Donald A. Wollheim (ed)

by The Hidden Planet

  "Thanks 111 call you."

  He left the room, anxious to get out of the heat, and saw the quite amazing girl come back in before he got out the door. The butler was waiting for him, and escorted him back to the patio field.

  It was night, and still raining. He lifted the copter out of the canyon and flew southeast toward his home on the desert. Far below him, almost hidden in a mask of rain, the light of Los Angeles glittered like multi-colored diamonds embedded in black sand.

  A government airsign loomed up like a pale violet ghost ahead of him: DON'T ROCK THE BOAT. Keith flew through it and it reformed itself behind him, patiently.

  Carrie would be waiting.

  Keith looked up, into the darkness and the rain. Venus was invisible, and a long, long way from home.

  II.

  They had real steak for supper that night, which was excellent, and when they were done they retired to the annex. They hardly ever sat in the glass-and-steel living room, unless they were entertaining guests, since both of them found it impossible to relax there. The annex was primarily a cozy room stuffed off in a wing—an artless conglomeration of books, tapes, half-finished paintings, old-fashioned furniture, and one small bar.

  Mostly, they lived in the annex.

  Carrie slipped a battered smock over her head and began to poke at her current artistic effort, an oil painting of a cactus in the desert sun. The subject, Keith thought, was none too original. He sprawled on a couch and pretended to read, watching his wife.

  She was a tiny blonde, barely five foot two, with a dolllike face that invariably earned her the designation of "cute," an adjective she cordially detested. Ortega had married her twenty years ago, when she was twenty-five, and they were still comfortably in love with each other. They had had a good life together, and Keith found it hard to put his finger on just what had been lacking in it.

  Perhaps he was at fault. He was a big man, and she had tended to walk in his shadow, both mentally and physically.

  Twenty years ago, he had been a leading socioculturist for the world federation, but he had become bored with the exactness and easy predictions and trivial problems. He had quit his job and gone around the world in an astonishing sailboat, looking for something he couldn't find. Carrie had adjusted without complaint. He had formulated his Dark Age thesis that had given him fame of a sort, and had lectured and written about his culture until he discovered that no one was taking him very seriously. He had drifted into an easy sarcasm that reflected an inner unease that he could not quite understand, and even the excitement of the Vandervort project had failed to satisfy him. He was not, he knew, the easiest man in the universe to live with.

  It would have been inaccurate to call Carrie depressed, but on the other hand he would have hesitated to say that she was happy. Restless. That was the word. She shifted from painting to writing, cheerfully admitting that she wasn't much good at either, and from night-life in Los Angeles to long morning horseback rides across the desert. She seldom complained, and she never interfered. She seemed, somehow, to be waiting, always waiting, without knowing just what it was that she waited for.

  They had both wanted children, but the children hadn't come. They had toyed with the idea of adoption, but had never taken any concrete steps in that direction.

  "I saw Van today, Carrie," he said finally, lowering his book.

  "Oh?" She added a dab of yellow to the brown of the sand. "Is he still alive?"

  "He'll go on forever. I wish I knew what he was after."

  Carrie squinted at the painting. "Well, we don't know, and that's that."

  "It's a funny deal, Carrie. I've set this whole thing up with his money and his determination. I've spent ten years of my life on it, and I still don't know why he's doing it."

  "You could always quit, Keith. We could haul the old sailboat out again."

  "No, baby. I can't quit this time." He hesitated. "Carrie, Van wants us to go to Venus for a year to get the feel of what's going on there."

  Carrie put down her brush and turned around, eyebrows arched. "You mean, in person?"

  "In person. To Venus."

  "What else happened today—war with Sweden?"

  "This is on the level, sugar. He wants us to go."

  Carrie came over and perched on the edge of the couch, almost birdlike in her smallness. She kissed him, pleasantly. She lit a cigarette and looked around her at the books and paintings and friendly walls. "When do we leave, hon?"

