Well, that was it. The ship had been ripped open like an over-inflated bladder. A dense, fragrant, steaming fog was already billowing in from outside. The ambulances would arrive to find them dead.
“Frank,” Garry whispered.
Frank struggled up. Syd lay crumpled; probably she was dead. He felt her pulse. No, she was alive. He and Garry stumbled through the ruins of the chamber, toward what had been the passage. The passage was sealed off by a collapsed wall; the only exit was the rip in the hull. They could go only one way: out. Around them, the ship was flattened junk.
“Where’s Irma?” Frank demanded hoarsely.
Garry was shoving through heaps of debris, toward the rip. “Out. She crawled out.” Grunting, struggling, he disappeared into the swirls of moist fog, and dropped through the rip. Frank followed.
The scene was unbelievable. For a time neither of them could grasp it. “We’re back home,” the boy murmured, dazed and confused. “Something went wrong. We went around in a circle.”
But it wasn’t the Refuge. And yet it was. Familiar hazy hills spread out, lost in billowing moisture. Green lichens grew everywhere; the soil was a tangled floor of lush growing plants. The air smelled of intricate organic life, a rich, complex odor, similar to the odor they remembered but, at the same time, far more alive. They gaped foolishly: there was no delineating wall. There was no finite hull confining it. The world lay stretched out as far as the eye could see. And above. The world was everywhere.
“My God,” Frank said. “It’s not a fake.” Bending down, he snatched up a crawling snail-like insect. “Not a robot—this is alive. It’s genuine!”
From the mist, Irma appeared. Blood oozed over one eye; her hair was matted and tangled, her clothing was torn. “We’re home,” she gasped, gripping a bulging armload of plant life she had gathered. “Look at it—remember it? And we can breathe. We can live.”
Off in the distance, great columns of steam rose up, geysers of boiling water forced through the rocks to the surface. An immense ocean pounded somewhere, invisible in the drifting curtain of moisture.
“Listen,” Frank said. “You hear that? You hear the water?”
They listened. They heard. They reached down and felt; they threw themselves on the ground, clutching frantically, faces pressed to the damp, warm soil.
“We’re home,” Irma wept. All of them were crying and moaning, wailing in bewildered joy. And above them, the other ship was already thundering down.
16
UNDER ITS CLOUD layer the surface temperature of Venus varied from 99 degrees Fahrenheit to 101 degrees Fahrenheit. The lower atmosphere was a mixture of ammonia and oxygen, heavily laden with water vapor. Among the oceans and rolling hills toiled a variety of life-forms, building and evolving, planning and creating.
Louis and Irma were repairing a turbine-driven tractor, when Dieter excitedly put in his appearance. “It’s ready!” he shouted, standing in the entrance of the shed. “We’re going to start!”
From under the tractor, Louis stuck out his head. “What’s ready?” he demanded sourly.
“The corn. We’re going to harvest it. We’ve got all the equipment down there; Vivian’s hooking it up.” Dieter danced up and down with frenzy. “You all have to pitch in—this stuff can wait. I rounded up Frank and Syd; they’re on their way. They’ll meet us along the route. And Garry’s tagging along.”
Grumbling, Louis dragged himself out from under the tractor. “It isn’t corn. Stop calling it corn.”
“It’s corn in the spiritual sense. It’s the essence of corn.”
“Even if it’s dark green?” Irma asked, amused.
“Even if it’s purple-striped and silver polka-dotted. Even if it stands ninety feet high and has lace-embroidered pods. Even if it spurts ambrosia and coffee-grounds. It’s still corn.”
Louis stood wiping his forehead. “We can’t come until the tractor’s working.” It was fifty miles to Dieter’s place, across rolling country. “I think we need a new ignition coil; that means back to the ship.”
“The heck with it,” Dieter said impatiently, “I’ve got my dobbin cart—we can all fit in that.”
