gold, silver, platinum, iridium, not to mention the more common iron and copper, which were not sought for because transportation back to earth was too expensive to pay profits.

“Off to the right,” Oscar whispered.

The glint of Jove-glow on a polished sight up the ravine gave Andy an aiming point and he snapped the blaster in that direction. He over-estimated the weak gravity of [.......] and the pellet hit on top of a high ridge beyond. A most satisfactory explosion took place there. Rocks split and tumbled in every direction. Andy lowered his sights and blasted again. Another brilliant explosion illuminated the landscape, far to the left this time…

entry 433      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

..."How come this gravity, Brain? I weigh about a hundred right now, I figure, and that’s too much, by plenty.  [..........] isn’t a quarter the size of our moon.”

"It’s supposed to have a core of heavy radioactive metals,” said Morley, thoughtfully, "and a corresponding high density. Keeps it warm anyway, instead of a big icicle, like Phoebe.”

"Phoebe!” Madsen laughed. "I remember, back in ’89 — ” He stopped abruptly at a rattling from the ledge. A green, little lizard-like creature was scrambling frantically over the granite, while hot in pursuit were three — spiders? Black, they were, a black like living velvet, and incredibly fast as they closed in, beady stalked eyes fastened on their prey. They were deliberately herding the desperate lizard toward a cleft in the rock. As the creature leaped into the opening, another spider dove at it from the recess. The others closed in…

...In a matter of minutes Spaceboat 6 was out of sight. With Madsen leading, they threaded their way through the scant undergrowth. Underfoot the dry, broadbladed grass rustled through a morning that had no beginning or end. Farther away were other and less easily explained rustlings, and once both men froze as a half-dozen of what looked like baby dragons arrowed past within yards of them.

"Formation flying, like ducks,” muttered Morley, watching from the corner of his eye.

When the whispering of scaled wings had died away, the castaways resumed their steady plodding into the south. Twice they crossed small fresh water brooks, providing a welcome opportunity to drink their fill, and replenish the canteens. The going was easy, since the footing was in fairly dense soil, and the scrub was not so thick as to provide any difficulties. After eight hours of nearly continuous travel, they reached the banks of a third stream. Here Madsen stopped, and dropped his knapsack to the ground…

entry 432      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

They used the elevator to the top of the big building. A lieutenant, his face serious, was waiting for them at the landing. He led them into the top dome.

Above them, through the plastic cover, a million stars sparkled. Seen through airless space, the stars were so brilliant they seemed to be just outside the dome. [..........] Station itself was set in the middle of a vast valley, with low hills surrounding it. On the left, were frozen runways extending the length of the valley. Then ended in the vast hump of the huge dome that served as a hangar for the space ships landing on [..........]. The hangar itself was part of the cluster of buildings that made up the station.

Up above the rocky surface of [..........], slanting downward toward the runways, was a pale blue glow.

"Hell, that’s not a meteor!” Craig gasped. "That’s a ship coming in from deep space for a landing here.”

entry 431      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

Owing to the slightness of the gravity given the Martians by their apparatus, progress was slow. Extreme care had to be taken to avoid dangerous falls among the giant boulders and cliffs. Crevices, wide and apparently bottomless, were everywhere. It was necessary to keep out of the shadows, for everything in them was as black as Erebus. They spread out and made a wide circle, keeping in touch with each other constantly. But to all appearances the planet was as virgin as at it birth. It was hard to believe it to be inhabited, and they began to wonder if they had not been the dupes of a cleverly arranged optical illusion.

They moved with extreme caution, and rather slowly and awkwardly, owing to the impeding cumbersomeness of the envelopes. The slightness of the gravity of [..........], combined with that added by their apparatus, did not trouble the Martians, for it was about normal to them. They held themselves constantly alert for signs of the enemy, picking their way around the pits and holes made by falling aerolites. At times they had to leap across great bottomless fissures. At last they found their progress barred by a precipitous gorge, several hundred feet in depth, and apparently miles in length. Its depths lay in profound blackness. They halted on an overhanging ledge and spent some time examining this magnified crack in [..........], for it was little more than a wide cleft between rock walls, with nearly perpendicular sides. At length Maltapa signed to Orala that he wished to talk.

He came close to his assistant, took up a small tubelike appendage hanging from the headpiece of his ether envelope, and clamped it with great care to a similar one in Orala’s envelope, forming a hermetically sealed passage between the two headpieces.

“Don’t appear to notice, Orala,” he cautioned, “as we are probably watched, but take a good look well down the opposite side there on the left just in the edge of the shadow. I thought I saw some sort of movement.”

Orala could not make out anything, and they were just about concluding that Maltapa had been mistaken, when, without warning flash or sound there was a terrific jar like a small earthquake, and a cloud of dust and pulverized rock enveloped them. The Martian Chief and his assistant leaped back instinctively from the edge, almost tearing asunder their speakers.

When they had recovered themselves and the dust cloud had cleared, they saw that a part of the ledge on which they had been standing had been clipped off sharply and precipitated down the wall of the gorge. Where there had been five Martians on the lip of the declivity, there were now but four.

“Damn that cursed aerolite!” exploded Maltapa. “It's lost us a good man!”

Detaching the speaking tubes, Maltapa waved the others farther back. He examined the ledge with care, selected a solid portion, and crawled forward on all fours to the very edge. Long and earnestly he swept the declivity below with his glass, until it came to rest on a particular spot. He signed Orala to him and attached the speakers.

“He’s lying about half way down there, poor devil! See him? He’s lying sprawled out in a sort of hollow just above that great pile of boulders. See him? Evidently the aerolite did not hit him. If it had, there wouldn’t be anything left to see.”

entry 430      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

The sun made long shadows of two ludicrous figures that went leaping and racing across the rocks. Their strength was prodigious, and they were filled with an upwelling joy of living and the combined urge of an eternity of spring-times. The very air tingled with life; there was overpowering intoxication in this potent, exhilarating breath from a world new-born.

The ground that they crossed so recklessly was a vast honeycomb of caves. Between the rocks the soil was soft with the waters from melting ice, and the men laughed as they floundered at times in the oozing mud. Beyond was a lake, and it was blue with a depth of color that was almost black, a reflection of the deep, velvet blackness of the sky overhead. And beyond that was the sloping side of an extinct volcano.

"Up—up!" Jerry shouted. "From up there we will see the whole world—the whole [..........]!" He laughed as he repeated the exultant phrase: "The [..........]!"

