Exile From Venus

His insistence widened Linda's eyes. The civilized Venusians were always ready to take the sensible, the expedient way. Had they been otherwise, had they not been the descendants of sensible Terrestrian ancestors, they would have been included in the devastation which had left all but small and widely scattered patches of Terra uninhabitable for the past seven-hundred years. Rather, those who today were Venusians would have been struggling savages, scraping out a living in some uncontaminated area.

Verrill's was an almost Terrestrian stubbornness; something primitive and atavistic, very much like that queer quirk which made some Venusians return to their native Earth to set up trading-posts, where they bartered with the barbarian tribesmen for tobacco and wines, spices and jewels and perfumes, all manner of luxuries which Venus did not offer.

Linda made her final appeal: "Leaving all this, to scramble around in that terrible waste and desolation--oh, do be sensible!"

Her voice, and the kiss that followed it, made Verrill at once aware of what generations of Venusians had taken for granted. He looked across the gardens and the lake, and up at the prodigious span of girders. The original purpose of the structure had been to house a military outpost that was to have outflanked a comparable one on Luna. In the years just before The War, engineers and scientists had been sent from Terra to build those enormous domes, plastic-sheathed and air-tight, to exclude the raging dust-storms and the overwhelming concentration of formaldehyde which made up most of the natural Venusian atmosphere. Rather than rely on any system depending upon chemically prepared oxygen, they had established gardens, orchards, fields of plant-life which liberated sufficient oxygen to maintain the required balance.

This was to have been simply a garrison. According to plan, it would have played a decisive part in the final clash for Terrestrian supremacy. Meanwhile, there had come to be little difference between the rival dictatorships, except in the wording of their slogans. The Anglo-Capitalist Bloc had borrowed all the kinds and twists of regimentation of the rival bloc. The difference finally became one of flavor rather than principle.

A cool-headed few, in command of the Venusian garrison, had seen that neither side could win; that there would be only mutual and total destruction. The warfare became more and more atrocious; and the Anglo-Capitalist Bloc drifted further and further from the sort of organization that the Venus garrison, in no immediate danger, could contemplate defending with enthusiasm. Thus, when one day the Lunar Base radio complained of attack by suicide-ships and then went abruptly silent, the Venusian Base, which might have been expected to cry "Geronimo!" and leap into the holocaust, instead underwent a short and violent revolution in which the ardently military were disposed of. Then, stubbornly intending to survive chaos and idiocy, the Venus Base folded its hands and sat out the fatal clash that ended The War and virtually the whole of Terrestrian civilization with it....

After several centuries, the Venus Council risked an exploration party to Terra to see whether the globe was becoming fit for human habitation again. Large areas had, of course, through natural processes become decontaminated; there were scattered colonies of survivors--farmers, herdsmen, hunters, armed with clubs, spears, and other primitive weapons. Contact was made, communication struck up, trade--of considerable importance to both--established; and, after the ten years which this took, the Venusians were left with very little inclination to colonize Terra. Life under the domes was comfortable, with controlled climate, law and order, science and art. Comfortable, civilized, and sensible. While Terra--

"_Be a sensible Venusian_," was what Linda meant. "_Don't go looking for trouble when you can do better without. Don't be a typical Terrestrian!_"

The whole clash of the previous night had been silly. Irritated by Gil Dawson's giving Linda a ruby as a souvenir of his official inspection-tour of the Council-controlled Terrestrian trading-posts, Verrill had flung the trinket into the lake. After a brisk fracas in which Dawson had finally wearied of getting up, only to be knocked down again, Verrill had shouted to Linda and to most of Venus that he'd get her a man's-sized ruby, the Fire of Skanderbek. She, thoroughly outraged, had told him and Dawson that by Heaven she'd not be the prize, either of a brawl or a souvenir-finding contest. To make it good, she had concluded by telling Verrill that he'd be far better occupied if he got the Venus Council to assign him to one of the committees for improving the living-standards of the Terrestrians, and won the Fire of Skanderbek as a token of their gratitude.

But however earnestly she besought him to forget it all, Verrill was just as unhappily determined to go through with it. "I can't back down. Dawson will surely take a crack at stealing the Fire himself--and that would make it tough for me. And for you."

"Oh, let the fool try!" she cried, desperately. "He'd never come back from the territory of those wildmen."

Verrill shook his head. "He might come back. Even though I did give him a trouncing, he's anything but a clown. You wouldn't accept the Fire of Skanderbek if he offered it--but he'd give it to someone else, and then--well, a lot of women do dislike you! There's nothing I can do, except to beat him to it."

And so, Verrill went to do as he had to do.

The space-freighter veered from her course only a little; instead of landing in the sun-blasted plain at the foot of the mountains into which Verrill was to go, she launched a crew-boat which took him to the trading-post at the foot of barren limestone bulwarks.

Dawson was not at the post. But while a head start was a happy omen, Verrill knew that it had its limits, since his plan to ingratiate himself with the barbarians until he could seize the fetish-ruby and return to the post involved so much time that the gain of hours or days meant little.

Ingratiate himself--steal the Fire of Skanderbek--and get out--infinitely simpler than Linda's suggestion, probably an utterly impossible one, of deserving it finally as a gift. His first look at the bearded mountaineers convinced him that no amount of do-gooding could ever move them to gratitude.

Those lounging in the compound of the fortified trading-post wore homespun pants and sheepskin jackets. They fairly clanked with trade daggers, trade pistols, and trade hatchets; some carried trade muskets, and some had the new repeating rifles. Their tanned and hairy faces and bitter eyes made it plain that looting and robbing, brawling and mayhem and murder were their very breath of life.

They spoke the international language which had developed sufficiently to come into common use around 2200 A.D. English, while a nightmare of contradictions to baffle a foreigner, had offered these advantages: next to Chinese, no other language was so free of inflections; and it could so readily assimilate all manner of foreign words. Thus, since the tone-deaf Occidental had not been able to master the simplicities of Chinese or other Mongolian tongues, the Asiatics had taken up English, with which had been blended Arabic, Urdu, Malay, and a good deal of Western European; and, while seven centuries of Venusian isolation had made the speech of the people of the Domes diverge from the original international Terrestrian, Verrill had not too much difficulty in making himself understood.

"This black bag," he told a group of the caravan men, "will interest Ardelan--that's your chief's name, isn't it? Let me go into the mountains with you to talk to him."

"You're crazy," a craggy faced fellow with drooping moustaches and hard blue eyes told him, levelly. "You think I'm crazy."

Verrill laid out three daggers. He picked one up, jabbed it into the top of a table cluttered with heaps of goatskins, dried apricots, raisins, and bags of coriander seed. He bent the weapon until the grip touched the table top. He released it. It snapped straight up, with a fine, high pitched spang. He plucked a dagger from the mountaineer's belt, drew the other weapon from the table, and slashed them edge to edge.