Donald A. Wollheim (ed)

by The Hidden Planet

  For many days and many nights the people had come across the swamps and jungles of the great continent to Halaja. They had come as they had always come, as their fathers had come, and as their fathers' fathers before them.

  Or so they believed—for had not their own fathers told them so, throughout the whole of their fives?

  From far Acosta by the northern sea they had come, and from the three cities of Wlan, Mepas, and Carin. They had walked from the swaying fields of Pueklor and from the rocky hills of Equete.

  It was the time of the Coming Together. Not all came, of course. These were only selected delegates who made the jungle trek and who would then return to their people as they had always done.

  The orange fires crackled and the drums throbbed. A new chant began.

  "Oh friends from far and near, we come together as we have always come—"

  And the answering chants came back, from the men and women of Acosta and the Three Cities and Pueklor and Equete:

  "Always come, always come . . ."

  "We come together, all different, all the same, in peace for all men are brothers—"

  "All men are brothers, all are brothers . . ."

  Side by side they sat—rough seamen and happy industrialists, proud hunters and serious philosophers from far Equete.

  The drums beat faster.

  The orange fires painted shadow-dances along the walls.

  It was the time of the Coming Together.

  Keith felt his heart beating with fierce pride in his chest, and he held his wife close by his side. Here in the night under an alien sky that glowed with the light of a million moons—here, at last, was a dream that could not die.

  Ralph Nostrand was silent, watching.

  The old people—it was hard to think of them as robots, for they had been fathers and mothers and friends—stayed in the rear circles, in the shadows, watching the children they had led through life.

  It was impossible to believe that they were not proud.

  For many long hours the ceremony went on through the long, long night. There was feasting and singing—and a little gay romancing among the young men and women from faraway lands, for these people were not saints.

  Fifty hours after the Coming Together had begun, the old, old chant was started by the pool that was the Home of the Spirit. The words were mysterious and strange, but did not the gods say that one day they would be filled with meaning?

  Keith saw his two sons singing by the pool. He felt his wife proud and happy by his side. "Beyond the clouds that roof our world, beyond the rains that cool our skies—"

  "Beyond the clouds, beyond the rain . . ." "Beyond our skies lie other skies—" "Other skies, other skies . . ."

  "Beyond the great sea where floats our world, beyond our sea floats another shore—"

  "Another shore, another shore . . ."

  "And there in the great beyond the green Earth waits for us, waits for the coming of our silver arrows—"

  "Silver arrows into beyond, beyond . . ."

  "The green Earth waits in the great beyond, and there our far brothers dance under a clean blue sky—"

  "Stiver arrows into beyond, beyond . . ."

  "Oh, our brothers of Earth are waiting for us in the great bqyond—"

  "Waiting, waiting for the Coming Together!"

  "Beyond the clouds that roof our world, beyond the rains that cool our skies—"

  "Waiting, waiting for the Coming Together!"

  The drums stopped and there was a silver silence.

  A fight rain fell from the glowing clouds and sprinkled the plaza with cool, sweet water.

  Keith could not speak. He held his wife's hand and shared her deep understanding. No matter what happened, he was glad that they had come to Venus, glad even if they failed, for it was better to fail than never to have tried at all.

  He turned slowly and looked at Captain Nostrand.

  Nostrand stood very straight, the firelight touching the old shadows on his face.

  His eyes saw far beyond the village of Halaja.

  He smiled and held out his hand to Keith. He nodded firmly.

  Around the plaza the drums rolled and the singing began again.

  VI.

  Five years after Ralph Nostrand had left for Earth, the village of Halaja still lay peacefully by the slow blue water of the Smoke River.

  Half die old robots had died and been buried, and Bill and Ruth Knudsen had gone home to a small farm in Michigan.

  It was time for the Venus colonies to strike off on their own. It was time for the men and women who had guided the new world to return to the old world.

  "I wish we could stay, Keith," Carrie said.

  "Me, too. But this isn't our world, and we're not needed any more."