  "Do you want to go? You know what Venus would be like. It's a long way from everybody and everything—"

  "I think it might do us good, Keith," she said slowly. She ran her slim fingers through her pale blond hair. "I'd like to

  go.;

  "You'd have to go to school for a while, baby."

  "I'm willing." Her blue eyes suddenly glowed with an unexpected, surprised hope. "Keith, you know what you were always saying about this Dark Age of ours? Well, I've often thought ... I mean—"

  He looked at his wife and smiled. "You've thought that we're caught in out culture, too," he said. "We're stale. I've thought the same thing. But somehow we just drift on—it isn't easy to break away."

  "We can, Keith. I know we can."

  She wanted this. She wanted it desperately. Keith himself wasn't sure, but he kept his indecision well disguised. He kissed his wife.

  "We'll see, baby," he said. "We'll see."

  The next few months went by in a hurry.

  Carrie was busy being indoctrinated into the Halaja culture pattern, but Keith Ortega had too much time on his hands. After he had thought himself into the same hole about one hundred times too often, he went back to see Vandervort.

  The Old Man, looking like a flushed, bearded gnome preserved for eternity in a stifling burial vault, seemed glad to see him, but slightly apprehensive. He was worried again, fretting over details. "To what do I owe this honor of this voluntary visit, Keith?" he boomed in his too-loud voice, pouring out a glass of exquisite but unwelcome brandy. "You haven't changed your mind?"

  "No, Van. We're still going."

  "Good. Splendid!" The pale blue eyes in the red face darted nervously around the enormous room, lighting here on a vase, there on an ancient statuette, somewhere else on a rosy fireplace. Despite the terrific heat, his skin was dry and Keith knew that it was cool to the touch. The loud voice tried to fill up the room. "Well? Anything wrong?"

  That was unusual directness for Vandervort, who was usually more subtle than he appeared. Keith took advantage of it. "Nothing's wrong, Van, except with me."

  "Oh?" The Old Man hauled himself to his feet, heedless of his doctor's instructions, popped a pill into his mouth, and washed it down with brandy. He pad-padded across the rich brown rug. The vein pulsed in his neck, feeding his brain with blood. "Well, well? Scared? Worried?"

  Keith took out his pipe, filled it, and lit it. The blue smoke curled up through the damp heat and filmed across the ceiling. "I'm worried about you," he said.

  "Ah," said Vandervort, sinking into his chair again and pouring more brandy. "You fear I may die and leave you in an . . . um-m-m . . . uncomfortable position? Is that it?"

  "No. It's your motive I'm worried about, Van."

  Vandervort narrowed his eyes to slits "That doesn't concern you, Keith."

  "I think I'm entitled to know."

  The Old Man seemed to shrink in his chair, looking smaller than ever. His white beard quivered slightly. Almost, he looked—what was the word? Afraid? What could James Murray Vandervort be afraid of? "Your salary has been good," he said, his voice not quite so loud as before.

  "I had money before I knew you. The money is secondary."

  The pale blue eyes opened. "Why did you take the job, Keith?"

  Keith Ortega hesitated. Well, why had he? Or did he know, really? "The ideas were mine," he said, feeling for words. "I thought it would be interesting. I guess I was bored." He smiled. "Maybe I wanted to rock the boat a little." The words did not satisfy him.

>   "Good. Splendid. Has it over occurred to you that maybe I just might want to see what would happen? Maybe I'm bored. Give a man a few billion dollars and he's still a man, Keith."

  "I'm not questioning your humanity." Keith puffed slowly on his pipe. "But I can't buy that story about your just being curious. I've watched you too closely, Van. This is more important to you than life itself. Why, Van, why?"

  Vandervort looked away, into the filled emptiness of the great room, and said nothing.

  Keith Ortega watched him closely. The Old Man was one hundred and five years old. Like Keith, he had no children. He had poured a billion dollars into the secret Venus project, and he had turned into a fanatic. What was he after on Venus?

