The Old Man had money; he had political power, he also had ideas of his own—and a whim of steel. But what that whim was, and why those ideas… that was hard to find out!
Illustrated by Freas
The Old Man had money; he had political power, he also had ideas of his own—and a whim of steel. But what that whim was, and why those ideas… that was hard to find out!
Illustrated by Freas
The cold wind swept in from the gray Pacific, drenching Los Angeles under sheets of driving rain. Keith Ortega, pushing his way through the uneasy puddles of Wilshire Walk, began to regret leaving his copter at the Center. He was dry enough in his rain-bender, but the air coming in from underneath the force lines was tasting decidedly stale.
The broad walkway was deserted around him, although he could see a few lights spilling out wetly from store windows. A violet government airsign hung in the rain, glowing gently just above his head: DON’T ROCK THE BOAT.
He turned left at the empty Santa Monica cross and two blocks later he reached the Vandervort Tower. A flashing orange neon sign above the ornate street doorway said: WE WANT YOUR BABY.
Keith Ortega stepped through the door and hurriedly shut off his rain-bender. He took a deep breath of relatively fresh air and felt much better. There was no one in the street lobby; he had already guessed that business would be slow this afternoon. He went across to the elevator, his feet light and awkward without the rain-benders on his shoes, and went up to the tenth-floor interview room. Surprisingly, it was in use.
Ellen Linford, who looked like the epitome of American motherhood, had another young couple on the hook. She was bouncing a baby on her knee and smiling, and even Keith’s knowledge that Ellen detested babies failed to spoil the warmth of the scene. Ellen was a good actress. She had to be.
Keith assumed what he trusted was a kind and paternal expression and sat down next to Ellen. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Linford,” he said. He beamed at the baby and chucked it under its chin. “What have we here? How are you, little fellow?”
“It’s a girl,” Ellen corrected him.
She turned to the nervous couple before her. “Well, aren’t we in luck! This is Mr. Ortega personally.”
Brother, thought Keith.
The couple brightened, confronted with Fame in the flesh.
“I’d like to have you meet Mr. and Mrs. Sturtevant,” Ellen said.“They’ve decided to leave their little Hazel to the Foundation. Isn’t that nice?”
“Wonderful,” Keith Ortega agreed heartily. He shook hands with the parents. “You’ve made a very wise decision.”
They hesitated. Then the woman blurted out the inevitable question. “I still don’t understand all the conditions, sir,” she said in a too-high voice. “Why couldn’t we see Hazel, just once in a while? I mean… we wouldn’t want to rock the boat or anything… but just to make sure she’s all right—”
“I’ve been trying to explain,” Ellen began.
“Well now, Mrs. Sturtevant,” Ortega cut in, “please let me assure you that we are in complete sympathy with your request. Your reaction is perfectly normal for an American mother, and we’re glad that you are concerned about your child. Unfortunately, it just would not be wise for you to see Hazel again, even for a little while.”
Mrs. Sturtevant looked at her husband for support, didn’t get any, and faltered ahead on her own. “But why?”
Keith frowned and made precise pyramids with his hands. “Facts are facts, my dear,” he said slowly. “If you wish to keep Hazel, that is certainly your privilege. You have come to the Foundation of your own free will, and you surely have investigated us enough to learn that we are an absolutely reliable concern. We believe that children entrusted to our care are entitled to a life of their own, and we have found that repeated contacts with the original parents just make it tough on the child. Now then, you want Hazel to lead a full, normal, happy life, don’t you?”
“Of course we do,” the husband said. Plainly, he didn’t care what happened to little Hazel.
Keith smiled. “Then you must trust us,” he said. “You can’t have it both ways. I give you my personal word that Hazel will be in good hands with the Foundation. If you have any doubts, I suggest that you go back home with your child and talk it over some more. The decision is yours to make.”
The parents held a whispered consultation. Mrs. Sturtevant finally whispered, “We’ll leave Hazel with you.”
“Splendid!” Ortega said. He shook hands again. “You just sign the papers with Mrs. Linford, and that’s all there is to it. I’ll look in on Hazel from time to time myself, so please don’t worry about her.” He looked at his watch, although he knew perfectly well what time it was. “I’m afraid I must be going. Good luck to you!”
He hurried out of the interview room to the elevator, leaving Ellen to finish things up. He couldn’t take the last farewells to the child; they gave him the creeps. If the parents loved their children so much, why did they give them to the Foundation?
The elevator whisked him up to the fifteenth floor.
Outside, the cold rain dropped from the sky and ran in rivers down the sides of the Vandervort Tower.
Keith Ortega checked in at his office, a pleasant sanctum lined with shelves of books and a clinging memory of blue tobacco smoke, and the first thing he saw was the red light blinking over the tri-di.
Someone had called. Since his private number was not generally known, the caller had probably been either Carrie or Old Man Vandervort himself. He dropped into the comfortable chair behind his desk and punched the button.
It was Old Man Vandervort. His lined face filled the screen, the snow-white beard bobbing up and down to punctuate his sentences. “Hello, Ortega,” he said. “Out again, I see. If you should by chance show up in your office today, I want you to come out and see me personally before you go home. Something important has come up. That’s all.” The screen faded.
“Damnation,” Ortega said aloud. “The master’s voice.”
Well, there was no getting out of it. He would have to go hold hands with the old joker, even though he knew that the “something important” was probably nothing more than Vandervort’s wanting someone to talk to. This made the second time this week, but then Vandervort was paying the bills.
He caught the elevator up to the main entrance at the thirtieth floor copter field and signed himself out in a Foundation copter. It was still raining hard enough to discourage traffic, but the wind conditions were not really prohibitive.
He lifted the copter up to the five-thousand-foot lane and gunned her north at a modest two hundred per. He kept slightly inland from the coastline, and set his pilot to hold him well below the overland freight routes. There was very little traffic, since the subs were holding back from the unloading chutes until the weather calmed down a bit.
In fifteen minutes, the copter veered off to the right and buzzed up Vandervort’s Canyon. He was challenged four times by the Old Man’s watchdog scanners, but managed to convince them that he was who he said he was. He made a wet, slippery landing on the patio field of the huge estate, activated his rain-bender, presented his credentials to a guard who should have known him by sight, and finally got inside the visitor’s wing.
One of the butlers bowed, smiled, and said, “Right this way, Dr. Ortega. Mr. Vandervort is expecting you.”
“So I heard,” Ortega said.
He followed the anachronism through the familiar labyrinth of richly-carpeted hallways, his senses overwhelmed as usual by the sheer richness of the Old Man’s castle. It wasn’t really that the place was in bad taste, but simply that there was so confounded much of it.
The procession of two moved sedately through the visitor’s wing and on into the private quarters, which were a trifle more elaborate, if possible. It marched up the marble stairs to the second floor, down the interminable gray passage, and finally came to a well-oiled halt before a fantastic mahogany door.
Congratulations, thought Ortega. You have circled the globe on roller-skates.
The butler knocked discreetly on the mahogany slab. A tiny green light blinked on in the center of the door.
“You may go in now, sir,” said the buller, and bowed.
Ortega resisted the impulse to bow-back and stepped through the opening door. He was just in time to catch a glimpse of an exceedingly sensuous young woman making her swishing exit by means of another door.
“Ah there, Ortega!” boomed Old Man Vandervort, straightening up in his chair. “What kept you?”
The room, like everything else in the mansion, was big. It had a wall-to-wall brown rug that must have cost a fortune, and it was literally stuffed with tables, chairs, desks, fireplaces, books, paintings, tapes, flowers, gewgaws, drapes, and nameless shapes and sounds. As always, it was much too hot, like a greenhouse on a humid day.
James Murray Vandervort was a small man, but he looked like what he was: the richest human being on Earth. He was dressed in a dark-green lounging robe. His face was red from too much brandy and his trim white beard was slightly askew. He was one hundred and five years old and he had a bad heart.
Ortega said, “I was delayed by a typhoon. Sorry.”
Vandervort laughed rather gaspingly and his face got still redder. “Well, well,” he said, “never mind about that. Have a brandy.” His voice was surprisingly loud, as though he were constantly shouting over great distances.
Ortega accepted the brandy, personally poured by the Old Man, and wiped his already moist forehead. He figured that the room temperature must be close to ninety, and he also figured that he was in for at least an hour of it.
The Old Man began, as was his custom, by energetically beating around some bushes. “How’s business?” he asked. “How many have we got for this load?”
Ortega sank into a huge, soft, chair that reduced his six feet of height to approximately pygmy stature. “It’s been a little slow today, Van. But we’ve got sixty-five so far. All healthy and yelling their heads off.”
“Um-m-m. And the breakdown?”
“Thirty-four set for the Foundation. The rest are already on the ship.”
“Good. Splendid. Any problems?”
