Donald A. Wollheim (ed) (4 page)

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
tirne
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? DONT 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 on 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.

HI.

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
bom
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 lizard-like 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
firepits
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 fife 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.