Battle on Venus

by William F. Temple

  In the afternoon, they struck off in a new direction. Instead of returning down the valleys to the known emptiness of the plain, they toiled over the hills to the west, seeking a viewpoint. They found it on one crest, and for a space they stood hand in hand surveying the panorama. Then George’s grip tightened. He pointed.

  In a place of rocks and cliffs there stood an isolated pinnacle. Unlike the other stone spikes, vegetation clung to its nearly perpendicular sides. It dominated an apparently artificially leveled area, in which the traces of a pattern showed through the undergrowth. And in which, also, there was a long box of a house, dun-brown, flat-roofed, many-windowed, with a beetling portico of disproportionate size.

  “Beneath the verdant tower… The house of bricks, a box of tricks,” said George, slowly. Was it mere chance they’d stumbled on the house described in Leep’s verse? Or had Leep really glimpsed a future event?

  “Come on, Mara,” he said. “Let’s see if Senilde is at home today.”

  She nodded, smiling, and plunged gaily down the hill with him.

  “This,” said George, when they reached it, “was once a cultivated garden.”

  She said, “Yes,” and let her gaze rove over the mold-encrusted stone seats, the weed-grown paths, the stagnant ornamental ponds, and the wilderness which was choking them all. At the far end, the house stood as silent as the towering rock-pinnacle behind it. She saw that the greenness of the latter was due to a wide-leafed creeper swarming over it. But the house and its ridiculous portico were free from any such green parasites.

  George noticed that Mara was getting two steps ahead of him up the main driveway to the house. But she hadn’t quickened her pace: he’d slowed his through caution. His pride made him catch up.

  They reached a big, wrought-metal fountain. It was covered with verdigris and its basin was empty and bone-dry. He was surprised by the similarity of terrestrial and Venusian ideas of landscape gardening. He thought: this could be a corner of Versailles after centuries of neglect.

  Then, without warning, the fountain squirted a wavering umbrella of dirty water. It spread well beyond the circumference of the basin and soaked them from head to foot.

  George thought he heard a thin, high laugh from the direction of the house. He glowered as he wiped his face. He loathed being made a fool of. Mara just giggled.

  “There’s a practical joker around,” George growled. “When I’m through with him, he won’t be quite so practical.”

  The water was sour and evil-smelling. His feet squelched in his shoes. There was a solid stone seat just off the driveway. George sat on it with the intention of removing his shoes. The seat sank silently and smoothly into the earth and he was flat on his back with his feet in the air.

  The faint laugh from the house was drowned by a howl of laughter from Mara.

  Red with mortification, violently angry, George jumped up, threw a withering glance at the convulsed Mara, and strode purposefully toward the house. He’d find this joker and wring his neck.

  The moss-grown path was hard under his feet. For a time. Then, although its surface texture looked just the same, it became soft, sticky, gooey, like molten rubber. He sank ankle-deep.

  Grimly, he tried to plod on. But the stuff clung. Soon, he was walking slow-motion, lifting one enlarged blob of a foot after the other with care, striving to keep his balance. He realized that the accumulation was becoming so heavy that presently he would be incapable of movement. So he abandoned the frontal assault and floundered to the solid ground bordering the driveway. His dignity had been hurt. Mara trotted along to him on the verge, and he wouldn’t look at her. He tried to pull the stuff off his feet. It stretched and stuck like chewed gum. He got himself into a fine mess. The unseen watcher was cackling continually. Mara, grinning, pulled out her knife and cut or scraped most of the stuff off.

  As she finished, a man emerged from the house into the dull daylight. He was short and broad, in a monkish gown corded at the waist. He was red-cheeked, healthy-looking, seemed to be around fifty. His mouth was sensual and hung half open, giving him a vacant look which was enhanced by his pale eyes, which appeared to comprehend only part of what they saw.

  He looked stupid and harmless. He said something in a weak, cracked voice to George, who merely scowled at him. Mara answered him in his own language. They had a chat.

  Then Mara said: “This is Senilde.”

