Man’s sojourn on Venus lasted somewhat longer than his whole career on
the Earth. From the days of Pithecanthropus to the final evacuation of
his native planet he passed, as we have seen, through a bewildering
diversity of form and circumstance. On Venus, though the human type was
somewhat more constant biologically, it was scarcely less variegated in
culture.
To give an account of this period, even on the minute scale that has
been adopted hitherto, would entail another volume. I can only sketch
its bare outline. The sapling, humanity, transplanted into foreign soil,
withers at first almost to the root, slowly readjusts itself, grows into
strength and a certain permanence of form, burgeons, season by season,
with leaf and flower of many successive civilizations and cultures,
sleeps winter by winter, through many ages of reduced vitality, but at
length (to force the metaphor), avoids this recurrent defeat by
attaining an evergreen constitution and a continuous efflorescence. Then
once more, through the whim of Fate, it is plucked up by the roots and
cast upon another world.
The first human settlers on Venus knew well that life would be a sorry
business. They had done their best to alter the planet to suit human
nature, but they could not make Venus into another Earth. The land
surface was minute. The climate was almost unendurable. The extreme
difference of temperature between the protracted day and night produced
incredible storms, rain like a thousand contiguous waterfalls,
terrifying electrical disturbances, and fogs in which a man could not
see his own feet. To make matters worse, the oxygen supply was as yet
barely enough to render the air breathable. Worse still, the liberated
hydrogen was not always successfully ejected from the atmosphere. It
would sometimes mingle with the air to form an explosive mixture, and
sooner or later there would occur a vast atmospheric flash. Recurrent
disasters of this sort destroyed the architecture and the human
inhabitants of many islands, and further reduced the oxygen supply. In
time, however, the increasing vegetation made it possible to put an end
to the dangerous process of electrolysis.
Meanwhile, these atmospheric explosions crippled the race so seriously
that it was unable to cope with a more mysterious trouble which beset it
some time after the migration. A new and inexplicable decay of the
digestive organs, which first occurred as a rare disease, threatened
within a few centuries to destroy mankind. The physical effects of this
plague were scarcely more disastrous than the psychological effects of
the complete failure to master it; for, what with the mystery of the
moon’s vagaries and the deep-seated, unreasoning sense of guilt produced
by the extermination of the Venerians, man’s self-confidence was already
seriously shaken, and his highly organized mentality began to show
symptoms of derangement. The new plague was, indeed, finally traced to
something in the Venerian water, and was supposed to be due to certain
molecular groupings, formerly rare, but subsequently fostered by the
presence of terrestrial organic matter in the ocean. No cure was
discovered.
And now another plague seized upon the enfeebled race. Human tissues had
never perfectly assimilated the Martian units which were the means of
‘telepathic’ communication. The universal ill-health now favoured a kind
of ‘cancer’ of the nervous system, which was due to the ungoverned
proliferation of these units. The harrowing results of this disease may
be left unmentioned. Century by century it increased; and even those who
did not actually contract the sickness lived in constant terror of
madness.
These troubles were aggravated by the devastating heat. The hope that,
as the generations passed, human nature would adapt itself even to the
more sultry regions, seemed to be unfounded. Far otherwise, within a
thousand years the once-populous arctic and antarctic islands were
almost deserted. Out of each hundred of the great pylons, scarcely more
than two were inhabited, and these only by a few plague-stricken and
broken-spirited human relics. These alone were left to turn their
telescopes upon the earth and watch the unexpectedly delayed bombardment
of their native world by the fragments of the moon.
Population decreased still further. Each brief generation was slightly
less well developed than its parents. Intelligence declined. Education
became superficial and restricted. Contact with the past was no longer
possible. Art lost its significance, and philosophy its dominion over
the minds of men. Even applied science began to be too difficult.
Unskilled control of the subatomic sources of power led to a number of
disasters, which finally gave rise to a superstition that all ‘tampering
with nature’ was wicked, and all the ancient wisdom a snare of Man’s
Enemy. Books, instruments, all the treasures of human culture, were
therefore burnt. Only the perdurable buildings resisted destruction. Of
the incomparable world-order of the Fifth Men nothing was left but a few
island tribes cut off from one another by the ocean, and from the rest
of space-time by the depths of their own ignorance.
