Some twenty thousand colonists lived there. They were miners, engineers, laborers, technicians in the food and maintenance centers. There were three doctors, a scattering of teachers and librarians and similar personnel, a handful of police and administrators. Exactly fifteen people were employed in brewing, distilling, tavern-running, movie operation, and the other non-essential occupations which men required as they did food and air.

  This was New America, chief city of Venus in 2051 A.D.

  Hollister didn’t enjoy his meal. He got it, cafeteria style, in one of the big plain messhalls, after a temporary ration book had been issued him. It consisted of a few vegetables, a lot of potato, a piece of the soggy yeast synthetic which was the closest to meat Venus offered—all liberally loaded with a tasteless basic food concentrate—a vitamin capsule, and a glass of flavored water. When he took out one of his remaining cigarettes, a score of eyes watched it hungrily. Not much tobacco here either. He inhaled savagely, feeling the obscure guilt of the have confronted with the have-not.

  There were a number of people in the room with him, eating their own rations. Men and women were represented about equally. All wore coveralls or the standard shorts, and most looked young, but hard too, somehow—even the women. Hollister was used to female engineers and technicians at home, but here everybody worked.

  For the time being, he stuck to his Earthside garments.

  He sat alone at one end of a long table, wondering why nobody talked to him. You’d think they would be starved for a new face and word from Earth. Prejudice? Yes, a little of that, considering the political situation; but Hollister thought something more was involved.

  Fear. They were all afraid of something.

  When Karsov strolled in, the multilingual hum of conversation died, and Hollister guessed shrewdly at the fear. The Guardian made his way directly to the Earthling’s place. He had a blocky, bearded man with a round smiling face in tow.

  “Simon Hollister . . . Heinrich Gebhardt,” the policeman introduced them. They shook hands, sizing each other up. Karsov sat down. “Get me the usual,” he said, handing over his ration book.

  Gebhardt nodded and went over to the automat. It scanned the books and punched them when he had dialed his orders. Then it gave him two trays, which he carried back.

  Karsov didn’t bother to thank him. “I have been looking for you,” he told Hollister. “Where have you been?”

  “Just wandering around,” said the Earthling cautiously. Inside, he felt muscles tightening, and his mind seemed to tilt forward, as if sliding off the hypnotically imposed pseudo-personality which had been meant as camouflage in the narcoquiz. “It’s quite a labyrinth here.”

  “You should have stayed in the barracks,” said Karsov. There was no expression in his smooth-boned face; there never seemed to be. “Oh, well. I wanted to say you have been found acceptable.”

  “Good,” said Hollister, striving for imperturbability.

  “I will administer the oath after lunch,” said Karsov. “Then you will be a full citizen of the Venusian Federation. We do not hold with formalities, you see—no time.” He reached into a pocket and got out a booklet which he gave to Hollister. “But I advise you to study this carefully. It is a resumé of the most important laws, insofar as they differ from Earth’s. Punishment for infraction is severe.”

  Gebhardt looked apologetic. “It hass to be,” he added. His bass voice had a slight blur and hiss of German accent, but he was good at the English which was becoming the common language of Venus. “This planet vas made in hell. If ve do not all work together, ve all die.”

  “And then, of course, there is the trouble with Earth,” said Karsov. His narrow eyes studied Hollister for a long moment. “Just how do people back there feel about our declaration of independence?”

  “Well—” Hollister paused. Best to tell the unvarnished truth, he decided. “Some resentment, of course. After all the money we . . . they . . . put into developing the colonies—”

  “And all the resources they took out,” said Gebhardt. “Men vere planted on Venus back in the last century to mine fissionables, vich vere getting short efen then. The colonies vere made self-supporting because that vas cheaper than hauling supplies for them, vich vould haff been an impossible task anyvay. Some of the colonies vere penal, some vere manned by arbitrarily assigned personnel; the so-called democracies often relied on broken men, who could not find vork at home or who had been displaced by var. No, ve owe them notting.”

