Worlds Apart

by J. T. McIntosh

  If they went away, no one would look for them, There might be a token search close to Lemon, but the people who made it wouldn't expect to find them. Any part of the planet was as safe as any other, as far as the colonists knew. They hadn't explored much of it, because there was very little to explore -- no seas to chart, no animals, the same kind of vegetation everywhere. The only thing that varied was temperature. One could find places where it was hotter, but few places where it was cooler.

  It would only be necessary to stay well out of sight for a month or two, and then come back alone -- without Toni. It would be quite a strong bargaining position. . . .

  Pertwee started to his feet. Toni was there beside him in the dusk.

  She came up silently, effortlessly. She was the right partner to have in an elopement like this. She knew what she could do. She had a sack on her back, and he could trust her to have packed what was necessary.

  They melted into the darkness without a word. It was not until they were clear of the bounds of Lemon that Toni remarked: "I still think we should have taken horses."

  "Apart from the fact that they would have left a track that could be followed," said Pertwee, "it would have made it more important for us to be discovered. They would have cared more about the horses than about us."

  Toni laughed. She laughed easily. She was a happy girl, and Pertwee felt his blood coursing through his veins in a more powerful surge at the thought that she was his. There was no doubt she was the most attractive girl in Lemon -- very little doubt, therefore, that she was the most attractive girl alive.

  There was a slight hiatus in his thoughts as he realized that there was something he didn't fully understand about the affair. Toni had had the thing worked out in a way that didn't seem at all typical of her. And she had made up her mind quickly after they had flirted briefly, innocently . . . It occurred to him fleetingly that instead of taking the leading part in the affair he was almost being pushed into it.

  But he refused to follow out that thought. John Pertwee was a strong man with a weakness, and his Achilles' heel was women. When the Council cut women out of his life, they struck deeper than would have been the case with most men of his years. With a wise woman he loved beside him, Pertwee could still be a leader, a big man in any community. Without her he was uncertain, weak, lacking purpose in life.

  He didn't /want/ to survey Toni's reasons too closely. It was enough that he had Toni.

  4

  The disappearance of Pertwee and Toni was probably the most disturbing single event in the history of Mundis. They were the first two who ran away from the community, and they were Pertwee and Toni. Only the disappearance of Rog Foley with Mary Bentley would have produced the same stir.

  It was suddenly rediscovered that Pertwee was a great man. This didn't mean people took his side and said they would welcome him with open arms when and if he came back. It meant, however, that the incident was important.

  Jim Bentley collected a dozen stories in the first morning. They included:

  Pertwee and Toni were setting out to start a new race on the other side of the planet. He would bring up his children indoctrinated to attack and destroy Lemon one day.

  Pertwee had gone to search for other human beings on Mundis in a sort of Hidden City somewhere. Deposed in Lemon, he was looking for another race he could rule.

  Pertwee and Toni had been kidnapped by intelligent non-human Mundans who lived underground and had hidden when the Terrans arrived in their great ship twenty years since.

  Pertwee and Toni were already dead. They had had a suicide pact -- one night of love, and then death together.

  An unknown lover had killed Toni. Then, wondering how to cover up, he hit on the plan of murdering Pertwee, too, and making it look as if they had gone away together.

  Bentley reported these to his wife and Alice and young Jim. Alice was diverted by the first theory.

  "Pertwee and Toni have to go away because our rules for strong breeding won't permit a union like that," she observed sarcastically. "Yet now it's suggested that the two of them can found a race that will overcome all of us here in Lemon. Do I smell an inconsistency?"

  The Bentleys got on better than most families. Perhaps that was because there were only four of them. Most families were much bigger, and there was a lot of quarreling just on general principles. The Bentleys never quarreled. They just silently disagreed. They seemed to get on even better than they did, for they avoided the subjects on which they knew they would disagree.

  "Do you know anything about this, Alice?" Bentley asked, with a shrewd glance at her.

  "No," she said honestly. "But I know what you mean. There's more in it than meets the eye. And I'll tell you this -- just before Rog Foley married June Smith, Toni was chasing him hard."

