Henry Kuttner - Valley of the Flame

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VALLEY
OF
THE
FLAME
I
FACE OF A GIRL
FAR OFF in the jungle an animal screamed. A river-moth flapped against the screen, nearly as large
as a fruit-bat: And very far away, subsensory, almost, Brian Raft could hear the low pulsing of
drums. Not unusual, drums on the Jutahy, in the great valley of Amazonas. But these were no signal
messages.
Raft wasn't an imaginative man. He left all that to Dan Craddock, with his Welsh ghosts and his
shadow-people of the lost centuries. Still, Raft was a doctor, and when those drums throbbed in
the jungle something curious happened here in his little hospital of plastic shacks, smelling of
antiseptic. Something he couldn't ignore.
When a sick man's blood beats in rhythm with the distant drums, slow or fast as the far-off echoes
set the pace, a doctor has reason to wonder....
The great moth beat softly against the screen. Craddock bent over a sterilizer, steam clouding up
around his white head so that he looked like a necromancer stooping over a cauldron. The drums
throbbed on. Raft could feel his own heart answering to their rhythm.
He glanced at Craddock again and tried not to remember what the older man had been telling him
about his wild Welsh ancestors and the things they had believed. Sometimes he thought Craddock
believed them too, or half believed, at least when he had been drinking.
He'd got to know Craddock pretty well in the months they had worked together, but he realized that
even yet he knew only the surface Craddock, that another man entirely lived in abeyance behind the
companionable front which the Welshman showed him, a man with memories he never spoke of, and
stories he never told.
This experimental station, far up the Jutahy, was a curious contrast, with its asepsis and its
plastics and its glitter of new instruments, to the jungle hemming it in. They were on assignment
just now to find a specific for atypical malaria.
In the forty years since the end of World War II, nothing yet had been discovered any safer than
the old quinine and atabrine treatment, and Raft was sifting the jungle lore now to make sure
there might not be some truth in the old Indio knowledge, hidden behind masks of devil-worship and
magic.
He had hunted down virus diseases in Tibet, Indo-China, Madagascar, and he had learned to respect
much that the witchdoctors knew. Some of their treatments were based on very sound theories.
But he wished the drums would stop. He turned irritably from the window and glanced once more at
Craddock, who was humming a Welsh ballad under his breath. A ballad full of wild, skirling music
about ghosts and fighting.
Craddock had talked a lot lately—since the drums began— about ghosts and fighting. He said he
smelled danger. In the old days in Wales men could always scent trouble in the wind, and they'd
drink quarts of uisquebaugh and go out brandishing swords, ready for anything. All Raft could
smell was the reek of disinfectant that filled the little hospital.
And all the wind brought to him was the sound of drams.
"In the old days," Craddock said suddenly, looking up from the sterilizer and blinking through
steam, "there'd be a whisper in the air from Tralee or Cobh, and we knew the Irish were coming
over the water to raid. Or maybe there'd be something from the south, and we'd get ready for the
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men of Cornwall. But we'd know. We'd know."
"Rot!" Raft said.
"Okay. But I felt something like this once before." Craddock sucked in his breath, a curious look
of fright and incredulity
on his wrinkled brown face. He turned back to the steam-cloud, and Raft watched him in puzzled
wonder.
There was a mystery about Craddock. He was a biologist, and a good one, but for thirty years or
more he had hung around the Jutahy country, never venturing farther away than Manaos, living
precariously as a sort of jungle general practitioner.
Raft had added him to the party on impulse, since Craddock knew the country and the natives. He
hadn't expected too much of the Welshman in the laboratory, for something had happened to
Craddock's hands—they were badly maimed. But he was pleasantly disappointed on that score.
Raft watched the mutilated hands working with hypodermics, twisting plunger from tube, deftly
pulling the hollow needles free. Craddock had three fingers on one hand, and the other was a claw,
with oddly stained and textured skin. He never spoke of what had happened. His injuries didn't
look like the scars of acid burns or animal teeth. Still, he was surprisingly deft, even when
liquor was heavy on his breath.
