The windows in one of the houses went dark. From the other house came the strains of a sad melody. Grasshoppers chirred in the grass, and he could hear the drowsy chirping of birds. Anyhow, I have nothing to do at this factory, thought Kondratev.
He got up and headed back. He floundered for a few minutes in the bushes, looking for the path, then found it and started walking among the pines. The path showed dull white under the stars. In a few more minutes Kondratev saw a bluish light in front of him—the gas lamps on the signpost—and almost at a run he came out to the moving road. It was empty.
Kondratev, jumping like a hare and shouting “Hup! Hup!,” ran over to the strip moving in the direction of the city. The ribbons shone gently underfoot, and to the right and left the dark masses of bushes and trees rushed backward. Far in front of him in the sky was a bluish glow-the city. Kondratev suddenly felt fiercely hungry.
He got off at a veranda with tables, the one near the sign that said YELLOW FACTORY—1 KM. From the veranda came light, noise, and appetizing smells; and all the tables were taken. Looks like the whole world eats supper here, Kondratev thought with disappointment, but all the same he went up the steps and stopped at the threshold. The great-great-grandchildren were drinking, eating, laughing, talking, shouting, and even singing.
A long-legged great-great-grandchild from the nearest table tugged at Kondratev’s sleeve. “Sit down, sit down, comrade,” he said, getting up.
“Thank you,” muttered Kondratev, “But what about you?”
“Never mind! I’ve eaten, don’t worry.”
Kondratev sat down uneasily, resting his hands on his knees. The person opposite him, an enormous dark-faced man who had been eating something very appetizing from a bowl, looked up at him suddenly and asked indistinctly, “Well, what’s going on over there? They drawing it out?”
“Drawing what out?” asked Kondratev.
Everyone at the table looked at him.
The dark man, distorting his face, swallowed and said, “You from Anyudin?”
“No,” said Kondratev.
A thickset youth sitting on the left said happily, “I know who you are! You’re Navigator Kondratev from the Taimyrl!”
Everyone became more lively. The dark-faced man immediately raised his right hand and introduced himself. “I am yclept Ioann Moskvichev. Or Ivan, as we say today.”
A young woman, sitting at the right, said, “Elena Zavadskaya.”
The thickset youth, shuffling his feet under the table, said, “Basevich. Meteorologist. Aleksandr.”
A small pale girl, squeezed in between the meteorologist and Ivan Moskvichev, gaily chirped that she was Marina.
Ex-Navigator Kondratev rose and bowed.
“I didn’t recognize you at first either,” declared the dark-faced Moskvichev. “You’ve gotten a lot better. We people here have been sitting and waiting. We’ve got nothing left to do but sit and eat sacivi. This afternoon they offered us twelve places on a food tanker—they thought we wouldn’t take them. Like idiots we started drawing straws, and in the meantime they loaded a group from Vorkuta onto the tanker. Really great guys! Ten people barely squeezed into the twelve places, and the other five were left here.” He laughed unexpectedly. “And we sit eating sacivi… By the way, would you like a helping? Or have you already eaten?”
“No, I haven’t,” said Kondratev.
Moskvichev rose from the table. “Then I’ll bring you some.”
“Please,” Kondratev said gratefully.
Ivan Moskvichev went off, pushing his way through the tables.
“Have some wine,” Zavadskaya said, pushing a glass over to Kondratev.
“Thank you, but I don’t drink,” Kondratev said automatically. But then he remembered that he wasn’t a spacer, and never again would be one. “Excuse me. On second thought, I will, with pleasure.”
The wine was aromatic, light, good. Nectar, thought Kondratev. The gods drink nectar. And eat sacivi. I haven’t tried sacivi in a long time.
“Are you traveling with us?” squeaked Marina.
“I don’t know,” said Kondratev. “Maybe. Where are you going?”
The great-great-grandchildren looked at each other. “We’re going to Venus,” said Aleksandr. “You see, Moskvichev has got the urge to turn Venus into a second Earth.”
Kondratev put down his glass. “Venus?” he asked mistrustfully. He himself remembered what Venus was like. “Has your Moskvichev ever been on Venus?”
“He works there,” said Zavadskaya, “but that’s not the point. What is important is that he hasn’t supplied the transportation. We’ve been waiting for three days.”
Kondratev remembered how he had once orbited Venus in a first-line interplanetary ship for thirty-three days and had decided not to land. “Yes,” he said. “That’s terrible, waiting so long.”
Then he looked with horror at small pale Marina and imagined her on Venus. Radioactive deserts, he thought. Black storms.
Moskvichev returned and crashed a tray covered with plates onto the table. Among the plates stuck out a pot-bellied bottle with a long neck. “Here,” he said. “Eat, Comrade Kondratev. Here is the sacivi itself—you recognize it? Here, if you like, is the sauce. Drink this—here’s ice—Pegov is talking to Anyudin again, and they promise a ship tomorrow at six.”
“Yesterday they promised us a ship ‘tomorrow at six’ too,” said Aleksandr.
“Well, now it’s for sure. The starship pilots are coming back. D-ships aren’t your piddling food tankers. Six hundred people a flight, and the day after tomorrow we’ll be there.”
Kondratev took a sip from his wineglass and started in on the food. His table companions were arguing. Evidently except for Moskvichev they were all new volunteers, and they were all going to Venus. Moskvichev exemplified the present Venusian population, oppressed by the severe natural conditions. For him everything was perfectly clear. As a Venusian he gave Earth seventeen percent of its energy, eighty-five percent of its rare metals, and lived like a dog, that is, did not see the blue sky for months at a time, and waited for weeks his turn to lie for a while on greenhouse grass. Working under these conditions was of course intolerably difficult; Kondratev was in full agreement.
The volunteers also agreed, and they were setting off for Venus with great eagerness, but by this means they pursued quite various ends. Thus squeaky Marina, who turned out to be some sort of heavy-systems operator, was going to Venus because on Earth her heavy-systems work had ceased expanding. She did not want to go on moving houses from place to place or digging basins for factories any more. She yearned to build cities on swamps, and for ferocious storms, for underground explosions. And for people to say afterward, “Marina Chernyak built these cities!” There was nothing to be said against her plans. Kondratev was in full agreement with Marina too, although he would have preferred letting her grow a bit more and, by means of specialized physical training, making her more of a match for swamps, storms, and underground explosions.
Aleksandr the meteorologist was in love with Marina Chernyak, but it wasn’t only that. When Marina had asked him for the third time to cut the comedy, he became very judicious and proved logically that for terrestrials there were only two ways out: since the work on Venus was so hard, we had either to abandon it entirely, or to improve the working conditions. Could we, however, desert a place where we had once set foot? No, we could not! Because there was the Great Mission of Humanity, and there was the Hour of the Earthman, with all the consequences flowing therefrom. Kondratev agreed even with this, although he strongly suspected that Aleksandr was continuing to exercise his wit.