  "Oh. Foley," said Bentley thoughtfully. "Frankly, Alice, I hoped you'd marry Rog."

  "It was duly considered," Alice observed briefly.

  Bentley and Mary looked at her with interest at that, but her expression told them not to pursue the matter.

  In the afternoon a large search party was organized. The older people were grim and angry; the young people thought the whole thing was a great joke. There was jocular calculation of how long Pertwee would last living with Toni.

  Hardly anyone could think of Toni's second name offhand. They had to go back in memory and remember her being born. She was the daughter of Albert Cursiter and Nancy Brown, they remembered, and she took after her mother. Nancy had been the Toni of her generation. She had died in the only disaster of Mundan history -- the bush fire that had killed five people, back when the country round about Lemon was still being explored and no one had much experience of Mundan bush fires. Like Toni, she hadn't been pretty -- only enormously attractive. She was called Nancy Brown because that was easier to remember than the name of the husband of the time. Actually she had been Nancy Mayor, Brown, Simpson, Smith, Cursiter, Jackson, and Morgan, in short order.

  Mundis was flatter than Earth. There had never been a survey from the air, so it was quite possible that some parts of the world would prove surprising. But certainly all that had ever been explored had proved very much the same.

  Over almost all of the surface of the planet a coarse grass grew. Its roots were so long and powerful that it seemed to be capable of leveling the ground itself. Once, no doubt, Mundis had been mountainous, but the grass had conquered all but the barest, rockiest ground. Even there it was working slowly and patienly, first gaining a precarious footing and then gradually eating away the mountain. Possibly the hill on which New Paris had been built was all that was left of a whole mountain range. The valley of Lemon was not so much a flat area among hills as a depression in flat ground.

  Here and there forests grew. Mundan trees were small and thick. Their wood was harder and tougher than the wood of Earth. It didn't burn as the wood the colonists were used to burned: only under pressure, reluctantly, but finally with enormous release of energy. Fires occasionally started in the grass or bush, and they would sweep rapidly along until they reached a wood. That stopped them. The woods were the natural fire depots of Mundis. Bush fires didn't often get round them; the trees were such powerful water pumps that the vegetation all round a wood smoldered damply instead of blazing.

  The search for Pertwee and Toni, in country like this, was admittedly a formality. If they had been careful not to leave tracks, they had left none.

  Dogs were useless for tracking. The grass had a harsh, musky odor that covered human scent very rapidly.

  Alice sought out Rog during the search. "Did you put Toni up to this?" she asked bluntly.

  Rog nodded, and dumfounded Alice once again. Rog was unpredictable. He would admit nothing or everything. It was no surprise to her that he should be behind the disappearance of Toni and Pertwee, but she hadn't expected him to admit it as casually as that.

  "Why?" she demanded.

  Rog nodded forward at June, a little further ahead. "June was jealous," he said
. "I had to get rid of Toni."

  Alice snorted. "If you expect me to believe that, you must think I'm dumb."

  "I don't think you're dumb, Alice."

  That was all he would say on the subject.

  The search, having accomplished all that anyone expected it to accomplish -- nothing -- was given up in the early evening. Pertwee and Toni were gone, lost, safe until they cared to come back, if they ever did.

  And good luck to them, said Rog and his friends with the cheerful unconcern they had often shown over the prohibitions of the Constitution.

  5

  Another meeting was held at Jessie Bendall's house, but the constitution of this one was different. Jessie and the Bentleys knew what Robertson would say -- "Death to both of them. They must be shown that the law means precisely what it says." They knew what Boyne would say, shaking his head -- " This thing is against the laws of God and man."

  But they didn't know what the attitude of the silent minority would be, the quiet, solitary people like Toni's improbable father, Albert Cursiter, and Bob Foley, and Kim Jackson. So they invited them instead of Robertson and Boyne.

  "There's something going on," Jessie Bendall said, her kindly face puzzled and worried. "Something's rocking the boat."

  "Somebody," corrected Bob Foley, who even now could almost he mistaken for his son. He had the same long nose, the same wiry strength, the same way of speaking. But Bob wasn't important; Rog was. "And I think the somebody is Rog Foley," Bob went on.

