"I don't want you to go."
"I know you don't. But too many of our friends were within sight and
hearing of the whole mess. Sooner or later their attitude would make
you unhappy about a man who talked big, and then backed down."
* * * * *
His insistence widened Linda's eyes. The civilized Venusians were
always ready to take the sensible, the expedient way. Had they been
otherwise, had they not been the descendants of sensible Terrestrian
ancestors, they would have been included in the devastation which had
left all but small and widely scattered patches of Terra uninhabitable
for the past seven-hundred years. Rather, those who today were
Venusians would have been struggling savages, scraping out a living in
some uncontaminated area.
Verrill's was an almost Terrestrian stubbornness; something primitive
and atavistic, very much like that queer quirk which made some
Venusians return to their native Earth to set up trading-posts, where
they bartered with the barbarian tribesmen for tobacco and wines,
spices and jewels and perfumes, all manner of luxuries which Venus did
not offer.
Linda made her final appeal: "Leaving all this, to scramble around in
that terrible waste and desolation--oh, do be sensible!"
Her voice, and the kiss that followed it, made Verrill at once aware of
what generations of Venusians had taken for granted. He looked across
the gardens and the lake, and up at the prodigious span of girders.
The original purpose of the structure had been to house a military
outpost that was to have outflanked a comparable one on Luna. In the
years just before The War, engineers and scientists had been sent from
Terra to build those enormous domes, plastic-sheathed and air-tight,
to exclude the raging dust-storms and the overwhelming concentration
of formaldehyde which made up most of the natural Venusian atmosphere.
Rather than rely on any system depending upon chemically prepared
oxygen, they had established gardens, orchards, fields of plant-life
which liberated sufficient oxygen to maintain the required balance.
This was to have been simply a garrison. According to plan, it would
have played a decisive part in the final clash for Terrestrian
supremacy. Meanwhile, there had come to be little difference between
the rival dictatorships, except in the wording of their slogans.
The Anglo-Capitalist Bloc had borrowed all the kinds and twists of
regimentation of the rival bloc. The difference finally became one of
flavor rather than principle.
A cool-headed few, in command of the Venusian garrison, had seen that
neither side could win; that there would be only mutual and total
destruction. The warfare became more and more atrocious; and the
Anglo-Capitalist Bloc drifted further and further from the sort of
organization that the Venus garrison, in no immediate danger, could
contemplate defending with enthusiasm. Thus, when one day the Lunar
Base radio complained of attack by suicide-ships and then went abruptly
silent, the Venusian Base, which might have been expected to cry
"Geronimo!" and leap into the holocaust, instead underwent a short and
violent revolution in which the ardently military were disposed of.
Then, stubbornly intending to survive chaos and idiocy, the Venus Base
folded its hands and sat out the fatal clash that ended The War and
virtually the whole of Terrestrian civilization with it....
After several centuries, the Venus Council risked an exploration
party to Terra to see whether the globe was becoming fit for human
habitation again. Large areas had, of course, through natural
processes become decontaminated; there were scattered colonies of
survivors--farmers, herdsmen, hunters, armed with clubs, spears, and
other primitive weapons. Contact was made, communication struck up,
trade--of considerable importance to both--established; and, after the
ten years which this took, the Venusians were left with very little
inclination to colonize Terra. Life under the domes was comfortable,
with controlled climate, law and order, science and art. Comfortable,
civilized, and sensible. While Terra--
"_Be a sensible Venusian_," was what Linda meant. "_Don't go looking
for trouble when you can do better without. Don't be a typical
Terrestrian!_"
The whole clash of the previous night had been silly. Irritated by
Gil Dawson's giving Linda a ruby as a souvenir of his official
inspection-tour of the Council-controlled Terrestrian trading-posts,
Verrill had flung the trinket into the lake. After a brisk fracas in
which Dawson had finally wearied of getting up, only to be knocked down
again, Verrill had shouted to Linda and to most of Venus that he'd
get her a man's-sized ruby, the Fire of Skanderbek. She, thoroughly
outraged, had told him and Dawson that by Heaven she'd not be the
prize, either of a brawl or a souvenir-finding contest. To make it
good, she had concluded by telling Verrill that he'd be far better
occupied if he got the Venus Council to assign him to one of the
committees for improving the living-standards of the Terrestrians, and
won the Fire of Skanderbek as a token of their gratitude.
But however earnestly she besought him to forget it all, Verrill was
just as unhappily determined to go through with it. "I can't back down.
Dawson will surely take a crack at stealing the Fire himself--and that
would make it tough for me. And for you."
"Oh, let the fool try!" she cried, desperately. "He'd never come back
from the territory of those wildmen."
Verrill shook his head. "He might come back. Even though I did give him
a trouncing, he's anything but a clown. You wouldn't accept the Fire
of Skanderbek if he offered it--but he'd give it to someone else, and
then--well, a lot of women do dislike you! There's nothing I can do,
except to beat him to it."
And so, Verrill went to do as he had to do.
* * * * *
The space-freighter veered from her course only a little; instead of
landing in the sun-blasted plain at the foot of the mountains into
which Verrill was to go, she launched a crew-boat which took him to the
trading-post at the foot of barren limestone bulwarks.
Dawson was not at the post. But while a head start was a happy omen,
Verrill knew that it had its limits, since his plan to ingratiate
himself with the barbarians until he could seize the fetish-ruby and
return to the post involved so much time that the gain of hours or days
meant little.
Ingratiate himself--steal the Fire of Skanderbek--and get
out--infinitely simpler than Linda's suggestion, probably an utterly
impossible one, of deserving it finally as a gift. His first look at
the bearded mountaineers convinced him that no amount of do-gooding
could ever move them to gratitude.
Those lounging in the compound of the fortified trading-post wore
homespun pants and sheepskin jackets. They fairly clanked with trade
daggers, trade pistols, and trade hatchets; some carried trade muskets,
and some had the new repeating rifles. Their tanned and hairy faces and
bitter eyes made it plain that looting and robbing, brawling and mayhem
and murder were their very breath of life.
They spoke the international language which had developed sufficiently
to come into common use around 2200 A.D. English, while a nightmare of
contradictions to baffle a foreigner, had offered these advantages:
next to Chinese, no other language was so free of inflections; and it
could so readily assimilate all manner of foreign words. Thus, since
the tone-deaf Occidental had not been able to master the simplicities
of Chinese or other Mongolian tongues, the Asiatics had taken up
English, with which had been blended Arabic, Urdu, Malay, and a good
deal of Western European; and, while seven centuries of Venusian
isolation had made the speech of the people of the Domes diverge from
the original international Terrestrian, Verrill had not too much
difficulty in making himself understood.
"This black bag," he told a group of the caravan men, "will interest
Ardelan--that's your chief's name, isn't it? Let me go into the
mountains with you to talk to him."
"You're crazy," a craggy faced fellow with drooping moustaches and hard
blue eyes told him, levelly. "You think I'm crazy."
Verrill laid out three daggers. He picked one up, jabbed it into the
top of a table cluttered with heaps of goatskins, dried apricots,
raisins, and bags of coriander seed. He bent the weapon until the grip
touched the table top. He released it. It snapped straight up, with a
fine, high pitched _spang_. He plucked a dagger from the mountaineer's
belt, drew the other weapon from the table, and slashed them edge to
edge.
He cut shavings from the mountaineer's weapon. Then he stropped his own
blade on the palm of his hand for a couple of strokes, and next ran it
along his arm. The hairs toppled as he cut them free; there was no drag
at all, the edge was so keen.
"Mine are not trade daggers," he said. "Bet you the three that Ardelan
will listen to me, and not throw me out."