  Keith knew the old boy fairly well. He was certainly not just a humanitarian idealist; he cared very little about the human animal one way or the other. He wasn't after commercial gain—after so many years, business bored him, and at best he regarded it as a means to an end. He was most emphatically not a dreamer.

  "Maybe," Keith said finally, to break the long silence, "you want to kick man upstairs to the stars. Maybe you believe in destiny."

  The Old Man laughed his booming laugh, his red face flushing with the strain. "Maybe I do, Keith," he chuckled. "Maybe I do."

  There was more talk, but it was singularly unproductive. Early in the morning, without finding what he had come for, Keith said good night and left. The Old Man stayed in his chair in the too-hot room, smiling a little, his eyes nervously peering into the shadows, sipping his brandy.

  Keith lifted his copter and flew toward home, with the lights of Los Angeles below him and a full moon above him. The' night wind, deflected by the vents, was fresh and cold in his face. High over bis head, the freight lanes were shadowed with ships.

  The violet sign floated in the air: DON'T ROCK THE BOAT.

  All the way home he thought of Old Man Vandervort, sitting alone in his castle, and the simple question whispered through his mind:

  Why?

  Some questions, fortunately, were easier to answer.

  Keith Ortega had answered some of them to his own satisfaction a long time ago. He had written a book, with the somewhat melodramatic title of The New Age of Darkness, and the book in a sense had led Vandervort to the idea of the Venus project. The book had been widely read, and was generally regarded as possibly correct and certainly amusing.

  No one took the book very seriously—which tended to confirm its thesis.

  No one but Vandervort.

  It was about the planet Earth.

  What was the book about?

  The story of Earth was a familiar one. After a million years or so of bashing in each other's brains with bigger and better weapons, the human animal had finally achieved a fairly uniform, stable, planet-wide civilization. He had done it out of sheer necessity, just a cat's whisker this side of nuclear extinction, but he had done it.

  By the year 2050, the dream of One World was no longer a dream.

  The human animal was living on it.

  In his understandable haste, however, he had overlooked a few basic points.

  One civilization had taken over from many diverse civilizations. Given the facts of history, it could not have been otherwise. An essentially Western culture, due to a running headstart in technology, had spread itself thickly around the globe. It had taken root and prospered wherever it had touched. It had swallowed and digested every other way of life on the planet Earth.

  There was One World, and there was peace.

  A standardized, uniform, flourishing, world-wide civilization.

  The human animal began to breathe more easily.

  There was a joker in the deck, even though his laugh was a long time in coming. One World meant one culture pattern. There had been no orchestration of differences, but simply an almost complete obliteration of differences. When man was in a hurry, he took the quickest available shortcuts.

  It was a good culture pattern, by and large, and the human animal was better off than he had ever been before. It was a lifeway of plenty, a culture of unlimited technological resources, a philosophy founded on the dignity of man.

  Earth became a paradise—literally, there was a paradise on Earth. The jungles and the deserts and the arctic wastes, when they were needed, were converted into rich, green land. The power of the sun was harnessed, and harnessed cheaply. Vandervort Enterprises made a thousand fortunes from solar power, but they delivered the goods. The culture flowered.

  The worlds of the solar system were briefly explored, written up, and ignored. Both Mars and Venus, contrary to early semi-scientific guesses, were found to be habitable. Habitable, but not very palatable. Mars was an almost waterless desert, and Venus a strange jungle world that never saw the sun. With the untapped resources of Earth ready and waiting in the back yard, the other planets were not worth colonizing.

  One thing about Paradise: nobody wanted to leave it.

  The human animal stayed home in droves.

  He had a good thing on Earth. It was up to him to appreciate it, to protect it, to cherish it. The new golden rule was: DON'T ROCK THE BOAT.

  The uniform culture pattern, the framework for human existence, filled out. Every culture has a potential beyond which it cannot go. Every culture has a stopping point. It can achieve its values, attain its goals, follow every path that is open to it. When that happens, whether in Greece or Rome or Stone-Age Australia, the culture exhausts itself and begins merely to repeat what it has already done. Throughout history when a civilization reached its climax and leveled off, there was a new, fresh, vital culture somewhere else to take up the slack and go off in a new direction, jolting the old civilization out of its rut.

