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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Green Dream, by Bryce Walton

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Title: The Green Dream

Author: Bryce Walton

Release Date: February 27, 2021 [eBook #64648]

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

Produced by: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed
             Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GREEN DREAM ***




                            THE GREEN DREAM

                            By BRYCE WALTON

             Owen Baarslag had brought terror to the swamp
              people. Joha, the little Venusian maid, was
            determined that he should not leave without it.

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                      Planet Stories Winter 1949.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


Joha, who was part Venusian, twined her translucent fingers through the
Earthman's matted hair. She smiled. Strangely, from her light green
face, red eyes shone with a terrible hatred and a malignant purpose.
But the man asleep on the couch of lizard-skin softened with layers of
wing-feathers from the Kuh-Kuri Swampbird, was unaware of that evil,
almost lustful hate--for it blazed outward from her delicate face only
while he slept.

The greenish glow from her body seeming to alienate her from anything
human, she squatted cross-legged on the damp tamped-earth floor beside
him. His body was long and gaunt, his face angular with deeply sunken
eyes which were closed in exhausted sleep. Only a slight twitching of
his facial muscles and an occasional jerking of his body signified the
horror of his growing nightmare.

She withdrew her hand. Her eyes blazed more brightly like evil jewels
into his, piercing the closed lids with invisible beams of malignant
and gloating resolve. Her voice was very soft.

"You do not sleep well, do you, Owen Baarslag? Every terrible thing you
have done to my people here in the swamps--the torture, the slavery,
the subjection and the terror--it haunts your dreams. Your blighted
conscience crawls, doesn't it, Owen?"

The sleeping man didn't answer. He was deep, deep down in the dark
fastnesses of his nightmare, trying to escape, trying to awake.

Outside the synthetic shell of the hut, in the fetid heart of the
Venusian swamp Sector 5, a serpent hissed as it raised its pointed head
from the slime and sank back again. A gigantic flying Gruoon gurgled
overhead as it fell on its prey and flapped upward into the thick mist.
Beyond these more abrupt sounds was the unceasing dreeing of millions
of insects and the loud croaking of the bloated albino tree-toads that
sagged heavily from the five-hundred foot crinoids.

Now she looked with even greater intensity into his nightmare-twisted
face, probed far behind the lids covering his black Tellurian eyes.
The cold light from the captured still-living Shnug-fly which dangled
from the low raftered ceiling molded a weird shadow on the walls of the
tiny hut. Joha's red eyes blazed brighter, brighter still. Her slightly
webbed hands gripped together with a tremendous tension of mental
effort.

Owen Baarslag screamed. He sat up with a sudden heaving motion of
agonized fear. His eyes were wide and horror-filled as he stared at
the half breed creature beside him. Sweat streamed from his face made
pallid by five years in the sunless swamp. His hands trembled over his
bearded jaw.

"Stith!" he choked harshly. "Get me Stith, quickly!" He raised an arm
to strike her, but she weaved away. She brought him a box of the Stith
tablets crystallized from the fermented juices of the Venusian aukweed.
He tremblingly swallowed three of them. He got to his feet and stood
there, shuddering, eyes wild with the memory of the terror-dream.

       *       *       *       *       *

He stared at her for a long time from fear-glazed eyes while the fear
gradually died into clouds of suspicion. He suspected her ability to
probe his mind during sleep and implant the seeds of nightmare there,
she knew that. But it was only an intangible suspicion. He needed her.
She was his only companionship in the vast global rain-forest of Venus.
And he wouldn't let the suspicion grow to the stage where he would have
to kill her or worse. Her hold over him was a strong one. If he lost
her, he would be alone.

To the Tellurian colonists scattered minutely through the rich area
of Sector 5, Owen Baarslag was an unspeakable obscenity. A degenerate
derelict; an abnormal who had "gone native" and things even more
despicable. A Stith addict who eeked out a precarious existence in the
most polluted occupation known: that of forcing the timid Venusian
swamp natives to harvest the meager crops of aukweed from the lake
bottoms. The vile drug brought fabulous credits when Baarslag managed
to get it into the hands of secret agents on the space liners that
docked at the Vencity spaceport twice a year.

And the Venusians themselves hated Baarslag with a helpless cowed
fear. He beat, tortured and killed them whenever they refused to obey.
And the necessity of probing the great depths of the lakes after the
aukweed twisted and deformed those it didn't kill, dooming them to a
life of incurable pain.