…Despite their strength which carried them in wild bounds across impassable chasms, their laboring lungs checked them in the ascent. The joyous inebriation was wearing off. Winslow met his companion's eyes sheepishly as they stopped where a sheer cliff of basalt above caught and held the warmth of the sun's rays. Behind them it rose a straight hundred feet, and before stretched a vast panorama. The sun was mounting now in the sky. It brought into strong relief the welter of volcanic waste that extended in bold detail through the clear air far out to the horizon, where, misty and dim, the first vaporous clouds were forming from the steaming earth.

And as they watched, the depressing bareness and emptiness of that gray-black expanse was changing. Far to the east a pink flush was spreading on the hills. It wavered and flowed, and it changed, as they watched, to deep areas of orange and red. The delicate pink swept in waves over valleys and hills, a vast kaleidoscopic coloration that rioted over a strange world.

In silence it spilled into the valley below. The slope they had traversed was radiant with color.

At their feet the ground was in motion: it heaved and rolled in countless places. Rounded shapes in myriads were emerging. Plants—mushroom growths—poured up from the earth to drink in the sunshine of their brief summer. They burst the earth to show unfolding leaves or blunted, rounding heads, that grew before the men's incredulous eyes.

entry 429      [contributed by Lone Wolf]

>>  here's where this is

“Down there should be the terminal of the [……….] Canal,” said Phil.

Instead was a roiling lake that filled the rock-rimmed valley and spilled over the edges into the valley next, where the water boiled away against the hot rocks and produced the clouds of vapor.

The [……….] Canal was not properly a canal ; a real canal is a channel cut out of the face of a planet by man. Nor was the [……….] Canal a natural waterway, for if [……….] had ever had any water, it had boiled away and gone elsewhere sometime within a few minutes after the first day of creation. Instead, the [………..] Canal meandered along what might have been a natural waterway, following a couple of thousand miles of normal declivities in the rocky surface of [……….]. It collected in broad pools here and there and dropped magnificently in a couple of waterfalls, spreading out to collect the heat from Sol as it flowed from Inlet to Outlet.

Here at Outlet Station it should have been a pleasant sight.

The rim of the Canal had been cooled by the water, just as the water had been heated by the planet and the sun. So the combination of water and sun and the general hardiness of life in general had produced a rather lush rain-forestry growth along this end of the [……….] Canal. None of this was visible now. The Outlet Station was immersed completely, too, in the vast lake that churned and tossed.

The tropical sea in a typhoon or the North Atlantic lashing at the rock-bound coast of Maine in a Nor’easter or the Mississippi on a rampage were nearly as violent as this lake below.

entry 428      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

He saw now a great plain, on which vugs, unmoving, rested at fixed spaces.  Or was it that they moved incredibly slowly?  There was an anguish to their situation; the vugs strained, but the category of time did not move and the vugs remained where they were.  Is it forever?  Joe Schilling wondered.  There were many of the vugs; he could not see the termination of the horizontal surface, could not even imagine it.

This is [..........], a voice said inside his head.

Weightless, Joe Schilling drifted down, wanting desperately to stablilize himself but not knowing how.  Dammit, he thought, this is all wring; I shouldn’t be here, doing this.  “Help,” he said aloud.  “Get me out of this…”

No one answered.

More rapidly now he fell.  Nothing stopped him in the usual sense and yet all at once he was there; he experienced it.

Around him formed the hollowness of a chamber, a vast enclosure of some nebulous sort, and across from him, facing him across a table, were vugs.  He counted twenty of them and then gave up; there vugs were everywhere in front of him, silent and motionless but somehow doing something.  They were ceaselessly busy and at first he could not imagine what they were doing.  And then, all at once, he understood.

Play, the vugs thought-propagated.

The board was so enormous that it petrified him.  Its sides, its two ends, faded, disappeared into the understructure of the reality in which he sat.  And yet, directly before him, he made out cards, clear-cut and separable.  The vugs waited; he was supposed to draw a card…

entry 427      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

The ship dropped lower as it cruised above the surface of [..........], and now those within the observatory of the interplanetary flyer could view the more minute details of the planet.

Gigantic forms lumbered ungainly through the yellow forests, raising their huge snouts to bellow defiance at the space ship.

"Oh, look, daddy !" exclaimed Sue suddenly. "Down there!" the girl pointed her finger at a small clearing in the forest of yellow, swaying branches.

"It is a battle of monsters!" exclaimed Clarkford.

Below them in the forest, two nightmarish engines of flesh and blood were preparing to tear one another asunder with the mighty weapons which nature had bestowed upon them! One of the creatures was formed like a great snake with a long body some five feet in diameter, having a series of some eight or ten sets of long legs which held it above the ground. The great, glittering rows of teeth which lined the terrible jaws of the animal were outstretched to a span of some twelve feet ready to close upon the anatomy of its equally fearsome adversary at the first opportunity! Its opponent was just as large, though of a more compact build, being of towering proportions mounted on three sets of legs. From all sides huge, curling tentacles waved nervously as the other beast approached. Four little eyes gleamed wickedly from the squat, diminutive head which, devoid of any neck, sprouted from the upper forepart of the creature's colossal bulk. The tail of the animal curled and switched as it stood, waiting defensively for the charge of the other snakelike creature. The later, its wide jaws distended, was rushing forward madly.

"What terrible things!" breathed the girl excitedly as she viewed the grotesque creations which roamed the forests of [..........].

AND now there broke forth upon the ears of the space ship passengers the most terrifying, blood-curdling roars, howls, mouthings and screams they had ever heard, the radio phones upon the outside of the craft conducting the sounds of conflict to the ears of those within.

The first animal leaped forward and seized a goodly portion of the second creature within its wide jaws which closed tightly in a vise-like grip! The bulky animal writhed and roared in the terrible grasp of the attacker. As its powerful tentacles closed upon the long, twisting body of the other in a death-hold, a large section of the animal was torn loose. And now the witnesses to the primitive, mortal combat saw the effects of the tightening tentacles upon the body of the wide jawed animal. The edges of the tentacles were lined with razor-edged segment, and as the tentacles closed tightly, working back and forth in a rapid motion, the body of the attacking beast was cleaved into three or four sections which continued to wriggle and twist separately in their death throes! The head of the disgusting creature released its mouthful of living flesh and seized upon the huge animal in a new spot!

