Bert sat down on a stone for ten minutes, regaining his strength, and thinking carefully. Then he stood up, with decision. But before he left he went back into the quarry to fetch his hat, for it had started to rain again.
ONCE THE acceleration was over, Bert emerged from his hiding place and mingled with the rest. A full hour passed before someone tapped him on the shoulder and inquired:
“Say, what the hell are you doing here?”
The Captain and the Chief Officer regarded him uncertainly as he was brought before them. The pistol he wore was almost a badge of rank in itself. “What’s the trouble?” Bert inquired, blandly.
“You’re not listed. How did you get here?” the Chief Officer inquired. Bert looked surprised.
“Not listed? Somebody must have slipped up. They only put me on this job yesterday. But they said you’d been informed already, Captain.”
“Well, I hadn’t. And what is ‘this job’?”
“It’s—er—well, kind of recruiting-sergeant. You see I can speak four Martian dialects, and get along in several more.”
“Recruiting Martians, you mean?”
“That’s the idea. Spin ’em the yarn, and bring ’em along. They’ll be useful managing griffas if nothing else.”
He looked steadily back at the Captain as he spoke, hoping that it would not occur to him that a Martian transferred to Venus would only be able to crawl about, if he weren’t actually pinned flat by the gravitation. It did not. Probably the man had never even seen a Martian. He merely frowned.
“I should have been informed,” he said, stiffly.
“Bad staff work somewhere,” Bert agreed. “But you could get radio confirmation,” he suggested.
“Do you know anything of radio conditions on Venus?” inquired the Chief Officer shortly.
“No, but on Mars we—”
“Maybe, but Mars isn’t Venus. Well, since you are here, you’d better make yourself useful on the trip.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” agreed Bert, briskly.
BY THE look of it no one had touched the old boat since he had moored her. Bert patted the engine, and then primed it. A pull-up or two, and she started. He laughed aloud. The old phut-phut-phut was like music to set his feet dancing. He cast off. In the old seat, with his arm over the tiller, he chugged out on the great canal.
Beyond the junction, and on a smaller canal, he stopped. From a locker in the cabin he produced old, patched clothes and a pair of the crude shoes that he was accustomed to make for himself. Overboard went the clothes they had given him on Venus, and the heavy, laced boots with them. He hesitated over the pistol, and then threw it after them—nobody used or needed such a thing on Mars. He felt lighter as he watched them sink. The miseries of the last few weeks on Venus, the long journey back from the quarries to the Settlement when he dared to move his weary body only by night for fear of being seen, the long wait in hiding close to the landing ground, the keeping alive on shoots and roots, the perpetual wet misery of the rain which scarcely ever let up, the anxious waiting for the return of the Rutherford A4, the delay while she was being made ready for her third and last trip of the conjunction, and, finally, the nervous business of smuggling himself aboard—all these began to become a bad dream.
He hitched his trousers, and tied them with a piece of cord. He was bending over the engine to restart it when the sound of a sudden thunder came rolling across the desert.
Bert looked back.
Above the horizon a plume of black smoke rose and expanded. He nodded in a satisfied way. The Rutherford A4 would not be taking part in any more slaving expeditions.
He whistled gently to himself as he coaxed the engine into action again.
IT WAS the mind’s eye picture come to life—even to the squeak pitched above the tinkerbell chimes telling that the waterwheel needed attention. As he walked towards the broken tower there was the familiar thump-thump of Annika, Zaylo’s mother, at her work of pounding grain. The bannikuks scampered up, pestering—only this time he had no nuts for them, and they wouldn’t seem to understand that. Annika rested her stone pestle as he approached.
“Hullo, Earthman,” she said. Her eyes searched his face keenly. “You have been ill?” she added.
Bert shook his head, and sat down on a stone bench.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said. “Remember last time I was here you said that if Earth was re-created now it would be stranger to me than Mars?”
“So it would, Earthman.”
“But I didn’t believe you.”
“Well—?”
“I think I see what you meant now.” He paused. “Back home,” he went on, “we used to talk about men and women we called saints—the funny thing about them was that they never seemed very real. You see, once they were dead, people agreed only to remember the good things about them. Seems to me—well, it might be there never was a place like the Earth I remembered…”
Annika nodded.
“A heaven behind you is no good,” she said. “A heaven ahead is better. But to make a heaven around you is best.”
“You understand things, Annika. I was like a rich man who had been cheated out of all his money—the only worthwhile thing seemed to be to get it all back.”
“And now—?” asked Annika.
“Now, I’ve stopped fooling myself. I don’t want it. I’ve stopped crying for the moon—or the Earth. I’ll be content to live and enjoy living. So this time—” He broke off.
Zaylo, coming out of the door in the tower base, had paused there at the sight of him. She stood quite still for a moment, poised with the grace of a young goddess. The coils of her dark hair shone like lacquer, her misted copper skin glowed in the sunlight. She put her hand to her breast, her eyes sparkled with sudden pleasure, her lips parted…
Zaylo was not quite as he had pictured her. She was ten times more wonderful than anything memory could contrive.
“So this time,” Bert repeated. “This time I have come to stay.”
The End.
Notes and proofing history
Scanned with preliminary proofing by A\NN/A
March 27th, 2008—v1.0
from the original source: New Worlds No. 9, Spring 1951