“I don’t know,” he said. “War, overpopulation, environmental degradation—”

  “Don’t be a gloomy,” Catalina chided him. The lambent light struck rainbows from the tiara of native crystal that she wore in her hair. “People can learn. They needn’t make the same mistakes forever. We’ll build paradise here. A strange sort of paradise, yes, where trees soar into a sky full of Jupiter, and waterfalls tumble slowly, slowly down into deep-blue lakes, and birds fly like tiny bright-colored bullets, and deer cross the meadows in ten-meter leaps…but paradise.”

  “Not perfect,” he said. “Nothing is.”

  “No, and we wouldn’t wish that,” she agreed. “We want some discontent left to keep minds active, keep them hankering for the stars.” She chuckled. “I’m sure history will find ways to make them believe things could be better elsewhere. Or nature will—Oh!”

  Her eyes widened. A hand went to her mouth. And then, frantically, she was kissing him, and he her, and they were clasping and feeling each other while the waltz melody sparkled and the flowers breathed and Jupiter’s glory cataracted over them uncaring whether they existed.

  He tasted tears on her mouth. “Let’s go dancing,” she begged. “Let’s dance till we drop.”

  “Surely,” he promised, and led her back to the ballroom.

  It would help them once more forget the giant meteoroid, among the many which the planet sucked in from the Belt, that had plowed into grim and marginal Outpost Ganymede precisely half a decade before the Martian colony was discontinued.

  Well, I guess people don’t learn. They breed, and fight, and devour, and pollute, till:

  Mother: “We can’t afford it.”

  Dad: “We can’t not afford it.”

  Mother: “Those children—like goblins, like ghosts, from starvation. If Tad were one of them, and somebody said never mind him, we have to build an interstellar ship…I wonder how you would react.”

  Dad: “I don’t know. But I do know this is our last chance. We’ll be operating on a broken shoestring as is, compared to what we need to do the thing right. If they hadn’t made that breakthrough at Lunar Hydromagnetics Lab, when the government was on the point of closing it down—Anyway, darling, that’s why I’ll have to put in plenty of time aboard myself, while the ship is built and tested. My entire gang will be on triple duty,”

  Mother: “Suppose you succeed. Suppose you do get your precious spacecraft that can travel almost as fast as light. Do you imagine for an instant it can—an armada can ease life an atom’s worth for mankind?”

  Dad: “Well, several score atoms’ worth. Starting with you and Tad and me.”

  Mother: “I’d feel a monster, safe and comfortable en route to a new world while behind me they huddled in poverty by the billions.”

  Dad: “My first duty is to you two. However, let’s leave that aside. Let’s think about man as a whole. What is he? A beast that is born, grubs around, copulates, quarrels, and dies. Uh-huh. But sometimes something more in addition. He does breed his occasional Jesus, Leonardo, Bach, Jefferson, Einstein, Armstrong, Olveida—whoever you think best justifies our being here—doesn’t he? Well, when you huddle people together like rats, they soon behave like rats. What then of the spirit? I tell you, if we don’t make a fresh start, a bare handful of us but free folk whose descendants may in the end come back and teach—if we don’t, why, who cares whether the two-legged animal goes on for another million years or becomes extinct in a hundred? Humanness will be dead.”

  Me: “And gosh, Mother, the fun!”

  Mother: “You don’t understand, dear.”

  Dad: “Quiet. The man-child speaks. He understands better than you.”

  Quarrel: till I run from them crying. Well, eight or nine years old. That night, was that the first night I started telling myself stories about Murphy’s Hall?

  It is Murphy’s Hall. I say that’s the right place for Dad to be.

  When Hoo Fong, chief engineer, brought the news to the captain’s cabin, the captain sat still for minutes. The ship thrummed around them; they felt it faintly, a song in their bones. And the light fell from the overhead, into a spacious and gracious room, furnishings, books, a stunning photograph of the Andromeda galaxy, an animation of Mary and Tad: and weight was steady underfoot, a full gee of acceleration, one light-year per year per year, though this would become more in shipboard time as you started to harvest the rewards of relativity…a mere two decades to the center of this galaxy, three to the neighbor whose portrait you adored…How hard to grasp that you were dead!