It was heavy now, and Raft thought the man must be deliberately timing his motions to the rhythms
of the drums. Or perhaps not. Raft himself had to pause consciously and break step with the beat.
And some of the sick men in the ward were alive, he thought, solely because the drum-beats would
not let their hearts stop pumping.
"A week now," Craddock said, with that rather annoying habit he had of catching another man's
thought, or seeming to. "Have you noticed the charts?"
Raft ran a nervous forefinger along the lean line of his jaw. "That's my job," he grunted.
Craddock sighed.
"You haven't lived in Brazil as long as I have, Brian. It's the things you don't usually notice
that count. Up to a week ago, this plague was killing off the Indians fast. The vitality level's
gone up a lot in the last seven days."
"Which is crazy," Raft told him. "It's accidental—just a cycle. There's no reason. The drums have
nothing to do with it."
"Did I mention drums?"
Raft glared.
Craddock put the hypos in the sterilizer and closed the lid.
"The drums aren't talking, though. It's not Western Union. It's just rhythm. And it means
something."
"What?"
The Welshman hesitated. His face was in shadow, and his white hair gleamed like a fluffy halo in
the overhead light. "I think, maybe, there's a visitor in the forest. I wonder now. Have you ever
heard of Curupuri?"
Raft's face was a mask.
"Curupuri? What's that?"
"A name. The natives have been talking about Curupuri. Or maybe you haven't been listening."
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"I seem to miss a lot around here," Raft said with heavy irony. "I haven't seen a ghost for
months."
"Maybe you will." Craddock turned to stare toward the window. "Thirty years. It's a long time.
I—I've heard of Curupuri before, though. I even—"
He stopped, and Raft breathed deeply. He'd heard too, but he didn't want to admit it. Superstition
is apt to be psychologically dangerous in the jungle, and Raft knew that Curupuri was a widespread
belief among the Indios. He'd encountered it ten years ago, when he was younger and more
impressionable. And yet, he thought, it's the only possible god for the Amazon Basin.
For Curupuri was the Unknown. He was the blind, ravening, terrible life-force that the Indios
think is the spirit of the jungle. A savage, primeval Pan, lairing in the darkness. But nothing so
concrete as Pan.
Curupuri moved along the Amazon as vast and inchoate and yet as tangible as life itself. Here in
the jungle one realizes, after a while, that a god of life can be far more terrible than a god of
death. The Amazonas is too alive. Too enormous for the mind to comprehend, a great green living
thing sprawled across a continent, blind, senseless, ravenously alive.
Yes, Raft could understand why the Indios had personified Curupuri. He could almost see him as
they did, a monstrous shapeless creature, neither beast nor man, stirring enormously in the
breathing fertility of the jungle.
"The devil with it," Raft said, and drew deeply on his cigarette. It was one of his last
cigarettes. He moved to Crad-dock's side and stared out the window, drawing smoke grate-
fully into his lungs and savoring the second-hand taste of civilization.
That was all they'd had for a year—second-hand civilization. It wasn't too bad. Madagascar had
been worse. But there was quite a contrast between the sleek modern architecture of the home base,
the Mallard Pathological Institute overlooking the Hudson, and this plastic-walled collection of
shacks, staffed by a few Institute men and some native helpers.
Three white men, Raft, Craddock, and Bill Merriday, were here. Merriday was plodding but a good
research pathologist, and the three of them had worked well together.
Now the work was ready to be wound up, and presently Raft knew he'd be in New York again, rushing
by air-taxi from roof night-club to club, cramming the excitement of civilization into as short a
time as possible. Then a little later, he realized, he'd be feeling a familiar itch again, and
would be heading for Tasmania or Ceylon or—somewhere. There were always new jobs to be tackled.
The drums were still throbbing faintly, far off in the dark. After a while Raft left Craddock in
the lighted lab and wandered outside, down to the river, trying not to listen to the distant pulse
of sound....
A full moon rode up from the Atlantic, brightening the great pleasure-city of Rio, swinging up the
Amazon to the backlands, a huge yellow disc against a starry backdrop. But across the Jutahy was
the jungle, black towering walls of it, creeping and swarming with a vitality that was incredible
even to a scientist. It was the fecund womb of the world.