The second beast, with victory within his grasp, though bleeding to death, stiffened spasmodically at this second onslaught, while the great jaws crunched together for the last time and froze, the bodily remains of the animal still squirming, the long legs kicking!

"How terrible!" shuddered the girl as she shrank back from the grisly sight.

As if by prearranged signal, there broke forth from the surrounding forest below a pack of animals as large as horses, running swiftly forward on ten legs. They appeared to be a cross between an animal and insect, for a series of antennae arose from their heads, while the covering on their backs was such as one sees on beetles. Their jaws were those of an animal, and from between them there issued dismal howls as the dozen or more of these denizens of the yellow forest broke forth into the clearing from the surrounding verdure. They had been impatiently awaiting the outcome of the conflict between the forest giants. They leaped, fought and howled, their weird cries wailing in concert as they viciously attacked and devoured the remains of the two great beasts who had fought and died within the short space of a few minutes.

entry 426      [contributed by Lone Wolf]

>>  here's where this is

Headley checked his radi-compass bearings, then braced the full force of the wind, Caxton pressing forward at his side. They struggled toward the ice-sheathed cliff a hundred yards away, each step an agony of effort, clumsily dodging a huge boulder that rolled a lazy path of death toward them.

Snow smashed at them, made vision difficult, went whirling away. Even through the radi-heated layers of their suits, they could feel the implacable cold plucking at their lives with skeletal fingers of death. Minutes passed, as they fought through the drifting snow, each minute an age of effort; and when Headley glanced back, he felt a vague surprise to find that they had travelled so short a distance. He grinned at Caxton.

“Like trying to run in a slow-motion dream,” he said, frowned slightly when he heard his partner’s sullen growl of acknowledgment.

They struggled forward again, approaching the cliff of ice and rock that towered overhead. Headley splashed heedlessly through a small pool of semi-liquid, halted with a tiny cry of excitement.

“Look!” he said. “That rock’s alive.”

Bart Caxton tilted his gaze to where several clay-colored rocks lay at the edge of the pool.

“You’re nuts,” he said. “They’re just rocks.”

“I’ll swear I saw one move out of the way of my foot,” Headley insisted stubbornly, bent and lifted the first of the rocks.

It was heavy in his hands, and he had the uncanny sensation that it squirmed impatiently as he lifted it. He examined it carefully, ignoring Caxton’s impatient words for them to hurry. And even as he watched, he saw the living rock split in his hands, opening down the side, disclosing gill-like fringed flesh that looked like slivers of whitish ice.

“It is alive!” he exclaimed excitedly, then dropped the stone as sudden giddiness clutched at his senses.

Caxton caught at his drooping body. “What’s wrong?” he snapped.

Headley blinked his eyes. “Nothing!” he disclaimed. “Just a combination of pressure and lack of oxygen.” He reached for his suit’s panel, opened the oxygen valve another quarter turn.

He shook his head slightly, then bent to study the rock he had dropped. It had not moved, nor had its mouth-like opening closed. It lay at his feet in the shallow liquid, resembling nothing more than a ruptured rock.

“To hell with it!” Caxton said disagreeably. “Let’s find the kronalium.”

Headley nodded, stumbled after Caxton. But jubilation was in his heart. When he and Caxton returned, they would take back several of the rock-creatures as living proof of the success of their mission.

He glanced back, saw squat legs flick from the opening in the rock, saw the creature scurry back to the few others of its kind that rested at the side of the semifrozen pool of liquid. He grinned again, then pressed forward to lead the way to the cliff…

entry 425      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

“PANADUR!” Mark Lynn breathed softly as he glanced at the stark grandeur of [..........] from one of the glassite ports. It was night. The macabre glow of Jupiter’s Red Spot enveloped the satellite in a red opaline haze that made the vari-colored cliffs gleam with twisted flames in deep crimson and orange and purple. Over all, an eternal mantle of snow lay like frozen spume. Mark opened his hand and looked at the jewel he held. It was pulsing now with a fiery radiance.

The great spacer was lying in the cupshaped hollow of the immense valley, resting on the blanketing snow, just as once before, a tiny cruiser had rested crippled in the fantastic [..........] night. But it was different then. Mark remembered his chilling awe at the Dantesque panorama, and his shock when Jim Brannigan had found life on [..........], the strange, exquisitely furred bipeds with slender arms and six-fingered hands. He had thought them animals then, despite the bright intelligence shining in the beryl-eyes of the creatures. But he’d learned differently in time, when Jim had crushed his skull from behind, and the Panadurs had saved him by absorbing Jim’s life-energy and transferring it to him while he lay unconscious. That was the miracle, that the metabolism of the Panadurs could absorb energy from any source and transfer it at will. They were telepathic, and their leader had given him the jewel to facilitate communication if Mark ever returned.

entry 424      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

IT WAS as though they stood upon a great, smoothly-curved mountain top.

Overhead showed the black of space’s night, with the hard glow of all the myriad stars, like spangles sewn haphazard in strings and clusters upon black velvet. At twenty degrees from zenith glowed the little orb of Venus, a silver farthing shedding soft white light upon them, and farther away and almost overhead the green dab that was Mother Earth. By Venus-light they made out the flat gray uniformity on which they stood and which extended around them and their craft on every hand —shaping into a smooth arc as it gained distance, without a dint or hummock to relieve. Away and away it curved, for furlongs that seemed small for the clearness of vision and lack of surface-modification, until it was lost in light. 

Light—an unbroken circle of it, pinky-red as blazing coals upon a home hearth. The mountain in space on which they seemed to stand was ringed about with that pink radiance. It was as if the sun were about to rise, no matter which way you looked—rather an unbroken ring of suns, ready to move forward and upward as one around the full sweep of the horizon.  

(...)

...“What’s that little patch of light, sir?”

“Eh?” said Jeffords, and then he, too, saw it—a moving shimmer of orange that seemed to play around their feet like a beam from a colored lamp.

FOR a moment, it paused at Paul’s toe and they made out its shape—a sort of luminous tadpole, a little oval the size of a pigeon’s egg with a vibrating steak like a tail. Then it was sliding quickly around the entire metal sole of the shoe, and finally away.

“It’s alive, intelligent,” exclaimed Jeffords. “Follow it.”

They ran, light and sure-footed on their magnetized boots, but the beam easily kept ahead, taxing their utmost powers to keep up. More moving lights seemed to break out ahead.

