“Sure—haven’t we all? Naturally it’s in your interest to help locate the ship so that you can come to Earth with us.”
“I don’t particularly want to go to Earth now,” said Leep. “If I go, I shall be well-fed—granted. But also I’ll be constantly harassed and importuned to use my gifts for others, to become a common fortune-teller. I’m an old man and in the normal way shan’t live much longer. I resent any limitation on my time for meditation. I’ve always resented the time wasted on the necessity for getting food. No, I’m quite willing to give my place in the ship to Senilde here.”
“To go to Earth?” said Senilde, surprised. “What makes you imagine I should want to go to Earth?”
Leep said, calmly: “You’ve exhausted all the pleasures of Venus, and you’re bored sick. On Earth there must be innumerable new pleasures you’ve never tasted, never even imagined. Again, the Earthlings are very shortlived. With your wisdom, knowledge, experience, authority, and invulnerability you would soon become their ruler. It’s inevitable that an immortal should rule mere mortals.”
Mara laughed at the cool cheek of it.
But George stammered with anger: “Why, you two-faced pocket Machiavelli, I wouldn’t l-let you come aboard the ship now to save my l-life!”
Leep said, softly: “You can’t go aboard the ship yourself if you can’t find it. I’ll tell you this: it’s very far from here. It would take weeks to walk there, even if you walked in the right direction. If you didn’t, it might take years.”
Mara said, shrewdly: “In return for directing us and Senilde to the ship, so that we can go to Earth, you wish Senilde to give you the secret of immortality, don’t you?”
“That’s it,” said Senilde. “I said before you were intelligent, Mara. Obviously more intelligent than this cracked visionary who imagines he can strike bargains with me.”
“I have set my heart on becoming an immortal,” said Leep. “To meditate, forever, without distraction, without ever having to worry again about finding food!”
“Rubbish!” snapped Senilde. “You’d become as bored as I am, and long for death, as often I have done. Immortality is a curse. I’ll be kind, and save you from it.”
“Ever the altruist,” murmured Leep, sarcastically. “The real truth is that you’re jealous of your uniqueness, Senilde. You fear to have a rival. In point of fact, you would have nothing to fear from me. The only power I seek is over myself, over the labyrinths of my mind. The whole universe lies in every man’s mind. Every man could discover that through mere contemplation— if he could live long enough to do so.”
“I’ve lived long enough,” said Senilde, “and I’ve discovered nothing worth eternal life.”
“I spoke of a man’s mind,” said Leep, scornfully. “Yours is the mind of an infant—it never became anything else. A clever, tinkering infant, with certain technical aptitudes. Emotionally, spiritually, morally, intellectually you remained immature, with only one aim: pleasure—crude, immediate pleasure. There’s nothing in you of timeless serenity, the spirit of contemplation. No wonder you’re bored. The boon of immortality is wasted on you. Let me have it. I know how to use it. You go to Earth and have your childish fun. Maybe they’ll appreciate your surprise fountains and squeaking cushions there, and put you in the kindergarten where you belong.”
Senilde’s slack mouth had been slackening still more. But now, suddenly, he shut it grimly. His pale eyes shone with hate. Leep had spoken truth, and the truth hurt.
He spat at Leep: “I would never perpetuate a snarling, spiteful creature like you. Earth couldn’t offer me any pleasure to compare with just watching you starve to death. Which I shall do. No one can speak to me like that and expect to get away with it. You fear hunger and death more than anything. All right—you shall now suffer both… slowly. And to show you how worthless your so-called bargaining counter is, I’ll find the ship myself. George, Mara—come with me.”
He led them to a wing of the house which they had not previously visited. They followed him through a doorway into a great covered space like an airplane hangar. Almost filling it, looming over them so that they had to crane their necks to see the top of it, was the largest tank George had seen yet. It was bigger even than the green triangle one which the wheeled torpedo had destroyed. But it carried no distinguishing mark and no gun. Also, it was of a different design, with a high turret crowned by a railed observation platform.
“My war chariot,” said Senilde. “I used it to travel around and observe the battles. Its outline is filed by both the circle and the triangle forces—which means that it’s registered as a friend by both sides. But just in case of accidents or stray shells, it’s very heavily armored. It’ll stand up to almost anything—except a wheeled torpedo. But I never ran into any trouble with it. Usually, I stayed aloft on the platform, in the juiciest battles too.”
“You seem to have gone to a lot of trouble to safeguard your immortality,”
said George, dryly.
Senilde said seriously: “If a shell blew me apart, I might take a long time to grow together again.”
George’s imagination boggled at the vision. He wondered if Senilde were trying to fool himself or them. There must be limits to this immortality proposition.
Senilde pulled a lever. The whole of the far wall split into two massive doors opening to reveal the gray Venusian landscape.
“We shall probably have to go searching for some days,” said Senilde. “I almost forgot—you two have to eat. You’d better go and bring some of your food along, George.”
George left. When he returned, carrying the provision box, the great tank was standing outside the doors in the overgrown garden; its engine beating steadily. Senilde and Mara were up on the observation platform, waiting. He clambered up steel rungs to them, carrying the box awkwardly. Mara inquired: “Did you leave any food for Leep?”
“Of course not,” said George, irritably. “What, after he tried to sell us down the river? Besides, we’ve no guarantee we’ll find the ship on this trip. If we fail and have to return, the chances are hunger will have softened up Leep some. If we dangle a few food bars in front of his nose, he might give in and tell us where the ship is.”
“Leep isn’t the sort to give in easily,” said Mara.
“Neither am I!” snapped George.
Senilde was listening and idly fingering pointers on a dial. He said: “All we require from Leep are two numbers—the numbers of the cross-lines to which to set these pointers. Then we’d only have to sit back, for the chariot would take us to the spot automatically. Maybe, in the end, I shall have to torture him.”
His washed-out eyes began to glaze and his tongue began to lick his thick lips.
“Let’s go,” said George, hastily.
V
FOR DAYS on end the great tank, quartering areas methodically, rumbled about the land. And there was an awful lot of land. The poor visibility made it necessary to beat back and forth across wastes which, had the light been better, could have been seen at a glance to be bare. Senilde treasured his telescope and used it all the time.
They skirted mountain ranges, forded rivers, circled over endless plains. Occasionally they saw other tanks, static and silent, frozen in their tracks. The slow pace of their own tank was frustrating to George. He said to Senilde: “Damn this ponderous thing! Why didn’t you choose something faster, say one of those wheeled torpedoes?”
“Because they’ve no accommodation for passengers. Because, unlike this tank, they’re not self-powered: to get one moving, I’d have to start the whole war up again. Because the torpedo shape is a target for all triangle forces. Reasons enough?”
After a fruitless, eventless week, Senilde became bored and headed the chariot home. They expostulated but Senilde said: “I don’t want Leep to die while I’m wasting time out here. I want some fun out of him first.”