Venerian swordfish-like beings

Venerian swordfish-like beings were the most intelligent and powerful species known in the ocean of Venus, where they built cities and a civilization sustained by radioactive matter. Their first contact with humanity came through dangerous resistance to exploration and settlement; what followed exposed both the limits of human understanding and the lethal cost of making another world habitable for the Fifth Men. The beings were not simply obstacles to colonization: they possessed their own social and military life, while the evidence available to humans left the meaning of that life largely unreadable.

Form and Life in the Ocean

The beings were about the size and shape of a swordfish, but their resemblance to familiar terrestrial animals was only partial. Three manipulative organs were usually sheathed inside the long structure described as a sword; they could extend beyond its point as branched, muscular tentacles. Their bodies moved with a screw-like motion, aided by three tails, while three fins served for steering. Phosphorescent organs, vision, touch, and a faculty analogous to hearing gave them ways to perceive and act in their environment.

Their world’s chemistry shaped their way of life. The ocean contained no freely dissolved oxygen, which had led humans to assume that it could not support life. Instead, its fauna drew energy from the controlled disintegration of radioactive atoms within their tissues. Venus was especially rich in such atoms and retained elements that had disappeared from Earth. The swordfish-like beings therefore belonged to an ecology with a radically different energetic basis from the human one: radioactive matter was not merely a resource for their civilization but a condition of their continued existence.

They appeared to reproduce asexually, laying eggs in the ocean-bed ooze. An individual gathered enough radioactive material in infancy to sustain it for years, but its supply eventually ran low and it weakened. At that point, younger members either killed it or buried it in a radioactive mine, from which it emerged months later rejuvenated. This account suggests that their society had practices for managing the decline and renewal of individuals, although the human observers could not establish how those practices fitted into the beings’ wider culture.

Cities, Communication, and Custom

The beings crowded the ocean floor with cities built from proliferating, coral-like structures. Submarine exploration revealed complex articles in these settlements, apparently serving both necessary and luxurious purposes. The cities and their material culture made clear that this was not an isolated collection of primitive organisms but a civilization with the capacity to build, organize, and sustain elaborate ways of life.

Their communication also remained only partly legible to human observers. They appeared to use symbolic language based on mechanical vibrations produced in the water by snapping their tentacles’ claws. Humans could infer that such signals carried meaning, but could not decipher the more complex activities they observed. This gap is central to the account: the beings’ existence and technical abilities could be recorded, while their purposes and inner life remained beyond confident interpretation.

They were strongly given to warfare, including conflicts between groups of their own species. Even when military disaster strained their society, they continued to produce material objects in great quantity, then destroy or neglect them. The juxtaposition troubled the observers, but did not yield a reliable explanation of the beings’ priorities. A separate recurring spectacle deepened that uncertainty: at certain seasons, three unusually luminous individuals approached one another with rhythmic movements, while a crowd gathered and circled them. The sequence ended in the destruction of the three participants. Humans first considered whether this was connected with reproduction, but could find no reproductive result; they could only propose that it might be an obsolete biological ritual, a form of religious sacrifice, or an activity altogether unintelligible to them.

Resistance to Human Settlement

As human activity on Venus expanded, the beings escalated their attempts to stop it. They could not leave the deep ocean to confront settlers on land, because without oceanic pressure their bodies would burst. Instead, they used explosives against island settlements and undermined them through tunnels. Their attacks seriously disrupted electrolysis, the process by which the Fifth Men were adding oxygen to Venus’s atmosphere.

Attempts to negotiate failed. That failure left the Fifth Men with a stark choice: halt the transformation and jeopardize their planned migration, or continue despite the presence of an intelligent native population. Their predicament was sharpened by the approaching lunar catastrophe, which made Venus necessary as a destination for humanity. The account also stresses the uncertainty built into the decision. Human observers judged the natives’ mental range inferior, yet admitted that this judgment might be wrong: a difference so great that humans could not recognize the beings’ form of superiority was conceivable, though not demonstrable from the available evidence.

There was a second reason the Fifth Men considered the conflict unavoidable. The beings depended on radioactive atoms, which steadily disintegrated and could not be replenished. Submarine research indicated that their fauna had once been more extensive, and that the difficulty of obtaining radioactive matter was already restricting their civilization. The natives therefore faced eventual decline even without human intervention. This did not make human actions harmless; it framed colonization as an acceleration of a danger already inherent in the beings’ material environment.

Extermination and Its Meaning

The Fifth Men initially hoped to colonize Venus without seriously damaging its native population. That hope failed on two fronts. The natives mounted attacks so destructive that they caused serious losses to the invaders as well as thousands of deaths among their own kind. Meanwhile, the oxygen generated by electrolysis dissolved into the ocean. It oxidized the natives’ tissues, slowly poisoning organisms adapted to oxygen-free water. The settlers could not stop the process before the atmosphere reached the oxygen level required for human life, and the native species faced extermination within a few thousand years at most.

The Fifth Men decided to end that suffering sooner rather than allow it to continue. Once they could walk on Venus’s islands and establish settlements, they built powerful submarines and sent them to destroy the ocean’s native fauna. The decision completed the reversal at the heart of the episode: beings first encountered as a threat to human work became victims of a human project that had made coexistence impossible. Their own attacks were real, and their future was constrained by dwindling radioactive resources, but the immediate cause of their elimination was the transformation and deliberate clearance required by human settlement.

The slaughter affected the Fifth Men in contradictory ways. It left them with guilt and disgust at the realization that survival had required killing intelligent life, and compounded their loss of confidence after science failed to explain the Moon’s approach. At the same time, some regarded the act as necessary and even justifiable, noting that the campaign was conducted without hatred and that closer observation had led the human crews to admire, and in a sense love, the beings they killed. The narrative does not resolve this conflict by granting the humans complete knowledge or moral certainty. Instead, the species’ extinction stands as the consequence of a collision between two forms of life whose needs could not be reconciled—and of a judgment made under conditions in which the other civilization remained only partly understood.