Hot countries mean growth, but in the Amazonas is growth gone wild. Its rich alluvial soil, washed
down for ages along the rivers, is literally alive; the ground beneath your feet moves and stirs
with vitality. There is something unhealthy about such abnormal rioting life, unhealthy as the
flaming Brazilian orchids that batten on rottenness and blaze in the green gloom like goblin
corpse-lights....
Raft thought of Craddock. Odd! That inexplicable mixture of incredulity and fear that Raft thought
he sensed in the Welshman was puzzling. There was something else, too. He frowned, trying to
analyze a vague shadow, and at length nodded, satisfied. Craddock was repelled by the drums but he
was also drawn, attracted by them in some strange way. Well, Craddock
had lived in this part of the forest for a long time. He was nearly Indio in many ways.
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Something moving out on the surface of the river, sheet-silver under the moon, roused Raft from
uncomfortable thoughts. In a moment he could see the outlines of a small boat, and two heads
silhouetted against the silvery water. The men were pulling in toward shore and the hospital's
lighted window.
"Luiz!" Raft called sharply. "Manoel! We've got visitors."
A feeble hail came across the water, and he saw the two outlines slump down, as if the last
efforts of exhaustion had brought them to the landing. Then came excitement—the boys running with
lights and shouts, everybody who could walk swarming to the doors and windows to watch. Raft
helped beach the boat and superintended as the two almost unconscious men were carried up to the
hospital.
One of them, he saw, wore an aviator's helmet and clothing; he was beyond speech. The other, a
slender, bearded man, rather startlingly graceful even in this extremity, lurched toward the door.
"Senhor, senhor," he murmured, in a soft voice.
Craddock came out to help. He stopped dead still on the threshold, though crowding bodies hid the
two arrivals from sight. Raft saw a look of absolute panic come over the Welshman's face. Then
Craddock turned and retreated, and there was the nervous clinking of a bottle.
Bill Merriday's stolid, intent features were comfortingly normal by contrast. But as Merriday,
bending over the aviator, was stripping off the man's shirt, he suddenly paused.
"I'll be hanged," he said. "I know this chap, Brian. Thomas, wait a minute. I'll have it. Da
something... da Fonseca, that's it! I told you about that mapping expedition that flew in a couple
of months ago, when you were in the jungle. Da Fonseca was piloting."
"Crack-up," Raft said. "What about the other man?"
Merriday glanced over his shoulder.
"I never saw him before."
The thermometer read eighty-six, far below normal.
"Shock and exhaustion," Raft surmised. "We'll run a stat C.B.C., just in case. Look at his eyes."
He pulled back a lid. The pupils were pin-points.
"I'll take a look at the other man," Merriday said, turning. Raft scowled down at da Fonseca, a
little uncomfortable, though he could not have said exactly why. Something seemed to have entered
the room with the two men, and it was nothing that could be felt tangibly. But it could be sensed.
Frowning, Raft watched Luiz milk a specimen from the patient's finger. The overhead light fell
yellow and unsteady on da Fonseca, upon a glitter of sudden brilliance from something that hung on
a chain about his neck. Raft had thought it a religious medal, but now he saw that it was a tiny
mirror, no larger than a half-dollar. He picked it up.
The glass was convex, lenticular, and made of a dark, bluish material less like glass than
plastic. Raft glimpsed the cloudy, shapeless motion of shadows beneath its surface.
A little shock went through him. The mirror did not reflect his face, though he was staring
directly into it. Instead he saw turbulent motion, though there was no such motion in the room. He
thought of storm-clouds boiling and driving before a gale. He had the curious, inexplicable
feeling of something familiar, an impression, an inchoate mental pattern.
Thomas da Fonseca. He caught the extraordinary impression, for a flashing, brilliant moment, that
he was looking into da Fonseca's eyes. The—the personality of the man was there, suddenly. It was
as though the two men were briefly en rapport.
Yet all Raft saw was the driving, cloudy motion in the mirror.