  “But the ramscoop is obviously functional,” said the captain, hearing his pedantic phrasing.

  Hoo Fong shrugged. “It will not be, after the radiation has affected electronic parts. We have no prospect of decelerating and returning home at low velocity before both we and the ship have taken a destructive dose.”

  Interstellar hydrogen, an atom or so in a cubic centimeter, raw vacuum to Earthdwellers at the bottom of their ocean of gas and smoke and stench and carcinogens. To spacefolk, fuel, reaction mass, a way to the stars, once you’re up to the modest pace at which you meet enough of those atoms per second. However, your force screens must protect you from them, else they strike the hull and spit gamma rays like a witch’s curse.

  “We’ve hardly reached one-fourth c,” the captain protested. “Unmanned probes had no trouble at better than 99 percent.”

  “Evidently the system is inadequate for the larger mass of this ship,” the engineer answered. “We should have made its first complete test flight unmanned too.”

  “You know we didn’t have funds to develop the robots for that.”

  “We can send our data back. The next expedition—”

  “I doubt there’ll be any. Yes, yes, we’ll beam the word home. And then, I suppose, keep going. Four weeks, did you say, till the radiation sickness gets bad? The problem is not how to tell Earth, but how to tell the rest of the men.”

  Afterward, alone with the pictures of Andromeda, Mary, and Tad, the captain thought: I’ve lost more than the years ahead, I’ve lost the year behind, that we might have had together.

  What shall I say to you? That I tried and failed and am sorry? But am I? At this hour I don’t want to lie, most especially not to you three.

  Did I do right?

  Yes.

  No.

  O God, oh, shit, how can I tell? The Moon is rising above the soot-clouds. I might make it that far. Commissioner Wenig was talking about how we should maintain the last Lunar base another few years, till industry can find a substitute for those giant molecules they make there. But wasn’t the Premier of United Africa saying those industries ought to be forbidden, they’re too wasteful, and any country that keeps them going is an enemy of the human race?

  Gunfire rattles in the streets. Some female voice somewhere is screaming.

  I’ve got to get Mother out of here. That’s the last thing I can do for Dad.

  After ten years of studying to be a food engineer or a doctor, I’ll probably feel too tired to care about the Moon. After another ten years of being a desk pilot and getting fat, I’ll probably be outraged at any proposal to spend my tax money—

  —except maybe for defense. In Siberia they’re preaching that strange new missionary religion. And the President of Europe has said that if necessary, his government will denounce the ban on nuclear weapons.

  The ship passed among the stars bearing a crew of dead bones. After a hundred billion years it crossed the Edge—not the edge of space or time, which does not exist, but the Edge—and came to harbor at Murphy’s Hall.

  And the dust which the cosmic rays had made began to stir, and gathered itself back into bones; and from the radiation-corroded skeleton of the ship crept atoms which formed into flesh; and the captain and his men awoke. They opened themselves and looked upon the suns that went blazing and streaming overhead.

  “We’re home,” said the captain.

  Proud at the head of his men, he strode uphill from the dock, toward the hall of the five hundred and forty doors. Comets flitted past him, novae exploded in dreadful glory, planets turned and querned, the clinker of a once-living world drifted by, new life screamed its outrage at being born.

  The roofs of the house lifted like mountains against night and the light-clouds. The ends of rafters jutted beyond the eaves, carved into dragon heads. Through the doorway toward which the captain led his crew, eight hundred men could have marched abreast. But a single form waited to greet them; and beyond him was darkness.

  When the captain saw who that was, he bowed very deeply.

  The other took his hand. “We have been waiting,” he said.

  The captain’s heart sprang. “Mary too?”

  “Yes, of course. Everyone.”

  Me. And you. And you. And you in the future, if you exist. In the end, Murphy’s Law gets us all. But we, my friends, must go to him the hard way. Our luck didn’t run out. Instead, the decision that could be made was made. It was decided for us that our race—among the trillions which must be out there wondering what lies beyond their skies—is not supposed to have either discipline or dreams. No, our job is to make everybody nice and safe and equal, and if this happens to be impossible, then nothing else matters.

