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?”
“It’s what you said.”
“It is your own translation of what I said. I would like it better balanced. Do you mind if we try again?”
They tried again. They made fourteen attempts before Pander was satisfied with the perfunctory appearance of letters and words he could not understand.
Taking the paper, he found his ray-gun, went to the base-rock of the beautiful thing and sheared the whole front to a flat, even surface. Adjusting his beam to cut a V-shaped channel one inch deep, he inscribed his poem on the rock in long, unpunctuated lines of neat Martian curlicues. With less confidence and much greater care, he repeated the verse in Earth’s awkward, angular hieroglyphics. The task took him quite a time, and there were fifty people watching him when he finished. They said nothing. In utter silence they looked at the poem and at the beautiful thing, and were still standing there brooding solemnly when he went away.
One by one the rest of the community visited the site next day, going and coming with the air of pilgrims attending an ancient shrine. All stood there a long time, returned without comment. Nobody praised Fander’s work, nobody damned it, nobody reproached him for alienizing something wholly Earth’s. The only effect—too subtle to be noteworthy—was a greater and still growing grimness and determination that boosted the already swelling Earth-dynamic.
In that respect, Pander wrought better than he knew.
A plague-scare came in the fourteenth year. Two sleds had brought back families from afar, and within a week of their arrival the children sickened, became spotted.
Metal gongs sounded the alarm, all work ceased, the affected section was cut off and guarded, the majority prepared to flee. It was a threatening reversal of all the things for which many had toiled so long; a destructive scattering of the tender roots of new civilization.
Pander found Graypate, Speedy, and Blacky, armed to the teeth, facing a drawn-faced and restless crowd.
“There’s most of a hundred folk in that isolated part,” Graypate was telling them. “They ain’t all got it. Maybe they won’t get it. If they don’t it ain’t so likely you’ll go down either. We ought to wait and see. Stick around a bit.”
“Listen who’s talking,” invited a voice in the crowd. “If you weren’t immune you’d have been planted thirty-forty years ago.”
“Same goes for near everybody,” snapped Graypate. He glared around, his gun under one arm, his pale blue eyes bellicose. “I ain’t much use at speechifying, so I’m just saying flatly that nobody goes before we know whether this really is the plague.” He hefted his weapon in one hand, held it forward. “Anyone fancy himself at beating a bullet?”
The heckler in the audience muscled his way to the front. He was a swarthy man of muscular build, and his dark eyes looked belligerently into Graypate’s. “While there’s life there’s hope. If we beat it, we live to come back, when it’s safe to come back, if ever—and you know it. So I’m calling your bluff, see?” Squaring his shoulders, he began to walk off.
Graypate’s gun already was halfway up when he felt the touch of Pander’s tentacle on his arm. He lowered the weapon, called after the escapee.
“I’m going into that cut-off section and the Devil is going with me. We’re running into things, not away from them. I never did like running away.” Several of the audience fidgeted, murmuring approval. He went on, “We’ll see for ourselves just what’s wrong. We mightn’t be able to put it right, but we’ll find out what’s the matter.”