  "I never thought that it would be harder to leave than it was to come."

  "I never thought we'd be here nineteen years, either."

  "I'm glad we won't have to say good-by to our boys."

  "It'll be rough enough as it is, Carrie. We'll just bring our old reasonable facsimiles in and let 'em die. I hate to do that to the boys, but they mustn't suspect anything."

  They walked down the jungle pathway toward Halaja, arm in arm, already trying to remember the world they had to leave. Fortunately, the two robots that had originally been designed to replace them when they went back to Earth were still waiting at the station clearing.

  Robots had infinite patience.

  They would go to Halaja when Keith and Carrie slipped away, and there they would sicken and die. They would be buried with the rest in the clearing by the Smoke River, where one day their sons, too, would lie— "I still wish we could stay, Keith."

  He kissed her and ruffled her blond hair. "It's our turn now, baby. We mustn't rock the boat."

  Still, they postponed it as long as they could.

  They found excuses to stay in Halaja with their sons.

  It took the message from Nostrand to make them leave. It came one night and Mark flew it out in the last station copter. It read:

  KEITH: OLD MAN VANDERVORT VERY ILL AND NOT EXPECTED TO LIVE. HE WANTS TO SEE YOU IF YOU CAN COME IN TIME. SHIP ON WAY TO YOU NOW. ALL O.K. AT THIS END. WHAT'RE YOU DOING UP THERE-GOING NATIVE? (SIGNED) RALPH.

  "Well," Carrie said, "he couldn't live forever."

  "He took a stab at it, though," Keith said.

  "We'll have to go."

  "Yes. We'll have to go."

  They deft the village that had been their home one night in the rain, while their sons slept. The two robot humanoids who were their identical twins climbed into the bed that was still warm from their bodies.

  Keith and Carrie walked together through the plaza of Halaja, past the Home of the Spirit, and out the gate. The rain was cold in their faces. They walked along the pathway through the Sirau-fruit to the damp athletic field to the west of the village.

  They did not look back.

  The copter lifted them into the silver clouds for the last time and carried them east to the station clearing. They said good-by to Mark Kamoto, who would follow them a year later on the voyage of no return.

  The ship that had carried them from Earth nineteen years ago waited now in the rain to carry them back again.

  They looked one last time at the gray-green wall of the jungle and the yellow light spilling out from the domed station house. They looked one last time at the banks of luminous clouds that flowed like a sea of moons through the sky.

  They looked one last time westward into the night, toward the sleeping village of Halaja. They boarded the ship.

  Ahead of them was Earth, and a dying man. Ahead of them, lost now in the immensities that swam between the worlds, was an old, old man with a white beard and nervous blue eyes that darted through the shadows of a too-hot room.

  Ahead of them was James Murray Vandervort and a final question.

  Why?

  The land was crisp and hot and clean under the Arizona sun. The air was charged with a fresh golden
tang that made you want to stand in the wonderful sand and fill your lungs over and over again.

  The sky was blue and cloudless. The greens of the desert plants were as bright and vivid as if they had been newly painted.

  Like flowers, Keith and Carrie lifted their faces to the wind and sought the sun. It was good to be back.

  There was no time to go home, and so a Foundation copter lifted them up into the desert air and carried them westward toward Los Angeles. They found themselves flinching involuntarily at the freight liners that roared through the air lanes and the flutter of copters that filled the sky like butterflies. Los Angeles was so vast and white and glearning that they could hardly take it in. Far below them, dots on the calm blue Pacific, the surfaced subs bobbed like schools of porpoise.

  The copter swung north along the coastline and then veered off to the right up to Vandervort's Canyon. They landed on the patio field of the huge estate and an old buder took them in tow.

  They walked through the richly-carpeted hallways and up the marble stairs to the second floor. They walked down the long gray passage and knocked on the mahogany door.

  A tiny green light blinked on in the center of the door.

