Somehow it was not surprising that Mierna should come at that moment, leading her oontatherium. She let go the leash and ran to me. «Hi, Mister Cathcart! I hoped a lot somebody would be up. I haven’t had any breakfast.»
«We’ll have to see about that.» I swung her in the air till she squealed. «And then maybe take a little flyaround in this boat. Would you like that?»
«Oooh!» Her eyes grew round. I set her down. She needed a while longer before she dared ask, «Clear to Earth?»
«No, not that far, I’m afraid. Earth is quite a ways off.»
«Maybe someday? Please?»
«Someday, I’m quite sure, my dear. And not so terribly long until then, either.»
«I’m going to Earth, I’m going to Earth, I’m going to Earth.» She hugged the oontatherium. «Will you miss me awfully, Big-Feet-Buggy-Eyes-Top-Man-Underneath-And-Over? Don’t drool so sad. Maybe you can come too. Can he, Mister Cathcart? He’s a very nice oontatherium, honest he is, and he does so love crackers.»
«Well, perhaps, perhaps not,» I said. «But you’ll go, if you wish. I promise you. Anybody on this whole planet who wants to will go to Earth.»
As most of them will. I’m certain our idea will be accepted by the Council. The only possible one. If you can’t lick ’em… get ’em to jine you.
I rumpled Mierna’s hair. In a way, sweetheart, what a dirty trick to play on you! Take you straight from the wilderness to a huge and complicated civilization. Dazzle you with all the tricks and gadgets and ideas we have, not because we’re better but simply because we’ve been at it a little longer than you. Scatter your ten million among our fifteen billion. Of course you’ll fall for it. You can’t help yourselves. When you realize what’s happening, you won’t be able to stop, you’ll be hooked. I don’t think you’ll even be able to resent it.
You’ll be assimilated, Mierna. You’ll become an Earth girl. Naturally, you’ll grow up to be one of our leaders. You’ll contribute tremendous things to our civilization, and be rewarded accordingly. But the whole point is, it will be our civilization. Mine… and yours.
I wonder if you’ll ever miss the forest, though, and the little houses by the bay, and the boats and songs and old, old stories, yes, and your darling oontatherium. I know the empty planet will miss you, Mierna. So will I.
«Come on,» I said. «Let’s go build us that breakfast.»
HONESTY
THE ALIEN ENEMY
Winter darkness falls early on Rotterdam. When my flitter had parked, I walked to a parapet and saw light in star clusters, nebulae, comet tails, filling the spaces of the city. Windows were blinking out in the offices, where towers lifted row on row from the waterfront. But vehicles swarmed, signs danced, shops beckoned, the pavements made a luminous web as far inland as I could see—it appeared to flicker with the ground traffic that counted endless rosaries along it—and the harbor and canals interwove a softer sheen. I was too high to make out people through all that gloom and glow. They were melted into a mere humanity, and their voices came to me as the distant surf of machines.
Up here was less illumination, just some tubes around the lanes and walkways, a fluorescent door to the elevator head, and whatever spilled down from the beacon. So although the air was raw and damp in my nostrils, forcing my hands into tunic pockets, I could look past the electric star which marks this building, out to a few of the real stars. Orion was aloft and the Charles Wain stood on its head over the Pole. I shivered and wished the Ministry of Extraterrestrial Affairs had picked some other place for a centrum, an island farther south where the constellations bloom after dark like flowers.
But even the Directorate has to make compromises. The desirable places on Earth filled up long ago, and then the less desirable, and then the undesirable, until the only clear horizons left are on the mountain roofs, the icecaps, the stone-and-sand deserts, whatever is still worse to make a living from than the bottom of a megalopolis. The bureaucrats I work for did not do so badly; the Low Countries complex has much to recommend it. They control a lot of wealth and are correspondingly influential.
Anyway, I don’t have to live in Rotterdam, except a few days at a time, reporting in or getting briefed. Otherwise I mostly spend my furloughs at one or another resort, as expensive and exclusive as possible. Thus I needn’t observe what man has inflicted on this planet his mother while I was gone. Spaceman’s pay accumulates wonderfully on the long hauls, years or decades in a stretch. I can afford whatever I want on Earth: even clean air, trees, a brook to drink from, a deer to glimpse, unlighted nights when I take a girl out and show her the stars I have visited.
Let me see, I thought, once this is over with here, where should I go? Hitherto I’ve avoided places where Cumae is visible. But why, really? Hm… catalogued HR 6806, 33.25 light-years distant, K2 dwarf of luminosity 0.62 Sol… yes, I’ll want a small telescope as well as some large brags for the girl…
One star detached itself and whirred toward me. Startled, I realized that this must be Tom Brenner coming. Suddenly I was in no more mood to brag about what I had done at Cumae than I was on first returning. I didn’t want to confront him, especially alone. If I hurried, I could be inside before he set down. I could await him together with d’Indre, impregnable in the apparatus of government.
But no. I had seen too much—we had both seen too much, he and I, and all those men and women and children for whom he must speak tonight—on the high plains of his planet. In our very separate ways, we had both known the terror of the alien enemy. I could never be totally an official to him. So I stayed by the parapet, waiting. The breath came out of me like smoke and the cold crept inside.
On Sibylla it was always hot. Cumae glowers half again as great in the sky of that world as Sol does on Earth, and pours down nearly twice the energy. Those wavelengths are poor in ultraviolet but rich in infrared. The sunlight is orange-tinted, not actually furnace color though it feels that way.
I asked Brenner why the colonists didn’t move upward. Peaks shouldered above the horizon. Their snows were doubly bright against the purplish heaven, doubly beautiful against the gray-green bushland that stretched around us, murmurous and resinous under a dry wind. I saw that timberline, or whatever passed for it, reached almost to the tops. The dark, slightly iridescent hues suggested denser growth than here. Yonder must be a well-watered country, fertile in soil, and cool, cool.
«Not enough air,» he said. He spoke English, with a faint American twang remaining after generations. They were chiefly Americans who went to Sibylla. «We’re about as high on this massif as we can go.»
«But… oh, yes,» I recalled. «The pressure gradient’s steeper than on Earth. Your planet’s got fifty percent more diameter, a third more surface gravity.»