Shaking as with dohl-fever, Owen staggered to the door, peering through
the insect-proof netting into the writhing tendrils coming up from the
phosphorescent bogs. He kicked Joha aside as though she were some crude
form of vermin.

They considered him a despised abnormality, the authorities. There was
a price on his head just the same, he mused proudly. Five thousand
credits for his capture--alive.

Dead, they wouldn't care for him particularly. His brain was
abnormal in an age when advanced psychometry had made abnormality a
rare exception. They needed his brain for analysis. Five thousand
credits--that was the price they placed on his brain in the massive
Chrome laboratories in Vencity.

The labs in which his twin, Professor Albert Baarslag, held his exalted
position as Chief of Psychometry!

The insidious influence of the euphoric stith burned into his mind,
fogged his eye with delusions of grandeur. He saw himself as a martyr,
a persecuted victim, sacrificed on the altars of socialization. He
slumped down on the kuh-kuri couch again, and looked at the sinuous
outline of the Venusian creature who took care of him as though love
could exist between an Earthman and a half Venusian fish.

"I wasn't always what I am now," he said. "You know that, Joha!"

She nodded. Yes. She knew. She had heard various phases of Owen's
life history many times. She liked to listen. The more she found out
about his twisted past the more horrible she could make his nightmare
by employing her powers of suggestion. That power was common among
her people--she still considered herself a Venusian in spite of her
Tellurian blood--but the fact that she was part Tellurian enabled her
to exercise that power on the Earthman better than a pure blooded
Venusian could. She knew that Owen had only a slight subconscious
realization of that power which she possessed, and which she had been
using for the past year to sow those insidious seeds of nightmare in
Owen's mind.

To admit that she held such power over him was to admit that this
green-skinned creature was superior to him--and that Owen Baarslag
could never admit. No one was superior to Owen Baarslag. The whole
world of science had been jealous and envious of him. That was why they
had banned him, made an outlaw of him!

"I could have been the greatest cosmologist ever known," he said. "You
know that, Joha!"

"Yes," she said in that strange slurred tongue that seemed to hold such
emotion, yet held no tangible meaning. "I know that, Owen."

Owen's pale face that had been buried in the sunless mist clouded,
darkened.

"My own brother," he said. "He betrayed me to the Scientific Council.
Think of it, Joha! My own brother--my twin brother! Now it's time for
him to die."

"You have found a way to kill him?" She backed away, eyes wide.

"Yes! And it is all perfect. Perfect. One would think Albert had
prepared everything for my benefit, so that I might kill him.
Everything is perfect. His experiment is finished. It is a great
success. And he deserves to die. You know that, don't you, Joha? Don't
you?"

"Yes. I know it," she said.

       *       *       *       *       *

Owen glared into the mist. "Fifteen years of study. My record was
undeniably the highest in my study section. I might have graduated from
World Tech this year, Joha! I might be in those Labs right now--instead
of rotting here in the slime-pit! I took the final psychotic tests,
weeks of mental probing with those damnable scanners digging into my
brain. And Albert--my own twin brother--with his hypocritical love
for me--he was the one who turned in the negative report! As Chief of
the Psychometric Council he could have passed me. It was because he
was my zygotic twin--because he knew me more intimately than even the
scanners--that he was able to deny me entrance into the Labs! Now,
Joha, doesn't he deserve to die?"

And Joha, who had heard this countless times before, made the customary
reply. "Yes, Owen." And then added. "You have been waiting five years
for him to perfect his Time-Encystment principle. This--suspended
animation. You have said you would murder him, and take his place
in the encystment chamber. But, Owen, are you sure you can escape
detection long enough to get to him in order to kill him?"

"Yes, yes! It is all arranged. I can't fail. I must get to him. All
these years of hell in this cesspool--they mustn't be wasted, Joha.
They can't be wasted, can they?"

"No," she said softly. "They can't be. But--but I love you so much,
Owen. When you leave, I shall be so lonely. I will probably die of
loneliness."

He laughed. It was a broken, bitter laugh. It was the laughter of a
mad man. The paranoiac who is guided by a strange genius for planned
destruction.