  If I went to that place—and I’m glad that this is a lie—I’d keep remembering what we might have done and seen and known and been and loved.

  Murphy’s Hell.

  Sister Planet

  Long afterward they found a dead man in shabby clothes adrift near San Francisco. The police decided he must have jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge one misty day. That was an oddly clean and lonesome place for some obscure wino to die, but no one was very much interested. Beneath his shirt he carried a Bible with a bookmark indicating a certain passage which had been underlined. Idly curious, a member of the Homicide Squad studied the waterlogged pulp until he deduced the section: Ezekiel vii, 3-4.

  -1-

  A squall hit when Shorty McClellan had almost set down. He yanked back the stick; jets snorted and the ferry stood on her tail and reached for heaven. An eyeblink later she was whipping about like a wind-tossed leaf. The viewports showed blackness. Above the wind there was a bongo beat of rain. Then lightning blazed and thunder followed and Nat Hawthorne closed off smitten sense channels.

  Welcome back! he thought. Or did he say it aloud? The thunder rolled off, monster wheels if it was not laughter. He felt the vessel steady around him. When the dazzle had cleared from his eyes, he saw clouds and calm. A smoky blueness in the air told him that it was near sunset. What answered to sunset on Venus, he reminded himself. The daylight would linger on for hours, and the night never got truly dark.

  “That was a near one,” said Shorty McClellan.

  “I thought these craft were designed to ride out storms,” said Hawthorne.

  “Sure. But not to double as submarines. We were pretty close to the surface when that one sneaked up on us. We could’a got dunked, and then—” McClellan shrugged.

  “No real danger,” Hawthorne answered. “We could get out the airlock, I’m sure, with masks, and stay afloat till they picked us up from the station. If Oscar and company didn’t rescue us first. You realize there’s no trouble from any native life-form. They find us every bit as poisonous as we find them.”

  “No danger, he says,” groaned McClellan. “Well, you wouldn’t have to account for five million bucks’ worth of boat!”

  He began whistling tunelessly as he spiraled down for another approach. He was a small, heavy-set, quick-moving man with a freckled face and sandy hair. For years Hawthorne had only known him casually, as one of the pilots who took cargo between orbiting spaceships and Venus Station: a cocky sort, given to bawdy limericks and improbable narratives about himself and what he called the female race. But on the voyage from Earth, he had ended with shyly passing around stereos of his children and describing plans for opening a little resort on Great Bear Lake when he reached retirement age.

  I thank the nonexistent Lord that I am a biologist, thought Hawthorne. The farcical choice of quitting or accepting a desk job at thirty-five has not yet reached my line of work. I hope I’ll still be tracing ecological chains and watching auroras over the Phosphor Sea at eighty.

  As the boat tilted forward, he saw Venus below him. One would never have expected a landless, planet-wide ocean to be so alive. But there were climatic zones, each with its own million restless hues—the color of light, the quality of living organisms, nowhere the same, so that a sea on Venus was not an arbitrary section of water but an iridescent belt around the world. And then there was the angle of the sun, night-lighting, breezes and gales and typhoons, seasons, solar tides which had no barrier to their 20,000-mile march, and the great biological rhythms which men did not yet understand. No, you could sit for a hundred years in one place, watching, and never see the same thing twice. And all that you saw would be beautiful.

  The Phosphor Sea girdled the planet between 55 and 63 degrees north latitude. Now from above, at evening, it had grown indigo, streaked with white; but on the world’s very edge it shaded to black in the north and an infinitely clear green in the south. Here and there beneath the surface twined scarlet veins. A floating island, a jungle twisted over giant bladderweeds, upbore flame yellows, and a private mistiness. Eastward walked the squall, blue-black and lightning, the water roaring in its track. The lower western clouds were tinged rose and copper. The permanent sky-layer above ranged from pearl gray in the east to a still blinding white in the west, where the invisible sun burned. A double rainbow arched the horizon.

  Hawthorne sighed. It was good to be back.

