by C. L. Moore
Fenton paused in his methodic packing. He looked at Bryne.
"Maybe a year," Bryne answered his own question. "Maybe less. In his condition he ought to be glad of it. I'm thinking about afterward. You and I understand each other, Fenton. I don't want to see the Torren holdings broken up. Suppose I keep the will that names you inheritor and tear up the new one Torren's going to make today? Would that be worth anything to you?"
Fenton looked out over the snow toward the turquoise valley where Kristin would be scattering yellow seeds into the furrows of the ploughed Ganymedan soil. He sighed. Then stooped and picked up the money, the ticket and the key.
"You'll have to take my word for it," he said, "that it would be. But I wish I understood why you're really doing this. I thought you and Torren got along better than that."
"Oh, we do. We get along fine. But—Fenton, he scares me. I don't know what makes him tick. Funny things are happening to the human race these days, Fenton." Unexpected sincerity showed on the gaunt face in the doorway. "Torren ... Torren isn't human. A lot of people aren't human any more. The important people aren't."
He swung a long arm toward the turquoise valley. "The Threshold people are getting the upper hand, Fenton. I don't mean here. I don't mean literally. But they're the inheritors of the future, not us. I guess I'm jealous." He grinned wryly. "Jealous, and a little scared. I want to feel important. You and I are human. We may not like each other much, but we understand each other. We can work together." He drew his shoulders together with a small shiver. "Torren's a monster, not a man. You know it, now. I know why you quarreled. I'm glad of it."
"I'll bet you are," Fenton said.
-
When it was safe, he drove the tractor car down the gorge between high banks of snow, rolling as fast as he dared toward the turquoise valley. The Ganymedan landscape framed in the square window openings all around him looked like so many television images on square screens. Probably some of it really was framed upon screens, back there in the Unit whose mile-square walls fell farther and farther behind as the tractor treads ground on.
Probably Torren's screen, tilted above the water bath, reflected some such landscape as this. But there were often tractor cars trundling along the snowy roads. Unless Torren had reason to suspect, he was not likely to focus too sharply upon this one. Still, Fenton knew he would feel more comfortable after he had passed beyond the range of the 'visor. Not that Torren couldn't summon up a picture of any Ganymedan area he happened to feel curious about. The thing was to keep his curiosity asleep, until the time came to rouse it.
The cold hills swung by. The heavy air swirled a little as the car spun along, making eddies like paradoxic heat waves between Fenton and the road. No man could live without an insulated suit and breathing-apparatus on the surface of Ganymede—yet. But the specially bred Ganymedans from the Threshold Planetarium could.
When men first reached the planets they found their thresholds fatally different from Earth. They began to alter the planets, and to alter the men. This after one whole wasted generation in which they tried to establish colonies that could be supported from Earth and could operate from artificial shelters. It didn't work. It never worked, even on Earth, when men tried to create permanent colonies in alien lands without subsisting on the land itself.
There is more to it than the lack of bread alone. Man must establish himself as a self-sustaining unit on the land he works, or he will not work it. Neither humans nor animals can subsist or function efficiently on alien territory. Their metabolism is geared to a different ecology, their digestive organs demand a different food, melancholia and lassitude overcome them eventually. None of the great bonanza ventures on the mineral-rich planets ever came to a successful production because agriculture could not keep up with them and they collapsed of their own weight. It had been proved true time and again on Earth, and now on the planets the old truism repeated itself.
So the Threshold Planetaria were set up and the vast experiment got under way. And they altered the planets as well as the stock that was to possess them.
Ganymede was cold. The atmosphere of heavy gases could not sustain human life. So with atomic power and technological weapons man began to alter the ecology of Ganymede. Through the years the temperature crept gradually up from the deadly level of a hundred degrees below centigrade zero. Wastefully, desperately, the frozen water was released, until a cloud-blanket began to form over Ganymede to hold in the heat.