The laughter died, and he seemed to have forgotten her. He paced back
and forth across the tiny damp hut. "Now. Now it is time. Five years in
hell--then paradise. Albert has perfected his time-encystment chamber.
He has insisted, bless him, on undergoing the experiment himself. He
insists against the will of the Tellurian Government, the Council,
everyone. He is noble. 'It would not be fair,' he says, 'to allow
another to take the chance. It is my experiment; and it is only right
that I must be the guinea pig.' Ah, my brother is so noble, so fair,
as are all hypocrites! How simple it is, Joha! I kill him. I become
Professor Albert Baarslag. I enter the time-encystment chamber as my
illustrious brother. I am put into a state of suspended animation. And
I awake in five hundred years--a free man!"

Joha knelt down, a look of worship coloring the green of her half-human
face. "You are so clever," she said. "So patient and so thorough, and
so brave."

"Killing him, that is all that really matters," said Owen. "The
encystment, that is only secondary. But it is ingenious, isn't it--to
become the man I kill? There can be no punishment, no ridiculous
retribution. Revenge is futile; in fact it isn't really revenge at all,
if the avenger is made to suffer for his acts of vengeance."

Owen grasped Joha's slim arm, spun her around. His mouth twisted with
cruel pleasure as he saw the slight painful writhing of her lips. "You
may begin your slow death from loneliness now, Joha. I'm leaving for
Vencity tonight."

She looked sadly resigned as she came close to him, slid one hand up
and into the thick matting of his hair. "You need rest, Owen. You were
out there two days in the swamp getting that last three kihn of aukweed
without sleep. You should rest well before you go into danger. You only
slept an hour."

He lay down with a long sigh. "Yes. That is a good idea. I'll need all
my powers when I go to Vencity. But those--those horrible nightmares."
His face drained, oozing sudden sweat at the memory. "Always the
nightmare. The same one. But each time I dream, the nightmare gets more
horrible! There must be some cause for it. If I could only find its
cause. As soon as I assume Albert's identity, perhaps I can use the
psychiatric scanner on myself and find the basic cause."

But her cool fingers stroking his brow sent him back into the sleep he
dreaded. Immediately her hands withdrew. "No, Owen, the psychiatric
scanner will never find the cause of this nightmare. It's artificially
endowed, Owen, dear. It has no roots in your twisted childhood, or in
your cruelty. And the scanner could never find its source. Because I am
its source, and I am alien."

Her hands drew back from his face. Her eyes pierced brighter, brighter,
eating down, down into the dregs, the dreary twisted depths of his mind.

       *       *       *       *       *

He was running, running as before, always as before. But this time
his pursuers were very near. He was running in a sticky bog. With
infinitely slow agony he drew each foot out of the slimy muck, sat it
down, drew up the other foot. Around him was a thick blanket of cold
clammy fog. And he knew it was an endless fog--that if he ran forever
he could never escape it. But he also knew he wouldn't run forever, or
even very long. His pursuers were too close.

His pursuers!

He looked back. A sense of profound horror sickened him. He recognized
them now. For the first time they were near enough for him to identify
them.

He sank down on his knees. He began to crawl through the stinking ooze.
Then he felt their nearness. They were surrounding him. He couldn't
escape. He saw a ring of cold green faces. Hands, innumerable hands,
reached out, tickling him with a branch of small blue nettles.

[Illustration: _They had caught up with him at last!_]

He screamed. The poison fangs of the bombi-vine. The final agonies of
the damned. The bombi-vine! Death would be infinitely preferable to
the sting of the bombi-vine. It was unendurable pain, indefinitely
prolonged. It directly effected a mysterious distortion in the nervous
structure. Science had no cure, had never found the cause. Men who
stumbled onto the nettles of the bombi-vine sought a quick and merciful
death as the only escape.

Without death, the victim lived out a full lifetime of raw, shrieking
pain....

His screams as he awoke silenced the giant tree-toads who hung heavily
from the five-hundred foot crinoids. But before he left for Vencity
through the darkness, he had suppressed the stark horror of the dream.

Once more he had drowned his hell in Stith.

       *       *       *       *       *

He crawled out of the decrepit tractor, on the outskirts of Vencity.
The city's lights glowed eerily through the night-thickened blanket
of fog, as Owen found his way cautiously through rotting vegetation,
then hesitated before entering Swamper Swhin's Dive. Tinny music
came from the native band inside the smoky interior as it played the
incomprehensible "music." A few Earthmen and women sat inside at the
small oblong tables--tourists getting a morbid thrill from Venusian
culture.

He slipped inside, around the shadowed wall and into a public
audio-booth. He dialed the Vencity Laboratories. "Connect me with the
Psychometric section, please. Urgent information for Chief Albert
Baarslag."

