by Garret Smith
But meantime the mechanic in charge of the motor had involuntarily obeyed the sharp command without waiting for proper authority. The wings swung into a vertical position. The ship leaped up sharply, then settled back, and hung motionless a hundred paces or so above the ground.
“What is it?” demanded Hunter. “What did you think you saw?”
“I saw what I see, my cousin,” she replied serenely. “The darkness ahead is turning white as if it were a great wall of ice.”
“I see nothing!” he snorted. “But lest your eyes prove sharper than mine, we will go ahead slowly. I want no more collisions.”
He gave the order, and under slowly beating wings, we crept ahead, pace by pace. For some moments the rest of us saw nothing, though the queen continued to point ahead and declaim excitedly.
But, in the end, she proved right, though what she saw was no ice wall. It gradually seemed that our lights ahead were defined less sharply against the darkness, then that they faded out to soft gray, but extended an immeasurable distance farther than had been their wont.
“There is light ahead! There is light ahead! Shut off the ship’s lights so we can see it!” Hunter cried out excitedly.
The blazing glare from the vessel winked out and at the same instant a chorus of wonder and relief broke from our lips.
Along the whole horizon ahead of us as far as eye could reach either way, was a low band of soft, gray light that even as we watched rose and grew in intensity until it’s subdued, insinuating radiance revealed our rapt faces to each other.
We were witnessing the first dawn in Venus!
CHAPTER V
A GREAT REVELATION
“IT IS the goal!” Hunter whispered at last. “The new Land of Light beyond the Circle of Darkness!”
He was pale and trembling with emotion. And all the rest of our company were visibly overcome with awe by this climax of our strenuous, blind venture.
I say all: I must except the queen. Her emotions were quite different. There was nothing of awe in her countenance as she turned to Hunter, her vivid face alight with excitement.
“I thank you now, my cousin, for bringing me with you. At last I am to be queen over a land of light!”
It served as a rude awakening from our solemn mood, a crude anticlimax, as though a wave of icy water had swept over the group.
Several laughed; then checked themselves nervously. Others glared in anger. Hunter eyed her blankly; then turned away without a word.
I have never slain a woman. I may say for myself with due modesty that I have never on cool reflection greatly desired to do so. But I swear that had some less finicky person undertaken the task at that moment, I would hardly have had the heart to stay his hand.
But the irritation of this jarring interruption passed quickly in wonder at the glorious panorama unfolding before us. Steadily, the light grew. We no longer needed the blaze of illumination from the ship’s lamps.
And now we saw that the surface of Venus over which we sailed was changing character. We had passed out over a great expanse of water again, and water no longer bridged over by an ice flooring. Such ice as it contained was in detached fragments, now and then a considerable floe, here and there an Ice mountain, but resolving more and more into mere drifting bits.
At length, all signs of ice had disappeared, and below us lay only a vast, limitless field of open water. The air that blew about us was becoming more and more balmy. Our heavy garments grew irksome and we began shedding them one by one.
Familiar sea-fowl flew about the vessel. And, most gratifying to behold, they had normal eyes.
In every respect, the sea below us, the mellow air about us, and the soft, gray sky above, were the same as we had left behind when we entered the Zone of Darkness.
Weaver now brought the ship down to the surface of the sea, and it once more assumed the character of an ordinary vessel. This manner of progress was much less rapid, but it was more saving of the machinery and the chemical supplies for driving it.
But welcome as was the discovery of light and warmth, we began soon to yearn for something more substantial than a watery realm. A region of limitless fluidity, however salubrious its climate, had little colonizing value to the overcrowded population of Venus.
Sleep after sleep passed, however, and no land hove in sight, though our lookouts gave to the search for it the same vigilance they had used in watching for the first signs of the new light.
As before, the queen was again one of the most eager of watchers. She was, likewise, more than ever obsessed with a sense of authority and importance, having discerned the light so far ahead of the rest of us. There was stirred up by her attitude an almost childish spirit of emulation among the men.
There seemed to be a tacit determination that, come what might, this domineering lady should not score a second triumph over us. The members of each watch, therefore, vied with each other in intentness, even to the extent of cutting short their sleep lest someone give the cry of “Land ahead!” when they were not on deck to share the discovery.
So for thirty sleeps we sailed over this empty, silent sea.
Three separate times we were thrown into a pitch of excitement by false hopes of land, begotten of low-lying mist banks, that soon dissipated again.
But, at length, in the middle of the thirty-first sleep, while the queen, as luck would have it, was for a brief time below decks, Tanner, stationed in the lookout-box, sighted a low-lying coast dead ahead, which quickly proved itself to all of us to be more substantial than the mist.
With the first cry, those who were oil watch rushed on deck. We behaved like madmen in our joy, rushing about, shouting and singing and sounding the praise of our leader, whose great vision was about to prove true in every detail.
The queen came on deck in the midst of our jubilation and was most evidently disgruntled at finding that she had been defeated this time.