“None to speak of. I’m still worried about parking that ship out in Arizona. If the government should stumble onto that crate—”
Vandervort laughed his alarming laugh and clapped his thin hands together. “The government! How many times must I tell you, Keith—I’ll handle the government. Or anybody else, for that matter. More brandy?”
Ortega could have struggled along without the brandy in the jungle heat, but he accepted another glass. It was part of the ritual. You simply had to wait the Old Man out. If he had something important to say, he would say it eventually. If not—well, Van was powerful enough to indulge in his whims.
“I’m a big man, Keith,” Vandervort said, his pale blue eyes darting around the room.
“I’m aware of that.”
“I can buy and sell the government, and make money on the deal. I’ve got the best experts in the world faking those records at the Foundation. Half the babies stay here on Earth, and that’s enough to cover our tracks. I’m not worried about the government.”
“So you keep saying. But I’m worried, just the same.”
Vandervort talked for twenty minutes on how unworried he was by the world government. He pointed out again and again how careful they had been, how many senators he owned, and how what they were doing was not illegal—only extralegal. Finally, after Keith Ortega estimated that he had dropped about five pounds sitting in the sweat bath with the Old Man, he edged in again toward the subject.
“How about our colonies? ” Vandervort demanded, sipping his brandy. “How about the robots?”
Keith shrugged. “O.K. as far as I know,” he said. “You know as much about it as I do. It’s still too early to get definite results. Culture A is only six years old, after all, and that’s the oldest one we’ve got.”
Vandervort drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair. “In other words,” he said, “you don’t know.”
Keith raised his eyebrows. “Van, we’re getting reports every week, and we’ve got twenty men and women up there—”
“But you don’t know. And you’re the one who has to know.” The Old Man got to his feet with an effort and paced the floor. The slippers on his feet pad-padded as he walked. His eyes began to gleam with the strange fanaticism that Keith had never understood. He stopped and jabbed a finger at Ortega. “Can’t you see that, Keith? Can’t you?”
Keith knew what Vandervort was talking about. He felt a vague unease stirring within him. “Spell it out, Van,” he said.
Vandervort walked over and stood right in front of him, breathing hard. A too-prominent vein pulsed in his neck. The heat was stifling. “All right, Keith, I’ll be more explicit. We’ve been working together for ten years, ever since I yanked you off your soapbox and put you back on the job. It was understood when you set up the colonies that you were to go out there yourself and supervise the project. I think it’s time you went, and I think you ought to stay at least a year. How about it?”
“There’s no need—”
“I think there is a need. Nothing must go wrong out there, do you hear? Nothing! You’ve master-minded enough from this end. I think you and Caroline should go out with the next shipload—and I’d hate to make that an order, Keith.”
Keith smiled. “Sit down, Van. You’ll pop an artery. And don’t threaten me, please. I’m not your slave.”
The Old Man frowned, considered, and sat down again. A faintly baffled expression crossed his face. “I should think you would want to go, Keith.”
“I’ll think it over.”
“All right. Sorry. It’s just… well, never mind. You can go, Keith.”
“Thanks. I’ll call you.”
He left the room, anxious to get out of the heat, and saw the quite amazing girl come back in before he got out the door. The butler was waiting for him, and escorted him back to the patio field.
It was night, and still raining. He lifted the copter out of the canyon and flew southeast toward his home on the desert. Far below him, almost hidden in a mask of rain, the lights of Los Angeles glittered like multi-colored diamonds embedded in black sand.
A government airsign loomed up like a pale violet ghost ahead of him: DON’T ROCK THE BOAT. Keith flew through it and it reformed itself behind him, patiently.
Carrie would be waiting.
Keith looked up, into the darkness and the rain. Venus was invisible, and a long, long way from home.
They had real steak for supper that night, which was excellent, and when they were done they retired to the annex. They hardly ever sat in the glass-and-steel living room, unless they were entertaining guests, since both of them found it impossible to relax there. The annex was primarily a cozy room stuffed off in a wing—an artless conglomeration of books, tapes, half-finished paintings, old-fashioned furniture, and one small bar.
Mostly, they lived in the annex.
Carrie slipped a battered smock over her head and began to poke at her current artistic effort, an oil painting of a cactus in the desert sun. The subject, Keith thought, was none too original. He sprawled on a couch and pretended to read, watching his wife.
She was a tiny blonde, barely five foot two, with a doll-like face that invariably earned her the designation of “cute,” an adjective she cordially detested. Ortega had married her twenty years ago, when she was twenty-five, and they were still comfortably in love with each other. They had had a good life together, and Keith found it hard to put his finger on just what had been lacking in it.
Perhaps he was at fault. He was a big man, and she had tended to walk in his shadow, both mentally and physically. Twenty years ago, he had been a leading socioculturist for the world federation, but he had become bored with the exactness and easy predictions and trivial problems. He had quit his job and gone around the world in an astonishing sailboat, looking for something he couldn’t find. Carrie had adjusted without complaint. He had formulated his Dark Age thesis that had given him fame of a sort, and had lectured and written about his culture until he discovered that no one was taking him very seriously. He had drifted into an easy sarcasm that reflected an inner unease that he could not quite understand, and even the excitement of the Vandervort project had failed to satisfy him. He was not, he knew, the easiest man in the universe to live with.
It would have been inaccurate to call Carrie depressed, but on the other hand he would have hesitated to say that she was happy. Restless. That was the word. She shifted from painting to writing, cheerfully admitting that she wasn’t much good at either, and from night-life in Los Angeles to long morning horseback rides across the desert. She seldom complained, and she never interfered. She seemed, somehow, to be waiting, always waiting, without knowing just what it was that she waited for.
They had both wanted children, but the children hadn’t come. They had toyed with the idea of adoption, but had never taken any concrete steps in that direction.
“I saw Van today, Carrie,” he said finally, lowering his book.
“Oh?” She added a dab of yellow to the brown of the sand. “Is he still alive?”
“He’ll go on forever. I wish I knew what he was after.”
Carrie squinted at the painting. “Well, we don’t know, and that’s that.”
“It’s a funny deal, Carrie. I’ve set this whole thing up with his money and his determination. I’ve spent ten years of my life on it, and I still don’t know why he’s doing it.”
“You could always quit, Keith. We could haul the old sailboat out again.”
“No, baby. I can’t quit this time.” He hesitated. “Carrie, Van wants us to go to Venus for a year to get the feel of what’s going on there.”
Carrie put down her brush and turned around, eyebrows arched. “You mean, in person?”
“In person. To Venus.”
“What else happened today—war with Sweden?”
“This is on the level, sugar. He wants us to go.”
Carrie came over and perched on the edge of the couch, almost birdlike in her smallness. She kissed him, pleasantly. She lit a cigarette and looked around her at the books and paintings and friendly walls. “When do we leave, hon?”
“Do you want to go? You know what Venus would be like. It’s a long way from everybody and everything—”
“I think it might do us good, Keith,” she said slowly. She ran her slim fingers through her pale blond hair. “I’d like to go.”
“You’d have to go to school for a while, baby.”
“I’m willing.” Her blue eyes suddenly glowed with an unexpected, surprised hope. “Keith, you know what you were always saying about this Dark Age of ours? Well, I’ve often thought… I mean—”
He looked at his wife and smiled. “You’ve thought that we’re caught in our culture, too,” he said. “We’re stale. I’ve thought the same thing. But somehow we just drift on—it isn’t easy to break away.”
“We can, Keith. I know we can.”
She wanted this. She wanted it desperately. Keith himself wasn’t sure, but he kept his indecision well disguised. He kissed his wife.
“We’ll see, baby,” he said. “We’ll see.”
The next few months went by in a hurry.
Carrie was busy being indoctrinated into the Halaja culture pattern, but Keith Ortega had too much time on his hands. After he had thought himself into the same hole about one hundred times too often, he went back to see Vandervort.
The Old Man, looking like a flushed, bearded gnome preserved for eternity in a stifling burial vault, seemed glad to see him, but slightly apprehensive. He was worried again, fretting over details. “To what do I owe the honor of this voluntary visit, Keith?” he boomed in his too-loud voice, pouring out a glass of exquisite but unwelcome brandy. “You haven’t changed your mind?”
“No, Van. We’re still going.”
“Good. Splendid!” The pale blue eyes in the red face darted nervously around the enormous room, lighting here on a vase, there on an ancient statuette, somewhere else on a rosy fireplace. Despite the terrific heat, his skin was dry and Keith knew that it was cool to the touch. The loud voice tried to fill up the room. “Well? Anything wrong?”
That was unusual directness for Vandervort, who was usually more subtle than he appeared. Keith took advantage of it. “Nothing’s wrong, Van, except with me.”
“Oh?” The Old Man hauled himself to his feet, heedless of his doctor’s instructions, popped a pill into his mouth, and washed it down with brandy. He pad-padded across the rich brown rug. The vein pulsed in his neck, feeding his brain with blood. “Well, well? Scared? Worried?”