"Who is calling?" the male secretary's voice said sleepily.

"Jonathon Graem, kelph farmer, Sector 5. I have highly interesting
information revealing some unknown facts about psychological motivation
of native swampers in my sector."

The male secretary hesitated.

"Professor Baarslag knows about me," Owen persisted. "I've submitted
other discoveries of mine to him before. He told me to come back, and
report any new discoveries to him immediately."

"Just a minute, sir. I'll connect your audio with Professor Baarslag's
study."

He knew he would get results with that line about new psychological
discoveries concerning native behavior patterns. Their mental processes
were quite a mystery. Not a mystery to Owen any more. As far as he was
concerned, they didn't have any mental processes at all.

Owen waited for Albert's voice. His twin still had a soft spot in his
heart for him, he was pretty certain of that. A desperate appeal of the
kind he intended to make would move his brother emotionally--get the
sympathetic reaction he needed to complete his rather fantastic plan.

His brother's voice startled him. It was a perfect replica of his own.
Soft, cultured and low. "Yes?"

"This is Owen."

He heard a catch, a pause from the other end of the audio.

"I--yes--why hello, Owen. Where are you? Wha--what do you want?"

Owen grinned coldly, but his voice was warm with repentant emotion.
"Albert. I--I'm giving myself up. I've had enough. It's been a noble
and futile life for me anyway. You know that it's always been just
a matter of time before I would give myself up. Well, this is it.
I'm--just outside the City now. At Swamper Swhin's Dive. But Albert--"

The Chief of Psychometry's voice was low, hoarse. "Yes, Owen."

"I want to see you first, Albert. I'll probably never get to see you
again. I'll be a completely new personality when they release me from
the reconditioning processes. I'd like to have a good talk with you
before I turn myself in. Just a brother-to-brother talk, like old
times, Albert. With me, it'll be a sort of cathartic, a confession.
I've sinned, sinned terribly. I'd like to get it all out of my system,
and you're the only one who might understand. Can I come up and see you
tonight in your lab, Albert?"

There was a long pause. "Why--why, I guess so, Owen. Yes, yes of course
you may."

Gullible fool, thought Owen.

"How can you get up here without being detected by the Scanner Guard?"

"I have the identification disks of Jonathon Graem. They'll pass the
Scanner Guard. I--Jonathon Graem died in the swamp two years ago."

"By accident," said Albert Baarslag pointedly.

"Naturally," said Owen with apparent sincerity, forgetting to add:
"--after I pushed him into a bog and kept him there too long for his
continued survival."

"Very well, Owen," said the Professor of Psychometry. Then, "I'm glad,
Owen. So very glad that you're giving yourself up."

"I'll see you soon then," said Owen, and severed the audio connection.

       *       *       *       *       *

The automatic electronic Scanner Guard passed him freely as the
swamper, Jonathon Graem. Professor Albert Baarslag was in his study,
waiting. The rich luxuriance, the soothing harmonics radiating from the
opaque walls--all rekindled the violent hatred Owen's paranoid mind
felt for his twin.

Albert Baarslag might have been Owen, only his dress was different. His
matted hair and beard were the same; Owen had been careful to keep that
constant similarity as he waited for this moment when it would be time
to act. A plastilex smock covered Albert, whereas Owen was dressed in
the rubberoidalls of the swamp farmer.

Albert's face was tense with conflicting strain. His eyes were flooded
with sympathetic emotion, and also with a disgust he could not conceal.
Albert stretched out a firm hand. Owen ignored it. Albert frowned, then
motioned to a chair. Owen kept on standing.

"Well," said Albert. "So you're repenting?"

"There's no use drawing out this obvious deception, Albert. I've been
waiting for this opportunity. I'm here for revenge, Albert. To me, you
are the most hated thing in the Universe. For the last five years I've
been waiting only for this chance."

Albert's face became grey.

"Owen. Owen, listen. I did it for you. You're inherently unstable.
A life in the labs would have broken you. Without perfect
cortical-thalamic integration, no mind could stand six months in these
Labs."

"Go on, Albert. Talk. That's what I'm here for. To watch you squirm."

"Listen to me, Owen! Whatever you do, you'll be apprehended. You can't
escape. If you'll give yourself up, like you said you would do, I can
see that you get special longevity treatment in my specialized Lunarian
Clinics."