There were many failures. There were long periods of inactivity, when the insulated domes were deserted. But as new methods, new alloys, new isotopes were developed, the process became more and more practical. When the final generation of Ganymede-slanted stock was bred, Ganymede was ready for them.
Since then, three generations had become self-sustaining on the satellite. They could breathe the air—though men could not. They could endure the cold—though men could not. They were taller than men, solider and stronger. There were several thousand of them now.
As they had driven along a genetic parabola to meet the rising parabola of an altered planetary balance, so now the Ganymedans and Ganymede together followed a new curve. In a few more generations it would circle back to meet normal humanity. By that time, Ganymede should be habitable for Earthmen, and by then Ganymedans should have altered once more, back toward the norm.
Perhaps the plan was not the best possible plan. Humanity is not perfect. They made many errors, many false guesses, when the Age of Technology began. Balance of power among the nations of Earth influenced the development of the Threshold Planetaria. Social conflicts changed and shifted as civilization found new processes and methods and power-sources.
Fenton thought of Torren. Yes, there had been many errors of judgment. The children of Torren should have walked like giants upon a free planet. Centrifuge-bred colossi. But that experiment had failed. Not even upon tiny Ganymede could Torren use the tremendous strength inherent in his helpless body to stand upright.
It was easier to work eugenically with animals. In the new Ganymedan seas, still growing, and on the frigid Ganymedan continents, were creatures bred to breathe the atmosphere—arctic and subarctic creatures, walrus and fish, snow-rabbit and moose. Trees grew on Ganymede now, mutated tundra spread across the barrens, supplemented by the photosynthesis laboratories. A world was being born.
And across the world marched the heat-giving, life-giving towers built over a hundred-year period by the Earth government, still owned by Earth, not to be touched even by Torren, who owned Ganymede. Fenton swung the tractor over the brow of the hill and paused for an instant to look west. A new tower was rising there, one of hundreds, to supplement the old towers with a new method of speeding up changes. Within ten years these snowy hills might ripple with wheat—
The road forked here. One way led toward the valley. The other lay like a long blue ribbon across the hilltops, dipping suddenly as the horizon dipped toward the spaceport and the ship that was headed for home.
Fenton touched the scar on his cheek and looked at the spaceport road. Earth, he thought. And then? He thought of Bryne's wise, gaunt face, and of Torren wallowing in his water bed that was linked like the center of a spider's web with every quarter of the mile-square Unit and every section of the little globe it stood on. No, not a spider web—an island. A floating island with no link that bound him to humanity.
Fenton spoke one furious word and wrenched violently at the wheel. The car churned up snow in a blinding haze and then leaped forward along the right-hand road, down toward the turquoise mist that hid the valley.
-
An hour later he came to the village called Providence.
The houses were of local stone, with moss-thatched roofs. Early experiments with buildings of metal, plastics and imported wood had been discarded, as might be expected, in favor of indigenous materials. For life on Ganymede no houses proved quite so satisfying as houses built of Ganymede stone.
The people came mostly of hardy Norse
stock, with Inuit and other strains mingled for the desirable traits. The Ganymedans who came out into the snow-powdered street when Fenton stopped his car were an entirely new race. An unexpectedly handsome race, since they had certainly not been bred for beauty. Perhaps much of their good looks sprang from their excellent health, their adjustment to their lives and their world, the knowledge that the world and the work they did upon it were both good and necessary. Until now.
A big yellow-haired man in furs bent to the window of the car, his breath clouding the heavy air which no normal human could breathe.
"Any luck, Ben?" he asked, his voice vibrating through the diaphragm set in the side of the car. It was only thus that a Ganymedan could speak to an Earth-born human. Their voices had to filter to each other through carbon dioxide air and metal and rubber plates. It meant nothing. There are higher barriers than these between human minds.
"About what you expected," Fenton told him, watching the diaphragm vibrate when sound struck it. He wondered how his own voice sounded, out there in the cold air heavy-laden with gases.
