Dobyns asked, “What are you doing? Where are you going? Do you have any leaders?”
He got cries and shouts in an unintelligible language. Here and there someone shouted in English “This way!” or “Leave us alone!” or “Keep going …” but that was all.
The experiment worked.
Eighty-two million people were dropped in that one day.
After four hours which seemed barely short of endless, Dobyns found Terza in a corner of the cold hell. Though Venus was warm, the suffering of the almost-naked Chinesians had chilled his blood.
Terza ran toward him.
She could not speak.
She put her head on his chest and sobbed. Finally she managed to say, “I’ve—I’ve—I’ve tried to help, but they’re too many, too many, too many!” And the sentence ended as shrill as a scream.
Dobyns led her back to the experimental area.
They did not have to talk. Her whole body told him that she wanted his love and the comfort of his presence, and that she had chosen that course of life which would keep them together.
As they left the drop area, which seemed to cover all of Venus so far as they could tell, a pattern was beginning to form. The Chinesians were beginning to round up the loudies.
Terza kissed him mutely after the gatekeeper had let them through. She did not need to speak. Then she fled to her room.
The next day, the people from Experimental Area A tried to see if they could go out and lend a hand to the settlers. It wasn’t possible to lend a hand; there were too many settlers. People by the millions were scattered all over the hills and valleys of Venus, sludging through the mud and water with their human toes, crushing the alien mud, crushing the strange plants. They didn’t know what to eat. They didn’t know where to go. They had no leaders.
All they had were orders to gather the loudies together in large herds and hold them there with human arms.
The loudies didn’t resist.
After a time-lapse of several Earth days the Goonhogo sent small scout cars. They brought a very different kind of Chinesian—these late arrivals were uniformed, educated, cruel, smug men. They knew what they were doing. And they were willing to pay any sacrifice of their own people to get it done.
They brought instructions. They put the people together in gangs. It did not matter where the nondies and needies had come from on Earth; it didn’t matter whether they found their own showhices or somebody else’s. They were shown the jobs to do and they got to work. Human bodies accomplished what machines could not have done—they kept the loudies firmly but gently encircled until every last one of the creatures was starved into nothingness.
Rice fields began to appear miraculously.
Scanner Vomact couldn’t believe it. The Goonhogo biochemists had managed to adapt rice to the soil of Venus. And yet the seedlings came out of boxes in the scout cars and weeping people walked over the bodies of their own dead to keep the crop moving toward the planting.
Venusian bacteria could not kill human beings, nor could they dispose of human bodies after death. A problem arose and was solved. Immense sleds carried dead men, women and children—those who had fallen wrong, or drowned as they fell, or had been trampled by others—to an undisclosed destination. Dobyns suspected the material was to be used to add Earth-type organic waste to the soil of Venus, but he did not tell Terza.
The work went on.
The nondies and needies kept working in shifts. When they could not see in the darkness, they proceeded without seeing—keeping in line by touch or by shout. Foremen, newly trained, screeched commands. Workers lined up, touching fingertips. The job of building the fields kept on.
“That’s a big story,” said the old man, “eighty-two million people dropped in a single day. And later I heard that the Waywonjong said it wouldn’t have mattered if seventy million of them had died. Twelve million survivors would have been enough to make a spacehead for the Goonhogo. The Chinesians got Venus, all of it.
“But I’ll never forget the nondies and the needies and the showhices falling out of the sky, men and women and children with their poor scared Chinesian faces. That funny Venusian air made them look green instead of tan. There they were, falling all around.
“You know something, young man?” said Dobyns Bennett, approaching his fifth century of age.
“What?” said the reporter.
“There won’t be things like that happening on any world again. Because now, after all, there isn’t any separate Goonhogo left. There’s only one Instrumentality and they don’t care what a man’s race may have been in the ancient years. Those were the rough old days, the ones I lived in. Those were the days men still tried to do things.”
Dobyns almost seemed to doze off, but he roused himself sharply and said, “I tell you, the sky was full of people. They fell like water. They fell like rain. I’ve seen the awful ants in Africa, and there’s not a thing among the stars to beat them for prowling horror. Mind you, they’re worse than anything the stars contain. I’ve seen the crazy worlds near Alpha Centauri, but I never saw anything like the time the people fell on Venus. More than eighty-two million in one day and my own little Terza lost among them.
“But the rice did sprout. And the loudies died as the walls of people held them in with human arms. Walls of people, I tell you, with volunteers jumping in to take the places of the falling ones.
“They were people still, even when they shouted in the darkness. They tried to help each other even while they fought a fight that had to be fought without violence. They were people still. And they did so win. It was crazy and impossible, but they won. Mere human beings did what machines and science would have taken another thousand years to do …
“The funniest thing of all was the first house that I saw a nondie put up, there in the rain of Venus. I was out there with Vomact and with a pale sad Terza. It wasn’t much of a house, shaped out of twisted Venusian wood. There it was. He built it, the smiling half-naked Chinesian nondie. We went to the door and said to him in English, ‘What are you building here, a shelter or a hospital?’
“The Chinesian grinned at us. ‘No,’ he said, ‘gambling.’