  Keith and Carrie entered the huge room, and it was almost like stepping from Earth to Venus. The hot, humid air boiled out into the hallway like an overflowing lake.

  The room had not changed. The wall-to-wall brown rug was still there, and the tables and chairs and desks and fireplaces and flowers and books and drapes—

  But the Old Man had changed.

  Nineteen years had taken their toll.

  Vandervort was one hundred and twenty-four years old.

  Even the geriatrics specialists could not save him now.

  The Old Man still sat in his huge, soft chair. He seemed very tiny now, and lost. His white beard was a dirty gray and his red face was blotched with unhealthy pink. His blue eyes were dull and glazed.

  Ralph Nostrand stood by his side, his face fighting with a smile of welcome.

  They shook hands.

  "Who is it?" choked the Old Man. "Who-s there? Is somebody there?"

  Keith leaned down toward him. "Van," he said. "Van, it's Keith Ortega."

  James Murray Vandervort stiffened as though an electric shock had shot through his thin, dry body. "Keith!" he wheezed. He tried to get up, but could not move. "Is it really you—after all these years?"

  "Yes, Van."

  The dead blue eyes swam into focus. The Old Man breathed fast and shallow. "I have to know, Keith," he said. His voice was weak, a shadow of the boom that had once filled the chamber and chased the darkness away. "It's been so hard. I have to know."

  Keith waited him out, feeling a vast pity for the wreck of a human being that was dying in the big soft chair. Pity— and something more than that.

  "I had to hear you say it, say it with your own voice," Van-dervort said, talking very fast. His voice was such a whisper that Keith could hardly hear him. "Is everything all right? Is it working, Keith? Is it working?"

  Keith made himself speak slowly and clearly. "You don't need to worry, Van. It's all right. Everything is all right. All the colonies are working just as we planned. Nothing can go wrong now. The new culture of Venus will come through space to Earth within a century. The new culture pattern will hit the Earth like a shot in the arm. We'll go on to the stars one day, Van. Everything is all right."

  "I gave them the stars," the Old Man said, his voice very tired. "I gave them the stars, didn't I?"

  "Yes," Keith said.

  The Old Man sank back into his chair in sudden, exhausted relaxation. The old, dead eyes closed. There was a long, hushed silence. "Is he all right?" Ralph asked. "I think so."

  The Old Man began to talk again, his voice far away and lonely. "I've covered my tracks," he whispered, "but not too well. When the new world comes out of space, the people of Earth will check back . . . check back—"

  The voice trailed away.

  "Yes, Van?" Keith urged.

  The Old Man sighed. "The people will check back. They'll find my name, find the records. They'll know I did it. They'll know, they'll know—"

  Again, the thin voice faded.

  The Old Man began to cry, softly. Keith leaned closer to hear him. Suddenly the Old Man tried to straighten in his chair and the faded blue eyes opened.

  "Keith, Keith," he whispered desperately, "will they remember me after I'm gone? I gave them the stars. Keith, will they remember my name? Will they remember my name?"

  The deep shadows of the vast, crammed room rustled around the walls, sliding in toward the firelight. Keith and Carrie and Ralph stood in the unnatural heat and stared at the tiny, dying man in the huge, swallowing chair.

  "They'll remember you, Van," Keith said. "They'll remember you long after the rest of us are a million years forgotten."

  James Murray Vandervort smiled. The blue eyes closed again. "Remember me," he mumbled. "Remember my name. Remember my name—"

  A doctor came in from the back door.

  "You'd better go now," he said. "Mr. Vandervort needs to rest."

  They walked out of the chamber, down the hallway, down the marble stairs.

  "All that," Ralph Nostrand said. "All that, just to keep a part of him alive."

  "He had no son," Carrie said quietly.

  They walked toward the copter in the patio. Keith was thinking of Halaja, and the dark log buildings in the gray-green jungles of another world.

  All that because a rich old man was afraid of the eternal dark.

  "All that," he said, "because he was just a man." Very late that night the three of them walked singing past the bright lights of Wilshire Walk.