Keith took out his pipe, filled it, and lit it. The blue smoke curled up through the damp heat and filmed across the ceiling. “I’m worried about you,” he said.
“Ah,” said Vandervort, sinking into his chair again and pouring more brandy. “You fear I may die and leave you in an… um-m-m… uncomfortable position? Is that it?”
“No. It’s your motive I’m worried about, Van.”
Vandervort narrowed his eyes to slits. “That doesn’t concern you, Keith.”
“I think I’m entitled to know.”
The Old Alan seemed to shrink in his chair, looking smaller than ever. His white beard quivered slightly. Almost, he looked—what was the word? Afraid? What could James Murray Vandervort be afraid of? “Your salary has been good,” he said, his voice not quite so loud as before.
“I had money before I knew you. The money is secondary.”
The pale blue eyes opened. “Why did you take the job, Keith?”
Keith Ortega hesitated. Well, why had he? Or did he know, really? “The ideas were mine,” he said, feeling for words. “I thought it would be interesting. I guess I was bored.” He smiled. “Maybe I wanted to rock the boat a little.” The words did not satisfy him.
“Good. Splendid. Has it ever occurred to you that maybe I just might want to see what would happen? Maybe I’m bored. Give a man a few billion dollars and he’s still, a man, Keith.”
“I’m not questioning your humanity.” Keith puffed slowly on his pipe. “But I can’t buy that story about your just being curious. I’ve watched you too closely, Van. This is more important to you than life itself. Why, Van, why?”
Vandervort looked away, into the filled emptiness of the great room, and said nothing.
Keith Ortega watched him closely. The Old Man was one hundred and five years old. Like Keith, he had no children. He had poured a billion dollars into the secret Venus project, and he had turned into a fanatic. What was he after on Venus?
Keith knew the old boy fairly well. He was certainly not just a humanitarian idealist; he cared very little about the human animal one way or the other. He wasn’t after commercial gain—after so many years, business bored him, and at best he regarded it as a means to an end. He was most emphatically not a dreamer.
“Maybe,” Keith said finally, to break the long silence, “you want to kick man upstairs to the stars. Maybe you believe in destiny.”
The Old Man laughed his booming laugh, his red face flushing with the strain. “Maybe I do, Keith,” he chuckled. “Maybe I do.”
There was more talk, but it was singularly unproductive. Early in the morning, without finding what he had come for, Keith said good night and left. The Old Man stayed in his chair in the too-hot room, smiling a little, his eyes nervously peering into the shadows, sipping his brandy.
Keith lifted his copter and flew toward home, with the lights of Los Angeles below him and a full moon above him. The night wind, deflected by the vents, was fresh and cold in his face. High over his head, the freight lanes were shadowed with ships.
The violet sign floated in the air: DON’T ROCK THE BOAT.
All the way home he thought of Old Man Vandervort, sitting alone in his castle, and the simple question whispered through his mind:
Why?
Some questions, fortunately, were easier to answer.
Keith Ortega had answered some of them to his own satisfaction a long time ago. He had written a book, with the somewhat melodramatic title of The New Age of Darkness, and the book in a sense had led Vandervort to the idea of the Venus project. The book had been widely read, and was generally regarded as possibly correct and certainly amusing.
No one took the book very seriously—which tended to confirm its thesis.
No one but Vandervort.
What was the book about?
It was about the planet Earth.
The story of Earth was a familiar one. After a million years or so of bashing in each other’s brains with bigger and better weapons, the human animal had finally achieved a fairly uniform, stable, planet-wide civilization. He had done it out of sheer necessity, just a cat’s whisker this side of nuclear extinction, but he had done it.
By the year 2050, the dream of One World was no longer a dream.
The human animal was living on it.
In his understandable haste, however, he had overlooked a few basic points.
One civilization had taken over from many diverse civilizations. Given the facts of history, it could not have been otherwise. An essentially Western culture, due to a running headstart in technology, had spread itself thickly around the globe. It had taken root and prospered wherever it had touched. It had swallowed and digested every other way of life on the planet Earth.
There was One World, and there was peace.
A standardized, uniform, flourishing, world-wide civilization.
The human animal began to breathe more easily.
There was a joker in the deck, even though his laugh was a long time in coming. One World meant one culture pattern. There had been no orchestration of differences, but simply an almost complete obliteration of differences. When man was in a hurry, he took the quickest available short-cuts.
It was a good culture pattern, by and large, and the human animal was better off than he had ever been before. It was a lifeway of plenty, a culture of unlimited technological resources, a philosophy founded on the dignity of man. Earth became a paradise—literally, there was a paradise on Earth. The jungles and the deserts and the arctic wastes, when they were needed, were converted into rich, green land. The power of the sun was harnessed, and harnessed cheaply. Vandervort Enterprises made a thousand fortunes from solar power, but they delivered the goods.
The culture flowered.
The worlds of the solar system were briefly explored, written up, and ignored. Both Mars and Venus, contrary to early semi-scientific guesses, were found to be habitable. Habitable, but not very palatable. Mars was an almost waterless desert, and Venus a strange jungle world that never saw the sun. With the untapped resources of Earth ready and waiting in the back yard, the other planets were not worth colonizing.
One thing about Paradise: nobody wanted to leave it.
The human animal stayed home in droves.
He had a good thing on Earth. It was up to him to appreciate it, to protect it, to cherish it. The new golden rule was: DON’T ROCK THE BOAT.
The uniform culture pattern, the framework for human existence, filled out. Every culture has a potential beyond which it cannot go. Every culture has a stopping point. It can achieve its values, attain its goals, follow every path that is open to it. When that happens, whether in Greece or Rome or Stone-Age Australia, the culture exhausts itself and begins merely to repeat what it has already done. Throughout history when a civilization reached its climax and leveled off, there was a new, fresh, vital culture somewhere else to take up the slack and go off in a new direction, jolting the old civilization out of its rut.
This time there were no rival cultures.
There was nothing to take over.
By the year 2100, the civilization of Earth had shot its ammunition. It was a perfect, static, frozen Western culture. It began to repeat itself over and over, endlessly. It went nowhere, and took its own sweet time doing it.
It was not decadent. It did not retrogress. It did not really deteriorate. It simply jogged along its well-worn circular cinder track, not working up a sweat, mildly pleased with itself.
Most people did not know what had happened, of course. How could they? Did the citizens of the Dark Ages know that the ages were dark? More significantly, did they give a damn?
People were as happy as they had ever been, after a fashion. They were well-fed. They were comfortable. There was no atomic horror staring them in the face. Kids still fell in love, and spring still came around every year.
Go up to the man in the copter. Tell him that his culture has run out of gas.
So what? DON’T ROCK THE BOAT.
Still, there were signs. Ignorance always carries a price tag.
The loss of cultural vitality made itself manifest—very slowly, the birth rate began to fall. The number of suicides, even in paradise, began to go up. People killed themselves for reasons that bordered on the whimsical. Parents who had children often did not want them. The number of illegitimate children, despite the lowered birthrate, went up.
The culture was aimless.
The word wasn’t decay.
It was boredom.
These were the facts, as Keith Ortega had worked them out. These were the facts that Vandervort had to deal with. These were the facts that added up to Venus.
At five o’clock in the morning on the first day of September in the year 2150, Keith Ortega and his wife boarded the Foundation ship hidden under an unreclaimed area of the Arizona desert.
In addition to Keith and Carrie, the ship carried two pilots, a navigator, a doctor, fifty babies, twenty-five special humanoid robots, computers, and supplies.
Keith and Carrie sat in their cabin. There was nothing to see—no windows, no viewscreens, no control panels, no flashing lights. There was nothing to do. Neither of them had ever taken off in a spaceship before. They waited.
A low whine whistled through the ship, and steadied into a low, powerful throbbing. The beat of the air-conditioner picked up. An electronic relay thunked heavily into position.
“Come on, come on,” Keith whispered.
The lights dimmed. A muffled, coughing roar cut loose from somewhere far away. There was a quick giddiness, a sudden second when the heart skipped a beat. Then the lights brightened again, the sound steadied, and the ship’s gentle gravity field took hold.
The ship went up.
Up, up through the pale sunlight of early morning. Up through the still, soundless sea that never knew morning or night, laughter or tears. Earth was gone.
Keith smiled at his wife and wondered how long it would be before either of them saw a blue sky again.
Venus.
Keith had a mental picture of it, and had even seen photographs and scientific reports brought back by the early expeditions. He thought he knew what he was getting into.
The reality, of course, was different.
When they stepped down from the ship at the receiving station, twenty-five million miles from Earth, his first surprised impression was one of sameness.
Even scientific accounts tended to emphasize the unusual and the unique. Reading old accounts of the Sahara or the Amazon Basin, it was possible to forget that those places were on the same Earth with Los Angeles or London or New Delhi—possible even to get the impression that the inhabitants weren’t really human beings at all.
