Venus Boy E-Book

Lee Sutton

• Herausgeber: Jovian Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 197

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

If you ever make a trip to the green planet of Venus, the first thing you'll see will be the fifty-foot high statue of Venus' greatest hero. It stands on the very top of towering New Plymouth Rock at the edge of the old colony of New Plymouth. Even from the rocket cradle, anyone can tell that the statue is of a twelve-year-old boy smiling up at the Venusian jewel bear perched on his shoulder...

Leseprobe

VENUS BOY

..................

Lee Sutton

JOVIAN PRESS

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Copyright © 2016 by Lee Sutton

Interior design by Pronoun

Distribution by Pronoun

TABLE OF CONTENTS

The First Two Secrets

The Treasure of Venus

A Dangerous Target

The Third Secret

A Mystery Indeed!

Inside New Plymouth Rock

The Rhinosaur Stampede

One Secret is Revealed

The Price of a Brother

Alone in the Jungle

The Friends are Separated

The Price of a Boy

Outwitting the Outlaws

Captured!

A City in the Trees

The Thunder of Rhinosaur Hooves

Teachers Can’t Play Hookey

Facts About Venus

THE FIRST TWO SECRETS

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IT WAS ROCKET DAY ON Venus!—the day the yearly rocket from Earth arrived, and it was like Christmas, Fourth of July and your birthday all rolled into one!

In the windowless, one-room New Plymouth school, Johnny Watson, a stocky twelve-year-old, sat toward the back of the room, a big Venus geography propped up in front of him. Johnny was supposed to be studying. Every time Mrs. Hadley, the teacher, glanced his way, a page of the book slowly turned. The teacher was much too busy with the half dozen squirming, excited first graders to notice that a small black paw fastened to a furry blue arm was really turning the pages.

On Johnny’s lap sat Baba, a perky-faced little blue bear with stand-up ears and bright blue eyes. To fool the teacher, the little bear, his eyes twinkling, flipped the pages one by one.

“We gotta do something quick, Baba!” Johnny whispered to his bouncing, jewel bear cub in a tight worried voice. “It’s only two hours till school’s out.”

The little bear peered over at the clock on the wall. He lay a tiny black paw on his blue button nose and cocked his head as if he were trying to tell the time.

When school was out everyone would go to the rocket field. Johnny knew that above all, he and his bouncing bear must not be there! Why Johnny and Baba dared not go was one of Johnny’s three secrets.

There was only one thing to do, Johnny thought. He would have to behave so badly that as punishment he would be forbidden to go.

“Nudge me when Mrs. Hadley turns around,” Johnny whispered. “We’re gonna get out of here!”

The little bear shoved his furry blue snout around the geography and peered from behind it. His bright eyes followed every move the teacher made.

The instant Mrs. Hadley turned to write on the blackboard Baba gave the boy a kick. Johnny slipped down on to his hands and knees in the aisle and Baba hopped upon his back. Rapidly and silently Johnny crawled toward the armor room. Behind him a little girl kindergartner began to giggle.

“Look at the horsie!” she yelled.

Johnny heard the teacher call, “Quiet, children!” The little girl giggled louder. But he hadn’t been seen! He scurried into the armor room.

As Johnny jumped to his feet and grabbed for his suit of rhinosaur-hide armor, Baba leaped toward the wall and hooked his claws into the concrete. Then he scurried straight up the wall like a fly and snatched up Johnny’s headglobe in his tiny black paws. While Johnny wriggled into the armor Baba fitted the headglobe over the boy’s tow head.

Without waiting to zip up, Johnny started toward the door. Baba jumped from the headglobe shelf and landed on his shoulder with a smack. The boy’s hand was scarcely on the latch when the teacher turned around, her mouth making an O of surprise. Quickly, Johnny jerked open the door and dashed through, slamming it closed. There was a space of a few feet and then another door. Holding the second door open, Johnny snapped tight his headglobe, while Baba’s small fingers pushed and pulled at the zippers fastening the armor. Both of them scanned the sky.