  “I had gathered as much,” said George, morosely. He’d been reflecting that as he needed information from this fool, it would hardly be politic to start by screwing his head off. He made an effort and swallowed his gorge. He took a spare Teleo from the satchel and told Mara: “Explain this to Senilde.”

  “I have explained,” she said, taking it. She was still two steps ahead of him. Through the new medium, Senilde said: “Once, long ago, I invented a gadget like this.”

  “Indeed?” said George. “Where is it now?”

  Senilde made a careless gesture. “I threw it away. I threw all my toys away in time. One gets bored… Still, I’m glad you came and let me play with my garden again. I haven’t been able to find a victim for years now. There are very few people left on this planet, you know. Maybe I overdid it.”

  “Overdid what?”

  “The war. It’s a game I used to play.”

  “A game! For Pete’s sake, you call it a game?”

  “ ‘It’s all a pointless game…’” Mara quoted.

  George remembered the men who were killed, and controlled his anger with difficulty. “A game you used to play? Seems to me the game’s still in full swing.”

  “Oh, yes, it’ll run on for a century or two, I suppose, until the last of the things have smashed themselves,” said Senilde. “I became tired of them, and just let them run on. They’re purely automatic, you know.”

  “You mean, all of those tanks and planes and things are unmanned?”

  “Naturally.”

  George thought of Freiburg basing his faith on his white circle “allies.” He recalled his own moment of emotion when the wheeled HQ seemingly rushed off to defend them. It was dismaying to have it confirmed that they’d been kidding themselves. He felt he’d been played a dirty trick. He said, truculently: “Why the hell do you let them go on smashing up everything?”

  Senilde shrugged. “Why not? None of it means anything.”

  “Well, it does to me. You nearly killed me. You did, in fact, cause the death of some of my companions—and for all I know, the rest of them may have been killed by now. Can you stop it?”

  “Yes, if I want to.”

  “Then stop it right now, damn you.”

  Senilde said, petulantly: “Why should I stop my game just because of you?”

  George snatched Mara’s knife. “Because I’ll stick this through you if you don’t.”

  “My dear fellow, that wouldn’t embarrass me in the least. I’m a good healer. In fact, I heal instantly. You can’t hurt me and you can’t kill me: I happen to be immortal.”

  “We’ll see about that,” said George, grimly, and started for him with the knife.

  Mara grabbed his arm, held him back. “No, George, violence won’t help. There’s always a way to get what you want without making trouble. Brutality is no substitute for brains.”

  Senilde looked at her with some approval. “You’re sensible besides being beautiful, young girl. George (what a queer name!)—let me have your girl, and I’ll switch off the war.”

  George let him have a hay-maker instead. It hit the solar plexus more by luck than judgment. Senilde rebounded like a rubber man. His pale eyes lit up, and he smiled slobberingly.

  “Oh, a new game! What do you call it? What do I do now?”

  George groaned. “Okay, Mara, he’s all yours to use your brains on.”

  She said: “Would you like to show us around your house, Senilde? Do you have any more gags like that fountain?”

  “Yes, lots of them. Such fun when I used to have visitors. Of course, I can’t show yo
u all of them—that would spoil it. I’d like you to discover some for yourselves—that’s much the best way to do it. You’ll be so amused. Come on.”

  Mara began to follow him back to the house. George shrugged, then followed her. He watched carefully where Senilde trod—then as carefully trod in his footprints. He wanted to avoid any more gooey patches. The doorstep behaved perfectly normally for Senilde and Mara. But it swung down like a trapdoor under George’s feet. He found himself sliding down a chute into darkness, with the echo of laughter following him. There was more sticky stuff awaiting him at the bottom. He reclined, helpless, in the dark, struck like an insect on fly-paper, thinking: There must be some way to kill that old maniac. He began wondering if Freiburg were still alive. If the skipper was still hopefully awaiting his return, maybe with some friendly and intelligent Venusians, willing to help. Thank heavens Freiburg didn’t know what was going on, that the intrepid explorer, George Starkey, was actually falling and fooling about like a slapstick comedian, getting no place at all in a crazy Lewis Carroll world.