Yellow heads and brown nodded recognition of what he meant. The tall people around the car seemed to sag a little, though two or three of them laughed shortly, and one big woman in a fur hood said:
"Torren's fond of you, Ben. He must be, after all. Maybe—"
"No," Fenton told her positively. "He's projected himself in my image, that's all. I can walk around. But I'm simply an extension, like an arm or a leg. Or an eye. And if Torren's eye offends him—"
He broke off abruptly, slapped the steering wheel a couple of times and looked ahead of him down the wide, clean street lined with clean, wide-windowed houses that seemed to spring from the rock they stood on. They were strong houses, built low to defy the blizzard winds of Ganymede. The clear, wide, snowy hills rolled away beyond the rooftops. It was a good world—for the Ganymedans. He tried to think of these big, long-striding people shut up in asylums while their world slowly changed outside the windows until they could no longer breathe its air.
"But, Ben," the woman said, "it isn't as if people needed Ganymede. I wish I could talk to him. I wish I understood—"
"Have you any idea," Fenton asked, "how much Torren spends in a year? People don't need living room on Ganymede, but Torren needs the money he could get if ... oh, forget it. Never mind, Marta."
"We'll fight," Marta said. "Does he know we'll fight?"
Fenton shook his head. He glanced around the little crowd.
"I'd like to talk to Kristin," he said.
Marta gestured toward the slope that led down into the farmland valley.
"We'll fight," she said again, uncertainly, as the car started. Fenton heard her and lifted a hand in salute, grinning without mirth or cheerfulness. He heard the man beside her speak as the car drew away.
"Sure," the man said. "Sure. What with?"
He knew Kristin as far as he could see her. He picked her figure out of the fur-clad group dark against the snow as they stepped out of the road to let the car go by. She waved as soon as she recognized him behind the glass. He drew the car to a halt, snapped on the heating units of the insulated suit he wore, closed the mask across his face and then swung the car door open. Even inside the mask his voice sounded loud as he called across the white stillness.
"Kristin," he said. "Come over here. The rest of you, go on ahead."
They gave him curious glances, but they nodded and trudged on down the hill toward the valley. It seemed odd to watch them carrying hoes and garden baskets in the snow, but the valley was much warmer below the mist.
Kristin came toward him, very tall, moving with a swift, smooth ease that made every motion a pleasure to watch. She had warm yellow hair braided in a crown across her head. Her eyes were very blue, and her skin milk-white below the flush the cold had given it.
"Sit in here with me," Fenton said. "I'll turn off the atmosphere unit and leave the door open so you can breathe."
She stooped under the low door and got in, folding herself into the too-small seat. Fenton always felt out of proportion beside these big, friendly, quiet people. It was their world, not his. If anyone were abnormal in size here, then it was he, not the Ganymedans.
"Well, Ben?" she said, her voice coming with a faint vibration through the diaphragm in his helmet. He smiled back at her and shook his head. He did not think he was in love with Kristin. It would be preposterous. They could not speak except through metal or touch except through glass and cloth. They could not even breathe the same air. But he faced the possibility of love, and grinned ironically at it.
He told her what had happened, exactly as it took place, and his mind began to clarify a little as he talked.
"I suppose I should have waited," he said. "I can see that, now. I should have kept my mouth shut until I'd been back on Ganymede at least a month, sounding things out. I guess I lost my temper, Kristin. If I'd only known, while I was still back on Earth ... if you could only have written—"
"Through the spaceport mail?" she asked him bitterly. "Even the incoming letters are censored now."
He nodded.
"So the planets will go on thinking we asked for the changeover," she said. "Thinking we failed on Ganymede and asked to be shut up in asylums. Oh, Ben, that's what we all hate worst of all. We're doing so wonderfully well here ... or we were, until—" She broke off.
