We struggled with Venza across the gluey river surface. She had fallen near the further shore. Rocks, crags and strewn boulders were passing as the current swept us along at a speed of about ten miles an hour. She lay in our arms, eyes closed, her face pallid but calm. She seemed to breathe rapidly; but that on Wandl was normal.
We landed on the rocky shore. It was still daylight. The blurred sun was winging across the zenith so swiftly that its movement was visible. Wandl had been suddenly endowed with axial rotation. Even in these few minutes, the day was past its noon. On the distant mountain peaks looming above the nearby horizon; it seemed that the sheen of coming night was mingled with the red sunlight.
Anita and Snap laid Venza on the rocks. I suddenly remembered the two blobs in the sky behind us, which had seemed to be following. I stood gazing across the river. The red sky there seemed empty.
"Thank God, she's reviving!" Snap called at me and I joined them. Venza was stirring. Color was coming into her cheeks. Her lips were murmuring as though she were talking in her sleep.
Then she opened her eyes. Her gaze fixed on us as we bent over her. "Why, what's the matter? Where are we? I thought we were in the tree-tops. Snap, don't look at me like that, dear. I'm all right—only confused."
She could remember nothing since that gruesome thing bit into her arm, but the attack of its poison in her veins seemed definitely over. We sat with her, soothing her, explaining what had happened. And she was wholly rational. Her strength came back; her mind cleared.
The brief red day came to its close. The sun plunged below the horizon; the stars winked into being. The red-purple Wandl night again was here. And now we saw that the whole firmament was swinging, the rotation made visible.
The darkness leaped around us. Shadows filled the rock hollows. The caves and recesses of this rocky shore turned black with darkness. And in the sky now we saw another of those familiar opalescent beams. This was the one from Mars: we could identify the red disc of the planet.
And then, from the mountains ahead of us but still below our horizon, the Wandl control station shot its attacking beam upward. Again there was that conflict in the sky. The axis of Mars was being altered, its rotation slowed.
We could see now that we were much nearer than before to the control station. It seemed only about twenty miles ahead of us. The scream from it was deafening.