"Spoke to them?"
"Yes. With the voice that has no sound. Warning them back."
Curt was startled. "The voice that has no sound. Telepathy! But it's strange we've felt nothing!"
There was no sight or sound of a living thing, but hot blasts of wind from above brought a miasmic swamp odor. It became almost an opiate to their senses.
Curt noticed the tangled walls on either side were beginning to widen away. And there was something else, as he felt his mind preternaturally alert despite the cloying odors. He imagined he felt the faintest thought-impression impinging on him, subtle and eerie, almost a feeling of being under surveillance. He glanced about at the others. They were feeling it too.
Suddenly the loom of jungle broke. They emerged into a downward sloping place that seemed all swamp; a vast circular area black and quiescent, with jungle rising on all sides. Descending toward it, they noticed a vague glistening shape protruding just above the area of muck.
"The spacer!" Tor Ekkov exclaimed. "Must be the one you saw, Emmons—it crashed here!"
Curt peered closer, then shook his head. He pointed out greenish swamp tendrils entwining over and about the hull, mute evidence of time.
"It's a spacer all right," Jeffers was taut with excitement. "It's the one Landreth boarded near Io, three years ago! By all that's holy, we've found it!" They could only make out the stern, but the very size of it indicated that the rest of the hull must be gigantic, far beneath the primordial ooze.
Lorine clutched at Curt's arm, pointing. The Swamp moved. The black surface was surging up in a horrible turgid mass. In one place and then another, dark tentacles broke the surface. A central body began to emerge, huge and bulbous beyond belief! It was octopoid—ghastly and gelatinous, the body itself some fifty feet across, with tentacles sprawling the entire diameter of the swamp. It pulled its greenish-gray shape toward the protruding stern of the spacer. Like an ominous guardian it draped itself entirely around and over the polished hull. There it lay, pulsing gently, lord of all it surveyed.