“Look, a whole swarm,” panted Paul, and a moment later their little guide was lost among its mates. Pausing on the edge of the bright, dancing array, the two Terrestrials stared in uncomprehending wonder.

There were scores, perhaps hundreds, of the bright little tadpoles, each moving independently of the others. Paul stooped and tried to pick up the nearest of them. It struggled under his pressing fingers, then slipped away as if greased.

“It hasn’t any substance,” reported the youth. “It’s like light, or a moving stain of color. What are they?”

“Living, intelligent beings,” repeated Jeffords, also genuinely excited. “Look at those diagrams yonder.”

He pointed. Several steps away stretched a row of rectangular figures, like sketches or geometrical designs. Each was perhaps three feet long by two wide, and each had one or more breaks in its boundaries. Through these breaks as through doors, the little tadpole-creatures flickered in and out. Carefully skirting the excited throng of beams, Paul and Jeffords approached the rectangular delineations.

Beyond the first row, they now saw, were other rows, drawn in purple, lavender, green, red—all colors, some shining as with phosphorescence, others reflecting the soft radiance of Venus overhead, still others flat and dull.

(...)

“Steady, sir,” said Paul at the same moment. “Something’s coming—something big and three-dimensional.”

Both he and Jeffords looked away across the little diagram-city. It was in the middle distance, a great moving lump like a legless elephant in size, and shining as with brick-red inner flame.

“The fire-thing,” came the quick, worried warning through the thought-interpreter. “It feeds upon our lives—we must flee. You say you are friends. Take friendly warning, then.”

Paul’s hand slid to his belt and caught the handle of his holstered automatic. His young eyes were fearless as they watched the approach of the new creature. Jeffords gazed also, the contemplatic scientist as usual.

The details of the shining shape were clearer now as it came humping and hurrying closer. It had no head or legs, unless the sheeny rippling of its underside was a succession of limb-motions too fast for eye to follow. Its bulk swelled upward, like a fiery tortoise-shell, but seemed to bend and quiver like jelly. The inner light waxed and waned as if to the pulse of a powerful heart. The glow it shed lighted up the gray, smooth plain for many yards around.

“Look,” said Paul tensely. “It’s at the other edge of the city—eating those poor little bugs!”

IT WAS. A scurrying little pool of colors showed where some of the tadpole-people had been overtaken. The front of the blister-like nemesis swelled and elongated, like the pseudopod of an amoeba. The extension wiped an end across the muddle of tiny fugitives, and they were no more.

entry 423      [contributed by Lone Wolf]

>>  here's where this is

The stars winked at him, the soft waves explored his face-plate with curious, white fingers of spray. Pretty soon there was sand scraping his boots . . . a long, smooth beach with rolling hills beyond.

…In the sudden scarlet of dawn, it was impossible to believe the night had even been frightening. Throughout the night, the Moseley clan huddled together there on the beach, waiting, silent, wondering. But when the sun burst over the horizon like a clamoring, brazen gong, they looked upon this land which was their new home — and found it good.

The night did not last long. But Pop had told them it would not.

“[..........] rotates on its axis,” he explained, “in about ten hours, forty minutes. Earth time measurement. Therefore we shall have ‘days’ and ‘nights’ of five hours; short dawns or twilights. This will vary somewhat, you understand, with the change of seasons.”

Dick asked, “Isn’t that a remarkably slow rotation ? For such a tiny planet, I mean ? After all, [..........] is only one hundred and eighty odd miles in circumference — "

“[..........] has many peculiarities...”

entry 422      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

Peter seized the oars and rowed swiftly toward the spot from whence the bullets had come. He did not know who had fired the shots, but he was certain that the man he sought was up there behind the jungle bush. With swift strong strokes, the boat shot shoreward, toward a slight indention in the river’s bank, over which hung a jungle giant bearing huge crimson flowers. Peter, intent upon grounding the light craft, paid no heed to the huge tree. Then suddenly he discerned a swift movement above. He saw a huge crimson belllike flower turning rapidly. A coiled liana within the gorgeous golden mouth darted downward. Other huge flowers also were turning down their gaping maws.

An agonized instant — for Peter. His eyes, for a horrible second, had turned to something else, swinging in the twining lianas above. It was a skeleton, bleached and white, hanging high on a limb like a scarecrow.

It was a trap ! These were carnivorous plants ! Above him, doubtlessly, hung the remains of one of the three who had preceded him, and perhaps somewhere along the river were the bones of the other two. Lured by a shot from the shore they had turned their craft into the gaping jaws of death.

Peter’s vocal chords were trying to scream, but he was paralyzed with sheer terror...

entry 421      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

“…Brute strength isn’t enough, nor agility. A tiger or a deer wouldn’t last long here. In the Forest, the survival of the fittest means the plant or animal that can get the most food. That sort of thing has been going on here for a million years. The beasts developed super-quick reactions. They could smell danger a mile away. So they had to have strength, agility, and something else — to get close to their prey.”

Brown stared. “What?”

“Invisibility. Or its equivalent. Ever heard of protective coloration? Camouflage? Well, the creatures of the Forest are the most perfect camouflage experts that exist. They don’t simply trick your eyes, either. They trick the other senses. If you smell perfume, take it easy, or you’ll find yourself asleep, while your head’s being chewed off by a lizard that looks as nasty as it smells good. If you see a path and it feels solid, don’t walk too far on it. Things have made that path. A carnivorous moss that feels exactly like smooth dirt underfoot — till their digestive juices start working. If you hear me yelling your name, take it easy. There are birds like harpies here that imitate sounds the way parrots do.”  Garth’s grin was tight. “You’ll find out. It’s camouflage carried to the last degree, for offense and defense. I know the Forest pretty well ; you don’t. You haven’t developed a sort of sixth sense — an instinct — that tells you when something smells bad, even though it looks like a six-course dinner.”

“All right,” the Captain said. “This is your territory, not mine. It’s up to you.”

It was. Garth decided later as he led the way through the black columns of the trees, very much up to him. Brown and the others were tough, hard fighters, but they didn’t know the subtleties of this hell-hole, where death lurked everywhere disguised...

