TEST FOR THE PEARL
By VASELEOS GARSON
Together, the Earthman and the Jovian
outfought and outwitted the prison guards,
the Venusian jungle-hell, the cunning Chameleon
men. Together, they were invincible. But at
the Test for the Pearl they divided....
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Fall 1947.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Far off in the steaming Venusian jungle, a band of the Chameleon men halted, lifting their mottled faces in the direction of the sound. Closer in, a four-man jungle patrol of Earthmen broke as one man into a run along the trail, their swift-moving bodies swishing the clouds into ragged streamers.
At the edge of the viscous river circling the island an armed guard slipped on his infra-red glasses and began searching his area carefully, his special light traveling slowly along the river and its near and opposite banks.
On the island, only a few yards from the high, thick walls of the Interplanetary Prison, a patch of ground, approximately eight feet by five quivered once—and was still.
The deep-throated roar of the escape siren was thunderous. It carried for scores of miles through the steamy atmosphere of the planet, alerting both natives and Earthman patrols to a successful break from that most fabulous of prisons—The Hole.
Behind the oxygen mask he wore, lying under a foot of the thick spongy soil of the planet, Jarl Gare wiggled his itching body and chuckled.