"It too hard for you, too dangerous! River cuts across—"
"So I'll get my feet wet. I'm not in a position to be worried by pneumonia. Let's head for the straight and narrow, MacDuff. I'm in a hurry."
The animal cocked its head to one side, dropped its wings in a gesture like a shrug and moved off the fern in a soaring glide southward. When it was about three hundred feet up, it circled back to make certain that Graff was following.
Now if you ever go to Venus, the Polar Continent is probably where you'll live for the duration of your stay. Not only is its temperature and annual rainfall the lowest on the planet (which makes it just a shade more uncomfortable than the Amazonian Jungle), but also it is the most heavily populated stretch of land—averaging close to one person every thirty square miles.
But if you find yourself on the Polar Continent you will be advised, and well-advised, to stay away from the Southern Peninsula. This is not merely because it is a dank and deadly swamp. But chiefly because of the Black River which winds through the peninsula, doubling back on itself, crossing through itself and becoming a tributary of itself a dozen times over, like a living surrealist corkscrew.
The Black River rises somewhere in the unscalable peaks of the San Mountains and comes roaring into the flatlands with a tremendous velocity. Just before reaching the peninsula, however, it is joined by the Zetzot River, and the two of them make a combination that is really in a hurry. Even if there were no rain at all (which is definitely not the case!), there would be a perpetual mist over the Southern Peninsula. And by the time the Black gets through doubling back on itself, giving itself a shove, so to speak—well, the reason no one knows exactly where the river empties into the Jefferson Sea is because the entire area is completely obscured by an opaque steaming fog which boils about for miles on either side.
Nor is that all. Certain animals like to wallow in the swamp created by the Black. And most of them are very large. Creatures which can survive in the swamp of the Southern Peninsula are quite tough, quite dangerous and most uniquely suited to their environment. There are snakes and insects and carnivorous plants galore, not to mention the huge creatures who live in quicksand and have yet to be classified. One of the smallest animals of the peninsula is a dark little fish which swims back and forth in the Black itself. Venusian colonists have christened it the sardine, possibly because it is the size of a terrestrial sardine. Its habits, however, resemble those of the South American piranha. It travels in large schools and eats its way through anything.
All in all, the Southern Peninsular Swamp is an ideal home for a baron of crime who wants to get away from it all. The all doesn't include law, of course. On Venus, each man writes his own code of laws with the weapon he finds handiest.
The trouble was, Graff Dingle reflected, as he found a ford and leaped across the screaming waters to the opposite bank, the trouble was that his folks and people like them had come to Venus to get away from lawlessness of the international kind only to hit the inevitable individual lawlessness of a frontier.