“We always need small spaceships and machinery replacements,” said Falkenhorst. “They should be able to make those.”

  “It’s a thought,” said Lyell. “But what I most wanted to emphasize was this: you know the Order is strictly non-political. Events have justified us. During the late Humanist Revolution, for instance, we were the only major group left undisturbed. We cut loose from the government because we foresaw trouble coming. Well, it came, and it is still going on, and things are going to get worse before they get better. If the Order is to survive the anti-scientific reaction budding up on Earth, it will have to stick by its policy.

  “That isn’t going to be easy. Jupiter, as the only state outside the Union, is distrusted on the inner planets, and people won’t thank us for building up their potentials. The Jovians won’t like us either, since we are inner planetarians. And from what little is known, Jovian society is such a turbulent mess that we’ll doubtless be pulled twenty ways at once by as many conflicting power groups.

  “But no matter what the provocation, remember your training and the rules, even if I should die and leave you on your own. The Planetary Engineers exist to serve all mankind. Sometimes that sounds vapidly idealistic, but it’s the only way we can preserve our identity and privileges, the only way we can weather the storm that is coming. The medieval Church was another supranational organization. Its attempts to interfere with separate states led only to trouble and ultimate failure, but in its character as the friend of all mankind it was honored and powerful. When that power began to be used for personal and local ends, the Church broke up. It’s an example we might all bear in mind.”

  He grinned and turned to a thick sheaf of papers on his desk.

  “All right, gentlemen. Lecture’s over. Now let’s get down to particulars.”

  -3-

  “During the lunatic years of the latter twentieth century the White American Church arose and became popular in the southern states of the old U.S.A. Like the contemporaneous Pilgrims, it represented reaction—partly against the troubles which preceded, accompanied, and followed World War III, partly against the spreading of scientific method in human relations which those same troubles forced as the only solution. Unlike the Pilgrim Church, the White Church method was not an attempt to return to a fancied norm, but an eccentric leap toward an imaginary millennium. It was not elaborately rationalized, but violently anti-intellectual; it was not austere, but given to curious orgiastic rites.

  “Some local politicians encouraged it so as to gain an organized, reliable voting body, and eventually it dominated many communities. Its intellectual isolationism caused it to go to still further extremes, especially against the concept of equal rights for all races and the widening public appreciation of rational, scientific thought. However, as it grew in wealth, to become of some importance, it necessarily acquired an intelligentsia and a systematized philosophy.

  “The increasingly effective program of undermining anti-rational organizations and beliefs, which was an important feature of the so-called New Enlightenment, eventually began to shrink its membership. The Second Conference of Rio had also made it obvious that before long the limited world government of the U.N. would be superseded by the complete federalism of the Solar Union which the White American doctrine considered intolerable.

  “Imitating the earlier Pilgrim exodus to Mars, the Church decided to found a colony on Ganymede, the Jovian System being chosen for its remoteness and the general lack of competitive interest in settling it. A large ecological-unit spaceship, the American, was built, and a number of smaller ones obtained. The scheme was that some thousands of members would go out to start the colony while the rest stayed at home and worked to finance the project.

  “In a decade or so of heroic effort, the city of X was firmly established—thus named to suggest the mysterious character of divinity and its dwelling. But meanwhile the financial drain had proved too great for the Mother Church. A membership which had hitherto been loyal broke away in large part because it was being impoverished by demands for money. Psychodynamic technicians of the government were adroit in using the discontent as a wedge for propaganda. By twenty-one hundred A.D., the Jovian colonists found themselves without a sponsor, no ties to Earth, almost completely cut off by the expense of travel to their system.

  “They sent occasional observers and representatives to Earth, but there was no Union governor over them since they seemed neither to need nor want one. Occasional reports about them still come in, rumoring the evolution of a strange and ruthless culture which through a series of ‘revelations’ has been changed far from the original concept.

  “But on the whole the Jovians have remained an isolated and unknown tribe. Their declaration of independence while the Union was confused by the Humanist Revolt on Earth, and their persistent refusal to rejoin, merely emphasizes their already accomplished secession from the rest of the human race.”

  Davenant switched off the microprojector that had been screening de la Garde’s Short History of Interplanetary Colonization. He sighed. “He could have gone into more detail.”

  “He wasn’t interested,” said Falkenhorst. “He deals with what he considers the main line of history, the inner planets. Elsewhere he gives an economic analysis to show that nothing beyond the Belt will ever be important—not enough resources, too hard to colonize, the problem of survival won’t leave any surplus energy.”

  “As a matter of fact,” said Lyell, “the colony wouldn’t have been possible at all if the American government hadn’t quietly subsidized it—by such indirect means that the Church itself never knew about it. The Psychotechs foresaw that the attempt would exhaust and break up the organization on Earth. I’ve seen secret records that the Humanists made public.”

  “They really did get Machiavellian back in those days, didn’t they?” murmured Yuan. “But seriously, there must be more information on Jupiter than this.”

  “Of course,” said Lyell. “Plenty of it. But nothing coherent. Part of our task will be to get the whole picture as it is today, so you boys, at least, may as well start without preconceptions.”