  A light went on. He was in a cellar which was bare save for some benches over by the wall. Presumably they accommodated an invited audience in Senilde’s halycon days—to watch the fate of unfortunate fellow-guests. Senilde entered, with his foolish grin. Then Mara, who again went into peals of laughter.

  George frowned at her. “Mara, you disappoint me. I thought you had an adult sense of humor. There’s nothing remotely funny in this childish clowning.”

  “Maybe not from where you sit,” she gurgled.

  George turned to Senilde. “As for you, you silly little fat fool, why don’t you be your age? How old are you, anyhow?”

  “Let me see now—three thousand, maybe four thousand, years. My memory isn’t what it was. Venusian years, that is—slightly shorter than your own.”

  George said, gruffly: “I don’t believe a word of it. Get me out of here.”

  “By all means.” Senilde pressed a button. Liquid bubbled from small holes in the floor. It was a solvent which melted the gummy substance and freed George.

  The tour continued. The whole house was full of fool tricks like that. There were door handles which came off in your hand, or stuck to it, or gave you an electric shock. Stairs which changed into smooth inclines and shot you to the bottom again. Flowers sprinkled with sneezing powder. Passages where the floor began to move backwards under your feet, whichever way you tried to go, so that you remained perpetually on the same spot.

  George went through the gamut sullenly. It was a little easier to take when Mara also fell for some of these creaking gags. All the same, it palled—like the goings on at some convention for dim Babbitts.

  At last it ended. Having seen no other soul around but themselves, they came into a lounge furnished with Eastern luxuriousness. The chairs, the carpet, the divans were all deep and soft. It was many-colored and cheerful because bright sunlight smote in through the windows and made the silks and satins glow.

  “The sun—out at last?” said George, wonderingly, and went to a window. It was as though the window were frosted: he couldn’t see the sky clearly—it was just a flat whiteness. In the center of it was a very bright but hazy disk, like the sun shining through a high mist.

  Senilde said, thinly: “It’s my own private sun. Quite a small thing, really, but it’s perpetual and emits all the qualities of sunlight. You know, as I grow older I find I don’t want to do much else but bask in here in the sunlight. Apart from today, I’ve not been out of this room in years. It’s too dull out there under the clouds. I often regret I cut the planet off from the sun like that, because I made it rather a depressing place for myself.”

  “What are you running on about now?” asked George, irritably. Mara sank into one of the divans, and a trick cushion squeaked under her. Senilde giggled fatuously.

  George’s irritation intensified. He gripped Senilde’s shoulders and shook him. “See here, I want to know just what you’ve been getting up to on this planet. I want a detailed report, and no more monkey business. Don’t hold out on me, don’t think I can’t hurt you. I can. I’ll burn this house of yours to the ground. Where would you be then, you old sybarite, without your playthings and your sunlight and your soft cushions?”

  One moment he was standing there bawling out Senilde and shaking him like a man emptying a sack. Next moment he was flat on his back on the carpet, with his mind cloudier than the sky.

  He regained his senses gradually. Mara was lying near him, apparently unconscious. He crawled over to her. When he touched her, she raised herself on her elbows, looking dazed.

  “Are you all right, lass?”

  “I guess so. George, I thought he’d killed you. So I stabbed him clean through the heart. And then… I don’t know what happened then.”

  A knife dropped onto the carpet between them. They looked up. Senilde stood over them. He’d closed his mouth and didn’t look quite so foolish. He said: “There’s your little toy back, my dear. I told you that sort of thing was useless. So many people have tried it at one time or another that it became tiresome. I discourage them with a gadget I wear which creates an electrical field at a touch and stuns anyone who touches me. Life’s so flat without a little fun.”

  But he didn’t smile, and neither did they.