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Then the storm-swirl rifted and was driven apart. From the tiny lens in his hand a vibration ran
up the nerves of his arm, striking into his brain. He stared down.
Now that the clouds had cleared away, it was not a mirror, but a portrait. A portrait? Then a
living portrait, for the face within it moved....
A mirror, after all, then. But no—for that was certainly not his own face that looked back at him
out of the small oval.
It was a girl's face, seen against a background of incredible richness and strangeness that
vanished as he looked, because she leaned forward as if into the very mirror itself, her herd
blotting out the remarkable background. And it was no painted picture. She moved, she saw—Raft. He
drew his breath in sharply.
There was never such a face before. He had no time to see her very clearly, for the whole
unbelievable glimpse was gone in an instant. But he would have known her out of a thousand faces
if they ever met again.
The look of delicate gayety and wickedness in the small, prim curve of her mouth, the enormous
translucent eyes, colored like aquamarines, that looked, for a moment, into his very solemnly
above the sweet, malicious, smiling mouth.
There could be no other face like it in the world.
Then the mists rolled between them as they stared. Raft remembered later that he shook the lens
passionately in a childish attempt to call her back, shook it as if his own hands could part those
clouds again and let him see that brilliantly alive little face, so gay and solemn, so wicked and
so sweet.
But she was gone. It had all happened almost between one breath and the next, and he was left
standing there staring down at the lens and remembering the tantalizing—oddness—of that face.
An oddness seen too briefly to understand except as something curiously wrong about the girl who
had looked into his eyes for one fraction of a second. Her hair had been—odd.
The eyes themselves were almost round, but subtly slanted at the corners, and with a blackness
ringing them that was not wholly the black of thick lashes, for a prolonged dark streak had run up
from their outer comers a little way, accentuating their slant, and giving a faint Egyptian
exoticism to the round, soft, dainty face with its rounded chin. So soft—he remembered that
impression clearly. Incredibly soft, she had looked, and fastidious.
And wrong. Racially wrong.
The mirror was blank again, and filled with the trembling fogs. But, very briefly, it had opened
upon another world.
II
DRUMBEAT OF DEATH
Luiz WAS STARING at Raft in surprise.
"S'nhor?" Luiz said.
"What?" Raft answered.
"Did you speak?"
"No." Raft let the lens fall back on da Fonseca's bare chest.
Merriday was at his side. "The other man won't let me look at him," he said worriedly. "He's
stubborn."
"I'll talk to him," Raft said. He went out, trying not to think about that lens, that lovely,
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impossible face. Subjective, of course, not objective. Hallucination—or self-hypnosis, with the
light reflecting in the mirror as a focal point. But he didn't believe that really.
The bearded man was in Raft's office, examining a row of bottles on a shelf—fetal specimens. He
turned and bowed, a faint mockery in his eyes. Raft was impressed; this was no ordinary backwoods
wanderer. There was a courtliness about him, and a smooth-knit, muscular grace that gave the
impression of fine breeding in both manners and lineage. He had also an air of hardly concealed
excitement and a certain hauteur in his poise which Raft did not like.
"Saludades, s'nhor," he said, his too-bright eyes dazzling in the light. Fever, perhaps, behind
that brilliant stare. His voice was deep, and he spoke with an odd, plaintive undertone that held
a distant familiarity. "I am in your debt."
His Portuguese was faulty, but one didn't notice that. Raft had a feeling of gaucherie, entirely
new to him.
"You can pay it right now," he said brusquely. "We don't want the station contaminated, and you
may have caught something up-river. Take off your shirt and let's have a look at you."
"I am not ill, doutor."
"You recover fast, then. You were ready to pass out when you came into the hospital."
The black eyes flashed wickedly. Then the man shrugged
and slipped out of the ragged shirt. Raft was a little startled at the smooth power in his sleek
body, the muscles rippling under a skin like brown satin, but rippling very smoothly, so that
until he moved you hardly realized they were there.
"I am Paulo da Costa Pereira," said the man. He seemed faintly amused. "I am a garimpeiro."