  Air whistled under the ferry’s glider wings. Then it touched pontoons to water, bounced, came down again, and taxied for the station. A bow wave broke among those caissons and spouted toward the upper deck and the buildings which, gyro-stabilized, ignored such disturbances. As usual, the whole station crew had turned out to greet the vessel. Spaceship arrivals were months apart.

  “End of the line.” McClellan came to a halt, unbuckled himself, stood up and struggled into his air harness. “You know,” he remarked, “I’ve never felt easy in one of these gizmos.”

  “Why not?” Hawthorne, hanging the tank on his own shoulders, looked in surprise at the pilot.

  McClellan adjusted his mask. It covered nose and mouth with a tight airseal of celluplastic gasketing. Both men had already slipped ultraviolet-filtering contact lenses over their eyeballs. “l keep remembering that there isn’t any oxygen molecule that’s not man-made for twenty-five million miles!” he confessed. The airhose muffled his voice, giving it for Hawthorne a homelike accent. “I’d feel safer with a space suit.”

  “De gustibus non disputandum est,” said Hawthorne, “which has been translated as, ‘There is no disputing that Gus is in the east.’ Me, I was never yet in a space suit that didn’t squeak and smell of somebody else’s garlic.”

  Through the port he saw a long blue back swirl in the water and thresh impatient foam. A grin tugged at his lips, “Why, I’ll bet Oscar knows I’m here,” he said.

  “Yeah. Soul mates,” grunted McClellan.

  They went out the airlock. Ears popped, adjusting to a slight pressure difference. The masks strained out some water vapor for reasons of comfort, and virtually all the carbon dioxide, for there was enough to kill a man in three gulps. Nitrogen, argon, and trace gases passed on, to be blent with oxygen from the harness tank and breathed. Units existed which electrolyzed the Earth-vital element directly from water, but so far they were cumbersome.

  A man on Venus did best to keep such an engine handy in his boat or on the dock, for recharging the bottle on his back every few hours. Newcomers from Earth always found that an infernal nuisance, but after a while at Venus Station you fell into a calmer pattern.

  A saner one? Hawthorne had often wondered. His latest visit to Earth had about convinced him.

  The heat struck like a fist. He had already donned the local costume: loose, flowing garments of synthetic, designed to ward ultraviolet radiation off his skin and not absorb water. Now he paused for a moment, reminded himself that Man was a mammal able to get along quite well at even higher temperatures, and, relaxed. The sea lapped his bare feet where he stood on a pontoon. It felt cool. Suddenly he stopped minding the heat; he forgot it entirely.

  Oscar frisked up. Yes, of course it was Oscar. The other cetoids, a dozen or so, were more interested in the ferry, nosing it, rubbing their sleek flanks against the metal, holding their calves up in their foreflippers for a good look.

  Oscar paid attention only to Hawthorne. He lifted his blunt bulky head, nuzzled the biologist’s toes, and slapped flukes on water twenty feet away.

  Hawthorne squatted. “Hi, Oscar,” he said. “Didn’t think I’d make it back, did you?” He chucked the beast under the chin. Be damned if the cetoids didn’t have true chins. Oscar rolled belly-up and snorted.

  “Thought I’d pick up some dame Earthside and forget all about you, huh?” murmured Hawthorne. “Why, bless your ugly puss, I wouldn’t dream of it! Certainly not. I wouldn’t waste Earthside time dreaming of abandoning you for a woman. I’d do it! C’mere, creature.”

  He scratched the rubbery skin just behind the blow-hole. Oscar bumped against the pontoon and wriggled.

  “Cut that out, will you?” asked McClellan. “I don’t want a bath just yet.” He threw a hawser. When Dykstra caught it, he snubbed it around a bollard, and began to haul. The ferry moved slowly to the dock.

  “Okay, Oscar, okay, okay,” said Hawthorne. “I’m home. Let’s not get sickening about it.” He was a tall, rather bony man, with dark-blond hair and a prematurely creased face. “Yes, I’ve got a present for you too; same as the rest of the station, but let me get unpacked first. I got you a celluloid dock. Leggo there!”