It was warmer in the Forest; the trees seemed to exhale heat and moisture, and there was no snow on the ground. Great ebony pillars of giant trees, rising hundreds of feet into the air, made the place a labyrinth. And the deceptive reddish twilight made walking difficult, even to Garth’s trained senses...

entry 420      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

Lucky jumped recklessly into the exposed river, drifting gently downward under the pull of [..........]’s weak gravity.  He was angry at the slowness of his fall, at Bigman for the childish enthusiasms that seized him so suddenly, and – unpredictably – at himself for not having stopped Bigman when he might.

Lucky hit the stream, and ammonia sprayed high in the air, then fell back with surprising quickness.  [..........]’s thin atmosphere could not support the small droplets even at low gravity.

There was no sense of buoyancy to the ammonia river.  Lucky had not expected any to speak of.  Liquid ammonia was less dense than water and had less lifting power.  Nor was the force of the current great under [..........]’s weak pull.  Had Bigman not damaged his air hose, it would have been only a matter of walking out of the river and through any of the drifts that might have packed it around.

As it was…

Lucky splashed downstream furiously.  Somewhere ahead the small Martian must be struggling feebly against the poisonous ammonia…

entry 419      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

... He was possessed with the same overmastering curiosity as to what lay below the barrier of illusion that had driven the others to dare its mystery.

He descended step by step. When he touched the shaking mist-mirror a peculiar thrill ran along his nerves. It was like s faint electrical charge - numbing, a slight, chilling shock. Nothing painful, but more than a bit startling.

The mist came up and drowned him. For a moment he felt himself completely blind; but the smooth stone steps were still there beneath his feet. He felt his way down, step by step, descending into complete darkness.

Out of darkness, light blossomed.

A dim, dreamy haze of light, soft and faintly golden.

As he descended beneath the barrier, a vision of strange marvels appeared, it was like a bit of stage legerdemain, or one of the miraculous transitions the old-time moviemakers knew how to work. The scene was transformed, instantly and completely, as by some mighty magician.

He stood on a steep slope of rock overgrown with a carpet of soft moss. Sapphire-blue was that moss, and it deepened to metallic indigo and brightened to lucent azure as the shifting light played across it.

A warm, humid gust of air met him, dampening his face and filling his lungs with the perfume of strange, unearthly flowers.

entry 418      [contributed by Lone Wolf]

>>  here's where this is

…A dark ragged terrain was spreading out below them.  Then, Curt saw the place at last.  A deep gorge, with cliffs towering up on either side.  He’d only been here twice before in his life but he knew the place well.

He maneuvered into place, and the cruiser descended slowly on the under-hull repulse beam.  Even Kraaz was puzzled now, as they went deep into this tiny world.  Suddenly the scene widened.  The terrain spread out again and lights leaped into view.  They were in a vast hollow where a complete town nestled, concealed by the sheering black cliffs.  They settle down onto a spaceport where a hundred ships rested. 

“Welcome to [..........],” Curt spoke dryly.  “But I hope we won’t be staying long.”

…They stepped down into the thin atmosphere of [..........] depths.  Ships of all sizes and designs rested there in the vast hollow; for this was an outlaw base for pirates of all planets…

…They saw spacers of every description… but they failed to meet the description Curt was after.  But suddenly, as they neared the edge of the hollow – he saw one…

…Kraaz had seen.  Now he strode purposefully toward the side locks.  It took all of Curt’s strength on his arm to stop him.

“Careful, man.  Remember you’re on [..........] now.”  Curt jerked his head toward the lights of the town.  “The owner must be around somewhere – let’s go find him.”

Kraaz nodded.  They walked toward the single sprawling street of [..........].  Sounds of revelry reached them, guttural laughter and curses and the click of gambling wheels.  Once they saw a thin, blue flash of an electro-pistol.  That was the only law here, and life was cheap among these cutthroat pirates…

entry 417      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

…To the East, as I stood there in the quietness of the Sleeping-Time on the One Thousandth Plateau, I heard a far, dreadful sound, down in the lightless East; and, presently, again – a strange, dreadful laughter, deep as a low thunder among the mountains.  And because this sound came odd whiles from the Unknown Lands beyond the Valley of the Hounds, we had named that far and never seen Place “The Country Whence Comes The Great Laughter.”  And though I had heard the sound, many and oft a time, yet did I never hear it without a most strange thrilling of my heart, and a sense of my littleness, and of the utmost terror which had beset the last millions of the world.

Yet, because I had heard the Laughter oft, I paid not overlong attention to my thoughts upon it; and when, in a little time it died away into that Eastern Darkness, I turned my spy-glass upon the Giants’ Kilns.  And these same Kilns were tended by the giants, and the light of the Kilns was red and fitful, and threw wavering shadows and lights across the mouth of the pit; so that I saw giants crawling up out of the pit; but not properly seen, by reason of the dance of the shadows…

entry 416      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

…The entities were aglow with a deep inner light.  They raised heavy appendages.  Tiny crystals slid forward to become tentacles, grasping the three visitors by the arms.  Those tentacles were heavy and strong and cold, cold as outer space.  Kraaz struggled, lashing out with his Jovian strength.  But mere protoplasmic strength was nothing.  His great muscles bulged, veins stood out – then he collapsed.

They were dragged roughly forward, through street after street in which other crystalline forms moved.  But not all were in human semblance.  They seemed able to take on any shape at will.  A tingling din was set up, as these crystal-shapes moved in their peculiar cohesive locomotion.

An entire city seemed to exist here far beneath the [..........] rock.  They came at last into another grotto, vaster than any they’d seen.  Their captors led them to a great blank wall of rock, extending far above their heads.  But it wasn’t entirely blank, hundreds of crystal forms clustered there, scattered in profusion across the perpendicular expanse.

As they stood there uncertainly, these crystal-forms began to move…

entry 415      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

…They crossed the end of that blackened strip, Curt and Otho hastening over the hot rocks, Grag plodding stolidly, Simon gliding ahead.

Before them the fern jungle rose into barren olive-colored hills, growing dark as the dusk deepened.  Almost at once Newton noticed something on the slope of the nearest hill.  It was a raw lumpy scar where a landslide had recently occurred.

“Simon, look at that landslide!  Notice anything?”

The Brain hovered, his lens-eyes surveying the dusky hillside.  “Yes, the outline.  Definitely unnatural.”

Otho and Grag were staring now, too.  “I don’t see anything unnatural about it,” boomed the metal giant.

“It covers a building that stood on that hillside,” Newton informed him.  “Look at the symmetry of it, even masked by soil – the contral cupola, the two wings.”