"A diamond-hunter, eh?" Raft slipped a thermometer between Pereira's lips. "Didn't know they had
diamonds around here. I should think you'd be in the Rio Francisco country."
There was no response. Raft used his stethoscope, shook his head and tried again. He checked his
findings by Pereira's pulse, but that didn't help much. The man's heart wasn't beating, nor did he
apparently have a pulse.
"What the devil!" Raft said, staring. He took out the thermometer and licked dry lips. Da
Fonseca's temperature had been below normal but Pereira's was so far above normal that the mercury
pushed the glass above 108°, the highest the glass tube could register.
Pereira was wiping his mouth delicately. "I am hungry, s'nhor" he said. "Could you give me some
food?"
"I'll give you a glucose injection," Raft said, hesitating a little. "Or—I'm not sure. Your
metabolism's haywire. At the rate you're burning up body-fuel, you'll be ill."
"I have always been this way. I am healthy enough."
"Not if your heart isn't beating," Raft said grimly. "I suppose you know that you're—you're
impossible? I mean, by rights you shouldn't be alive."
Pereira smiled.
"Perhaps you don't hear my heartbeat. I assure you that it's beating."
"If it's that faint, it can't be pumping any blood down your aorta," Raft said. "Something's
plenty wrong with you. Lie down on that couch. We'll need ice-packs to bring your temperature
down."
Pereira shrugged and obeyed. "I am hungry."
"We'll take care of that. I'll need some of your blood, too."
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"No."
Raft swore, his temper and nerves flaring, "You're sick. Or don't you know it?"
"Very well," Pereira murmured. "But be quick. I dislike being—handled."
With an effort, Raft restrained an angry retort. He drew the necessary blood into a test-tube and
capped it.
"Dan!" he called. There was no answer.
Where the devil was Craddock?
He summoned Luiz and handed him the test-tube. "Give this to Doutor Craddock. I want a stat
C.B.C." He turned back to Pereira. "What's the matter with you? Lie back."'
But the diamond-hunter was sitting up, his face alive and alight with a wild, excited elation. The
jet eyes were enormous. For a second Raft watched that stare. Then the glow went out of Pereira's
eyes and he lay back, smiling to himself.
Raft busied himself with ice-bags. "What happened up-river?"
"I don't know," Pereira said, still smiling. "Da Fonseca blundered into my camp one night. I
suppose his plane crashed. He couldn't talk much."
"Were you alone?"
"Yes, I was alone."
That was odd, but Raft let it pass. He had other things on his mind—the insane impossibility of a
living man whose heart did not beat. Ice-cubes clinked.
"You a Brazilian? You don't talk the lingo too well."
The feverishly brilliant eyes narrowed.
"I have been in the jungle a long time," the man said. "Speaking other tongues. When you do not
use a language, you lose it." He nodded toward the bottles on the wall. "Yours, doctor?"
"Yes. Fetal specimens. Embryonic studies. Interested?"
"I know too little to be interested. The jungle is my—my province. Though the sources of life—"
He paused.
Raft waited, but he did not go on. The strange eyes closed.
Raft found that his fingers were shaking as he screwed the tops on the ice-bags.
"That thing da Fonseca wears around his neck," he said, quite softly. "What is it?"
"I had not noticed," Pereira murmured. "I have had a difficult day. If I might rest, it would be
nice."
Raft grimaced. He stared down at that cryptic, inhuman figure, remembering the odd malformation of
the clavicle he
had felt during his examination, remembering other things. Some impulse made him say, "One last
question. What's your race? Your ancestors weren't Portuguese?"
Pereira opened his eyes and showed his teeth in an impatient smile that was near to a snarl.
"Ancestors!" he said irritably. "Forget my ancestors for tonight, doutor. I have come a long way
through the jungle, if you must know it. A long, long way, past many interesting sights. Wild
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beasts, and ruins, and wild men, and the drums were beating all the way." His voice lowered. "I
passed your ancestors chattering and scratching themselves in the trees," he said in a purring
murmur. "And I passed my ancestors, too." The voice trailed off in an indescribably complacent
sound. After a moment of deep silence, he said, "I would like to sleep. May I be alone?"
