"I don't get it," Burford said. "Radio signals started practically as
soon as we hit atmosphere. They wavered, but we traced them down right
about here. Then, as soon as we landed, they quit. There's something
funny about that."
"Well, now," said Davies, wagging his head, "I wouldn't exactly say it
was _funny_, Charley.... Now you take us, there might be any number
of reasons why we'd quit signaling, if it was the Venusians landing
on Earth instead of us the other way around...." He sighed. "But it
comes to this, boys. If there are any animals on Venus, intelligent or
otherwise, it makes no never-mind, we've got to find 'em. We got to
have _some_ kind o' specimens to take back, or we're sunk. You remember
how much trouble we had, just getting the Supreme Council to subsidize
us at all...."
Shoemaker remembered. Davies' math was all right; it was the only
language he really knew his way around in. And he had the fuel, and the
motor. All he needed was money to build a ship. But he'd picked the
wrong time for it.
It had been just five years after the end of World War III when Davies
had started making plans for his ship. The World Federation was only
four and a half years old, and still bogged down in a quagmire of
difficulties. What with two Balkan and three Indian principalities
still "unreconstructed," ousted officials of other retarded nations
raising hell with underground movements, the world rearming for still
another war--plus a smashed, half-starving empire, smouldering with
atomic fire, to deal with--the Supreme Council had little time or money
to give to space flight.
Davies, though, had had his first and only non-mathematical idea, and
it was a good one. This is the way it added up. The World Federation
argued, reasonably, that the only way to police the world effectively
against the possibility of another war was for everybody to come into
the W. F. But the hold-out nations in Europe and America, who had
been neutral during the last conflict--and were powerful out of all
proportion simply because they had--plus the millions of emigres who
had set up shop in South America and Africa, replied that the W. F.
wasn't going to police _them_, and that they'd sooner _have_ another
war and, furthermore, that if the W. F. thought it could win it, let
them go ahead and drop the first bomb.
The result was an impasse that was throwing the World's Cultural
Rehabilitation Program all out of kilter. Well, said Davies, suppose
it were possible to prove to the reactionary nations that Venus was
habitable--wouldn't they jump at the chance to avoid World War IV by
moving out entirely? Then the W. F. would be able to go about its
business, organizing the Earth into One World--until it was so strong
that the Venus colony would be a pushover, and serve them right.
Meanwhile, what if there were intelligent life on Venus--intelligent
enough to be a new source of cheap labor, now that every world citizen
was demanding that his working day be cut immediately to five hours?
The bored Bureau Chief to whom Davies had talked had nodded
thoughtfully and said there might be something in it, and a few months
later Davies had been set up as head of a new Department, with a wholly
inadequate appropriation.
Burford and Hale had been assigned to the project by the North American
Labor Bureau, and Shoemaker, appealed to by Davies, had joined up
principally because it was a tough job. Then they'd gone to work,
spending the money in driblets as they got it. They'd had to revise
the specifications downward half a dozen times, and when they were
through, the _Space Queen_ was a rule-of-thumb monstrosity that only a
mechanical genius could hold together. Shoemaker was the genius.
* * * * *
He thought about the time the meteor had hulled them, piercing both
shop walls and banging hell out of the compartment across the corridor.
Shoemaker had been in the shop, so drunk he could hardly stand up; but
he'd held his breath long enough to slap a patch over the hole through
which all the air in that section had gone whistling out, and seal it
tight. Then he'd staggered to an oxygen flask, turned it on full and
got enough air in his lungs to keep from passing out. By the time the
others rolled out of bed and came down to see whether he was alive or
dead, pressure was back to normal.
He remembered Hale's white face poked through the open seal-door in
the corridor. "What happened, for Pete's sake?"
"Termites," Shoemaker had said.
What a trip, ye gods, what a trip. He'd done some cockeyed things in
his life, but this junket a million miles from anywhere took the oscar.
And now, if he was going to have the screaming meemies, he wanted to
have them in a nice comfortable hospital--not in this watered-down
version of a surrealist's nightmare.