Otho’s bright eyes flashed.  “The citadel Carlin mentioned?”

“Perhaps.  Let’s have a look.”

They moved on.  In a brief time they were climbing the slope to that great lumpy scar of new soil.

Newton looked back down at the jungle.  No one had followed them out of it onto the bare slope.  The giant ferns stretched far away and he could catch the tawny gleam of Yellow Lake in the distant dusk…

entry 414      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

Ten days later, Earth time, he was circling [..........], while he searched the grim, forbidden terrain beneath. After days of studying and speculation he had decided that the Caves must be situated in the Inferno Range, a place so particularly vicious that no man, so far as was known, had ever explored it. During the day the heat would boil eggs, and at night the sub-zero cold cracked great scales off the granite boulders. And here, too, lay the Trap-Door City of the monster spiders!

The grim, fantastic range soon appeared over the horizon, stabbing its saw-tooth peaks far into the sky. Dawn was still lighting the world, and a great snow-storm, a howling, furious blizzard, concealed the lower slopes of the mountains. Penrun knew that presently the driving snow-flakes would change to rain-drops, and the shrieking, moaning voice of the gale would give way to the crashing, rolling thunder of the tempest. As the day advanced the storm would die abruptly and the clouds vanish under the deadly heat.

Then the Trap-Door City, which covered the slopes above the plateau at the three-thousand-foot level like a checker-board of shimmering, silken circles, would spring to febrile life as the spider monsters went streaking and leaping across the barren, distorted granite on the day's business, the hunt for food in the lowlands, and the opening of the trap-doors to gather in the heat of the day in the silken tunnel homes set in the gorges and among the boulders. At sunset the doors would all be closed, for then the rain and the electrical storm would return, and at night the blizzard. The storm-and-heat cycle was the deadly weather routine of the Infernos.

entry 413      [contributed by Lone Wolf]

>>  here's where this is

This wasn’t the information he wanted. “Addison, is there any life on [……….]?”

“The night life never ends.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Sorry, just a joke to lighten the mood. [……….] It is theorized that some life may dwell in the deep oceans, protected by a layer of ice, but to date none has ever been found.” 

Amir considered this. No fish could have knocked him from the docking arm. “Anything else?”

“Some residents and guests claim to have seen a creature locally called the ‘gaunt.’ Descriptions vary, but most agree its a fast, elusive being that avoids light. Disappearances are sometimes blamed on the gaunt. No solid evidence has ever surfaced to support the possibility of its existence.”

“...Disappearances?”

"Yes. Many who vanish are sadly never found, even if they went missing within just a few miles of the colony. One of the difficulties of living on such a rugged world without sunlight."

entry 412      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

"That crazy android!  I might have known he’d pull something like this!  When I get my hands on him – "

Curt was already donning a space-suit.  He screwed its helmet tight, grasped his proton-pistol, and strode into the water.

The head soles of his suit held him on the sea floor as he marched down an oozy slope.  Flame-fish and hydras swam past him in the green deeps.  The space-suit was a perfect diving suit for his purpose.  He strode deeper and deeper until he glimpsed a bright gleam of light ahead.

It came from the Futuremen’s diving bell.  The improvised bell was an upright cylinder of transparent metal, that stood now amid crumbling black ruins which were half covered by ooze.  Curt glimpsed Otho, Grag and Joan clearly inside the bell, which had a makeshift rocket tube for ascending.

The diving bell had been fastened tightly to the ocean’s slippery floor.  Chains attached the the bell’s underside had been securely pegged down.  And around it were circling a dozen fiercely excited sub-sea men, of the race long known to inhabit the depths of [..........]’s waters.

The scaled, anthropoidal green monsters glimpsed Curt and rushed toward him, leveling their rude spears…

entry 411      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

The gorge was so deep that the blazing sunlight did not reach its bottom, which was a place of great boulders and shadows.  There were cracks of yawning fissures in the precipitous walls.  And bright streaks of metallic ores gleamed at many places in the rock.

It was these metal ores, Curt knew, that drew the [..........] here.  The strange, non-breathing creatures could ingest metallic elements as their food.  They could sense the presence of such elements from afar.  That was what made them dangerous to men wearing metal space-suits.

“The fissure I noticed when we formerly explored this place is near the west end of the gorge,” Captain Future declared.  “Come on!”

They clambered down into the shadowy bottom of the gorge, and started between the masses of jagged boulders toward its distant west end.

As they came round one looming mass of rock, they suddenly confronted two [..........].  The creatures were big, wolflike beasts with gray silicate flesh, whose curiously filmed eyes glared at the Futuremen…

entry 410      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

… They rose quickly to a moderate altitude and headed for the city of Kir, the walls and towers of which could be discerned in the distance. The visitors experienced a slight sense of discomfort; for it was considerably warmer here than in their own land and the humidity was far higher. But otherwise they observed little difference from conditions on Arin, though the sun was shining less brightly here by reason of their greater distance from the luminary.

“Do you desire to encircle the city before landing at the hotel?” inquired the pilot, who seemed to be friendly enough.

“Yes, that is a good suggestion,” agreed Ronal. “It will give us an opportunity to orient ourselves.”

“You have never visited Voris?”

“Never. And we are looking forward to it with much pleasure.”

“Well, you have arrived at a good time. In the city of Kir the celebration of Matara is now being observed – one of our holidays, you know – and there is much merry-making. We shall pass over the amphitheatre where Olar is now reviewing his mounted guard.”

Ronal translated rapidly to Barlo, who displayed keen interest in the news. This entire trip was more or less of a holiday to the middle-aged man who had left the city of La-dar but three times during his lifetime. But the young prince was not so enthusiastic; for the Andites has told him of some of the orgies of the Keronians when on holiday.

The air was filled with pleasure craft and beneath them spread a city of a size fully as great as La-dar. Its upper moving ways were crowded with people in holiday attire. The high walls surrounding Kir were bedecked with emblems and banners of many colors, as were the myriad aircraft that darted and circled about them on every side. Now they shot past a tall spire, that rose from the upper surface of the city to so great a height that its pointed tip seemed to be but a few feet beneath them. The pilot advised Ronal that this was the spire which surmounted the palace of Olar, ruler of all Keron, and thus, by overlordship of the mightiest nation, the actual dictator of his entire world.