The dobbin cart and the dobbin itself waited quietly. Louis approached cautiously, his eyes narrow with suspicion. “What do you call it?” He had seen the animals a long way off, but never this close. The dobbin was mostly legs, with immense flat feet like leather suction cups. A matted pelt, ragged and uneven, hung over it. The dobbin’s head was tiny; its eyes were half-shut and indolent. “How’d you trap it?” he asked.
“They’re tame enough, if you have the patience.” Dieter climbed up into the cart and grabbed hold of the reins. “I’ve taught the hell out of this thing. They’re sort of quasi-telepathic; all I have to do is think what I want, and off it goes.” He wrinkled his nose contemptuously. “Forget that tractor; you can’t keep it running anyhow. This is the vehicle of the future—the dobbin cart is the coming thing.”
Irma got gingerly into the cart beside Dieter, and after a moment Louis followed. The car was crude but solid; Dieter had laboriously constructed it during the last four months. The material was a now-familiar, heavy bread-like plant fiber that rapidly hardened on exposure. After it had been aged and dried, it could be cut, sawed, polished, and stained. Occasionally, migratory animals gnawed the material away, but that was the only known hazard.
The dobbin’s vast flat feet began rhythmically to pound; the cart moved forward. Behind them, Louis’ cabin dwindled. He and Irma had single-handedly built it; a year had passed in which much had been accomplished. The cabin, made of the same bread-like substance, was surrounded by acres of cultivated land. The so-called corn grew in dense clumps; it wasn’t really corn, but it functioned as corn. Bulging pods ripened in the moist atmosphere. Around the base of the crop, insects crept; predators devouring plant-pests. The fields were irrigated by shallow trenches bringing water out of an underground spring that spilled up to the surface in a hot, bubbling torrent. In the warm, humid atmosphere, almost unchanging, virtually hothouse in its stability, four crops a year were possible.
Parked in front of the cabin were half-assembled machines carted from the wreckage of the ships. Gradually, Irma was reconstructing new implements from the remains of the old. The fuel pipes of the ships were now sewage drains. The control board wiring carried electricity from the water-driven generator to the cabin.
Standing glumly in the shed beyond the cabin were a variety of indigenous herbivores, drowsily munching moist hay. A number of species had been collected; it wasn’t yet established what each was good for. Already, ten types with edible flesh had been catalogued, plus two types secreting drinkable fluids. A gargantuan beast covered with thick hair served as a source of muscle-power. And now the big-footed dobbin that Dieter used to pull his cart.
The dobbin raced determinedly down the road; in a matter of seconds it had hit full velocity. Feet flying, it sped like a furry ostrich, tiny head erect, legs a blur of motion. Blop-blop was the noise a running dobbin made. The cart bounced wildly; Louis and Irma held on for their lives. Delirious with joy, Dieter clutched the reins and urged the thing faster.
“This is fast enough,” Irma managed, gritting her teeth.
“You haven’t seen anything,” Dieter yelled. “This thing really loves to run.”
A wide ditch lay ahead, a tumble of rocks and shrubs. Louis closed his eyes; the car was already on the verge of bursting apart. “We won’t make it,” he grunted. “We’ll never get across.”
As it reached the ditch, the dobbin unfolded two stubby, rattyhided wings and flapped them energetically. The dobbin and the cart rose slightly in the air, hung over the ditch, and then bumpily lowered on the far side.
“It’s a bird,” Irma gasped.
“Yes!” Dieter shouted. “It can go anywhere. That’s my good dobbin.” He leaned precariously forward and whacked the thing on its shaggy rump. “Noble dobbin! Majestic bird!”
The landscape shot p
ast. To the far right rose a hazy range of mountains, mostly lost in the drifting swirls of fog that kept the surface of the planet always damp. A solid skin of growing vegetation and creeping insects . . . everywhere Louis looked there was life. Except at one charred spot at the base of the mountains, a black sore already beginning to turn green as plant-life quietly covered it.
The scout domes had been there. The non-Venusians who had preceded them, cooped up in their “refuges,” their airtight stations. Now they were dead; only the eight Venusians remained.
