Mrs. Campbell, we discovered, had checked in at the Majestic Hotel for one week, and left, giving no forwarding address. After that she had been heard from in two or three of the border cities. She had made the rounds of all the beauty parlors and quack establishments in town. This was her fourth trip to Venus, and all of the merchants knew her by sight.
But she was not, currently, visiting any of these places. It seemed that Althea Campbell, a couple of days ago, had disappeared, which was nothing to me, except that she had taken a tiny girl named Sukey Jones with her.
Mrs. Campbell may have had acquaintances about Venus, but not many friends. Especially among the natives, whom she loathed and treated like scum. The natives of the temperate belts were humanoid, and though primitive in culture, fairly intelligent.
They were thin, and not too bad-looking if you could get used to the fish-belly whiteness of their scaly skins, and a partial lack of symmetry in their bodies, such as having one eye a couple of sizes bigger than the other one.
It was from one of the Venusians that we found our first clue. He was Argol Beg, the head of the native Security Police, an individual with silvery, heavy-lidded eyes, and long, nervous, quadruple-jointed fingers.
He mentioned a name that I had heard a long time ago, and forgotten. Marjud. Marjud had been one of the rebel chieftains who had fought against the Alliance in the late Venerian sectional war, and now was outlawed from the Northern settlements.
I call him a man, but I had seen pictures of Marjud once, and there were features about that gross body of his that no one except a Venusian would believe. He was a native of the steaming jungles of the torrid zone, a forbidden area where the native form mysteriously shifted and changed from generation to generation for reasons at which the anthropologists could only guess. His race was still barbaric, for the most part, which was why it was off limits.
It seemed that Marjud was now in the beauty racket. That could have handed me a laugh, except that we were too worried about Sukey.
We got a newspaper, the Medean Times, and sure enough, there was his ad, in scrambled English that hadn't even been changed by the proofreader.
See Marjud, High Priest of Love and Beauty
It Is for a Smooth, White Appearance and I
Will Give You the Limbs Long and Pale,
and Also Supple and Graceful.