With almost breathless eagerness our whole company crowded against the forward rails and intently scanned the approaching shore to learn as quickly as possible what manner of country we were about to invade.
Nearer and nearer it drew. Land birds began to fly over us. We caught the scent of verdure now and then over the tang of the sea air and were rejoiced to know that we were not approaching a desert country.
Since first sighting this coast, it had remained partly shrouded behind a thin sea haze which prevented our determining much of its character, excepting that it was low and level and seemed to have few indentations.
But presently the water rippled under a sudden puff of wind. The mist curtain wavered and broke into curling eddies of clouds that in a moment had altogether dissipated and left the strange coast clear-cut before us.
At that a chorus of involuntary exclamations arose from our company. They expressed a mixture of surprise, pleasure, and regret.
I do not know that any of us had definitely thought of the possibility that this land to which we all looked forward so eagerly might already be preempted to the full by intelligent beings like ourselves. Certainly it was reasonable enough that it should be. But, at any rate, I think we had all more or less unconsciously assumed that we were to take possession of a rich but uninhabited territory.
Hence our surprise and regret, mingled with somewhat inconsistent pleasure, when the shifting of the mist revealed a land covered as far as the eye could reach in every direction with familiar pyramidshaped buildings, such as we last saw as we sailed from our home port so many sleeps away.
Directly ahead was a port, crowded with great piers and basins. Huge warehouses lined its shores. At either side of the port long rows of houses, evidently dwellings surrounded by gardens, extended away till they faded from sight in the distance. Here and there at long intervals were tall signal towers like those in our Land of Light. Small boats, familiar in form, plied the offshore waters, and as we looked a great ship put out, a ship in many details like our own familiar merchantmen.
Hunter, who stood n
ear me, sighed deeply, “I don’t know why I expected an empty land. Why should this not be inhabited? But I am amazed that it is peopled with beings evidently like us in development. Certainly there could never have been communication between our lands.”
“If this be a sample of this new world,” I ventured, “I see little hope that any of our overcrowded population can find refuge here.”
“I fear not,” he agreed.
It was evident that his interest in finding another new people was outweighed by disappointment at the knowledge that his quest for an unclaimed land was as yet unfulfilled.
AT THAT moment Weaver, who had mounted the lookout-box for a nearer view, returned to us. The moment I got a square view of his face I knew there was something amiss. Hunter, too, caught the look, and eyed him apprehensively.
“What do you make of it, Weaver?” he asked.
The shipmaster looked our leader in the face for a long moment without replying. I thought I read in his eyes mingled pity and embarrassment. Then, still without a word, he turned away again and studied the approaching shore.
“In the Over Spirit’s name I what is it, Weaver?” cried Hunter.
Weaver replied haltingly, without turning his head our way:
“See those two nearest signal-towers? Note their position. See that longest pier projecting just halfway between? See that light off to the right of the harbor-mouth? See that small stream flowing into the sea at the left?
“Do those landmarks mean nothing to you? Even in this world of eternal sameness, I could not mistake them. You have both seen them before. I have sailed into this roadstead a hundred times, if once.
“I am loath to say it, Hunter, but ’tis no new land we see. Something has gone awry with our calculations. We have returned to our own Land of Light. This is the harbor of West Venus before us.”
We stared at our shipmaster in amazement. Had he taken leave of his senses? But he continued to point at the approaching harbor.
“Look and convince yourselves,” he said.
I had visited West Venus twice, once in my early youth and once not long ago. Hunter had been there at least once to my knowledge. We shook ourselves from the daze of Weaver’s revelation and endeavored to recall our impressions of the place. It took some moments for us to convince ourselves that the shipmaster was not suffering from a hallucination, but in the end we were so convinced beyond the slightest doubt.
But once having made sure that we were now about to touch at the extreme western shore of the great continental mass of the Land of Light, on the side directly opposite to the one from which we sailed, the mystery remained as to how we could have come there. Our guiding instruments, I knew, from such record of our course as I had obtained from time to time through Hunter or Weaver, showed that we had apparently held a straight course due east from our home port of East Venus, throughout the whole period of our voyage.
I had only the vaguest theoretical knowledge of the science of nautical reckonings. To me, in my ignorance, it seemed possible nature might be so altered that our instruments had misled us. We might then, instead of crossing the darkness as we supposed, have merely skirted its inner edge in a great half-circle, emerging by accident on the opposite side of our continent.
When I advanced this idea, however, Hunter dismissed it as out of the question.
“No,” he declared. “The mystery lies deeper. We have two sets of guiding instruments, based on entirely different principles. They have agreed throughout our course, a thing that would not be likely were the laws of nature upset.”
So I stood by, a curious but useless spectator, while Hunter and Weaver checked back over the records of the voyage. We had slipped down to Hunter’s cabin together, without a word to the others of our momentous discovery. Even the usually vigilant queen was so intent on studying the new marvels out across the water that she hardly noticed our departure.
