Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs by Mike Resnick, Robert T. Garcia Page A

nightmarish monsters resembled a mad attempt to blend a human being with a gigantic arthropod. Imagine if you can a man with the claw-tipped limbs and deadly stinging tail of a monstrous scorpion. They had no voices in the sense which you would recognize as such. Instead they communicated by a combination of clicking mandibles and weird, ear-piercing screeches, and we could hear them now, a hunting party close on our trail.
    “Press on, my Princess,” I urged Duare. I took up a position with my back to her, ready to face the lead Andak, who seemed to have been sent ahead of his monstrous fellows as a kind of advance guard. Pushing aside a tangle of writhing vines, it stood facing me, its terrible mandibles opening and closing, its weird, faceted eyes blazing eagerness and hatred.
    It reached for me with a pair of pincers that I slapped aside with my machete. The other pair of pincers snapped, snagging the sleeve of my garment. Ignoring the threat, I lunged with my fire-tempered weapon, wishing futilely for a steel-bladed sword, or better yet a firearm.
    Straight for the monster’s eye I lunged. The Andak dodged aside, and my blade passed harmlessly over its naked, scaly shoulder. Frustrated in its attack, it emitted a screech that all but stunned me, clearly a weapon with which evolution had fitted these monsters to use as they closed in combat with their enemies.
    “Carson!” I heard Duare’s scream of warning. “Beware! Above you!” I jerked my head and saw the Andak’s deadly curving tail plunging downward toward me. This time it was I who dodged to the side. It drew its tail back, a few drops of its deadly venom dripping onto my arm, where they burned and hissed, emitting a sickening stench of death and instant decay.
    In the throes of its continuing attack, the Andak had yanked its claw free of my sleeve. It reared back, its segmented, chitinous tail arching overhead in another attempt to strike at me. I barely managed to leap aside, my shoulder colliding with the trunk of a nearby crann tree, a Venusian giant roughly comparable to a Florida palmetto.
    The Andak’s tail swung toward me, and as I threw myself flat, it thudded into the trunk of the tree, the twin knifelike shafts that it used to administer venom to its prey trapped for the moment in the pulpy crann wood.
    In response to the twin jolts administered to the crann tree by my shoulder and the monster’s venomous tail, a green shaft no thicker nor longer than an ordinary lead pencil tumbled from a limb of the tree, landing on the back of the Andak. It was followed by another and yet another, until I saw that the green shafts were raining down upon it, burying their tips in its flesh until it resembled an Earthly porcupine or spiny sea urchin.
    The green shafts, I realized, were Venusian nathair culebras, or tree snakes. Among the deadliest of the venomous creatures that infest the jungles of Earth’s sister planet, they covered the body of the Andak and were soon squirming like the snakes on a Gorgon’s head.
    Even as the Andak writhed and emitted the ear-piercing screams of its death agony, I lost no time in grasping Duare by the wrist and half dragging, half-carrying her ahead. Our determination to persevere was quickly rewarded as we burst from the forest into a grassy clearing surrounded by towering crann trees and giant, wind-tossed ferns.
    We made our way to the center of the clearing, believing for the moment that we had reached safety, but our relief proved to be short-lived, as the very ground beneath us began to move, at first with gentle tremors almost too slight to be felt, then with perceptible ripples, finally heaving itself as if it were the back of a giant beast and Duare and myself annoying pests of whom it was trying to be rid.
    “Duare,” I cried, “what is this? What is happening, O my princess?”
    She had gone suddenly pale, her normally healthy olive-hued complexion becoming almost corpse-like in its pallor. “Carson,”