The swamp was much worse than Tallon had anticipated; in fact, he discovered he had not really expected the swamp to be a problem. They were able to remain upright and move ahead by walking and wading for the first hour, covering about two hundred yards in reasonable comfort. But presently Tallon began to hit patches where his feet seemed to sink through six inches of molasses before reaching solid support. The goo made walking difficult but not impossible, even when it had begun to reach nearly to his knees. Tallon went steadily ahead, sweating in his plastic sheet. Then the bottom seemed to drop out of the world. Instead of his feet finding bedrock, they kept going down and down as though the whole planet was sucking him through its skin.
“Fall forward,” Winfield shouted. “Throw yourself down on it and keep your arms spread out.”
Tallon splashed forward, spread-eagled on the heaving surface of the quagmire, embracing its filth. The water splashed over his face, and sediment swirled to the surface, releasing all the odors of death. Uncontrollable spasms of retching forced his face down again, into the crawling fluid.
“Are you all right, son?” Winfield’s voice was anxious.
Tallon’s first impulse was to shout for help in his black, blind universe, but he clenched his teeth and kept beating the surface of the quagmire with his arms. Gradually his feet worked upward, and he moved forward again in a semi-swimming motion.
“I’m all right, Doc. Keep traveling.”
“That’s the way. It won’t all be like this.”
Furious splashing sounds from up ahead told Tallon the doctor was already moving on. Grinning with desperation, Tallon flailed after him. Sometimes they would reach little islands where they were able to travel short distances on foot, beating their way through the rubbery vegetation. At other times they encountered solid curtains of vines and had to go to the side or even backtrack to get by them. Once Tallon put his hand squarely on something lying flat and icy smooth below the surface. It humped convulsively and drove out from under his body with silent strength, paralyzing him with fear.
As the night wore on Tallon found himself catching up to Winfield with increasing frequency, and he realized the doctor was reaching the point of exhaustion. Winfield’s breathing became a harsh, monotonous sobbing.
“Listen, Doc,” Tallon finally shouted. “We both need a rest. Is there any point in risking a heart attack?”
“Keep moving. There’s nothing wrong with my heart.”
Tallon found some firm ground under his feet. He lunged forward, throwing his weight onto Winfield, and brought him crashing down. The doctor fought him off stubbornly while struggling to move on.
“For Christ’s sake, Doc,” Tallon gasped, “I’m talking about my heart. Take it easy, will you?”
Winfield fought on for a moment, then went limp. “Okay, son,” he said between gasps. “I’ll give you five minutes.”
“Believe me, Doc, I’m grateful to you.”
“I’m grateful to myself.”
They lay huddled together, laughing weakly while Winfield’s breathing gradually returned to normal. Tallon told him of his encounter with the underwater creature.
“A slinker — harmless at this time of the year,” Winfield said. “In the laying season, though, the skin of the female toughens into knife edges at the sides. They slice past anything that moves, laying it open, and inject their eggs at the same time.”
“Nice habits.”
“Yes. I’m told the thing to do is to think of it not as losing a foot, but as gaining a batch of slinker offspring. As a matter of fact, we’re making this trip at a very good time. The swamp is pretty quiet late on in the winter. The only real danger is from muck spiders.”
“Poisonous?”
“No. With the sort of mouths they have, poison would be superfluous. They lie in shallow water, with their legs stuck up in the air like bullrushes, and there’s nothing in the middle but mouth. If you ever come through here again, son, avoid walking through any neat circular clumps of bullrushes.”
Tallon got an unpleasant idea. “What’s that bird’s night vision like? Are you getting a good enough picture to let you spot a muck spider?”
Winfield snorted. “What are you worrying about? Aren’t I going first?”
When daylight came to the swamp Winfield insisted on letting Tallon have a spell with the eyeset.
Tallon accepted, grateful for the release from blackness, and took the lead for several hours. He used a crude spear, which Winfield had made by snapping a thin sapling, to beat smaller vegetation out of his way. The bird fluttered occasionally in its plastic-covered cage, but showed no signs of any real discomfort. As he moved through slow-dripping foliage Tallon saw that the water was alive with dark brown leechlike creatures, writhing, twisting, continually warring on each other. Great streamers of their dark bodies trailed around his legs. The air hummed with the vibration of tiny gnats, or was parted by the heavy throb of huge sooty-black insects blundering through the swamp, intent on unknown missions.
Twice during the day, low-flying aircraft swept by directly overhead, but the ice-green mist hid them from view. Tallon’s mental processes slowed down while he labored mechanically, thinking river-bed thoughts, dreaming brown dreams. Their rest periods grew longer, and the intervals between them shorter, as fatigue spread through their bodies. At dusk they found a small knoll of almost dry ground and slept like children.
The robot rifles were more than capable of shooting clear across the four-mile reach of swamp, so their missiles were fitted with time fuses, which limited the range to two thousand yards. Their effective range, however, was governed by the density of the swamp mist. When it was at its thickest a man could get within four hundred yards of the pylons before his body heat reached the trigger threshold. But even in the murkiest periods, a sudden gust of wind could open a swirling avenue far into the swamp, the gleaming grasshopper legs of the servos would contract, and a heavy slug would howl its way down the misty tree lanes.
Winfield had thought a lot about the rattler rifles while he was planning his escape.
On the second morning in the swamp he opened his pack, took out a small knife, and split the plastic that covered Tallon’s hands and his own. They gathered armfuls of the thick, double-walled dringo leaves, dodging the whizzing leaps of the sheltering scorpions, and sewed them together to make heavy dark green blankets.
“We’ll soon be back on dry land,” Winfield said. “You can see the green stuff thinning out already. The mist is quite heavy this morning, so we’re all right for another few hundred yards; but after that keep your head down and stay under your screen. Got it?”
“Keep my head down and stay under my screen.”
The encumbrance of the heavy blanket of leaves made movement more difficult than ever. Tallon sweltered under the plastic as he struggled along behind the doctor, deprived of even the meager companionship of the sonar torch’s electronic voice in his ear. He had had to switch it off as soon as the screen was pulled over his head.
They inched their way forward for two hours before Tallon noticed that the going was getting easier. Gradually there was less backtracking to do, fewer floundering escapes from seemingly bottomless wells of slime. He began to think about the possibility of walking upright in fresh air, of being clean and dry, of eating again.
Suddenly, up ahead, Winfield gave a hoarse scream.
“Doc! What is it?” Tallon heard violent splashing sounds, and cursed his blind helplessness. “What’s wrong, Doc?”
“A spider. A big one… .” The doctor screamed again, and the splashing grew louder.
Tallon threw aside the burden of leaves and crept forward as quickly as he could, expecting at any moment to put his unprotected hand far down into a cold wet mouth.