“I sure did.” He sat down, staring at the Martian, his pale gray eyes bothered. “I don’t mind giving in to the boys when I can’t beat ‘em off any longer, but I’m durned if I’m going to tell the girls.”
Pander said, “I have been asked about this many a time before. I could not tell much because I was by no means certain whether you breed precisely as we breed. But I told them how we breed.”
“The girls too?”
“Of course.”
“Jeepers!” Graypate mopped his forehead again. “How did they take it?”
“Just as if I’d told them why the sky is blue or why water is wet.”
“Must’ve been something in the way you put it to them,” opined Graypate.
“I told them it was poetry between persons.”
Throughout the course of history, Martian, Venusian, or Terrestrial, some years are more noteworthy than others. The twelfth one after Pander’s marooning was outstanding for its series of events each of which was pitifully insignificant by cosmic standards but loomed enormously in this small community life.
To start with, on the basis of Redhead’s improvements to the premasticator, the older seven-now bearded men-contrived to repower the exhausted sled and again took to the air for the first time in forty months. Experiments showed that the Martian load-carrier was now slower, could bear less weight, but had far longer range. They used it to visit the ruins of distant cities in search of metallic junk suitable for the building of more sleds, and by early summer they had constructed another, larger than the original, clumsy to the verge of dangerousness, but still a sled.
On several occasions they failed to find metal but did find people, odd families surviving in under-surface shelters, clinging grimly to life and passed-down scraps of knowledge. Since all these new contacts were strictly human to human, with no weirdly tentacled shape to scare off the parties of the second part, and since many were finding fear of plague more to be endured than their terrible loneliness, many families returned with the explorers, settled in the shelters, accepted Pander, added their surviving skills to the community’s riches.
Thus local population grew to seventy adults and four hundred children. They compounded with their plague-fear by spreading through the shelters, digging through half-wrecked and formerly unused expanses, and moving apart to form twenty or thirty lesser communities each one of which could be isolated should death reappear.
Growing morale born of added strength and confidence in numbers soon resulted in four more sleds, still clumsy but slightly less dangerous to manage. There also appeared the first rock house above ground, standing four-square and solidly under the gray skies, a defiant witness that mankind still considered itself a cut above the rats and rabbits. The community presented the house to Blacky and Sweetvoice, who had announced their desire to associate. An adult who claimed to know the conventional routine spoke solemn words over the happy couple before many witnesses, while Pander attended the groom as best Martian.
Toward summer’s end Speedy returned from a solo sled-trip of many days, brought with him one old man, one boy and four girls, all of strange, outlandish countenance. They were yellow in complexion, had black hair, black, almond-shaped eyes, and spoke a language that none could understand. Until these newcomers had picked up the local speech, Pander had to act as interpreter, for his mind-pictures and theirs were independent of vocal sounds. The four girls were quiet, modest, and very beautiful. Within a month Speedy had married one of them whose name was a gentle clucking sound which meant Precious Jewel Ling.
After this wedding, Pander sought Graypate, placed a tentacle-tip in his right hand. “There were differences between the man and the girl, distinctive features wider apart than any we know upon Mars. Are these some of the differences which caused your war?”
“I dunno. I’ve never seen one of these yellow folk before. They must live mighty far off.” He rubbed his chin to help his thoughts along. “I only know what my old man told me and his old man told him. There were too many folk of too many different sorts.”
“They can’t be all that different if they can fall in love.”
“Mebbe not,” agreed Graypate.
“Supposing most of the people still in this world could assemble here, breed together, and have less different children; the children bred others still less different. Wouldn’t they eventually become all much the same-just Earth-people?”
“Mebbe so.”
“All speaking the same language, sharing the same culture? If they spread out slowly from a central source, always in contact by sled, continually sharing the same knowledge, same progress, would there be any room for new differences to arise?”
“I dunno,” said Graypate evasively. “I’m not so young as I used to be, and I can’t dream as far ahead as I used to do.”
“It doesn’t matter so long as the young ones can dream it.” Pander mused a moment. “If you’re beginning to think yourself a back number, you’re in good company. Things are getting somewhat out of hand as far as I’m concerned. The onlooker sees the most of the game, and perhaps that’s why I’m more sensitive than you to a certain peculiar feeling.”
“To what feeling?” inquired Graypate, eyeing him.
“That Terra is on the move once more. There are now many people where there were few. A house is up and more are to follow. They talk of six more. After the six they will talk of sixty, then six hundred, then six thousand. Some are planning to haul up sunken conduits and use them to pipe water from the northward lake. Sleds are being built. Premasticators will soon be built, and force-screens likewise. Children are being taught. Less and less is being heard of your plague, and so far no more have died of it. I feel a dynamic surge of energy and ambition and genius which may grow with appalling rapidity until it becomes a mighty flood. I feel that I, too, am a back number.”
“Bunk!” said Graypate. He spat on the ground. “If you dream often enough, you’re bound to have a bad one once in a while.”
“Perhaps it is because so many of my tasks have been taken over and done better than I was doing them. I have failed to seek new tasks. Were I a technician I’d have discovered a dozen by now. Reckon this is as good a time as any to turn to a job with which you can help me.”
“What is that?”
“A long, long time ago I made a poem. It was for the beautiful thing that first impelled me to stay here. I do. not know exactly what its maker had in mind, nor whether my eyes see it as he wished it to be seen, but I have made a poem to express what I feel when I look upon his work.”
“Humph!” said Graypate, not very interested.
“There is an outcrop of solid rock beneath its base which I can shave smooth and use as a plinth on which to inscribe my words. I would like to put them down twice-in the script of Mars and the script of Earth.” Pander hesitated a moment, then went on. “Perhaps this is presumptuous of me, but it is many years since I wrote for all to read-and my chance may never come again.”
Graypate said, “I get the idea. You want me to put down your notions in our writing so you can copy it.”
“Yes.”
“Give me your stylus and pad.” Taking them, Graypate squatted on a rock, lowering himself stiffly, for he was feeling the weight of his years. Resting the pad on his knees, he held the writing instrument in his right hand while his left continued to grasp a tentacle-tip. “Go ahead.”
He started drawing thick, laborious marks as Pander’s mind-pictures came through, enlarging the letters and keeping them well separated. When he had finished he handed the pad over.
“Asymmetrical,” decided Pander, staring at the queer letters and wishing for the first time that he had taken up the study of Earth-writing. “Cannot you make this part balance with that, and this with this?”