The Wealth of Echindul

The Wealth of Echindul

"The Wealth of Echindul" by Noel Loomis is a science fiction adventure story set on a hostile, largely unexplored Venus in the year 2542, following a small, physically unimpressive but extraordinarily determined Earthman named Grant Russell as he attempts to recover a fortune in rare alien gemstones and bring them safely to market despite facing a powerful criminal overlord and the lethal dangers of a poisonous alien world. Grant Russell is known throughout the settlements of Venus as the Hard-Luck Man of the Swamp, a prospector of small stature and limited resources who has spent years struggling to make good on a planet that rewards the physically powerful and well-connected. His motivation is deeply personal: his wife died after their daughter Beth was born, and he subsequently fell apart financially, leaving little Beth in a child welfare home in New Jersey. The institution will not release her to him until he can demonstrate financial stability. He has promised her a small farm, strawberries, and a life together, and that promise drives everything he does. The story opens with Grant emerging from the Great Sea-Swamp of Venus after a forty-day crossing on foot through two hundred miles of lethal terrain, a feat no one has accomplished before him. He has spent six months in total reaching the Red Lava Range, where the extinct echindul once nested. The echindul was a flying lizard whose gizzard-stones come in matched pairs and possess a natural telepathic property: each stone of a pair is tuned to the other, allowing whoever holds one to perceive what is happening near its twin. Wealthy Earth buyers prize the stones as a romantic novelty, and scientists regard them as nature's equivalent of advanced radio communication. Grant has located a million-year-old nest containing sixteen pairs of the stones, worth approximately half a million dollars in total. The immediate problem Grant faces upon returning to land is that to reach Aphrodite, Venus's largest city where he can sell the stones legally and safely, he must pass through a settlement called The Pass, a lawless city of vice wedged between two impassable natural barriers. The Pass is controlled by Relegar, a Uranian crime lord who operates from underground headquarters and maintains a monopoly on intelligence throughout the southern hemisphere of Venus. Relegar exploits a biological quirk: the fish-people of the swamps communicate in a frequency only Uranians can hear, and since no Uranian trusts another, Relegar alone can serve as interpreter. He pays his vast network of informants with a narcotic called Venus-snow, and virtually nothing of value changes hands anywhere in the region without his knowledge. Grant knows with certainty that Relegar already knows about the stones. Faced with the impossibility of walking through The Pass carrying the stones, Grant conceals them in a daring and inventive way. He ties the leather bag containing fifteen of the sixteen pairs to the leg of a dead fish that a massive Venusian water-constrictor has just swallowed whole. Since the constrictor's jaws are distended around the meal and it is temporarily helpless, Grant is able to approach it safely. He keeps only a single stone in his watch-pocket, knowing that the telepathic link between matched pairs means he can locate the bag again by concentrating on his stone and reading its twin's location within the animal. He then walks into The Pass empty-handed. In The Pass, Grant attempts to arrange protection through Netse, a Jovian fence who operates under the guise of a jewelry dealer and who physically manifests as an impossibly tiny butterfly of extraordinary intelligence and will. Grant offers Netse three-quarters of the stones in exchange for safe passage, a generous offer that stuns even Grant himself, but Netse refuses entirely. Relegar has clearly already communicated that the stones are his business, and even Netse will not cross him. Grant is then detained by Relegar's men and brought before the Uranian himself in an underground cavern, where Relegar's enormous spider-like body, sixteen jointed legs, paired bulbous eyes, red-rimmed maw, and gray poison-mandibles combine to produce a paralyzing terror in Grant. Relegar informs Grant that he knows the stones have been hidden and tells him to go retrieve them, making clear that he will follow personally and that no one who has been personally hunted by Relegar has ever returned sane. Grant goes back to the swamp, locates the constrictor using the telepathic stone, kills the massive reptile with his heat-gun, cuts out its gizzard, and recovers all fifteen stones. He also takes a square of the constrictor's outer hide, which becomes mildly radioactive after the animal's death, because he has deduced that Uranians, who evolved in an environment almost entirely free of radiation and retain an instinctive dread of it, will be paralyzed by sustained exposure to such a source. When Relegar catches up to him the following afternoon, Grant uses the hide as a shield to keep the spider at bay and systematically burns off eight of the Uranian's sixteen legs with his heat-gun, rendering Relegar immobile by destroying all the legs on one side of his body. Rather than attempting the impossible task of killing the Uranian outright, Grant leaves him pinned under the radioactive hide with enough legs burned away that he will be unable to travel until he grows replacements, a process that will take long enough for Grant to reach Aphrodite freely. Grant reflects with some surprise that he, a nobody with no money, no influence, and no friends, has inadvertently broken Relegar's grip on The Pass entirely, since Relegar cannot operate or threaten from a distance while regenerating limbs in a swamp. With his pockets full of the echindul stones, Grant descends back into the brown water of the swamp and makes his way toward Aphrodite, thinking of Beth, New Jersey, strawberries with fresh cream, and the conclusion that his luck has at last genuinely changed.

By Noel Loomis · First published 1955 · Genre: Science Fiction, Adventure, Noir · 8,204 words

First lines

He came up out of the Great Sea-Swamp of Venus like old Father Neptune. He was covered with mud and slime. Seaweed hung from his cheap diving-suit. Brine dripped from his arms that hung limp and weary; it ran from his torso and made a dark trail in the sand.

Without even looking back, he stood for a moment as if fighting to keep on his feet, while the brine made a small puddle in the green sand. Finally he unscrewed the helmet and took it off. He turned around slowly and looked back across the two hundred miles of deadly swamp, at the flaming craters of the Red Lava Range from which he had come.

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The Wealth of Echindul is listed on Textopian as a short story by Noel Loomis, dated 1955 CE.

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science-fiction · venus · prospector · telepathy · survival · greed · treasure-hunt · alien-wildlife · adventure · space-exploration · 1950s-pulp · short-story

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