  "I believe everyone overestimates Rog," Mary Bentley remarked. "He's always seemed a placid, straightforward sort of boy to me."

  He's a devil," said Bob morosely. "You never know what he's up to."

  "Let's stick to the main issues," said Jessie. "Pertwee is one of our big men. We always knew that. The trouble is, our life here isn't a struggle. There aren't emergencies. We don't need Pertwee."

  "We haven't needed Pertwee for the last ten years or so, anyway," said Bentley. "We may need him again."

  "Then," said Jessie, "do you say, Jim, that we must accept his marriage to Toni? Are we to break down Article Six? Do we admit we were wrong and -- "

  "What the hell," said Kim Jackson abruptly. "We /were/ wrong. It was nonsense. I always said so."

  Jessie and Mary and Bentley exchanged startled glances. Was this, then, going to be one of the attitudes to be reckoned with? Jackson, of course, had not always said so. In public, at any rate, he seldom said anything. Certainly nothing so forthright.

  "It's not really so much a question of whether we were wrong or not," said Jessie carefully, "as whether we admit it. Whether we're being edged into admitting that some of the Constitution is wrong, and therefore possibly more of it -- "

  "For chrissake," said Jackson loudly and unhelpfully. "If you try to cut stone with wood and it won't cut, do you go on trying and insisting it's got to cut?" He looked round challengingly, obviously certain he had put his finger right on the core of the matter.

  "Toni isn't had," said Albert Cursiter eagerly, unaware that his contribution was hardly relevant. "She wouldn't do anything she thought was wrong."

  Jessie caught Mary's eye and shook her head helplessly. She frowned at Brad, who was taking no part in the discussion. Brad merely grinned back.

  "Rog /is/ bad," said Bob Foley gloomily. "Always been bad. I'm sure I don't blame his mother, but -- "

  "What are we going to do," Jessie interrupted rather impatiently, "when Pertwee comes beck? Sooner or later he will. He's no hermit. Suppose he walks into Lemon tomorrow. What do we do? What do we say to him?"

  "How about 'Hallo---see you're back'?" suggested Brad. "Why don't all you earnest people just let things work themselves out quietly?"

  "Because they won't," snapped Jessie. "Sorry, Brad. Didn't mean to shout at you. But you seem to forget everyone isn't like you. If they were, we wouldn't have a government of any kind, and we wouldn't need it. Frankly, I don't think we'd get much done, either."

  "Just a minute," said Mary. They listened, not only because she generally had something to say when she spoke, but because they liked her. It was said that even Tom Robertson liked Mary. "Hasn't Brad got a point there, Jessie? Let's stop going round in circles for a moment.

  "What is the trouble, anyway? Tension, uneasiness. Old people and young people not pulling well together. Disagreement about our laws. The children growing up and wanting to change things. Didn't Jessie put her finger on the trouble when she said life here was easy? All of us here came from a world that was destroying itself. We're going on the basis that it /has/ destroyed itself by now. So we're afraid, frightened, worried. We feel we have a heavy responsibility.

  "Aren't we just taking thins too seriously?"

  She looked at each of them in turn. "Jessie was asking for a plan," she went on. "Here's one. Let us all, each of us independently, try to understand the young people better and win their confidence. Just that."

  Jessie frowned, unsatisfied. Jim Bentley pursed his lips, apparently not entirely satisfied either. Albert Cursiter looked from one face to another, wondering if they really thought Toni was all bad. Bob Foley stared at the floor, meditating on the ingratitude of children. Jackson took no further interest in the proceedings. He had told them what he thought; a man could do no more.

  Only Brad nodded. "Ever considered this, folks?" he inquired. "Who talks of danger and death and dissension and destruction in this community? Who's worried? Who's unhappy? Not the youngsters. We wanted them to multiply, and that's what they're doing. We wanted them to grow crops, and settle down, and make Mundis their home, and so they have. What are we concerned about? Why don't we realize we've done our job, and die, and let them get on with it?"

