Far From This Earth

by Chad Oliver

  The violet sign floated in the air: DON’T ROCK THE BOAT.

  All the way home he thought of Old Man Vandervort, sitting alone in his castle, and the simple question whispered through his mind:

  Why?

  Some questions, fortunately, were easier to answer.

  Keith Ortega had answered some of them to his own satisfaction a long time ago. He had written a book, with the somewhat melodramatic title of The New Age of Darkness, and the book in a sense had led Vandervort to the idea of the Venus project. The book had been widely read, and was generally regarded as possibly correct and certainly amusing.

  No one took the book very seriously—which tended to confirm its thesis.

  No one but Vandervort.

  What was the book about?

  It was about the planet Earth.

  The story of Earth was a familiar one. After a million years or so of bashing in each other’s brains with bigger and better weapons, the human animal had finally achieved a fairly uniform, stable, planet-wide civilization. He had done it out of sheer necessity, just a cat’s whisker this side of nuclear extinction, but he had done it.

  By the year 2050, the dream of One World was no longer a dream.

  The human animal was living on it.

  In his understandable haste, however, he had overlooked a few basic points.

  One civilization had taken over from many diverse civilizations. Given the facts of history, it could not have been otherwise. An essentially Western culture, due to a running headstart in technology, had spread itself thickly around the globe. It had taken root and prospered wherever it had touched. It had swallowed and digested every other way of life on the planet Earth.

  There was One World, and there was peace.

  A standardized, uniform, flourishing, world-wide civilization.

  The human animal began to breathe more easily.

  There was a joker in the deck, even though his laugh was a long time in coming. One World meant one culture pattern. There had been no orchestration of differences, but simply an almost complete obliteration of differences. When man was in a hurry, he took the quickest available short-cuts.

  It was a good culture pattern, by and large, and the human animal was better off than he had ever been before. It was a lifeway of plenty, a culture of unlimited technological resources, a philosophy founded on the dignity of man. Earth became a paradise—literally, there was a paradise on Earth. The jungles and the deserts and the arctic wastes, when they were needed, were converted into rich, green land. The power of the sun was harnessed, and harnessed cheaply. Vandervort Enterprises made a thousand fortunes from solar power, but they delivered the goods.

  The culture flowered.

  The worlds of the solar system were briefly explored, written up, and ignored. Both Mars and Venus, contrary to early semi-scientific guesses, were found to be habitable. Habitable, but not very palatable. Mars was an almost waterless desert, and Venus a strange jungle world that never saw the sun. With the untapped resources of Earth ready and waiting in the back yard, the other planets were not worth colonizing.

  One thing about Paradise: nobody wanted to leave it.

  The human animal stayed home in droves.

  He had a good thing on Earth. It was up to him to appreciate it, to protect it, to cherish it. The new golden rule was: DON’T ROCK THE BOAT.

  The uniform culture pattern, the framework for human existence, filled out. Every culture has a potential beyond which it cannot go. Every culture has a stopping point. It can achieve its values, attain its goals, follow every path that is open to it. When that happens, whether in Greece or Rome or Stone-Age Australia, the culture exhausts itself and begins merely to repeat what it has already done. Throughout history when a civilization reached its climax and leveled off, there was a new, fresh, vital culture somewhere else to take up the slack and go off in a new direction, jolting the old civilization out of its rut.

  This time there were no rival cultures.

  There was nothing to take over.

  By the year 2100, the civilization of Earth had shot its ammunition. It was a perfect, static, frozen Western culture. It began to repeat itself over and over, endlessly. It went nowhere, and took its own sweet time doing it.

  It was not decadent. It did not retrogress. It did not really deteriorate. It simply jogged along its well-worn circular cinder track, not working up a sweat, mildly pleased with itself.

  Most people did not know what had happened, of course. How could they? Did the citizens of the Dark Ages know that the ages were dark? More significantly, did they give a damn?