  He took out a curved pipe and began loading it. “Yes, there’s scattered information, but what nobody knows yet is the total cultural pattern. Just remember that man necessarily develops a different civilization in every environment if he stays long enough, and that what may shock you is normal, perhaps necessary, on Ganymede. Also—the Order stays out of politics!”

  Davenant reflected on what he had seen and heard. He had been on Earth but little, even though the Engineers did some work there. Their main interest was space. The planet of his birth had become a stranger to him.

  But he knew the hectic commerce and gaiety which was Luna City; knew the stiff dignity, the high sense of order and discipline, and the respect for intellectual achievement that characterized Mars; was familiar with the patriarchal, somewhat violent clan life which was developing on Venus since the invention of the cheap mobile reclamation unit. But Ganymede would not be like anything he knew.

  The ship, Let There Be Light, hummed and murmured. Stars blazed against blackness in the vision ports. She was a cruiser, one of the new models which could accelerate most of the way and reach even Jupiter in a couple of weeks.

  There were only the six of them aboard, with a full cargo of equipment and supplies. That was not cutting it as fine as an ordinary spaceman would think. Even though only Lyell and Davenant had the full specialized knowledge required for a certificate, any Engineer could operate a spaceship alone if it had not been too drastically damaged.

  Lyell puffed smoke and squinted through a mesh of crow-feet.

  “One more thing might need emphasizing,” he said. “We’ll be there for a year, I imagine, and you’ll want recreation from time to time. I’m afraid you’ll have to do without it. One of the psychological mainstays of the Order’s power is the impression of lawfulness and restraint its men give.”

  “We know that, Boss,” said Kruse, looking hurt.

  “Yes, of course. Still, on an inner planet job a man does get leaves, he knows what amusements accord with local customs, and he goes incog anyway. None of that will be true on Ganymede. I doubt if they have red lights of any sort, for instance, and no disguise will be good enough in so small a commune. On a planet where hedonism was considered normal, where everyone was expected as a matter of morals to indulge himself, we would. But if, as I suspect, the Jovians have a Puritan code, we’ll have to go them one better.”

  “Oh, well.” Kruse grinned. “I figured as much, and built up a reserve the last time I was in Luna City.”

  Davenant felt a certain wistful envy of the man. He himself was too shy and introverted, he knew, to make a decent roisterer. An occasional fling in a licensed rec house, beer and gambling and whatnot was about his speed. If he were rich—but Engineers didn’t get rich. All the profits of the Order went back into the Order and its development. Personnel from cadet to coordinator drew small salaries and no bonuses. The rewards were intangibles—prestige, comradeship, a sense of being important to man’s highest and finest adventure.

  A watch-change bell broke up the discussion. Some went to sleep, some to their posts. Only Kruse and Davenant remained in the little saloon. The Venusian drifted across to a locker—they were currently in free-fall orbit—and got two bulbs of beer.

  “This ends my ration for today,” he said. “Care to join me, Hall?”

  “Sure.” Davenant took one, put the tube in his mouth, and squeezed. The cool tingle of it was refreshing.

  Kruse hooked a leg around a stanchion and hung across the table from him. “If I’m not getting too personal,” he asked, “why did you join?”

  “Eh? Oh!” Davenant felt himself reddening, for no good reason. That irritated him, but he liked the big Venusian. “The usual. They saw my school and psych records, offered me an appointment, I took it. Isn’t that what happens to everybody?”

  “Yeah, sure. But you were only fourteen or fifteen then, not really capable of deciding such a thing. A lot of kids sign up because they think it’s glamorous, and drop out after a couple of years. What made you stick?”

  “What makes anybody stick? I was a poor boy. My father was one of the intellectual routineer class which was displaced by the Second Industrial Revolution, though he never joined the Humanists. He didn’t like living off citizen’s allowance and odd jobs—called it a handout. My people were Alaskans, with some of the pioneer tradition left in them. But his health was too frail for him to emigrate to Mars or Venus. I didn’t want to go through that myself.”

  Davenant shrugged, not meeting Kruse’s blue eyes. There had been other reasons—a girl, other women since then, even if he wasn’t a successful chaser. Sometimes he wondered if a man ever really falls out of love. The pain stops, most of it, and presently a new love comes along. But isn’t she merely added to the pantheon?

  “Why do you ask?” he said.

  “Oh, just getting acquainted.” Kruse shrugged. “Me, I was offered the same, and my folks urged me to accept. Parents’ consent is needed on Venus. The family is more important there than it’s become in Western Earth. It’d be something for the clan to brag about, a member in the Engineers. So I did join and I’m not sorry, but I think I’ll resign after this job is over.”

  Davenant felt shocked. “How come? Don’t you like it?”

  “Sure. But I’m pushing forty, and it’s time I raised a family. The lucky girl can’t see living on Luna, so I’ve got my eye on a valley in the Hellfires. Under the Development Act, I can homestead the whole place. It’s just rock and sand now, but give me a few years and it’ll be the sweetest little oasis you ever saw.”

  “There’s a breakdown coming,” said Davenant. “The Humanists didn’t stay in power long, no, but they were only one symptom. You can see corruption and personal government are growing. You’re better off belonging to an organization which is above such matters.”

