“Because of the cold?”
“That — and other things. But in the end they made it possible for you to live here. They had to work very hard and cleverly for you. More than once we thought we were going to lose you.”
“But what were they doing?”
“I don't understand much of it. But you see you were intended for a different world. It must have been one where there was more weight, thicker air, more humidity, higher temperature, different food and — oh, lots of things you'll learn about when you're older. So they had to help you get used to things as they are here.”
Jannessa considered that.
“It was very kind of them,” she said, “but they weren't very good, were they?”
Telta looked at her in surprise.
“Dear, that's not very grateful. What do you mean?”
“If they could do all that, why couldn't they make me look like other people? Why did they leave me all white, like this? Why didn't they give me lovely hair like yours, instead of this yellow stuff?”
“Darling, your hair's lovely. It's like the finest golden threads.”
“But it's not like anyone else's. It's different. I want to be like other people. But I'm a freak.”
Telta looked at her, unhappily perplexed.
“Being of another kind isn't being a freak,” she said.
“It is if you're the only one. And I don't want to be different. I hate it,” said Jannessa.
A man made his way slowly up the marble steps of the Venturers' Club. He was middle-aged, but he walked with a clumsy lack of certainty more appropriate to an older man. For a moment the porter looked doubtful, then his expression cleared.
“Good evening, Dr. Forbes,” he said.
Dr. Forbes smiled.
“Good evening, Rogers. You've got a good memory. It's twelve years.”
“So now you're home for good — and loaded with medical honours,” Franklyn said.
“It's a curious feeling,” Forbes said. “Eighteen years altogether. I'd been there almost a year when you came.”
“Well, you've earned the rest. Others got us there, but it's your work that's enabled us to build there and stay there.”
“There was a lot to learn. There's a lot yet.”
“You never remarried?” he asked.
“No.” Franklyn shook his head.
“You should have. I told you, remember? You should have a wife and family. It's still not too late.”
Again Franklyn shook his head.
“I've not told you my news yet,” he said. “I've had word of Jannessa.”
Forbes stared at him. If he had ever thought anything more unlikely he could not recall what it was.
“Had word,” he repeated, carefully. “Just what does that mean?”
Franklyn explained.
“For years I have been advertising for news of the Aurora. The answers came mostly from nuts, or from those who thought I was crazy enough for them to cash in on — until six months or so ago.”
“The man who came to see me then was the owner of a spaceman's hostel in Chicago. He'd had a man die there a little while before, and the man had something he wanted to get off his chest before he went out. The owner brought it to me for what it was worth.”
“The dying man claimed that the Aurora was not lost in space, as everyone thought; he said that his name was Jenkins and he had been aboard her, so he ought to know. According to his story, there was a mutiny on the Aurora when she was a few days out from Mars. It was on account of the captain deciding to hand some of the crew over to the police on arrival, for crimes unspecified. When the mutineers took over they had the support of all but one or two of the officers, and they changed course. I don't know what the ultimate plan was, but what they did then was to lift from the plane of the ecliptic, and hop the asteroid belt, on a course for Jupiter.”
“The owner got the impression that they were not so much a ruthless gang as a bunch of desperate men with a grievance. They could have pushed the officers and the passengers out into space since they had all qualified for a hanging anyway. But they didn't. Instead, like other pirates before them, they elected to maroon the lot and leave them to make out as best they could — if they could.”
“According to Jenkins, the place chosen was Europa, somewhere in the region of its twentieth parallel, and the time somewhere in the third or fourth month of 1995. The party they stranded consisted of twelve persons — including a coloured girl in charge of a white baby.”
Franklyn paused.
“The owner bears a quite blameless character. The dying man had nothing to gain by fabrication. And, on looking up the sailing list, I find that there was a spaceman named Evan David Jenkins aboard the Aurora”
He concluded with a kind of cautious triumph, and looked expectantly across the table at Forbes. But there was no enthusiasm in the doctor's face.
“Europa,” he said, reflectively. He shook his head.
Franklyn's expression hardened.
“Is that all you have to say?” he demanded.
“No,” Forbes told him, slowly. “For one thing I should say that it is more than unlikely — that it is almost impossible that she can have survived.”
“Almost is not quite. But I am going to find out. One of our prospecting ships is on her way to Europa now.”
Forbes shook his head again.
“It would be wiser to call her off.”
Franklyn stared at him.
“After all these years — when at last there is hope—”
The doctor looked steadily back at him.
“My two boys are going back to Mars next week,” he said.
“I don't see what that has to do with it.”
“But it has. Their muscles ache continually. The strain of that makes them too tired either to work or to enjoy life. The humidity here also exhausts them. They complain that the air feels like a thick soup all around and inside them. They have never been free of catarrh since they arrived. There are other things, too. So they are going back.”
“And you stay here. That's tough.”
“It's tougher on Annie. She adores those boys. But that's the way life is, Frank.”
“Meaning?”
'That it's conditions that count. When we produce a new life, it is something plastic. Independent. We can't live its life as well as our own. We can't do more than to see that it has the best conditions to shape it the way we like best. If the conditions are in some way beyond our control, one of two things happens; either it becomes adapted to the conditions it finds — or it fails to adapt, which means that it dies.
“We talk airily about conquering this or that natural obstacle — but look at what we really do and you'll find that more often than not it is ourselves we are adapting.”
“My boys have been acclimatized to Martian conditions. Earth doesn't suit them. Annie and I have sustained Martian conditions for a while, but, as adults, we were incapable of thorough adaptation. So either we must come home — or stay there to die early.”
“You mean, you think that Jannessa—”
“I don't know what may have happened — but I have thought about it. I don't think you have thought about it at all. Frank.”
“I've thought of little else these last seventeen years.”
“Surely ‘dreamed’ is the word, Frank?” Forbes looked across at him, his head a little on one side, his manner gentle. “Once upon a time something, an ancestor of ours, came out of the water on to the land. It became adapted until it could not go back to its relatives in the sea. That is the process we agree to call progress. It is inherent in life. If you stop it, you stop life, too.”