“Vomact wouldn’t believe it: ‘Gambling?’
“‘Sure,’ said the nondie. ‘Gambling is the first thing a man needs in a strange place. It can take the worry out of his soul.’”
“Is that all?” said the reporter.
Dobyns Bennett muttered that the personal part did not count. He added, “Some of my great-great-great-great-great-grandsons may come along. You count those greats. Their faces will show you easily enough that I married into the Vomact line. Terza saw what happened. She saw how people build worlds. This was the hard way to build them. She never forgot the night with the dead Chinesian babies lying in the half-illuminated mud, or the parachute ropes dissolving slowly. She heard the needies weeping and the helpless nondies comforting them and leading them off to nowhere. She remembered the cruel, neat officers coming out of the scout cars. She got home and saw the rice come up, and saw how the Goonhogo made Venus a Chinesian place.”
“What happened to you personally?” asked the reporter.
“Nothing much. There wasn’t any more work for us, so we closed down Experimental Area A. I married Terza.
“Anytime later, when I said to her, ‘You’re not such a bad girl!’ she was able to admit the truth and tell me she was not. That night in the rain of people would test anybody’s soul and it tested hers. She had met a big test and passed it. She used to say to me, ‘I saw it once. I saw the people fall, and I never want to see another person suffer again. Keep me with you, Dobyns, keep me with you forever.’
“And,” said Dobyns Bennett, “it wasn’t forever, but it was a happy and sweet three hundred years. She died after our fourth diamond anniversary. Wasn’t that a wonderful thing, young man?”
The reporter said it was. And yet, when he took the story back to his editor, he was told to put it into the archives. It wasn�
�t the right kind of story for entertainment and the public would not appreciate it anymore.
Before Eden
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
Arthur C. Clarke is perhaps the most famous modern science-fiction writer in the world, seriously rivaled for that title only by the late Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein. Clarke is probably most widely known for his work on Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, but is also renowned as a novelist, short-story Writer, and as a writer of nonfiction, usually on technological subjects such as space flight. He has won three Nebula Awards, and three Hugo Awards, the British Science Fiction Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and a Grandmaster Nebula for Life Achievement. His best-known books include the novels Childhood’s End, The City and the Stars, The Deep Range, Rendezvous with Rama, A Fall of Moondust, 2001: A Space Odyssey, 2010: Odyssey Two, 2061: Odyssey Three, Songs of Distant Earth, and The Fountains of Paradise, and the collections The Nine Billion Names of God, Tales of Ten Worlds, and The Sentinel. The best known of his many nonfiction books on scientific topics are probably Profiles of the Future and The Wind from the Sun, and Clarke is generally considered to be the man who first came up with the idea of the communications satellite. His most recent books are the novel 3001: The Final Odyssey, the nonfiction collection Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds: Collected Works 1944-1998, the fiction collection Collected Short Stories, and a novel written in collaboration with Stephen Baxter, The Light of Other Days. Most of Clarke’s best-known books will be coming back into print, appropriately enough, in 2001. Born in Somerset, England, Clarke now lives in Sri Lanka, and was recently knighted.
Clarke wrote one of the most complete treatments of the terraforming process (and one of the earliest realistic ones) in science fiction with his groundbreaking 1951 novel The Sands of Mars, echoes of which can be heard clearly more than forty years later in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, in Stephen Baxter’s work, and elsewhere throughout the field. In the incisive story that follows, also well ahead of its time when it was published, he takes us to another planet (Venus instead of Mars) for a sharp lesson that the human race might be better off today for having learned when Clarke taught it back in 1961—that sometimes you can radically and permanently transform a planet’s ecosystem without even intending to do it at all … .
“I guess,” said Jerry Garfield, cutting the engines, “that this is the end of the line.” With a gentle sigh, the underjets faded out; deprived of its air cushion, the scout car Rambling Wreck settled down upon the twisted rocks of the Hesperian Plateau.
There was no way forward; on neither its jets nor its tractors could S.5—to give the Wreck its official name—scale the escarpment that lay ahead. The South Pole of Venus was only thirty miles away, but it might have been on another planet. They would have to turn back, and retrace their four-hundred-mile journey through this nightmare landscape.
The weather was fantastically clear, with visibility of almost a thousand yards. There was no need of radar to show the cliffs ahead; for once, the naked eye was good enough. The green auroral light, filtering down through clouds that had rolled unbroken for a million years, gave the scene an underwater appearance, and the way in which all distant objects blurred into the haze added to the impression. Sometimes it was easy to believe that they were driving across a shallow seabed, and more than once Jerry had imagined that he had seen fish floating overhead.
“Shall I call the ship, and say we’re turning back?” he asked.
“Not yet,” said Dr. Hutchins. “I want to think.”
Jerry shot an appealing glance at the third member of the crew, but found no moral support there. Coleman was just as bad; although the two men argued furiously half the time, they were both scientists and therefore, in the opinion of a hardheaded engineer-navigator, not wholly responsible citizens. If Cole and Hutch had bright ideas about going forward, there was nothing he could do except register a protest.