More than anything else, the receiving station area of Venus looked like an obscure corner of Earth on a mildly unusual day. It was very cloudy, which was to be expected, and the air was like thick gray fog. It was warm and damp, and the atmosphere tasted artificially sweet and heady. Gray-green vegetation circled the station like a choking wall, and the hush in the air was a thick and heavy oil.
But the really alien aspects of Venus—the diffuse colonies of oxygen-breathing organisms that webbed the higher clouds, the strange temperature currents that precipitated the water vapor before it could rise to the four-mile carbon dioxide bands—were invisible.
While the doctor and the perfectly humanoid robots unloaded the babies, Keith and Carrie started across to the dome-shaped station house. Mark Kamoto spotted them before they had taken ten steps. He ran up to them, waving and hollering.
“Hey!” he yelled. “Welcome to the Underwater Kingdom!”
Four hours and two pots of coffee later, they were still talking full blast, in that inevitable outburst of verbiage which occurs whenever long-separated friends are reunited.
Keith grinned at Mark, who looked thinner and tougher than when he had left Earth three years before. “We’d like to get out and look at it,” he said finally.
“We’ve got some work to do first,” Mark said, “so I think we’d better wait until tomorrow. That’ll be about eleven Earth-days yet.”
“Don’t play pioneer and greenhorn with us, old boy,” Keith said. “We know how long the night is.”
“That’s what you think,” Mark told him. “You know it on a clock; wait till you Live it!”
By the time the night had come and gone and the gray light of day had rolled around again, Keith was ready to admit that Mark had been right. The ten Earth-days of the Venusian night had been busy and full, and spiced with the exoticism of the truly new.
Still, they were long, long days.
It rained a good fifty per cent of the time—a hard, steady, monotonous rain that drummed into the jungle with unholy steadiness. The clouds glowed with a pale phosphorescence. To a man born and raised on Earth, the effect was disconcerting. It was as if you somehow slept through every day, and whenever you woke up it was always a cloudlighted midnight, and whenever you went to bed it was midnight still.
With Mark piloting the copter, they took off into the morning fog and soon left the station clearing far behind them, four babies, comprising the quota for Halaja, shared the back of the cabin.
One of them, a solemn-eyed child with long curls and a pug nose, would be Keith’s son until he returned to Earth.
“Look at the birds,” Carrie said.
There were thousands of them, as large as hawks and brilliantly colored. They swarmed above the gray-green jungles in plumed squadrons, slanting down occasionally to snare tiny lizardlike reptiles that lived on the broad leaves at the top of the forest. More than anything else, they resembled the aquatic birds over the seas of Earth, diving after fish.
The copter flew due west, in a lane between the swollen mountains of the clouds and the rolling roof of the jungle. Once they passed an open plain, crisscrossed with small streams and dotted with grazing animals. There were many swamps and bogs, but few hills.
“Hang on,” Mark said.
Venus promptly exhibited her favorite stunt: raining. It got just a trifle darker, and then the sponges of gray clouds began to drip. The copter cut wetly through the downpour, wobbling slightly when it ran into semi-rivers in the sky. There were no high winds, however. There was no lightning and no thunder.
In eight hours they reached Halaja.
From the air, half hidden through a drizzle of rain, the village of Halaja looked like a faded photograph of an ancient frontier fort on Earth. It had no wall around it, but the wooden houses were built in a square around a central plaza, and were interconnected by covered plank passageways. In the center of the plaza was a circular pool, and around the pool was a ring of fire-pits for cooking. For perhaps two miles in three directions around the village the jungle had been cut back and the land was planted with Sirau-fruit. To the west, there was an open field, and beyond that was the Smoke River, its slow blue water winding lazily through the dense gray-green of the jungle. Several moving figures were visible in the plaza, looking like tiny black ants from the copter’s altitude.
Halaja. A place where people lived.
Keith took Carrie’s hand.
Mark set the copter down in the damp athletic field to the west of the village.
Side by side, the three of them walked across the field and along a wet path through a patch of Sirau-fruit. Keith carried a baby uncomfortably in his arms while Mark, as an old hand, hauled two of them. Carrie took the small gentleman with the pug nose. The spray of thin raindrops in the air cooled their faces and dripped down the backs of their necks.
“Hey!” came a shout from the village. “Company!”
A cluster of adults came running out to greet them. They were simply dressed in shirts and shorts, with their feet bare. Most of the kids were too young to walk, but two of them toddled out as far as the gate and stared wide-eyed at the procession.
“Looks like old-home week,” Keith grinned.
“You won’t get many visitors in Halaja,” Mark said.
The villagers swarmed around them, all talking at once. They pounded Keith on the back and gravely shook Carrie’s hand. The babies were taken away from them, much to Keith’s relief, and there was much clucking and laughing and general baby-talk.
Bill and Ruth Knudsen were the only human couple in the village, but if Keith had not known them previously he could never have picked them out. The robot humanoids were virtually perfect imitations.
“Keith!” boomed Bill Knudsen, a big blond in need of a shave. “It’s good to see you!”
Ruth, beaming from ear to ear, said: “So glad you decided to come. We’ve fixed up a room we know you’ll like.” The delight in her eyes spoke eloquently of her loneliness for another human woman.
They all surged into the village with a whoop and a holler.
Six hours later, Mark took the copter and left.
Their life in Halaja had begun.
It was surprisingly easy to adjust to the life of the village. Different as it was from the life they had known on Earth, they had been trained in its ways and fitted smoothly into its routine. The Sirau-fruit did not require an inordinate amount of time, and the free hours were filled with games and rituals and the telling of sacred stories—most of which Keith had written himself.
Ceremonialism, in a very real sense, was Halaja’s business.
Carrie had named their adopted son Bobby. After two Earth-months in the village, Bobby was almost a year old and growing rapidly. He was probably no more admirable than other small children in Halaja, but Keith and Carrie thought that he was.
One night Keith took the boy to the pool in the center of the plaza. He sat down on a wooden bench and balanced Bobby on his knee.
It had been raining for six Earth-days, but now it had stopped. A cool, sweet breeze blew in from the dripping jungles. The night-glow from the massed clouds in the sky was like soft moonlight, coating the land with warm silver. The perfumes from jungle flowers eddied like streams in the air. Yellow firelight spilled out from across the plaza, and the houses of the village were black shadows under the pale mountains of the clouds.
“Bobby,” he said to his son, “we call this pool the Home of the Spirit. Perhaps there are those who would say that no spirit exists, but we know better.”
The boy gurgled gleefully, paying no attention.
Keith tilled his pipe with one hand and lit it with his lighter. “It won’t be many years, Bobby, before you will be meeting other men and women before this pool—mariners from Acosta by the northern sea, industrialists from Wlan, Mepas, and Carin, great hunters from Pueklor, people from far Equete, where space flight is already a dream. You will be dancing with them, and singing with them, and sharing ideas with them. You will be one of the participants from the first generation of men to live on Venus. You will meet the others who are growing up on this world, meet them in peace because that will be your way of life, and together… what’s that, Bobby?”
Bobby burped genially.
Keith laughed. “You won’t understand what I’m saying, son. Not yet. But one day you will understand. One day—”
He felt a hand on his shoulder.
“Getting pretty melodramatic for an old man, aren’t you?” asked Carrie, kissing his ear and sitting down at his side.
“Well, I sure wasn’t bowling Bobby over with my profundity,” Keith admitted. “He’s bored.”
“Give him a few years, darling.”
Keith looked at his wife in the cloudlight. Her blue eyes were brighter than they had ever been on Earth. Sitting there by him, so small in the night, she was filled with a relaxed happiness that made him feel good just to be around her.
“In a few years Bobby will have a robot for an old man,” he said.
“I know.”
The cool breeze that had swept in after the rains faded to a sluggish warmth. A horde of hungry insects flew into the plaza, intent upon demonstrating the digestibility of human blood. All the people had been injected to keep the pests off, but they were a humming nuisance just the same.
The three of them walked away from the pool under the glowing clouds and went inside.
Eight Earth-months had passed.
Outside, in the plaza surrounding the Home of the Spirit, the drums throbbed rhythmically and a ritual chant filled the air. The robot humanoids were conducting another in the round of sacred ceremonies, while the children of the village crowded around the pool raptly, absorbing the words and music and sentiments that were fast becoming their own.
Inside, in the pleasant center room of their wooden house, Keith and Carrie sat on a barkcloth mat and listened. Across from them were Ruth and Bill Knudsen.
“One thing about being human,” Bill said, “you can let the robots do all the work, at least until the kids grow up enough to wonder why we’re not out there yelling and stomping with the rest.”
“What made you come out here, anyway?” asked Keith.
Bill shrugged. “Ruth tricked me into it.”
His wife, a rather plain woman with a deep strength that made her attractive, nodded. “Too many pretty gals back home. I figured Bill was safer here.”