Now they were over the main thoroughfare of the city, a broad central lane of traffic on either side of which rose the larger buildings of Kir. These, unlike the pleasingly-decorated edifices of La-dar, were monotonously uniform in construction, and of neutral hued, non-corrosive metal. Were it not for the holiday decorations, thought Ronal, this city of Kir would indeed present a drab and uninteresting appearance to the eye of the cultured visitor from Arin. Ahead of them, the central roadway terminated in a large circular area which they soon made out as the amphitheatre of which the pilot has spoken. Then they were directly overhead; and the cab dropped still lower and hovered about to permit them to witness the scenes beneath.

In the exact center of the arena was a large dais, upon which sat Olar and his royal party in the midst of his courtiers and ministers. the stands were packed with his subjects, and the gesticulations and flag-waving of the multitude viewed from above produced the effect of a restless body of water. In a circular track, which occupied the entire space between the dais and the stands, paraded the royal guard, several hundred brightly plumed soldiers, mounted on yaraks, those swift-footed striped quadrupeds whose breed had been perpetuated through the ages. The maneuvres of the perfectly-trained troops proved of interest for some little time and then, suddenly very tired, Ronal directed their pilot to convey them to the hotel.

entry 409      [contributed by Lone Wolf]

>>  here's where this is

…With no clouds to hamper them, they could see the horizon, less than a mile away in each direction.  Numerous small gray bushes were the only break in the monotony of the reddish landscape.

A hundred yards or so away from them, a tiny object sprang into the air, and settled rapidly down again.

“Animal life,” remarked the gloomy, white-faced pseudo-android.

Several others of the tiny objects leaped up closer at hand.

“They’re butterflies!” exclaimed Loring.

“I’ve seen their kind on Jupiter,” observed the Jovian.

Blackbeard was staring at the insect-like creatures uneasily.

“I wasn’t expecting this,” he said.  “We’d better return to the ship.”

The pretended robot looked at him with puzzled eyes.  “Why?  They’re no more than a couple of inches long.  They can’t be dangerous!”

“They have wings, but despite the presence of an atmosphere, they can’t fly.  That means that they’re too heavy to be supported by matter of any ordinary kind.  And if their bodies are of heavy matter, we don’t want to tangle with them…”

entry 408      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

It was a well.

Henry Bedrosian and Christopher Luden bent over the lip, peering down into the jet darkness.  Their balloon-tired motorcycle lay forgotten on the talcum sand, fine pink sand that stretched endlessly away to the flat horizon, borrowing its color from the sky.  The sky was the color of blood.  It might have been a flaming Kansas sunset, but the tiny sun was still at the zenith.  The translucent hewn stone of the well-mouth stood like a blasphemy in the poisonous wilderness that was [..........].

It stood four feet above the sand, roughly circular, perhaps three yards across.  The weathered stones were upright blocks, a foot tall by five inches wide by perhaps a foot thick.  Whatever the material of those stones, they seemed to glow with a faintly blue inner light.

“It’s so human!” said Henry Bedrosian.  His voice held a touch of bewildered frustration…

“…Did you notice the shape of the bricks?”

“Yes.  Odd. But they could still be man made.”

“In this air?  Breathing nitric oxide, drinking red fuming nitric acid?  But – “ Chris drew a deep breath.  “Why complain?  It’s life, Harry!  We’ve discovered intelligent life!”

entry 407      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

Seconds flowed into moments, and the moments merged into one another, and still the clouds pressed with a visible strength against the ports. The rockets drummed steadily, holding the ship aloft, dropping it slowly toward the planet below. Then the clouds thinned, and, incredibly, were permeated with a dim and glowing light. A second later, and the clouds were gone, and a thousand feet below tumbled and tossed in a majestic display of ruthless strength an ocean that seemed to be composed of liquid fluorescence.

Kerry Blane heard Splinter's instant sigh of unbelief.

"Good Lord!" Splinter said, "What—"

His voice stilled, and he was silent, his eyes drinking in the weird incredible scene below.

The ocean was a shifting, white-capped wash of silvery light that gleamed with a bright phosphorescence of a hundred, intermingled, kaleidoscopic colors. And the unreal, unearthly light continued unbroken everywhere, reflected from the low-hanging clouds, reaching to the far horizon, bathing every detail of the planet in a brilliance more bright than moonlight.

Splinter turned a wondering face. "But the official reports say that there is no light on [..........]," he exclaimed. "That was one of the reasons given when exploration was forbidden!"

Kerry Blane nodded. "That was merely a pretext to keep foolhardy spacemen from losing their lives on the planet. In reality, the ocean is alive with an incredibly tiny marine worm that glows phosphorescently. The light generated from those billions of worms is reflected back from the clouds, makes [..........] eternally lighted."

He turned the ship to the North, relaxed a bit on the air bunk. He felt tired and worn, his body aching from the space bends of a few hours before.

"Take over," he said wearily. "Take the ship North, and watch for any island."

Splinter nodded, rested his long hands on the controls. The space cruiser lifted a bit in a sudden spurt of speed, and the rocket-sound was a solid thrum of unleashed power.

Kerry Blane lit a cigarette, leaned toward a vision port. He felt again that thrill he had experienced when he had first flashed his single-man cruiser through the clouds years before. Then the breath caught in his throat, and he tapped his companion's arm.

"Take a look!" he called excitedly.

They fought in the ocean below, fought in a never-ending splashing of what seemed to be liquid fire. It was like watching a tri-dim screen of a news event, except for the utter lack of sound.

One was scaly, while the other was skinned, and both were fully three hundred feet long. Great scimitars of teeth flashed in the light, and blood gouted and stained the water crimson whenever a slashing blow was struck. They threshed in a mad paroxysm of rage, whirling and spinning in the phosphorescent water like beings from a nightmare, exploding out of their element time and again, only to fall back in a gargantuan spray of fluorescence.

And then the scaly monster flashed in a half-turn, drove forward with jaws agape, wrenched and ripped at the smooth black throat of the other creature. The second creature rippled and undulated in agony, whipping the ocean to foam, then went limp. The victorious monster circled the body of its dead foe, then, majestically, plunged from sight into the ocean's depths. An instant later, the water frothed, as hundreds of lesser marine monsters attacked and fed on the floating corpse.

entry 406      [contributed by Lone Wolf]

>>  here's where this is

“…It was a jewelled world.  Cities – the great, perfect cities – still glowed.  They glowed in soft, golden light above, and below, the harsher brighter blue of mercury vapour lighted them…

“ ‘We enter’ – he named a city; I cannot reproduce that name – ‘now…’

“…So I entered that city, the living city of machines, that had been when time and the universe were young.