No arrow-birds.

Johnny grabbed a stone from beside the step and wedged it in the outer door so it could not close. To keep out these murderous flying lizards, all buildings were windowless and had double doors. When one door was open the other automatically locked.

“Johnny, Johnny! You come right back in here!” a muffled voice called. Johnny sighed regretfully as he slipped out of the schoolhouse into the pearly green light of Venus.

Baba on his shoulder, he started out at a dead run through the collection of windowless buildings that made up colony headquarters. The two had barely made it to the foot of a tall heavily leafed tree when the door of the main headquarters building began to open.

“Up the meat tree!” Johnny yelled.

Baba leaped from Johnny’s shoulder and rolled himself into a furry blue ball as he fell. The little bear smacked the ground with the sound of a bouncing basketball and bounced high into the air! At the top of his bounce his arms and legs shot out; he hooked his claws into the trunk half way up the meat tree. Baba wasn’t called a bouncing bear for nothing!

Johnny jumped for the nearest branch. Weighed down by his arrow-bird armor, he was slow pulling himself up—too slow. Baba scurried down the trunk like a squirrel, his claws scattering bits of bark on Johnny. Hanging on with three paws he reached out and hooked his claws into Johnny’s armor. One pull from that tiny but powerful arm and Johnny was sitting on the branch. From there up it was easy. The branches made a perfect ladder. Soon they were entirely surrounded by green shadowy leaves.

Johnny carefully pushed aside a green fruit the size of a cantaloup and looked out. Striding across the dusty road came a tall man in headglobe and black armor—Captain Thompson of the colony guard. The teacher must have phoned for help. The man’s square face was set in anger as he kicked the rock away from the schoolhouse door. The teacher stepped out and Johnny could hear their angry voices.

After a moment Mrs. Hadley went back inside and the guard captain strode purposefully away toward Mayor Watson’s office.

Sitting on a branch swinging his legs, Baba winked a shiny blue eye. He reached over and patted Johnny on the spot where the boy was likely to pay for his pranks.

“I think we’ve done it this time,” Johnny whispered. “I hope it’s not just another spanking.” Johnny spoke with deep feeling. He had had three spankings in three days.

The little bear looked sadly down his blue muzzle and made an odd deep clicking noise in the back of his throat.

“Sure,” Johnny said, as if answering the bear’s clicks, “I want to go to the planet-fall, but we just can’t.”

The bear clicked again.

“I know,” Johnny went on, “I know the earthies would give you chocolate. Besides I was going to have a job.” Johnny’s eyes began to shine with tears he wouldn’t let come. For the first time he would have been working on the rocket field with the men instead of being on the sidelines watching with the women and little kids.

The little bear patted him on the shoulder and clicked in low tones.

“All right, I won’t be sad if you won’t.” Johnny shook the tears away and tried to make a joke. “Gosh, Baba, you talk funny since you know what.” Johnny screwed up his face. “You’re such a mushmouth now I can hardly understand what you say.”

Baba stuck out his long blue tongue.

This was Johnny’s first secret. His little bear could talk!

Baba’s clicks were really the words of his own language. Although he couldn’t make the sounds of the human voice, he could understand people perfectly. Johnny could both understand what the bear said and speak in the same clicking language.

This hadn’t started out to be a secret at all. As a little boy, Johnny thought everyone knew that those clicks were Baba’s words. When Baba came to live with him, the little bear cub already knew his own language, but Johnny was just learning to talk. He learned human words and click words at the same time, and thought everyone understood them. When he was almost five, Johnny discovered to his amazement that no one understood Baba but him. He then went proudly spreading the news that he and his bear could talk together. When the first person laughed, Johnny didn’t mind. But when everybody laughed at him he began to get a little mad. The crowning insult was being spanked for lying.

After that, Johnny decided if telling grownups that Baba could talk only got him licked and laughed at, it might as well be a secret. Besides, it was fun keeping it secret.

After a few minutes of waiting, Baba scurried along a branch and hung by his black claws while he thrust his blue button nose through the twigs and leaves. Johnny followed along another branch.