When the second ship had landed, the ambulances were already on the way. The second landing was more successful; nobody had been hurt, and the ship was virtually undamaged. The ambulances had collected the injured and taken them to the installations set up in anticipation of their arrival. During the first month, the non-Venusians had cooperated fully—in spite of orders from the Crisis Government. Then, toward March, the Crisis Government had stopped transmitting. A week later a heavy-duty projectile had come bursting down on the non-Venusian domes; within a day only the eight Venusians were extant.
The death of the non-Venusians was a shock, but a shock they could recover from. The problem of their own existence was simplified; now they were totally on their own, without communication of any sort with non-Venusians.
Between the ruined domes and their own ships and installations there was ample intact equipment at their disposal. Promptly, they had begun carting it off and putting it into operation. But a lethargy crept over them. Finally they had ceased the regular pilgrimages; they stopped collecting the Earth-manufactured materials, the elaborate machinery and industrial products.
None of them really wanted to go on from the point at which they had left off. In actuality they wanted to start from the bottom up. It was not a replica of Earth-civilization that they wanted to create; it was their own typical community, geared to their own unique needs, geared to the Venusian conditions, that they wanted.
It had to be agrarian.
They already had crops and simple cabins, irrigation ditches, clothing woven from plant fiber, electricity, a pair of dobbin-drawn carts, sanitation and wells. They had domesticated native animals; they had located natural building materials. They were shaping basic tools and functional artifacts. In their first year, thousands of years of cultural evolution had been achieved. Perhaps, in a decade—
Off beyond the meadow was a long gully. Occasional drifters lay here and there among the shubbery; a cloud had come settling down, the week before. And beyond the gully, in the shadows of a wide ridge, rested an immense wad of white material.
“What’s that?” Dieter inquired, interrupting Louis’ thoughts. “I’ve never seen that life-form.”
In the second dobbin cart, Frank and Syd approached. The Venusians gathered silently, uneasy in the presence of the ominous mound of white. In Syd’s arms the baby stirred fitfully.
“It doesn’t belong here,” Frank said finally.
“Why do you say that?” Dieter asked. “Who are you to pass judgment?”
“I mean,” Frank explained, “it’s not Venusian. It came down a day or so after the drifters.”
“Came down!” Dieter was perplexed. “What do you mean?”
Frank shrugged. “Like the drifters. It descended.”
“I saw another one,” Irma volunteered. “Apparently it’s a second interstellar life-form.”
Abruptly, Louis’ hand closed around Dieter’s shoulder. “Take the cart over to it. I want to examine it.”
Dieter’s face sagged resentfully. “Why? I want to show you my corn.”
“The hell with your corn,” Louis said sharply. “We better take a look at that thing.”
“I looked at the other one,” Frank said. “It seemed harmless. I couldn’t see any special characteristics . . . it’s a single cell, like the drifters.” He hesitated. “I broke it open. It’s got a nucleus, cell-wall, granules within the cytoplast. The usual stuff; it’s definitely a protozoon.”
Dieter headed the dobbin cart toward the wad of white. In a moment they had drawn up beside it and halted. The other cart followed. One of the dobbins sniffed at the white wad; without comment he began to nibble.
“Leave that alone,” Dieter ordered nervously. “Maybe it’ll poison you.”
Louis leaped down and strode over.
The wad was faintly moist. It was alive, all right. Louis got a stick and began prodding it experimentally. Here was a second life-form out of space, a rarer form, not as common as the smaller drifters. “Just two?” he asked. “Nobody’s seen any more?”
“There’s one over there,” Irma said, pointing.
A quarter of a mile away a third wad had recently landed. From where they stood they could see it sluggishly stirring . . . the wad was making its way slowly over the ground. Its movement slowed. Presently it came to rest.
“It’s dead,” Dieter commented indifferently.
Louis walked over toward it, across the spongy green surface of plant life. Tiny animals scuttled underfoot, hard-shelled crustaceans. He ignored them and kept his eyes on the looming wad of white. When he reached it, he discovered that it wasn’t dead; it had found a hollow depression and was laboriously anchoring itself. Fascinated, he watched it exude a slimy cement. The cement hardened, and the wad was tightly fixed to the ground. There it rested, obviously waiting.