  This time there were no rival cultures.

  There was nothing to take over.

  By the year 2100, the civilization of Earth had shot its ammunition. It was a perfect, static, frozen Western culture. It began to repeat itself over and over, endlessly. It went nowhere, and took its own sweet tirne doing it.

  It was not decadent. It did not retrogress. It did not really deteriorate. It simply jogged along its well-worn circular cinder track, not working up a sweat, mildly pleased with itself.

  Most people did not know what had happened, of course. How could they? Did the citizens of the Dark Ages know that the ages were dark? More significantly, did they give a damn?

  People were as happy as they had ever been, after a fashion. They were well-fed. They were comfortable. There was no atomic horror staring them in the face. Kids still fell in love, and spring still came around every year.

  Go up to the man in the copter. Tell him that his culture has run out of gas.

  So what? DONT ROCK THE BOAT.

  Still, there were signs. Ignorance always carries a price tag.

  The loss of cultural vitality made itself manifest—very slowly, the birth rate began to fall. The number of suicides, even in paradise, began to go up. People killed themselves for reasons that bordered on the whimsical. Parents who had children often did not want them. The number of illegitimate children, despite the lowered birthrate, went up.

  The culture was aimless.

  The word wasn't decay.

  It was boredom.

  These were the facts, as Keith Ortega had worked them out. These were the facts that Vandervort had to deal with. These were the facts that added up to Venus.

  At five o'clock in the morning on the first day of September in the year 2150, Keith Ortega and his wife boarded the

  Foundation ship hidden under an unreclaimed area of the Arizona desert.

  In addition to Keith and Carrie, the ship carried two pilots, a navigator, a doctor, fifty babies, twenty-five special humanoid robots, computers, and supplies.

  Keith and Carrie sat in their cabin. There was nothing to see—no windows, no viewscreens, no control panels, no flashing lights. There was nothing to do. Neither of them had ever taken off on a spaceship before. They waited.

  A low wh
ine whistled through the ship, and steadied into a low, powerful throbbing. The beat of the air-conditioner picked up. An electronic relay thunked heavily into position.

  "Come on, come on," Keith whispered.

  The lights dimmed. A muffled, coughing roar cut loose from somewhere far away. There was a quick giddiness, a sudden second when the heart skipped a beat. Then the lights brightened again, the sound steadied, and the ship's gentle gravity field took hold.

  The ship went up.

  Up, up through the pale sunlight of early morning. Up through the still, soundless sea that never knew morning or night, laughter or tears.

  Earth was gone.

  Keith smiled at his wife and wondered how long it would be before either of them saw a blue sky again.

  HI.

  Venus.

  Keith had a mental picture of it, and had even seen photographs and scientific reports brought back by the early expeditions. He thought he knew what he was getting into.

  The reality, of course, was different.

  When they stepped down from the ship at the receiving station, twenty-five million miles from Earth, his first surprised impression was one of sameness.

  Even scientific accounts tended to emphasize the unusual and the unique. Reading old accounts of the Sahara or the Amazon Basin, it was possible to forget that those places were on the same Earth with Los Angeles or London or New Delhi—possible even to get the impression that the inhabitants weren't really human beings at all.

  More than anything else, the receiving station area of Venus looked like an obscure corner of Earth on a mildly unusual day. It was very cloudy, which was to be expected, and the air was like thick gray fog. It was warm and damp, and the atmosphere tasted artificially sweet and heady. Gray-green vegetation circled the station like a choking wall, and the hush in the air was a thick and heavy oil.

  But the really alien aspects of Venus—the diffuse colonies of oxygen-breathing organisms that webbed the higher clouds, the strange temperature currents that precipitated the water vapor before it could rise to the four-mile carbon dioxide bands—were invisible.