An ex-spaceman sniffed knowingly.
"Yep. It's Mars, all right."
When the train came out into the crater itself, Winchester's surprised eyes were treated to a sight he had often dreamed of in his earlier existence, but never thought he would live to see.
The dome-workers had done their job and gone. Overhead was what looked to be a dusty, dirty-greenish sky; and through some trick of refraction, the oversized Sun of Luna had been reduced to the hazy, dimmer spot of light it seems to be from Mars.
The crater floor was already covered for miles with leveled iron-rust. It shimmered with the ruddy, characteristic color of the fourth planet.
Further on they came to mounds and dumps of rust which had not yet been spread. Slave-operated tractors were at work, dragging it away with giant scrapers, and supervisors carrying photographs were showing them where and how to shape it into the mounds and hummocks that abound in the Martian desert.
The work-train pulled on beyond a little way and then began to dump its load. Off toward the center of the crater, Winchester could see a group of pyramidal stone buildings crawling with workmen. That, he presumed, was to be the new Martian Embassy.
"Don't need any more spreaders," said a guard, coming up. "Take these guys over to the West Portal and put 'em to work there. A shipment of stuff is due from the Botanical Gardens and is gotta be planted around. Tricky things, them Martian plants — you always wind up with less men than you started with. So be sure you put your tough eggs on the job, men you won't mind losing."
"I gotcha," said the train guard, grinning. "Well, they can have this whole lot and never squeeze a tear out of my eye." He turned to his charges. "Come on, you bozos. Pick up those shovels and march. We're legging it across to the other side."
Hours later the dusty convicts were brought to a weary halt beside a string of flat-cars.
"Here you go," said a man, coming out from behind the cars.
He was tall and thin, wore horn-rimmed glasses and looked more like a college professor than conductor of a work-train. He was not a Mongoloid, but he bore himself with authority.
"Thirty choice Martian phygrices here. They go into those holes. Handle 'em with care, they're man-eating. But whatever you do, don't burn one down. Those are strict orders from the Director himself. They're very valuable and rare specimens."
He poked a receipt for the plants at the convict guard.
"Sign this and I'll go on back to the Botanical Gardens and send up some moss. In an hour or so you'll get a train of desert goats. Feed them to these plants after they're bedded in. Two goats to a phygrix is about right. S'long."
He pocketed the signed receipt for the cargo and swung himself up into the cab of the waiting locomotive. Winchester looked from him to the boxed plants with interest. Each plant bore a sign.
Martian pitcher-plant. Dangerous! Handle with caution.
"What's dangerous about 'em?" asked a convict.
"How do I know?" replied the guard. "Watch your step, that's all. Grab a couple of loose rails over there and let's skid 'em onto the ground and have a look at them."
Winchester examined one of the plants after it was on the ground and unboxed, but he failed to see anything hazardous-looking about it. The thing had a fat, bulbous root some ten feet in diameter that was covered with a leathery skin. Its upper part consisted of a number of fleshy leaves of from six to eight feet in length, temporarily bound together with turns of wire rope.
The gang slid them one by one across the gravelly waste, and lowered them into their holes. By quitting time the entire thirty had been transplanted and the backfill done. Winchester and another man began taking the ropes off the bound leaves. "Hold on," he warned, as he loosened the last knot. "Let's get out of reach before we unwind them."
He jumped back a good ten feet, holding the stray end of the line in his hand. For being so close, he could not miss the fetid breath of the thing, knew without doubt that the plant was carnivorous. But at the same time, Winchester thought he understood its method of attack.
Each of the fleshy leaves terminated in what was the caricature of a human hand. A tough, horny palm divided on one side into three muscular fingers. Growing out of the other side was an opposed thumb.
As the bonds were loosened, the fingers and thumbs kept opening and closing spasmodically, and tremors could be felt running up the leafy arms.
From the safe distance where he stood, Winchester began hauling the slack line to him and making it up into a coil. Meanwhile, the released leaves began to weave about and thresh the air, as if warming up after their long confinement.
"I'd hate to have that thing grab me," remarked his fellow convict.
"Yeah," agreed Winchester, looking dubiously at the menacing clump of leaves.
He was wondering how a plant that smelled so vilely could induce any living thing to come within its reach. An ambush as obvious as that of the phygrix seemed to him to be a poor one. He would have thought nature did things better.
Winchester retrieved and coiled all the line and turned to walk away. Down the track, he noticed that most of the other plants had been untied and the convicts were moving back toward the train. Apparently all had seen the danger as quickly as he had, for there was none of the excitement that would have been attendant on the struggle of one of them with a clutching phygrix.
Something whizzed by the American's head, narrowly missing his ear. Then another, and another. A heavy stone struck him sharply between the shoulder blades and he stumbled and fell.
At the same time, a veritable hail of gravel and small rocks began pelting the ground all about him.
He scrambled to his feet, saw that his companion was down and unconscious, bleeding from a deep cut in the head. He picked him up and staggered on a few paces, then went down himself, struck from behind again.
Winchester was unconscious but a moment. He blinked and pulled himself up to a sitting posture. For the first time, he saw the source of the barrage of missiles. The pitcher-plants had gone into action! Their hand-tipped leaves were wildly swooping and grasping the small stones that lay near them. They hurled the stones with deadly accuracy at everything in the vicinity that moved.
From the inner recesses of the plant cluster, slender, slimy antennae snaked out. These were long — sixty feet or longer — and while some retrieved and brought back the hurled stones for further casting, others groped the ground for unconscious victims.
Winchester was appalled to see one of the feelers wrap itself around the form of a convict off to his left. He turned his head quickly, just in time to see another of the antennae slithering toward him.
Dizzy and bleeding though he was, he managed to stagger to his feet, with his companion's body thrown across his shoulder. He must have made another ten feet of retreat good when one last well-aimed stone brought him down. Things in his vision swirled madly a moment and then went black.
CHAPTER VIII
An Old Enemy
The clickety-clack of wheels on rail joints was the first sound Winchester recognized. Then he knew he was lying on his back on one of the benches in the caboose. He heard the low voices of grumbling convicts.
"The dirty heels!" one was saying. "They wouldn't pull a trigger to fry one of those plants, but they'd burn us down as soon as look at us. 'Valuable plants,' the rat said,