Bill and Ruth seldom talked seriously about themselves. Keith wondered whether it was a symptom of the age they lived in, or if men had always been reticent about the things that really counted.
“It’s been wonderful having you and Carrie with us,” Ruth said. “We’ll miss you when you go.”
“You may not feel that way four months from now.”
“I think we all need a little ceremonial drink,” Bill boomed. “This joint is getting maudlin.”
Keith turned to Carrie. “What say, high priestess?”
“As long as it’s purely ceremonial,” Carrie said, “it would seem to be our duty.”
“By a strange coincidence,” Bill informed them, “I happen to have some good stuff concealed in my quarters.”
“Go, boy,” Keith said.
Bill ducked through the connecting tunnel, his bare feet thumping on the boards, and returned with a fifth of bourbon. Carrie produced four clay drinking utensils and a pot of water.
They drank up, gratefully. Much as they all loved Halaja and what it stood for, it was still not their village. They were all playing parts, and once in a while it felt good to get away.
From the plaza came the thudding of the drums and the undulating chants of the robot elders of Halaja. The children were very quiet.
“What we need are a few ceremonial toasts,” Bill said.
“Check,” said Keith.
They drank one to Old Man Vandervort.
They drank one to Earth.
They drank a few more on general principles.
By the time the fifth was gone, they were all feeling pretty good.
“I guess,” Carrie said finally, “that this is as good a time as any to spring the glad tidings.”
“Um-m-m,” said Keith. “Spring away.”
Carrie brushed a strand of her blond hair out of her eyes. “To be unutterably crude,” she said, “I’m pregnant.”
Keith found himself on his feet. Suddenly aware that his mouth was open, he closed it and sat down again.
Bill and Ruth laughed their congratulations.
Carrie looked thoroughly pleased with herself.
“We’ll have to hurry up and get out of here,” Keith said. “Get back to Earth, hospitals—”He stopped, catching the expression on his wife’s face.
“Easy does it,” Carrie said. “No hot water needed yet.”
“Sorry,” Keith subsided.
“Darling,” she said slowly, “do we have to go back? Do you really want your child to be born on Earth?”
The drums stopped and the singing died to a lonely humming in the plaza by the Home of the Spirit.
Keith smiled. “It’s up to you, Carrie,” he said. “It’s up to you.”
They stayed where they were.
One year later, after their son had been born and named in the naming ceremony of Halaja, Keith got a message from the Old Man. Mark flew it out to him, and it read:
MY DEAR KEITH: IT PAINS ME TO STATE THAT I AM UNHAPPY ABOUT YOUR REPORTS ON OUR PROJECT. I HAVE FOUND THEM SKIMPY AND UNINFORMATIVE. PLEASE MAKE THEM MUCH MORE DETAILED IN THE FUTURE. IT IS IMPERATIVE THAT I KNOW EVERYTHING THAT TRANSPIRES IN OUR COLONIES. REPEAT: IMPERATIVE. HOW IS THE CEREMONIAL FRAMEWORK SHAPING UP? ARE THE INDUSTRIES OF WLEN AND MEPAS AND CARIN PROPERLY INTEGRATED WITH THE SPECULATIONS OF THE EQUETE SPACE PHILOSOPHERS? HOW ABOUT THE INDIVIDUALISTIC ATTITUDES OF THE PUEKLOR HUNTERS? I MUST KNOW EVERYTHING. HOW MUCH LONGER WILL YOU STAY? HOW ARE THE ROBOTS WORKING OUT? WHEN WILL THE FIRST DEATHS OCCUR? SOME SLIGHT AGITATION HERE. RUMOR THAT ONE OF OUR SHIPS REPORTED IN TAKE-OFF. RUMOR OF INVESTIGATION. BUT I CAN HANDLE GOVERNMENT. FOUNDATION STILL GOING SMOOTHLY AND MORE CHILDREN ON THE WAY. MUST KNOW COMPLETE RESULTS OF ALL NEW DEVELOPMENTS. UNDERSTAND YOU NOW HAVE SON. PLEASE MAKE ALL REPORTS MORE THOROUGH IN FUTURE. (SIGNED) JAMES MURRAY VANDERVORT.
The message worried Keith, and he did not show it to Carrie. The rather crotchety demands for fuller information were typical enough for Van, but the hints of possible suspicions on the part of the government were disquieting.
Despite the Old Man’s power and influence, he did not run Earth. Undynamic as the world government might be, it still could not be ignored.
Peace on Earth had been won at the price of conformity. The era of plenty was founded on a stable system where people thought alike, believed alike, talked alike. The dream of mankind through centuries of war and hate and fear had been achieved. Man had what he had always wanted, and he was in no hurry to change. His motto was simple:
DON’T ROCK THE BOAT.
Well, the Venus colonies were rocking that boat.
They were blowing up a storm.
It was true that they were not exactly illegal; there were no laws against fresh cultures on Venus. No one had ever thought about them—there quite literally were no legal precedents.
They were outside the law.
But if they were discovered the game was up. Their entire effectiveness depended upon secrecy. The colonies had to have time to grow up and develop and charge their lifeways with life and vigor. They had to contact Earth—not the other way around.
Once, to Keith, it had all been an unusually interesting scientific experiment; nothing more than that. He had not, of course, been worried about the outcome. There was absolutely no danger that the new cultures might flower only to bring war back to a peaceful Earth. The colonies were planned so that war was impossible.
The early socioculturists had made a science out of the primitive social disciplines of psychology, sociology, anthropology, and economics. The Venus colonies were products of that science.
One thing about a science: it works.
If an engineer knows his business, his bridge does not fall down.
If a socioculturist knows his business, his culture does what he wants it to.
Keith, in a way, had been building a bridge. True, it was a bridge on the grand scale, but still it was a bridge. He had not been too emotionally involved in it.
That was before he had come to Venus.
That was before he had lived in Halaja.
That was before he had known that his own son would have to walk across the bridge he was building.
He did not want anything to happen to that bridge.
And, holding the message in his hand, the old question nagged at his mind. He could see the Old Man as he had last seen him—a flushed, bearded gnome, pad-padding across the rug in his stifling, incredible room, the fanatical blue eyes that peered into the dark and shadowed corners—
This was the Old Man’s bridge, too.
He was the one who had insisted that it be built, knowing he could not live to see it, or benefit by it.
Keith’s question came back, insistently:
Why?
The years drifted by, and for Keith and Carrie they were supremely happy years.
They raised their two sons—Bobby, the adopted one, and Keith, their own child. They watched them grow, strong and straight, and they never regretted depriving them of Earth. Each child loves the culture into which he is born, and for Keith and Bobby Halaja was home.
The days were long and filled with work and laughter. The Sirau-fruit flowered in the cleared jungle fields and the great hawklike birds splashed vivid colors across the rolling gray clouds of the sky. In the field by the slow blue water of the Smoke River games were played with the fierce intensity of a World Series on Earth—and, in fact, one of the games played was baseball. It was strange to hear the clean crack of a bat singing through the humid Venusian air—
There were expeditions through the jungles, encounters with strange animals, the perfumed smell of tropical flowers.
And always, endlessly, the rituals and ceremonies that were to be Halaja’s contribution to the emerging pattern of life on Venus.
There were the great torrential rains that swept through the log houses of the village—rain that drummed on the plank passageways and churned the water in the little circular pool in the center of the plaza. At night, the clouds glowed with the soft silver of an ageless enchantment, and Keith and Carrie knew what it was to fall in love again.
The children grew until they were no longer children.
The robot humanoids began to fade into the background, as they aged before the children’s eyes. The first of them was scheduled to die in less than a year.
Earth seemed very far away.
And then, fourteen years after he had first seen the village of Halaja, Keith heard the sound he had been dreading.
There was a sudden jagged scream that split the clouds above his head, a sharp roar that clattered through the gray rain of a long, lazy afternoon. Keith could not see the thing, but he knew what it was.
A spaceship.
And not a Foundation ship, either.
The world government still had a few spacecraft on operational status—a few lonely skeletons left from the half-forgotten fleet that had long ago explored the solar system and pronounced it useless.
A few ships used for infrequent investigations, a few ships to back up the slogan:
DON’T ROCK THE BOAT.
Keith Ortega stood in the rain and swore.
“Carrie! You look after things—tell Bill I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“Be careful, Keith.” She stood in the doorway of their home, small and fragile in her shirt and shorts.
Little Keith—who was not so little any more—and Bobby listened curiously to the echoes of the decelerating ship and wondered what their father was worried about.
“What’s up, Dad?” asked Keith.
“Can we go with you? We can help,” Bobby assured him.
Keith looked at them with what he hoped was a stern expression. “You’re not children now,” he said. “You’re young men, and you have responsibilities. Have you forgotten about the ceremonies tonight?”
“Sorry, Dad. We just thought—”
“I’ll attend to this. It’s nothing important.”
