Far From This Earth

by Chad Oliver

  His wife, a rather plain woman with a deep strength that made her attractive, nodded. “Too many pretty gals back home. I figured Bill was safer here.”

  Bill and Ruth seldom talked seriously about themselves. Keith wondered whether it was a symptom of the age they lived in, or if men had always been reticent about the things that really counted.

  “It’s been wonderful having you and Carrie with us,” Ruth said. “We’ll miss you when you go.”

  “You may not feel that way four months from now.”

  “I think we all need a little ceremonial drink,” Bill boomed. “This joint is getting maudlin.”

  Keith turned to Carrie. “What say, high priestess?”

  “As long as it’s purely ceremonial,” Carrie said, “it would seem to be our duty.”

  “By a strange coincidence,” Bill informed them, “I happen to have some good stuff concealed in my quarters.”

  “Go, boy,” Keith said.

  Bill ducked through the connecting tunnel, his bare feet thumping on the boards, and returned with a fifth of bourbon. Carrie produced four clay drinking utensils and a pot of water.

  They drank up, gratefully. Much as they all loved Halaja and what it stood for, it was still not their village. They were all playing parts, and once in a while it felt good to get away.

  From the plaza came the thudding of the drums and the undulating chants of the robot elders of Halaja. The children were very quiet.

  “What we need are a few ceremonial toasts,” Bill said.

  “Check,” said Keith.

  They drank one to Old Man Vandervort.

  They drank one to Earth.

  They drank a few more on general principles.

  By the time the fifth was gone, they were all feeling pretty good.

  “I guess,” Carrie said finally, “that this is as good a time as any to spring the glad tidings.”

  “Um-m-m,” said Keith. “Spring away.”

  Carrie brushed a strand of her blond hair out of her eyes. “To be unutterably crude,” she said, “I’m pregnant.”

  Keith found himself on his feet. Suddenly aware that his mouth was open, he closed it and sat down again.

  Bill and Ruth laughed their congratulations.

  Carrie looked thoroughly pleased with herself.

  “We’ll have to hurry up and get out of here,” Keith said. “Get back to Earth, hospitals—” He stopped, catching the expression on his wife’s face.

  “Easy does it,” Carrie said. “No hot water needed yet.”

  “Sorry,” Keith subsided.

  “Darling,” she said slowly, “do we have to go back? Do you really want your child to be born on Earth?”

  The drums stopped and the singing died to a lonely humming in the plaza by the Home of the Spirit.

  Keith smiled. “It’s up to you, Carrie,” he said. “It’s up to you.”

  IV

  They stayed where they were.

  One year later, after their son been born and named in the naming ceremony of Halaja, Keith got a message from the Old Man. Mark flew it out to him, and it read:

  MY DEAR KEITH: IT PAINS ME TO STATE THAT I AM UNHAPPY ABOUT YOUR REPORTS ON OUR PROJECT. HAVE FOUND THEM SKIMPY AND UNINFORMATIVE. PLEASE MAKE THEM MUCH MORE DETAILED IN THE FUTURE. IT IS IMPERATIVE THAT I KNOW EVERYTHING THAT TRANSPIRES IN OUR COLONIES. REPEAT: IMPERATIVE. HOW IS THE CEREMONIAL FRAMEWORK SHAPING UP? ARE THE INDUSTRIES OF WLEN AND MEPAS AND CARIN PROPERLY INTEGRATED WITH THE SPECULATIONS OF THE EQUETE SPACE PHILOSOPHERS? HOW ABOUT THE INDIVIDUALISTIC ATTITUDES OF THE PUEKLOR HUNTERS? I MUST KNOW EVERYTHING. HOW MUCH LONGER WILL YOU STAY? HOW ARE THE ROBOTS WORKING OUT? WHEN WILL THE FIRST DEATHS OCCUR? SOME SLIGHT AGITATION HERE. RUMOR THAT ONE OF OUR SHIPS REPORTED IN TAKE-OFF. RUMOR OF INVESTIGATION. BUT I CAN HANDLE GOVERNMENT. FOUNDATION STILL GOING SMOOTHLY AND MORE CHILDREN ON THE WAY. MUST KNOW COMPLETE RESULTS OF ALL NEW DEVELOPMENTS. UNDERSTAND YOU NOW HAVE SON. PLEASE MAKE ALL REPORTS MORE THOROUGH IN FUTURE. (SIGNED) JAMES MURRAY VANDERVORT.