  Senilde said: “Don’t ever threaten me again, George (silly name!) Don’t try to use violence on me or my possessions. It’ll never work and you may kill yourself. Everything I have is protected in some way. I’m a cautious man. Now I suggest you make yourselves comfortable, and I’ll tell you a story. My story. You’d never have gotten away from here without having to hear it, anyway. Every man needs an audience, and I’ve been without one for far too long…”

  IV

  NATURE MAKES many blunders,” Senilde said, “and one of them, I always thought, was that men should have to die. Simple cell creatures keep splitting in halves, and the halves in turn split, and so on. But the original portions still live. Any one of those creatures could truly be said to be potentially immortal. You can take a tissue of man or beast and keep it alive indefinitely in a suitable culture.

  “Single protoplasmic cells or small groups of them survive. But if they grow into a large, multi-celled body, like that of a man, that large group dies. Why does it die? The only different factor is— size. The size of the group. Once a group grows beyond a certain size, it seals its own doom.”

  “Critical mass,” George murmured.

  “You know about atomic energy?” asked Senilde, mildly interested. “Yes, I suppose you would. Tell me, have you ever made any of those delightful atomic bombs?”

  “Not personally,” said George.

  “They were my favorite toys at one time. Such a spectacle! But one wearies even of that… My instruments tell me that they still go off in various parts of the planet sometimes, but I never bother nowadays to go out and look at them. I’ve still got a pretty large stock of them around somewhere… I think.”

  “Our astronomers saw some of your explosions, I guess,” said George.

  “Great atmospheric disturbances concentrated in various small spots. One in November, 1985. One in June, 1927—photographed at Mount Wilson. Another back in February, 1913.”

  “Indeed?” said Senilde, indifferently.

  Mara said: “I don’t know what you’re both talking about. Why don’t you keep to the subject, which was immortality?”

  “I find these days a growing tendency of my mind to wander,” said Senilde.

  “Where was I?”

  Mara told him. He went on: “The reason, I found, was that the duration of life was directly linked to the permeability in that part of the living cell exposed to the radiations of the universe around it. As growth— that is, accumulation—proceeds, so the inner cells suffer a natural and inevitable decrease in that permeability. They’re entombed, choked, cut off from light, denied invigorating contact with exterior radiation.”

  “I still don’t know what
you’re talking about,” said Mara pouting. George said, thoughtfully: “Half a century or more ago, on Earth, a fellow named… er… Benedict—yes, H.M. Benedict—came to that conclusion after studying the senility of plants.”

  “Did he go on from there?”

  “How could he?”

  “I did. Nature made an error in the colloidal degree of protoplasm. I corrected it. Just a matter of the injection into the bloodstream of a perpetual solvent, which, as it circulates, thins out the too dense, too clinging proteins. The cells of your body are specialists. Either they travel a fixed, confined circuit in your bloodstream or else they’re gummed immovably in place in your flesh and bones. Except the white blood corpuscles, that is.

  “Fixity and specialization spell death. My body-cells are free, fluid, adaptable, amoeboid. When they feel the need to come to the surface, they do so. They move slowly—but they move. Also, they’re versatile and continually change their functions. I could make you immortal, too, if I chose to. But I shan’t. You are harmless, simple people. Why should I condemn you to the nightmare of boredom I endure?”

  “Is it that bad?” asked George.

  “Young man, I’ve tried every kind of pleasure a million times; from the common pleasures of sensuality to the rarer ones of labor and asceticism; intellectual pleasures and bodily pleasures; the pleasures of lust and power and humility and martyrdom. And I have exhausted them. My palate has lost nearly all sensation. Repetition of a pleasure does not increase the pleasure: it makes it pall. Looking back, I see that the happiest time of my whole life was when I was a child, absorbed in play. I seek in my sad way to recover some of that pleasure in the childish devices you deprecate. You should not be angry with me, but sorry for me.”

  “I’m sorry for you,” said Mara.

  But sorrow didn’t come so easily to George. What the hell did Senilde have to beef about? He hadn’t missed a thing.

  “Mara, you have a sweet nature, besides being sensible and beautiful,” said Senilde. “You’re something rare. I don’t like people much. When you’ve lived as long as I have, you’ve lost all your illusions about people. Under the skin, most people have hard little hearts, and they’re aways dancing to the tune of self-interest.”