"It's too late for any ridiculous therapy," said Owen. "I know what
happens in those Lunarian Clinics of yours. The result is called a
cure, but the poor devils who are supposed to be cured aren't even the
same personalities any more. Who wants to be a well-integrated but
characterless non-entity?"

"No, Owen! You're not the extreme case that demands that kind of
treatment. Only a slight lack of integration which can be leveled
off--if you'll only--"

"That's enough," snapped Owen. "I have a cure, for both of us. A
natural one, time-tested. It's as old as mankind." He revealed suddenly
a small proton gun, issued to the swampers for survival against the
carnivorous flora and fauna of Venus. He brought it out casually from
inside the bib of his rubberoidalls, and directed it at Baarslag's
chest. "Jonathon Graem's," said Owen with a stiff grin.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Chief of Psychometry staggered back from his chair, staring, eyes
wet with fear and mental pain. "Not that, Owen--not from you--my--my
twin."

"It is grotesque, isn't it?" said Owen. "I thought so too, when you
did something perhaps worse to me. Now listen. I knew you'd finally
persuade the Council and the Government to let you be the victim of
your own experiment in suspended animation. I've been waiting for them
to agree, and for a definite time to be set for the beginning of the
time-encystment experiment. You see, Albert, I wouldn't kill you unless
I knew there was a good chance to get away with it, as the old timers
used to say. And I'm definitely assured of escape. Albert, I'm taking
your place in the time-encystment chamber and I'm the one who's going
to see the future you might have seen."

Albert Baarslag stared at his twin with incredulous horror. He no
longer seemed to notice the gun. "Owen," he said faintly. "Owen. Listen
to me. It won't work with you. You're unintegrated. You--"

He finished the admonition with a long bubbling cry, and crumbled on
the plastic mosaic of the floor. A bright, unreal-looking stream of
blood flowed oilily from the blasted chest.

Owen leaned with a sudden awful weariness against the desk. He had
wondered how it would feel to kill his twin. Now he knew. A strange
mysterious fear filled his heart as he stood there in the silence
looking down at the corpse. Somehow, the revenge wasn't so delectable
as he had anticipated.

But after that Owen didn't waste any more time. First he dragged
Albert's body into the small but expensively compact and complete
laboratory just off Albert's office. He prepared a large vat which,
thirty minutes after his twin's corpse was lowered into it, revealed
only scant fluid evidence that Albert Baarslag had ever existed. No
one would ever check because Owen was assuming his identity. The
blood-stained clothes he also disposed of in a similar manner. He
cleaned up the blood-stains on the floor with the immaculate care of
his kind.

After that, dressed in Albert's clothes, no one could possibly have
known that it was not really Albert Baarslag, but the hated, despised,
obscenity known as Owen Baarslag, who sat behind his desk.

And it was the next afternoon that Professor Albert Baarslag was
supposed to submit himself to the time-encystment experiments. The
Professor, Owen Baarslag, was right on time as he dropped his gyro-car
down on the vast roof-landing of the great Solar Museum which contained
the deeply-buried encystment chamber inside its massively thick and
many-layered vault.

The teleo-electronic robot attendant wheeled the gyro onto an elevator
while Owen, stifling a growing feeling of dusty desperation, dropped
downward toward the deeply-buried rendezvous.

Professor Kaufman, one of the Chiefs from the Cosmology Section,
greeted Owen with frank and open concern. From his earlier
acquaintanceship with his brother, Owen knew that Kaufman had been
Albert's closest associate. Others greeted Owen with formal, though
terrific enthusiasm. This was one of the most dramatic experiments of
the past five eras--eras which had been obsessed with social sciences
and not sensational pastimes.

There weren't many there besides the Teleaudio Ethercast
Representatives. They were busy broadcasting to Earth, Mars and the
rest of Venus, the details of the experiment in suspended animation.

Owen was the center of the stage. The central actor in one of history's
most sensational dramas. And it was being witnessed by a bigger
audience than had ever been commanded by the greatest dramatist in
solar history.

A soft-spoken interviewer from Solar Broadcasters questioned him.
Owen's voice in his perfectly acted role was being broadcast and
telescreened everywhere on Earth, Mars and Venus. For the benefit of
the teleaudience, a microfilm was projecting a complete scientific
explanation, while the smooth-voiced announcer read it aloud for those
who demanded visual and audial transition.