  People were as happy as they had ever been, after a fashion. They were well-fed. They were comfortable. There was no atomic horror staring them in the face. Kids still fell in love, and spring still came around every year.

  Go up to the man in the copter. Tell him that his culture has run out of gas.

  So what? DON’T ROCK THE BOAT.

  Still, there were signs. Ignorance always carries a price tag.

  The loss of cultural vitality made itself manifest—very slowly, the birth rate began to fall. The number of suicides, even in paradise, began to go up. People killed themselves for reasons that bordered on the whimsical. Parents who had children often did not want them. The number of illegitimate children, despite the lowered birthrate, went up.

  The culture was aimless.

  The word wasn’t decay.

  It was boredom.

  These were the facts, as Keith Ortega had worked them out. These were the facts that Vandervort had to deal with. These were the facts that added up to Venus.

  At five o’clock in the morning on the first day of September in the year 2150, Keith Ortega and his wife boarded the Foundation ship hidden under an unreclaimed area of the Arizona desert.

  In addition to Keith and Carrie, the ship carried two pilots, a navigator, a doctor, fifty babies, twenty-five special humanoid robots, computers, and supplies.

  Keith and Carrie sat in their cabin. There was nothing to see—no windows, no viewscreens, no control panels, no flashing lights. There was nothing to do. Neither of them had ever taken off in a spaceship before. They waited.

  A low whine whistled through the ship, and steadied into a low, powerful throbbing. The beat of the air-conditioner picked up. An electronic relay thunked heavily into position.

  “Come on, come on,” Keith whispered.

  The lights dimmed. A muffled, coughing roar cut loose from somewhere far away. There was a quick giddiness, a sudden second when the heart skipped a beat. Then the lights brightened again, the sound steadied, and the ship’s gentle gravity field took hold.

  The ship went up.

  Up, up through the pale sunlight of early morning. Up through the still, soundless sea that never knew morning or night, laughter or tears.

  Earth was gone.

  Keith smiled at his wife and wondered how long it would be before either of them saw a blue sky again.

  III

  Venus.

  Keith had a mental picture of it, and had even seen photographs and scientific reports brought back by the early expeditions. He thought he knew what he was getting into.

  The reality, of course, was different.

  When they stepped down from the ship at the receiving station, twenty-five million miles from Earth, his first surprised impression was one of sameness.

  Even scientific accounts tended to emphasize the unusual and the unique. Reading old accounts of the Sahara or the Amazon Basin, it was possible to forget that those places were on the same Earth with Los Angeles or London or New Delhi—possible even to get the impression that the inhabitants weren’t really human beings at all.

  More than anything else, the receiving station area of Venus looked like an obscure corner of Earth on a mildly unusual day. It was very cloudy, which was to be expected, and the air was like thick gray fog. It was warm and damp, and the atmosphere tasted artificially sweet and heady. Gray-green vegetation c
ircled the station like a choking wall, and the hush in the air was a thick and heavy oil.

  But the really alien aspects of Venus—the diffuse colonies of oxygen-breathing organisms that webbed the higher clouds, the strange temperature currents that precipitated the water vapor before it could rise to the four-mile carbon dioxide bands—were invisible.

  While the doctor and the perfectly humanoid robots unloaded the babies, Keith and Carrie started across to the dome-shaped station house. Mark Kamoto spotted them before they had taken ten steps. He ran up to them, waving and hollering.

  “Hey!” he yelled. “Welcome to the Underwater Kingdom!”

  Four hours and two pots of coffee later, they were still talking full blast, in that inevitable outburst of verbiage which occurs whenever long-separated friends are reunited.

  Keith grinned at Mark, who looked thinner and tougher than when he had left Earth three years before. “We’d like to get out and look at it,” he said finally.

  “We’ve got some work to do first,” Mark said, “so I think we’d better wait until tomorrow. That’ll be about eleven Earth-days yet.”

