Donald A. Wollheim (ed) (7 page)

Keith
was exhausted but confident.

"Pal," he said, "you
ain't
seen
nothm
yet."

Beyond the station house, the warm rain fell
into the thick jungles and the long gray afternoon began to fade into evening.

V.

A
t
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
intendy
.

"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
neady
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
youll
just stop a bit and think.
After all, a child is
always
bom
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
independendy
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 fives?

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
.