Waiting for what?
Curious, he walked all around it. The surface was uniform. It certainly looked like a cell, all right: a giant single cell. He picked up a rock and tossed it; the rock embedded itself in the white substance and stuck there.
No doubt it was related to the drifters. Two stages, perhaps; that was the probable explanation. The drifters, he knew, were incomplete; they lacked the ability to ingest food, to reproduce, even to stay alive. But this thing was clearly staying alive: it was getting itself set up. A symbiotic relationship, perhaps?
While he was studying it, he noticed the drifter.
The drifter was coming down. He had seen it happen before, but it always fascinated him. The drifter was using the air as a medium: carefully it maneuvered itself like a weed-spore, first floating in one direction, then in another, keeping itself aloft as long as possible. The drifters didn’t like to land; it meant an end to mobility.
There it came, drifting down to its death, to expire fruitlessly. The senseless mystery of the interstellar creature: wandering millions, billions of miles, over centuries—for what? To wind up here, to perish without purpose?
The familiar cosmic meaninglessness. Life without goal. In the last two years billions of drifters had been exterminated. It was tragic, stupid. This one, hovering momentarily, was trying to keep itself alive one last second, before it fell to its pointless death. A hopeless struggle; like all of its race, it was doomed.
Suddenly the drifter folded into itself. Its thin, extended body snapped together like a rubber band; one second it was spread out, catching air currents—the next second it was a thin elongated pencil. It had literally rolled itself up in a tube. And now, thin and tube-like, it dropped straight down.
The tube-like projectile fell expertly, purposefully, directly into the wad of white dough.
It neatly penetrated the white wad. The surface closed after it, and no sign of it remained.
“It’s a house,” Dieter said uncertainly. “That’s a dwelling, and the drifter lives in it.”
The white mass had begun to change. Incredulous, Louis saw it swell until it was almost double its original size. It couldn’t be; it was impossible. But even as he stood there, the wad divided into two hemispheres, joined, but clearly distinct. Rapidly, the white mass grew and formed four connecting units. Now growth was frantic; the thing bubbled and swelled like yeast. Two, four, eight, sixteen . . . geometric progression.
A chill, ominous wind eddied around him. The undulating shape seemed to cut off the sunlight; all at once he was standing in a darkening shadow. In panic, Louis retreated. His terror spread to th
e two dobbins; as he reached out to take hold of Dieter’s cart the birds suddenly unfolded their wings and bolted. Dragging the carts after them, they floundered away from the swelling white shape. He was left standing alone, impotent and stunned.
“What is it?” Frank was shouting. Hysteria rose up into his voice; now they were all yelling. “What is it? What’s happening?”
Dieter leaped to the ground and stood with his feet braced apart, the reins gripped. “Come on,” he shout to Louis. “Get in!”
With a snarl of aversion, the dobbin shuddered away from Louis. Ignoring it, he clambered into the cart and sat hunched over, lips moving, face white. Dieter leaped back in, and the cart began to move away.
“It’s an egg,” Syd said faintly.
“Was,” Louis corrected. “Not now. Now it’s a zygote.”
The cosmic egg had been fertilized by the microgametophyte. And Louis, watching, knew what the drifters were.
“Pollen,” he whispered, stricken. “That’s what they’ve been all the time. And we never guessed.”
The drifters were pollen, radiating in clouds across space between star systems, in search of their megagametophytes. Neither they nor the white wad was the final organism; both were elements of the now visibly growing embryo.
And he realized something else. Nobody had guessed, but Jones must have known this—and for some time.
The team of biologists spread out their reports. Jones barely glanced at the collection of papers; he nodded and moved away, deep in brooding thought.
“We were afraid that might be it,” Trillby, the head of the team, said. “That explains their incompleteness; that’s why they don’t have digestive or reproductive systems.” He added, “They are a reproductive system. Half of it, at least.”
“What’s the word?” Jones asked suddenly. “I forget.”