After many thousands of years human nature did begin to adapt itself to
the climate and to the poisoned water without which life was impossible.
At the same time a new variety of the fifth species now began to appear,
in which the Martian units were not included. Thus at last the race
regained a certain mental stability, at the expense of its faculty of
‘telepathy’, which man was not to regain until almost the last phase of
his career. Meanwhile, though he had recovered somewhat from the effects
of an alien world, the glory that had been was no more. Let us therefore
hurry through the ages that passed before noteworthy events again
occurred.
In early days on Venus men had gathered their foodstuff from the great
floating islands of vegetable matter which had been artificially
produced before the migration. But as the oceans became populous with
modifications of the terrestrial fauna, the human tribes turned more and
more to fishing. Under the influence of its marine environment, one
branch of the species assumed such an aquatic habit that in time it
actually began to develop biological adaptations for marine life. It is
perhaps surprising that man was still capable of spontaneous variation;
but the fifth human species was artificial, and had always been prone to
epidemics of mutation. After some millions of years of variation and
selection there appeared a very successful species of seal-like submen.
The whole body was moulded to stream-lines. The lung capacity was
greatly developed. The spine had elongated, and increased in
flexibility. The legs were shrunken, grown together, and flattened into
a horizontal rudder. The arms also were diminutive and fin-like, though
they still retained the manipulative forefinger and thumb. The head had
sunk into the body and looked forward in the direction of swimming.
Strong carnivorous teeth, emphatic gregariousness, and a new, almost
human, cunning in the chase, combined, to make these seal-men lords of
the ocean. And so they remained for many million years, until a more
human race, annoyed at their piscatorial successes, harpooned them out
of existence.
For another branch of the degenerated fifth species had retained a more
terrestrial habit and the ancient human form. Sadly reduced in stature
and in brain, these abject beings were so unlike the original invaders
that they are rightly considered a new species, and may therefore be
called the Sixth Men. Age after age they gained a precarious livelihood
by grubbing roots upon the forest-clad islands, trapping the innumerable
birds, and catching fish in the tidal inlets with ground bait. Not
infrequently they devoured, or were devoured by, their seal-like
relatives. So restricted and constant was the environment of these human
remnants, that they remained biologically and culturally stagnant for
some millions of years.
At length, however, geological events afforded man’s nature once more
the opportunity of change. A mighty warping of the planet’s crust
produced an island almost as large as Australia. In time this was
peopled, and from the clash of tribes a new and versatile race emerged.
Once more there was methodical tillage, craftsmanship, complex social
organization, and adventure in the realm of thought.
During the next two hundred million years all the main phases of man’s
life on earth were many times repeated on Venus with characteristic
differences. Theocratic empires; free and intellectualistic island
cities; insecure overlordships of feudal archipelagos; rivalries of high
priest and emperor; religious feuds over the interpretation of sacred
scriptures; recurrent fluctuations of thought from naïve animism,
through polytheism, conflicting monotheisms, and all the desperate
‘isms’ by which mind seeks to blur the severe outline of truth;
recurrent fashions of comfort-seeking fantasy and cold intelligence;
social disorders through the misuse of volcanic or wind-power in
industry; business empires and pseudo-communistic empires—all these
forms flitted over the changing substance of mankind again and again, as
in an enduring hearth-fire there appear and vanish the infinitely
diverse forms of flame and smoke. But all the while the brief spirits,
in whose massed configurations these forms inhered, were intent chiefly
on the primitive needs of food, shelter, companionship, crowd-lust,
love-making, the two-edged relationship of parent and child, the
exercise of muscle and intelligence in facile sport. Very seldom, only
in rare moments of clarity, only after ages of misapprehension, did a
few of them, here and there, now and again, begin to have the deeper
insight into the world’s nature and man’s. And no sooner had this
precious insight begun to propagate itself, than it would be blotted out
by some small or great disaster, by epidemic disease, by the spontaneous
disruption of society, by an access of racial imbecility, by a prolonged
bombardment of meteorites, or by the mere cowardice and vertigo that
dared not look down the precipice of the fact.