  The message worried Keith, and he did not show it to Carrie. The rather crotchety demands for fuller information were typical enough for Van, but the hints of possible suspicions on the part of the government were disquieting.

  Despite the Old Man’s power and influence, he did not run Earth. Undynamic as the world government might be, it still could not be ignored.

  Peace on Earth had been won at the price of conformity. The era of plenty was founded on a stable system where people thought alike, believed alike, talked alike. The dream of mankind through centuries of war and hate and fear had been achieved. Man had what he had always wanted, and he was in no hurry to change. His motto was simple:

  DONT ROCK THE BOAT.

  Well, the Venus colonies were rocking that boat.

  They were blowing up a storm.

  It was true that they were not exactly illegal; there were no laws against fresh cultures on Venus. No one had ever thought about them—there quite literally were no legal precedents.

  They were outside the law.

  But if they were discovered, the game was up. Their entire effectiveness depended upon secrecy. The colonies had to have time to grow up and develop and charge their lifeways with life and vigor. They had to contact Earth—not the other way around.

  Once, to Keith, it had all been an unusually interesting scientific experiment; nothing more than that. He had not, of course, been worried about the outcome. There was absolutely no danger that the new cultures might flower only to bring war back to a peaceful Earth. The colonies were planned so that war was impossible.

  The early socioculturists had made a science out of the primitive social disciplines of psychology, sociology, anthropology, and economics. The Venus colonies were products of that science.

  One thing about a science: it works.

  If an engineer knows his business, his bridge does not fall down.

  If a socioculturist knows his business, his culture does what he wants it to.

  Keith, in a way, had been building a bridge. True, it was a bridge on the grand scale, but still it was a bridge. He had not been too emotionally involved in it.

  That was before he had come to Venus.

  That was before he had lived in Halaja.

  That was before he had known that his own son would have to walk across the bridge he was building.

  He did not want anything to happen to that bridge.

  And, holding the message in his hand, the old question nagged at his mind. He could see the Old Man as he had last seen him—a flushed, bearded gnome, pad-padding across the rug in his stifling, incredible room, the fanatical blue eyes that peered into the dark and shadowed corners—

  This was the Old Man’s bridge, too.

  He was the one who had insisted that it be built, knowing he could not live to see it, or benefit by it.

  Keith’s question came back, insistently:

  Why?

  The years drifted by, and for Keith and Carrie they were supremely happy years.

  They raised their two sons—Bobby, the adopted one, and Keith, their own child. They watched them grow, strong and straight, and they never regretted depriving them of Earth. Each child loves the culture into which he is born, and for Keith and Bobby Halaja was home.

  The days were long and filled with work and laughter. The Sirau-fruit flowered in the cleared jungle fields and the great hawklike birds splashed vivid colors across the rolling gray clouds of the sky. In the field by the slow blue water of the Smoke River games were played with the fierce intensity of a World Series on Earth—and, in fact, one of the games played was baseball. It was strange to hear the clean crack of a bat singing through the humid Venusian air—

  There were expeditions through the jungles, encounters with strange animals, the perfumed smell of tropical flowers.

  And always, endlessly, the rituals and ceremonies that were to be Halaja’s contribution to the emerging pattern of life on Venus.

  There were the great torr
ential rains that swept through the log houses of the village—rain that drummed on the plank passageways and churned the water in the little circular pool in the center of the plaza. At night, the clouds glowed with the soft silver of an ageless enchantment, and Keith and Carrie knew what it was to fall in love again.

  The children grew until they were no longer children.

  The robot humanoids began to fade into the background, as they aged before the children’s eyes. The first of them was scheduled to die in less than a year.

  Earth seemed very far away.

  And then, fourteen years after he had first seen the village of Halaja, Keith heard the sound he had been dreading.

