1
Nobody moaned: ‘Buddy, please listen to me! I’m hungry. Couldn’t you at least give me something to eat?’
We paid no attention.
‘Oliver,’ she said, ‘I love you.’
I stopped and kissed her. Nobody sobbed and drifted away in the mist
All of Grendoon was down by the Wallow. Torches inflamed the fog like living lips of fire, kissing each other as they blended. The noise of the big jungle machines boomed in the background, but it was almost drowned out by the crowd, a constant bull’s bellow of noise. ‘Listen to them, Diane,’ I said. ‘They’re happy.’
‘And so am I,’ she whispered.
‘You don’t miss the plantation?’
‘No.’
‘Nor-’
‘Nor Albert,’ she said, remembering. ‘Especially not Albert.’
I felt her shiver in spite of the fact that the temperature was one hundred and ten.
Nobody clutched at my arm, looming out of the mist, but I shook him off and he stumbled, muttering, away.
I stopped, looking at Diane. Suddenly she was tense. ‘What’s the matter?’
She said in a small voice: ‘Did you recognize that one?’
It was embarrassing. I shook my head. She said: ‘I did, Oliver. He used to work for Albert too. And he crossed him, and now -’
The joy froze in me. I said roughly: ‘Snub Albert! Let’s get down to the Wallow. This is our night, Diane - don’t let anything spoil it.’
But behind us in the fog, nobody was sniffling wretchedly.
It was sundown, you see.
Not that we ever see the sun on Venus. But it makes a difference. During ‘day’ we stay indoors as much as we can, and when we go out we wear not only thermosuits and hoods, but portable air - at least at ‘noon.’ Towards twilight we can breathe the ambient air; at dusk we can leave off the hoods. At ‘night,’ sometimes, you can go out without even a thermosuit, but it was a long way from night.
It is also at night that the fog begins to condense. For about two months right around ‘midnight’ the ceiling climbs, sometimes to a thousand feet, and all that water has to go somewhere; and it does.
It makes a nice celebration.
Grendoon has nearly eighteen hundred people living in it, and I don’t think a hundred stayed to mind the store. Everybody else was laughing and joking and wandering around, carrying the torches, waiting for the water. The kids always get an enormous lick out of it; so do most of the grownups.
‘It’s coming,’ whispered Diane.
‘I see.’
Already the bottom of the Wallow was sticky with red mud, like the blood that runs out of a prime roast of beef. We were at the town end of the Wallow now, following the tapewalks to the deep part towards the hills. ‘Here you are, buddy!’ shouted a grinning vendor and thrust a pair of torches at me. I paid him, handed one to Diane and walked on.
There’s a reason for the torches too. The English knew about it; in the old wars, before aircraft bothered much with radar, the English were plagued by fog. They dug trenches around their landing strips and filled them with oil; when the planes came in and the fog was too thick they touched off the trenches of oil and the curtain of flame burned off the fog. That’s what our torches were for.
First we could see only outlines, then bright beads of light from the torches themselves, and by the time a thousand torches were all aburn, we could see for more than fifty yards. We didn’t need tapewalks then; we hurried down the bank towards the cheering, jostling throng.
There was a roar from the northern end of the Wallow, where the sludgy creek drained thick juices from the hills. ‘It’s coming!’
Diane took her hand off my forearm. I released her hand. We both pressed forward, looking.
In the licking light of the torches the first thin trickle of water was coming down into the Wallow. Although it happened every few months, every time slow Venus completed a spin on its axis relative to the sun, it was like a miracle. It always was. Even inside my thermosuit I felt cooler, more comfortable. It was like Iowa in October, it was like the first freeze-up on the stream that went by everybody’s home long ago. The water was coming down!
I whispered! ‘It’s a wonderful time to be in love.’
But Diane wasn’t beside me.
I bawled: ‘Diane! Where are you?’
And then I saw her.
She had been separated in the crowd, but she was only a couple of yards away, stumbling back towards me. I couldn’t see her face, only the hooded neck and line of the right mandible of her jaw, obscured by the transparent mantle of the thermosuit. But it was enough.
Diane was terrified.
A huge hulking cow of a man with a face like a footprint in mud and an expression like a stepped-on lizard was bellowing angrily at her: “Wassamatta thew? Whyntcha watchwatcha doing?’
Diane turned to me, white-faced. ‘Olivier,’ she sobbed, ‘this gentleman says I stepped on his foot.’
‘What?’
‘I - I didn’t, Olivier! You believe me, don’t you?’
‘Of course.’ But it was like a knell tolling.
‘You’ve got to believe me!’
‘I believe you.’ But it didn’t matter; nothing mattered; we both knew the score then.
I said to the stepped-on lizard: ‘Sir, my fiancée is deeply apologetic. The crowd ... the excitement... all the confusion…’
He stared at me, glowering. He glanced around from under shaggy eyebrows, gauging the mood of the crowd around us. It didn’t satisfy him. He shrugged and moved off.
‘Come on, dear,’ I said, and urgently hurried her along.
She said: ‘Olivier. They won’t give up. They’ll try again.’
‘It won’t do them any good!’
‘But it will, Olivier,’ she said reasonably. ‘You know Albert. He never gives up. That was just one of his bullies. He’ll have others.’
I took her by the elbows and turned her to face me. In the red and shuddering light of the torches her eyes were dark, but luminous; her face was sad and calm. Her beauty wrung my heart.
‘We can take care of ourselves, Diane,’ I promised. But it was a lie. I knew it was a lie. Albert Quayle hadn’t given up, not that easily. He wasn’t going to let me have his wife without a fight.
He was out to get her - with hired assassins, no doubt.
And when she was gone, he would be coming after me. I remembered how nobody had whimpered in the fog.
‘Will we whimper, do you think?’ Diane asked suddenly. It was no more than I was asking myself. I caught her arm and turned her again towards the Wallow. Our torches were getting low. I threw them into the first few inches of silted water, and we watched without words as they choked and died.
2
The world had begun for me six months before.
I came down on the ship from Earth like a newborn baby, all pink and squally, tied my deceleration-proof bassinet, crushed with the parturition pains of landing by rocket on an alien planet.
What did I know? The ads said: ‘Venus, the New Frontier!’ ‘Venus, the planet where every man can start over!’ ‘Own 1,000 Acres! Be Your Own Boss on Venus!’
Naturally I fell for it. So did thousands of others. It wasn’t any lie. It was all there.
I got out of the ship at Grendoon and got on line at Customs. It wasn’t a long line. ‘Immigrant?’ they asked.
And I said: ‘Sure. I’m going to spend the rest of my life here.’
It was true. But I didn’t know why they laughed. I didn’t know there wasn’t any choice. I didn’t know that, once you were conditioned for Venus, you couldn’t ever live on Earth again.