Hutchins was pacing back and forth in the tiny cabin, studying charts and instruments. Presently he swung the car’s searchlight toward the cliffs, and began to examine them carefully with binoculars. Surely, thought Jerry, he doesn’t expect me to drive up there! S.5 was a hover-track, not a mountain goat … .
Abruptly, Hutchins found something. He released his breath in a sudden explosive gasp, then turned to Coleman.
“Look!” he said, his voice full of excitement. “Just to the left of that black mark! Tell me what you see.”
He handed over the glasses, and it was Coleman’s turn to stare.
“Well I’m damned,” he said at length. “You were right. There are rivers on Venus. That’s a dried-up waterfall.”
“So you owe me one dinner at the Bel Gourmet when we get back to Cambridge. With champagne.”
“No need to remind me. Anyway, it’s cheap at the price. But this still leaves your other theories strictly on the crackpot level.”
“Just a minute,” interjected Jerry. “What’s all this about rivers and waterfalls? Everyone knows they can’t exist on Venus. It never gets cold enough on this steambath of a planet for the clouds to condense.”
“Have you looked at the thermometer lately?” asked Hutchins with deceptive mildness.
“I’ve been slightly too busy driving.”
“Then I’ve news for you. It’s down to two hundred and thirty, and still falling. Don’t forget—we’re almost at the Pole, it’s wintertime, and we’re sixty thousand feet above the lowlands. All this adds up to a distinct nip in the air. If the temperature drops a few more degrees, we’ll have rain. The water will be boiling, of course—but it will be water. And though George won’t admit it yet, this puts Venus in a completely different light.”
“Why?” asked Jerry, though he had already guessed.
“Where there’s water, there may be life. We’ve been in too much of a hurry to assume that Venus is sterile, merely because the average temperature’s over five hundred degrees. It’s a lot colder here, and that’s why I’ve been so anxious to get to the Pole. There are lakes up here in the highlands, and I want to look at them.”
“But boiling water!” protested Coleman. “Nothing could live in that!”
“There are algae that manage it on earth. And if we’ve learned one thing since we started exploring the planets, it’s this: wherever life has the slightest chance of surviving, you’ll find it. This is the only chance it’s ever had on Venus.”
“I wish we could test your theory. But you can see for yourself—we can’t go up that cliff.”
“Perhaps not in the car. But it won’t be too difficult to climb those rocks, even wearing thermosuits. All we need do is walk a few miles toward the Pole; according to the radar maps, it’s fairly level once you’re over the rim. We could manage in—oh, twelve hours at the most. Each of us has been out for longer than that, in much worse conditions.”
That was perfectly true. Protective clothing that had been designed to keep men alive in the Venusian lowlands would have an easy job here, where it was only a hundred degrees hotter than Death Valley in midsummer.
“Well,” said Coleman, “you know the regulations. You can’t go by yourself, and someone has to stay here to keep contact with the ship. How do we settle it this time—chess or cards?”
“Chess takes too long,” said Hutchins, “especially when you two play it.” He reached into the chart table and produced a well-worn pack. “Cut them, Jerky.”
“Ten of spades. Hope you can beat it, George.”
“So do I. Damn—only five of clubs. Well, give my regards to the Venusians.”
Despite Hutchins’ assurance, it was hard work climbing the escarpment. The slope was not too steep, but the weight of oxygen gear, refrigerated thermosuit, and scientific equipment came to more than a hundred pounds per man. The lower gravity—thirteen percent weaker than Earth’s—gave a little help, but not much, as they toiled up screes, rested on ledges to regain breath, and then clambered on again through the submarine twilight. Th
e emerald glow that washed around them was brighter than that of the full Moon on Earth. A moon would have been wasted on Venus, Jerry told himself; it could never have been seen from the surface, there were no oceans for it to rule—and the incessant aurora was a far more constant source of light.
They had climbed more than two thousand feet before the ground leveled out into a gentle slope, scarred here and there by channels that had clearly been cut by running water. After a little searching, they came across a gulley wide and deep enough to merit the name of riverbed, and started to walk along it.
“I’ve just thought of something,” said Jerry after they had traveled a few hundred yards. “Suppose there’s a storm up ahead of us? I don’t feel like facing a tidal wave of boiling water.”
“If there’s a storm,” replied Hutchins a little impatiently, “we’ll hear it. There’ll be plenty of time to reach high ground.”
He was undoubtedly right, but Jerry felt no happier as they continued to climb the gently shelving watercourse. His uneasiness had been growing ever since they had passed over the brow of the cliff and had lost radio contact with the scout car. In this day and age, to be out of touch with one’s fellow men was a unique and unsettling experience. It had never happened to Jerry before in all his life; even aboard the Morning Star when they were a hundred million miles from Earth, he could always send a message to his family and get a reply back within minutes. But now, a few yards of rock had cut him off from the rest of mankind; if anything happened to them here, no one would ever know, unless some later expedition found their bodies. George would wait for the agreed number of hours; then he would head back to the ship—alone. I guess I’m not really the pioneering type, Jerry told himself. I like running complicated machines, and that’s how I got involved in space flight. But I never stopped to think where it would lead, and now it’s too late to change my mind … .
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