Once again it held letters and this time the letters were crammed with sheafs of hundred-credit notes, a gift from the marooned spacemen to their relatives, although it should be noted immediately that the spacemen themselves probably did not consider that they were marooned.
The letters acknowledged the receipt of the replies that had been sent from Earth and told more about the planet Kimon and its inhabitants.
And each letter carefully explained how they had hundred-credit notes on Kimon. The notes as they stood, the letters said, were simply counterfeits, made from bills the spacemen had in their pockets, although when Earth’s fiscal experts and the Bureau of Investigation men had a look at them there was no way in which you could tell them from the real thing.
But, the letters said, the Kimonian government wished to make right the matter of counterfeiting. To back the currency the Kimonians, within the next short while, would place on deposit with the World Bank materials not only equivalent to their value, but enough additional to set up a balance against which more notes could be issued.
There was, the letters explained, no money as such on Kimon, but since Kimon was desirous of employing the men from Earth, there must be some way to pay them, so if it was all right with the World Bank and everyone else concerned …
The World Bank did a lot of hemming and hawing and talked about profound fiscal matters and deep economic principles, but all this talk dissolved to nothing when in the matter of a day or two several tons of carefully shielded uranium and a couple of bushels of diamonds were deposited, during the afternoon coffee hour, beside the desk of the bank’s president.
With evidence of this sort, there was not much that Earth could do except accept the fact that the planet Kimon was a going concern and that the Earthmen who had landed there were going to stay, and take the entire situation at face value.
The Kimonians, the letters said, were humanoid and had parapsychic powers and had built a culture which was miles ahead of Earth or any other planet so far discovered in the galaxy.
Earth furbished up a ship, hand-picked a corps of its most persuasive diplomats, loaded down the hold with expensive gifts, and sent the whole business out to Kimon.
Within minutes after landing, the diplomats had been quite undiplomatically booted off the planet. Kimon, it appeared, had no desire to ally itself with a second-rate, barbaric planet. When it wished to establish diplomatic relationships it would say so. Earth people might come to Kimon if they wished and settle there, but not just any Earth person. To come to Kimon, the individual would have to possess not only a certain minimum I.Q., but must also have an impressive scholastic record.
And that was the way it was left.
You did not go to Kimon simply because you wished to go there; you worked to go to Kimon.
First of all, you had to have the specified I.Q. rating, and that ruled out ninety-nine per cent or better of Earth’s population. Once you had passed the I.Q. test, you settled down to grueling years of study, and at the end of the years of study you wrote an examination and, once again, most of the aspirants were ruled out. Not more than one in a thousand who took the examination passed.
Year after year Earth men and women dribbled out to Kimon, settled there, prospered, wrote their letters home.
Of those who went out, none came back. Once you had lived on Kimon, you could not bear the thought of going back to Earth.
And yet, in all those years, the sum of knowledge concerning Kimon, its inhabitants and its culture, was very slight indeed. What knowledge there was, the only knowledge that there was, was compiled from the letters delivered meticulously once each week to the desk of the postal chief in London.
The letters spoke of wages and salaries a hundred times the wages and salaries that were paid on Earth, of magnificent business opportunities, of the Kimonian culture and the Kimonians themselves, but in no detail, of culture or of business or any other factor, were the letters specific.
And perhaps the recipients of the letters did not mind too much the lack of specific information, for almost every letter carried with it a sheaf of notes, all crisp and new, and very, very legal, backed by tons of uranium, bushels of diamonds, stacked bars of gold and other similar knick-knacks deposited from time to time beside the desk of the World Bank’s president.
It became, in time, the ambition of every family on the Earth to send at least one relative to Kimon, for a relative on Kimon virtually spelled an assured and sufficient income for the rest of the clan for life.
Naturally, the legend of Kimon grew. Much that was said about it was untrue, of course. Kimon, the letters protested, did not have streets paved with solid gold, since there were no streets. Nor did Kimonian damsels wear gowns of diamond dust—the damsels of Kimon wore not much of anything.
But to those whose understanding went beyond streets of gold and gowns of diamonds, it was well understood that in Kimon lay possibilities vastly greater than either gold or diamonds. For here was a planet with a culture far in advance of Earth, a people who had schooled themselves or had naturally developed parapsychic powers. On Kimon one could learn the techniques that would revolutionize galactic industry and communications; on Kimon one might discover philosophy that would set mankind overnight on a new and better—and more profitable?—path.
The legend grew, interpreted by each according to his intellect and his way of thought, and grew and grew and grew …
Earth’s government was very helpful to those who wished to go to Kimon, for government, as well as individuals, could appreciate the opportunities for the revolution of industry and the evolution of human thought. But since there had been no invitation to grant diplomatic recognition, Earth’s government sat and waited, scheming, doing all it could to settle as many of its people on Kimon as was possible. But only the best, for even the densest bureaucrat recognized that on Kimon Earth must put its best foot forward.
Why the Kimonians allowed Earth to send its people was a mystery for which there was no answer. But apparently Earth was the only other planet in the galaxy which had been allowed to send its people. The Earthmen and the Kimonians, of course, both were humanoid, but this was not an adequate answer, either, for they were not the only humanoids in the galaxy. For its own comfort, Earth assumed that a certain common understanding, a similar outlook, a certain parallel evolutionary trend—with Earth a bit behind, of course—between Earth and Kimon might account for Kimon’s qualified hospitality.
Be that as if may, Kimon was a galactic El Dorado, a never-never land, a place to get ahead, the place to spend your life, the country at the rainbow’s end.
Selden Bishop stood in the parklike area where the gig had landed him, for Kimon had no spaceports, as it likewise failed to have many other things.
He stood, surrounded by his luggage, and watched the gig drive spaceward to rendezvous with the liner’s orbit.
When he could see the gig no longer, he sat down on one of his bags and waited.
The park was faintly Earthlike, but the similarity was only in the abstract, for in each particular there was a subtle difference that said this was an alien planet. The trees were too slim and the flowers just a shade too loud and the grass was off a shade or two from the grass you saw on Earth. The birds, if they were birds, were more lizardlike than the birds of Earth and their feathers were put on wrong and weren’t quite the color one associated with plumage. The breeze had a faint perfume upon it that was no perfume of Earth, but an alien odor that smelled as a color looked, and Bishop tried to decide, but couldn’t, which color it might be.