«And less air to start with.» Brenner cleared his throat. I recognized the preliminary to a speech.
«We leave the lowlands be because they’re too hot, not because of too thick an atmosphere,» he said. «Remember, this is a metal-poor globe, lowish density in spite of its mass. So it didn’t outgas as much as it might have, in the beginning. Also, on account of the slow rotation, it don’t have any magnetic field worth mentioning. Cumae may not be the liveliest star in the universe, but it does spit plenty protons and photons and stuff to thin out an atmosphere that hasn’t got a magnetic field to hide behind. We get a pretty strong radiation background too for the same reason; gives medical problems, and it’d be worse higher up. Furthermore, when you got an extra ought-point-three gee on you, and manual labor to do, you need lots of oxygen. So the long and the short of it is, we can’t colonize the real heights.» He cocked his head at me. «Didn’t they brief you ay-tall, son?»
I looked back at him hard, feeling I rated more respect as the first officer of an exploratory ship. His leathery features crinkled in a slow grin. The President of Sibylla was no more formal than the rest of his ten thousand people.
He wore the usual archaic kilts, blouse, boots, sun helmet set rakishly on his grizzled head, machete at hip. But my uniform was less neat than his garb, ten minutes after we had left the buggy by the roadside and started climbing. The gravity didn’t bother me; we use rougher accelerations on a craft like the Bering. I was aware of my flesh and bones dragging downward, nothing worse. The heat, though, the booming and thrusting wind, the scanted lungfuls I breathed, dryness afire in nose and throat, malignant grab of branches and slither of sandy soil, something faintly intoxicant about the plant odors, had entered me. I was sweat-drenched, dusty, a-gasp and a-tremble, and gladder than I should be of a chance to rest.
I decided not to stand on the dignity I didn’t have. Besides, I thought, we were men together in the face of the not human. It had killed, it could kill again, it could smite Earth herself. I felt lonelier in that wide grim landscape than ever between the stars.
«They gave us what information was available,» I said. «But it was simultaneously too ample—for one head to contain—and too little—for the totality of a world. Hard for us to guess what’s significant and what’s incidental. And you’ve been isolated from us for nearly two centuries. Nothing but a thread of laser contact, with a third of each century needed to cross the distance between. Our fleet took longer still, of course; the big ships aren’t meant to go above one gee, so they need a year to approach light speed and another year to decelerate. Inboard time at minimum tau factor isn’t negligible either. We experienced several months in covering those parsecs. And we were wondering the whole way if we’d arrive to find the aliens had returned—arrive to find you dead here and a trap set for us. Under the circumstances, sir, we were bound to forget some of what we’d learned.»
«Well, yes, I reckon you would at that,» Brenner said. «Getting back to why we’ve settled this Devil’s Meadows district, I can tell you we haven’t got any better place, and most are not as good. Sibylla is not Earth and never will be.»
«But you have colonized the polar regions, haven’t you? The original expedition team suggested it, and my briefing said—»
«We abandoned them a spell back. They do have higher air pressure and lower background count, at a reasonable average temperature. But that’s only an average. Don’t you forget, the rotation period is locked to two-thirds of the year, we being so close to the sun. Sixty-five Earthdays of light are tolerable, though it gets too hot toward evening for us to work. We can grow crops, sort of, with lamps to help through the sixty-five-day night. But at the poles, a thirty-seven-degree axial tilt, the seasons are too flinkin’ extreme. What with everything else they had going against them, our poor little terrestrial plants kept dying off there. We haven’t the industry or the resources to practice greenhouse agriculture on the needful scale.» Brenner shrugged. «Finally we gave up and everybody moved equatorward.»
I glanced down the crater slope. The road from Jimstown was dirt, a track nearly lost to sight, rutted, overgrown in places, little used since the destruction of New Washington. But traffic had never been heavy along it; no community on Sibylla was ever more than an overgrown village, and most were less. Tiny at this remove stood Brenner’s buggy. The lank horse sniffed discouragedly at the brush it could not eat.
We might have taken a flitter from one of the relief ships. But that would have meant waiting until it could be unloaded and fetched down from orbit. Besides, I had wanted some feel of what Sibylla and its people were really like.
I was getting it.
High hopes, two hundred years ago. People who were going to an uncrowded unplundered world, a whole new world, and this time build things right. They understood there would be hardships, danger, strangeness, on a planet for which our kind of life is not really fitted. But there would be nothing that men had not encountered and overcome elsewhere. The explorers had made certain of that beforehand.
Economics was a stronger motive than decency for being sure. The Directorate takes a bit of political pressure off itself with each colony it establishes, but does not really solve any physical problems at home; and the cost of sending the big ships is fantastic. The aim is to make Earth’s people look up through the dust and smoke and say, «Well, at, least somebody’s doing all right out there, and maybe we’ll be picked to go in the next emigration, if we stay in favor with the authorities meanwhile.» Failures would be very, very upsetting. Only the news of outright attack had justified organizing the Colonial Fleet to evacuate the Sibyllans.
The investment in them was so huge. Their ancestors came with tools, machinery, chemicals, seeds, suspended-frozen animal embryos, scientific gear… the basics. Of course, they brought a full stock of technical references too. As population expanded, they would build fusion power stations, they would replace the native life forms in ever larger areas with terrene species, they would at last create Paradise. To judge from their laser reports, they had been following out the plan. It was going slowly, because Sibylla was uncommonly hostile, but it was going.
Now—the reasons why they had not rebuilt were plain to see. The lean ships that appeared in the sky, sixty-eight years ago, bombing and flaming, had knocked the foundations out from under the colony. Too much plant was wrecked, too many lives were lost, too few resources were left. For a lifetime, the people could merely hang on, keep their economy stumbling along at a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century level, cling to the hope that we would answer their appeal. And all the while they knew fear.
I looked again at Tom Brenner. Before he was born, the enemy aliens had destroyed from pole to pole. In days—Earth-days—their fleet had departed back into unknownness. At any instant they might return, and not be content with blowing his toy towns off the map. I wondered how deep the weariness went that I read upon him. Yet he stood straight, and he had a squinty-eyed grin, and two of his children had survived to adulthood and one grandchild was alive and healthy.
«Come on,» I said in a harshened voice. «Let’s get this finished.»
We didn’t stop till we mounted the rim and looked down into the fused black bowl where New Washington had been. A few skeletons of buildings jutted from the edges, but only a few, their frameworks grotesquely twisted. I estimated that the blast had released fifty megatons.
The star became a taxi. It glided to a halt across the deck from me and balanced while the stocky figure climbed out. I wondered how he paid it. They had told me the Sibyllans were interned on a military reservation while the Director and his cabinet decided what to do about them. Well, when d’Indre demanded a live conference with the old man, perhaps the colonel had taken pity and slipped him some munits so he could arrive like a citizen, not a consignment.