“Still, with all the start we could give ’em our first lot weren’t stuck on the place—but they’d signed for a minimum of five Earth years, and a pension at the end of it. There were twenty-five families in that first lot. Another twenty-five families were in space on their way there when whatever it was that happened at home did happen.”
BERT nodded. “I remember. They were due for take-off about a week after we left.”
“They made it, too. Several other ships came in, as well. But a good many just vanished. They tell me that two ships that were on the Venus to Earth run managed to divert here. They hadn’t a chance to turn back, of course. Deceleration and acceleration again would have left them with no fuel for landing. The most they could risk was expending some fuel on making the diversion.”
“But that didn’t apply to an atomic-drive ship. The Rutherford A4 had left Venus two days before, and she did have the reserve of power necessary for a stop, start and land, so she got back—with not a lot to spare. As far as we know, the other atomic ships all bought it. A1 was smashed in a crash on Jupiter, you remember. A2, 3 and 5 are thought to have been on or near Earth when it happened.
“So you see our position was a lot different from yours here. We had about the same number of space-port personnel, but we didn’t have a whole flock of miners and prospectors—just a few explorers, botanists, chemists, and the like. And we had a colony containing some fifty women, and nearly a hundred children. Also we had a planet with its best years yet to come. We’ve got something to work with and to work for. This time the human race has got hold of a planet where it really is in on the ground floor. But what we need right now is as many men as we can get to help us. We’d be getting along a lot faster if we had more to oversee the work.”
“Oversee? What, one another?” said Bert.
“No. We’ve got the griffas working for us.”
“I thought—”
“You thought griffas were only good for making fur-coats? That’s what everyone thought. On account of the price the furs brought nobody bothered to get nearer to them than shooting range. But that’s not so. They’ve got quite enough intelligence to do useful work, and they can be trained up to more tricky stuff when we’ve got the time. Of course, they’re small, but there’s any amount of them. The thing is they’ve got to be watched all the time. There has to be a man in charge—and there’s our chief limitation.”
“So what you’re offering is a kind of foreman job?”
“That’s about it—to begin with. But there’s opportunity. It’s a place that’s going to grow. One day it’s going to grow mighty big, and have all that Earth ever had.
“Maybe the climate’s not too good, but there are decent houses to live in, and already there’s getting to be something that looks like civilisation. You’ll be surprised. Here on Mars there’s nothing to do but rot. So how about it?”
“You took a long time finding out you needed us,” Bert said.
“No, we knew that all right from the start. Trouble was the getting to get here. That took time. Fuel. To fuel a rocket you’ve got to produce fuel on the big scale. It takes a lot of labour and time that we couldn’t afford for the returns. Just building the plant was too expensive for us to think of. But when we ran across fissile material we could spare the time refining that to get the A4 into use. We want radioactive material anyway, so it became worth doing.
“Now we can take forty-five men this trip, picking the fittest first. You’ll make it, easy. You’ve not let yourself go to seed like most. So how about putting your name down?”
“I’ll think about it,” Bert said. All the other three stared at him.
“God almighty!” said the pale man. “A chance that’s almost a miracle to get off this sandheap—and you’ll think about it!”
“I was twenty-one when I came here,” Bert said. “Now I’m thirty-four, Earth reckoning. You kind of grow into a place in that time. I’ll let you know.”
HE WALKED off, conscious of their eyes following him. Without noticing where he was going, he found himself back at the canal bank. He sat down there among the tinkerbells and stared across the water.
What he was seeing again was a ruined tower beside another canal. A life that went on there placidly, harmoniously. A group of people content to live simply, to enjoy what life offered without striving restlessly for some undefined end. People who were quite satisfied to be part of a process, who did not perpetually itch to master and control all around them. It was true that Mars was close to dying. But the whole solar system, the whole universe was in the process of dying. Was there really so much more virtue in battling for thousands of years to subdue a planet than in living for a few centuries in quiet content? What was it the Earthmen imagined they sought with all their strife, drive, and noise? Not one of them could tell you that ultimate purpose. For all one knew there was none, it might be just a nervous tic. All their boasts need not be more than the rationalisations of a dominating egoism imposed upon a kind of transcendant monkey inquisitiveness…
The Martians were not like that. They did not see themselves as arbiters, as men to be made gods. But simply as a part of life.
Some lines from a poem came into his mind. Whitman had been speaking of animals, but it seemed to Bert to apply very well to Martians:
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied—not one is demented with the mania of
owning things…
The image of Zaylo stepped into his thought’s sight. About her like an aura was a sense of peace to soothe his mind and heart. “Time to rest, Earthman,” her mother had said.
But he had fled because to rest, to settle down, to make a home there seemed like a betrayal of all that the vanished Earth had taught him. The act of surrender to Mars at last, against which the voice inside him still protested: “I am the Captain of my Fate.”
And now there was the chance to join others who thought that way. A pitiful few, but determined to rise again above the catastrophe which had all but finished them.
A vision of Earth as it had been replaced Zaylo in Bert’s mind. Cities full of life, wide farmlands rich in crops, the music of great orchestras, the voices of crowds, the liners on the seas and the liners in the air. The world made fit for man by man—the glorious dream of the composite mind of man come true. None who were living now would ever see Earth’s genius on its pinnacle again. But it could climb there in time. The spirit still was there. One day there would be re-created on Venus everything that had seemed lost with Earth—perhaps it would be a creation even more magnificent.
What he was being offered was a chance to help to raise civilisation again out of disaster. That, or to stay on in puny futility on Mars…
The image of Zaylo stood before him again, lovely, gentle, like balm for a bruised spirit, like heaven for a lonely soul…
But there beside her shimmered the spires and towers of new cities springing into Venusian skies, great ships cleaving Venusian seas, myriads of people laughing, loving, living, in a world that he had helped to build.
Bert groaned aloud.
The echo of a puritan ancestor said: “The hard way must be right: the easy way must be wrong.”
The murmur of another mocked it: “The way of vanity must be wrong: the way of simplicity must be right.”