  Hollister shrugged. “I’m not arguing. But people do wonder why, if you wanted national status, you didn’t at least stay with the U.N. That’s what Mars is doing.”

  “Because we are . . . necessarily . . . developing a whole new civilization here, something altogether remote from anything Earth has ever seen,” snapped Karsov. “We will still trade our fissionables for things we need, until the day we can make everything here ourselves, but we want as little to do with Earth as possible. Never mind, you will understand in time.”

  Hollister’s mouth lifted in a crooked grin. There hadn’t been much Earth could do about it; in the present state of astronautics, a military expedition to suppress the nationalists would cost more than anyone could hope to gain even from the crudest imperialism. Also, as long as no clear danger was known to exist, it wouldn’t have sat well with a planet sick of war; the dissension produced might well have torn the young world government, which still had only limited powers, apart.

  But astronautics was going to progress, he thought grimly. Spaceships wouldn’t have to improve much to carry, cheaply, loads of soldiers in cold sleep, ready to land when thermonuclear bombardment from the skies had smashed a world’s civilization. And however peaceful Earth might be, she was still a shining temptation to the rest of the System, and it looked very much as if something was brewing here on Venus which could become ugly before the century was past.

  Well—

  “Your first assignment is already arranged,” said Karsov. Hollister jerked out of his reverie and tried to keep his fists unclenched. “Gebhardt will be your boss. If you do well, you can look for speedy promotion. Meanwhile,”—he flipped a voucher across—“here is the equivalent of the dollars you had along, in our currency.”

  Hollister stuck the sheet in his pouch. It was highway robbery, he knew, but he was in no position to complain and the Venusian government wanted the foreign exchange. And he could only buy trifles with it anyway; the essentials were issued without payment, the size of the ration depending on rank. Incentive bonuses were money, though, permitting you to amuse yourself but not to consume more of the scarce food or textiles or living space.

  He reflected that the communist countries before World War Three had never gone this far. Here, everything was government property. The system didn’t call itself communism, naturally, but it was, and probably there was no choice. Private enterprise demanded a fairly large economic surplus, which simply did not exist on Venus.

  Well, it wasn’t his business to criticize their internal arrangements. He had never been among the few fanatics left on Earth who still made a god of a particular economic set-up.

  Gebhardt cleared his throat. “I am in charge of the atmosphere detail in this district,” he said. “I am here on leafe, and vill be going back later today. Very glad to haff you. Hollister, ve are alvays short of men. Ve lost two in the last rock storm.”

  “Cheerful news,” said the Earthman. His face resumed its hard woodenness. “Well, I didn’t think Venus was going to be any bed of roses.”

  “It vill be,” said Gebhardt. Dedication glowed on the hairy face. “Some day it vill be.”

  II

  THE OATH was pretty drastic: in effect, Hollister put himself completely at the mercy of the Technic Board, which for all practical purposes was the city government. Each colony, he gathered, had such a body, and there was a federal board in this town which decided policy for the entire planet.

  Anyone who wished to enter the government had to pass a series of rigid tests, after which there were years of apprenticeship and study, gradual promotion on the recommendations of seniors. The study was an exhausting course of history, psychotechnics, and physical science: in principle, thought Hollister, remembering some of the blubberheads who still got themselves elected at home, a good idea. The governing boards combined legislative, executive, and judicial functions, and totaled only a couple of thousand people for the whole world. It didn’t seem like much for a nation of nearly two million, and the minimal paperwork surprised him—he had expected an omnipresent bureaucracy.

  But of course they had the machines to serve them, recording everything in electronic files whose computers could find and correlate any data and were always checking up. And he was told pridefully that the schools were inculcating the rising generation with a tight ethic of obedience.

  Hollister had supper, and returned to the Casual barracks to sleep. There were only a few men in there with him, most of them here on business from some other town. He was wakened by the alarm, whose photocells singled him out and shot forth a supersonic beam; it was a carrier wave for the harsh ringing in his head which brought him to his feet.

