He glanced at the foot of the page and saw the name, Casimir Colegrove. Of course, he had seen that name before. An old poet. A good one. But what did the words mean to him, Rod McBan, sitting in a hidden hole within the limits of his own land? He was a Mister and Owner, in all except final title, and he was running from an enemy he could not define. “The hostile justice of my self-contempt…” That was the key of it! He was not running from the Onseck. He was running from himself. He took justice itself as hostile because it corresponded with his sixty-odd years of boyhood, his endless disappointment, his compliance with things which would never, till all worlds burned, be complied with. How could he hier and spiek like other people if somewhere a dominant feature had turned recessive? Hadn’t real justice already vindicated him and cleared him?
It was he himself who was cruel.
Other people were kind. (Shrewdness made him add, “sometimes.”)
He had taken his own inner sense of trouble and had made it fit the outside world, like the morbid little poem he had read a long time ago. It was somewhere right in this room, and when he had first read it, he felt that the long-dead writer had put it down for himself alone. But it wasn’t really so. Other people had had their troubles too and the poem had expressed something older than Rod McBan. It went:
“Godmachine,” thought Rod, “now that’s a clue. I’ve got the only all-mechanical computer on this planet. I’ll play it on the stroon crop, win all or lose all.”
The boy stood up in the forbidden room.
“Fight it is,” he said to the cubes on the floor, “and a good thanks to you, grandfather-to-the-nineteenth. You met the law and did not lose. And now it is my turn to be Rod McBan.”
He turned and shouted to himself,
“To Earth!”
The call embarrassed him. He felt unseen eyes staring at him. He almost blushed and would have hated himself if he had.
He stood on the top of a treasure-chest turned on its side. Two more gold coins, worthless as money but priceless as curios, fell noiselessly on the thick old rugs. He thought a goodbye again to his secret room and he jumped upward for the bar. He caught it, chinned himself, raised himself higher, swung a leg on it but not over it, got his other foot on the bar, and then, very carefully but with the power of all his muscles, pushed himself into the black opening above. The lights suddenly went off, the dehumidifier hummed louder, and the daylight dazzled him as the trap-door, touched, flung itself open.
He thrust his head into the culvert. The daylight seemed deep grey after the brilliance of the treasure room.
All silent. All clear. He rolled into the ditch. The door, with silence and power, closed itself behind him. He was never to know it, but it had been cued to the genetic code of the descendants of Rod McBan. Had any other person touched it, it would have withstood them for a long time. Almost forever.
You see, it was not really his door. He was its boy. “This land has made me,” said Rod aloud, as he clambered out of the ditch and looked around. The young ram had apparently wakened; his snoring had stopped and over the quiet hill there came the sound of his panting. Thirsty again! The Station of Doom was not so rich that it could afford unlimited water to its giant sheep. They lived all right. But he would have asked the trustees to sell even the sheep for water, if a real drought set in. But never the land. Never the land. No land for sale.
It didn’t even really belong to him: he belonged to it — the rolling dry fields, the covered rivers and canals, the sky catchments which caught every drop which might otherwise have gone to his neighbors. That was the pastoral business — its product immortality and its price water. The Commonwealth could have flooded the planet and could have crated small oceans, with the financial resources it had at command, but the planet and the people were regarded as one ecological entity. Old Australia — that fabulous continent of old Earth now covered by the ruins of the abandoned Chinesian cityworld of Aoujou Nam-bien — had in its prime been broad, dry, open, beautiful; the planet of Old North Australia, by the dead weight of its own tradition, had to remain the same. Imagine trees. Imagine leaves — vegetation dropping uneaten to the ground. Imagine water pouring by the thousands of tons, no one greeting it with tears of relief or happy laughter! Imagine Earth. Old Earth. Manhome itself. Rod had tried to think of a whole planet inhabited by Hamlets, drenched with music and poetry, knee-deep in blood and drama. It was unimaginable, really, though he had tried to think it through.
Like a chill, a drill, a thrill cutting into his very nerves he thought:
Imagine Earth women!
What terrifying beautiful things they must be. Dedicated to ancient and corruptive arts, surrounded by the objects which Norstrilia had forbidden long ago, stimulated by experiences which the very law of his own world had expunged from the books! He would meet them; he couldn’t help it; what, what would he do when he met a genuine Earth woman?
He would have to ask his computer, even though the neighbors laughed at him for having the only pure computer left on the planet.
They didn’t know what grandfather-to-the-nineteenth had done. He had taught the computer to lie. It stored all the forbidden things which the Law of the Clean Sweep had brushed out of Norstrilian experience. It could lie like a trooper. Rod wondered whether a “trooper” might be some archaic Earth official who did nothing but tell the untruth, day in and day out, for his living. But the computer usually did not lie to him.
If grandfather 19 had behaved as saucily and unconventionally with the computer as he had with everything else, that particular computer would know all about women. Even things which they did not themselves know. Or wish to know.
Good computer! thought Rod as he trotted around the long, long fields to his house. Eleanor would have the tucker on. Doris might be back. Bill and Hopper would be angry if they had to wait for the mister before they ate. To speed up his trip, he headed straight for the little cliff behind the house, hoping no one would see him jump down it. He was much stronger than most of the men he knew, but he was anxious, for some private inexpressible reason, for them not to know it.
The route was clear.
He found the cliff.
No observers.
He dropped over it, feet first, his heels kicking up the scree as he tobogganed through loose rock to the foot of the slope.
And aunt Doris was there.
“Where have you been?” said she.
“Walking, mum,” said he.
She gave him a quizzical look but knew better than to ask more. Talking always fussed her, anyhow. She hated the sound of her own voice, which she considered much too high. The matter passed.
Inside the house, they ate. Beyond the door and the oil lamp, a grey world became moonless, starless, black. This was night, his own night.