  There was a sudden jagged scream that split the clouds above his head, a sharp roar that clattered through the gray rain of a long, lazy afternoon. Keith could not see the thing, but he knew what it was.

  A spaceship.

  And not a Foundation ship, either.

  The world government still had a few spacecraft on operational status—a few lonely skeletons left from the half-forgotten fleet that had long ago explored the solar system and pronounced it useless.

  A few ships used for infrequent investigations, a few ships to back up the slogan:

  DON’T ROCK THE BOAT.

  Keith Ortega stood in the rain and swore.

  “Carrie! You look after things—tell Bill I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  “Be careful, Keith.” She stood in the doorway of their home, small and fragile in her shirt and shorts.

  Little Keith—who was not so little any more—and Bobby listened curiously to the echoes of the decelerating ship and wondered what their father was worried about.

  “What’s up, Dad?” asked Keith.

  “Can we go with you? We can help,” Bobby assured him.

  Keith looked at them with what he hoped was a stern expression. “You’re not children now,” he said. “You’re young men, and you have responsibilities. Have you forgotten about the ceremonies tonight?”

  “Sorry, Dad. We just thought—”

  “I’ll attend to this. It’s nothing important.”

  “Well, gee, what was that funny noise?”

  “That’s what I want to find out,” Keith said. “Some sort of storm up above the clouds, I think.”

  “O.K., Dad.”

  He left them in the rain and sprinted out of the village and along the pathway that led to the Smoke River. He swam the river, which was hardly wetter than the pelting rain in the air, and hurried along a concealed path through the jungle. By the time he reached his hidden emergency copter he was breathing hard.

  If those kids ever saw that spaceship, there would be hell to pay.

  He took the copter up into the sea of gray rain, gunned it to full power, and headed for the dome-shaped station house far to the east. Undoubtedly, they had tracked a Foundation ship from Earth. Since those ships were carefully shielded from the native colonies, they always landed at the station clearing, where Keith himself had landed fourteen years before.

  Keith stared into the rain and clenched his fists.

  If that ship was a government ship—and it had to be—then there was going to be trouble.

  He could not bear the thought of failure now.

  Somehow, that ship had to be stopped.

  In eight hours, he landed at the station clearing.

  The rain had stopped and he saw the ship as soon as he came over the dripping wall of the gray-green jungle. It was a big one, and it had the blue symbol of the world government on its nose. He set the copter down next to it, his heart thumping like a hammer in his chest.

  The ship loomed silently over his head, its very hugeness impressing upon him the absurdity of his own plans. What could he do—attack the thing with a club and a handful of rocks?

  It was still daylight, but he saw a gleam of yellow light inside the dome of the station house. He didn’t know what he was going to do, but he did know that he was going to do something.

  He walked across the field, acutely aware of the vast ship behind him. Could that ship be destroyed? Would he do it if he could? And if he did, wouldn’t that just confirm the suspicions on Earth—wouldn’t they send more ships, more men?

  He shook his head. He wasn’t thinking straight.

  The cold knot in his stomach drew tighter.

  There were no windows in the round station house, so there was no way for him to sneak a look inside. He simply walked up to the door, knocked, and went in.

  A large central room, stacked with supplies. A door to his right, where babies were received. Two humanoid robots conversing in low tones against one wall. A bright yellow light in the ceiling.

  Toward the back, another door, partly open.

  Voices.

  Keith picked his way through the piles of supplies and knocked on the half-open door.

  “Who is it?” Mark’s voice.

  “Keith.”

  “Come on in!”

  He went inside. There, at the table where he and Carrie and Mark had shared their coffee so many years ago, there was more coffee.

  And a man in a uniform.

  “Keith, this is Captain Nostrand—Space Security. Captain, this is Keith Ortega.”

  They shook hands.

  “I’ve heard of you, sir,” Captain Nostrand said. “I never expected to meet you under these … unusual … circumstances.”

  Keith sized up the captain. After the mental image he had built up in his mind of a veritable ogre sent out from Earth to crush his dream, Captain Nostrand was a pleasant surprise. He was middle-aged, relaxed, with graying hair. He had quiet brown eyes and an easy smile.