“I did not know then, that, when all this universe had dissolved away, when the last sun was black and cold, scattered dust in a fragment of a scattered universe, this planet with its machine cities would go on – a last speck of warm light in a long-dead universe.  I did not know then.

“ ‘You still wonder that we let man die out?’ asked the machine.  ‘It was best.  In another brief million years he would have lost his high estate.  It was best.

“ ‘Now we go on.  We cannot end, as he did.  It is automatic with us.’

“I felt it then, somehow.  The blind, purposeless continuance of the machine cities I could understand.  They had no intelligence, only functions.  These machines – these living, thinking, reasoning investigators – had only one function, too.  Their function was slightly different: they were designed to be eternally curious, eternally investigating…”

entry 405      [contributed by Zendexor]

Thrice the Jalathadar circled the stone-walled city of the Ku Thad, gaining altitude with each swing around the city.  The streets shrank below us – the palaces and mansions and citadels of Shondakor dwindled.  The mighty throng became a many-colored carpet filling the squares and rooftops.  We could see the glittering curve of the great river that flows by Shondakor, and from our ever-growing height the dark mass of foliage that was the immense jungled tract of the Grand Kumala became dimly visible on the horizon.

When we had ascended to the height of about half a mile, I gave the appropriate commands.  The galleon leveled off and pointed her ornate prow north and west, in the general direction of the mountain country wherein Zanadar rears her castled crest.  The wheel gangs settled down to a steady rhythm, the huge vans beating slowly, the enormous rudder holding the ship of the skies steady on her course.

I leaned against the carven rail, staring down at the broad meadows that slowly passed by far underneath our keel.  Soon we would be beyond the measureless plains and flying above the great jungles…

entry 404      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

…Almost the first moments of that day of recreation afforded me one of those pictures which haunt the memory ever after.  The sun had risen over a burning ocean.  He was not, as you might expect in our remote world, a small and feeble sun; for between your age and ours a collision had increased his bulk and splendour to a magnitude somewhat greater than that with which you are familiar.

Overhead the sky was blue.  But for [..........] eyes its deep azure was infused with another unique primary colour, which your vision could not have detected.  Toward the sunrise, this tincture of the zenith gave place to green, gold, fire-red, purple, and yet another of the hues which elude the primitive eye.  Opposite there lay darkness.  But low in the darkness gleamed something which you would have taken for a very distant snowy horn, whose base was lost in night, though its crest gleamed orange in the morning.  A second glance would have revealed it as too precipitous and too geometrical for any mountain.  It was in fact one of our great public buildings, many scores of miles distant, and nearly one score in height.  In a world where mountains are crushed by their own weight these towering edifices could not stand, were it not for their incredibly rigid materials, wherein artificial atoms play the chief part.  The huge crag of masonry now visible was relatively new, but it could compare in age with the younger of your terrestrial mountains…

entry 403      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is

The light wavered, cutting through the intense darkness to settle upon one of the strangest scenes ever destined for Earth-born men to witness — the surface terrain one encounters in the long ten-month darkness periods of [..........].

Each movement sank them knee-deep into the fragile mold growths that covered the ground level; their savage actions crushed the fragile formations and left twisted pits and furrows in their wake; beyond them, on low ridges, the white-limbed X-ray trees of [..........] thrust quivering branches upward, their leafless projections hanging with pale toady flowers; here in the sunless periods a bizarre plant life, independent of sunlight, waxed fertile…

…Perhaps the parlous pass in which we found ourselves will be better understood if I stop to explain a few of the characteristics of [..........]

The daylight period of ten months duration is accompanied by excessive vegetative growth, resulting in a luxuriant jungle bush that mats every available bit of soil. With the coming of the ten-month night, the vegetation perishes almost instantaneously and decomposes rapidly under the action of highly developed parasites that wax fertile in the dark hours.

The poles of [..........] are almost exactly perpendicular to the rays of the sun. Thus there are two seasons, following each other endlessly around [..........]. The vegetation growing in the darker period differs in several particulars from ordinary plant life:

First, it is either parasitic or feeds on tiny particles carried by the wind. Silvery sprays of parasites gather on the blackened stumps of trees that had lived in the daylight, and the result is a weird mimicry of the former plants, which are referred to most often as X-ray trees.

Secondly, normal plant growths function through a system known as photosynthesis, and cannot exist in the absence of the solar rays. The X-ray parasites utilize cosmosynthesis, as do the fungus plants and the blue mold. The cosmic ray, manifested with universal strength in visible light’s spectrum or in total darkness, is a vital essential in the lightless world of the Umbra. Among the vicissitudes afforded by these extremities of plant life, animal life must survive as best it may.

A further obstacle is encountered in the magnetic variations of the planetal body. The polar fluctuations are so continuous as to render a compass a useless bit of added weight. The air is so impregnated with flying umbrella spores and particles of decomposing vegetation as to obscure all starlight, hiding the familiar sign posts of the heavens: the constellations.

entry 402      [contributed by Lone Wolf]

>>  here's where this is

“You peel an old life off and you step forth in a new and shining life,” said Seven, “but you must know the way. There is a certain technique and a certain preparation. If there is no preparation and no technique, the job is often bungled.”

“Preparation,” said Webb. “I have no preparation. I do not know about this.”

“You are prepared,” said Seven. “You were not before, but now you are...  You found humility.”

“I do not know the technique,” said Webb, “I do not…”

“We know the technique,” Seven said. “We take care.”

The hilltop where the dead city lay shimmered and there was a mirage on it. Out of the dead mound of its dust rose the pinnacles and spires, the buttresses and the flying bridges of a city that shone with color and with light; out of the sand came the blaze of garden beds of flowers and the tall avenues of trees and a music that came from the slender bell towers.

There was grass beneath his feet instead of sand blazing with the heat of the [..........] noon. There was a path that led up the terraces of the hill toward the wonder city that reared upon its heights. There was the distant sound of laughter and there were flecks of color moving on the distant streets and along the walls and through the garden paths.

Webb swung around and the seven were not there. Nor was the wilderness. The land stretched away on every hand and it was not wilderness, but a breath-taking place with groves of trees and roads and flowing water courses…

entry 401      [contributed by Zendexor]

>>  here's where this is