  “Now you’re just parroting what your trainers taught you,” said Kruse. “It’s probably true enough as far as Earth is concerned, but Venus is a big place. Have you ever thought that maybe the Order is wrong? That maybe by setting itself above the realities of politics it’s cutting itself off from its own roots?”

  Davenant gulped beer and tried to settle a suddenly chaotic mind. It was not merely that Kruse spoke heresy. The Order permitted, even encouraged independent thinking for the simple reason that a rigid brain was no good for its purposes. But the Venusian, what he had seen of him, had never given the impression of being an intellectual beyond the requirements of his work. A skilled technician, yes, a big, laughing, hard-fisted tosspot, a collector of improper limericks, but he had no business dealing in disquieting philosophies.

  Davenant was not especially narrow. He read widely, enjoyed music and chess, liked to think of himself as a bit of a universalist. But he realized now with some dismay that his intellectually formative years might have been too bookish, too concentrated on one ideal and in one way of life. He had crossed millions of kilometers and seen strange landscapes, but had he ever looked into the soul of a man—even his own?

  “Let’s have another beer,” he said hastily. “We can borrow from tomorrow’s ration. How about some chess?”

  -4-

  Seen from space, Ganymede was bleaker than Luna herself—seamed with mountains, pocked with craters, mottled dark and light over her sterile face. This far from the sun, her dayside was wrapped in dusk. Since she always faced Jupiter, the primary was gibbous or only a great scimitar while the sun was up, and at high noon a total eclipse threw blackness across the land.

  As the cruiser approached, her radar picked up an object in orbit not far above the surface: metallic, to judge from the intensity of the returning signal.

  “Odd,” muttered Lyell. “I know the colonists broke up the old American and most of their other spaceships for the parts. I didn’t know they’d established a satellite station.”

  He beamed a call, but there was no answer. Only the dry whisper of cosmic interference.

  “Maybe a ship parked there?” suggested Yuan.

  “Too big to be an ordinary ship. Well—let’s come down the hard way, then.”

  It was a tricky job to ride a vessel as massive as the Light down a GCA beam, but Lyell managed it with hardly a bump.

  When they were in their cradle, Davenant looked out and could not see much of X—just the spacefield, a radio mast, several buildings, and a cluster of other structures which were well distant. Most of it must be underground.

  The sun was a tiny, blinding flame in a sky nearly black. The tremendous edge of Jupiter dominated heaven—amber, streaked with dull reds and blues and greens and browns, splotches which were storms that could have swallowed Earth whole. The planet was so big that it seemed to be endlessly falling, about to crash ruinously on the broken face of its moon. Io was visible as a giant sliver to one side of the primary. The whole sky looked unnatural, like something seen in a dream.

  A ring of hills shouldered starkly above the horizon, barely visible in the vague, cold, misty twilight under which the world seemed to lie. Davenant saw fields of snow that must be frozen ammonia, and part of the range looked as if it might be one enormous chunk of ice. The air was thin—nitrogen and argon, a wisp of methane and other gases.

  Luna had been near home when the first men reached it; Mars had had some life, at least; Venus had been a wind-howling hell, but rich with promise. This place seemed to hold a perpetual despair. It was, somehow, the grimmest scene Davenant had ever experienced.

  Trying to shake off his depression, he pointed to the nearer buildings—long, low, featureless boxes with an odd bluish shimmer.

  “I wonder what those are made of?” he asked.

  “Ice, I imagine,” said Falkenhorst.

  Davenant blinked. “You mean solid water?”

  “Surely,” said the Martian. “There’s a lot of it on the Galilean moons. It’s a pretty good insulator, can be worked with a blow-torch or cast into molds, and if you make your walls thick enough and insulate them on the inside, they’ll do fine at these temperatures.”

  Davenant nodded. He should have realized that. His training, the whole history of space colonization emphasized that other worlds were not Earth, and that a whole new approach was needed for each one.

  “I’ll bet they use the Absolute scale habitually here,” he said. “It’d be too much trouble always to speak of minus a hundred and some degrees Centigrade.”

  “You’re getting the idea,” said Falkenhorst.

  There was no provision for taking a spaceship cradle underground, but a small trac appeared, drawing a long plastitube two meters in diameter out of a valve in one building. It gripped around the airlock, and Lyell led his crew through it. They were all in dress uniform and wore their carefully schooled dignity on their features.

  Emerging at the farther end of the tube, they stepped into a room which struck them with chill. The Jovians must have habituated themselves to such temperatures, to conserve power. Davenant, for one, had to take conscious control of somatic reactions, and force his body to accept the conditions.

  Ten guards were drawn up on either side of the entrance, an immobile line. They had the gangling, bulge-chested slenderness which was also characteristic of Martians—low gravity, low air pressure even inside the settlements—but this was exaggerated, for they were easily two meters tall. Under steel helmets, their faces were white rather than sun-darkened. Their uniform was a one-piece black coverall fitting the muscular bodies closely, boots, a belt supporting pistol and pouch; their heads were shaven, and they stood like robots.