No Place Like Earth by John Wyndham (as by John Beynon)
The decision was difficult—remain at peace on Mars, or migrate to Venus and rebuild Earth’s lost heritage. The outcome would be momentous. (The sequel to “Time to Rest.”) 
Illustrated by Clothier
ON THE left bank lay the ruins of a great city. According to the Martians it was called something like Thalkia. It was unlike any waterside city, unlike, indeed, any city that Bert had seen on Earth. There were no vestiges or signs of quays. Instead, half a dozen stone-paved roads, ramps with low walls ran from the land into the water. Looking over the side of the boat one could follow them down into the murky depths. From them Bert had deduced that the Great Ones who had built the city had employed some kind of amphibious craft, able to run from the canal into the market-places or wherever it was that the cargoes were needed. It was just another of those hints about the Great Ones that, put together, added up to practically nothing.
Several times Bert had stopped there, and made his way among the ruins. They told him little: he could not deduce even the size or nature of the Great Ones. Pale red sand had crept across much of the place. Out of it protruded pillars and walls of the darker red stone, and between them the corners of fallen blocks. Here and there great lintels, architecturally fantastic, and structurally impossible on Earth, still stood. It could be seen that the Great Ones had abhorred the straight line, delighted in the subtle curve, and had had a particular penchant for a gently swelled three-sided pillar. And, too, that there was nothing ephemeral in their building notions. Allowing for the different gravity, there was a massiveness which nothing on Earth, save possibly the Egyptian pyramids, had employed. It awed Bert quite a deal to be standing in the remains of the oldest structural work anyone had ever seen. The civilisation of Earth seemed by contrast like a quickly blown and burst bubble. He doubted whether Thalkia had looked much different at the time when men’s ancestors were leaving the trees for the ground. Each time he had come away humbled by antiquity, and with the desire to dig there one day and find out more about the Great Ones.
MANY miles behind him, beside a smaller canal than this, stood a ruined tower that had changed from its obscure original purpose to become the home of a Martian family, and it was there that his mind was lingering. The family sustained itself on the produce of a few fields irrigated by the usual wheel beside the canal. It was to keep the wheel turning and to repair such domestic objects as confounded the limited local talent that Bert had the family on his schedule of calls. Of seven Martian years (which would have been something over 13 Earth years had the disintegrated Earth survived as a measure of time) Bert had spent more than six wandering the canals in his boat, leading a tinker’s life from which he returned occasionally to base at the Settlement to pick up metal, make a few pots, and collect such supplies as he could conveniently remove. The small farms and scarce villages on his route had become used to him, and to putting broken objects aside for him to mend when he called, and he had grown to know and to like the people who lived in them. At first, to his Earth-raised mind, they had been too quiet, and ineffective, and fragile-looking, so that like most of the Earthmen he had thought them decadent. But in time he began to see himself and the other Earthmen with something like Martian eyes—as neurotic, acquisitive, and with values which were sometimes suspect. He had begun to wonder whether “drive” was always the virtue he had been taught it was—whether it might not sometimes be the expression of instability or poor integration. Though that was not a thought one would mention to another Earthman.
“To us it seems,” a Martian had once told him, “that a sense of guilt lies on each of you Earthmen. You all of you think that you ought to be better men, or bigger men, or at least different men in some way. We wonder why a whole race should have the inferiority complex which makes it base its virtues on the assumption of its own inadequacy. To us that seems strange.”
It seemed strange to Bert, too, and not very palatable when put in that way, so that he had disputed it. Nevertheless, as time went by, he had found himself understanding Martian views better, and Earthmen’s views less well.
It was disagreeable to realise, too, that the Martians mattered more now, for the Earthmen were finished. The ‘drive’ of the Earthmen, which was something superimposed upon the normal will to live, had brought them to the end. By accident, carelessness or irresponsibility it had torn the Earth into the millions of fragments which now circled the Sun as an inner asteroid belt. The few hundreds of men left stranded here and there were of no account any longer. It made little difference whether they died off from drink or illness, or waited for old age to take them. In less than thirty Martian years the last of them would have gone, and the brief disturbance of their incursion would gradually drop out of Martian memory, leaving no sign but some admixture in the Martian blood—Which brought Bert back to considering the family that lived in the ruined tower.
There, as in other places, he had been accustomed to tell tales to the children as he worked. He had been only half aware that they were growing up. Mars was a world so spent, so far into old age, that younger generations still growing up there seemed not only incongruous, but pointless to an extent where he scarcely admitted to himself that they were doing so. His last visit, however, had left no doubt about it, for the youngest daughter, Zaylo, whom he thought of as a little girl, had suddenly become transformed into a young woman. The realisation had disquieted him in a way that was quite new…
BERT had come to some sort of terms with the conditions thrust upon him. He was not interested in the few Martian girls who hung around the Settlement. Occasionally he came across one of the Earthmen who had settled down with a Martian girl. Sometimes it seemed a qualified success, more often it didn’t. In the early days some such idea had tentatively entered his own head, but he had dismissed it, rather as he had dismissed the idea of an alcohol-soaked life in the Settlement. The indications were, he decided, that it did not work well.
Bert was not analytical in the matter. It had not occurred to him that the chief factor in a Martian marriage would be the temperament of the man concerned—his ability, or lack of it, to adapt. Nor had he looked closely at the motives of his decision. He was aware that he resisted something, but had anyone told him that in his heart he was sentimentally preserving a useless loyalty to a world and a race that had finished, he would not have believed it. If his informant had gone further, and told him that the Earth he revered was an idealistic, romantic conception with little likeness to the vanished Earth of reality, he would not have understood.
What he did understand was that the sight of Zaylo had somehow pulverised in a moment a philosophy which had hitherto been adequate enough, and that the placidity of his existence had been torn to shreds. In his mind he could hear the voice of Annika, Zaylo’s mother, saying: “Life is not something which you can stop just because you don’t like it.” He did not want to believe that. There had been a poet once who wrote:
I am the Master of my Fate,
I am the Captain of my Soul.
That was what Bert believed—or hoped.
Ever since the day when he had accepted the grim fact that he was stranded on Mars for the rest of his life he had steered his own course. He had shown the Greater Fate that it could not get him down, and he intended to go on showing it. Zaylo was a trap—a beautiful trap, like a fly-eating orchid. The sight of her and the sound of her voice had pierced through all his defences. He ached from the resulting wound. He knew perfectly well that if he were to stay near her he could no longer hold that Captaincy undisputed. He was jealous of her power to move him, angry with her for revealing to him the dry sawdust within his life. And so he had run away…