  “Don’t play pioneer and greenhorn with us, old boy,” Keith said. “We know how long the night is.”

  “That’s what you think,” Mark told him. “You know it on a clock; wait till you live it!”

  By the time the night had come and gone and the gray light of day had rolled around again, Keith was ready to admit that Mark had been right. The ten Earth-days of the Venusian night had been busy and full, and spiced with the exoticism of the truly new.

  Still, they were long, long days.

  It rained a good fifty per cent of the time—a hard, steady, monotonous rain that drummed into the jungle with unholy steadiness. The clouds glowed with a pale phosphorescence. To a man born and raised on Earth, the effect was disconcerting. It was as if you somehow slept through every day, and whenever you woke up it was always a cloudlighted midnight, and whenever you went to bed it was midnight still.

  With Mark piloting the copter, they took off in the morning fog and soon left the station clearing far behind them. Four babies, comprising the quota for Halaja, shared the back of the cabin.

  One of them, a solemn-eyed child with long curls and a pug nose, would be Keith’s son until he returned to Earth.

  “Look at the birds,” Carrie said.

  There were thousands of them, as large as hawks and brilliantly colored. They swarmed above the gray-green jungles in plumed squadrons, slanting down occasionally to snare tiny lizard-like reptiles that lived on the broad leaves at the top of the forest. More than anything else, they resembled the aquatic birds over the seas of Earth, diving after fish.

  The copter flew due west, in a lane between the swollen mountains of the clouds and the rolling roof of the jungle. Once they passed an open plain, crisscrossed with small streams and dotted with grazing animals. There were many swamps and bogs, but few hills.

  “Hang on,” Mark said.

  Venus promptly exhibited her favorite stunt: raining. It got just a trifle darker, and then the sponges of gray clouds began to drip. The copter cut wetly through the downpour, wobbling slightly when it ran into semi-rivers in the sky. There were no high winds, however. There was no lightning and no thunder.

  In eight hours they reached Halaja.

  From the air, half hidden through a drizzle of rain, the village of Halaja looked like a faded photograph of an ancient frontier fort on Earth. It had no wall around it, but the wooden houses were built in a square around a central plaza, and were interconnected by covered plank passageways. In the center of the plaza was a circular pool, and around the pool was a ring of firepits for cooking. For perhaps two miles in three directions around the village the jungle had been cut back and the land was planted with Sirau-fruit. To the west, there was an open field, and beyond that was the Smoke River, its slow blue water winding lazily through the dense gray-green of the jungle. Several moving figures were visible in the plaza, looking like tiny black ants from the copter’s altitude.

  Halaja. A place where people lived.

  Keith took Carrie’s hand.

  Mark set the copter down in the damp athletic field to the west of the village.

  Side by side, the three of them walked across the field and along a wet path through a patch of Sirau-fruit. Keith carried a baby uncomfortably in his arms while Mark, as an old hand, hauled two of them. Carrie took the small gentleman with the pug nose. The spray of thin raindrops in the air cooled their faces and dripped down the backs of their necks.

  “Hey!” came a shout from the village. “Company!”

  A cluster of adults came running out to greet them. They were simply dressed in shirts and shorts, with their feet bare. Most of the kids were too young to walk, but two of them toddled out as far as the gate and stared wide-eyed at the procession.

  “Looks like old-home week,” Keith grinned.

  “You won’t get many visitors in Halaja,” Mark said.

  The villagers swarmed around them, all talking at once. They pounded Keith on the back and gravely shook Carrie’s hand. The babies were taken away from them, much to Keith’s relief, and there was much clucking and laughing and general baby-talk.

  Bill and Ruth Knudsen were the only human couple in the village, but if Keith had not known them previously he could never have picked them out. The robot humanoids were virtually perfect imitations.

  “Keith!” boomed Bill Knudsen, a big blond in need of a shave. “It’s good to see you!”

