Bert made no comment on that. He sat looking out at the blanched landscape through the drizzling rain. Presently the train jerked itself aside on to a loop in the single line, and settled down to wait for a bit. His neighbour offered him a roll of the curious local bread. Bert thanked him, and bit into it. For a time they champed in silence, then the man said:
“Not what you expected, eh? Well, it’s not what any of us expected. Still, it’s all we’ve got.”
“Huh!” grunted Bert, non-committally.
HIS mind had been wandering very far away. He had been back in his old ramshackle boat idling along the canal. In his ears was the friendly chug of the engine mingled with the tinkerbell chimes. The thin, crisp air of Mars was in his lungs again. Beyond the bank red sands rolled on to low mountains in the distance. Somewhere ahead was a water-wheel that would surely be needing attention. Beside it a ruined tower of carved red stone. When he walked towards it the bannikuks would come bounding out of their holes, clinging and squeaking, and pestering him for nuts. In the doorway of the tower Zaylo would be standing in a bright coloured dress, the silver pins shining in her hair, her eyes serious, her lips slightly smiling…
“No,” he added. “Not what I expected.” He paused, then he added. “How did it get this way?”
“Well, the Administrator here was okay with authority behind him—but without it he was nothing. Chris Davey saw that right off, and moved fast. The only serious opposition came from Don Modland who wanted a democratic set-up. But Don disappeared quite soon, and that had a kind of discouraging effect all round. So Davey and his mob took over. They built the seraglio stockade for the safety of the women and children—they said. If you’re one of Davey’s mob, that’s where you live. If you’re not, you never see the inside of the place. You only think you may—one day.
“Maybe it is true what they say about the birth rate and the death rate in there. Likely it’s not. There’s no way of checking. The place is guarded. It’d be hard to get in—harder still to get out, alive. If you’re one of Davey’s mob you carry a gun—if you’re not, you don’t. The long and the short of it is that if the results are coming along Chris doesn’t trouble how his buddies get them.”
“He’s made himself kind of—king of Venus?” Bert suggested.
“That’s about it. This part of Venus, anyway. He’s sitting pretty, with everything the way he wants it. The doggone thing is that whether you like it or not, he’s making a job of it. He is building the place up—in his way.
“One of the things his buddies put out is that it’s a race between us and the Slav lot down in the south. If they get ahead, and come beating through the tropics some way, it’s going to be bad for us. So it’s better for us to get ahead.”
“And attack them, you mean?”
“That’s the way of it—sometime, when we’re ready.”
A TRAIN came clattering past on the other loop. Small open trucks loaded with produce, others full of iron-ore, some travelling pens packed with silvery griffas, a couple of glass-windowed carriages on the end. Their own train started off again with a series of jolts. Bert continued to look out of the window. His companion’s hand came down on his knee.
“Cheer up, son. We’re still alive, anyway. That’s more than you can say for most.”
“I was alive on Mars,” said Bert.
“Then why did you come here?” asked the other.
Bert tried to explain it. He did his best to convey his vision of an Earth reborn. The other listened sympathetically, with a slightly wistful expression.
“I know. Like the Old Man said: ‘—a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal—’.”
“Something like that,” Bert agreed.
“Son,” said the other man, “you were very young when you left Earth.”
“I was twenty-one,” said Bert.
“Twenty-one’s still trailing clouds of glory—for all it thinks it knows. It was a grand thing the Old Man said, but have you ever thought how many empires had to grow up and be knocked out, or how many billions of poor guys had to die in slavery before a man could get up and say that?”
“I hadn’t,” Bert admitted. “But it has been said. So why can’t this be a ‘nation conceived in liberty’?”
“Well, I guess perhaps the Old Man didn’t have quite the right phrase, maybe. You see, after a creature is conceived, it has to go through all the stages—kind of recapitulate its evolution before it can get born.”
“That doesn’t sound much like a subversive element talking,” said Bert.
“You don’t have to be in a hurry to be subversive. All you got to do is to say ‘why?’ when it ought to be ‘yes’. If you keep on saying it you find yourself booked for another spell of managing griffas in the quarries, the way I am now.”
“But there’s no reason to go back to the primitive. What’s been said and worked out is all there in the books—books that are here on Venus. What I’ve seen for myself and what you’ve told me goes against it all. The thing they’ve set up is something like an ancient slave-state. We all know there’s a better way of life than that—so, for God’s sake, what’s happening? With all the knowledge from Earth behind them, and the chance to build a new Earth here, surely they aren’t going to pour half history down the drain?”
The other man looked at him for some moments before he answered, then he said:
“Son, I guess you’ve got it kind of wrong. Building a new Earth is just what they are doing. What you’re complaining about is that they’ve not started in building a new heaven.”
Bert regarded him more closely.
“I don’t get that. I can remember Earth, you know.”
“Me too. The difference is, like I said, the clouds of glory. What did you do there?”
“I went to school, then to college, then to the School of Spacetraining.”
“And me. I worked on buildings, in factories, in ships, on docks, in spaceports, on railroads. I bummed around quite a stretch. Do you reckon I got to know what Earth was like my way—or was your way better?”
Bert sat silent awhile, then he said:
“There were fine cities, happy people, music—and fine men, too.”
“Ever seen an iceberg? The part you do see looks mighty pretty in the sunshine.”
“There was enough to show the way a world might be, and ought to be.”
“Sure, sure. We all know the way things ought to be. We all got our little heavens.” He paused contemplatively. Looking at Bert again, he added: “Maybe—one day. We have come quite a way in a few thousand years—but we’ve still got to grow up. Takes time, son, takes time.”
“But here things are wrong. They’re going back. They seem to have forgotten all the things we’ve learned. We have to go on, not back. Now the people on Mars—”
“Sure. Tell me about Mars, son. That’s one place I never was.”
BERT went on telling him about Mars. About the place itself, about the way the people, for all the simple poverty of their lives, seemed to enjoy life as a gift in itself, not as a means to something else, and were happy that way.
The little train rattled along. A dim line of hills ahead became visible through the drizzle, but Bert did not see them. His sight was all nostalgic. It showed red deserts set with placid canals, green patches about little homesteads. Somehow he found himself telling the stranger about Zaylo…
The stranger said nothing. Once or twice he made as if to ask a question, but let it go unspoken. Bert talked on, oblivious of the compassion in the listener’s eyes.
They were almost at the end of the line before the other broke in on Bert’s mood. He pointed out of the window at the hills now quite close. In places the green-grey vegetation on the slopes was scarred with the dark marks of workings.