  Gebhardt met him at an agreed-on locker room. There was a wiry, tough-looking Mongoloid with him who was introduced as Henry Yamashita. “Stow your fancy clothes, boy,” boomed the chief, “and get on some TBI’s.” He handed over a drab, close-fitting coverall.

  Hollister checked his own garments and donned the new suit wordlessly. After that there was a heavy plasti-cord outfit which, with boots and gloves, decked his whole body. Yamashita helped him strap on the oxygen bottles and plug in the Hilsch cooler. The helmet came last, its shoulder-piece buckled to the airsuit, but all of them kept theirs hinged back to leave their heads free.

  “If somet’ing happens to our tank,” said Gebhardt, “you slap that helmet down fast. Or maybe you like being embalmed. Haw!” His cheerfulness was more evident when Karsov wasn’t around.

  Hollister checked the valves with the caution taught him on Luna—his engineering experience was not faked. Gebhardt grunted approvingly. Then they slipped on the packs containing toilet kits, change of clothes, and emergency rations; clipped ropes, batteries, and canteens to their belts—the latter with the standard sucker tubes by which a man could drink directly even in his suit; and clumped out of the room.

  A descending ramp brought them to a garage where the tanks were stored. These looked not unlike the sandcats of Mars, but were built lower and heavier, with a refrigerating tube above and a grapple in the nose. A mechanic gestured at one dragging a covered steel wagon full of supplies, and the three men squeezed into the tiny transparent cab.

  Gebhardt gunned the engine, nodding as it roared.

  “O.K.,” he said. “On ve go.”

  “What’s the power source?” asked Hollister above the racket.

  “Alcohol,” answered Yamashita. “We get it from the formaldehyde. Bottled oxygen. A compressor and cooling system to keep the oxy tanks from blowing up on us—not that they don’t once in a while. Some of the newer models use a peroxide system.”

  “And I suppose you save the water vapor and C02 to get the oxygen back,” ventured Hollister.

  “Just the water. There’s always plenty of carbon dioxide.” Yamashita looked out, and his face set in tight lines.

  The tank waddled through the great air lock and up a long tunnel toward the surface. When they emerged, the wind was like a blow in the face. Hollister felt the machine shudder, and the demon howl drowned out the engine. He accepted the earplugs Yamashita handed him with a grateful smile.

  There was dust and sand scudding by them, making it hard to see the mountainside down which they crawled. Hollister caught glimpses of naked fanglike peaks, raw slashes of ocher and blue where minerals veined the land, the steady march of dunes across the lower ledges. Overhead, the sky was an unholy tide of ragged, flying clouds, black and gray and sulfurous yellow. He could not see the sun, but the light around him was a weird hard brass color, like the light on Earth just before a thunderstorm.

  The wind hooted and screamed, banging on the tank walls, yelling and rattling and groaning. Now and then a dull quiver ran through the land and trembled in Hollister’s bones, somewhere an avalanche was ripping out a mountain’s flanks. Briefly, a veil of dust fell so thick around them that they were blind, grinding through an elemental night with hell and the furies loose outside. The control board’s lights were wan on Gebhardt’s intent face, most of the time he was steering by instruments.

  Once the tank lurched into a gully. Hollister, watching the pilot’s lips, thought he muttered. “Damn! That vasn’t here before!” He extended the grapple, clutching rock and pulling the tank and its load upward.

  Yamashita clipped two small disks to his larynx and gestured at the same equipment hanging on Hollister’s suit. His voice came thin but fairly clear: “Put on your talkie unit if you want to say anything.” Hollister obeyed, guessing that the earplugs had a transistor arrangement powered by a piece of isotope which reproduced the vibrations in the throat. It took concentration to understand the language as they distorted it, but he supposed he’d catch on fast enough.

  “How many hours till nightfall?” he asked.

