“Oh, yeah, Jat said you’d be by. My name’s Theodore, by the way. You folk want a drink, bite to eat?”
“We’re kind of eager to keep going while there’s light, thank you all the same,” said Vinnie. “We’re going into the Roar to see if anyone’s survived a spaceship crash. Time might be kind of short if someone has.”
“Yeah, I heard about that,” said Theodore. “You need a frogsled, too, and a driver?”
“We do,” said Vinnie. “I was hoping we could work something out with your people, maybe Terran credit, or lizard steaks or hides, whatever.”
“Sure, sure, we’ll take your credit,” said Theodore. “Or the Navy’s, I believe.”
“And I heard tell that you … your people—”
“Call us Lepers, that’s what we call ourselves,” said Theodore, with a laugh that set the filaments on his head all quivering.
“I heard tell that you Lepers can find your way in the Roar,” said Vinnie. She pulled out a paper map—map tablets died faster than treated paper would rot on Venus—unfolded it across her arm, and pointed out the likely position of the yacht. “We got a rough planetfall, probably give a search area of a couple of kilometers, but I sure as shit can’t navigate us there, not in the Roar.”
Theodore leaned close to look at the map and nodded.
“That’s not far off a marked trail, and it’s in the eye,” he said. “Tell you what, I might drive that frogsled for you folks myself. Been a while since I went into the Roar. Might be kind of unsettling going through the storm, but it’s very nice in the eye. Calm, and you get less cloud. I even saw the sky once.”
“Get out of here!” protested Kelvin. In thousands of shuttle flights, he’d never seen the sky. Not as such, not from anywhere even close to ground level. The cloud cover extended from twenty thousand meters to ground level, and never cleared. Not anywhere near Venusport, anyway.
“Just for half a minute or so, the clouds were sucked back by the storm,” said Theodore. “Beautiful! Now, you all lichened up, all parts? Because you don’t want to be on a frogsled with me, nor go into the Roar, unless you are. We don’t do conscription, you know. Got to volunteer to be a Leper. Like an ASAP, huh, Vinnie?”
“I never volunteered for anything,” said Vinnie sternly. “That was propaganda bullshit. We were made to be ASAPs. Variation D12 of only six clone lines, most of us Kelvin Kelvins or Oscar Goodsons.”
“Well, we’re honest about the volunteering,” said Theodore. “Truth is, it don’t work out unless it’s voluntarily. Fungus grows wrong otherwise, don’t know why, but that’s what happens. So if you get to be interested, just let me know.”
“Will do,” mumbled Kelvin, with something like a nod from Mazith. Vinnie didn’t answer.
“When was Jat here, by the way?” asked Vinnie. “Did she say where she was going?”
Theodore laughed.
“She was kind of here, then she wasn’t,” he replied. “Yesterday. Dunno where she went, or even how she was traveling. Didn’t see a lizard.”
“That’s Jat,” said Kelvin. Annoying as hell but often useful. He hoped she was going to be around. The more he saw of Lieutenant Mazith, the more he doubted she was a straightforward special communicator, and if she wasn’t a communicator, then what was she?
“Let’s go get on the sled,” said Theodore. “Got a bunch of frogs raring to go, we should make good time.”
The frogsled was a kind of punt drawn by four of the jumping Venusian batrachian analogues that were similar to Terran frogs, being a nice bright green with big back legs for jumping and smaller ones at the front. They were also the size of small hippos and on closer inspection they turned out to have hard carapaces and an additional set of vestigial legs, so the comparison was not very scientific. When harnessed to a frogsled, they moved the vehicle in a series of jerking, sliding, bucking movements that Kelvin had always found horribly like a spacecraft about to suffer a catastrophic thruster explosion.
The first day’s travel was relatively uneventful, at least by the standards of the Swamp. For a while, Kelvin thought that Theodore was changing direction erratically, just for the fun of alarming his passengers, but after some careful observation he recognized that the Leper was avoiding potential dangers, and not just danger to the humans, but also the other way around, where their passage might disrupt the careful balance of the Swamp’s ecosystem. This included taking a long diversion around a huge mass of early stage breadfungus that would have been torn apart by the frogsled and not come to maturity, depriving many of the higher life-forms of their sustenance.
They had to sleep on the sled that night, no islands being in evidence, with the frogs circled round and two of them on watch at all times. Toward dawn Kelvin woke Theodore to point out something he didn’t recognize, a slow-moving luminous carpet of something that was either a fungus or a gestalt entity of tiny insects that mimicked the look of spores, floating across the water.
Theodore knew it, and swam around cursing while he quickly harnessed the frogs.
“Glowpile,” he explained, as they started out again, the frogs swimming rather than jumping, taking it slow. “Absorbs everything in its path, spits what it doesn’t want out the back. Highly resistant to heat-beams, chemicals, and the defensive spores we use. But at least it’s slow and we can get out of its way.”
When they stopped for breakfast on a welcome islet of rare rock, Mazith suddenly stopped chewing and her eyes went blank for half a minute. Kelvin watched her carefully, presuming that he was witnessing a communication from her telepathic sibling. Which meant a message from the battle cruiser.
When her eyes focused again and she started chewing, Kelvin asked her what that communication had been.
“Just routine,” she said. “Like a radio check. They want to know if we’re getting close.”
“We are,” said Theodore. “Can’t you hear it?”
“Hear what?” asked Mazith.
“The Roar,” answered Theodore, the tendrils on his head making a waving motion, all in the same direction, though the ever-present fog was so thick there was no knowing what he was pointing out that way.
“I’m not … sure,” said Mazith. She tilted her head, listening intently. “There is something.”
They could all hear it, now that they were listening. It was slight, for the moment, like a faint clearing of the throat noise overheard through a closed window, but constant.
“It will get louder,” said Theodore. “Much louder.”
He was right. The noise got much louder and louder still with every kilometer they zigzagged and backtracked and meandered toward the Roar.
With the noise, there later came a breath of wind, welcome at first, simply because it made a change. The fog moved and shifted, and after a few more hours transformed into scudding cloud at surface level, sometimes even breaking up enough so that they could see more than the twenty meters they’d got used to in the other parts of the Swamp.
This too, was welcome at first. But the wind speed continued to increase as they lurched and skipped onward, soon drenching them in muddy spray mixed with spores, with the frogsled making a crabwise course, constantly having to be angled diagonally across the wind, for it was impossible to go against it. The frogs were not jumping now but rather crawling and paddling, their pace slowed to something not much better than a human could wade.
“Worse higher up,” shouted Kelvin to Vinnie, as they lay flat on the frogsled, drenched, mud-spattered, and windblown, gripping on for dear life. “Wind’s about eighty kilometers an hour down here, double that at two thousand meters, double again at ten thousand meters.”
“It’s bad enough here,” yelled Vinnie. The frogsled had almost gone over several times, and would have if Theodore had not already deployed a kind of gripping keel that provided greater stability, again at the cost of slowing their speed even more.