Raft set his teeth. Delirium, of course. That accounted for the senseless rambling. But that
imperious dismissal was intrinsic in the man himself.
Now he gathered his rags about him as if they had been ermine. He seemed to fall asleep almost
instantly. From his recumbent form there breathed out a tremendous vitality that set Raft's nerves
jangling.
He turned away. A heartbeat so faint that it was imperceptible? Ridiculous. Some new disease, more
likely, though its symptoms were contradictory. Pereira seemed in perfect health, and yet he
obviously couldn't be.
There might be another answer. A mutation? One of those curious, specialized human beings that
appear occasionally in the race? Raft moved his mouth impatiently. He went back to check on the
aviator, conscious of a queer, rustling alertness permeating the hospital, as though the coming of
the two men had roused the place from sleep to wakefulness.
There was no change in da Fonseca, and Merriday was busy with stimulants. Raft grunted approval
and went in search of Craddock.
Halfway down the hall he stopped at the sound of a familiar voice. The diamond-hunter's low,
smooth tones, urgent now, and commanding.
"I return this to you. I have come very far to do it, s'nhor."
And Dan Craddock replying in a stumbling whisper that held amazement and fear.
"But you weren't there! There was nothing there, except—"
"We came later," Pereira said. "By the sun and the waters we guessed. Then at last we had the
answer."
Raft let out his breath. A board creaked under him. Simultaneously he heard a—a sound, a susurrus
of faint wind, and felt a sense of inexplicable motion.
Startled, he hurried forward. The passage lay blankly empty before him. Nothing could have left
the laboratory without his knowledge. But when he stood on the threshold he faced Craddock, and
Craddock alone, staring in blank, astounded paralysis at nothing.
Quickly Raft searched the room with his eyes. It was empty. The window screens were still in
place, and, moreover, were so rusted that they could not be removed without considerable noise.
"Where's Pereira?" he asked curtly.
Craddock turned to face him, jaw slack. "Who?"
"The man you were just talking to."
"I—I—there was nobody here."
"Yeah," Raft said. "So I'm crazy. That wouldn't surprise me, after what's happened already
tonight." He noticed a booklet in Craddock's hand, a ring-bound notebook with its leather cover
moulded and discolored by age. The Welshman hastily stuffed it into his pocket. Avoiding Raft's
probing eyes, he nodded toward the microscope.
"There's the blood. I must have bungled it somehow. It's all wrong." Yet he didn't seem unduly
surprised.
Raft put his eye to the lens. His lips tightened.
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"So I am crazy," he said.
"It is funny, isn't it?" Craddock said, inadequately.
It was more than funny. It was appalling. The vascular system has certain types of blood cells
floating free, of course; they have a definite form and purpose, and intruding organisms may
affect them in various ways.
But this specimen on the slide showed something Raft had never seen before. The red cells were
oval instead of disc-shaped, and in place of the whites there were ciliated organisms that moved
with a writhing, erratic motion.
And moving fast—too fast!
"They've slowed down a lot since I first looked," Craddock said. "In the beginning they were
spinning so quickly I couldn't even see them."
"But what sort of bug would do that? It's destroyed the phagocytes. Pereira ought to be dead, if
he hasn't a white blood cell in his body. No, there's a mistake somewhere. We'd better run some
reagent tests."
They did, going through the routine, but found nothing. Te every test they could devise, the
reaction was that of apparently normal blood. Furthermore, the writhing ciliate things seemed not
to be malignant. When toxic matter was introduced the ciliates formed a barrier of their own hairy
bodies, just as phagocytes should have done, but three times as effective.
A specimen slide glittered and trembled in Craddock's mutilated hand.
"It's an improvement," he said. "Those bugs are better than whites."
"But where are the whites?"
"Deus, how should I know?" Craddock's fingers slid into the pocket where he had placed that
discolored notebook. "I'm not in charge here—you are. This is your problem."
"I wonder if it is," Raft said slowly. "Just what was there about the—sun and the waters?"
Craddock hesitated. Then a wry, crooked smile twisted his mouth.