“Well, gee, what was that funny noise?”
“That’s what I want to find out,” Keith said. “Some sort of storm up above the clouds, I think.”
“O.K., Dad.”
He left them in the rain and sprinted out of the village and along the pathway that led to the Smoke River. He swam the river, which was hardly wetter than the pelting rain in the air, and hurried along a concealed path through the jungle. By the time he reached his hidden emergency copter he was breathing hard.
If those kids ever saw that spaceship, there would be hell to pay.
He took the copter up into the sea of gray rain, gunned it to full power, and headed for the dome-shaped station house far to the east. Undoubtedly, they had tracked a Foundation ship from Earth. Since those ships were carefully shielded from the native colonies, they always landed at the station clearing, where Keith himself had landed fourteen years before.
Keith stared into the rain and clenched his fists.
If that ship was a government ship—and it had to be—then there was going to be trouble.
He could not bear the thought of failure now.
Somehow, that ship had to be stopped.
In eight hours, he landed at the station clearing.
The rain had stopped and he saw the ship as soon as he came over the dripping wall of the gray-green jungle. It was a big one, and it had the blue symbol of the world government on its nose. He set the copter down next to it, his heart thumping like a hammer in his chest.
The ship loomed silently over his head, its very hugeness impressing upon him the absurdity of his own plans. What could he do—attack the thing with a club and a handful of rocks?
It was still daylight, but he saw a gleam of yellow light inside the dome of the station house. He didn’t know what he was going to do, but he did know that he was going to do something.
He walked across the field, acutely aware of the vast ship behind him. Could that ship be destroyed? Would he do it if he could? And if he did, wouldn’t that just confirm the suspicions on Earth—wouldn’t they send more ships, more men?
He shook his head. He wasn’t thinking straight.
The cold knot in his stomach drew tighter.
There were no windows in the round station house, so there was no way for him to sneak a look inside. He simply walked up to the door, knocked, and went in.
A large central room, stacked with supplies. A door to his right, where babies were received. Two humanoid robots conversing in low tones against one wall. A bright yellow light in the ceiling.
Toward the back, another door, partly open. Voices.
Keith picked his way through the piles of supplies and knocked on the half-open door.
“Who is it?” Mark’s voice,
“Keith.”
“Come on in!”
He went inside. There, at the table where he and Carrie and Mark had shared their coffee so many years ago, there was more coffee.
And a man in a uniform.
“Keith, this is Captain Nostrand—Space Security. Captain, this is Keith Ortega.”
They shook hands.
“I’ve heard of you, sir,” Captain Nostrand said. “I never expected to meet you under these… unusual… circumstances.”
Keith sized up the captain. After the mental image he had built up in his mind of a veritable ogre sent out from Earth to crush his dream, Captain Nostrand was a pleasant surprise. He was middle-aged, relaxed, with graying hair. He had quiet brown eyes and an easy smile.
He looked like a nice guy—if that helped any.
“Mark, what’s the deal?”
Mark Kamoto shrugged and poured Keith a cup of coffee. “I guess you’ve about figured it,” he said.
“I heard the ship. I knew it wasn’t one of ours.”
Captain Nostrand sat down and crossed his long legs. “The government has been getting reports off and on of unexplained spaceship take-offs,” he said. “They finally decided to find out what was going on. They tracked one ship here, and sent me up to have a look-see. Simple enough.”
“How many men are with you?”
Nostrand smiled quizzically. “You planning on starting a fracas, Dr. Ortega? I’m unarmed, of course.”
Keith felt the hot blood in his cheeks. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m upset—to put it mildly. Look, what are you going to do?”
Nostrand sipped his coffee. “What do you think?”
“You can’t go back and tell them, captain. This is too big. You don’t understand. You can’t tell them.”
“Want to bet?”
“Easy, now,” Mark said. “Drink your coffee, Keith. It won’t do any good to go off half-cocked.”
Keith downed his coffee at one searing gulp.
“You’re mighty nervous,” Captain Nostrand grinned. “What have you got out in that jungle anyhow? A swamp full of monsters?”
Keith managed to laugh, not too successfully. “Hasn’t Mark told you?”
“I haven’t said anything,” Mark cut in. “But the captain has sharp eyes.”
“Has he got a cigarette?”
“Sure,” said Nostrand. He fished out a pack and handed one to Keith. The smoke tasted good.
“Look, Captain Nostrand. I’m sorry I came busting in here like a fugitive from a nightmare. It’s just that this thing is terribly important—more important than you can imagine. One word from you now will destroy two decades of work. You and your crew have got to be made to see—”
“The crew’s robot,” Nostrand said. “I’m the only one you’ve got to deal with.”
“Then look—”
“You listen to me a minute,” Captain Nostrand said slowly. “I wasn’t sent out here to pass judgment on whatever it is you’re doing. That’s not my job. I was just sent out to see if you’re doing anything up here. You are, that’s clear. I’ll go back and tell them there’s an unreported settlement here, and that’s the end of it as far as I’m concerned. Nothing personal, understand?”
Keith slammed his fist down on the table. “It is personal!” he said, amazed at his own vehemence. If he had needed any proof that the Keith Ortega who had come out here from Earth fourteen years ago was dead, he had it now.
Outside, the rain started up again, swishing down the sides of the station dome.
Desperately, Keith leaned across the table, staring at the man in the old uniform of Space Security. There was one chance, a long one—
“Nostrand,” he said carefully, “how many men besides yourself are still in the space service?”
The captain poured himself another cup of coffee. “You already know that, Dr. Ortega.”
“A hundred? Two hundred?”
“A hundred and twenty.”
“Mostly maintenance men?”
“Yes.”
The rain came down harder, rushing like a river over the slick bulge of the station house.
“What made you stay in the space service, captain? What made you stay when space was dead?”
Captain Nostrand shrugged, but his brown eyes narrowed.
“How many flights have you made, captain? How many in the last thirty years?”
“Four,” he said slowly. “Three were runs to Luna.”
“What made you stick it out, captain?”
Nostrand stood up. “That’s none of your business.”
Keith faced him. “It is my business. I know you, Nostrand. I know why you went out into space when other men stayed at home.”
Captain Nostrand shrugged again.
“Captain, listen. I’m asking you to wait one Earth-month before you go back. Let me show you what we’re doing here—all of it, every bit of it. If you still think it’s your duty to tell them after that, O.K. If you don’t, then you can report that the rocket they tracked was just a private ship out on a lark—some crazy back-to-the-good-old-days enthusiast. Vandervort can fix it up—yes, I’ll tell you all about him, too. Captain, you’ve got to stay now—it’s your duty to find out everything they want to know. Radio back and tell them it will take you a little time to investigate. Will you do that, Nostrand?”
“What’s in it for you?”
Keith kept his voice even. “If you understand what Venus means, you’ll never tell them. You know and I know that Earth may never go back into space on her own—it’s too late. I can’t put this into words, captain. But I know what made you go into space even when space was almost forgotten. I know. Have you forgotten?”
“I haven’t forgotten.”
“O.K. I’m asking for a month.”
Captain Nostrand sat down and sipped his coffee. He listened to the rain roaring down outside. He looked at Mark Kamoto, who remained silent.
“You make a mean speech, friend,” Nostrand said finally, “I can see your month. It had better be good.”
Keith was exhausted but confident.
“Pal,” he said, “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
Beyond the station house, the warm rain fell into the thick jungles and the long gray afternoon began to fade into evening.
At the northernmost extremity of the one inhabited continent of Venus, a brown peninsula thrust out into the swells of a vast gray-green sea.
In the copter that hovered just under the cloud masses that roofed the world, too far away to be seen with the naked eye, Ralph Nostrand brought his viewer into focus and looked into it intently.
“So that’s Acosta,” he said.
“Yes,” Keith said. “Watch off the coast there—see those ships coming in? They’re whalers.”
“Whalers?”
“Not really whales, of course. They’re true fish, not mammals. But they’re plenty big enough—and they hunt them with hand harpoons.”
“Funny looking place.”
The viewer showed a small settlement of perhaps one hundred gabled stone houses, placed on a shelf of rock overlooking the tossing sea. Most of the men and boys were out in the boats, but the women of the town were clearly visible in the streets.
“There,” Keith said. “The near boat crew is beaching one.”
In the viewer, the men and boys leaped out of their sturdy canoes into shallow water. They all grabbed a line from the near ship and ran with it up onto the beach. They formed a row and heaved.
An enormous black shadow-shape slid out of the sea and was hauled up on the rocks, its great tail still bobbing in the gray-green water. It rolled over, white belly upwards, and the men began to dance around it, chanting.
“Whew,” said Nostrand. “That’s quite a baby.”
“Acosta is a pretty rugged place,” Keith said. “It’s a colony of maritime adventurers, as I told you. It’s a people who will have a long tradition behind them of dangerous voyages.”
Ralph Nostrand eyed him. “Shrewd.”
