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The Hawk's lips compressed as his old enemy neared, and into his watching gray eyes came the deadly cold emotionless look that was known and feared throughout space, wherever outlaws walked or flew. Ku Sui so close! There, in that even-gliding figure, was the author of the infamy done to Leithgow, of the crime to the brains that lived though their bodies were dead; of the organized isuan trade.
Their slavering lips open, the isuan weed forgotten, they stared: and then howling and shrieking they broke and went splashing off panic-stricken through the marsh.
On the third table lay a shape skeletonlike in appearance, so emaciated was it, so closely did the bones press into the dry, fever-yellowed skin. Of one leg, only the stump was left; this creature had been forced to hop or crawl his way through the isuan swamps. The head, too, was no more than a skull, with great sunken dark-rimmed eyes, discolored fangs and loose, leathery lips.
It lay at least a thousand miles a thousand miles of ugly, primeval jungle from the nearest unfriendly isuan ranch, and was diametrically opposite Port o' Porno. Thus it allowed Leithgow and Carse to come and go with but faint chance of being observed, and the steady watch kept through the laboratory's telescopic instruments lessened even that.
Business men and sight-seers, except the most bold, were apt to stay in their houses after their first visit to the Street of the Sailors. Each face on the street or in the kantrans that lined it bore the mark of drink, or the contemptuous, insolent expression bred by Porno's favorite drug, isuan.
They were outcasts from the port of outcasts, driven out of Porno into the wilderness, where they tracked out their miry ways searching ever for the isuan weed until some animal ended their enslavement, or the drug itself finally killed them in convulsions. They were the legion of the damned.
There had been no hair on this death's head; it had long been bald, and now, washed, clean for the first time in months or even years, it was to hold the brain of Dr. Ralph Swanson, Earth's one-time leader in the science of psychology. On the fourth table lay a giant's body but a hollow giant, a giant made thin and pitiful by the ravages of his destroyer, isuan.
The fourth night after the Hawk had met his friends at Ban Wilson's was sunless and Jupiter-less, nor was there the slightest breath of wind; and in the humid, dank jungle surrounding on three sides the isuan ranch of the Venusian Lar Tantril the sounds of night-prowling animals burst full and loud, making an almost continuous babel of varied and savage noise.
Ku Sui controlled the isuan drug trade, and Carse was against it, as he was against everything underhanded and unclean; Ku Sui had tricked and, by a single deed, driven Carse's loved comrade, Master Scientist Eliot Leithgow, from his honored position on Earth, and Carse was sworn to bring Ku Sui to Earth to clear the old scientist's name.
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