Venerians

The Venerians are intelligent native inhabitants of Venus’s oxygen-poor ocean, whose civilization depends on radioactive matter rather than ordinary food or photosynthesis. Their encounter with the Fifth Men exposes the limits of human understanding and makes the settlement of Venus a conflict between humanity’s need to survive and the continued existence of an intelligent native population.

Discovery and Environment

The Venerians enter the human account through evidence of resistance to the Fifth Men’s preparations for settlement. Several Venus electrolysing stations are wrecked, apparently by submarine eruptions, while Ether ships surveying the ocean explode. One damaged vessel returns with a large artificial sphere attached to its sounding apparatus by a hook; when the object bumps against the hull, it detonates. The discovery of this device leads the humans to suspect that intelligent life is trying to stop their operations.

The ocean had seemed uninhabitable to the humans because it contained no freely dissolved oxygen. Their observations overturn that assumption: Venus’s world-wide ocean contains living things ranging from sessile and microscopic organisms to creatures as large as whales. Their life is based on the controlled disintegration of radioactive atoms, which Venus possesses in greater abundance than Earth, including elements that had long since disappeared from Earth.

Biology and Civilization

Among the ocean’s varied life, several species can manipulate their surroundings and use mechanical devices. One intelligent kind dominates the others and has established a civilization powered by radioactive matter. The Venerian swordfish-like beings are about the size and shape of swordfish; three manipulative organs, usually sheathed within the long “sword,” can extend beyond its point as branched muscular tentacles. They swim with a screw-like motion of the body and triple tails, steer with three fins, and possess organs for phosphorescence, vision, touch, and something resembling hearing.

The account describes their reproduction as apparently asexual, with eggs laid in the ocean-bed ooze. They do not need nutrition in the ordinary sense: young individuals seem to gather enough radioactive matter to sustain them for years. As an individual’s supply runs low and it weakens, its juniors either destroy it or bury it in a radioactive mine, from which it emerges rejuvenated months later. These practices belong to a life system the humans can observe but do not fully understand.

Resistance to Colonization

As the Fifth Men expand their activities on Venus, the Venerians intensify their efforts to drive the newcomers away. They cannot leave the deep ocean without being harmed by the loss of pressure, so their resistance relies on attacks against the islands and the human infrastructure there. Explosives are hurled into island centres, and tunnels are used to undermine them. The attacks seriously hamper electrolysis, the process on which the human settlement depends. Attempts to parley fail, leaving the two populations without an agreed means of coexistence.

The Fifth Men recognize that the conflict poses a moral problem, not merely an engineering obstacle. The Venerians are plainly intelligent, even though their mental lives remain difficult for humans to interpret. The humans recall that Martian invaders had once treated humanity as an inferior kind; now, in colonizing Venus, they may be committing a comparable wrong. Yet the Fifth Men believe that humanity must move to Venus because the Moon is expected to fall, making migration necessary for human survival. Their judgment that the Venerians are mentally inferior is based on limited evidence, and the account acknowledges that this assessment could be mistaken.

Extinction and Human Consequences

The prospect of accommodation becomes less tenable as the colonization project changes Venus’s environment. Radioactive matter, essential to Venerian life, is finite and already increasingly difficult for the native population to obtain. The Venerians’ civilization is therefore understood to face eventual decline, though human activity will hasten it. Meanwhile, oxygen released by electrolysis enters the ocean and begins to damage the Venerians’ tissues. The Fifth Men conclude that they cannot stop electrolysis before the atmosphere reaches a level suitable for human life, and that the native population will otherwise perish over the following few thousand years.

After the first settlements are founded, the humans decide to end the Venerians’ suffering sooner by sending powerful submarines to destroy the native ocean fauna. The decision resolves the immediate obstacle to settlement through the deliberate extinction of life that the humans know to be intelligent, but cannot fully comprehend. It leaves the Fifth Men with an enduring sense of guilt and disgust at humanity’s resort to killing for survival. At the same time, their growing knowledge of the Venerians fosters admiration and even a form of affection among those carrying out the destruction. The Venerians thus remain more than an impediment in the human migration: their fate forces the Fifth Men to confront the costs of calling one species’ survival necessary at another’s expense.