  He looked like a nice guy—if that helped any.

  “Mark, what’s the deal?”

  Mark Kamoto shrugged and poured Keith a cup of coffee. “I guess you’ve about figured it,” he said.

  “I heard the ship. I knew it wasn’t one of ours.”

  Captain Nostrand sat down and crossed his long legs. “The government has been getting reports off and on of unexplained spaceship take-offs,” he said. “They finally decided to find out what was going on. They tracked one ship here, and sent me up to have a look-see. Simple enough.”

  “How many men are with you?”

  Nostrand smiled quizzically. “You planning on starting a fracas, Dr. Ortega? I’m unarmed, of course.”

  Keith felt the hot blood in his cheeks. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m upset—to put it mildly. Look, what are you going to do?”

  Nostrand sipped his coffee. “What do you think?”

  “You can’t go back and tell them, Captain. This is too big. You don’t understand. You can’t tell them.”

  “Want to bet?”

  “Easy, now,” Mark said. “Drink your coffee, Keith. It won’t do any good to go off half-cocked.”

  Keith downed his coffee at one searing gulp.

  “You’re mighty nervous.” Captain Nostrand grinned. “What have you got out in that jungle anyhow? A swamp full of monsters?”

  Keith managed to laugh, not too successfully. “Hasn’t Mark told you?”

  “I haven’t said anything,” Mark cut in. “But the captain has sharp eyes.”

  “Has he got a cigarette?”

  “Sure,” said Nostrand. He fished out a pack and handed one to Keith. The smoke tasted good.

  “Look, Captain Nostrand. I’m sorry I came busting in here like a fugitive from a nightmare. It’s just that this thing is terribly important—more important than you can imagine. One word from you now will destroy two decades of work. You and your crew have got to be made to see—”

  “The crew’s robot,” Nostrand said. “I’m the only one you’ve got to deal with.”

  “Then look—”

  “You listen to me a minute,” Captain Nostrand said slowly. “I wasn’t sent out here to pass judgment on whatever it is you’re doing. That’s not my job. I was just sent out to see if you’re doing anything up here. You are, that’s clea
r. I’ll go back and tell them there’s an unreported settlement here, and that’s the end of it as far as I’m concerned. Nothing personal, understand?”

  Keith slammed his fist down on the table. “It is personal!” he said, amazed at his own vehemence. If he had needed any proof that the Keith Ortega who had come out here from Earth fourteen years ago was dead, he had it now.

  Outside, the rain started up again, swishing down the sides of the station dome.

  Desperately, Keith leaned across the table, staring at the man in the old uniform of Space Security. There was one chance, a long one—

  “Nostrand,” he said carefully, “how many men besides yourself are still in the space service?”

  The captain poured himself another cup of coffee. “You already know that, Dr. Ortega.”

  “A hundred? Two hundred?”

  “A hundred and twenty.”

  “Mostly maintenance men?”

  “Yes.”

  The rain came down harder, rushing like a river over the slick bulge of the station house.

  “What made you stay in the space service, Captain? What made you stay when space was dead?”

  Captain Nostrand shrugged, but his brown eyes narrowed.

  “How many flights, have you made, Captain? How many in the last thirty years?”

  “Four,” he said slowly. “Three were runs to Luna.”

  “What made you stick it out, Captain?”

  Nostrand stood up. “That’s none of your business.”

  Keith faced him. “It is my business. I know you, Nostrand. I know why you went out into space when other men stayed at home.”

  Captain Nostrand shrugged again.

  “Captain, listen. I’m asking you to wait one Earth-month before you go back. Let me show you what we’re doing here—all of it, every bit of it. If you still think it’s your duty to tell them after that, O.K. If you don’t, then you can report that the rocket they tracked was just a private ship out on a lark—some crazy back-to-the-good-old-days enthusiast. Vandervort can fix it up—yes, I’ll tell you all about him, too. Captain, you’ve got to stay now—it’s your duty to find out everything they want to know. Radio back and tell them it will take you a little time to investigate. Will you do that, Nostrand?”

  “What’s in it for you?”