“Looks clear,” Baba clicked. “Let’s go!”

“Wait a minute.” A quick movement in the distance caught Johnny’s eye. Four men came out of a long grey building marked Hunters Hotel.

Johnny was instantly alert. Colonists always kept a sharp eye on such men. These were the dangerous marva hunters, whose only law was an ato-tube gun.

Johnny swung to a branch where he could see better.

“What’s up?” Baba clicked.

“Hunters!” clicked Johnny. “They’re watching the guard change at the old stockade.”

“Oh.”

The two looked at each other. Both knew what was in the stockade, locked away in the big safe. Marva teeth and claws. Jewel claws and teeth from grown-up bears just like the cub Baba!

“Come on, Baba.” Johnny shinnied back to a place where branches forked from the trunk of the meat tree. “We’d better check your nails ‘fore we go down.”

After making sure no arrow-birds were feeding on the meat fruit, he undid one of his armor zippers and pulled a bottle of black liquid and a small brush from an inside pocket. Baba plopped down on his lap.

“Smile,” Johnny commanded.

Baba pulled back his lips, showing black teeth. Johnny looked at them carefully, grunted, and then picked up one of the little bear’s paws. All the nails seemed perfectly black, but on the tip of one of them there sparkled a point of bright blue.

“Dang it, we gotta find something better than this nail polish. A little climbing and it’s all scraped off.” Johnny scowled and dipped the little brush in the bottle of black liquid. Carefully he painted the tip of the claw. Looking over the little bear’s paws he found four more claws that showed blue. He painted them, too.

“Now don’t climb down when we go, Baba! When the polish is dry, jump.”

The little bear nodded.

This was Johnny’s second secret. Everyone thought Baba still had his valueless black baby claws and teeth. But, under the coating of black nail polish, each of Baba’s claws was really a precious blue jewel.

Johnny Watson owned a million dollar pet!

THE TREASURE OF VENUS

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Yes, a million dollars, maybe even more, and all for one little bear!

Johnny sighed shakily at the thought and hugged his bear to him.

“What’s the matter, Johnny?” Baba clicked, waving his claws to dry them, like a lady getting ready for a party.

“You know,” Johnny said, “I was just wishing for the good old days when you had your baby black nails and your pretty squeaky voice, and we didn’t have to be afraid of anything.”

“I’m sorry,” Baba clicked. “I couldn’t help it. I just grew.” Baba looked so sorrowfully down his nose that Johnny laughed, swung the little bear up above his head and sat him down on a branch.

“You’re a silly,” Johnny said. “I know you couldn’t help it. I was just wishing.”

Most of all he was wishing that bouncing bears didn’t have jewels for claws at all. But he knew that was a silly wish, too.

Grabbing a branch, Johnny swung himself back to a spot where he could see the hunters. As he watched, more were arriving. About a mile away a battered hunting tank came lumbering through the sliding doors of the fifty-foot high concrete wall surrounding the colony. Outside those walls, Johnny knew, lay the murderous animal life of the jungle planet.

Every living thing on Venus attacked men. Not just the huge rhinosaurs and the horned river snakes, but even tiny scarlet apes and pigmy antelope. Johnny knew the colonists and hunters would never have come to such a savage place at all without the lure of tremendous wealth to be made from bouncing bears’ claws.

Harder than diamonds and just as clear, these magical jewels shone soft blue in the night and were blindingly bright in the sun. But that wasn’t the only reason claws were valuable. A tiny piece of claw, or even of the duller teeth, melted in thousands of tons of plastic, made that plastic tough enough to be used for the hulls of rocket ships. Men called it marvaplast.

With such a treasure beckoning, man could not stay away from Venus. Rockets came hurtling across space filled with hunters. Traders followed. After the traders came the colonists, led by Johnny’s father and mother.

Johnny sighed again.

“Don’t be so sad,” Baba clicked. “We’ve been real lucky so far.”