  Two days later the complete Inner Council, young and old, decided on a policy of closer co-operation between all groups.

  The next day the whole Council decided that the Gap didn't matter anyway, and voted it out of existence, Pertwee and Toni could come back any time they liked and live where they liked. Robertson was shouted down, not by Rog Foley's party but by the founders.

  Everyone was to live happily ever after, by order.

  But Alice remarked shrewdly to Rog as they came out of the meeting together: "That wasn't what you wanted, was it?"

  "No," Rog admitted.

  "You wanted this to build up so that when it broke there would be a real snap, didn't you?"

  "Yes," said Rog.

  "So what are you going to do now?"

  "Retire from politics," sighed Rog, "and raise a family."

  6

  Eight million miles away, on Secundis, Phyllis Barton was just reaching a basis for action on what Worsley had said to her when she lost the chance quite finally.

  On one of the days when the full operational crew of the Clades was on board, a call to attention sounded from all the loudspeakers on the ship. There was only one thing that could mean, and Phyllis guessed at once it was Worsley who was going to play the central part. He had spoken to someone else, been reported and convicted, and she had lost an opportunity.

  She fell in step with the others. Every steel corridor resounded to marching feet, until a loudspeaker order told all sections to break step. Girders don't take too kindly to a rhythmic, unified assault on them.

  At first Phyllis seethed with self-reproach. Someone was certainly going to profit by Worsley's fall, and it wouldn't be her. But a few minutes thought restored her usual calm. Whoever had cut the ground from under the captain's feet had had more strings to pull than she had -- she'd have done it if she could.

  Clades poured from the four locks and formed, with the symmetry and neatness of crystallization, a square six deep. Into the center marched Commodore Corey and -- yes, Worsley, in a uniform stripped of all indication of the rank he had held. With them was Mathers, wearing his ceremonial sword.

  Phyllis was at once interested. Something might come of this after all. She had something that might possibly he used against Mathers.

  Corey
spoke into the microphone, and his voice thundered back from the ship. There was little or nothing to be learned from what he said -- Worsley was a traitor, Mathers had unmasked him, justice would be done. Phyllis knew all that. How had Mathers got real evidence? Naturally, Corey didn't say. The same methods could be used again and again, so long as they weren't freely discussed every time they were successful. Presumably, Mathers had somehow been able to record without Worsley knowing he was recording.

  In the middie of the commodore's speech Worsley tried to grab his gun. It was futile; Mathers spun him back before he was near Corey.

  And at the end Corey pointed dramatically to Mathers, who flicked out his sword. Muttering stopped. If one closed one's eyes one might, for all the sound there was, have been alone on the bare, pitted field.

  The point of the sword made neat, rapid passes in the air. Worsley was held now, but it wasn't necessary. The ignominy of cowardice would have held him steady and straight. A neat square of skin was bared, unbroken by the point. Phyllis saw with disgust that though Worsley was standing steadily enough, he couldn't prevent the flesh of his stomach from shivering convulsively.

  Mathers made a quick thrust, and it was over. Or rather, it was begun. Writhing on the ground Worsley was still some hours from death, but short of medical attention which he wouldn't get, death was certain. Bets had been made on how long he would last, at odds which took into consideration Worsley's constitution and Mathers' probable skill with the sword.

  Still no one moved. Phyllis didn't like this part much, yet it was undeniably exciting.

  They were waiting now for Worsley to scream. If he died without a sound, even the worst of traitors was accorded a decent burial. It seldom happened, however. For seconds, minutes, a man might writhe silently, determined not to make a sound. But sooner or later, knowing there were hundreds of eyes on him, hundreds of Clades waiting for him to voice his agony, he would make the slightest of sounds and then, the dam burst, scream until his lungs were raw. Then he would be left alone.

  One could feel Worsley's resistance being drawn tighter and tighter. Still there was no sound. Murmuring wouldn't start again until he broke, or until it was obviously near the end and he sank visibly. Many Clades were sorry for a man beaten by unconsciousness, a man who made no sound until he didn't really know what was going on; and then moaned.