“I know my racket.”
The captain returned to his viewer and watched for a long time. Finally he nodded. “Next,” he said.
Mark took the copter up higher to hit a favorable wind belt, and they flew through the warm clouds above the jungles, moving inland. In four hours, they went down again.
The first of the Three Cities was spread out on the viewer.
“Wlan?” asked Nostrand.
“That’s right.”
Wlan was a far cry from the seaside settlement of Acosta. This was a genuine small city, with a population of perhaps five thousand people. It was neatly arranged into squares, with snug modern houses, and it was dominated by two large buildings that could only be factories.
“The Three Cities are our industrialists,” Keith said. “Of course, they’re not turning much out yet, and the economy is highly artificial at present, but they’ve got the basic techniques down pat. We’ve set up an embryonic technological culture, and the kids have been brought up to appreciate what that means. We’ve given them enough leads so that they’ll have aircraft within a century.”
Nostrand nodded. “One thing I’ve been meaning to ask you, Keith.”
“Shoot.”
“Is it really fair to bring these kids up here and determine their lives for them? It seems—sort of wrong, somehow.”
The copter veered toward the southeast, rising again into the clouds.
“I know what you mean,” Keith said. “It seems to deny them their free will. That’s not true, though—you know that yourself, if you’ll just stop a bit and think. After all, a child is always born into a culture he has not built himself; that’s a characteristic of human beings. In that sense, a kid’s future is always determined for him. What he does with the materials of his culture, though, is up to him. So long as he has the stuff, he’ll make out O.K. anywhere. Don’t forget that to the kid this is his culture; it’s home. He’s never known anything else, and he’d fight to stay there. And don’t forget, too, that those kids were abandoned by their own parents on Earth. This beats a Foundation orphanage, believe me.”
“I surrender,” Nostrand grinned.
“Excuse the sermon, Ralph. It’s hell to really have faith in something again. We’re not used to it, back on Earth.”
The copter paused briefly at Mepas and Carin, the other two nearby industrial towns, and then flew southwest across the continent. They set the copter on automatic, caught what sleep they could, and in sixteen hours were high above the skin tents of Pueklor. The gray sky and the massed oceans of the clouds had not changed—and there were still eight Earth-days left before the coming of the pale Venusian night.
“Looks like an Indian tribe,” commented Nostrand, looking closely into the viewer. “I remember seeing some old photographs somewhere.”
Keith nodded. “They’re modeled on the ancient Plains Indians of North America,” he said. “You’ll notice how different the country is here—tall grass instead of jungle. Pueklor has a basically hunting culture; they go after an animal not too unlike the old bison, but much slower. They hunt ’em on foot.”
Far below, the skin tents of Pueklor stood in a large ring in the grassy fields of the southwestern plains. Curls of smoke drifted up into the still air and a group of children were running races along the banks of a sluggish river.
“You’ll catch it more clearly when you see some of them in Halaja,” Keith said. “Pueklor is an extremely proud culture—filled with the joy of living, if I can put it that way. They’ll lend a very real esprit de corps to the continental culture that will be here a century from now.”
The copter swung eastward through thick sheets of rain, and by the time they reached Equete in the southeastern hills the three men were bone tired. Nevertheless, the sight of Equete nestled in a rocky valley picked them up.
Equete was a series of low, rounded rock structures that harmonized beautifully with the rugged grandeur of its surroundings. It blended browns and pinks and greens into a pleasing pattern that accentuated the banded colors of the land.
“That’s your baby, Ralph.”
Nostrand looked down at its image in the viewer and tried to see in Equete what he was supposed to see.
“Not much visible from here,” he said.
Keith smiled wearily. “The business of Equete is ethics—ethics and elaborate social complexities. In addition, this is where the basic research is being done that will one day lead to the independent development of space flight on Venus. See that tall, domed structure over there? We’ve given them enough hints so that they’ll develop a cloud-piercing telescope before too many years have gone by. Philosophically, we’ve already provided them with a logical picture of the universe—and their ethics demand space flight as the first great step in the fulfillment of man’s destiny.”
“Sounds good,” Ralph said.
“It is good,” Mark corrected.
“It’s all so complicated,” Ralph Nostrand said tiredly. “I try to see it the way you do—but it isn’t easy. All these new cultures, growing up independently of Earth, groping toward space travel in a hundred years or so. Don’t forget what Earth is like these days—what if these people come swooping down and smash it to pieces?”
“When you see the ceremony at Halaja,” Keith said, “you won’t worry about that.”
Captain Nostrand was unconvinced, but he held his tongue. The copter lifted again into the clouds and flew northward, back to the hidden receiving station where the great Space Security ship still waited in the late morning fog.
Keith closed his burning eyes and tried to relax. He knew that Nostrand was an unusual man—he had to be or he would never have gone into space in this century of stability and easy living. But could he see Venus as they saw Venus? Could he see Venus as the cradle of a new and vigorous culture that would jolt Earth from the rut into which it had fallen?
If the Coming Together at Halaja failed to move him, they were through.
And this was the first of the vast ceremonies to be conducted almost entirely by the children who were now young men and women. The old robot humanoids would stay strictly in the background. Surely their teaching had been effective; it had to be.
But when Keith dozed off into a troubled sleep, his dreams were as gray and cheerless as the wet clouds above his head.
It was the time of the Coming Together at Halaja.
Five Earth-days were left out of the month that Keith had asked for.
With his wife and Captain Nostrand he stood in the doorway of his log home and waited for the ceremony to begin.
It was night, and the soft silver cloudlight glinted in the Home of the Spirit and touched the central plaza of Halaja with pale and enchanted fingers. Great orange fires blazed inside the ring of the wooden houses and passageways, throwing black, twisted shadows on the walls.
Drums beat with a slow rhythm and the mixed voices of low, insistent chants drifted up to the roof of the world and lost themselves in the glowing mists of night.
For many days and many nights the people had come across the swamps and jungles of the great continent to Halaja. They had come as they had always come, as their fathers had come, and as their fathers’ fathers before them.
Or so they believed—for had not their own fathers told them so, throughout the whole of their lives?
From far Acosta by the northern sea they had come, and from the three cities of Wlan, Mepas, and Carin. They had walked from the swaying fields of Pueklor and from the rocky hills of Equete.
It was the time of the Coming Together.
Not all came, of course. These were only selected delegates who made the jungle trek and who would then return to their people as they had always done.
The orange fires crackled and the drums throbbed.
A new chant began.
“Oh friends from far and near, we come together as we have always come—”
And the answering chants came back, from the men and women of Acosta and the Three Cities and Pueklor and Equete:
“Always come, always come…”
“We come together, all different, all the same, in peace for all men are brothers—”
“All men are brothers, all are brothers…”
Side by side they sat—rough seamen and happy industrialists, proud hunters and serious philosophers from far Equete.
The drums beat faster.
The orange fires painted shadow-dances along the walls.
It was the time of the Coming Together.
Keith felt his heart beating with fierce pride in his chest, and he held his wife close by his side. Here in the night under an alien sky that glowed with the light of a million moons—here, at last, was a dream that could not die.
Ralph Nostrand was silent, watching.
The old people—it was hard to think of them as robots, for they had been fathers and mothers and friends—stayed in the rear circles, in the shadows, watching the children they had led through life.
It was impossible to believe that they were not proud.
For many long hours the ceremony went on through the long, long night. There was feasting and singing—and a little gay romancing among the young men and women from faraway lands, for these people were not saints.
Fifty hours after the Coming Together had begun, the old, old chant was started by the pool that was the Home of the Spirit. The words were mysterious and strange, but did not the gods say that one day they would be filled with meaning?
Keith saw his two sons singing by the pool.
He felt his wife proud and happy by his side.
“Beyond the clouds that roof our world, beyond the rains that cool our skies—”
“Beyond the clouds, beyond the rain…”
“Beyond our skies lie other skies—”
“Other skies, other skies…”
“Beyond the great sea where floats our world, beyond our sea floats another shore—”
“Another shore, another shore…”
“And there in the great beyond the green Earth waits for us, waits for the coming of our silver arrows—”
“Silver arrows into beyond, beyond…”
“The green Earth waits in the great beyond, and there our far brothers dance under a clean blue sky—”
“Silver arrows into beyond, beyond…”
“Oh, our brothers of Earth are waiting for us in the great beyond—”
“Waiting, waiting for the Coming Together!”
“Beyond the clouds that roof our world, beyond the rains that cool our skies—”
“Waiting, waiting for the Coming Together! ”
The drums stopped and there was a silver silence.
A light rain fell from the glowing clouds and sprinkled the plaza with cool, sweet water.
Keith could not speak. He held his wife’s hand and shared her deep understanding. No matter what happened, he was glad that they had come to Venus, glad even if they failed, for it was better to fail than never to have tried at all.
He turned slowly and looked at Captain Nostrand.