“I suppose so.” Johnny had to admit they’d both been lucky. Baba had been lucky not to be killed as his mother and brother had been. And Johnny had been lucky to get Baba at all. If there had been any other way of raising the bear until his black baby claws turned blue, Johnny never would have gotten him. All other young marva that had been captured had died. They refused to eat or drink. They simply squatted down and whimpered piteously until they died of what seemed to be loneliness and heartbreak.

When Baba had been captured, Mrs. Watson brought him home, hoping to save his life. Two-year-old Virgil Dare, as Johnny was called then, was fascinated.

“Ba-ba,” he had cried, trying to say bear, and had thrown his arms around it. Surprisingly, the little bear had stopped whimpering and had hugged Johnny back. A few minutes later it had eaten some diamond-wood nuts.

After a week, the colonists had decided that the little bear would live and he was taken away and put in a small diamond-wood cage for safe keeping. The little bear promptly refused to eat and almost died, whimpering over and over a sound that was just like “Johnny, Johnny, Johnny.” It was the only sound he could make beside the clicking noise. He had to be sent back to the little boy. From then on Virgil Dare was called Johnny.

He and Baba went everywhere together, even to school. As the years went by they became closer than brothers and it was easier and easier to forget that the blue cub was really colony property.

Then, Baba’s voice had deepened; the black nails had gradually loosened; and, all in one Venus night, during Baba’s long sleep through five earth days of darkness, the new nails had come in. Johnny had a mixture of india ink and nail polish all ready. It had worked for two months now. But the polish did chip off and the claws had to be painted over and over.

“Oh, Baba, why can’t you be a sensible little bear and stay home where people can’t see you,” Johnny said.

“You know why, Johnny,” Baba clicked. “You’re my kikac.” This was a word in the clicking language that meant friend, pet and brother, all in one. Baba said kikacs should never be parted.

That was the reason Johnny could not go to see the rocket come. If he went, Baba was sure to follow. Everyone, colonists and hunters, was going to be at the field, and if one of them caught sight of a flash of blue from Baba’s claws, it would mean the end of Baba. The colonists liked the little bear but the colony was very poor. They wouldn’t think long about killing him for his jewel claws. The hunters wouldn’t think at all. They would steal him as quick as the flight of an arrow-bird.

It was a very dangerous situation. But if he could keep from going to the rocket field, Johnny had a plan. The plan depended on Johnny’s third secret.

Draped over his branch, Johnny kept his eye on the hunters. They just seemed to be strolling about the settlement now—getting used to the fact that they were out of the dangerous jungle where they lived in concrete forts. When the door of the settlement headquarters opened again, Johnny pulled his head back in among the leaves.

A grey haired man with heavy eyebrows stepped out of the door. It was Jeb, the old hunter, one of the first men to come to Venus hunting marva. Now he was one of the colony guards, and a very good friend of Baba and Johnny.

When the old man came close enough for him to hear, Johnny crawled out where he could be seen, called down to him, and waved.

“Hi, Jeb—whatcha doing?”

The old man stopped in his tracks, looked carefully around him, then cocked an eye up into the tree. He frowned, his grey eyebrows making a V over his deep-set eyes. He shook his head in disapproval, but said nothing until he was directly under the tree.

“What I’m doin’ isn’t important,” Jeb said in a gruff voice, looking up at Johnny. “But what are you a-doin’ up that tree when you’re supposed to be doin’ book work?”

“Aw,” Johnny started, “I just....”

“You just made your paw boiling mad, that’s what,” Jeb interrupted, “locking the teacher in that way.” He snorted.

“Did Dad say anything about keeping me away from the rocket landing?” Johnny demanded anxiously.

“Nup,” answered Jeb. “Cap’n Thompson wanted him to, but he says no, that you worked real hard all year. But I’m warning you. You better get on inside that school house, unless you want a good tannin’. Your ma’s out lookin’ for you with fire in her eye.” He started to walk away.

“Hey, wait a minute Jeb,” Johnny called.

“Well?”