And while the announcer explained for the fascinated audience, mostly
laymen, Owen, two medics, and Kaufman, entered the many-doored
thickness of the chamber, and into the very small interior where
the encystment reservatory machine waited. To Owen, it resembled a
streamlined coffin, barely large enough for his gaunt length ...
frightfully small, and confining.

The thick series of interlocking doors were still open and Owen could
hear the announcer's voice:

       *       *       *       *       *

"And, as you perhaps already know, the principle of Professor
Baarslag's time-encystment process involves phenomena we're all
familiar with. The stasis developed by Professor Albert Baarslag,
and to which in exactly fifteen minutes he will subject himself,
incorporates a kind of super-sleep principle. The synaptic connections
will be broken through amoeboid contraction--and this disconnection
will exist until that future time, five hundred years hence, when
Professor Baarslag will awaken. Five hundred years is only the opening
experiment, says Professor Baarslag. The next experiment can possibly
be for any definite period of time.

"This awakening is also interestingly arranged for by leaving one
awaking threshold at its normal waking level. When this is activated by
automatic relays--"

Owen was stripped now, and his body was outstretched in the soft, deep
depths of the reservatory. The sliding panel that exposed his upper
torso was slid open and he was looking up into Kaufman's red face, and
the intent professional faces of the two medics. But Kaufman's face was
serious now as he reached inside the reservatory and gripped Owen's
damp hand.

"Goodby, Al," he said. "You're curious about man's destiny. I'm not. I
wonder if you'll really be able to bear the knowledge of where we're
going."

Owen's mouth was dry. He licked sticky lips. He didn't say anything.

They were preparing his arm for an injection of hypnotosin.

Owen twitched. He wanted to cry out his guilt. Surrender. He knew now
that he had made a horrible mistake.

But things blurred fast. He couldn't speak. There was a dull, pleasant
haze, a feeling of utter relaxation. Not utterly. It should be that
way, but it wasn't.

Because he knew, now!

Voices came from a very far distance, slow, soft and rhythmical. After
the anaesthesia, they would sink slender electrodes through the brain
tissue of the cerebrum's third ventricle. Chemical reaction would
destroy the substance of the electrodes gradually, a process of slow
disintegration carefully gauged. And the lesions in the posterior
region of the floor and walls of the third ventricle would heal, so
that he might awaken--

_No! Anything would be better than this! He wanted to tell them. But he
couldn't. It was too late. He was going under--deep down and far under._

He had been terribly misled by all the scientific jargon. Why couldn't
they have been simple and direct? All this principle really was, was a
complete mastery and understanding of the oldest phenomenon in man--the
most common and the most persistent mystery.

Synapsis severed. Each cellular unit self-feeding through synthetic,
inexhaustible sources. Oxygen intake lowered to an incredibly low
level. But it was really nothing other than--

_SLEEP! Sleep! Pure, prolonged, unblemished, unsullied sleep!_

And so....

Owen Baarslag was again running through the endless gray mist. His feet
were again rising and falling with a terrifying, agonizing slowness
from the thick, oozing bog.

He was down on his knees again, crawling with a futile frantic
desperation. They ringed him in. He was trapped again. He saw the
cordon of silent, emotionless green fishmen. Venusian native fishmen
and in their hands reaching out, were branches of the bombi-vine!

He screamed. He kept on screaming as the nettles slashed his flesh with
a burning hideous fire. It crept like molten liquid flame into his
nerves, into his brain.

Unendurable pain, indefinitely prolonged. His only escape from the
nightmare had been his ability to wake. But now he was doomed to go on
sleeping, sleeping and dreaming and knowing the infinite, implacable
pain--

--for five hundred years!

       *       *       *       *       *

Joha, who was part Venusian, dove easily and silently into the swamp
lake. She swam to the other side and stood poised on the bank. She met
them there. The green fish faces gazed at her with unblinking eyes and
one of them said:

"It has been done, as you planned it, Joha?"

"It is done," she said softly. "For two years I prepared him for
fulfillment of the dream. There is no escape for him now. The dream
is planted too deeply. He will suffer torture greater than any he
inflicted on our people. And he will suffer them for half a thousand of
his years."

"Then your redemption is complete," said the little green fishman.
"What you have done entitles you to enter our tribe again. Even though
you are part Tellurian, you are again considered one of us. Come, my
daughter. Shall we go back?"

Joha dropped down, bowed her head twice before him. "I am ready," she
said.

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