  “About twenty.” Yamashita pointed to the clock on the board, it was calibrated to Venus’ seventy-two hour day. “It’s around one hundred thirty kilometers to the camp, so we should just about make it by sunset.”

  “That isn’t very fast,” said Hollister. “Why not fly, or at least build roads?”

  “The aircraft are all needed for speed travel and impassable terrain, and the roads will come later,” said Yamashita. “These tanks can go it all right—most of the time.”

  “But why have the camp so far from the city?”

  “It’s the best location from a supply standpoint. We get most of our food from Little Moscow, and water from Hellfire, and chemicals from New America and Roger’s Landing. The cities more or less specialize, you know. They have to: there isn’t enough iron ore and whatnot handy to any one spot to build a city big enough to do everything by itself. So the air camps are set up at points which minimize the total distance over which supplies have to be hauled.”

  “You mean action distance, don’t you? The product of the energy and time required for hauling.”

  Yamashita nodded, with a new respect in his eyes. “You’ll do,” he said.

  The wind roared about them. It was more than just the slow rotation of the planet and its nearness to the sun which created such an incessant storm; if that had been all, there would never have been any chance of making it habitable. It was the high carbon dioxide content of the air, and its greenhouse effect; and in the long night, naked arid rock cooled off considerably. With plenty of water and vegetation, and an atmosphere similar to Earth’s, Venus would have a warm but rather gentle climate on the whole, the hurricanes moderated to trade winds; indeed, with the lower Coriolis force, the destructive cyclones of Earth would be unknown.

  Such, at least, was the dream of the Venusians. But looking out, Hollister realized that a fraction of the time and effort they were expending would have made the Sahara desert bloom. They had been sent here once as miners, but there was no longer any compulsion on them to stay; if they asked to come back to Earth, their appeal could not be denied however expensive it would be to ship them all home.

  Then why didn’t they?

  Well, why go back to a rotten civilization like—Hollister caught himself. Sometimes his pseudo-memories were real enough in him to drown out the genuine ones, rage and grief could nearly overwhelm him till he recalled that the sorrow was for people who had never existed. The anger had had to be planted deep, to get by a narcoquiz, but he wondered if it might not interfere with his mission, come the day.

  He grinned sardonically at himself. One man, caught on a planet at the gates of the Inferno, watched by a powerful and ruthless government embracing that entire world, and he was setting himself against it!

  Most likely he would die here, and the economical Venusians would process his body for its chemicals as they did other corpses, and that would be the end of it as far as he was concerned.

  Well, he quoted to himself, a man might try.

  Gebhardt’s camp was a small shell, a radio mast, and a shed sticking out of a rolling landscape of rock and sand; the rest was underground. The sun was down on a ragged horizon, dimly visible as a huge blood-red disk, when he arrived. Yamashita and Hollister had taken their turns piloting; the Earthman found it exhausting work, and his head rang with the noise when he finally stepped out into the subterranean garage.

  Yamashita led him to the barracks. “We’re about fifty here,” he explained. “All men.” He grinned. “That makes a system of minor rewards and punishments based on leaves to a city very effective.”

  The barracks was a long room with triple rows of bunks and a few tables and chairs; only Gebhardt rated a chamber of his own, though curtains on the bunks did permit some privacy. An effort had been made to brighten the place up with murals, some of which weren’t bad at all, and the men sat about reading, writing letters, talking, playing games. They were the usual conglomerate of races and nationalities, with some interesting half-breeds; hard work and a parsimonious diet had made them smaller than the average American or European, but they looked healthy enough.

  “Simon Hollister, our new sub-engineer,” called Yamashita as they entered. “Just got in from Earth. Now you know as much as I do.” He flopped onto a bunk while the others drifted over. “Go ahead. Tell all. Birth, education, hobbies, religion, sex life, interests, prejudices—they’ll find it out anyway, and God knows we could use a little variety around here.”

  A stocky blond man paused suspiciously. “From Earth?” he asked slowly. “We’ve had no new people from Earth for thirty years. What did you want to come here for?”