Fenton touched the button that started his motor and turned the car around so they could look out across the broad plain below. They faced away from the Unit, and except for blurs of turquoise mist here and there where other warm valleys breathed out moisture and the exhalation of growing things there was no break in the broad sweep of snowy hills—the towers marching in a long row across the planet.
"Does he knew we'd die in the asylums?" Kristin asked.
"Would you?"
"I think we would. Many of us would. And I think we'd never have any more children. Not even the idea of having great-great-grandchildren who might be able to walk on Ganymede again would keep the race alive. We wouldn't kill ourselves, of course. We wouldn't even commit race-suicide. We won't want to die—but we won't want to live, either—in asylums."
She twisted on the smooth car seat and looked anxiously at Fenton through the glass of his respirator.
"Ben, if the planets knew—if we could get word outside somehow—do you think they'd help? Would anyone care? I think some might. Not the Earth-bred, probably. They wouldn't really know. But the Thresholders would know. For their own safety, Ben, I think they might have to help us—if they knew. This could happen to any Threshold group on any world. Ben—"
A blue shadow gliding across the snow caught her eye and she turned her head to watch it.
-
Then concussion heeled the car over.
Dimly Fenton heard metal rip around him against rocks hidden under the snow they plowed through. In the echoing immobility while the vehicle hung poised, before it settled back, he tasted blood in his mouth and felt Kristin's weight heavy against his shoulder, saw the black outlines of his own hands with fingers spread, pressing the glass against the whiteness of snow.
The car smashed over the edge, jolting downward on its treads, down faster and more roughly with each jolt. The winged blue shadow wheeled back and sailed over them again.
The silhouetted hands moved fast. Fenton was aware of them turning, pulling, gripping numbly at levers they scarcely felt. The idling motor exploded into a roar and the car sprang forward, straight down the unbroken slope.
Then the second blast came.
The rear of the vehicle lifted, hurling Fenton and the girl against the cushioned panel and the thick, shatterproof windshield, which released its safeties under the impact and vanished in a whirl of brightness somewhere outside. The treads screamed as the car ground across the bare rock and snow boiled up in a whirlwind around them. The car shot forward again to the very edge of the slope and hung tottering over a hundred-foot drop beyond.
There
was a timeless interval of what felt like free fall. Fenton had time to decide that his instinct had been right. The fall was the safer choice. The car's interior was braced and shock-absorbent, and they would survive a drop better than another bomb-hit.
Then they struck the ground, whirled out, struck again, in an increasing avalanche of ice and rock and snow. The shocks changed to the thunder of bombs, and then absolute darkness and silence without echo.
Neither of them could have survived alone. It took Kristin's Ganymedan strength and vitality and the resilience that had kept her from serious injury, plus Fenton's knowledge of mechanics and his fierce, devouring anger.
Buried thirty feet under a solid, freezing mass of debris, Fenton whipped the girl with words when even her hardiness began to fail. With one arm broken, he drove himself harder still, ignoring the shattered bone, working furiously against time. Enough air was trapped in the loose snow to supply Kristin, and Fenton's respirator and suit were tough enough to survive even such treatment as this.
The mercury-vapor turbine that generated the car's power had to be repaired and started anew. It took a long time. But it was done. What Fenton wanted was the tremendous thermal energy the exhaust would give them. Very slowly, very carefully, using a part of the turbine sheath as a shield, they burned their way to the open air.
Twice settling rock nearly crushed them. Once Kristin was pinned helpless by the edge of the shield, and only Fenton's rage got them through that. But they did get through. When only a crust remained, Fenton carefully opened small view-cracks in the shadow, and waited until he was sure no hovering helicopter still waited. Then they climbed free.
There were signs in the snow where a copter had landed and men had walked to the edge of the abyss, even climbed part of the way down.
"Who was it, Ben?" Kristin asked, looking down at the footprints. When he did not answer, "Ben—your arm. How bad—"