They let you wear the brassard for two weeks - everybody knows what it means; everybody gives you plenty of leeway. That’s so you can find your way around. You find a place to live. You get a job. You make your plans. You make up your mind.
Then - if you want to stay - you get conditioned.
If not, there’s the return rocket waiting.
It was before I was conditioned, while I was still under the brassard, that I met Albert Quayle. And his wife, Diane.
Grendoon was the steam chamber outside the gates of Hell. They sold me a thermosuit and pinned a brassard on it, with the sparkling word Visitor brightly picked out in diamonds. They gave me a card with Quayle’s name and address on it, and turned me loose to hit him up for a job. I stepped out into the hot, penetrating fog.
Albert Quayle’s address was on Breezy Point, overlooking the Wallow. I struggled along the tapewalks; even inside the thermosuit I was wringing wet. It was a hot day. The fog was whitely bright, a flour of soggy pearls that I stirred as I walked. I sucked a tube of suit air, but my face was exposed to the steam; I felt as if I were being gently boiled. Voices spoke to me out of the fog, begging; I couldn’t help them so I ignored them, as might any citizen of Grendoon.
Then I came to Albert Quayle’s house. Enormous blowers ripped the fog to tendrils around it. I could see it through a wavering haze. A big place of pink aluminium with picture windows to look out on fog. A big place for a big shot; and that was Albert Quayle.
I walked up the cinderblock path. It was like a Japanese garden back on Earth. Out of the condensation sumps in the walls a stream of hot water pulsed. It flowed through cement-walled troughs across a cactus garden; the path became a little arched bridge over one of the gently steaming brooks. With such an expensive layout you couldn’t blame him for spending enough on blowers to give it a chance to be seen. The water, of course, came out of the sluice from the air-conditioning. It had to go somewhere. But the garden, the little stream, the bridge - that took money.
That was what Quayle had - and he had something more than money... he had Diane.
I rang. The door opened. There she was.
I glanced at the card in my gauntleted fingers. ‘Mrs. Quayle?’
‘I’m Mrs. Quayle.’
‘I’m looking for a job,’ I mumbled. A figure like a night-club moaner. Eyes like the sad pits of Hell. Lips that tragically invited. I tore my eyes off her and dashed them against the card again. ‘Your husband - they said at the office he could help me.’
‘Help you?’ Her voice was like a bitter lullaby. ‘He’ll help himself. But he’ll give you a job, if that’s what you want.’
And then I knew I was in love. And I knew what it meant. Because even then, not twenty-four hours on Venus, I knew who Albert Quayle was. I knew he wasn’t a man to tangle with, not in Grendoon, not if you wanted to stay alive.
But I tangled with him after all. Oh, yes. I took from him the one possession he did not care to lose.
Diane caught my hand. She was shaking. ‘Oliver, Oliver. It’s him.’
‘I know.’
‘That fat man - he was working for Albert.’
‘I know.’
‘He’s out to get us. Both of us! Oliver, I shouldn’t have let you do this. It’s the end.’
‘I know.’
‘Quit saying “I know!” ‘ she screamed.
I patted her hand through the gauntlet to show that I understood. Gently I led her along the banks of the Wallow, down to where the crowd was thickest.
‘I’m sorry, Oliver,’ she whispered suddenly. ‘I’d like to kill him.’
‘You can’t.’
‘I know I can’t, but I’d like to. If only we weren’t conditioned-‘
I said: ‘Forget it. We’re through with him. As soon as your divorce is final, we’ll get married. That’s that.’ I glanced at my watch, under the transparent gauntlet of the thermosuit. ‘Only another hour,’ I told her.
‘Oh, Oliver!’
That was more like it. Her expression was like a candy bride’s beaming from the top of a white frosted wedding cake. Only another hour, and then the statutory waiting period would be over. It was hard to believe that already eleven hours had passed since we confronted Quayle with our love.
Almost gaily we moved among the rejoicing throng. It was a festival; the Grendoonians were laughing, singing, like happy children. It was like Iowa when I was a boy. There, when the creeks froze over, the whole town would come down to the lake - the grownups to watch, the teenagers to skate, the old ones and the babies to walk stiff-legged across the ice, everyone enjoying what the weather had done. Here it turned fog into water -water enough to fill the Wallow and make a pond of it for a few months of each year. There it had been water into ice, but the principle was the same; it was a carnival time.
Nobody came sniffling up to us. Abjectly he asked: ‘Mister, please. I’m hungry! Couldn’t you help me out?’ Diane shivered and clutched my arm. For an instant I was tempted to speak, but the instant passed. And then there was a confused clamour, and the nobody suddenly turned. ‘An Earthie!’ he gasped, and darted away from us.
Diane stood on tiptoe, peering. ‘It is,’ she said. ‘Look, Oliver!’
And there he was, an Earthman, tall and darkfaced with the UV tan of a sunny planet but his face was crimson with anger now. He was backed against the margin of the Wallow surrounded by a dozen nobodies, imploring, clamouring, begging unashamed for food, for help - for everything. His gold brassard shone clearly, with the word Visitor glittering an invitation in diamond ink to every shunned nobody in Grendoon, for only an Earthie would fall so low as to talk to them. Short of grubbing for roots in the jungle and taking their chances with swamp, disease and the giant sapoaurs, the only way a nobody could live was by finding a Terrestrial to help them.
But this Terrestrial was making hard work of it. He was offering them money, which was foolish - what good was money to them? And he was striking at them irritably, which was even worse. It was bringing him down to the level of the nobodies, almost.
‘I’ll have to help him,’ I told Diane.
She nodded.
I walked sternly over to him. The nobodies scattered like mist before me.
They fled, whimpering, as I began to talk to him.
He said angrily: ‘Thanks. What kind of a place is this?’
‘I’m sorry you were bothered. Don’t pay any attention to them. They’ll go away.’
‘But why?’
‘It’s the way we do things here,’ I explained.
‘Humph.’ He looked at me irritably. In a high, shrill voice, his face pouting like a fish out of water, he complained: ‘I don’t think much of Venus. What a gyp! I spent twenty-five hundred bucks on this trip. I might as well have gone to the Moon.’
‘You’re a tourist?’
‘That’s what they said when they sold me the ticket,’ he said disagreeably.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It isn’t your fault,’ he admitted. Then he tried to be a little more friendly. ‘Look,’ he said confidentially, ‘is this all there is to it? I mean, the Coming of the Water, and the spirit of Mardi Gras that runs through the town and all, like they said in the travel agency?’
‘This is all.’
‘Man!’ He shook his head ruefully. ‘But isn’t there, well, some place where I can find a little more excitement? I came millions of miles. I’ve been saving up for this vacation for years.’
‘Not the kind of excitement you want, mister,’ I told him, and turned to look for Diane.
But she wasn’t there.
‘Diane!’ I shouted, and heard my voice drowned out in the multitudinous cries of the crowd around the Wallow. ‘Diane, where are you?’
No answer.
‘Something wrong, buddy?’ asked the Earthie. But I didn’t have any answer for him. There was something wrong - plenty was wrong, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it.
She was gone. Search as I did, I couldn’t find her. Quayle. It had to be Quayle. Somehow, in the minutes when I left her out of my sight, he had begun his revenge.