"They appeared quite normal to me," he said. And, turning on his heel, was gone.
Raft stared after him. What was behind this? Craddock obviously knew Pereira. Though how that
interview had been held, Raft did not know. Ventriloquism? He snorted at the thought. No, Pereira
had been in the laboratory with Craddock, and then he had, seemingly, walked through solid walls.
Which meant—what?
Raft turned to the microscope again. There was no help there. In the sane, modern world of 1985
there was simply no place for such irrationalities. Incidentally, where was Pereira now?
He wasn't in the office where Raft had left him. And as Raft hesitated on the doorway, he heard a
sound that brought
blood pumping into his temples. He felt as though the subtle, half-sensed hints of wrongness had
suddenly exploded into action.
It was merely the faint pop-popping of exhaust, but there was no reason for the motor launch to be
going out at this hour.
Raft headed for the river. He paused to seize a flashlight. There were faint shouts. Others had
caught the souhd of the engine too. Merriday's bulky form loomed on the bank.
Raft leveled the light and sent the beam flashing out into that pit of shadows. The smooth surface
of the river glinted like a stream of diamonds. He swung the beam.
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There was the motor launch, ploughing a black furrow in the shining water as it melted away into
the gloom where the flashlight's rays could not penetrate.
But just as it vanished the light caught one full gleam upon a face—Pereira's face, laughing back
across his shoulder, white teeth glittering in the velvety beard. Triumph was arrogant in his
laughter, the elation Raft had sensed before.
There was someone with him; Raft found it impossible to make out who that someone was. The Indies
were running along the cleared bank, and a couple of them had put out in a canoa, but that
wouldn't help. Raft drew the pistol he always carried in the jungle. The thought of sending a
bullet after that arrogant, laughing face was very pleasant.
"No, Brian!" Merriday said, and pulled down his arm.
"But he's getting away with our boat!"
"Dan Craddock's with him," Merriday said. "Didn't you see?"
The pop-popping of the motor was fainter now, dying into the dim murmur of the Jutahy drums. Raft
stood motionless, feeling bewildered and helpless.
"Nothing we can do till morning, anyway," he said presently. "Let's go back inside."
Then a voice he did not know jabbered something in Portuguese.
"He has gone back to his own land—and he has taken something with him."
Raft flashed the light up into the face of the aviator, da Fbnseca, his flyer's cap gripped in one
hand as he fumbled at
his throat, groping, searching. The pupils of his eyes were no longer tiny. They were huge.
"Taken what?" Merriday said.
"My soul," da Fonseca said quite simply.
There was a moment of stillness. And in that pause da Fonseca's words fell with nightmare clarity.
"I had it in a little mirror around my neck. He put it there. It gave him the power to—to—" The
thin, breathless voice faded.
"To do what?" Raft asked.
"To make men slaves," the aviator whispered. "As he did with the doutor."
Craddock! Raft had a sudden insane relief that the Welshman had not, then, gone off willingly with
Pereira, in some mysterious unfathomed partnership. Then he was furious with himself for instantly
accepting such a fantastic explanation from a man so obviously mad.
Yet it was an explanation. There seemed to be no other.
"Let me down," da Fonseca said, stirring against the hands that held him upright. "Without my soul
I cannot stay here long."
"Carry him inside," Raft said. "Bill, get a hypo. Adrenalin."
Da Fonseca had collapsed completely by the time he was laid gently on a cot. His heart had
stopped. Merriday came running with a syringe.
He had put on a long needle, guessing Raft's intention.
Raft made the injection directly into the heart muscle. Then he waited, stethoscope ready. He was
conscious of something—different. Something changed.
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摘要：

file:///F|/rah/Henry%20Kuttner/Kuttner,%20Henry%20-%20Valley%20Of%20The%20Flame%20-%20uc.txtVALLEYOFTHEFLAMEIFACEOFAGIRLFAROFFinthejungleananimalscreamed.Ariver-mothflappedagainstthescreen,nearlyaslargeasafruit-bat:Andveryfaraway,subsensory,almost,BrianRaftcouldhearthelowpulsingofdrums.Notunusual...

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