  A man and his wife, who had carried out an Old Man's plan.

  A captain in a forgotten service, who had falsified a report to make a dream come true.

  The violet government airsign hung in the air: DON'T ROCK THE BOAT.

  They walked through the sign.

  They walked on, arm in arm, singing under the frost of stars. They walked on and all who saw them that night on Earth wondered at the smiles they smiled and the strange, strange song they sang—

  A song that whispered beyond the clouds—

  Beyond the rains that cool our skies.

  Beyond . . . beyond . . .

  VENUS MISSION

  by J. T. McIntosh i

  The crippled ship screamed down toward Venus, upright, in a slow axial spin, riding silent jets. Grey cloud curved sleekly past the fins, streamed up in trembling ribbons along the shining sides. At the noseport, Warren Blackwell strained his eyes in an effort to pierce that boiling greyness, but he knew the Venusian atmosphere, knew he was wasting his time. He would see the ground when the ship was fifty feet above it, and that would be far too late.

  The door of the control room clicked, and the girl who sat at the other end of the table from him at meal-times entered and came up to him.

  "The captain sent me, in case I could help," she said.

  "And to get you out of the way."

  She grinned without humor. "No doubt."

  "What's your name?" he asked.

  "Virginia Stuart. You might as well call me Virginia. There's not much time left for formality, is there. . . . You're Blackwell, aren't you—the Blackwell?"

  "If you mean the one who won all the medals, yes. How many are there left?"

  "Of the crew? The captain and his second officer. And the captain's weaving about a bit. It won't be long before the radiation gets him too."

  Warren surveyed her and decided she could take the truth. "Go back and get one of them out," he told her. "It'll only need one to jam on all the power there is left when I ring for it. But there must be one. It isn't much of a chance, but it's the only one we've got."

  "Check," she said. "Isn't the phone working?"

  "No. Only the alarm."

  She nodded, and left him. Warren strained again to pierce the grey cloud. He was a passenger on the Merkland,
but he had been co-opted when the powerleak developed. He knew more than any of the crew about Venus. Not that that made much difference. All that he could do was stay where he was and sound the alarm when he saw the ground. Then, down below, whoever was left would touch off the braking jets, and with luck the ship would come down hard but in one piece. But it would need a lot of luck.

  There wouldn't be much hope for any one who was below. Warren, right in the nose, probably stood the best chance, after the rest of the passengers, who were locked in a storeroom amidships. None of the other passengers would have been much help, and apparently the captain had picked out him and the girl as the only ones who might be useful in the emergency. He seemed a brave and able officer, that captain. He could have stayed in the nose himself, safe, if anyone was, and left the problem of the leaking radiation to someone else. But he knew that only he or some other member of his crew could handle the jets, and that it was vital that they should fire exactly when needed.

  The girl came back, and Captain Morris was with her. "I make it twenty thousand feet up, Blackwell," said Morris. "Do you think that would be about right?"

  Virginia hadn't exaggerated when she said the captain was weaving about a bit. He was in the last stages of plutonium poisoning. Warren thought, a trifle cynically, that the captain might as well go on being a hero now, for he was a dead man already. But Warren was used to death. The rows of ribbons somewhere in his luggage proclaimed that.

  "I never flew much over Venus," he admitted. "Nobody does. I'd say we were well up yet, on a long slant. But don't quote me."

  The captain sank heavily into one of the control seats. He

  could never stop his shaking now, but he could limit it by trying to relax. "We can blast for five seconds, I make it," he said. "That means at our speed we should start a hundred and twenty feet up."

  Warren shook his head. "You might see a hundred and twenty feet on the surface. But not straight down. It's thickest about sixty feet up."

  "That's why I came to see you. We're in your hands, Blackwell. You know more about these currents than anyone else on board. You'll have to guess, that's all. The instruments aren't anywhere near that precise, and if you wait till you see solid ground it'll be too late. Someone has to guess. It might as well be you."