“I was watching those hunters. They’re sure interested in the stockade. You better tell Cap’n Thompson.”

“We know they’re interested. I don’t think they’ll do anything. That old reprobate of a Trader Harkness’ll keep ‘em in line. You’d better watch out, though. I might tell Cap’n Thompson where he could find him a hooky-player.” With a fierce snort the old man was on his way.

Johnny smiled. He knew Jeb would never tell where he was hiding, in spite of the gruff warnings. Jeb was a nice old fellow. He’d shot his marva years before, gone down to earth, spent his millions in a few wild years and returned to Venus dead broke. In twenty years hunting he had never made another kill. Marva were as hard to find as they were valuable.

“Guess you just weren’t quite bad enough!” Baba clicked to Johnny. “My claws are dry. Let’s go before your mother finds us.”

Johnny crawled down to the little bear.

“We gotta think of something else bad to do. It’s that or just plain refuse to go. But then they’d think something was funny, sure as shooting!”

“There’s lots of ripe meat fruit in the tree,” Baba clicked, and grinned. “Maybe you could drop one on Captain Thompson!”

“Oh boy!” Johnny exclaimed in excitement. Then he frowned. “Aw, he probably won’t come by here again.”

“Somebody will!” Baba said. “Let’s keep an eye out.”

The two of them posted themselves in different parts of the tree and watched for possible targets for ripe meat fruit. No one seemed to want to walk under the tree. Finally Johnny caught sight of a short fat bald-headed man and a tall redhaired man leaving the Hunters Hotel together. One was Trader Harkness, who all but ran the colony, and the other, his bodyguard, Rick Saunders. They seemed to be headed for the trading post and would have to pass directly under Johnny’s tree to get there. Baba saw them at the same time.

“How about Trader Harkness?” the little bear clicked. “Do you think he’d be a good target?”

“A kind of dangerous one,” Johnny clicked back, his heart racing. “But where’s that meat fruit?”

There wasn’t any question about his getting into enough trouble this time. He just hoped he wouldn’t get into too much trouble!

Trader Harkness was a very important man, but Johnny didn’t like him. He had started as a hunter and then had turned trader. By killing off most of his opposition, he had become the only important trader on Venus. If he hadn’t wanted a walled settlement to protect his goods, the colony might have failed. A hunter would stop at nothing to get what he needed and the colony had had more than one of its tanks ambushed and stolen to hunt marva.

A red, ripe meat fruit was not hard to find. Johnny wrenched one from the branch and held it carefully by its long stem. The size of a small melon, green meat fruit must be cooked before eating. Once ripe, their thin skins are plump full of a sweet strong-smelling paste—a natural high protein baby food.

“There’s plenty more,” Johnny clicked softly. “Think we ought to get Rick, too?”

“He’s too good a friend,” Baba clicked back. “Besides he might not give me any more chocolate.”

Johnny agreed with a laugh, and pushed leaves aside so he could see. He shivered. Below him came the most powerful man on Venus—a short, immensely fat man, who waddled forward rather than walked. On earth he would have been laughed at, but on Venus he was feared and respected. He liked that respect and demanded it.

Johnny swallowed hard. The man he was going to drop the fruit on had once been ambushed by five hunters—none of them had survived.

A DANGEROUS TARGET

..................

AS THE TWO MEN MOVED closer to Johnny’s and Baba’s meat tree, they appeared to be arguing about something. The trader glittered as he waddled forward. His armor was of the clearest, brightest marvaplast plastic, and his fingers were studded with marva jewel rings. They stopped just a few feet away from the tree. Johnny could tell the trader was angry. Though he was keeping himself under tight control, his heavy jaw was set and his little black eyes flashed under his smooth, hairless brow.

“I’ll put it to you straight, Rick,” the trader’s heavy voice rumbled up to Johnny. “I couldn’t stay in business a year if I did as you asked me to.”

The redhaired bodyguard was flushed. “Well, then, I guess I’ll have to do it,” he said in a tight, defiant voice. “If you won’t warn the colonists, I will.”