Nostrand stood very straight, the firelight touching the old shadows on his face.
His eyes saw far beyond the village of Halaja.
He smiled and held out his hand to Keith. He nodded firmly.
Around the plaza the drums rolled and the singing began again.
Five years after Ralph Nostrand had left for Earth, the village of Halaja still lay peacefully by the slow blue water of the Smoke River.
Half the old robots had died and been buried, and Bill and Ruth Knudsen had gone home to a small farm in Michigan.
It was time for the Venus colonies to strike off on their own. It was time for the men and women who had guided the new world to return to the old world.
“I wish we could stay, Keith,” Carrie said.
“Me, too. But this isn’t our world, and we’re not needed any more.”
“I never thought that it would be harder to leave than it was to come.”
“I never thought we’d be here nineteen years, either.”
“I’m glad we won’t have to say good-by to our boys.”
“It’ll be rough enough as it is, Carrie. We’ll just bring our old reasonable facsimiles in and let ’em die. I hate to do that to the boys, but they mustn’t suspect anything.”
They walked down the jungle pathway toward Halaja, arm in arm, already trying to remember the world they had to leave. Fortunately, the two robots that had originally been designed to replace them when they went back to Earth were still waiting at the station clearing.
Robots had infinite patience.
They would go to Halaja when Keith and Carrie slipped away, and there they would sicken and die. They would be buried with the rest in the clearing by the Smoke River, where one day their sons, too, would lie—
“I still wish we could stay, Keith.”
He kissed her and ruffled her blond hair. “It’s our turn now, baby. We mustn’t rock the boat.”
Still, they postponed it as long as they could.
They found excuses to stay in Halaja with their sons.
It took the message from Nostrand to make them leave. It came one night and Mark flew it out in the last station copter. It read:
KEITH: OLD MAN VANDERVORT VERY ILL AND NOT EXPECTED TO LIVE. HE WANTS TO SEE YOU IF YOU CAN COME IN TIME. SHIP ON WAY TO YOU NOW. ALL O.K. AT THIS END. WHAT’RE YOU DOING UP THERE—GOING NATIVE? (SIGNED) RALPH.
“Well,” Carrie said, “he couldn’t live forever.”
“He took a stab at it, though,” Keith said.
“We’ll have to go.”
“Yes. We’ll have to go.”
They left the village that had been their home one night in the rain, while their sons slept. The two robot humanoids who were their identical twins climbed into the bed that was still warm from their bodies.
Keith and Carrie walked together through the plaza of Halaja, past the Home of the Spirit, and out the gate. The rain was cold in their faces. They walked along the pathway through the Sirau-fruit to the damp athletic field to the west of the village.
They did not look back.
The copter lifted them into the silver clouds for the last time and carried them east to the station clearing. They said good-by to Mark Kamoto, who would follow them a year later on the voyage of no return.
The ship that had carried them from Earth nineteen years ago waited now in the rain to carry them back again.
They looked one last time at the gray-green wall of the jungle and the yellow light spilling out from the domed station house. They looked one last time at the banks of luminous clouds that flowed like a sea of moons through the sky.
They looked one last time westward into the night, toward the sleeping village of Halaja.
They boarded the ship.
Ahead of them was Earth, and a dying man. Ahead of them, lost now in the immensities that swam between the worlds, was an old, old man with a white beard and nervous blue eyes that darted through the shadows of a too-hot room.
Ahead of them was James Murray Vandervort and a final question.
Why?
The land was crisp and hot and clean under the Arizona sun. The air was charged with a fresh golden tang that made you want to stand in the wonderful sand and fill your lungs over and over again.
The sky was blue and cloudless. The greens of the desert plants were as bright and vivid as if they had been newly painted.
Like flowers, Keith and Carrie lifted their faces to the wind and sought the sun.
It was good to be back.
There was no time to go home, and so a Foundation copter lifted them up into the desert air and carried them westward toward Los Angeles. They found themselves flinching involuntarily at the freight liners that roared through the air lanes and the flutter of copters that filled the sky like butterflies. Los Angeles was so vast and white and gleaming that they could hardly take it in. Far below them, dots on the calm blue Pacific, the surfaced subs bobbed like schools of porpoise.
The copter swung north along the coastline and then veered off to the right up Vandervort’s Canyon. They landed on the patio field of the huge estate and an old butler took them in tow.
They walked through the richly-carpeted hallways and up the marble stairs to the second floor. They walked down the long gray passage and knocked on the mahogany door.
A tiny green light blinked on in the center of the door.
Keith and Carrie entered the huge room, and it was almost like stepping from Earth to Venus. The hot, humid air boiled out into the hallway like an overflowing lake.
The room had not changed. The wall-to-wall brown rug was still there, and the tables and chairs and desks and fireplaces and flowers and books and drapes—
But the Old Man had changed.
Nineteen years had taken their toll.
Vandervort was one hundred and twenty-four years old.
Even the geriatrics specialists could not save him now.
The Old Man still sat in his huge, soft chair. He seemed very tiny now, and lost. His white beard was a dirty gray and his red face was blotched with unhealthy pink. His blue eyes were dull and glazed.
Ralph Nostrand stood by his side, his face lighting with a smile of welcome.
They shook hands.
“Who is it?” choked the Old Man. “Who’s there? Is somebody there?”
Keith leaned down toward him. “Van,” he said. “Van, it’s Keith Ortega.”
James Murray Vandervort stiffened as though an electric shock had shot through his thin, dry body. “Keith!” he wheezed. He tried to get up, but could not move. “Is it really you—after all these years?”
“Yes, Van.”
The dead blue eyes swam into focus. The Old Man breathed fast and shallow. “I have to know, Keith,” he said. His voice was weak, a shadow of the boom that had once filled the chamber and chased the darkness away. “It’s been so hard. I have to know.”
Keith waited him out, feeling a vast pity for the wreck of a human being that was dying in the big soft chair. Pity—and something more than that.
“I had to hear you say it, say it with your own voice,” Vandervort said, talking very fast. His voice was such a whisper that Keith could hardly hear him. “Is everything all right? Is it working, Keith? Is it working?”
Keith made himself speak slowly and clearly. “You don’t need to worry, Van. It’s all right. Everything is all right. All the colonies are working just as we planned. Nothing can go wrong now. The new culture of Venus will come through space to Earth within a century. The new culture pattern will hit the Earth like a shot in the arm. We’ll go on to the stars one day, Van. Everything is all right.”
“I gave them the stars,” the Old Man said, his voice very tired. “I gave them the stars, didn’t I?”
“Yes,” Keith said.
The Old Man sank back into his chair in sudden, exhausted relaxation. The old, dead eyes closed.
There was a long, hushed silence.
“Is he all right?” Ralph asked.
“I think so.”
The Old Man began to talk again, his voice far away and lonely. “I’ve covered my tracks,” he whispered, “but not too well. When the new world comes out of space, the people of Earth will check back… check back—”
The voice trailed away.
“Yes, Van?” Keith urged.
The Old Man sighed. “The people will check back. They’ll find my name, find the records. They’ll know I did it. They’ll know, they’ll know—”
Again, the thin voice faded.
The Old Man began to cry, softly. Keith leaned closer to hear him. Suddenly the Old Man tried to straighten in his chair and the faded blue eyes opened.
“Keith, Keith,” he whispered desperately, “will they remember me after I’m gone? I gave them the stars. Keith, will they remember my name? Will they remember my name?”
The deep shadows of the vast, crammed room rustled around the walls, sliding in toward the firelight. Keith and Carrie and Ralph stood in the unnatural heat and stared at the tiny, dying man in the huge, swallowing chair.
“They’ll remember you, Van,” Keith said. “They’ll remember you long after the rest of us are a million years forgotten.”
James Murray Vandervort smiled. The blue eyes closed again. “Remember me,” he mumbled. “Remember my name. Remember my name—”
A doctor came in from the back door.
“You’d better go now,” he said. “Mr. Vandervort needs to rest.”
They walked out of the chamber, down the hallway, down the marble stairs.
“All that,” Ralph Nostrand said. “All that, just to keep a part of him alive.”
“He had no son,” Carrie said quietly.
They walked toward the copter in the patio. Keith was thinking of Halaja, and the dark log buildings in the gray-green jungles of another world.
All that because a rich old man was afraid of the eternal dark.
“All that,” he said, “because he was just a man.”
Very late that night the three of them walked singing past the bright lights of Wilshire Walk.
A man and his wife, who had carried out an Old Man’s plan.
A captain in a forgotten service, who had falsified a report to make a dream come true.
The violet government airsign hung in the air: DON’T ROCK THE BOAT.
They walked through the sign.
They walked on, arm in arm, singing under the frost of stars. They walked on and all who saw them that night on Earth wondered at the smiles they smiled and the strange, strange song they sang—
A song that whispered beyond the clouds—
Beyond the rains that cool our skies. Beyond… beyond…