At length Hunter arose from his computations and stared thoughtfully at his plaster model of the Land of Light. Suddenly, with an exclamation of disgust, he kicked the model with such force-that the fragile affair broke into a dozen fragments.
“So perish an age-old error!” he exclaimed. “That model and all its like are of no more use to the scholars of Venus. Our Venus is not a hill of light in a sea of darkness, as we supposed. It is a great ball floating in an open space—one half light, the other half dark. We have held a straight easterly course, just as we supposed, and we have sailed entirely around our Venus! Men! Men! We have made the greatest discovery of the ages! Our world is no longer a mystery!
“Best of all, we have proved that there are also other worlds as I had dreamed, only different. They are not connected with our Land of Light, as I thought, but float detached from us out in empty space. We have seen them with our own eyes, worlds without end! And we have the means to reach them. We’ll start again as soon as I can alter our ship so as to sail in the airless spaces between worlds.
“The people of Venus need no longer fear overcrowding! We are the saviors of our race! The universe lies open at our very doors!”
THAT is a true saying I have read recently in one of your sacred Earth books: “A prophet is not without honor save in his own country.”
Our revered leader, Hunter, was a notable exemplar of its wisdom. The treatment accorded him by his own people, even, I regret to say, by some of the very company that had so heroically attended his wanderings, is evidence that human nature, in this respect at least, differs little between Venus and Earth.
Our leader had sailed away under a cloud of universal disapproval and unbelief, shared even by us, whose personal devotion and zest for adventure had caused us to accompany him against our saner judgment. He returned with a tale of achievement, to the popular mind more insane and preposterous by far than the prophecy with which he set sail, and added to that a new prophecy that staggered the imagination.
That he was received with almost universal incredulity, I believe proved the greatest surprise and grief of his life. He had fully expected the evidence he offered as to his momentous discoveries to convince even those who had been most skeptical.
He had been confident of reinstatement as a popular hero with a greatly added prestige.
But on the contrary, where he had left behind him incredulity tinged with pity and affection, he returned to find not only disbelief but animosity, a quite general conviction that having failed in his quest, he had turned charlatan and was attempting to impose a colossal falsehood upon the world.
His first taste of this had come’-to him when he called the rest of the ship’s company together after convincing Weaver and myself, and unfolded to them his discovery. They had by now learned the truth as to our whereabouts, and assembled in the main cabin at Hunter’s call, muttering among themselves and casting dubious glances in his direction.
His explanations they received for the most part in silence. At the end a few asked eager questions and were apparently convinced. The queries of others were put with covert sneers. The rest maintained significant silence.
From remarks I overheard as our meeting broke up, I gathered that the disaffected ones thought they had been made dupes. They had, they held, been put to great stress of mind and body for a long period when all the time, light, warmth, and safety lay but a scant sleep away, and all that a vainglorious adventure might win false fame and delude the world with false notions and false hopes. To their minds the man they had revered and trusted and followed had proved himself utterly unworthy. Their loyalty was at an end.
This division of faith and opinion among his followers later proved fuel to the fire of popular distrust.
While the harbor pilot was putting out to escort us ashore I had prepared a brief summary of our report which I signaled from our masthead to the nearest tower. By the time we set foot ashore, the news was on its way over all the Land of Light and was being posted on the city’s street bulletins.
Accordingly, the streets greeted us with a throng a
s great as had watched our departure from East Venus. Everywhere, I noted signs of animosity as we made our way through the crush to a street boat. There was everywhere through the throng the jangling of acrimonious controversy. The shouts that reached our ears made it all too evident that the unbelievers outnumbered our friends.
We did not know till afterward that the director of the chief college of West Venus happened to be among the first to read my bulletin and to misinterpret its meager explanations. Being a man given to hasty actions, he had immediately caused to be posted under it a statement by himself denouncing the account as an outrageous fraud. This man had once had a controversy with Hunter’s father, the Chief Patriarch, and his conduct was animated not a little by spleen.
I will do the man justice to add that he afterward was convinced of Hunter’s truthfulness, on going over his complete records, and apologized publicly.
The mischief was done, however, for the denial of this high authority reached the people at the same time as my original statement and they felt fully confirmed in their natural tendency to be skeptical, and highly resentful at what they believed was an attempt at a general swindle.
But, of course, no one interfered with our progress, and we arrived shortly at the leading travelers’ home and engaged apartments for a brief, rest and an opportunity to prepare a fuller statement before proceeding around to East Venus.
Here we were shortly waited upon by the local Patriarch. He accorded us a polite but rather frigid welcome and intimated before he left that the first-accounts of our voyage were doubtless distorted through haste and that he would await with interest our official statement.
By this time Hunter was in a sullen rage, a state of mind that hardly left him for a moment during the remainder of our stay on Venus.
For some sleeps we remained here, working over the records of our voyage and receiving a vast number of visitors, some friendly disposed, but more having a manner of veiled hostility and evidently impelled to call on us only by curiosity.