  Ruth, beaming from ear to ear, said: “So glad you decided to come. We’ve fixed up a room we know you’ll like.” The delight in her eyes spoke eloquently of her loneliness for another human woman.

  They all surged into the village with a whoop and a holler.

  Six hours later, Mark took the copter and left.

  Their life in Halaja had begun.

  It was surprisingly easy to adjust to the life of the village. Different as it was from the life they had known on Earth, they had been trained in its ways and fitted smoothly into its routine. The Sirau-fruit did not require an inordinate amount of time, and the free hours were filled with games and rituals and the telling of sacred stories—most of which Keith had written himself.

  Ceremonialism, in a very real sense, was Halaja’s business.

  Carrie had named their adopted son Bobby. After two Earth-months in the village, Bobby was almost a year old and growing rapidly. He was probably no more admirable than other small children in Halaja, but Keith and Carrie thought that he was.

  One night Keith took the boy to the pool in the center of the plaza. He sat down on a wooden bench and balanced Bobby on his knee.

  It had been raining for six Earth-days, but now it had stopped. A cool, sweet breeze blew in from the dripping jungles. The night-glow from the massed clouds in the sky was like soft moonlight, coating the land with warm silver. The perfumes from jungle flowers eddied like streams in the air. Yellow firelight spilled out from across the plaza, and the houses of the village were black shadows under the pale mountains of the clouds.

  “Bobby,” he said to his son, “we call this pool the Home of the Spirit. Perhaps there are those who would say that no spirit exists, but we know better.”

  The boy gurgled gleefully, paying no attention.

  Keith filled his pipe with one hand and lit it with his lighter. “It won’t be many years, Bobby, before you will be meeting other men and women before this pool—mariners from Acosta by the northern sea, industrialists from Wlan, Mepas, and Carin, great hunters from Pueklor, people from far Equete, where space flight is already a dream. You will be dancing with them, and singing with them, and sharing ideas with them. You will be one of the participants from the first generation of men to live on Venus. You will meet the others who are growing up on this world, meet them in peace because that will be your way of life, and together … what’s that, Bobby?”

  Bobby burped genially.

  Keith
laughed. “You won’t understand what I’m saying, son. Not yet. But one day you will understand. One day—”

  He felt a hand on his shoulder.

  “Getting pretty melodramatic for an old man, aren’t you?” asked Carrie, kissing his ear and sitting down at his side.

  “Well, I sure wasn’t bowling Bobby over with my profundity,” Keith admitted. “He’s bored.”

  “Give him a few years, darling.”

  Keith looked at his wife in the cloudlight. Her blue eyes were brighter than they had ever been on Earth. Sitting there by him, so small in the night, she was filled with a relaxed happiness that made him feel good just to be around her.

  “In a few years Bobby will have a robot for an old man,” he said.

  “I know.”

  The cool breeze that had swept in after the rains faded to a sluggish warmth. A horde of hungry insects flew into the plaza, intent upon demonstrating the digestibility of human blood. All the people had been injected to keep the pests off, but they were a humming nuisance just the same.

  The three of them walked away from the pool under the glowing clouds and went inside.

  Eight Earth-months had passed.

  Outside, in the plaza surrounding the Home of the Spirit, the drums throbbed rhythmically and a ritual chant filled the air. The robot humanoids were conducting another in the round of sacred ceremonies, while the children of the village crowded around the pool raptly, absorbing the words and music and sentiments that were fast becoming their own.

  Inside, in the pleasant center room of their wooden house, Keith and Carrie sat on a barkcloth mat and listened. Across from them were Ruth and Bill Knudsen.

  “One thing about being human,” Bill said, “you can let the robots do all the work, at least until the kids grow up enough to wonder why we’re not out there yelling and stomping with the rest.”

  “What made you come out here, anyway?” asked Keith.

  Bill shrugged. “Ruth tricked me into it.”