For years they had wandered the eternal
seas of Venus, seeking the home that was
their birthright, death walking in their
wake. And now they were making their final
bid--three of them fighting toward the
promised land, battling for a hopeless cause.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Spring 1945.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The breeze was steady enough, but it was not in a hurry. It filled the
lug sail just hard enough to push the dirty weed-grown hull through the
water, and no harder. Matt Harker lay alongside the tiller and counted
the trickles of sweat crawling over his nakedness, and stared with
sullen, opaque eyes into the indigo night. Anger, leashed and impotent,
rose in his throat like bitter vomit.
The sea--Rory McLaren's Venusian wife called it the Sea of Morning
Opals--lay unstirring, black, streaked with phosphorescence. The
sky hung low over it, the thick cloud blanket of Venus that had made
the Sun a half-remembered legend to the exiles from Earth. Riding
lights burned in the blue gloom, strung out in line. Twelve ships,
thirty-eight hundred people, going no place, trapped in the interval
between birth and death and not knowing what to do about it.
Matt Harker glanced upward at the sail and then at the stern lantern
of the ship ahead. His face, in the dim glow that lights Venus even at
night, was a gaunt oblong of shadows and hard bone, seamed and scarred
with living, with wanting and not having, with dying and not being
dead. He was a lean man, wiry and not tall, with a snake-like surety of
motion.
Somebody came scrambling quietly aft along the deck, avoiding the
sleeping bodies crowded everywhere. Harker said, without emotion, "Hi,
Rory."
Rory McLaren said, "Hi, Matt." He sat down. He was young, perhaps half
Harker's age. There was still hope in his face, but it was growing
tired. He sat for a while without speaking, looking at nothing, and
then said, "Honest to God, Matt, how much longer can we last?"
"What's the matter, kid? Starting to crack?"
"I don't know. Maybe. When are we going to stop somewhere?"
"When we find a place to stop."
"Is there a place to stop? Seems like ever since I was born we've been
hunting. There's always something wrong. Hostile natives, or fever, or
bad soil, always something, and we go on again. It's not right. It's
not any way to try to live."